When Taya Zinkin, the French-born journalist and author, first arrived in India in 1945, she was an ?unorthodox sari-wearing ICS (Indian Civil Service) wife?. But she soon fell in love with India and when The Economist asked her to profile Jawaharlal Nehru, India?s first prime minister ? ?Nehru lived at No 17 York Road, across the road from us;? ? it set her on her journalistic career. As correspondent of both the Manchester Guardian and Le Monde, she travelled across India for a decade. In a fascinating essay on her discovery of India, she tells us how ?as late as 1959, I was telling tribals that India had been independent since 1947 and it once fell to me, in Telengana, to break the terrible news of Lenin?s death to a young activist?.
Years ago, as editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, Khushwant Singh had asked Zinkin ? and others like her, the sahibs who loved India ? to write an essay on ?What India Meant to Me.? Now Singh has compiled and edited them in this delightful edition picking 22 essays from the series of articles he had commissioned in 1971.
So we have JAK Martyn, the first deputy headmaster and the second headmaster of the Doon School, reminiscing about how he came about teaching boys in Dehra Dun from Harrow; architect H A N Medd, who entered the office of Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1915, writing about his Delhi interlude as also his Himalayan and other escapades after he became ?a keen shikari?; Philip Crosland describing his days at The Statesman and visits to ?one of the great Calcutta institutions of that time?, the Indian Coffee House on Chittaranjan Avenue, where one would often find Satyajit Ray, who was then ?a quarter way through the making of Pather Panchali?.
India clearly changed the lives of these sahibs and memsahibs and they pay rich tribute. Some like Lord Mountbatten had a special reason why India had an ?additional warm spot? in his heart.
India was where he proposed to Edwina Ashley ?who accepted me and all my happiness started from that day?. Stanley Jepson, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, spent 30 years in India, the first decade in the army and the rest as journalist and editor. He started the Amateur Cine Society of India.
There are some quibbles too, mostly about the apathy in the bureaucratic order or the depressing heat or the terrible inequalities, but then they are outweighed by the deep love and affection for a country the sahibs made their own.
