What do you think?
Rate this book
British Social Life In India, 1608–1937
First published in 1938, the author describes the ways in which the British lived in India from the early adventurous period of the East India Company until the 1930s when modern means of travel and communication enabled the sahibs to keep in close touch with home and eschew oriental influences. He describes their amusements and sports, their domestic arrangements, their relations with the native population. There is a delicious period panorama of Simla in the eighties. He gives a careful historical account of the growth and fate of the Eurasian population. The approach throughout is decorative rather than academic, and leads to a highly entertaining pageant of the British in India.
- GenresHistoryIndiaNonfiction
408 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 11, 2015
80 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 25, 2018
Provides a fascinating insight into the daily life of the British elite during the Raj. Written in 1938 by a British civil servant, the account is first-hand and authentic.
November 8, 2025
‘…………………..But openings for English trade were won, not by the salesmanship of these wandering bagmen but by the rash and nonchalant bravery of a series of fighting seamen. In their choleric defiance of opposition there is a familiar ring. When the Musulman allies of the Portuguese sent Middleton a warning letter he replied, "You sent me a foolish paper, what it is I know not, nor care not. In God is my trust, and therefore respect not what the devil or you can do with your charms." When the Moguls revoked their first permission to settle in Surat, English ships blockaded the coast of Gujarat, attacking the pilgrim-ships bound for Mecca till the Mogul Governor capitulated. And when the Portuguese opposed English penetration, the English, in face of extraordinary odds (" the Dragon alone made their Admiral and Vice-Admiral turn back and fly before her, we having had but one man slaine " 1) swept Portuguese shipping from the Indian seas, and in spite of the Viceroy's exclamations against " these thieves, disturbers of States, a people not to be permitted in any commonwealth ",2 actually blockaded Goa. However, English and Portuguese interests were too closely allied for long hostility and the two nations presently concluded a treaty which was " carried out with the greatest punctuality by the English ", wrote the Viceroy of Goa, " very different," added the Viceroy, " from the Dutch."……..
[Prologue]
In the long, elaborate dance of empire, few stages were as theatrically layered as British India. Here, where power wore the garb of civility and conquest masqueraded as culture, Dennis Kincaid’s ‘British Social Life in India, 1608–1937’ performs its historical pirouette—sometimes elegant, sometimes awkward, but always compelling. The book is less a formal history than a gossipy, vividly textured chronicle—a collage of anecdotes, eccentricities, and contradictions that collectively define the strange, hybrid world the British built for themselves while ruling another civilization.
Originally published in 1938, Kincaid’s work captures the Raj not from the angle of imperial administration or policy, but from the vantage point of social habit and human absurdity. It is about the tea parties and tiger hunts, the Durbar glamour and the deadly boredom, the sahibs sweating in cantonments and the memsahibs gossiping over bridge tables.
In short, it is an ethnography of empire’s leisure class—those who ruled the subcontinent while trying, often comically, to recreate a miniature England in the tropics.
Kincaid, a member of the Indian Civil Service himself, writes with the kind of insider irony that can only come from someone both implicated in and disillusioned by the system. His tone wavers between affection and mockery, nostalgia and critique. He knows the ridiculousness of Anglo-Indian society—the obsession with class, propriety, and race—and yet he sees in it the faint shimmer of tragicomedy. The book’s strength lies precisely in this moral ambivalence: Kincaid neither flatters nor damns the Raj, but examines its strange anatomy with a satirist’s wit and a historian’s curiosity.
Kincaid begins with the early East India Company period, when the first Englishmen—traders, sailors, and soldiers—arrived on India’s coasts. They came not as imperialists but as adventurers, marrying local women, adopting Indian dress, and blending languages in an informal cultural symbiosis. These early settlers were, in many ways, more Indianized than their Victorian successors would ever allow themselves to be. Kincaid’s sketches of these figures are almost Rabelaisian—filled with bawdy humor, exotic misadventures, and the raw vitality of a new frontier.
