To The Coral Strand

The first member of the Savage family to reach India stepped ashore on the coral strand of ''Coromandel!' in the year 1628. From that date, for 319 years, the Savages were bound to India by an ever- strengthening chain of event and emotion, of incident and accident, of power and sacrifice. Of all this John Masters has written in The Deceivers, Nightrunners of Bengal, The Lotus and the Wind, Far, Far the Mountain Peak, and Bhowani Junction. The events of Bhowani Junction took place in 1946 and the protagonist, Rodney Savage, then stood on the threshold of the great change which was to come over India the following year--largely as a result of the work of himself and his forebears. Now he must sail away, finally, from the soil which over the generations has become a part of his being. But he can no more leave India, on command, than a man can walk away and leave his heart. On the surface, therefore, this is the exciting story of one man's efforts to find terms on which he can live with the new India and his own pride. Yet he fails. With the certainty of an event already recorded in the history books we know that for all his genius, for all the passion of his struggle, he will be crushed--and, as we watch, he is. Then begins a new struggle in which Rodney Savage is not the protagonist but the prize: the struggle of a woman to remake this broken, defeated man, who sees himself only as the last of the line, the fourteenth generation of Savages to serve in India.