ABSTRACT
When the liner which took me to India for the first time, S.S. Ranpura of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, three weeks out of London, made a landfall at Bombay and disembarked her passengers at Ballard Pier, it surprised nobody on the crowded quayside that with hardly an exception we were English. For Englishmen had been seen hereabouts a good three hundred years. They had even been lording it over the whole continent for a matter of one hundred and eighty. Understandably, therefore, the illusion of the permanence of our presence and authority persisted. And yet in barely another twenty years, we—for I can revert to ‘we’ in this sentence instead of ‘they’—would have packed up and gone.
