[In the following essay, Nagarajan discusses Duncan's Set in Authority and The Burnt Offering as representative of her Anglo-Indian novels.]

The work of the Canadian novelist, Sara Jeannette Duncan is not generally known outside her own country, and even in Canada, all but one of the nearly two dozen books she wrote are out of print. Many of these novels deal with the life of the British in India—Anglo-Indian fiction, we may call these novels, after Bhupal Singh—and Canadian readers, unless they have a special interest, are not naturally drawn to them. (Significantly, the novel that has been reprinted, The Imperialist, has a Canadian setting.) But that reason does not explain why historians of AngloIndian fiction also tend to overlook her. It is true she is a minor writer compared to Kipling or Forster, but that may be too drastic a criterion to invoke since it would extinguish the historical consideration of all Anglo-Indian fiction. Miss Duncan's work deserves our notice because we can see in it how some of the major features, issues and personalities of British Indian society and politics at the turn of the century appeared to an intelligent contemporary writer who was in a sense an outsider. Her work can also help in bringing home to us the 'feel' of the period and its diversity, especially the diversity in the attitudes and relationships of the British and the Indians amongst themselves and toward each other. She writes unevenly and is unsuccessful on the whole in presenting a coherent vision of Anglo-India, but at times, she could also write extremely competently, with great humour and sympathy.

She came to her career as a novelist of Anglo-India with some advantages. She was an unorthodox person for her times. She had worked for some time as Parliamentary correspondent of the Montreal Star at Ottawa. She could appreciate the clash of interests and personalities in political life and the surprising ways in which the public life and the private life mesh with each other. She could sense, without always making sense of, the nationalism that lay just beyond the horizon of what appeared to many of her abler contemporaries in official life as mere agitation against authority. She had travelled widely, accompanied only by a girl of her own age. The book which described her travels was rightly called A Social Departure: How Orthodocis and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890). She dedicated the book to Mrs. Grundy 'as a slight tribute to the omnipotence of her opinion and a humble mark of profoundest esteem.' Thus, when in 1892 she married an Englishman, Everard Charles Cotes, and came out to live in Calcutta, the then Imperial capital where her husband was the Curator of the Museum (later he became the Managing Director of the Indian News Agency), she was, one may say, in a more favourable position than most women of her class to see what was going on around her and comment upon it. In her earliest book on Anglo-India, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) she described very amusingly how a simple, fresh and innocent English girl who came out to India with all kinds of plans and good intentions for the improvement of the heathen was gradually metamorphosed into a memsahib whose 'tissues are made of a substance somewhat resembling cork.' "She is growing dull to India, too, which is about as sad a thing as any. She sees no more the supple savagery of the Pathan in the market-place, the bowed reverence of the Mussulman praying in the sunset, the early morning mists lifting among the domes and palms of the city. She has acquired for the Aryan inhabitant a certain strong irritation, and she believes him to be nasty in all his ways. This will sum up her impressions of India as completely years hence as it does today. She is a memsahib like another.… I hope she may not stay twenty-two years." In later years Miss Duncan came to see with greater sympathy and pity the tragedy of these AngloIndian women—boredom, alienation from their environment and physical exhaustion often ending in sudden death.

Between 1893 and 1905 she wrote five other novels on Anglo-India, but for the introductory purpose of this article, I have selected two novels, Set in Authority (1906) and The Burnt Ofering (1909). In order to appreciate them, however, a little historical background is necessary.

After the Rising of 1857, especially during the 70's and 80's a perceptible change came over the attitudes and the mutual relationships of the British and the Indians—as some of the 'natives' were now beginning to think of themselves. Trust and confidence gave place to suspicion and suppressed hostility, aggravated by the Englishman's barely concealed scorn for the 'native.' Social intercourse between the two races was replaced with a purely formal, official contact. Better means of communication between India and England—the telegraph and the Suez Canal, for example—made it unnecessary for the large majority of Englishmen to look upon the country as their home for the best part of their working lives. There were also more Europeans in the country, and an exclusive European society of sorts was now possible; a small, claustrophobic, inbred society, though, rigid in its taboos and resembling an army of occupation that has been ordered not to fraternize with the local population. A feeling of restless, impatient doubt about why they were in the country grew up in place of the earlier affectionate curiosity about the country and the sense of an imperial mission—to lead one-sixth of the human race toward nationhood and self-government. Many British officials and Liberal statesmen deplored and fought against their tendencies but with only indifferent success. At the same time the effects of the English education that the Indians had been receiving for some decades were also beginning to be felt. The Indians wished to graduate from admiration for the democratic thought and institutions to their masters to their practical adoption for themselves. They were encouraged in these aspirations by the tenour of the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 and the frequent pronouncements by leading British statesmen, notably of the Liberal Party. The birth of this aspiration at first delighted the Englishmen who saw in it the fulfilment of their plan and their responsibility. But for the majority of the British in India, the side from the notion of imperial trusteeship to that of a chosen race lording it over the lesser breeds proved irresistible. When they met educated Indians who expressed the new aspiration, they were at first, puzzled and incredulous; later, they became sullen and angry or sarcastic and insulting. The Indians were told that they were not fit as yet, wouldn't be for a long while, either for self-administration or even for a share in the administration at the higher levels. They were told that the reform of Indian society was the prior task and responsibility that they should undertake; Mill On the Subjection of Women and not Mill On Liberty was what they should be learning from. While some Indians were persuaded, others felt that a society which had not been confronted with the challenge of self-government calling for decisive choices of goals and methods, would not transform itself with any sense of urgency or necessity. Many of the measures of the Government during the last two or three decades of the century strengthened the feeling among educated Indians that their country was to be ruled to promote British interests, sometimes the interests of the Conservative Party, and that they were to be victims of racial discrimination in their own country. The notorious Anglo-Indian agitation over the Ilbert Bill strengthened this feeling. It was also suspected—not without justification—that British policy in India encouraged centrifugal tendencies, retarding the progress of the country toward nationhood. Thus the fears to the Muslims of the Hindu majority over whom they had ruled for centuries were sought to be allayed by measures that in fact institutionalised those fears. Parties that acquiesced in the status quo were encouraged. (Their identity, economic, social or religious, differed from region to region; nor was it always an internally consistent identity.) Indians who offered constructive criticism were regarded as a seditious, loudmouthed urban minority of no consequence. It was contended that the vast majority of the country, the tillers of the soil, did not care about these political matters and were solidly behind the Government. (This was true enough, but it did not remain so for long—thanks to Gandhi who swung the balance away from the Government.) But the fact was inescapable—not many tried to escape it—that a gulf had opened up between ruler and ruled, between British and Indian.

