Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

These chapters introduce a deeper interrogation of the cultural attitudes that prevail in the Major’s social circle and the conflicts that result from growing closer to Mrs. Ali. The author also probes more deeply into the Major’s internal conflicts, which include his increasing awareness of the emotional distance that he maintains from those around him. To this end, the narrative delivers hints that the Major feels distant from Roger and sometimes even disapproves of his son’s attitudes and activities. His sense of isolation and grief over Bertie’s death is further exacerbated when he realizes that Majorie (his sister-in-law) and Jemima (his niece) do not view him as close family. When he visits, for example, he notices that neither of them inquire about how he is feeling. Both their disregard for the Major’s father’s stipulation that the guns be reunited and their wish to sell this family heirloom for immediate profit challenge the Major’s personal values and offend his sense of loyalty to the family legacy. He sees the act of storing Bertie’s gun in a cupboard, where it is neither maintained nor used, as a form of dishonor to the Pettigrew name. However, the Major also fears that this neglect is indicative of Bertie’s true feelings about their relationship, and this sense of division with his late brother, who can no longer be consulted or confronted, contributes to the Major’s emotional turmoil and loneliness.

Part of his emotional distance from the other people in his life stems from his own natural reticence, and although the Major is slowly gaining awareness of this quirk, he believes that his inclinations show good breeding and appropriately “masculine” behavior. However, on his golf outing with Alec, the Major notes that their carefully polite conversation merely skims the surface of their most pressing concerns—the hospitalization of Alec’s granddaughter and the death of the Major’s brother. All of these dynamics tie into the Major’s growing awareness that he longs for companionship with a like-minded person, whom Mrs. Ali is proving to be. In this way, his gradual inner realizations simultaneously fuel his own growth and advance the romance plot of the novel.

Additionally, Cultural Prejudice and the Possibility of Integration are examined further when Daisy Green, the vicar’s wife, and the other ladies select a theme for the golf club dinner. Their choice of the Mughal Empire reflects the fact that, to them, this culture is exotic and appealing because it is so different from their own. Yet in their use of this piece of history as a party theme, they reveal their lack of understanding about Mughal culture and they incorrectly assume that because the empire was largely based in the Indian subcontinent, Hindu deities would be appropriate props to evoke this period. The Major is the one who points out this erroneous assumption when he reminds them that the Mughals were Muslim rulers.

This is the kind of ignorance that Mrs. Ali counseled George’s mother, Amina, to ignore when confronting the tea lady at the seashore, but such ignorance has its roots not in a lack of historical knowledge but in the ingrained attitude of considering other cultures to be inferior. The tendency among Western subjects to consider Eastern cultures as exotic, fascinating, or threatening was explored by the Palestinian American literary critic and scholar Edward Said in his critical works Orientalism (1978) and Cultural Imperialism (1993); these concepts became the basis for the literary and philosophical theory known as postcolonialism.

Because Mrs. Rasool is well aware that her white British customers consider her Indian culture exotic or “other,” she has chosen to take advantage of this interest by providing food and décor that has just enough “exotic” appeal while remaining acceptable to the British palate. When she jokes that they will deliver a “Mughal” dinner of roast beef and trifle (traditional English dishes) and will ensure they are not too spicy, this quip hints that she has learned to market herself with efficiency to white Britons who are accustomed to plain fare. Furthermore, when she jokes that the trifle (a layered dessert made of cake typically soaked in alcohol) was one of the positive impositions that the British made on Indian cultures, she draws attention to the inconvenient fact that the would-be partygoers’ cultural appropriation itself resembles a colonizing act. By contrast, Alec’s joke that the Major is Indian merely because he was born in Lahore falls flat because his audience knows that the British presence in India was as a governing class; the Major was never truly an Indian subject. Likewise, the Major’s affection for rasmalai, a Bengali sweet made of cheese and boiled milk, shows that cultural appropriation can surface even in presumably innocent acts of kindness and nurture, since his taste for this dish is interwoven with the British colonial presence in these lands.

Within this context, Mrs. Augerspier emerges as a blunter representation of white prejudice itself, although she veils her racism in the vocabulary of manners, as shown by her discussion of what qualities mark a lady. Roger puts this issue directly into words when he implies that Grace, who appears tipsy, and Mrs. Ali, who is of Pakistani descent, cannot be the “right” sort of people, and implies that associating with them could harm his or the Major’s reputation. Mrs. Augerspier’s dingy furniture and her quick acceptance of Roger’s cashier check suggest that despite her lofty airs, she is a greedy woman who lacks taste. Later, Frank Ferguson will suggest that even British “breeding” can be bought when he becomes the owner of Loch Brae and the associated pedigree.