The Anglo-Indian Festival of New York

Synopsis:

The book is set in 1947; Victoria is an Anglo-Indian, the daughter 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 a British officer who has attempted to rape her, and is helped to avoid detection by a Sikh, Ranjit, who hopes to marry her.

Her becoming engaged to Ranjit was an attempt to become assimilated in the wider Indian society - since British rule is visibly on its way out - until she realises that this 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, 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.

Patrick dies heroically at the end of the film, The change was presumably required because the book's conclusion was in contradiction with the conventions of Hollywood, in which dashing officers rarely lose out to gauche railway-workers.