It is Guy who returns in 1947/8 to be an observer of India on the eve of Independence this assignment soon turns into a personal inquiry into the truth behind the hushed-up story of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Merrick's death in Mirat. The new man on the scene is Sergeant Guy Perron, who was a pupil at a public school called Chillingborough, which Hari Kumar (as Harry Coomer) also attended when he lived in England. The story covers in personal terms the humbling and hasty decamping of the British: the precipitous concession of power to a country fiercely bent on division the travails of an honorable Muslim Congressman, Mohammed Ali Kasim, and his sons, one of whom had deserted to the Japan-directed Indian National Army the quandary of the Nawab of the small fictitious princely state of Mirat, left in the lurch by the lapse of British Paramountcy the suicide of a dysentery-debilitated and maladapted British officer the prowling of the haunted Ronald Merrick. Another town, Muzzafirabad is the headquarters of the Muzzafirabad ("Muzzy") Guides, another Indian Army regiment, as well as the Bishop Barnard mission. At Premanagar there is an old fortification that is used by the British as a prison. During the cool season, the regiment moves to Ranpur, on the plains. Pankot is a "second class" hill station in the province which serves as a headquarters for the 1st Pankot Rifles, an important regiment of the Indian Army, who fought the Axis in North Africa. The princely state of Mirat is a nominally sovereign enclave within the province.
Another large city in the province is Mayapore, which was the key setting in The Jewel in the Crown. The province has an agricultural plain and, in the north, a mountainous region.
The names of places and people suggest a connection to Bengal however, the physical characteristics place the setting in north-central India, rather than in northeast India. The province shares characteristics with Punjab and the United Provinces.
The story is set in 19 in several locations throughout India, prior to and after Indian independence, particularly in an unnamed province of northern India. Many of the events are retellings from different points of view of events that happened in the previous novels. It follows on from the storyline in The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, and The Towers of Silence.
It is the fourth and final book of his Raj Quartet. A Division of the Spoils is the 1975 novel by Paul Scott.
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