For the interdisciplinarian, Anglo-Indian historiography can be
frustrating. In working
on Paul Scott's Raj quartet (four profoundly historical novels
about Anglo-India,
1942–7, better known as TV's The jewel in the crown)
I have faced such questions as: whether it
is reasonable to believe that in 1947 a senior British police officer who
owned Pathan
clothes and brown make-up used them professionally, passing as an Indian
to gather
intelligence; what credence the officer's probable homosexuality gives
an alternative
explanation, that cultural transvestism and Indian guise served private
sexual rather
than public professional ends; and whether the resonances with Thuggee
in the
costumed and made-up officer's murder by strangulation (in a Muslim-ruled,
Hindu-majority,
not-yet-acceded princely state in late July 1947) are of any historical
merit.
But the archetypes in which writers of fiction can combine scope and particularity
are
unavailable to the historian, too often confined to the dense and satisfying
footnotery of
the local study claimed as typical, or happily wandering the open generalizations
of the
all-India history claimed as exemplary; and for the critic wishing to test
the historical
probity of a fiction the result is Hobson's choice between easily-found
but tangential
treatments, and trawling memoirs for the reticent implications of conventional
Anglo-Indian understatement.