Since Scott lists among Thornhill 's earlier works ‘a trio of novels about colonial life’ (p. 26), he may already have had in mind the explorations which would yield his own discoveries. In June 1964, soon after coming back from his first visit to India since the war, he began writing what was to be the first volume of his own quartet on the same subject.

True to form, his starting-points were not ideas but images, almost cinematic in their vividness: as he explained later, one was that of a girl (who would become Daphne Manners) running; the other was that of a mission school superintendent (who would become Miss Crane) removing Gandhi's portrait from her wall. Scott then came up with another picture to which Miss Crane was attached: ‘an old engraving showing Queen Victoria receiving tribute from representatives of her Indian empire’ (MAM 64). The subcontinent itself was Victoria's greatest asset, and this gave him his first title, The Jewel in the Crown; and, although not in any simplistic way – for Miss Crane's impatience with Gandhi did not mean that she respected British policies – it admirably suggested his more negative themes of loss and change. But at the same time, the first image gave Scott something far more positive, something he had been seeking to formulate in his earlier novels. For the girl running, inspired by a rather lumpish young woman whom he had encountered in Calcutta in 1964, and who had been in love with an anglicized Indian, was ‘strangely of good heart’; she had something about her which ‘had not been changed by a bitter experience’. With her ‘great capacity for love’, she represented ‘something admirable in the human spirit’ (MAM 60, 63–4).

Yet if Scott was already close to his ‘discoveries’, he still needed to work them out fully, and not just through the girl; and with one image yielding to countless others, and the burden of all that he knew and felt about India to be carried by both images and characters, there was more need than ever for structural organization of a very high order.