That fact received its topographical expression and won its symbolic status in Anglo-Indian fiction in the division of towns where both Indians and Europeans lived into a native area and a European cantonment. The town of Pilaghur, the capital of the Province of Ghoom, in Set in Authoity is so divided:

Reflecting, we must call Pilaghur two capitals. There is the Pilaghur which the ladies of the station think of, and which figures—it has a cathedral—in diocesan reports. It has a parade-ground as well as a Cathedral and a station-club where are tennis-courts and the English illustrated papers, and public gardens set with palms and poinsettias where the band plays twice a week in the evenings after polo. Two or three roads lie fairly parallel in Pilaghur, and two or three lie more or less across, broad empty roads named after Indian administrators, bordered with tamarinds and acacias. There are certainly lamp-posts and infrequent in the distance, a bright, red letter-box; but the absence of everything else gives a queer, quiet, theatrical look to the highways … The sun-suffused roads run up into rubbly banks on either side, and these are crowned with grey-green cactuses, many-armed and dusty. Behind them, indeterminately far in, indeterminately far apart, are houses, thick-looking low houses. They stand in the sun as a child might draw them on a very simple plan and rather crooked, with inexplicable excrescences, made too as a child might perhaps make them, chiefly of mud and colour-washed.… They are all of one substance … cream-coloured, but some are pink and some are yellow; there are even blue ones. I cannot conceive why they do not give Pilaghur a more cheerful appearance than it has. Perhaps it is because they stand, behind their cactus hedges and their hibiscus bushes, so remote from one another; they insist upon their approaches, they will have their atmosphere, and do not justify either. Or perhaps Pilaghur is depressed because, it has properly speaking, no shops. In one bungalow, standing in a roomy acre of its own, with three crooked sago palms in a far corner and nothing else, a photographer does business, but does so little that his two terriers bark furiously at any customer. In another, the small discoloured pink one by the tank, Miss Da Costa, from a wellknown Calcutta firm, is understood to make very nice blouses; and I could show you where to find Mrs. Burbage, spoken of lamentably as an officer's widow.… But all this is hidden away … The eye rests comforted on a small sign, the sign of Ali Bux, General Stores Dealer.… Ali Bux seems to be permitted rather than encouraged or relied upon; we miss the backbone of life. From a point in mid-air, far enough up, this Pilaghur would have the vagueness of a family-wash, spread out in the manner of the country, to dry upon the ground.

The other Pilaghur crowds upon the skirts of this—a thick embroidery. Far out it spreads imperceptibly into a mustard-fields; but here below Dalhousie Gardens, and all along to the old Mosque of Akbar it falls close packed to the river; and beyond the reservoir it lives; with indifference round the upright stone finger of an old conquest that still points to history the way of the Moghuls. Out there the multitudinous mud-huts are like an eruption of the baked and liver-coloured earth, low and featureless; but in the narrow ways of the crowded city by the river the houses jostle each other to express themselves. The upper storeys crane over the lower ones, and all resent their neighbours. They have indeed something to say with their carved balconies of wood and even of stone, with the dark-stained arches, pointed and scalloped, of their shop-fronts, their gods in effigy, their climbing, crumbling ochres and magentas. They have the stamp of the racial, the inevitable, the desperately in earnest, which is the grim sign of cities; there is no sign of vagueness, nothing superimposed, in Pilaghur-by-the-river. Never is there room for the tide of life that beats through it, chaffering and calling, ox-carts pushing, water-carriers trotting, vendors hawking, monkeys thieving, and Ganeshi Lal who wires a price to London for half the seed-crops of Ghoom.… Ganeshi sits on the floor, he wears a gold-embroidered velvet cap, and the scalloped window frames him to the waist. There are hundreds of such pictures.… The Oriental gutter runs along the side, the Oriental donkey sniffs at the garbage; there is an all-pervasive Oriental clamour and an all-pervasive Oriental smell. The city by the river trenches hardly anywhere on the station beyond; only the Brass Bazaar in one place strays across. You have to drive through it to get to the railway station. Pariahs dash out at bicycles, there are one or two haunting lepers, and cholera usually begins there; but it has a pictorial twist and a little white temple under an old banyan tree which the ladies of the station always praise and generally sketch. And there is no other way of getting to the railway station. These are Pilaghur.

It was not only in her 'natural descriptions' that Miss Duncan could achieve, when she was writing at her best, a symbolic meaning, an 'objective correlative,' but in her characterizations also. One instance must suffice, again from Set In Authority. This is the contrast between Ruth Pearce, and extremely capable and dedicated surgeon, and her rather ignorant ayah. Miss Duncan is able to convey through the broken English of this ayah the unmistakable contrast between vitality and mere energy.