But as the British consolidated power, the tone shifted. By the nineteenth century, the Raj had become a rigid social hierarchy, obsessed with racial purity and class decorum. What had begun as a rough fraternity of traders transformed into a stratified bureaucracy of officials, soldiers, and their families—each class bound by unwritten rules of etiquette, reinforced by gossip and exclusion. Kincaid paints this transformation with exquisite irony, noting how the very people who prided themselves on “civilizing” India often regressed into parochial small-mindedness once insulated within their cantonments.
The book’s middle chapters are filled with the texture of Anglo-Indian life: the long, indolent afternoons, the endless rounds of tennis and gin, the formal dances in hill stations, and the unspoken loneliness beneath the spectacle. Through letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kincaid reconstructs a world at once intensely alive and quietly rotting from within.
Few writers capture the absurdities of colonial life as deftly as Kincaid. His portraits of characters—civil servants who write doggerel poetry, generals who faint at the sight of curry, memsahibs who despise “natives” yet cannot do without Indian ayahs—are drawn with Dickensian relish. He turns social history into a kind of tragic farce, where power is performed through ritualized eccentricity.
Take, for instance, his account of the British obsession with clubs. These institutions—half refuge, half fortress—were microcosms of imperial order. The club was where the empire’s fiction of supremacy was rehearsed daily: natives were barred, gossip ruled, and gin flowed like diplomacy. Yet beneath the veneer of composure, there lurked a desperate need to affirm identity in alien surroundings. “If Calcutta was hot,” Kincaid quips, “the club made it bearable; if India was incomprehensible, the club made it English.”
Equally sharp is his depiction of Anglo-Indian women. They were both participants and prisoners in this colonial drama—expected to embody decorum while navigating isolation, heat, and suppressed sexuality. Kincaid’s sympathies are subtly feminist for his time. He writes of women who turned to charity, amateur theatricals, and gossip as means of survival in a landscape that simultaneously revered and confined them. The result is a portrait of gender under empire that feels startlingly modern in its psychological acuity.
While Kincaid is witty, his wit often serves to mask melancholy. The deeper one reads, the more the Raj appears not as a political structure but as an emotional condition—a kind of historical neurosis. The British in India, he suggests, were perpetually exiled from themselves. They ruled a land they could never belong to, performing superiority to conceal their own estrangement.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Kincaid’s evocation of the “hill station”—Simla, Ootacamund, Darjeeling—those invented Edens where the English escaped the plains to play at being home again. The artificiality of these spaces is staggering: fake Gothic cottages in the Himalayas, mock English gardens in tropical soil, Sunday services held with the solemnity of a vanished England. “They lived,” Kincaid observes, “not in India, but in a mirage of England projected upon Indian air.”
This psychological reading of empire—years before postcolonial studies would formalize such analysis—makes Kincaid’s book remarkably prescient. He anticipates later thinkers like Edward Said or Gauri Viswanathan in recognizing that colonialism was as much a fiction of identity as it was a system of rule.
The final sections of ‘British Social Life in India’ trace the slow disintegration of the Raj. The twentieth century brought new anxieties—nationalism, reform, war—and the once unshakeable British self-confidence began to erode. Yet Kincaid notes that even as the empire crumbled, its social rituals persisted with absurd tenacity. The last generation of British officials continued to hold fancy-dress balls and tea parties while Gandhi marched and the world changed around them.
This tension between ceremony and collapse gives the book its elegiac rhythm. Kincaid writes of a civilization dying in denial, performing its routines with grim cheerfulness. “The British,” he writes, “had conquered India by accident and lost it by fatigue.” His prose has a tragic restraint, suggesting not moral outrage but weary understanding. He neither condemns nor absolves—he simply observes a world dissolving under the weight of its own pretensions.
Kincaid’s prose is luminous—witty yet melancholic, precise yet conversational. He moves between anecdote and reflection with ease, weaving letters, diaries, and personal reminiscences into a tapestry of social observation. Unlike the heavy-handed moralism of later postcolonial histories, his approach is impressionistic—he paints scenes rather than arguing theses. This makes his work both seductive and slippery: it’s not always easy to tell where sympathy ends and irony begins.
