Thursday, April 16, 2015

Top 10 books about the British in India

From Rudyard Kipling to William Dalrymple, these titles document the folly, cruelty and heroism of the Raj
Judy Davis in the film version of A Passage to India.
What did the British think they were there for? ... Judy Davis in the film version of A Passage to India. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library
For the past five years I have been bewitched by the story of the British in India. It started with my rediscovery of my grandmother’s family, the Lows of Clatto, who for more than a century endured mutiny, debt and disease everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows.

But then I was drawn into the wider history of this extraordinary enterprise. How did the British come to be ruling the most populous nation on earth? What did they think they were there for? Did they genuinely believe that the empire would last forever? I have tried to go beyond the breathtaking rush of events, the terror and the cruelty and the heroism, to get to the doubts and flashes of understanding which some of them had now and then, none more so than John Low, the family patriarch, who was famous for his love of native rule; yet who helped to depose three rajas and was ultimately blamed for the outbreak of the Great Mutiny. The books I have chosen illustrate these melancholy paradoxes of empire.
Top ten list

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