Victoria

Last week I introduced you to Bhowani Junction by John Masters. I tried to make you see that AngloIndian bashing is easy, because, once the stereotype is reinforced, it is almost impossible to alter the accepted status quo. Masters therefore paints one of his characters, Patrick Taylor, as an oversized oaf who is also proud, possessive and petty when it comes to the others around him. He is allowed to snare his girl, Victoria Jones, but not before he proves to be shallow, sex-starved and simple-minded most of the time. All’s well that ends well, as the dramatist concluded, and so who is Masters to argue with the Bard about the unverified truth that “to each his own” is a viable social norm.

Masters, through his other anti-hero, Rodney Savage, confirms the slobbish, snobbish ways of Patrick Taylor. He—both Savage and Masters himself, I mean—revel in the prospect of belittling Taylor. Not even Patrick’s size is intimidating enough, though he strikes terror among most of the locals that he comes into contact with. But, that’s enough about Patrick; he was “tailor-made” for the tale.

Where Masters goes horribly wrong is with his characterization of his heroine, Victoria Jones, the belle of Bhowani. I will digress here to point out that amazingly few male writers have been able to portray standalone, solid, and stimulating women of substance. There are instances, however. Think of Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath”, think of Shakespeare’s Portia in “The Merchant of Venice”, think of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (“I am sick of these shadows”, she said), think about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter”, and think about the Maid of Orleans in Shaw’s “St Joan”. Now, only now, think about Victoria Jones in Masters’s “Bhowani Junction”. Do you, dear Reader, see anything in this AngloIndian character that reminds you of anything in the above-mentioned fictional characters? I advise you to reserve your answer for later, for I mean to show you that, despite the best efforts of the writer, Victoria Jones comes through—thick and thin and tacky—in flying colours, to stand out, alone, surrounded by the umpteen mediocre men in her life.

Victoria knows that her father is living a pipedream. He prides himself over his daughters, though he would like the elder one to be more selective. He is proud of his ancestor, Sergeant Duck, even though he is just a photograph on a wall. He is proud and happy with his job, quite content to obey orders to the T. He is proud and happy that Colonel Rodney Savage has hand-picked his daughter Victoria, very certain that the officer will be a gentleman at all times. He doesn’t think too much about his marriage, because the fraction in his fractured life (as an Anglo-Indian married to an Indian) has become even more fragmented in his two daughters. What he does not want to know, or even consider, is that Victoria knows his frustration. She cannot help him because her own life is a tangle: of conflicting emotions, of trying to face the truth, and of the lonely journey she has to undertake for the sake of “becoming”—a human being.

At 28 years of age, Victoria is not yet on the shelf. She is not interested in settling down, perhaps because her own life is so unsettled. Her boyfriend, Patrick, is way below her in understanding and also in social graces. Her stint as a WAC(I) only confirms her innate feeling that men, in general, only want one thing from her—uninhibited, uncommitted sex. Only her friend, and (for some time at least), her suitor, Ranjit Singh Kasel, gives her the respect she craves as a woman, but even he is not strong enough to accept Victoria for who she really is. At their betrothal, Victoria realizes that their union would force her to abandon her identity. She knows that she will always be Victoria Jones, irrespective of creed, colour, and a specific upbringing. But while she asserts her individuality in her dealings with Ranjit Singh, she falls to the wiles of her uniformed superior, Colonel Rodney Savage, all the while indulging herself to the very extreme.

This arrangement—of Victoria shacking up with Colonel Savage—also follows the stereotypical idea that the half-caste [read “Anglo-Indian”] woman would use any means to ensnare a white man. We saw the same masala in Paul Scott’s “The Alien Sky”, and book after book on the “Anglo-Indian” theme feeds on this gross exaggeration. When Rodney Savage completes his fun and games with the ever-compliant Victoria, he makes a mock-hero of Patrick Taylor, the ploy sufficient enough to make Victoria accept that it is her fate to be attached to a dunderhead.

There is more to Victoria Jones than I have given you. Even though the all-controlling author of the novel tries his best to put her down, Victoria is the epitome of a strong woman. She is not in the mould of the great heroines in literature and in life. Ultimately, Victoria understands who she is, where her roots are, and why she will not be anything but her true self.

More about Victoria Jones, next week, dear Readers. I will, then, try to show you why it is vitally important that the writer stands apart from his work. If he intrudes, if he allows the narrator—himself, actually—to dictate the flow of the book, it will be seriously flawed. And that is what I feel about “Bhowani Junction”.