There is also a cinematic quality to his writing. One moment we are in a Mughal court watching English traders bungle diplomacy; the next, we’re at a 1920s garden party in Delhi, where the champagne sparkles and the Empire silently fades. His eye for detail—clothing, slang, etiquette—is so precise that the past feels touchable. Yet his humour ensures the narrative never ossifies into nostalgia.
And though Kincaid was himself a product of the Raj, his critique is remarkably nuanced. He sees the racism, hypocrisy, and vanity of Anglo-Indian society clearly—but he also recognizes its humanity, its fragility. His portraits of ordinary Englishmen and women struggling to make sense of an alien world are tinged with empathy. In that balance lies his genius: he neither romanticizes nor demonizes, but humanizes.
To read this book today is to engage with a paradox. The world it describes no longer exists, yet its shadows linger in both Britain and India—in attitudes, institutions, even architecture. The very tone of Kincaid’s book feels like an artifact of that vanished world: urbane, ironic, faintly melancholic.
Modern readers might find his lack of explicit moral outrage problematic, but that restraint is precisely what gives the book its staying power. Kincaid trusts the absurdity of facts to indict the system more effectively than sermonizing ever could. His colonial officials and memsahibs, trapped in their rituals of privilege, become symbols of an entire civilization’s inability to face reality.
There’s also something deeply literary about his approach. Kincaid’s vignettes often read like miniature novels—tiny Chekhovian studies of alienation and denial. His sense of irony prefigures E.M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ and even shades of Orwell’s ‘Burmese Days’. Yet he is gentler, less ideological. Where Orwell despised empire with righteous anger, Kincaid regards it as a tragic farce—one where everyone, colonizer and colonized alike, plays their part in the illusion.
By the book’s conclusion, one senses not merely the end of the Raj but the exhaustion of a worldview. Kincaid ends with a subtle irony: the British came to India seeking permanence—fame, fortune, immortality—but left behind nothing enduring except stories. The institutions collapsed, the empire dissolved, yet the gossip, diaries, and memoirs remained. History, it seems, survives as anecdote.
Kincaid himself died young, in 1937, just before his book was published. There’s an almost prophetic sadness in that timing. He did not live to see the Raj’s final demise, yet his chronicle reads like a premonition of its death. His tone—wry, weary, humane—feels like the voice of a man watching his own civilization quietly disintegrate.
And that, perhaps, is what makes ‘British Social Life in India’ endure: it is not just a history of the British in India, but a study of impermanence, of how cultures fabricate illusions to survive exile. It reminds us that empire was not merely a political project but an emotional one—a vast attempt to manufacture belonging in a place that would never truly be home.
What Impact Did the Book Have on Me?
Reading Kincaid today felt like eavesdropping on an empire in self-reflection. I was struck by his candor—the way he admits the absurdities of British pretension without bitterness.
The book left me oddly contemplative. As a reader from postcolonial India, I found myself moving between fascination and quiet anger, watching how genteel lifestyles masked systems of exploitation.
Yet I could not help admiring Kincaid’s ability to see his world with such unflinching irony. His prose made me imagine the ghosts of those long verandahs, the echo of British laughter fading against the monsoon night.
The impact was moral as much as intellectual. It reminded me that history isn’t only about rulers and rebels—it’s about the unspoken texture of daily life, the furniture of empire, the habits that built illusion into permanence. Kincaid taught me to read the Raj not merely as politics, but as theatre.
Why Should You Read This Book Today?
Because British Social Life in India humanizes history without romanticizing it. It is a mirror held up to empire—not polished propaganda, but an insider’s chronicle tinged with self-doubt. In an era when colonial nostalgia still lingers in popular culture, this book feels like a gentle antidote. It reveals how fragile, improvised, and absurdly human the British Raj really was.
You should read it if you want to understand not just how empire worked, but how it felt: the loneliness of the memsahib, the arrogance of the district officer, the weariness of the civil servant who knew history was turning against him.
Kincaid’s writing preserves the mood of an age poised between pride and decline—an age that shaped, and was ultimately undone by, its own illusions.
