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As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us.
Experience teaches the necessity of explaining to Western readers certain terms which even long residence in India often fails to make clear to Anglo-Indians. Let it be remembered then that the terms India, Indian, have only a geographical reference: they do not signify any particular race or religion.
One of the most serious duties attending a residence in India is the correcting of those misapprehensions which your travelling M.P. sacrifices his bath to hustle upon paper. The spectacled people embalmed in secretariats alone among Anglo-Indians continue to see the gay visions of griffinhood. They alone preserve the phantasmagoria of bookland and dreamland. As for the rest of us:
Non-Official Anglo-Indians. The problem becomes more complicated by the existence in India of a small but powerful body of the same race as the higher officials; there are only 122,919 English-born persons in this country, while there are 245,000,000 in the British Raj and another 70,000,000 in the Indian States, more or less affected by British influence.
"Yes; he's a friend of mine, and one of the straightest men I know. I suppose, like many Anglo-Indians, he felt it was hopeless to give you any just idea of any Indian question without the documents before you, and in this case the documents you want are the country and the people." "Precisely. That was why I came straight to you, bringing an open mind to bear on things.
Mr. Aitken's name will be kept green among Anglo-Indians by the well-known series of books published by Messrs. Thacker & Co., of London and Calcutta. They are The Tribes on my Frontier, An Indian Naturalist's Foreign Policy, which was published in 1883, and of which a seventh edition appeared in 1910.
"I don't know You see it's my mother that belongs. My grandfather's a Minister in a big Native State out there." "Oh I say!" There was a shadow of change in his tone. His direct look was a little embarrassing. He seemed to be considering Roy in a new light. "I I wouldn't have thought it," he said; and added a shade too quickly: "We don't belong that way. We're all Anglo-Indians Frontier Force."
Judy moved away from it and sat clasping her knees on the edge of the veranda. Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always at the lily. Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, 'I think you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise. There was an instant's silence, and then Judy turned her face into the lamplight from the drawing-room.
"How shall a man see justly if he holds the telescope wrong way round, as too many do over there. It also remains true, however, that the manners of certain Anglo-Indians create a lot of bad feeling. Your so-called reforms do not interest the masses or touch their imagination. But the boot of the low-class European touches their backs and their pride and hardens their hearts.
Among Anglo-Indians the straits of Malacca, Sunda, and so on, together with the China sea, and those magnificent groups of islands the Philippines and Moluccas, are all included in the sweeping term "To the eastward." At almost every part of this immense range I found further local distinctions, of greater or less peculiarity and extent according to circumstances.
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