In A Division of the Spoils, the chaos of the departure of the British and the fervor of Partition wreaks havoc upon the twilight of the Raj - and the end of a era. In The Towers of Silence, Barbie Batchelor, a British missionary and schoolteacher, befriends a British family and witnesses the trial of Hari Kumar, an Indian man accused of assaulting his beloved Daphne Manners, while observing the dangerously cruel Captain Ronald Merrick, Hari's nemesis. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence from Britain. The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal.
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