In the end, British Social Life in India is both elegy and confession. It asks us to look past power and see people—to witness empire not as destiny, but as a fragile social performance that believed in its own myth until the curtain fell. And that, perhaps, is why it still matters.
‘‘My Final Verdict’’
If I had to summarize ‘British Social Life in India’ in one image, it would be a faded watercolour—elegant, ironic, slightly tragic, and endlessly fascinating. Dennis Kincaid captures the British in India not as villains or heroes, but as human beings ensnared in the theatre of empire, acting out their roles until the curtain falls.
His narrative is both critique and requiem—witty enough to entertain, wise enough to disturb. As a teacher of history or literature, you could use this book to show students how social detail can illuminate political truth; as a casual reader, you might lose yourself in its gossip and glamour, only to emerge reflecting on the deeper absurdities of human power.
Ultimately, Kincaid’s book is less about India than about illusion itself—about the fragile performances through which societies sustain their myths. Reading it today, one senses that every empire, every ideology, carries within it this same brittle grace—the charm of self-deception, the melancholy of grandeur.
So, my final verdict? This isn’t just a history—it’s an elegy dressed as a comedy. A book that laughs, but with tears quietly collecting at the edge of its smile.
[Prologue]
In the long, elaborate dance of empire, few stages were as theatrically layered as British India. Here, where power wore the garb of civility and conquest masqueraded as culture, Dennis Kincaid’s ‘British Social Life in India, 1608–1937’ performs its historical pirouette—sometimes elegant, sometimes awkward, but always compelling. The book is less a formal history than a gossipy, vividly textured chronicle—a collage of anecdotes, eccentricities, and contradictions that collectively define the strange, hybrid world the British built for themselves while ruling another civilization.
Originally published in 1938, Kincaid’s work captures the Raj not from the angle of imperial administration or policy, but from the vantage point of social habit and human absurdity. It is about the tea parties and tiger hunts, the Durbar glamour and the deadly boredom, the sahibs sweating in cantonments and the memsahibs gossiping over bridge tables.
In short, it is an ethnography of empire’s leisure class—those who ruled the subcontinent while trying, often comically, to recreate a miniature England in the tropics.
Kincaid, a member of the Indian Civil Service himself, writes with the kind of insider irony that can only come from someone both implicated in and disillusioned by the system. His tone wavers between affection and mockery, nostalgia and critique. He knows the ridiculousness of Anglo-Indian society—the obsession with class, propriety, and race—and yet he sees in it the faint shimmer of tragicomedy. The book’s strength lies precisely in this moral ambivalence: Kincaid neither flatters nor damns the Raj, but examines its strange anatomy with a satirist’s wit and a historian’s curiosity.
Kincaid begins with the early East India Company period, when the first Englishmen—traders, sailors, and soldiers—arrived on India’s coasts. They came not as imperialists but as adventurers, marrying local women, adopting Indian dress, and blending languages in an informal cultural symbiosis. These early settlers were, in many ways, more Indianized than their Victorian successors would ever allow themselves to be. Kincaid’s sketches of these figures are almost Rabelaisian—filled with bawdy humor, exotic misadventures, and the raw vitality of a new frontier.
But as the British consolidated power, the tone shifted. By the nineteenth century, the Raj had become a rigid social hierarchy, obsessed with racial purity and class decorum. What had begun as a rough fraternity of traders transformed into a stratified bureaucracy of officials, soldiers, and their families—each class bound by unwritten rules of etiquette, reinforced by gossip and exclusion. Kincaid paints this transformation with exquisite irony, noting how the very people who prided themselves on “civilizing” India often regressed into parochial small-mindedness once insulated within their cantonments.
The book’s middle chapters are filled with the texture of Anglo-Indian life: the long, indolent afternoons, the endless rounds of tennis and gin, the formal dances in hill stations, and the unspoken loneliness beneath the spectacle. Through letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kincaid reconstructs a world at once intensely alive and quietly rotting from within.
Few writers capture the absurdities of colonial life as deftly as Kincaid. His portraits of characters—civil servants who write doggerel poetry, generals who faint at the sight of curry, memsahibs who despise “natives” yet cannot do without Indian ayahs—are drawn with Dickensian relish. He turns social history into a kind of tragic farce, where power is performed through ritualized eccentricity.
