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The Day of the Scorpion
HISTORY OF SOUTHERN ASIA
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WE ARE OPEN ~ WEEK ONE ~THE DAY OF THE SCORPION~June 16 - June 22~PROLOGUE and BOOK ONE -(1-42) No Spoilers
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Chapter Overviews and SummariesPrologue
The author gives us an overview of two of the major items that will be the foci of the book; the town of Ranpur and the Fort of Premanagar.
Book One ~ The Prisoners in the Fort ~ An Arrest, 1942
We meet the Ex-Chief Minister Mohammed Kasim who is being arrested under the Defence of India rules for being a member of the Indian Congress which is moving against British rule. He is well thought of by the British and is taken to the Fort of Premanagar and treated well although he refuses to resign from the Congress, an action which would free him.
We learn the family background of Mr. Kasim which is aristocratic although he is from the Rampur branch which is made up of professionals and merchants. He writes a letter to the Governor stating the position of the Indian Congress, many members of which have also been arrested, including Gandhi. He also mentions the Bibighar Gardens rape of Daphne Manners which we learned about in the first book of the quartet.
Question:How do you feel about the position of the Indian Congress as it relates to independence and their activities which put Britain and India in a vulnerable position during WWII?
Note: It may be helpful to the reader to refer to posts 12, 17 and 20 of our Glossary at the link provided below as it provides further information on the Indian Congress and the attitude of its members when WWII breaks out. This helps explain the arrest of its members during the war years.
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Happy to be starting our group read! Scott sets the stage in this section by laying out some background through the interaction between Kasim and Malcolm. With regard to your question, Jill, I think it was understandable for the Congress to try and use their support for the war as a bargaining chip for independence. From their perspective at the time, they were being denied the sovereign right to self rule that they were being asked to defend. They no doubt saw their cooperation as de facto support for British imperialism and the blatant exploitation of India's natural and human resources.
Of course, with the benefit of hind sight, we might view their position as shortsighted and even self-defeating in view of the promise of future concessions being offered by the British. But they didn't trust the British, and the Congress, itself, was divided within. Some of the more radical even joined forces with Japan.
Mod
What Donna posted.The Congress' agenda was topped by gaining independence, the single most important accomplishment in the history of any modern state. The conflict known as WW II was of secondary importance to gaining independence, it seems to me.
Of course the Brits saw it a little differently. Preserving their own empire, their sphere of influence against warring enemies, was their top priority. Part of the ally grand plan was buying the Indians off with promises of autonomy and/or independence if they would only join the allied war effort with no assurances that the long-promised independence would come about.
That strikes me as being the political nub of the situation.
There was no good decision for Congress, or so it seems to me..
Thanks for the comments and I tend to agree. The Indians had no basis to believe that the British were going to grant them independence after the War or anytime in the future. On the other side of that coin, it could have driven the entire Indian nation into the Japanese camp eventually. As Donna mentioned, some radicals had already done that. Basically India was being used by both the British and the Japanese and indeed, there was no good decision for the Congress.
Hi Everyone! Glad to be back to our discussion on the Raj Quartet. I don't know that I have a lot to add to the comments on Jill's discussion question. I agree that for the Indian Congress, independence was their priority, but they could not trust the British to grant it to them and little wonder that some would look to the Japanese to see what they might offer. I do like how this section starts out reminding the reader of the political strife going on then reintroducing us to Ms. Manners and the rape that was the focal point of the first book.
Mr. Kasim is a very interesting man who is true to his principles and I think that is why he gets grudging admiration from the British. He will not budge from his position even though his son is a POW of the Japanese and they might use the situation as a tool to pressure the boy to switch to the Japanese cause. That would be a very tough decision for any father.
I found the political maneuvering described here by Mr. Kasim to be very interesting. The Congress leaders would have sought to coordinate a passive resistance to the war effort. Knowing this, the British arrested them, resulting in what Mr. Kasim refers to as their Machiavellian intention: "the intention of turning the onerous task into the simpler one of strong-arm tactics. It is easier to fire on rioters led by undesirable elements than to force resisting workers back into an arms factory, dockers back to the docks and engine-drivers back to the controls of their locomotives" (p. 527 in my edition). Predictably, these arrests provoked the people of India to violence - with Ms. Manners and Miss Crane as two of the casualties.
Right on point, Donna. The arrests were not well thought out because of the possibility of violence was something that the the British thought would never happen. Violence begets violence but the British just kept arresting the passive resistants. There had been uprising and mutinies in the past but the British chose to ignore that something similar and much larger could happen.
Both Mr. Kasim and Sir George Malcolm came across as so very civilized; both honorable, highly intelligent men who were trapped by their roles, their race, their particular view of duty. Major Tippit is something else again, almost a caricature of the dim-witted colonial: "the kind of man, Kasim guessed, who, lacking skill, energy or resolution, would make up for them with a mindless, vegetable implacability."
