Sahibs' India

Book excerpt: 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.