Take, for instance, his account of the British obsession with clubs. These institutions—half refuge, half fortress—were microcosms of imperial order. The club was where the empire’s fiction of supremacy was rehearsed daily: natives were barred, gossip ruled, and gin flowed like diplomacy. Yet beneath the veneer of composure, there lurked a desperate need to affirm identity in alien surroundings. “If Calcutta was hot,” Kincaid quips, “the club made it bearable; if India was incomprehensible, the club made it English.”
Equally sharp is his depiction of Anglo-Indian women. They were both participants and prisoners in this colonial drama—expected to embody decorum while navigating isolation, heat, and suppressed sexuality. Kincaid’s sympathies are subtly feminist for his time. He writes of women who turned to charity, amateur theatricals, and gossip as means of survival in a landscape that simultaneously revered and confined them. The result is a portrait of gender under empire that feels startlingly modern in its psychological acuity.
While Kincaid is witty, his wit often serves to mask melancholy. The deeper one reads, the more the Raj appears not as a political structure but as an emotional condition—a kind of historical neurosis. The British in India, he suggests, were perpetually exiled from themselves. They ruled a land they could never belong to, performing superiority to conceal their own estrangement.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Kincaid’s evocation of the “hill station”—Simla, Ootacamund, Darjeeling—those invented Edens where the English escaped the plains to play at being home again. The artificiality of these spaces is staggering: fake Gothic cottages in the Himalayas, mock English gardens in tropical soil, Sunday services held with the solemnity of a vanished England. “They lived,” Kincaid observes, “not in India, but in a mirage of England projected upon Indian air.”
This psychological reading of empire—years before postcolonial studies would formalize such analysis—makes Kincaid’s book remarkably prescient. He anticipates later thinkers like Edward Said or Gauri Viswanathan in recognizing that colonialism was as much a fiction of identity as it was a system of rule.
The final sections of ‘British Social Life in India’ trace the slow disintegration of the Raj. The twentieth century brought new anxieties—nationalism, reform, war—and the once unshakeable British self-confidence began to erode. Yet Kincaid notes that even as the empire crumbled, its social rituals persisted with absurd tenacity. The last generation of British officials continued to hold fancy-dress balls and tea parties while Gandhi marched and the world changed around them.
This tension between ceremony and collapse gives the book its elegiac rhythm. Kincaid writes of a civilization dying in denial, performing its routines with grim cheerfulness. “The British,” he writes, “had conquered India by accident and lost it by fatigue.” His prose has a tragic restraint, suggesting not moral outrage but weary understanding. He neither condemns nor absolves—he simply observes a world dissolving under the weight of its own pretensions.
Kincaid’s prose is luminous—witty yet melancholic, precise yet conversational. He moves between anecdote and reflection with ease, weaving letters, diaries, and personal reminiscences into a tapestry of social observation. Unlike the heavy-handed moralism of later postcolonial histories, his approach is impressionistic—he paints scenes rather than arguing theses. This makes his work both seductive and slippery: it’s not always easy to tell where sympathy ends and irony begins.
There is also a cinematic quality to his writing. One moment we are in a Mughal court watching English traders bungle diplomacy; the next, we’re at a 1920s garden party in Delhi, where the champagne sparkles and the Empire silently fades. His eye for detail—clothing, slang, etiquette—is so precise that the past feels touchable. Yet his humour ensures the narrative never ossifies into nostalgia.
And though Kincaid was himself a product of the Raj, his critique is remarkably nuanced. He sees the racism, hypocrisy, and vanity of Anglo-Indian society clearly—but he also recognizes its humanity, its fragility. His portraits of ordinary Englishmen and women struggling to make sense of an alien world are tinged with empathy. In that balance lies his genius: he neither romanticizes nor demonizes, but humanizes.
To read this book today is to engage with a paradox. The world it describes no longer exists, yet its shadows linger in both Britain and India—in attitudes, institutions, even architecture. The very tone of Kincaid’s book feels like an artifact of that vanished world: urbane, ironic, faintly melancholic.
