Where the lion trod [antikvár]

FOREWORD This is a light political travel book, written primarily to entertain. But even a clown must have a skeleton, and so I have built the chapters around one central theme : what have the British left behind them in India of endiuring value ? The question is a massive one, which serious scholarship alone can unravel. Indeed, the reader may well ask whether I am justified in motmting these weighty matters on such a slender framework. All I can reply is that they just climbed up there quite naturally by themselves and I hadn't the heart to dislodge them. True, there is no more authority behind any of the opinions I offer than that provided by one extensive but superficial tour ofthe subcontinent. These flittings by plane and jeep lasted a bare four months — about one-eighth of the average span of spare-time research spent on my previous books. Yet, the more I talked to Englishmen of all ages in all corners of that vast country, the more it struck me that almost the only foreigners with any picture at all of India were those who had been there less than six months or more than twenty years. Both the curious newcomer and the disenchanted old-timer may well be wrong ; but at least they see an outline of sorts which seems denied to the in-betweens. Viewing the Indian scene is, in fact, rather like going through a long tunnel. For a few himdred yards after entering its mouth, you have enough guiding vii