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Sahibs Who Loved India
A rare collection of essays that invites the reader to revisit a vanished era of sahibs and memsahibs. From Lord Mountbatten to Peggy Holroyde to Maurice and Taya Zinkin, Britishers who lived and worked in India reminisce about topics and points of interest as varied as the Indian Civil Service and the Roshanara Club, shikar and hazri, the Amateur Cine Society of India and the Doon School, Rudyard Kipling and Mahatma Gandhi.
Selected from a series of articles commissioned by Khushwant Singh when he was the editor of the ‘Illustrated Weekly of India’, these delightfully individualistic and refreshingly candid writings reveal a fascinating array of British attitudes, experiences, observations, fond memories, the occasional short-lived grouse and, above all, a deep and abiding affection and respect for India.
Selected from a series of articles commissioned by Khushwant Singh when he was the editor of the ‘Illustrated Weekly of India’, these delightfully individualistic and refreshingly candid writings reveal a fascinating array of British attitudes, experiences, observations, fond memories, the occasional short-lived grouse and, above all, a deep and abiding affection and respect for India.
200 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2009
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166 people want to read
About the author
Khushwant Singh
298 books1,429 followersKhushwant Singh, (Punjabi: ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ਵੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ, Hindi: खुशवंत सिंह) born on 2 February 1915 in Hadali, Undivided India, (now a part of Pakistan), was a prominent Indian novelist and journalist. Singh's weekly column, "With Malice towards One and All", carried by several Indian newspapers, was among the most widely-read columns in the country.
An important post-colonial novelist writing in English, Singh is best known for his trenchant secularism, his humor, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit.
An important post-colonial novelist writing in English, Singh is best known for his trenchant secularism, his humor, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 15, 2017
I bought this book with a very different concept from what the book actually is in mind. I thought it would be excerpts and essays from prominent British administrators who ruled this land and fell in love with it. Maybe some 19th century Governor-General or Pre-Curzon Viceroy or some Aide-de-camp who was enamoured of the people or the culture or the variegated terrain or the monumental architecture.
What it is however, is a series of rather dated articles for the now out-of-publication “Illustrated Weekly” written by an odd assemblage of full or part Indophiles, most friends of the then editor of the Illustrated Weekly the late Mr. Khushwant Singh. All the contributors came to India during the fag end of the “Raj”, some choosing to stay back, for various periods of time, after Independence.
I didn’t find the articles path-breaking or truly engrossing. There were the usual platitudes and standard statements of love, respect and brotherhood. However, there were a few little gems hidden here and there that warmed my heart or simply brought the period to life.
It’s a small book and while it isn’t “must read” literature, it is worth going through once if you get your hands on it.
What it is however, is a series of rather dated articles for the now out-of-publication “Illustrated Weekly” written by an odd assemblage of full or part Indophiles, most friends of the then editor of the Illustrated Weekly the late Mr. Khushwant Singh. All the contributors came to India during the fag end of the “Raj”, some choosing to stay back, for various periods of time, after Independence.
I didn’t find the articles path-breaking or truly engrossing. There were the usual platitudes and standard statements of love, respect and brotherhood. However, there were a few little gems hidden here and there that warmed my heart or simply brought the period to life.
It’s a small book and while it isn’t “must read” literature, it is worth going through once if you get your hands on it.
May 25, 2019
Once upon a time when the map of the world was largely red and the sun never set on the British Empire, India was considered Britain’s greatest colony – the so-called ‘Jewel in the Crown’. As well as a source of great trade and wealth, India became a place where young men – yes, mostly men – could go to make their fortune. The big employers were the Army, the Civil Service and for the less affluent and less classically educated, the railways. India was for some a land of opportunity but for many a living hell. The heat, the dirt and the disease, as well as the sheer sense of nothing being at all like home, meant many who went didn’t come back or came back badly damaged by their experience.
In his introduction to 'Sahibs who Loved India', Kushwant Singh comments that many of the Brits who went to India did so because they couldn’t make it back home. It reminded me of the slang used to describe Brits in Hong Kong in the final decades of it being a British colony. They were known as ‘FILTH’ – or ‘failed in London, try Hong Kong’. He also tells us that the majority of Brits in India hated everything about the place – “its climate, mosquitoes, flies, the filth, dirt and smell. Above all, they hated Indians”. Others had a wonderful time living in big bungalows with cheap staff, hunting and playing polo, and having lots of booze and good food in their ‘clubs’ which were for the most part ‘Whites Only’. This book is devoted to a third group – the men and women who stayed away from the clubs, met and became friends with the locals, and maintained those friendships for many decades. Many of them stayed on after Independence and made India their home – others returned to Britain but left their hearts in the sub-continent.
