In the final novel of Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet,” “A Division of the Spoils” (1975), the stoic “English manner” abroad is the subject of idle wonder: “The irony is . . . that at home it’s been going out of fashion for years. Rather like one of those strains of indigenous plants that turns out to flower more profusely abroad and withers away in its home soil.” And indeed, British colonials flowered in altogether different ways from those they left behind. David Gilmour’s marvelous “The British in India: A Social History of the Raj” classifies and conjures more than three centuries of eclectic Anglo-Indian flora.

As with his earlier “The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj” (2005), Mr. Gilmour orders “The British in India” thematically, from “Numbers,” “Motivations” and “Origins and Identities” to “Last Posts” (death, repatriation, staying on). The structure’s success owes as much to its simplicity as to Mr. Gilmour’s remarkable feel for detail, perspective and proportion.

George V hunting tigers in the Nepal jungle in January 1912. Photo: Mirrorpix via Getty Images

The British in India By David Gilmour

FSG, 618 pages, $35

According to the 18th-century eccentric Horace Walpole, “No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.” So long as the East India Co. oversaw British interests on the subcontinent (ca. 1600-1858), India’s chief inducements were quickly made fortunes (“shaking the pagoda tree”), restricted opportunity at home and, not least, refuge from disgrace. William Hickey, one of the 19th century’s most original memoirists, called an EIC cadetship “the last resource of ruined profligates.” Later, after the 1858 Government of India Act, whereby authority passed from the EIC to the British crown, imperialist and missionary zeal and family tradition became more common pulls.

Once in India, transplants’ impressions and experience ranged widely, depending on profession and posting. Do-it-all district officers, forest men, engineers, merchants, jurists, adventurers, wives, planters, policemen and prostitutes spread from the Punjab to Bengal and Burma—few lived alike. Whereas the extraordinary traveler Fanny Parkes could “with a good tent and a good Arab [horse] . . . be happy for ever in India,” Alfred Lyall, who served on the India Council throughout the 1890s, lamented in verse: “[India] hast racked him with duns and diseases, / And he lies, as thy scorching winds blow, / Recollecting old England’s sea breezes, / On his back in a long bungalow.”

Even the Raj’s soldiers resist pigeonholing. Until the founding of Addiscombe, the EIC’s military academy, in 1809, an officer could be commissioned without formal training. Not that 19th-century cadets were much inconvenienced by the introduction of nominally competitive exams that tested “a knowledge of Caesar’s Commentaries, vulgar fractions and writing of a legible hand,” or by an unexacting code of conduct, principally, as Maurice Henry of the Madras army recalled, “avoid[ing] being seen downtown in uniform with some awful tart.” Conditioned by an ethos of amateurism, British officers were of variable quality, from geniuses such as Richard Burton, with his mastery of 29 languages, to “bad bargains” like Col. Reginald Dyer, the madman responsible for the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters at Amritsar in 1919.


Mr. Gilmour delights in his subjects’ oddities. There are the impeccably named (Pvt. Swindlehurst); yarn-spinning sportsmen, the spiritual forebears of P.G. Wodehouse’s Oldest Member; an ill-informed Calcutta businessman who “thought Omar Khayyám was a curry”; and suspect hangover cures (the “prairie oyster”—made of raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper and olive oil—for rallying the “already assaulted liver”). His chapter on “Intimacies” is particularly affecting and amusing. On his wedding night, the Indian Civil Service officer Roger Pearce records being “very tired, overwrought, unsure . . . and unskilled too.” Meanwhile, like something out of E.M. Delafield’s “Provincial Lady” series, the honeymoon diary kept by Fanny Maxwell, the wife of another ICS officer, features “curt references to ‘cross husband’ and entries no more romantic than ‘usual number of meals, nothing else worth chronicling’ or ‘I have not room to describe my feelings.’”

“The British in India” isn’t merely colorful trivia. Mr. Gilmour grapples with systematic injustices and suffering and the frequent debility and loneliness of the Anglo-Indian lot. Grabby second sons and husband-hunters; pasty viceregal Etonians; mediocrities on the spot with “brick-red faces and moustaches”; half-witted devotees of the cricketer’s poet laureate, Henry Newbolt; soldiers and administrators steeped in drink and prejudice—these are the roles traditionally assigned to the British in India, with more recent emphases on violence, bigotry and corruption projected with all the subtlety of an unhinged silent film ensemble. Mr. Gilmour’s command of primary and secondary texts imbues these stock types with nuance and humanity. He doesn’t spare the Col. Dyers of the Raj, but neither does he allow that within every Anglo-Indian heart there lurked an inner Dyer waiting to be released.

Newsletter Sign-Up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. Subscribe Now

Playing to type was nevertheless an occupational hazard in British India. By the 20th century, one could never be sure, as Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard, who served in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), wrote, “whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.” The best of the British embraced, lived for and learned from India and its people. The weakest made sense of their alien surroundings by clinging tenaciously to stiff, exaggerated social observances and taking an ugly pride in their apartness.

The erudition, balance and wit of “The British in India” are in keeping with Mr. Gilmour’s superb Anglo-Indian biographies “Curzon: Imperial Statesman” (1994) and “The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling” (2002). And with its greater sweep and overlap, “The British in India” renders Mr. Gilmour’s Victorian precursor “The Ruling Caste” obsolete. Together these works bring to mind the closing moments of J.G. Farrell’s novel “The Siege of Krishnapur” (1973)—itself among the finest imaginings of 19th-century Anglo-Indian attitudes—in which the garrison’s retired collector reflects on the Raj: “Perhaps, by the very end of his life, . . . he had come to believe that a people, a nation, does not create itself according to its own best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge.” The Raj’s “own best ideas” lie in “Curzon” and “Kipling”; in “The British in India” are its shaping forces.


—Mr. Carter is the head of the Impressionist and modern art department at Christie’s in New York.