Resolute attempts were made by many British administrators to bridge what Lord Curzon described as the "chasm of racialism" in Anglo-Indian relations; he warned that racialism would 'split the Empire asunder.' Admitting Indians to European Clubs was not possible. "According to English standards a man is not 'clubbable' if he thought you were unfit to associate with his womenkind and if he lived half his life in a milieu from which he claimed rigidly to exclude you." Ad hoc 'bridge-parties' (to use E. M. Forster's term) were tried as a substitute. In Set In Authority Sir Ahmed Hossein is posted to Pilaghur as District and Sessions Judge. The European community discusses whether he should be socially recognized. "'Is there a Lady Hossein?' asks the General's wife. 'If there is one and Sir Ahmed lets her go out to dinner, we will ask them and dine with them. But if he keeps her behind the purdah, I am neither to invite them to our house, nor will the General let me set foot in theirs—Judge or no Judge." A party is however held, and Sir Ahmed is invited; Lady Hossein, it mercifully transpires, is away in her village. At the party, writes the novelist, "in every eye he saw the barrier of race forbidding natural motions." Eventually he is elected to the exclusive Pilaghur Club, all the military members voting for him because he has passed a very light sentence on a soldier found guilty of the murder of an Indian. Whether he had let him off lightly because he wanted to win the favour of the English community or because although a Muslim he hated taking life, even the life of a scorpion,—'the twentieth century permits such religious eclecticism,' he says—or because he felt that racial feelings, already bad, would become worse if a heavy sentence were imposed, are points that are deliberately left vague in the novel.

There is an even more interesting example of a 'bridge party' in The Burnt Offering. It is arranged by the wife of a senior British official. The Rani Janaki who has been educated at Oxford and who is the daughter of a judge of the Calcutta High Court explains the party to Joan Mills, a Girton graduate who is visiting India with her father, a Radical M.P.:

"I do not know why, but suddenly they decided they would know us. The ladies of Calcutta, the burramems. They found they had a duty not only to those who go about like me, but to all the little ladies who keep purdah. It was very kind. They consulted some of us, and we agreed to join and persuade our friends. You will see." "It doesn't sound real ", said Joan.

"It was very kind."

The Anglo-Indian ladies moved about with painstaking friendliness; and now and then, in response to an invitation, one or two of the Indian ones would rise and follow them obediently in the direction of the refreshments. The Indian faces were all polite, and smiled responsively, but they spoke little English. Topics were plainly difficult to find, and the air was full of pauses.

"Not an Englishwoman in the room understands Bengali," said Janaki, "and their Hindustani—poor dear ladies—it is of the kitchen"

"There seems to be very little in common", Joan ventured.

"What can they have in common?" said Janaki, "the ladies of the zenana and the ladies of the gymkhana? But, yes, there is one thing. That is politics. Every Bengali woman in this room is in her way a politician. But, naturally, they will not speak of that."

"Naturally?" exclaimed Joan. "Is any one afraid to talk politics, under the British flag?"

"We will say that they are shy", said Janaki.

"But wait…"

(And on being invited to sing, one of the Bengali ladies sings a patriotic song.)

"They are all families of the Moderates, those ladies."

"Even the one who sang?" asked Joan.

"Oh yes. She has several relatives in the Civil Service. Their husbands and fathers are Moderates—but they sing. I too am a Moderate, and I do not even sing. I think," she added in a lower tone—and Joan could not see her face for a fold of her sari, "that I have lost my voice."

Joan Mills asks Mrs. Foley, the wife of the Standing Counsel to the Government, whether the Viceroy's band ever plays Indian music. "Oh no, our instruments aren't adapted to it." "It is what I am beginning very strongly to think. Whatever our instruments produce in India, it isn't music."

Racial discrimination and estrangement showed itself in several ways. I shall, however, refer only to those aspects of it that are taken up prominently by Miss Duncan. First, there was the question of the entry of Indians to the Covenanted Services, of which the most prestigious, the most powerful and the best-paid too, was the I.C.S. (the Indian Civil Service). Recruitment to this Service was done by means of a competitive examination held in England, and the age-limits were low. In effect this meant that very few Indians could get in. Curzon held the view that the I.C.S. should be for the most part in the hands of Englishmen; they were uniquely qualified for it by heredity, upbringing, integrity, vigour of character and knowledge of the principles of administration. His view was shared by several British administrators. In 1887 out of about a 1700 superior posts (with a salary of Rs. 800/—p.m. or more) only 77 were held by Indians; in 1903, of about 32003 posts, only 85 were held by Indians. In 1906 the Viceroy, Lord Minto frankly stated that it was impossible to appoint an Indian to a Governorship since the Services would not tolerate it. Questions of race and colour always came up in the appointment of Indians to superior posts. When it was proposed that an Indian should be appointed to the Viceroy's Council as part of the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, the King felt that the step "was fraught with the greatest danger for the Indian Empire." When Minto eventually chose S. P. Sinha (later Lord Sinha of Raipur who, as Under Secretary of State for India, piloted the Montagu-Chelmsford—Reforms in the House of Lords soon after the First World War) in preference to Asutosh Mukherjee, the Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, an argument in favour of Sinha, was that Sinha was comparatively white whereas Mukherjee was 'black as my hat' and the opposition in the official world "would not be regardless of mere shades of colour." A great deal of mental energy was expended by both Morley and Minto on the problem of how to give representation to an Indian on the Viceroy's Executive Council in the most innocuous way. Morley told Minto truly enough that what the educated classes in India wanted a million times beyond political reform was access to the higher administrative posts. (a) The problem was aggravated by the fact that the educational system was churning out hundreds of Arts graduates who were utterly dependent upon the Government for employment, (b) Failing to find it, they turned against the Government. One reason that the Government put out for not employing Indians in the I.C.S. was that the Punjabi would not tolerate a Bengali as Head of the District (Kipling!) and the Muslims would feel insecure in an administration whose officers were predominantly Hindu.

