Shortly after Victoria returns to the town, a Gurkha regiment headed by Colonel Rodney Savage (the third protagonist) arrives in town. Victoria, on the other hand, after living and working in Delhi for the last four years, has changed greatly and she constantly experiences certain ambivalence towards Patrick as she receives a severe jolt of reverse culture shock when she returns to her hometown. Patrick, being the young, conventional man that he is, considers himself to be Victoria’s boyfriend. The novel is narrated from the point of view of the three protagonists: Patrick Taylor, an Anglo-Indian young man who is a native of Bhowani and works in the railways, Victoria Jones is another Anglo-Indian from the town who had joined the women’s wing of the military during the Second World War and spent about four years in Delhi. As it is a major railway town, it becomes an established centre for commerce, politics and military movement. The town boasts a sizeable population of Anglo-Indians, as well as other Indian ethnic groups. The novel is set in a fictional central Indian town of Bhowani which is an important town on the railway network of the surrounding areas. Masters’ novel, Bhowani Junction (1952) is set during the last few years of the British rule in the Indian Subcontinent and the tumultuous atmosphere of those times is incorporated perfectly into the story. However, there is a John Masters too, who after being considered at par with Forster, Kipling and many of his other contemporaries who wrote about similar topics as him for a certain period of time, eventually went out of print and thus became an unrecognised, almost unknown author.

Amongst the numerous books written about the British colonial era in the Indian Subcontinent, we have the well-known classics like A Passage to India by E.M Forster and books by Rudyard Kipling.

Bhowani junction by john masters