The Heart of India [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When I ended my long career as the BBC's correspondent in Delhi, many people I met in India were surprised that I was not returning to live in Britain. They imagined I would follow the pattern of the British civil servants and police officers who spent their most active years ruling India and then returned to Dorset, Devon or Cornwall to enjoy their well-earned retirement. But the idea of leaving India never crossed my mind. I would have looked back on my life as wasted if, after spending nearly thirty years working in India, I had no desire to remain once my BBC career was over. The roots I had put down were not so shallow that I could pull them up as soon as the job which brought me here had ended. At least four générations of my mother's family before me spent their working lives in India. Most of them went 'home' to retire, and I can well understand why. In the first place, they were positively discouraged from 'staying on'. Britain ruled India, but it did not colonize it. The British Raj did not encourage settlers. Settlers might set a bad example and 'go native', destroying the carefully nurtured image of the différence, and hence the superiority, of the British race. The Raj, it was thought, depended on that image of superiority to enable it to rule so many with so few. Philip Mason was a member of the Indian Civil Service, the 'steel frame' which held the Raj together. In his memorable book The Men Who Ruled India he described the Indian Civil Service as 'a corps of men specially selected, brought up by a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modem people have subjected