Introduction

Indian Diamonds 159
sion, not the pursuit of mysterious Orientals in an imperial city but the cultivation
of the national flower: “Far from the crimes and the mysteries of the great city,
the illustrious thief-taker was placidly living out the last Sybarite years of his life
smothered in roses!” (354). In “The Rajah’s Diamond” the diamonds are “rolling
here and there among the rosebushes like drops of morning dew” (84). The picture
of innocence evoked through the flowers and diamonds as fresh dew stand in
stark contrast to the description of the Rajah’s Diamond as “crawling with the
worms of death” and “compacted out of innocent blood” (Stevenson, “Rajah’s”
131). The contrast which is established here pits the roses as a symbol of the domestic
against the diamond. The value and exotic splendour of the one is juxtaposed
with the native, natural but invaluable beauty of the other. In the face of the
ancient and “unfathomable” (Collins, Moonstone 70) Moonstone the roses are the
natural and unrefined answer that promise simplicity. In the same vein, the “little
nosegay” reminds Ezra Jennings of pleasant experiences in England as opposed to
his ‘unspeakable’ upbringing in the unnamed colony: “‘How beautiful they are!’ he
said simply, showing this little nosegay to me [Franklin Blake]” (366). The presentation
of England as rural assumes that it is not involved in colonialism and also
untainted by crime.
Betteredge with his “English ideas” (81) and long service in the Verinder family
stands for the decidedly English values which are also present in the setting of
the country house. His constant reading of Robinson Crusoe exemplifies his representation
of Englishnesss. The religious reverence with which he treats it, however,
rather evokes the Indian “hocus-pocus” that he condemns. He mimics Robinson
Crusoe’s use of the Bible during his isolation on the island so that Betteredge
perpetuates the practise found in Robinson Crusoe using the narrative of European
colonialism in the Caribbean to find answers in the use of Crusoe as “a combination
Bible and Ouija board” (Mehta 622) in the present. Duncan asserts that
Betteredge’s domestic leisure pursuit is downright imperialist: “Robinson Crusoe is
the founding fable of a modern, economic, and colonial formation of British identity,
while tobacco is one of England’s original imperial commodities” (Duncan
309-310). Betteredge’s reading of Robinson Crusoe and his tobacco pipe brings together
one of the earliest ideological founding texts of imperialism and its contemporary
economic result. The substitution of Robinson Crusoe for the Bible already
suggests the stand-in of imperialism for faith which marks the late-Victorian
times (Brantlinger, Rule 228). Betteredge’s ignorance of the connection between
the theft of the Moonstone and the colonial implications of Robinson Crusoe is illustrated
in his checking his digression on Crusoe with the words: “Still this don’t look
much like starting the story of the Diamond, does it” (Collins, Moonstone 19), when
the colonial text clearly is a very good starting point for “the story of the Diamond.”
Gabriel Betteredge and Sergeant Cuff, who represent ‘Englishness, are
united by their ignorance of colonial connections to their respective situations.
Cuff ignores the Indian origin of the Moonstone, and Betteredge equally unre-