Kushwant Singh was one of India’s greatest – and most irascible – writers. I first got to know him through his classic story ‘The Train to Pakistan’ about the Partition of India and since then have bought and read several of his novels and essays. During his tenure as editor of ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India', he invited his British friends – the Sahibs and Memsahibs of his title – to write short essays about what India meant to them. These essays were collected in the 1970s but did not become this book until 2008 – just a few months after the 60th anniversary of Independence. The essays had fallen into the hands of Phillip Knightly, an ex-editor of the Sunday Times and writer of chapter 14 who arrived in Bombay in 1960 to fall in love with the country and his Indian wife. He sent the manuscript to Singh’s son, not knowing whether Singh senior was still alive.
The three decades that passed between the writing and the publishing of the essays meant that many of the older writers were dead by the time the book came out. At the end of each chapter Singh, gives a biographic update on the writers – whether they are still alive and what they did after the essays were written. Singh appears to have viewed the publishing of the book as an act of remembrance for his friends and equally an opportunity to show his countrymen that not all Brits hated his country or survived only by cutting themselves off from their surroundings. It’s a lovely collection of essays about a time that’s long gone and largely forgotten. This book was written for the Indian market, not for the export trade, and is more endearing for that target. My copy came from my favourite dusty little bookshop in Delhi.
If you’re going to start a book or recollections of India in the 20th Century then you really can’t do better than to kick it off with the words of Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy and a man whose love of the country was intrinsically linked with his love of his wife Edwina, whom he met there when he was a 21-year-old naval lieutenant. Mountbatten was for me the only household name in the book. If I were twenty or thirty years older there might have been others I would have recognised but I’m too young to know who these people were. That’s not a problem – instead, the book gave me a chance to get to know a bunch of people about whom I could have had no preconceived ideas. In effect, it’s not the individuals that matter – it’s their collected experience of and enthusiasm for India that moves me deeply. It’s my guess that few of the other writers will be known to most of the book’s readers. The majority are media-men – people who went out to work on the newspapers before or after Independence. This is perhaps inevitable given that they’ve been chosen and invited by Singh, who is himself a writer – editor – journalist. They are perhaps not the most representative sample of their era but their accounts are charming, nonetheless and their investigative roles brought them into more direct contact with local people than many other trades.
In twenty-two short chapters we meet two women and twenty men who loved India. Many were journalists but there are architects, engineers, civil servants, a headmaster, soldiers and even an ambassador to add some variety. Several tell of meeting Indian history’s greats – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mrs Gandhi, and many leading politicians. These are not always the stories of grand encounters – one woman writes that Nehru would offer her a ride in his car if he saw her out walking. Many went out to India expecting to find the land of Kipling but found instead a land of their own.
It’s perhaps more moving that so many of the authors are now dead and there’s a poignancy that comes with lifting the lid of a box of forgotten treasures. By keeping each chapter short and giving the writers some key questions, most notably “What does India mean to me”, Singh has managed to stop a lot of elderly ex-pats from banging- on too much about the past and instead kept them focused on their love of this great country.
As a 21st Century Brit who loves India, I loved this book and the opportunity it gave to look at an earlier era. I’ve often wondered whether if I’d been born 40 or 50 years earlier I would have found a way to get to India. Sadly I fear that the only way for women to get there in those days was in pursuit or support of a good husband. I wouldn’t have been posh enough for the former or probably subservient enough to take the latter course. So on balance, I’d rather be around now.
In his introduction to 'Sahibs who Loved India', Kushwant Singh comments that many of the Brits who went to India did so because they couldn’t make it back home. It reminded me of the slang used to describe Brits in Hong Kong in the final decades of it being a British colony. They were known as ‘FILTH’ – or ‘failed in London, try Hong Kong’. He also tells us that the majority of Brits in India hated everything about the place – “its climate, mosquitoes, flies, the filth, dirt and smell. Above all, they hated Indians”. Others had a wonderful time living in big bungalows with cheap staff, hunting and playing polo, and having lots of booze and good food in their ‘clubs’ which were for the most part ‘Whites Only’. This book is devoted to a third group – the men and women who stayed away from the clubs, met and became friends with the locals, and maintained those friendships for many decades. Many of them stayed on after Independence and made India their home – others returned to Britain but left their hearts in the sub-continent.
Kushwant Singh was one of India’s greatest – and most irascible – writers. I first got to know him through his classic story ‘The Train to Pakistan’ about the Partition of India and since then have bought and read several of his novels and essays. During his tenure as editor of ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India', he invited his British friends – the Sahibs and Memsahibs of his title – to write short essays about what India meant to them. These essays were collected in the 1970s but did not become this book until 2008 – just a few months after the 60th anniversary of Independence. The essays had fallen into the hands of Phillip Knightly, an ex-editor of the Sunday Times and writer of chapter 14 who arrived in Bombay in 1960 to fall in love with the country and his Indian wife. He sent the manuscript to Singh’s son, not knowing whether Singh senior was still alive.