Major Tippet explains himself rather diffidently to Kasim: "I'm a historian, really...I retired from the army in 1938, but they dug me out."
The war changed everything for Britain in India. The best and brightest were fighting on other fronts, has-beens and never-beens were being called into service. Nobody wanted the distraction of India's problems and dreams of independence. Congress didn't understand that Britain was in a struggle to the death on her own little home island. Neither India, nor Britain, was thinking clearly about the other.
Not to be an apologist for Britain, but just to add another layer of context, Mr. Kasim's arrest takes place on August 9, 1942. Back in England, between April 22 and June 6, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury were under bombardment by the Germans, with over 1,600 casualties, even more injuries and 50,000 homes destroyed. Between January-July of 1942, the speed and completeness of Japan's Pacific conquests was really breathtaking. Britain was in full scale retreat. Only India and Australia remained as beachheads and America was only just staggering back after the devastation of Pearl Harbor.
Hana wrote: "Both Mr. Kasim and Sir George Malcolm came across as so very civilized; both honorable, highly intelligent men who were trapped by their roles, their race, their particular view of duty. Major Ti..."
I'm afraid that Major Tippet is somewhat reflective of those British officers in India who were not in combat. The "John Bull" image!!
Frankly I would have thought that those Indians in the Congress would have realized that the war would make a huge difference in what happened to India if the British were defeated. Whether Japan or Germany moved into India, they would still remain a colony of one of those countries and certainly in worse shape than under the British. Their move for independence, which was a foregone conclusion may have been ill-timed. Does that make sense?
Their move for independence, which was a foregone conclusion may have been ill-timed. Does that make sense?Yes, Congress had tunnel vision for sure. But they did not have the luxury of hindsight so I'm not sure they really believed that independence was a foregone conclusion or that it would occur with any expediency. As Kasim says in our novel,"I do not agree with you when you speak of Indian independence having become a foregone conclusion. Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist" (p. 510).
I don't necessarily mean that independence was a foregone conclusion but that the move by the Congress to independence may have been. It had been fomenting for years but it just seems that the timing was really bad. But isn't 20/20 hindsight wonderful???? :>)
I think Mr.Kasim's comment (pg 36) is very telling about the feelings of those who were supporting the Congress and independence. Speaking of the British he said ".....holding the insulting belief that the people of India are so spineless and apathetic that the disappearance from their midst of the men who have risen to positions of responsibility to them should at once leave them as malleable and directable as dull and unimportant clay". It perfectly explains how the arrest of the major Congress leaders was a huge mistake by the British. But I also still think that the Congress should have postponed its actions until the war was decided for the reasons I stated in post #15.
I think we agree, Jill. As I said in an earlier post (#5), the decision, while understandable, was short-sighted and potentially self-defeating. And, as you point out, their best bet for independence was an Allied victory. I'm wondering, though, were the arrests a mistake or a calculated power move on the part of the British? On the one hand, the arrests resulted in an outbreak of violence. But might the British have seen this as the lesser of two evils, when faced with the possibility of the passive resistance movement the Congress leaders were promoting (factory shutdowns, lack of military cooperation, etc.)? The British knew they needed India's resources to help win the war.
My sense of the mass arrests was that they were made in desperation, in frustration and fury; if there was any real logic behind it it was what Donna points out in post 19.I thought Sir George Malcolm's analysis (p.13-16) of the struggle between Congress and Jinnah's Muslim League, his assessment of why Congress rejected the Cripps proposal, and all of the negative consequences of the mass resignation, was absolutely brilliant.
"When you all resigned the power you'd got, in the belief that you were striking another blow for India's independence [in reality]....you were striking a blow at your own existing and potential political power...."
"You well know that for the first time....the Cripps Mission wasn't just us going through the old motions...but us under pressure from outside, from our allies, from America in particular...."
"I think you understood too that the Cripps proposals were the were the best you are going to get while the war is on and...the last chance...to contain Jinnah. But what happens? Your party shies like a frightened horse at from the mere idea that any province...should have the power to secede...."
Does anyone know of a good book that deals with Victor Hope, the Marquess of Linlithgow and India's Governor General and Viceroy at the time? He seems to have been quite inept, but that might be good old 20/20 hindsight.
Hana.....I found two but the first is only 124 pages long and appears to be made up of articles about the Marquess of Linlithgow. The second covers all the Viceroys of India.
by Jesse Russell (no photo)
by Mark Bence-Jones(no photo)
Thank you so much Jill! Those sound like two great places to start. It's always easy to find books about the people who succeeded according to our 20/20 hindsight and collective mythology; it's so much harder to find information about those who are considered to have "failed".
