Sahibs India

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.