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Women of Affairs: Contrasting Images of Empire in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet

Critics still find an element of “Raj nostalgia” in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Yet right from the start he uses an old engraving of Queen Victoria to expose the false and damaging premises on which the Raj was built. Dwindling on its journey through the Quartet, this picture is at length discarded. In contrast, Scott’s “primary” image (which also harks back to the Victorian period) is that of a girl running, at first in the shadow cast by old atrocities, but eventually into a greater freedom, a new “wholeness”. The historical sweep of the Quartet, and its analysis of the political issues involved in the disintegration of the Raj, should not obscure Scott’s fundamental purpose here: to tackle the “many-headed dragon” of prejudice by rejecting the system that promoted it; and to encourage instead, particularly through his independently-minded and stout-hearted women characters, a commitment to a postcolonial and post-racial society.