Bhowani Junction
John Masters
 The book is set in 1946/1947, shortly before India gained independence. Victoria is an Anglo-Indian, the daughter of a railwayman. Patrick, also an Anglo-Indian, considers himself her boyfriend, but her feelings towards him have become ambivalent since her experience of British Army culture (see below). In vigorously defending herself from a British army officer who is attempting to rape her, Victoria unintentionally kills him. She is persuaded not to report the matter by a subordinate of Patrick's, a Sikh, Ranjit, who hopes to marry her and whose family and friends help her to avoid detection. As presented in the novel (though rather simplified in the film), Victoria had earlier decided to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Anglo-Indian community by joining the British Army during the Second World War. With the war's end and her return home, however, she is confronted with the problem of her identity all over again. She decides to get engaged to Ranjit in an attempt to become assimilated in wider Indian society—since British rule is visibly on its way out—but then she realises that such a marriage would require her to give up her name (and, essentially, her identity). She runs away from the Sikhs and literally into the arms of a dashing British officer, Rodney Savage (commander of a Gurkha battalion), becoming both his lover and his unofficial adjutant in the last hectic days of British rule in India. But in the end she realises that she cannot escape her origins, and—rejecting both the Indian man and the British one—chooses Patrick, an Anglo-Indian like herself. Rodney Savage recognises that he is losing out to his social inferior, but realises that he is powerless to prevent it. Patrick for his part begins to realise that, in the new India, his children might have a chance of becoming anyone they want to, rather than having to stick to the Anglo-Indians' traditional role of working on the railways. In the film version of Bhowani Junction, Patrick dies heroically, rather than surviving to win Victoria as in the novel. In the film, it is Rodney Savage who gets the girl. The change was presumably required because the book's conclusion was in contradiction to the conventions of Hollywood, in which dashing European officers, played by leading movie stars like Stewart Granger, are not expected to lose out to gauche, mixed-race railway-workers played by less-established actors (as Bill Travers was in 1956).