'''''Bhowani Junction''''' is a 1952 novel by John_Masters, which became the basis of a successful 1956 film. It is set amidst the turbulence of the British withdrawal from India. It is notable for its portrayal of the Eurasian (Anglo-Indian) community, closely involved with the Indian railway system. The film was directed by George_Cukor, and was shot on location in Lahore, Pakistan. It starred Ava_Gardner as Victoria Jones, an Anglo-Indian Nurse in the British_Army, and Stewart_Granger as Colonel Rodney Savage, a British army officer. {{spoiler}} The book is set in 1947, shortly before India achieved independence. Victoria is the mixed-race child of a Railway worker. Patrick, also an Anglo-Indian, considers himself her boyfriend, but her feelings towards him are platonic. In self-defence, Victoria kills an English officer who has attempted to rape her, and is helped to avoid detection by an Indian, Ranjit, who hopes to marry her. She then becomes involved in an exercise to capture a local terrorist, along with her commanding officer, Rodney Savage, with whom she has an affair. As presented in the novel (and rather simplified in the film), Victoria tries to escape the suffocating and narrow-minded atmosphere of the (Anglo-Indian) community - serving with distinction in the British Army, becoming engaged to marry an Indian Sikh but escaping when finding out that this marriage would require her to give up her name (and essentially, her identity). She literally runs away, directly into the arms of the dashing British officer Rodney Savage, and becomes 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 - chooses Patrick, an Anglo-Indian like herself. This conclusion, which is an essential part of what Masters wanted to say in the book, was avoided in the film. Patrick dies heroically at the end of the film, rather than survives to marry Victoria. The change was presumably due to the fact that the book's conclusion was in direct contradiction to the conventions of Hollywood, in which dashing officers rarely lose out to gauche raliway-workers. In the book, the sarcastic Rodney Savage is well-aware of the irony of the fact that he loses out to a weaker man, but is helpless to stop it. The 'model' for the town of Bhowani Junction, was the central Indian railway town of Bhusawal. Bhowani Junction's 'real' counterpart is 'Bhusawal Junction'. Another theme in the book is the atmospehere of the early Cold_War, as manifested in India. The British have already resolved upon leaving India, but are actively trying to define who their inheritors would be, and are particularly concerned with "preventing the threat of a Communist takeover" - particularly following the The_Royal_Indian_Navy_Mutiny which reminds both the British and the Indian Communists of Communist-led sailor mutinies in the October_Revolution and in post-WWI Germany. As against the Communists, the British are throughout the book actively striving to prop up and nurture the Congress_Party and its leader Gandhi, whom they had imprisoned just a short time earlier. In one passage the British character Rodney Savage reflects upon the irony of his being charged with protecting Gandhi against a terrorist assasination attempt. Savage returns in a sequel, To_the_Coral_Strand, where he undergoes a deep personal crisis which ends with his staying on in Indepedent India rather than return to Britain, and coming to terms with the new reality. Category:British_novels Category:Indian_books Category:1956_films Category:Films_based_on_fiction_books De:Knotenpunkt_Bhowani Es:Cruce_de_destinos It:Sangue_misto_(film_1956) Sv:Bhowani_-_station_i_Indien