THE INDIAN PROBLEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 285, 2 December 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE INDIAN PROBLEM.

A DISTINGUISHED NOVEL. Since Flora Annie Steel wrote "On the Face of the Waters," the student of Indian affairs has been obliged to give some attention to the fiction on the subject. To-day men and women with knowledge of India are busy putting it into the form of fiction, sometimes with serious intention to educate. Among those most highly gifted in special knowledge, deep sympathy and literary ability is Mr. Edward Thompson, who has become one of the foremost exponents in England of a liberal policy towards India. He uses the novel as well as the article to throw light on his vast subject. This latest work on India takes the form of a novel and is called "So a Poor Ghost," taken from a verse of Rupert Brooke, in which a condition of doubt is described. It is a condition of confusion in India at the present time that is depicted. An Englishman who fought in the war and then "went Radical" on the Indian question returns to take up service in a native State. His views are anathema to soldiers and officials of the old school, and his contract is cancelled before lie reaches his post. Immediately on arrival he is thrown into contact with a capable, enlightened, young, native ruler, who has been educated in England and represents an important aspect of the selfgovernment question that is often overlooked outside India. This prince's capital is becoming industrialised, and some of the unloveliest features of Western town life, have been introduced. A riot occurs and the young Englishman, despite his radicalism, helps to suppress it. He meets again the woman he was in love with, but she is married to a perfectly impossible British official, a man both incompetent and hopelessly narrow. Their romance is skilfully inter-woven with many aspects of the tremendous Indian-problem. Mr. Thompson's knowledge of the Indian scene and Indian history is exceptional, and he writes with tl» imagination of a poet and the sympathy of one who regards the Indian as a human being. He offers no solution, but presents a case as he sees it, and as it has to be considered by Britain. For one thing, his picture of the Anglo-Indian community is more just than that in that famous, but to our mind rather over-rated story "A Passage to India." This distinguished book comes from Macmillan's.