This question is taken up by Miss Duncan in several novels. In The Simple Adventures, Mr. Sayter, a senior I.C.S. officer tells a visiting Radical M.P. who wishes to champion the cause of the 'natives':

You will of course endeavour to extend the employment of baboos in the higher branches of the Covenanted Service—the judicial and administrative. They come much cheaper, and their feelings are very deeply hurt at being overlooked in favour of the alien Englishmen. You could get an excellent baboo for any purpose on earth for thirty rupees a month… a nice, fat, wholesome baboo who could write a beautiful hand—probably a graduate of the Calcutta University. (Mr. Sayter refers in the conversation to 'the extraordinary aptitude of the Bengali for the retention of printed matter.')

Since Mr. Sayter is presented as a character worthy of the reader's approval, his views are apparently offered for serious acceptance. In Set in Authoity a constrast is drawn between Sir Ahmed Hossein and the English Chief Commissioner of the province in their official attitudes and approaches. The Government of India suggests to the Chief Commissioner that he should prefer an appeal in the Calcutta High Court against the lenient sentence awarded to the English soldier. The Viceroy is bitterly opposed to racial discrimination and wants to show that British justice is impartial. The Chief Commissioner agrees that the sentence was light but opposes the suggestion till the Viceroy personally orders him to appeal. The Commissioner feels that the appeal would be interpreted by the Anglo-Indian community as an act of interference with the judiciary and racial tensions would increase. He is neither subservient to the Viceroy nor disobedient. The High Court sentences the soldier to capital punishment. However, the soldier contrives, with the connivance of the English warders of the gaol, to commit suicide by swallowing an overdose of opium. After his death evidence comes to light that the case against him had been concocted by the Muslim munshi of the town with the help of the corrupt local Police to settle an old Mutiny score against the soldier's regiment. Again the Commissioner refuses to give publicity to the new evidence on the ground that the peace of the Empire would be disturbed and the position of the King-Emperor's Representative would be embarrassed. It is important to preserve the Viceroy's image because he is the "shadow of the King, but the substance of kingship is curiously and pathetically his, and his sovereignty is most real with those who again represent him. In lonely places which the Viceroy's foot never presses and his eye never sees, man of his own race find in his person the authority for the purpose of their whole lives. He is the judge of all they do and the symbol by which they do it.… He stands for the idea, the scheme and the intention to which they are all pledged.… The Viceroy may be a simple fellow, but his effigy is a wonderful accretion." This attitude of the Chief Commissioner contrasts with that of Sir Ahmed Hossein who sinks into despondency and even contemplates suicide when he learns that the Viceroy is displeased with him. He has had an Oxford education; he refers to Shakespeare and Blake as 'our poets'; and when he applies for leave to go to England, it is 'home leave' for him, but the essential traits of an English administrator have eluded him.

This conviction that Indians do not make good administrators and that they have a long way to go is also expressed by John Game, the Government Home Secretary in The Burnt Offering. Game is represented as a very decent person and indeed one of the best of the British bureaucrats, altogether free from racialism. He is asked whether the disqualification that had been recently announced of an Indian from the I.C.S. for his failure to pass the riding-test (rather as Sri Aurobindo was) was justified. "Are many Englishmen disqualified for the same reason," asks Joan Mills. Game justifies what has been done on the ground that much of the work of a District Officer is done on horseback, and Englishmen naturally know how to ride. "As all Englishmen are naturally able to govern," is the sarcastic comment of Joan. "Precisely," Game retorts, ignoring the sarcasm. He concedes that an I.C.S. officer is 'put on the rails' and the Service is 'an iron system.' But it also offers great opportunity for service, and seen in that light, 'the job is too high for the best of us.' He admits that the British administration is guilty of lapses and failures—'We are only a Government, not god Almighty'—but these judgements of fitness and achievement are after all relative. Game's view was widely shared by both Conservative and Liberal statesmen of England, and Indian leaders also did not, on the whole, seriously disagree that England had an imperial mission to fulfil—service and the education of the native. The Indians argued that the fulfilment called for the increasing participation in the legislative and executive functions of Government. Democracy is a game that is learnt only by playing it. The Indians began to agitate when they felt that no serious attempt was being made to fulfil the promises. In its early phase the aim of the agitation was to remind the British of the responsibility they owed to India. In its later phase its aim was to convince the British that they had no option in the matter, that India could not be ruled without the consent of the Indians, a consent that was strictly time-bound. Gandhi's achievement consisted in teaching the Indians how to express this consent, or lack of it, in ways that suited their character and temperament and the circumstances of time and place. However before Gandhi appeared on the scene, there was a brief phrase of terrorist agitation, chiefly in Bengal, in the first decade of the century. The agitation failed of course—as it deserved to—but it had several ambiguous features which are very skilfully recaptured by Miss Duncan in The Burnt Ofering. (The title itself reflects this ambiguity.)

The novel opens very effectively with a scene in which a young Bengali youth, educated at Cambridge and Paris, is most insolently refused admission to a first class carriage on a railway train by a couple of European planters, a class that was notorious for its racial arrogance.

"You can't get in here, Baboo. There isn't room."

The train was standing in the little pink station of Pubni, on its way to Calcutta. A lean old man with water in a goat-skin slaked the platform with a flourishing jet from his fingers, and the afternoon suns slanted on the purple bougainvilliers over the gate-posts of the station-master's garden. It was a warm, gentle, still halting-place; between the grunts of the pausing engine a bee buzzed audibly in the bougain-villiers; and a crow in a pipal across the lines seemed to deliver himself for the whole district.

"How many persons are in this carriage, sir?"

"Never mind about that, Baboo. There isn't room for you."

The young man spoke good-naturedly enough, but he definitely barred the entrance with the lower half of a leg in flannel trousers, and a foot in a brown leather boot. He had not taken the trouble to shut the door.

The person addressed as "Baboo," who wore neat European clothes and a small white and gold twisted head-dress, nevertheless ventured to step upon the footboard and look into the carriage, which contained a good deal of dusty luggage and one other younger gentleman, stretched upon the opposite seat and reading the Planters' Gazette.

"I must insist upon coming in here," he said; "you are but two passengers."

