An English Girl's Indian Childhood during the Raj

Studying Indian history in India, one gets a picture of British rule in India being truly awful in many ways. Yes, the British built railroads, but the railroads had more to do with themselves and their trade than with Indians. And yes, the British were also responsible for developing the country's post and telegraph systems but those systems probably served their own interests more than they served Indian interests. For the average Indian, British rule meant much higher taxation than Indian emperors and kings used to levy. It meant the existence of some roads to travel to places most Indians never travelled to. It also meant widespread starvation and deprivation. And for the country as a whole, it meant the redirection of not only national resources to a foreign land but also the theft of tangible pieces of history and culture to another country. As far as India is concerned, the less said about the theft / annexation of Indian treasures, the better.

The strange thing is that this isn't a view shared by the British in general. Some time ago, I read a book called 'The Sun in the Morning' by M M Kaye (the author of 'The Far Pavilions') about the early years of her childhood which she spent primarily in Shimla and Shahjahanabad (in Old Delhi). In it, she repeatedly speaks of thinking of India as her country, and that in itself is understandable since she was then a child who lived in India and did not really think of England with its grey skies as 'home'. Her father, she says in the book, reminded her that India belonged to Indians but she didn't really understand that --- to her, India was her country.

What surprised me though was that she also repeatedly seemed to speak of the sacrifices the British made to serve not in India but to serve India. While it can hardly be denied that the British who worked in India did have to make sacrifices being separated from their native land and, in some cases, from their families, it seemed very strange to me that the tone of the book suggested that those sacrifices had been made not for the benefit of the British Empire but for the benefit of India.

Having always looked at the Raj from the perspective of an Indian, it seemed stunning to me that the author, writing as an old lady, could somehow think that Englishmen serving English interests in India was analogous to Englishmen serving India. She says that they --- or perhaps she specified that it was some of them, I don't remember --- loved India. And while I don't dispute that some of them probably did, as interesting as I found her book, I could not find it in myself to be sympathetic to the British for all the sacrifices they had to make to enrich themselves at India's expense.

That being said, I loved getting a glimpse into what life was like during the Raj. Most of all, I enjoyed the author's descriptions of what is now the national capital region. To her, Okhla was a 'picnic' spot no one ever went to that was infested with crocodiles. Today, it is an area no one would ever want to go to because it is jam packed with traffic and ugly concrete buildings. The Taj Mahal was a monument which was rarely visited by anyone --- she was a child in the days before the Age of Tourism. And when she visited the site where the foundations of New Delhi were being laid, she thought it was the most desolate spot in which anyone could build a city --- today, it is where most of the country's Central Government buildings stand.