Modern readers might find his lack of explicit moral outrage problematic, but that restraint is precisely what gives the book its staying power. Kincaid trusts the absurdity of facts to indict the system more effectively than sermonizing ever could. His colonial officials and memsahibs, trapped in their rituals of privilege, become symbols of an entire civilization’s inability to face reality.
There’s also something deeply literary about his approach. Kincaid’s vignettes often read like miniature novels—tiny Chekhovian studies of alienation and denial. His sense of irony prefigures E.M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ and even shades of Orwell’s ‘Burmese Days’. Yet he is gentler, less ideological. Where Orwell despised empire with righteous anger, Kincaid regards it as a tragic farce—one where everyone, colonizer and colonized alike, plays their part in the illusion.
By the book’s conclusion, one senses not merely the end of the Raj but the exhaustion of a worldview. Kincaid ends with a subtle irony: the British came to India seeking permanence—fame, fortune, immortality—but left behind nothing enduring except stories. The institutions collapsed, the empire dissolved, yet the gossip, diaries, and memoirs remained. History, it seems, survives as anecdote.
Kincaid himself died young, in 1937, just before his book was published. There’s an almost prophetic sadness in that timing. He did not live to see the Raj’s final demise, yet his chronicle reads like a premonition of its death. His tone—wry, weary, humane—feels like the voice of a man watching his own civilization quietly disintegrate.
And that, perhaps, is what makes ‘British Social Life in India’ endure: it is not just a history of the British in India, but a study of impermanence, of how cultures fabricate illusions to survive exile. It reminds us that empire was not merely a political project but an emotional one—a vast attempt to manufacture belonging in a place that would never truly be home.
What Impact Did the Book Have on Me?
Reading Kincaid today felt like eavesdropping on an empire in self-reflection. I was struck by his candor—the way he admits the absurdities of British pretension without bitterness.
The book left me oddly contemplative. As a reader from postcolonial India, I found myself moving between fascination and quiet anger, watching how genteel lifestyles masked systems of exploitation.
Yet I could not help admiring Kincaid’s ability to see his world with such unflinching irony. His prose made me imagine the ghosts of those long verandahs, the echo of British laughter fading against the monsoon night.
The impact was moral as much as intellectual. It reminded me that history isn’t only about rulers and rebels—it’s about the unspoken texture of daily life, the furniture of empire, the habits that built illusion into permanence. Kincaid taught me to read the Raj not merely as politics, but as theatre.
Why Should You Read This Book Today?
Because British Social Life in India humanizes history without romanticizing it. It is a mirror held up to empire—not polished propaganda, but an insider’s chronicle tinged with self-doubt. In an era when colonial nostalgia still lingers in popular culture, this book feels like a gentle antidote. It reveals how fragile, improvised, and absurdly human the British Raj really was.
You should read it if you want to understand not just how empire worked, but how it felt: the loneliness of the memsahib, the arrogance of the district officer, the weariness of the civil servant who knew history was turning against him.
Kincaid’s writing preserves the mood of an age poised between pride and decline—an age that shaped, and was ultimately undone by, its own illusions.
In the end, British Social Life in India is both elegy and confession. It asks us to look past power and see people—to witness empire not as destiny, but as a fragile social performance that believed in its own myth until the curtain fell. And that, perhaps, is why it still matters.
‘‘My Final Verdict’’
If I had to summarize ‘British Social Life in India’ in one image, it would be a faded watercolour—elegant, ironic, slightly tragic, and endlessly fascinating. Dennis Kincaid captures the British in India not as villains or heroes, but as human beings ensnared in the theatre of empire, acting out their roles until the curtain falls.
His narrative is both critique and requiem—witty enough to entertain, wise enough to disturb. As a teacher of history or literature, you could use this book to show students how social detail can illuminate political truth; as a casual reader, you might lose yourself in its gossip and glamour, only to emerge reflecting on the deeper absurdities of human power.