"No, you don't," said the owner of the brown leather boot; but the roll-up of the new-comer was already being pushed by a coolie under the barrier leg. This awoke the young man on the seat opposite to sudden and expressive wrath. He raised himself threateningly on one elbow.

"Get out of this," he exclaimed, "or damn it, I'll hoof you out."

All the world might hear, if the world had not been fortunately absent. One person did, a tall English girl who seemed to be the only other passenger. She was walking up and down the platform sending her long shadow in front of her, and she heard. She paused for an instant, startled; then she simply stopped and listened. The approaching water-carrier waited with difference until she should resume her walk, gave it up and ran on, shedding his cascades in a semicircle before her. With her hands thrust into the pockets of her dust-cloak she made a casual but attentive spectator.

The coolie pushed the roll-up further in, and followed it with a bag.

"Excuse me," said Bepin Behari Dey, making an attempt to pass the defensive leg, "I have a first-class ticket and I claim accommodation."

"Oh, get out, Baboo," said the youth at the door, "and don't give trouble. No admittance here, don't you see? Can't have you spitting about here."

"Ticket or no ticket, you can jolly well travel somewhere else," announced he who was lying down, and sprang up to enforce his words. "Here—out you go."

The Indian could not be said to be in, but his luggage, sped by a couple of vigorous kicks, went out for him, alighting not far from the feet of the girl looking on, who came, with interest, a step nearer.

"Sir, I do not expectorate."

"Oh yes, you do, Baboo. You expectorate all right. Anyhow"—and the door finished the sentence with a bang.

The young native certainly showed self-control. There was cloud in his glance, but no lightning. He looked more determined to enforce his point than indignant at his repulse. The resentment and dislike in the fact he turned upon the occupants of the carriage seemed rather a settled and habitual thing than any outcome of his present treatment.

"I will send for the station-master," he said.

"By all means," returned the second defender of the carriage. "Here he comes, Hi, there—Station-master! Here's this Baboo making a most infernal disturbance trying to shove himself into this carriage. Just run him in somewhere else, will you?"

The station-master, a fat Eurasian, a good deal darker than the Bengali looked at him with the expression of a gentleman who could sympathise with the grievance of his fellows, and waited in irritated official tolerance for what an inferior might have to say.

Bepin produced his ticket.

"It is first-class," he said, "and I think the only other first-class is a ladies' compartment."

The station-master took the ticket, examined it, frowned upon it, and handed it back.

"What is the use of getting in where you know objection will be taken?" he said in the clicking, doubling talk of the mixed race. "Further on there is a second-class carriage which you can have entirely to yourself. You can be private there."

"If I wished to be private I was at liberty to reserve a carriage," protested the Bengali. The arbiter looked as if nothing in the world would make him responsible.

"Well, you had better get in somewhere," he said. "She is going now. I cannot stop the train for disputes amongst passengers," and turned upon an indifferent heel.

Appeal to authority having failed him, and the carriage door being now definitely shut in his face the young man stepped back upon the platform, and the hovering coolie again seized his luggage. When Joan Mills spoke to him he gave her a violent look, as if some further indignity was to be expected from her. But that was not her intention.

"The other first-class carriage is not reserved for ladies," she told him. "My father is with me, and there is plenty of room. Will you not come in there?"

Her voice trembled with anger, but it was equally characteristic of her that she did not take her hands out of her pockets.

"Thank you, I am obliged to you; but I do not wish to intrude in your carriage."

"It is not our carriage, and you will be very welcome," said Miss Mills, casting, as she spoke, a glance upon the victorious occupants of the compartment in which they might have read a measure of contempt for her race as excusable as it was extravagant.

"Then I will come."

The girl led the way, Bepin following with the laden coolie.…

"Father," said the girl, as she and Bepin entered the carriage, and the train moved out, "I have told this gentleman there is plenty of room in here.…"

"I was only thinking—How monstrous!" said the girl. "This gentleman," she said to her father, "was refused admittance to their carriage in the most brutal manner, by a couple of Europeans just now. We had heard such things happened, but we could hardly believe it," she added.

Her father took his pipe from his lips, which composed themselves sternly. He opened them to say, "I thought as much."

Bepin, to hide his embarrassment, laughed. All sorts of things were hidden in the laugh which, on the outside deprecated, made nothing of the incident.

"Oh," he said, "that is very common. European gentlemen in India do not like travelling with the people of the country. We are not always able to assert our rights."

"European. gentlemen!" breathed Joan. "And these are the people who govern you—these are your civil administrators!"

"No. The officials do not speak in that way to Indians. Those were common men, what we call chotasahibs—mill assistants, I think."

"I wish I knew for certain." Plainly, she would have preferred to be right.

"If you do—if you think it worth while," said the girl with quick tact, "you may count upon me as a witness. I saw the whole thing."

"It should not be allowed to pass," urged her father.

Bepin looked contemptuous. "Oh, I can complain," he said, "but what is the use? That would not prevent the same thing happening again. Besides, it is a small matter. I am not hurt."

"Then," said Joan, "you must be a philosopher."

"Yes—I hope. But I am not so good a philosopher as my father was. He is dead now, but for years he always travelled third-class, and he was not a poor man."

"Why did he do that?" asked Joan.

Bepin laughed again. "It was a fancy of his, since one day he was travelling in a first-class carriage and two young officers got in, with very wet and muddy boots, at a small station where they had been shooting the jheels. They were very angry finding my father in the carriage, and told him to get out. He refused to get out, so when the train started they ordered him to pull off their boots. He refused this also, but they stood over him and compelled him to do it, and being an old man he dared not resist. So after that he travelled third-class rather, with the coolies."

Joan's eyes blazed.

"In your own country!" she exclaimed. "How can you bear it!"

"I think you are strangers," young Dey replied, always with the laugh which defended him from sympathy. "Only strangers would ask that. We have no alternative."

