Indian Summer

I often like to read several books on one topic or related topics. This summer it's been India, more specifically India as part of the British Empire.

I'm an admitted Anglophile, but a cynic (i.e. a disgruntled idealist) as well and my India reading began with Flashman and the Great Game. George Macdonald Fraser's great Flashman series combines wit with history and before you know it, you've been uproariously entertained and learned a few things. I suppose I should issue a disclaimer that Flashman tends to be on the bawdy side, but not graphically so. Flashy is also thoroughly a cad of 19th century upper class England.

Flashman and the Great Game centered on the Indian Mutiny and that led me to finally reading the more serious, but still entertaining Siege of Krishnapur , a fictionalized account of the Siege of Lucknow during the Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Rebellion). The Siege of Krishnapur was the second of J.G. Farrell's three books on the British Empire. I read the New York Review of Books Classics version and highly commend it. The NYRB books always have excellent introductions that add great value and context.

Here's an excellent short study of British attitudes towards Indians in the colonial era: http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/FORTESCUE.pdf

I've also tossed off Under the Banyan Tree a collection of short stories by R.K. Narayan. Here's an essay on Narayan.

I've delved into Kim by Rudyard Kipling, the Norton Edition, which includes a number of essays that set the historical context (late 1880's) or provide critical reviews over the years, such as one from Edward Said among others. Whatever you might think of Kipling, and today's left mainly sees him as a great expositor of colonialism (to the extent that he's thought of at all any more), the book is good story, well-told and an important piece of history.

I've never been to India; always thought it would be fascinating, but challenging travel, to say the least.