Ultimately, Kincaid’s book is less about India than about illusion itself—about the fragile performances through which societies sustain their myths. Reading it today, one senses that every empire, every ideology, carries within it this same brittle grace—the charm of self-deception, the melancholy of grandeur.
So, my final verdict? This isn’t just a history—it’s an elegy dressed as a comedy. A book that laughs, but with tears quietly collecting at the edge of its smile.
July 2, 2021
Very interesting to read how during the Raj, the British residents of India had to spend a small fortune to keep up appearances in the hopes of being promoted and be seen as “Pucca Sahibs’.
March 24, 2022
In context of content in it is quite readable but it is loosely Accounted book. Also it seems to loose connections in between
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2023
A treasure hunt for students of History and to know about the life of Britishers in colonial India.
August 14, 2023
Detailed and ENGAGING
A binocular gaze in to distant past of India during British regime. British life in India described in vivid and candid manner.
A binocular gaze in to distant past of India during British regime. British life in India described in vivid and candid manner.
July 3, 2024
Some books are not meant to be read. There is unnecessary ranting about something . I only read few pages and I am done with this book.
February 2, 2021
While the political role of the British in the history of our country is well covered, the social and economic life of an ordinary English officer in the 17th, 18th and 19th century India hasn't quite received the attention. This book is the fruit of labour of two authors, Dennis Kincaid, a third generation civil servant and after Dennis' untimely death, his friend David Ferrer.
The British started arriving in India in the 16th century as merchant-explorers having heard a lot about the exotic East. Those early settlers had to adjust themselves to local food as European options were limited. For example, lack of European wine meant they had to do with the Persian variety.
One gets a good account of how independently the East India Company ran it's affairs and brooked no interference even from the Crown Government. However, the Company wasn't a professional run firm either. On the contrary, corruption, inefficiency and incompetence pervaded all levels of it. The early years were marked by slave trade in medieval India which included European women as well. While India was home to European trading communities such as French, Dutch, Portuguese, Danes, English who mingled socially but matrimonial alliances with other European nationality was discouraged on account of religious differences.
The rise of the East India Company through expansion of trade and territory meant it's officials saw rise in their fortunes as well for opportunity for shady deals were aplenty. The need to make quick bucks were necessitated by high cost of living in the latter half of the 18th century and ostentatious show of wealth by a fashion-conscious, class-conscious Anglo-Indian society. Lavish parties which comprised gambling, drinking and elaborate spread on the table was an everyday affair.
Despite a sense of racial superiority and pretentions, the British society had it's frailties like any other. Brawls during Sunday morning prayers as men vied for attention of unmarried women were a regular thing. Bitching, back biting, discreet dalliances and intrigues come across as a recurring theme of their social milieu. The underbelly of the English society in colonial India is aptly summed up by Rudyard Kipling through a parody of the famous children rhyme Jack and Jill.
Jack's own Jill goes up the hill,
To Murree or Chakrata,
Jack remains, and dies in the plains,
And Jill remarries soon after.
Kipling earned himself a fair share of critics and disapprovals for his writings, Dennis Kincaid's grandmother being one.
On the other hand, as the colonial masters become more and more entrenched, British society also underwent gradual transformation. Relations with the natives improved and the exclusivity of their social life eased. Apart from dance, parties and picnics the British now took interest in Indian culture, heritage and it's landscape. Landscape painting became a hobby among many.
Political upheavals of the 19th century impacted their social life. The revolt of Kanpur and slaughter of European women and children ignited racial hatred and old prejudices raised their ugly head. The author takes a sympathetic view towards Indians with regards to the Revolt.
While social life in colonial India in the 17th and18th century was one of formality and seniority in social interactions, the latter half of the 19th century through to the first half of the 20th century saw rise of informal and laud behaviour among the young recruits which dismayed the seniors. For example, hookah smoking which was done in privacy of homes and clubs became a practice in the open spaces such as parks and near beaches in the 1840s among the young officers of Bombay.
Surprisingly, the turmoil of the First World War hardly had any impact on British social life in colonial India.They went about their happy ways. However, the rise of political movements with nationalistic overtones, in the post war years, made the European gentry uneasy. Indian Civil Service became less coveted and recruitment dwindled.
