The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) by Paul Scott Page A

in the days when Mayapore was a Native State. The raja had been deposed in 1814 and the state annexed by the East India Company, absorbed into the province of whose score of districts it now ranked as second in size and importance.
    Although Lady Chatterjee was the leader of Indian society in Mayapore, Miss Crane scarcely knew her. She met her at the Deputy Commissioner’s but had never been to the MacGregor House which, it was said, was the one place where English and Indians came together as equals, or at least without too much caution on the part of the Indians or too much embarrassment on the part of the English. Miss Crane did not actually regret never going to the MacGregor House. She thought Lady Chatterjee overwesternized, a bit of a snob, socially and intellectually; amusing enough to listen to at the DC’s dinner table but not inthe drawing room afterwards, when the women were alone for a while and Lady Chatterjee asked questions of them which Miss Crane thought were calculated to expose them as lacking in social background at home or cosmopolitan experience abroad, finally lapsing into dignified silence and letting the English small-talk get under way without attempting to contribute to it, content to waft for the men to rejoin them when she would again have the opportunity of sparkling and making everybody laugh. The English women found Lady Chatterjee easier-going if they had the men with them. They were all, Miss Crane concluded, rather afraid of her. And Lady Chatterjee, Miss Crane thought, was—although not afraid of them—certainly on her guard, as stuffy in her own way as the Englishwomen. For Miss Crane she seemed to have no feelings whatsoever; a disinterest that might have been due to her discovery by direct questioning at the first dinner they attended together that Miss Crane had no degree, in fact no qualifications to teach other than the rough and ready training she had received years ago in Lahore after leaving the service of the Nesbitt-Smiths. On the other hand Lady Chatterjee’s indifference was equally probably due to a disapproval of missions and missionaries and of anyone connected with them. Westernized though she was Lady Chatterjee was of Rajput stock, a Hindu of the old ruling-warrior caste. Short, thin, with greying hair cut in European style, seated upright on the edge of a sofa, with the free end of her saree tight-wound around her shoulders, and her remarkably dark eyes glittering at you, her beaky Rajput nose and pale skin proclaiming both authority and breeding, she looked every inch a woman whom only the course of history had denied the opportunity of fully exercising the power she was born to.
    Widowed some years earlier by the death of a husband who had been older than she and by whom she had had no children, an Indian who was knighted for his services to the Crown and his philanthropy to his own countrymen, Lady Chatterjee, so far as Miss Crane was concerned, now seemed to be continuing what must have been Sir Nello’s policy of getting the best out of both worlds. She thought this in rather bad taste. Friends in the old days of Sir Henry Manners and his wife who, for a time, had been Governor and Governor’s lady of the province, Lady Chatterjee still went annually to Rawlpindi or Kashmir to stay with Lady Manners, now a widow like herself; and a Manners girl, Daphne, a niece of Sir Henry, rather plain, big-boned and as yet unmarried, was working in the hospital at Mayapore for the war effort and living in theMacGregor House as Lady Chatterjee’s guest. It was, no doubt, Lady Chatterjee’s standing with distinguished English people like old Lady Manners as much as the position she enjoyed in Mayapore as Sir Nello’s widow and as member of the board of governors of the Technical College, member of the committee of the purdah hospital in the native town, that caused her to be treated with such outward consideration by the leaders of the English colony. With the DC and his