Description
WRITINGS on the Indian Mutiny by ordinary British men and women differ significantly from the official reports of it commissioned by the British government and from later accounts written by historians. They include casual notes taken during the events and later expanded into a volume for the perusal of friends and relatives back home, private letters written on the spot, daily entries into diaries and journals kept for the purpose, reminiscences and recollections, and impressions provoked by a return to the scenes of war. Thus the descriptions are varied, heterogeneous, plentiful and fall very much within the tradition of non-fictional narratives by the British in India going back a hundred years and more. They depict both the excitement of fresh encounters with the East and the hardships of living in a hot country where Europeans were susceptible to all kinds of diseases previously unknown to them. Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India' is a good example of this genre of writing, where the form of the letter and the journal is used to unfold a personal narrative. Though such letter journals continued to be written during the entire period of British presence in India, they are progressively supplemented in large numbers by other kinds of writings, ranging from personal narratives like diaries, memoirs, and reminiscences, to formal literary texts like poems and novels. Early texts abound in picturesque descriptions and rich documentation of Indian life and character. In them, a search for the picturesque coexists with revelations of life in the zenana (women's quarters) and with 'random sketches ... interspersed with legends and traditions'? Most of these accounts begin with a description of the almost legendary voyage from England to India that marked the transition from a known world to an unknown one. Landing at the port of Madras, or Bombay, or Calcutta, most of them were impressed by the `...Asiatic splendour, combined