Eight-Anna Girl

BHOWANI JUNCTION (394 pp.)--John Masters--Viking ($3.75).

In days gone by, when the sun never set on the British Empire, old India hands toted the white man's burden, and Rudyard Kipling wrote about it in some 35 volumes of prose and poetry. Now that the burden has been lifted, many an old India hand has little to tote but a stiff upper lip. Not so John Masters, exbrigadier of the Indian army. Bounced out of India by Indian independence, he has bounced right back again, figuratively, at least, with a self-imposed burden of Kiplingesque dimensions. The burden: to write 35 novels about the land of purdah and pukka sahibs, covering the rise and fall of British imperial rule. Bhowani Junction is 39-year-old Author Masters' fourth, and a Book-of-the-Month-Club choice for April. It covers part of the fall.

Three of Bhowani Junction'?, main characters take turns at telling the story, which hangs on the problems of a group Americans know little about. In India, there are many names for them--Anglo-Indians, Eurasians, half-castes, chee-chees, blacky-whites, eight-annas.* Victoria Jones, an eight-anna girl, is "the color of dark ivory." She is a lush beauty with come-hither eyes and a figure that would make an hourglass seem angular. But in 1946. with the British on their way out of India, Victoria's problem is acute. ("We couldn't become English, because we were half Indian. We couldn't become Indian, because we were half English.")

For most of Bhowani Junction'?, running time Victoria gets switched on to branch lines while seeking the main track of her allegiance and affections.

She ditches a well-intentioned but bum bling Anglo-Indian, because he has "ten thumbs and a soul like a boiled ham."

She runs out on a marriage with a gentle Sikh nationalist, because "it was awful, trying to be an Indian," and there would be nothing to talk about except "politics and strikes and the future of mankind."

Then she topples into the bed of Lieut. Colonel Rodney Savage, 13th Gurkha Rifles, who is as effective as Tom Swift in dealing with men and more effective in dealing with women. In his arms Victoria finds "peace" and "ecstasy." But since the colonel is an Englishman, that is not enough. At novel's end, Victoria goes back to her bumbling Anglo-Indian and her own people at Bhowani Junction, where "the lines spread out to every Indian horizon for them."

Novelist Masters keeps his melodrama going at top speed with a terrorist plot, an attempted rape, a murder and plenty of political intrigue and skulduggery, and he handles it all with wit and intelligence. Though he does not go to the heart of his characters, at least he manages to get under their skins. But he is at his best when he catches the pathos of his eight-anna heroine and her half-caste lover, human beings who do not belong because the color of their skin is a shade too dark.

-In the same sense as twelve carats out of 24; there are 16 annas in a rupee.

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