In view of Scott 's chosen technique, questions about ‘what the author has to say’ seem especially hard to answer, even unfair. However, Scott himself felt that ‘Nothing is worse for a novel than for the novelist to see all sides of a question and fail to support one’ (MAM 57); and while he disliked the idea that a novel should have a ‘moral purpose’, he agreed that it may well have a ‘moral effect’ (MAM 78). Themes do emerge, then, and these eventually take the reader beyond matters of time and place, beyond history in fact, and produce their more profound implications.

Racial prejudice, which Scott saw as the main log that is ‘damming the stream’ of ‘the moral drift of history’ in our times (MAM 145), is a central concern throughout the Quartet. Scott himself was well aware of the dangers of dealing with such a sensitive and complicated issue. But he was determined to tackle it head-on.

And head-on it had to be: a more rigorous observance of the racial boundary was one inevitable consequence of the 1857–9 Mutiny, and Scott sets his work in the very years when this boundary had grown hardest to cross. The man-bap mentality was being eroded by resentment on both sides as the independence movement gained momentum; besides, Scott himself had realized at last that it only cloaked condescension, perhaps even (as Merrick puts it) ‘a mixture of perverted sexuality and feudal arrogance’ (Dsc 327). Not without some regret, he consigns it to the anachronistic Teddie Bingham in the Raj Quartet. When Teddie sacrifices his life in an effort to bring INA defectors back into the fold of their old regiment, there is still something heroic about the gesture; but on the whole it is made to seem foolhardy, if not actually foolish. Scott saw – and shows – that the embattled sense of racial superiority was hardening, now, into outright contempt.

The case of Harry Coomer/Hari Kumar is far more telling than that of Forster's Aziz in A Passage to India. It is appalling as well as ridiculous that a personable and intelligent young man like Hari should lose all value for the British as soon as he arrives in India, simply because of his colour. Here Scott's preoccupation with male identity finally and most effectively elides with his interest in cultural identity