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198 M. K. NAJK

ficlion, by some of her characters. Maud Diver seems to believe that a union between the best in the two races - the upper class Whiles and Indian aristocracy

—    would actually produce splendid results, of which both England and India

should be proud. Le Roy Sinclair in Diver’s Far to Seek is the son of Sir Nevil Sinclair and Ułamani, daughter of Sir Lakshman Singh, a high-caste Rajput gentleman. Roy is described as a man with a high and complex heritage... the blood of two virile races English and Rajput was mingied in his veins.’⁵⁵ He thinks of himself not as a pathetic half-caste of the usual kind, but as ‘of a double caste, a fusion of the best in both races.'⁵⁶ The distinction is thus explained by a character in the novel : (Eurasians are) ‘the fruit, most    often of promiscuous unions between low-caste types on    both sides,

with    a sense of stigma    added to drag them down lower    still.    But where

the Crossing of the highest caste... I can see no sligma; perhaps even a spiritual gain    to your children...    India may some day be saved by    the    son of just

such    a union... He will    have the strenglh of his handicap;    the    soul of the

East, the forceful mind and character of the West... What if the ultimate meaning of British occupation of India be just this—that the successor Buddha should be a man born of high caste, high-minded British and Indian parents

—    a fusion of the finest that East and West can give.’⁵⁷

However, Roy himself is shown to have occasional doubts about the ‘Double-caste’ theory, indicating that in spite of all her liberalism, Diver herself could not shake otlf traditional Anglo-Indian prejudices completely. This is suggested by comments like the following apropos of Roy in her The Singer Passes : ‘Always at the centre, lurked that sharp cleavage between East and West the profound uncertainty of a divided soul'; and, ‘Had he, because of his Eastern blood, a less purposelul grip on the work he loved than his father ?'⁵⁸

Prcdictably enough, there is very lillle support for Maud Diver’s championship of the Eurasian among Anglo-Indian novclists, though one does find a stray example in a little-known, slight novel like Fitch and His Fortunes by G. Dick. Fitch, the protagonist here is in love with Savitra (sic) Bai, a beautiful and wealthy Indian lady. He defends himself by saying, ‘If well-born Englishmen and high-caste ladies of India wedded, it brings about the English at home a wondcrful fusion, a hybrid, mongrel lot, if you like, Norman-Dane, Anglo-Saxon, but the peer of the West, as the Eurasian would be the peer of the East, and not the by-product of the lower classes of each proud race as he is at present.’⁵**

‘Peer of the East ?’, ‘sheer nonsense’ : the Anglo-Indian novelist in generał would certainly comment; hence the Eurasian remains for him mostly a ‘Lord of the Void\ a ‘Dangling Man’, suspended in mid-air, a piebald Triianku,⁶⁰ who can neilher ascend to the heaven of Wholeness, nor ever find his feet firmly planted on roots-giving earth.