Dr. Ameer Ahmad Khan
Volume: 14 Issue: 02, 2026
Abstract:
Among the Anglo-Indian writers who narrated the historical developments happened during the struggle for independence of India, Paul Scott enjoys a very unenviable position. Scott’s The Raj Quartet is a historiographical narration of the impacts of the relation between England and India. In this masterpiece work the demise of British India is traced through the fortunes of an enormous cast of characters who respond to these problems of personal identity in a variety of ways. The events of the novels extend over a period of five years from the ‘Quit India’ motion of the All-India Congress Committee in August 1942 to the preparations for partition that followed the British retreat in August 1947. Scott’s award winning and final fictional contribution, Staying On (1977), a different work written in the background of free India, is a wonderfully comic and deeply moving novel. The protagonists of the novel Mr Tusker and Mrs Lucy Tusker represent the British men who opted to continue in India when their people left India. They experience the modern India ruled and controlled by the money minded and profit seeking brownsahibs where the former colonisers are totally insignificant and irrelevant.