The three decades that passed between the writing and the publishing of the essays meant that many of the older writers were dead by the time the book came out. At the end of each chapter Singh, gives a biographic update on the writers – whether they are still alive and what they did after the essays were written. Singh appears to have viewed the publishing of the book as an act of remembrance for his friends and equally an opportunity to show his countrymen that not all Brits hated his country or survived only by cutting themselves off from their surroundings. It’s a lovely collection of essays about a time that’s long gone and largely forgotten. This book was written for the Indian market, not for the export trade, and is more endearing for that target. My copy came from my favourite dusty little bookshop in Delhi.
If you’re going to start a book or recollections of India in the 20th Century then you really can’t do better than to kick it off with the words of Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy and a man whose love of the country was intrinsically linked with his love of his wife Edwina, whom he met there when he was a 21-year-old naval lieutenant. Mountbatten was for me the only household name in the book. If I were twenty or thirty years older there might have been others I would have recognised but I’m too young to know who these people were. That’s not a problem – instead, the book gave me a chance to get to know a bunch of people about whom I could have had no preconceived ideas. In effect, it’s not the individuals that matter – it’s their collected experience of and enthusiasm for India that moves me deeply. It’s my guess that few of the other writers will be known to most of the book’s readers. The majority are media-men – people who went out to work on the newspapers before or after Independence. This is perhaps inevitable given that they’ve been chosen and invited by Singh, who is himself a writer – editor – journalist. They are perhaps not the most representative sample of their era but their accounts are charming, nonetheless and their investigative roles brought them into more direct contact with local people than many other trades.
In twenty-two short chapters we meet two women and twenty men who loved India. Many were journalists but there are architects, engineers, civil servants, a headmaster, soldiers and even an ambassador to add some variety. Several tell of meeting Indian history’s greats – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mrs Gandhi, and many leading politicians. These are not always the stories of grand encounters – one woman writes that Nehru would offer her a ride in his car if he saw her out walking. Many went out to India expecting to find the land of Kipling but found instead a land of their own.
It’s perhaps more moving that so many of the authors are now dead and there’s a poignancy that comes with lifting the lid of a box of forgotten treasures. By keeping each chapter short and giving the writers some key questions, most notably “What does India mean to me”, Singh has managed to stop a lot of elderly ex-pats from banging- on too much about the past and instead kept them focused on their love of this great country.
As a 21st Century Brit who loves India, I loved this book and the opportunity it gave to look at an earlier era. I’ve often wondered whether if I’d been born 40 or 50 years earlier I would have found a way to get to India. Sadly I fear that the only way for women to get there in those days was in pursuit or support of a good husband. I wouldn’t have been posh enough for the former or probably subservient enough to take the latter course. So on balance, I’d rather be around now.
January 20, 2015
When an average Indian is asked to list the names of any five random Britishers during the British Raj, the list usually includes at least Dyer, Curzon or Clive. The common misconception among the Indian masses about the 'Sahibs' who came to India, oftentimes fired up even by contemporary popular visual media, newly cropped celebutants and sometimes by ancient greybeards, is that they were all a snobbish lot whose sole purpose in life was to fulfill 'the Whiteman's burden'. There truly are several Britons who were totally in love or in the least sense interested in India and everything related to her.
KS's wonderful compilation of articles is truly a recommended read for everyone interested in seeing the other side of the grossly underrepresented Brits.
KS's wonderful compilation of articles is truly a recommended read for everyone interested in seeing the other side of the grossly underrepresented Brits.
February 12, 2025
A collection of Hit & Miss chapters. For the most part, a whole lot of British Babus paraphrasing their Resumes, tenure served in India. No 'love' or affection for India emanating through the words. However, honorable mentions to Taya Zinkin, J A K Martyn, Arthur Hughes and Phillip Knightley chapters wherein you really get a glimpse of India like it was during the British Raj. These few chapters provide a rare POV of British during British Raj and also an inside story of emjnent indian institutions like the Army, Civil Service, Doon School, and central vista etc.
November 18, 2012
RESEARCH: 4/5
EASE OF UNDERSTANDING: 3/5
LANGUAGE: 3/5
ENTERTAINING: 3/5
I'd give it a 3.5. I found it interesting initially, but it got a bit boring on the go.
EASE OF UNDERSTANDING: 3/5
LANGUAGE: 3/5
ENTERTAINING: 3/5
I'd give it a 3.5. I found it interesting initially, but it got a bit boring on the go.
