The Sahibs and the Lotus - The British in India

What were the British, who lived and ruled in India for more than two centuries, really like? What sort of lives did they live? What thoughts did they have about themselves and those they had conquered? The answers to these and many other quesrions are presented here as facets of a multi-media production. There is melodrama, tragedy, circus acts, high and low comedy, and blood and thunder. There are numerous changes of scenery, of actors - both principal and supporting - as well as a variety of sound effects and incidental music. In a phrase, `a panorama of human beings,' in all their diversity of character, ambitions, arrogance, cruelty, decency, stupidity and ordinariness. There is gaiety and sadness, heroism and despair, sickness and death. For much of the period of British rule, the threat to life from tropical diseases was vastly more frightening than that of the battlefield. There was profir, of course, some of it, at least in the early years, more in the nature of loot, but there was also a price, paid often by the innocent, particularly the children. However, death was usually indiscriminate, and long forgotten cemeteries scattered throughout India remain as monuments to those whose bones became part of the earth they had once walked upon as kings. A satisfying and authentic (not ramanticized) picture of what life in India was like for the British during the period of their domination...

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