"The Jewel in the Crown" has at its heart the confrontation between Hari Kumar, the young, English public-school educated Indian liberal and the grammar-school scholarship boy turned police superintendent Ronald Merrick. Merrick both hates and is attracted to Kumar and seeks to destroy him, after Daphne Manners, the English girl who is in love with Kumar and has been courted by Merrick, is raped. Critics have seen this conflict as one fundamentally influenced by Scott's own bisexuality, with Kumar representing everything young, bright, and forward-looking that had been brutally crushed in Scott's own youth. At the same time Merrick, probably a repressed homosexual, with authoritarian leanings and an arrogant sense of his own racial standing, is partly a self-portrait, in which Scott confronted his own and his compatriots' defensive impulse to racial and personal self-aggrandisement, and to moral and political pretence. The result is widely seen as a substantial and to date definitive fictional exploration of the underbelly of the Raj in India and of its workings.