The Crown: The official book of the hit Netflix series

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Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Caldecott Honor Book This then, was the time when I first read The Jewel in the Crown, along with many of my friends. It was a time when British people were tired, and largely ashamed, of their Imperial past. It’s 1942 and tensions are running high in India. Britain, with its usual high-handedness, has decided that Indian troops will join the war effort without consulting the Indian leaders. Gandhi is demanding that the British quit India, even though that will probably mean that the Japanese move in. When the British arrest the leaders of the Independence movement, for a few short days the peace of Mayapore is broken as rioters take to the streets. And in that time one British woman will see her idealistic dreams destroyed while another will be brutally raped. Eighteen years later, an unnamed researcher will come to Mayapore to try to discover the truth of what happened in those days. Perhaps Siva should occupy the center, I'm thinking with his second wife Parvati, who not so coincidentally to Scott's story is the daughter of the Englishwoman Daphne (more on her later). Parvati also is the brother of Vishnu, a deity of some significance in The Crown Jewel.

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It is surprising that such a book can hold the attention, since there is no attempt at mystery or tension, but merely a carefully balanced and largely neutral account, giving equal weight to all points of view, and showing how misrepresentations, partisan beliefs, ambitions and resentments influenced the events portrayed. For of course although this is a time capsule, a snippet of time, the human condition itself is timeless. I could not help but feel proud of the years of British rule. Even in these turbulent times the charm of the cantonment helped one to bear in mind the calm, wise and enduring things. One had only to cross the river into the native town to see that in our cantonments and civil lines we had set an example for others to follow and laid down a design for civilised life that the Indians would one day inherit.' vs 'We were in India for what we could get out of it.' Ethel Manners expressed it best in the novel. "Such a marvelous opportunity wasted. I mean for us, by us. Indians feel it too, don't they? I mean, in spite of the proud chests and all the excitement of sitting down as free men at their own desks to work out a constitution. Won't that constitution be a sort of love-letter to the English-the kind an abandoned lover writes when the affair has ended in what passes at the time as civilized and dignified mutual recognition of incompatibility?"A searing, harrowing, bleak and terrible indictment of British rule in India, this is perhaps the most sophisticated, nuanced and self-aware analysis of colonialism and its inevitably violent destruction that I've read. Rich, Motoko (December 3, 2008). "Major Reorganization at Random House". ArtsBeat . Retrieved October 14, 2019. Former imprints of the Crown Publishing Group included Amphoto Books, Bell Tower Press, Orion Books (unconnected to Orion Publishing), Shaye Areheart, and some related subsidiaries like Gramercy Publishing Company. These have either been discontinued or transferred to other Random House units. TV M6 W9 6ter Paris Première Téva Série Club [j] M6 Music Gulli Tiji Canal J MCM MCM Top La Chaîne du Père Noël RFM TV Catchup and Video on Demand 6play Salto [k] Radio RTL RTL2 Fun Radio I realised how much easier it was to talk to another English woman, even if you disagreed with everything she said. People of the same nationality use a kind of shorthand in conversation, don’t they? You spend less effort to express more

Jewel in the Crown - Goodreads The Jewel in the Crown - Goodreads

Perhaps this is why Mayapore had got bigger but made me smaller, because my association with Hari--the one thing that was beginning to make me feel like a person again--was hedged about, restricted, pressed in on until only by making yourself tiny could you squeeze into it and stand, imprisoned but free, diminished by everything that loomed from outside, but not diminished from the inside; and that was the point, that’s why I speak of joy. Reading the original first novel, The Jewel in the Crown now, it seems even more like a piece of history long gone, with perceptions we find mind-bogglingly patronising, and so alien to our modern view that they are hard to grasp. The British largely viewed their role in India as “nurturing” another culture until they were politically mature enough to govern themselves. But during the Second World War was a time of political unrest in India. For years the British had promised to leave India to govern itself, but when World War II broke out, Britain feared that the Japanese would invade India if they left. The Indian leaders, in particular the Mahatma Gandhi, demanded that the British quit India, but because they considered the time to be militarily dangerous for India, the British administrative and military establishment actively tried to suppress any unrest in the towns. The problem with Siva's posture in the center of our thangka is that in Scott's story his dancing manifestation is cited. This is fine for our principal concern, the unity of the cyclic destruction and rejuvenation manifested in our larger story of colonizer and colonized, as well as the inner story of Daphne and Hari/Harry.

The Jewel in the Crown is set in 1942. This is after the great hey day of the British Empire in the 1920s when over a 1/5th of the world population rose in the morning under the British flag. The empire is crumbling and yet still the British government continued to dispatch earnest young men around the globe to shore up their interests in far flung kingdoms. It was an amazing feat using thousands to control millions. With the war pulling apart the world and Britain short on resources this the perfect point in history for India to press for independence. By 1947 Pakistan has been partitioned off and India has gained their independence. Truly excellent historical novels capture the history of a time and place through human interactions. History is made by human beings going about their business, with all their failings, prejudices and strivings. This novel is one of the better ones I've ever read in helping to understand India under British rule, The Raj. It not only tells us what, but how, and even more importantly, why. This is the first book of a quartet, and I have no doubt that when I finish the fourth one, I can claim it is the "War and Peace" of India. The anonymous singer, of course, runs off with her dark-skinned lover, a story that repeats itself in the more recent story of Daphne and Hari/Harry.

The Crown: The official book of the hit Netflix series

A story this complex that treats time as spatial may be best understood graphically. More than anything, this story reminds me of a thangka, those stylized paintings of the East, especially India, that frequently tell a story. This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it, and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.The third paragraph of the first part of the first volume of Paul Scott's monumental Raj Quartet. This my first time reading it, but I thought I knew it from having seen the British Granada TV series twice now, the last quite recently. But Scott's book is a revelation. It is not just the fact of its being another medium; it occupies another dimension—several of them, in fact. Even beside EM Forster's A Passage to India, that touchstone critique of colonialism, it is a work of genius in its scale, in the stupendous breadth of its sympathies, and in its extraordinary narrative technique. Daphne, in a posture of courage in search of wholeness (think Siva's destruction/rejuvenation), will be placed a foot in the waters, ready to give herself over to the flow, whatever may come, as there is no bridge capable of crossing (p.142). Jewel in the Crown' is a very circular narrative, at times very stream of consciousness, most of the novel is told throw interviews of secondary characters, but I like how this gives a large physiological scope, the Kipling like army officer, the well meaning missionary, the radical, the saint, and the upper class Indian. In both cases, they are stories of the Siva cycle of destruction and rejuvenation (or creation), so entwined they not only can't be separated, but sometimes can't be told apart.

There are two stories here, one within the other. The inner story is of a young Englishwoman named Daphne who immerses herself in India and the flow of history during the volatile period of 1942. The larger story is of the relationship between the colonizer and its subject, both yearning for India's freedom, yet unable to get it done.