All this is seen in the novel, with the various factions arguing and plotting, while the British try to keep the order they have always imposed. After that, India might become a democracy, a Communist state or be partitioned. But there are many factions, and the only thing they agree on is ridding themselves of the British. The war is not long over, with the chaos that implies, and all India is agitating for freedom. The novel is set in 1946, at the very time when the British are preparing to leave India, but when neither they nor the Indians quite know the time or manner of the leaving. Several of his novels, including Bhowani Junction, tell the story of the Savages, a military family, over the many years they have lived in India, and it seems likely that Masters was drawing in part on his own family history and experiences.īhowani Junction is a case in point, with one of its principal characters, Colonel Rodney Savage, commanding a brigade of Gurkhas during WWII and after, just as Masters did. He was born there, to a British family which served the Raj, and followed its tradition by becoming a soldier in India and Burma. John Masters had long experience of India – a now vanished India, distorted by the British Raj.
Post-colonial fiction is now rightly recognised and its subject matter is fascinating colonial fiction is often frowned upon, but it can be revealing. John Masters was in his day a popular author of often historical epics set in India but is largely forgotten today.
The novel is available second-hand and there is a Kindle edition but I am betting that it is not much read now.
It was years before I read the novel, by John Masters (1914-1983), on which the film is based, and I did that only because I am interested in the translation of books into films (in this case, as so often, there is a major plot change). The dramatic title above is taken from a tie-in paperback of the novel, and a poster for the movie is even stronger: ‘Love, lust and violence in the last days of British India’.
I guess I first saw it on Sunday afternoon television, watching with my mother who was a great film fan and brought me up to be the same. I came across Bhowani Junction years ago, in the shape of the spectacular 1956 MGM film starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger and directed by George Cukor.
0 kommentar(er)