How true, Hana. Unless the failure is immense and spectacular such as that of General George Custer at the Little Big Horn, it is hard to find anything on those "little failures".
And the 'little failures' are the ones that teach most of us the lessons we need to learn!
Question:Do you see the move for independence as "political" or "religious"?......political meaning a desire of the people to rule themselves or religious meaning the Muslims against the Hindu and all other faiths as we currently see in the Middle East?
Yasmin Khan, in The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan provides abundant evidence from local archival material that the politicization of religion that began to creep into the discussions about independence was something quite new--and something done deliberately by Jinnah and the Moslem League, as well as by hardline Hindu nationalists like the Hindu Mahasabha splinter party. To quote Yasmin Khan:'A strain of utopianism began to enter political rhetoric and new terms, swaraj (self rule) and Pakistan (land of the pure), started to be used in a deliberately vague fashion as a way of drumming up support.'
by Yasmin Khan (no photo)
"I think we agree, Jill. As I said in an earlier post (#5), the decision, while understandable, was short-sighted and potentially self-defeating. And, as you point out, their best bet for independence was an Allied victory."Before we get away from this, I wanted to file the minority report on this issue.
I think the judgement that India's best hope for independence was to align itself with the allied war effort. Depending on perspective, I think there's a pretty strong argument that undercuts that assessment.
For starters, it assumes the colonizers/occupiers/oppressors were finally going to follow through on promises they had indicated, or made, in the past and broken. It's pattern throughout history. Saying you're going to relinquish power and relinquishing it are two very different things.
Secondly, the first thing that a modern nation must do at birth is show that it can defend itself. This, I think, implies that during the independence process the emerging nation must be able to defend and assert its independence. Conflict of some sort is an inevitable part of nation birthing, it seems.
The history put forth holding that India was imperiled by the Japanese is questionable. We knew at the time (our knowledge informed the strategy we used in WWII in the Pacific) that the Japanese were overextending themselves militarily. In effect, their goose was cooked in their victory at Pearl Harbor (they left us in the war).
And that's how it played out in SE Asia. Just because they reached India's doorstep doesn't mean India was threatened.
The interest of the Brits was to maintain their colonial presence in India. Why would that interest, steeped in more 200 years of colonial rule, change on a promise made under duress? I think that was foremost, and justifiably so, on the minds of all Indians, including the Congress.
From their perspective, to one degree or another, they were faced with continued colonization with a power that had been promising independence, but not delivering it; or possibly enduring a much shorter occupation by an oppressor that had over reached it's sphere of influence.
There were no good decisions.
To judge door one over door two, or vice versa, seems a mistake to me. There is not solid enough grounds, I think, to judge.
I think the best we can do is understand and I think that's the magic in Scott's story. He portrays the decline of the Raj, and to a lesser extent the birth of India, in a manner that is most fully realized when we set judgment aside.
As for the question on independence as religious, or political, I see the two as impossible to separate. But, hey, I'm half blind.
Hana,Thanks for the link and post.
As the extensive bibliography here indicates, there are many religions in India. Conflict between various groups throughout the ages, which is a part of politics, is baked into India's DNA, at least according to the histories I have read.
It's also true that religious considerations were prominent in India's independence as Scott makes clear throughout the quartet.
Good comments as usual, Martin. Hindsight gets in the way of coming up with a definitive answer to when the Congress should have made its move and how the British should have reacted. I have to agree that Japan was overreaching but that may not have been evident to them or others at the time and I believe they could still have possibly posed a threat to India. Regardless, India certainly could not depend on Britain to keep the promises of independence. The British PM made no secret of that fact. So as you say, there really weren't any good decisions but the discussion has given us a chance to play strategists for independence. Scott gives the reader an opportunity through his writing style to raise questions and that is what I like about his writing.
Exactly. Scott's historical fiction is finest kind for that reason.
What impresses me so far is not the political analysis (cogent as it is), but the artistry and sympathy with which Scott draws each of these characters:Our anonymous narrator who looks sadly in India for 'traces of things the island people left behind' and finds no memorial, but only the collective witness 'that here...the British came to the end of themselves as they were.' p. 3
Mr. Kasim, so honorable, so dignified and so honest; with his deep religious conviction, his unwavering party loyalty, his courageous single-minded devotion to the cause of freedom.
Sir George, with his brilliant, prescient sense of the damage Congress is doing to itself. Sir George who is so courteous, yet so quietly cruel in the way he wields the terrible threat to Kasim's son.
Even the clumsy but well-meaning Major Tippet who just wants to be studying history and Islamic art, is drawn with a kind of wry fondness.
Scott is making the history, the moment in time deeply personal. I know I am going to care what happens to all of these men and I am afraid for them.