"Yes," said the elderly man, "we are strangers.

But we have come to learn, and we are learning," he added, "very fast."

Joan's father is Vulcan Mills, Radical M.P. for Further Angus who is visiting India to see things for himself. He was probably modelled after Keir Hardie who visited India for a few months in 1907 and wrote a series of letters on India in The Labour Leader which he later collected into the book, India, Impressions and Suggestions (1909). He made a sympathetic and intelligent assessment of the Indian scene, and offered a number of sensible suggestions to improve the administration and bring it closer to the people, and the climate of progressive opinion. He particularly noted that the 'colour line was being more rigidly drawn every year' and gave several instances of it.

When I entered the train at Madras, there were two Indian gentlemen in the compartment. One of them rose as I entered, and said, "Shall we move to another compartment, Sir?" I stared at the man, and asked whether he had paid his fare. "Oh, yes," he replied; "but English gentlemen don't as a rule like to travel with natives". Now I knew that in parts of America the colour line was strictly drawn, but I was not prepared for this kind of thing in India. Here, be it remembered, is a people who have inherited a civilization which was old as the West had begun to emerge from savagery. Those who travel first or second-class are mostly men with a University education, and speak English fluently. Some of them are wealthy, and many of them are of ancient lineage and noble descent. And yet, travelling on a Government railway in their own country, they are treated by the governing white caste much as they themselves treat the poor outcast pariahs.

Nearer to the episode in the novel is another instance that Hardie gives of a Muslim gentleman, of handsome, refined appearance, descended of an illustrious family, educated at Cambridge (as Dey in the novel is) and called to the Bar. On his return from England, he entered a first-class carriage in which two Englishmen were travelling. He was at once ordered out—the compartment was not reserved—'and in the end, for his own comfort, was forced to go out to escape the studied insults of his travelling companions.' Hardie declared that 'one way to break down the colour line was to raise the official status of the people. So long would they be looked down upon by their rulers.. In this, as so much else, self-government is the solvent to which we must look for dissolving a difficulty rapidly becoming unbearable.' He quoted Mill's dictum that such a thing as the government of one people by another did not and could not exist. Hardie's utterances and contracts with Indian leaders gave much offence to the Government of India, and he was seriously misrepresented and caricatured in the London Press also. The Viceroy Cyord Minto wrote to Morle the Secretary of State, that the modern House of Commons was 'absolutely incapable of understanding Indian humanity' and constituted 'the greatest danger to the continuance' of British rule in India.

Miss Duncan's portrait of Keir Hardie as Vulcan Mills, Socialist M.P. for Further Angus, is not unsympathetic, though eventually she deports him from India just as he is about to address a meeting in Calcutta in defiance of the Act for Prevention of Seditious Meetings.

Vulcan Mills is described as 'the romance of the British proletariat… He stood for their actual and private emotions, he was their larger heart, and with a tongue that did not stumble, he celebrated that which they desired to believe.. He never faltered in the ideals he had, as it were, undertaken on their behalf, and as his social proposals were still very far from serious consideration or practical test by the Commonwealth, he could hold them up with every happy advantage. He sat earnestly at Westminster with his feet upon the floor—and his policy in the clouds; and every time he spoke, the millennium came nearer in the eyes of Further Angus. Pending its realization he did spade work on committees upon labour-questions which was generally admitted to be useful.… He was a man singularly without personal ambition in politics. He tramped after his ideal wherever he saw it, tramped after it in the same old heavy boots.… He belonged emphatically to the earlier emergence of the socialistic idea before it had learned the necessity of compromise or the value of business methods, when the voice in the wilderness carried all before it, and organization was as irrelevant as quadratics.'

The Standing Counsel to the Government who thinks Vulcan Mills rather a nuisance admits that 'he has heart and eloquence of a sort, and he's quite honest. The people like him too because he's never climbed on their shoulders into a silk hat and a frock coat.'

(A reference probably to Keir Hardie's famous cap.) When Mills meets his Indian friends, he tells them—after rebuking one of them for calling his fellow-Indians 'natives'—that 'the people must govern themselves. That is the proclamation of the twentieth century. Not in England, not in America only, but in every cursed Dependency and emasculated Crown Colony on the fact of the earth.' He urges them to 'agitate, agitate. It is my first word to you, and I foresee it will be my last. Agitate every way you know. We—your brothers—in England—are oppressed by class-domination there just as you are here, but we have found that we can shake it by agitation.' Miss Duncan perceived that the leaders of the terrorist movement did not believe in the Western type of secular democracy. Swami Yadava, the Hindi sanyasin in the novel wants the British to stay on though he knows that 'they as a people have little affection for us as a people,' because as champions of the status quo, they will help to keep the old social order intact with the Brahmin at the top. And they will do the job much less expensively than, for instance, the Japanese (whose stock had gone up in India after the Russo-Japanese war) or the Americans in similar circumstances. When Swami Yadava speaks to Mills of the danger of new wine in old bottles, Mills retorts: 'Let the bottles burst. The people will drink the new wine, and it will hearten them for great deeds.… Excuse me, Swami Yadava, you are a priest, and there never was a priest yet who did not find sacerdotal domination was easier in political coma.' For the leaders of the terrorist movement their activity constituted a 'burnt offering' to God, or rather, to 'the Mother.' When Aurobindo retired to Pondicherry he had not giving up politics for religion; he had never given up religion. In the novel, the guru of the terrorists is Ganendra Thakore, ostensibly the editor of a newspaper, The Lamp of Youth, and the director of a school (Anushilansamithi) for physical and cultural education. (The young man involved in the railway train incident quoted earlier, B. B. Dey, is a member of the gang but Mills is unaware of these affiliations.) Ganendra thinks that the Western model of government is unsuited to the genius of the country. 'But give us back our Mother, and we shall not trouble about the fashion of her dress, he says to Mills, and in order, no doubt, to bring home to him how keenly the deprivation of freedom was being felt, asks Mills whether he had ever been forcibly separated from his mother. To which, Mills replies, with breezy unsentimentality, 'I never had one,' and repeats, 'No mother and no gods.' Joan Mills also fails to comprehend this language of the heart. (Curzon, it will be recalled, also could not understand this language and refused to attach any importance to the Bengali agitation against the Partition of Bengal.) When Swami Yadava rather loftily tells Vulcan Mills that Indians have another kind of freedom than representative institutions, Mills gives him 'a glance of half-contemptuous pity,' and retorts: "There is no other kind. And you in India must rouse yourselves to feel that. It is what I preach to my friends here day and night."

