Raj: A Scrapbook of British India: 1877 - 1947

Charles Allen, Raj: A Scrapbook of British India, 1877 - 1947. London: Book Club Associates, 1977.

Hard cover, dustwrapper, 26 x 20.5 cm, 142 pages, illustrations, facsimiles.

Light wear to the dustwrapper, very slight foxing on the endpapers and edges of the text-block. Good condition.

'Charles Allen's new book is a nostalgic and affectionate portrait, in both words and pictures, of life in the great years of the British Raj; of the men and women who went out to India, generation after generation, as rulers and housemothers of the Empire: They marked out for themselves a distinct lifestyle, neither Indian nor English. where protocol and duty allowed few concessions either to India or to the changing times. It was a world of dak bungalows, Cold Weather Tours, Governor's Camps, Orders of Precedence, fancy-dress balls and calling cards: of Walers, hog-spears, trophies, Roorkee chairs, bedding rolls and soda-water machines.

'Their unique way of life is brilliantly captured in Charles Allen's extraordinary collection of pictures, culled from lovingly preserved albums, scrapbooks, family papers and other ephemera, as well as from such essential features of Anglo-Indian life as mail-order catalogues - with their advertisements for Curzon topees, cholera belts, spine-pads and belly-bands, the works of Rudyard Kipling, books on shikar (hunting and shooting), Dr Moore's Family Medicine and The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. He offers a fresh and wholly original approach to the Anglo-Indian experience as well as an invaluable historical record of a vanished age.'