Oh, don't fret, Hana. There is a Sanskrit word dukha, which is difficult to translate. Frequently, it is translated as suffering. But some hold discomfort is a better translation as suffering is just a farther point on the discomfort continuum.Without disclosing anything, you can be assured there is no shortage of dukha, either in India, or in Scott's recounting of the Raj's decline and India's birth.
Hana, you have found that secret that is Scott's writing. We noted in the first book's discussion that this author has a style that sometimes leaves questions with the reader but still has the ability to draw one in with his empathy and descriptive talents for his characters and situations. He makes you care.I was struck by the Governor's comment to Mr. Kasim (pg 21). "May I send you away with an interesting thought..........That one day this desk will probably be yours". He was a wise man who knew what the future held for Britain and India.
Jill wrote: one day this desk will probably be yours..."Yes! That was a wonderful moment.
Question:Why do you think the British treated Mr. Kasim so kindly while imprisoned? Was he a "specimen under observation" as Mr. Kasim stated (pg.40) that the British could use to their advantage?
@Hana - Loved your comments. Very nice summary of each our principal characters so far. In particular, Mr. Kasim and Sir George are symbolic of the larger groups they each represent, yet this is done in such a subtle way.
That is the beauty of Scott's writing, isn't it. His approach is almost indirect but yet we realize what he is implying. I said once that his writing was "like looking through gauze".
Could someone explain Bronowsky's position? He seems to have some political power. How did a Russian get a position in British-ruled India? Is he a diplomat or something?
I got the impression he was one of the many noble-born Russians who emigrated after the Bolshevik Revolution. Apparently, the south coast of France was a favored location for these expats, many of whom were very wealthy, well-educated and Westernized. I figured he fell in with the Nawab in Monte Carlo or some such place and just seized his chance. There's a bit more of his back story in Part Three: A Wedding.This is an interesting review of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy:
http://www.newrepublic.com/book/revie... I just added Douglas Smith's book to my TBR list.
by
Douglas Smith
Interesting. So presumably, Sister Lyudmilla got to India by the same route.
You must be right, Kressel! I hadn't made that connection.
The difference is that Sister Lyudmilla was an eccentric. Bronowsky had actual power. How did he get it?
Read on :) He's a wonderful character!!
Just started reading. I don't know why I waited till a week late to start, I had forgotten how much I enjoy Scott's writing.
Kathy wrote: "Just started reading. I don't know why I waited till a week late to start, I had forgotten how much I enjoy Scott's writing."Oh, I know. It's really wonderful, isn't it? So sad that he didn't get the recognition he deserved while he was alive. And I think he's still under appreciated.
Honestly, I would probably have never found the books without the nudge from the History Book Club.
I agree, Donna, that Scott is under-appreciated and I'm not sure why. It may be that much of his stories leave certain situations up to the interpretation of the the reader. His books make you think and aren't particularly "light" reading.
How under-appreciated is his work though? I mean, we're reading and greatly appreciating it. Ha, ha.But, really, his stuff is still in print and enjoys a certain longevity that reaches beyond the grave.
I find the quartet marvelous for the subtle skill in which he weaves a wealth of thought into both his action and his characters.
Some years back, there was a guy named Aristotle who penned some thoughts on literature positing that the three most important elements of a story are the action, characters and thought. Thought being: given the action and the characters, what is possible/probable going forward?
It seems to me Scott's quartet lends itself well to such an approach.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (other topics)The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (other topics)
The Viceroys of India (other topics)
Marquess of Linlithgow (other topics)
The Day of the Scorpion (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Douglas Smith (other topics)Yasmin Cordery Khan (other topics)
Mark Bence-Jones (other topics)
Jesse Russell (other topics)
Paul Scott (other topics)
For the weeks of June 16th - June 22nd, we are reading the PROLOGUE, BOOK ONE -The Prisoners in the Forts and PART ONE - An Arrest - The Day of the Scorpion - Book Two of the Raj Quartet.
The first week's reading assignment is:
WEEK ONE- June 16th - June 22nd
PROLOGUE and BOOK ONE - The Prisoners in the Fort :PART ONE - An Arrest, 1942 (1-42)
We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads as we did for other spotlighted books.
This book is being kicked off on June 16th.
We look forward to your participation. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other noted on line booksellers do have copies of the book and shipment can be expedited. The book can also be obtained easily at your local library, local bookstore or on your Kindle. Make sure to pre-order now if you haven't already. This weekly thread will be opened up on June 16th.
There is no rush and we are thrilled to have you join us. It is never too late to get started and/or to post.
Jill will be leading this discussion and back-up will be Bentley.
Welcome,
~Bentley
TO ALWAYS SEE ALL WEEKS' THREADS SELECT VIEW ALL
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