Vulcan Mills of course simplifies the issues but Miss Duncan shows how dangerous it is to mix politics and religion. More boys wish to join the school of Ganendra Thakore so that they may study the Gita and hate the English. "Already we hate them—but not truly.… the holy Gita strengthens the heart … We are religious and wish to be made ready to die for our sacred mother." The High Court judge, Sir Kristodas Mukherjee who sentences Ganendra for sedition, tells him before pronouncing judgement:

The fact remains, and you have made it abundantly clear to me this afternoon, that the religious emotion, however pure, can furnish no sound basis for political life. These things stand aside one from the other; and from the bottom of my heart I adjure you, and all others like you, who believe that they need only fan a desire to turn it into fact, to understand and believe that this is not possible, and to turn their souls from crime in whatever disguise it may present itself … You have held out the arm of the priest to point the way to violence and crime. That this has been a source of true spiritual satisfaction to you many will doubt, and that spiritual satisfaction should make a feather's weight against the gravity of your misdeeds all will deny.

Gandhi attempted, with some success, to show that instead of defiling religion with politics, politics could be purified with religion. In politics the end is all important; but religion teaches that means are as important as ends. It is to the credit of Miss Duncan that writing at a period when terrorism had brought Indian religion as a whole under suspicion, she was able to perceive that at least in its original intention the religious inspiration of the terrorist movement was noble. That perception is presented in a fairly sophisticated dialectical way. There is Swami Yadava who is presented in his conversations with Mukherjee and his daughter—he is their guru—and with John Game as a man of some spirituality. (Like Swami Vivekananda he is widely travelled and has American disciples also.) But he is an obscurantist in politics, and a police informer to boot. The character of Sir Kristodas Mukherjee is more ambivalent. (His christian name is a tactful combining of Krishna and Christ.) At the end of the novel we see him renouncing his knighthood and retiring to the Himalayas. But his earlier reformist beliefs and practices are unambiguously ridiculed. He had started off as an extremely orthodox Brahmin, bathing in the Ganges every-day and spending several hours in worshipping the Sivalinga. After the K.C.I.E. (Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire) had been conferred on him, he had the Ganges water brought to his bath-room and shifted the Sivalinga to an upper shelf in the library 'where it was flanked by Spencer on one side and Mill on the other.' "He presently dined with Englishmen, soon smoked their cheroots, and finally drank their champagne." He gave out that he had liberalized his views, and even published a book on the future of caste which, says the novelist, was too philosophic to be progressive. He was even prepared to arrange a second marriage for his daughter who had been widowed in early life. He sent her to Oxford, but recalled her when her letters became somewhat critical of the Raj.

But this satire is altogether absent from the portrait that Miss Duncan presents of Ganendra Thakore at his trial. He justifies his conduct in a speech which, as Sir Kristodas Mukherjee acknowledges, has a strangely moving power. It deserves to be quoted since Miss Duncan never wrote anything finer:

"My Lord Judge," said Ganendra Thakore slowly, "I, Ganendra Thakore, accused in this case, have no wish to defend myself from the charges brought against me, in the ordinary sense of the term. The charges as they stand must remain, and I may venture to hope will ever remain, associated with my name." Sir Kristodas looked up sharply; but there was in the prisoner's bearing no arrogance. His head was bent, his hands clasped behind his back. One would have said, a man realizing himself at the most serious moment of his life. The judge uttered no rebuke.

"Personally I would prefer that this case should go down to history undefended, either by me or by any one on my behalf. But there are other considerations, and therefore I speak, no not for myself, but for my offence. I am not a lawyer, and I have small experience of Courts of Justice. I do not know how far I will be heard in urging the moral sanction, the moral justification, of the offence I have committed, and how far I must plead extenuation only."

"You had better confine yourself to extenuating circumstances," said the Judge.

Ganendra lifted his head.

"Then, my Lord," he said in a stronger voice, with careful self-control, "shall hope to show extenuation so great, pollution so wide, that it will reach beyond this Court to the legislators of this country. So it may be that my offence, having been committed, shall disappear; and if such result comes of it I shall think myself happy, my Lord Judge.

"I am accused of inciting to hatred and disaffection; but I submit that these harsh words do not truly describe the new emotion which is beginning to thrill the hearts of my countrymen. A new emotion they have, and through it they are finding a kind of life for their souls. It may be a feverish life. I do not ask you to believe that it is yet very sane or well-regulated. But I do ask a hearing when I maintain that it is the only one they have; and that before they found it they were dead. I know that before I found it I was dead. I ate and drank complacently, in agreement with the world as it had produced me; but I did not know my own spirit. In my fortieth year came the misfortune which awakened me, my Lord, to what your law calls hatred and disaffection; and while I cannot even yet bless that misfortune, there is no moment of the life of the soul into which it ushered me that I would exchange for all the forty dead years that went before."…

"My Lord Judge, I was raised from the dead. Is it a thing incredible to your Lordship? I stand before you not in my corruptible body, but in my incorruptible body. I, who am permitted by the clemency of this Court to address you, have consciously and gloriously partaken of the Divine essence. I have spoken with the Lord of the Herds, and in part the vision of Arjuna has been mine." …

"I came into this estate by the way of what your law calls hatred and disaffection. Not hatred of any person or disaffection to any potentate, but hatred and disaffection toward the political conditions which were numbing the manhood, and silencing the voice, and destroying the traditions of my own great and ancient people. I placed this estate against the fat prosperity of a few rich men, against the disturbing of our immemorial peace with a few more railroads, against all the other economic blessings which we are so often bidden to count. I placed against it the Pax Britannica. And I chose the word of the Lord.

