Playing the White Man: Ronald Merrick, Whiteness, and Erotic Triangles in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet

Abstract

In his seminal Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction Bhupal Singh suggests that ‘‘strictly speaking’’, the term Anglo-Indian fiction ‘‘means fiction mainly describing the life of Englishmen in India’’.1 Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet,2 which as Sabina Sawhney (amongst others) has noted, is ‘‘populated almost exclusively by the British’’, clearly fits this narrow definition of the genre. Sawhney goes on to suggest that Scott’s ‘‘monocular vision reinforces the Western European and North American prejudices of the relative importance of various peoples’’.