January 2, 2026
I went into this book (part of me judging the book by its cover) to unravel some of the 19th Century world of the Raj or perhaps even pre-1857 accounts of life- rather what I got was this mostly unromantic collection of experience, memories, observation and more at the time of dawn of the great British Empire in India and accounts of 'Burra' Sahibs who continued their stint in an Independent India.
But despite my utter disappointment I was still engrossed by some of the accounts, selected from the series of articles commissioned by Khushwant Singh for now defunct Illustrator Weekly of India.
This book shows the world beyond the high class British aristocracy, beyond the viceroys, beyond the occasional Balls and so on. It is in fact a very individualistic array of life woven together with the respect and gratitude of a land that gave life and success to many.
This book deepened my love and respect for my India and to quote Peggy Holroyde,
But despite my utter disappointment I was still engrossed by some of the accounts, selected from the series of articles commissioned by Khushwant Singh for now defunct Illustrator Weekly of India.
This book shows the world beyond the high class British aristocracy, beyond the viceroys, beyond the occasional Balls and so on. It is in fact a very individualistic array of life woven together with the respect and gratitude of a land that gave life and success to many.
This book deepened my love and respect for my India and to quote Peggy Holroyde,
She is princely rich and peasant poor, warm of heart yet inexplicably cruel, painfully beautiful and harsh, puzzling to the Greek logic of mind yet clear in immediate flashes as the frosted ice on the far reaches of the Himalayas. She is funny with ridiculous solemnity, demanding of patience, bound by an exasperating rigidity of ritual which created the ancient shastras yet flexible at the final point of despair, and tolerant in a unique way of all beliefs. She sprawls like formless chaos and her people seem to be in a constant state of flux, coming and going in torrential flood and reforming again, reviving after each gigantic cultural invasion.
India is as touchingly and maddeningly sensitive as an adolescent coming young and fresh into a technological century, and yet we begin to look again to her old, old wisdom, old as her mountain ridges buckling into the earth like pre-historic brontosaurian monsters.
February 18, 2021
What a book this is. It’s not very elaborate or very fancy, but it describes my India back then, I am from mumbai and I know it’s every nook and corner, through this book I was able to think of how there used to be Britishers enjoying Matheran hill station or roaming around Marine Drive, dining in Santa Cruz.
It’s a very simple, thoroughly enjoyable read with stories of people describing their love for India.
The title is also so apt, if there were people like general Dyer there were also people like Lord Mountbatten, Jim Corbett who had a natural love for India.
It’s a very simple, thoroughly enjoyable read with stories of people describing their love for India.
The title is also so apt, if there were people like general Dyer there were also people like Lord Mountbatten, Jim Corbett who had a natural love for India.
March 14, 2021
Didn't read all the letters by the Sahibs but got the zest out of the book..
May 10, 2013
Takes barely an hour or two to read. Short articles by some British people who came to India as employees of EIC or British Raj and eventually fell in love with their conquered land. Numerous people detailing how India inspired them and how it would be cherished in their memories for the rest of their lives.
Too short pieces for a gratifying read. Less length, therefore less depth in the pieces, owing to the scarcity of enough words to truly explain their affection for an alien culture. All we read is many people inexplicably bearing fond memories of a country they came to rule over.
Pleasing to read, but leaves us craving for more. Deeply unsatisfying. Despite having no cause to dislike the book, a longer, meaningful memoir of one person's experience would be any day more welcome than a number of short expressions of love.
Would rather read twice Begums, Thugs, and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes
Too short pieces for a gratifying read. Less length, therefore less depth in the pieces, owing to the scarcity of enough words to truly explain their affection for an alien culture. All we read is many people inexplicably bearing fond memories of a country they came to rule over.
Pleasing to read, but leaves us craving for more. Deeply unsatisfying. Despite having no cause to dislike the book, a longer, meaningful memoir of one person's experience would be any day more welcome than a number of short expressions of love.
Would rather read twice Begums, Thugs, and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes
February 19, 2013
This is a group of somewhat interesting essays that were written by British nationals who lived in India prior to India's partition and independence. While many former members of the colonial ruing class did not enjoy their stay in India, these essay were requested of people who did enjoy being there. These excellent essayists give insight into the types of lives and work they had as part of the "Raj" and many of their most favorable memories. The essays originally were to be recollections of former "sahibs" who answered the question, "what India meant to me."
March 1, 2015
It's a lovely collection of people who loved india from core of their heart. Just started it.. Not wanting to close their journeys being played in front of my eyes. Carrying some of their feelings myself, it's wonderful feelings being woven by them and collected by master storyteller KS...
July 11, 2014
a nice description of the pre-independent india and british way of life in india.
May 8, 2016
An interesting book with lot of description on British India. It contains stories about British Officials who loved India for its simplicity, beauty, culture and heritage. A good read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews