Paul Scott (1) (1920–1978)

On August 15th, at the stroke of midnight in 1947, British rule comes to an end and India has gained her independence. Not all British soldiers have departed India in shame, though. Colonel Tusker Smalley and his wife, Lucy, have stayed on. It is now 1972 and the couple have started to fade in money, health, vitality, and the real reason they decided to remain in the remote hill station of Pankot. Everything is in question now. Complicating matters is their antagonistic landlady, Mrs. Bhoolabhoy. Bhoolabhoy is determined to humiliate the British couple into leaving her country. After all these years her tactics are getting more and more hostile, forcing the English couple to renew their commitment to one another.
A backdrop for Staying On is the tapestry of culture and caste. What it means to have wealth and status in a country on the verge of finding a new identity. The Smalleys and the Bhoolabhoys are no different in their hope for the future.… (more)

Tusker y Lucy Smalley decidieron permanecer en la India. Ante la opción de volver a "casa" tras el retiro de Tusker, antiguo coronel del ejército británico, optaron por quedarse en la pequeña ciudad de Pankot, con sus habitantes excéntricos y costumbres arcaicas, resquicio de los gloriosos días del imperio. Sólo la tiranía de la casera, la capitalista Mrs. Bhoolabhoy, amenaza con acabar con la placidez que se respira en la casa de los Smalley.

Los rezagados es un retrato único y absorbente del final del imperio y del ocaso de un idilio de más de 40 años.… (more)

It's WWII, in India, and Ghandi Is just getting started. Thus, politics between Indians and the meddling English living there are heating up. Barbie Batchelor gets "retired" from the mission school she is superintending. With no family to go live with, either in India or England, she answers an ad to share a home with another elderly woman who has a house in Pankot, a fictional English"station" in the hills where the meddling English go with their families and servants during the hottest part of the year. She doesn't know what she's getting into. A bittersweet story.… (more)

Scott spent time in the army in the 1940s as a commissioned officer in British India. This is how he came by the material he used to write The Raj Quartet. I so far have only read the last two volumes of this work, and I want to complete the Quartet and also read "Staying On," his book about those English who stayed on in India after the British took their (bloody) hands off the Indian affairs they had so mucked up.

Before England colonized India, it was a rich country. England raped it, and had the nerve to suppose that the "savages" were better off under English rule. I cringe at their hubris--and am glad for only having a fraction of my mutt-ness made up of English descent.… (more)