"Having found my own soul I looked, my Lord, with the eyes of my soul, for the soul of the Mother, I saw it dumb and dying in the souls of her sons. The Troubler of Men spoke to me and gave me a message. Then I saw and knew why my own soul had been shown to me; and from that moment to this I have never ceased to deliver the message—this message. The men of my race must come out of political bondage; they must tear themselves at any sacrifice from ignoble dependence upon an alien power, from the poor comfort and security that we are asked to value above our birthright—in order that they may enter into the first condition under which they can realise and proclaim to the world the Divinity that from the beginning has loved this land above all others.

"I say the first of the conditions. For God is mukta—free. He is buddha—enlightened. He is suddha—pure. Those who would be clothed with His mission must be all three, but freedom comes first. And India claims His mission to the world—India, whose God is older than light or thought, whose inspiration gave the West a religion which it dares to retail to us at second-hand India is the guru of the nations. Let others invent their luxuries, build their ships, forge their great instruments of war. The mission of India is to proclaim and to prove the union of God and man, the supreme, universal, and eternal necessity of knowledge. India holds the torch of the spirit, and would hold it high. This is the mission of Nationalism, miscalled hatred and disaffection, for the sake of which I am accused before you to-day.

"Hatred and disaffection? Not to any person or to any potentate. Were Bhishma and Drona, men meet for honour, my Lord, fought with disaffection of the field of the Kurus? Had the blind King hate from Pritha's son? Was not the fight made at the bidding of a voice which said, 'If thou wilt not wage this lawful battle, then wiltthou fail in thine own Law and thine honour?' And was that voice other than the voice which the Nationalists of this country hear today?

Sir Kristodas, listening sat forward, with his elbow on the desk, his hand now shading his eyes. The spectators listened too, a little perhaps, as if to a poet or a performance, but closely, intently.…

"I believe," summed up Ganendra, "that the law takes cognisance of what it describes as good and bad intention. I do not hope to establish my intention in the eye of the law—but I know, I know, that I have established it in the eye of God."

Sir Kristodas sentences him to ten years in a penal colony, but says in the course of his summing-up, "It may be that it would be wiser for the Government which rules and must continue to rule this land and better for us if they would try to understand our people more by the light of those old books from which you have quoted." Ganendra dies in prison before he is removed to the penal colony—which seems to have been Miss Duncan's way of tempering law with justice. Miss Duncan was no doubt in the final reckoning a writer of 'imperialist' novels, but she felt the appeal of India and the claims of Indian nationalism. The Viceroy in the novel concludes his Convocation Address to the Calcutta University with the nationalist cry, Bande Mataram (Obeisance to the Mother). The novelist describes the cry as 'the watchword of the nascent nation, unloved by authority, dear to the people, and as they caught it from the Viceroy, his audience laughed and sobbed together and would have carried him out like a Krishna image at the Festival of Vishnu, the Preserver of Men.' Joan Mills wants to marry Dey (rejecting Game, the Home Secretary of the Government) and settle in India to work for India's 'awakening.' Her former life in England of committees and campaigning for women's rights seems to her, in comparison, like the beating of a nursery drum. She tells Mrs. Foley: 'It is all tawdry and feverish, full of expediency and vulgarity. I love the larger peace and the deeper dream of India.' Miss Duncan is again very successful in capturing that larger peace in her description of the landscape:

The band ceased, and the curious, soft silence spread about them that falls with every evening about Calcutta. Now and then a horse shifted restlessly with a clink of harness, or a crow, settling on his branch for the night, cawed a raucous protest against intrusion; but there was hardly any other sound. A hawker of buttonhole bouquests offered his basket from carriage to carriage. The scent of his tuberoses and jasmine wandered through the still air, and his voice sounded timid and tentative in the quiet. The palms of the gardens stood theatrically in the electric light which burnished and importance of the policeman who moved about regulating the ranks of the carriages. Further out in one direction, the circle showed a dim funnel or two, and died away in another toward the jewelled expanse of the Maidan. Within stood saliently the white marble figure of a British admiral who once brought his blue jackets and their cutlasses up the river, and now seemed to contemplate, not without criticism, the scene he had helped to save for his country.

Joan sees her dedication to India as a duty. "How else can one so completely devote one's self to these unhappy browbeaten people whose heart is spurned by the heel of our race? How can one do anything short of identifying one's self with them? And how little it is, how little, after all the arrogance, the misunderstanding, the contempt. In the whole world is there love enough to blot it out?" Her father, the Radical M.P., 'saw the dedication of his future activities to the cause of India somewhat less simply than his daughter did' but the essential validity of Joan Mills's approach to the Indian problem—India's freedom and India's relations with England—derives its attestation from the opening scene of the novel that I have quoted above. Dey shoots himself after an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Viceroy, but even after his death, Joan wants to stay on in India. "What does it matter," she says when she hears of his suicide, "what does it matter a little disorder—a life here and a life there—so long as a principle shines out brighter and clearer than before?"

That the principle does indeed become a little clearer and brighter than before is what makes these novels of Miss Duncan worth our attention—in spite of the fact that their overall 'philosophy' does not have the courage to assimilate their own experience. In her dreams Miss Duncan saw an India that Anglo-India did not seem very often. But the pity was that she could not remember her dreams when she woke up to drive in her tikka-gharry to Pilaghur Cantonment. Tikka-gharry and Pilaghur Cantonment have gone, with Dey, into the shadows, but the dreams remain.