Sahibs' India: Vignettes from the Raj

STEP BACK TO GLIMPSE
A BYGONE TIME...

Mahlee, dhobie, cook, horsekeeper,
Each were to the chokee sent,
Last of all the wretched sweeper-
Still the Colonel's liquor went.

'Devlish odd this!' said the Colonel
'What a land to soldier in!
Aboo, this is most infernal -
Who the blazes drinks my gin?'

Sahib's India's is a panaromic look at the lives of the British in colonial India. Culled from Raj literature, it reveals little-known aspects of their lives and their dealings with their Indian subjects. Drawing from contemporary journals, plays and poems, the author provides wonderful descriptions of British homes and servants, their tastes and fashions, cultural idiosyncrasies, profligacy, sports, hunts and shoots, giving us, with the relaxed familiarity of the after -dinner raconteur, a flavour of the period. The book is peppered with a host of characters- astrologers, jugglers, magicians, grass widows, the 'fishing fleet', missionaries, nautch girls, mavericks and eccentrics- who made India their home as the British turned from traders to empire- builders, and is interspersed with period photographs, paintings and sketches. Thsi is a delightful evocation of a vanished world.