This year sees the seventieth anniversary of the formal end of the British Empire. Queen Victoria was persuaded in 1877 to become Victoria RI, Regina et Imperatrice, the Queen-Empress, because in the wake of the Indian Mutiny the British had taken formal control of India, recognising more than 600 remaining Indian Princes as sovereign rulers, and she needed to be first among equals. Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, and George VI were formally Rex et Imperator, King-Emperors, until Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947, when the need and the style lapsed.
How might or should we think about the reflections of empire in the fiction it produced? This course takes three major works, two written close together during the imperial period and one written in its wake, and sets about some triangulation.
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) is perhaps the best-known of all imperial fictions, and often accused of romanticising empire, but beneath its superb evocation of Indian ethnic diversity, landscape, and culture, is the stony truth of the Victorian ‘Cold War’ with Russia, and the spyscape of the ‘Great Game’. If it has a rival as the book of empire, it would be Joseph Conrad’s searing novella Heart of Darkness (1899), based on his experiences in the Belgian Congo and written as an indictment of imperialism – but now often itself denounced as racist, following the attack on it by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.
One would think that romanticising and indicting imperialism ought to be opposites and incompatible, but both Kipling’s and Conrad’s understandings are reflected and digested in Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1966), the first volume of his outstanding ‘Raj Quartet’. Overwriting Forster’s whitewash in A Passage to India, which sells the Raj as a place where a miscarriage of justice was averted, Scott at once values the commitment and passions of Anglo-Indians and knows that India was where the British ‘came to the end of themselves as they were’.
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