‘Why are you so keen to get rid of us, Munshi sahib?”

“Because, Morrison sahib, we wish to order our own affairs. We shall not order them as efficaciously as you do, my God, no, but then efficacy is not important to us, you understand. . . .”

“It’s your fault. You will insist on the British leaving.”

“Partly because we do not like being spoken to in that tone of voice.”

—Simon Raven, Sound the Retreat.

One can half appreciate the annoyance of the British officer cadets in Raven’s novel. Having been trained to rule India, and sent all the way out there, they find that independence is coming and that it’s closing time in the playgrounds of the West. Just 50 years ago, to put it shortly, the last rays flickered on that empire on which it was said (by its balladeers) that the sun never set and (by its detractors) that the blood never dried. As the munshi, or teacher, says, it’s largely a matter of tone.

The British Raj—meaning rule, which had been in place for nearly two centuries—actually came to an end several decades earlier than that, a few yards from where I began writing these words. The town of Amritsar, in the northern Punjab, is the site of the fabulous Golden Temple and constitutes the Jerusalem of the Sikh religion. It lies athwart the Grand Trunk Road, that imposing trade route that runs all the way from Peshawar on the North-West Frontier Province to Calcutta in distant Bengal. Rudyard Kipling’s father was curator of the museum in nearby Lahore, and Kipling’s boy-hero Kim met with all of his adventures on the Grand Trunk Road—including being thrown off the train at Amritsar. And it was to save British control of the Punjab, “Land of the Five Rivers,” that on April 13, 1919, General R. E. H. Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on a crowd of unarmed Amritsar civilians, who were packed into a no-exit public garden, or bagh, named Jallianwala. He wanted to set an example. But he got the tone all wrong. Not content with killing about 400 protesters and maiming many hundreds more, he had objectors flogged in the streets and issued an order that all Indians had to crawl on their bellies when passing the site of an alleged attack on an Englishwoman. This was too much. Huge numbers of Punjabis had just finished fighting for the British in the First World War and were no longer to be treated as serfs and sweepers. The Amritsar massacre provoked the great Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabin-dranath Tagore into renouncing the

Like many Indian cities, Amritsar is full of statues and monuments. Some of these date back to the Victorian epoch—the heyday of the commemorative sculptor specializing in jubilees—and some are more recent. As I skidded toward the bazaar in the back of a yelping and burping three-wheeler taxi, I was suddenly brought up in my decrepit seat by a rapid deceleration. It wasn’t the driver braking for a cow (though that does happen a lot). It was him stopping to show me a statue. There on the plinth was a turbaned Sikh, rather incongruously wearing a suit and tie and flourishing a concrete revolver. I think the statue was made out of concrete. It may have been asbestos. Anyway, this was Udam Singh, who in 1940 strode into a hall in Westminster, London, and gunned down Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the ex-governor of the Punjab who had approved the 1919 massacre. The name “Singh,” which is attached to every Sikh male as an honorific, means “lion.” Everybody hereabouts is a citizen-soldier, at least potentially. The driver gestured toward old Udam, who, having crossed half a world to exact vengeance, had been hanged for his pains. There was absolutely no rancor or resentment, still less triumph, in the driver’s attitude. He just guessed that, as a visiting Englishman, I would be interested.