The idea of ‘Britishers’ still stuck in the craw of most Indians when Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartetwas being published in the late 1960s. Then India produced her very own ‘oppressor’. In 1975 Mrs Gandhi was accused of election violations in the Supreme Court, and then visited on her countrymen the brutish dictatorship that was The Emergency. At the end of this extreme period in India’s recent history Scott’s epilogue to the quartet, Staying On, was published. It was greeted with enthusiasm in India by an increasing number of Indians of the ‘old school’, Indians from the army and the very colonially structured civil service, who were beginning to feel sentimental about the Raj. Scott had sensed the spirit of this time, in defiance of its dynastic leadership and the pervasion of creeping corruption. He took the moment and turned it into a gentle tale from the hills.

Staying On surprised people with its success in India, a readership that had struggled with The Quartet and often raged against it in print. But this was now a time of such distaste for government that perhaps the book struck chords of rebellion and nostalgia. It seems sadly ironic that Scott died so soon after it was published, perhaps before he had a chance to enjoy being accepted by a widening readership in the country that had imprinted itself on him so markedly, though he was rewarded with the Booker prize.
He was often reviewed as someone who wrote caricatures of the British in India, and those who served them but, to this reader, both in my late teens and then twenty years on, they are not. I have met versions of the characters in Staying On over and over across an adult lifetime spent in India, scattered not only among hill stations in the Himalayas and The Western Ghats, but also in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and beyond.

When I first read Staying On I was in Shimla, the former summer capital of the Raj, a creaking mess of mock-Tudor official buildings and cottages crossbred somewhere between village Sussex and The Brighton Pavilion. The house where I was staying, Chapslee, time-arrested somewhere in the 40s. The plumbing still has to be taken by surprise, the beds have brass knobs, and the food is perfect Chutney Mary. I buried myself there, your average teenage reader, using the privacy of a book as a way to avoid interaction with real life. But the world that I had come into in India came right out at me from Scott’s pages.

I had already read The Raj Quartet, liking it in parts, but having such a profound loathing for the linking character of the repulsive Ronald Merrick that I did not really feel I had enjoyed it. Staying On was different. The first time it made me cry, now it reads as a memento mori, not just to the passing of a way of life for all those who served under the Raj, but also for a time in contemporary Indian history when the lustre of Independence was fading, the joy of ‘freedom at midnight’ almost lost as the country struggled to find her way both domestically and internationally. Some gentler older Indians refer to it now as ‘the time of darkness’, when the patriotic spirit of a new India had been ground down by economic instability, and Mrs Gandhi was seen as the emasculator of so much of the country’s masculine pride.
To that self-involved teenager at Chapslee House in Shimla, more interested in the crumpets that came on a silver chaffing dish for tea, this was a straightforward story of an old English couple in the imaginary hill station of Pankot. Tusker and Lucy Smalley, now centre stage, had played bit parts in Scott’s quartet, and indeed within the structures of the Raj. Around them move a cast of characters in ever-increasing circles. These were the same people that I was meeting in the bazaars, shrieking at each other