Dramatic Possibilities in the First Jewel in the Crown assignment for the end-of-the year plays. The first 36 pages may be found at this link. 

The story of the rape

Two nations locked in an imperial embrace “of such long standing and subtlety that it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate identities.”

                       
The most stunning and incomprehensible act of this embrace was Gandhi’s open invitation to the Japanese to invade India during World War II.

Miss Crane is also locked in this embrace with her recognition that she gets along best with people of mixed blood and her realization that she will need a courage to survive this intimacy that she does not possess.

The expatriate community abroad that gives an elevated sense of security at the cost of a heightened sense of snobbery not only towards the indigenous population but towards each other.

An increasing sense of alienation and isolation on the part of Miss Crane: “And so on, year after year, as Crane, Miss Crane, and sometimes, increasingly rarely, until no more, Edwina?” This leads to “giving a thought that had never properly been a thought until now, ‘to train for the mission.’”

The picture of the Jewel in the Crown and Miss Crane conflating her role with that of the “old Queen” to promote a “wider happiness” and “rid the world of the very evils the picture took no account of: poverty, disease, misery, ignorance and injustice.”

The catena between Miss Crane and the Humanists: she rationalizes staying on “to promote human dignity and happiness” and to feed the “migratory birds” that carried the “humane concepts of classical and Renaissance Europe” to India.