By the turn of the 20th century, one gets a clear picture of the Anglo-Indian culture having morphed into a distinct identity quite removed from English culture in England so much so that few elderly British reminisce about England having become a strange country to them.
As the book draws to a close with Independence on the horizon, one can't miss the melancholy in the author's tone when he says they won't be considered as belonging to this land despite many of them being born and raised here.
Although Dennis Kincaid has given a close portrayal of British life in India, the narration lacked a seamless flow as it moved from one chapter to another. It improves in the latter part as David Ferrer takes over after Dennis' demise.
The British started arriving in India in the 16th century as merchant-explorers having heard a lot about the exotic East. Those early settlers had to adjust themselves to local food as European options were limited. For example, lack of European wine meant they had to do with the Persian variety.
One gets a good account of how independently the East India Company ran it's affairs and brooked no interference even from the Crown Government. However, the Company wasn't a professional run firm either. On the contrary, corruption, inefficiency and incompetence pervaded all levels of it. The early years were marked by slave trade in medieval India which included European women as well. While India was home to European trading communities such as French, Dutch, Portuguese, Danes, English who mingled socially but matrimonial alliances with other European nationality was discouraged on account of religious differences.
The rise of the East India Company through expansion of trade and territory meant it's officials saw rise in their fortunes as well for opportunity for shady deals were aplenty. The need to make quick bucks were necessitated by high cost of living in the latter half of the 18th century and ostentatious show of wealth by a fashion-conscious, class-conscious Anglo-Indian society. Lavish parties which comprised gambling, drinking and elaborate spread on the table was an everyday affair.
Despite a sense of racial superiority and pretentions, the British society had it's frailties like any other. Brawls during Sunday morning prayers as men vied for attention of unmarried women were a regular thing. Bitching, back biting, discreet dalliances and intrigues come across as a recurring theme of their social milieu. The underbelly of the English society in colonial India is aptly summed up by Rudyard Kipling through a parody of the famous children rhyme Jack and Jill.
Jack's own Jill goes up the hill,
To Murree or Chakrata,
Jack remains, and dies in the plains,
And Jill remarries soon after.
Kipling earned himself a fair share of critics and disapprovals for his writings, Dennis Kincaid's grandmother being one.
On the other hand, as the colonial masters become more and more entrenched, British society also underwent gradual transformation. Relations with the natives improved and the exclusivity of their social life eased. Apart from dance, parties and picnics the British now took interest in Indian culture, heritage and it's landscape. Landscape painting became a hobby among many.
Political upheavals of the 19th century impacted their social life. The revolt of Kanpur and slaughter of European women and children ignited racial hatred and old prejudices raised their ugly head. The author takes a sympathetic view towards Indians with regards to the Revolt.
While social life in colonial India in the 17th and18th century was one of formality and seniority in social interactions, the latter half of the 19th century through to the first half of the 20th century saw rise of informal and laud behaviour among the young recruits which dismayed the seniors. For example, hookah smoking which was done in privacy of homes and clubs became a practice in the open spaces such as parks and near beaches in the 1840s among the young officers of Bombay.
Surprisingly, the turmoil of the First World War hardly had any impact on British social life in colonial India.They went about their happy ways. However, the rise of political movements with nationalistic overtones, in the post war years, made the European gentry uneasy. Indian Civil Service became less coveted and recruitment dwindled.
By the turn of the 20th century, one gets a clear picture of the Anglo-Indian culture having morphed into a distinct identity quite removed from English culture in England so much so that few elderly British reminisce about England having become a strange country to them.
As the book draws to a close with Independence on the horizon, one can't miss the melancholy in the author's tone when he says they won't be considered as belonging to this land despite many of them being born and raised here.
Although Dennis Kincaid has given a close portrayal of British life in India, the narration lacked a seamless flow as it moved from one chapter to another. It improves in the latter part as David Ferrer takes over after Dennis' demise.
January 14, 2022
Basically pointless, and bereft of the charm that was frequently worked up - even from my Indian point of view - in many such writings by the British. This one, unfortunately, is very stale !
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews