Picking up any book that bears a quaint gramophone, a derby, a tennis racket and the British flag on the cover brings to mind a light-hearted tale my otherwise serious grandfather once shared. An English – for Indians, all white foreigners fall into this catchall category, leave aside making fine distinctions between Scots and Irish – officer turns to take command of the parade and orders Column will advance! No one stirs. The bewildered officer turns to the subedar-major, who shouts Kallam billad bans! and the native Indian soldiers march forward. Similar phonetic wordplays about English ladies being taught everyday phrases like There was a banker for Darwaza band kar (ie, close the door), and There was a cold day for Darwaza khol de (open the door), provided us much amusement while growing up in the cantonments of independent India.
This kind of playing-on-words finds unexpected support from Pramod K Nayar, a professor of English at the University of Hyderabad. "Negotiations with servants very often involved long and laborious conversations in 'Hindustani'," he writes, "which the Memsahibs had to acquire if they wanted to run efficient households." In a suitably benevolent mood, one flicks open Days of the Raj and the preface heightens expectations, promising, "The most entertaining sections of the imperial archives … is writings that deal with such mundane things as the right amount of spice in making fish soup or dealing with a truculent dhobi." On the subject of archives, the book informs us that British India left behind the largest imperial archive in the world, with the East India Company material alone comprising nine miles of shelving. This explains one of life's mysteries, clearing up why it is that Indians doing research on India jet off to London at every opportunity.
For his part, Nayar, author of tomes such as English Writing in India, 1600-1920: Colonizing aesthetics, confesses that he read much of the "informal" material as a diversion. He says that the material that went into Days of the Raj provided much-needed respite from his other work – descriptions of troop movements and treaty negotiations, mapping projects and sati – during the course of producing ponderous travel pieces and memoirs. However, for those fortunate enough not to have to engage with the said troop movements, the worthwhile nuggets are surprisingly few and far between.
Nayar's volume presents copious selections from official documents, memoirs, letters, reports, extracts from periodicals, recipe and cookbooks, instruction manuals, advice books and others materials of this ilk. The book begins with 'Raj Travels', the first of four sections, tracking journeys from England to India and within India. A short description of the travails of the Englishperson travelling in a palaki or palanquin is in order: "Five times in one hour did they throw me down, and scream out, 'Snake, lady, snake', and though I was not hurt, still you will allow it was not pleasant." In other memories, Francis Younghusband and Edward Molyneux, speaking of travels in Kashmir, write in 1909: "The visitor disposed to solitude more frequently encounters his fellow-countrymen," reminiscent of people tripping over each other while trekking to popular spots in Nepal or the Pindari Glacier in India.