Sahibs’ India

Vignettes from the Raj

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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.