‘Too Late’

Abstract

The India of Kipling’s Simla, E. M. Forster’s Chandrapore, George Orwell’s Kyauktada, and Paul Scott’s Pankot is visibly the same. The British inhabitants of these cities seem to stand still while the code of the pukka sahib becomes ever more stifling as the circumstances of the Anglo-Indians deteriorate dramatically. Kipling’s administrators are full of work, certain of their role in bringing good government to India. Forster’s administrators, created just before and after the First World War, are much less certain about the permanence of British rule. Orwell’s characters have even less confidence in the survival of the raj. Finally, Scott’s Anglo-Indians preside over the winding up of empire, some deciding to stay on.

Lo, soul, sees’t thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

W. Whitman, ‘Passage to India’ (1871), 2, 11. 31–5

I can connect

Nothing with Nothing.

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), 11. 301–2