Memsahibs in the Raj

Ipshita Nath's book captures the hermetically sealed nature of the memsahibs' world from the country in which they lived

Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India
Author: Ipshita Nath
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 294
Price: Rs 699

The Raj exerts an enduring fascination for educated upper middle class Indians in a way that the Mughal era can rarely match. The author, Ipshita Nath, is well aware of this appeal when she selected as a topic for doctoral thesis this study of memsahibs in colonial India. As she writes in a lengthy prologue, “…sometimes a voice in my head asked if… I had been bitten by the ‘Raj nostalgia’ after all?” Her answer is that her interest was simply a “scholarly