Plain Tales from the Raj

Drawn from interviews made for a BBC oral-history project, Plain Tales from the Raj records the memories of British men and women who lived in India during the final decades of imperial rule. Civil servants, soldiers, wives, children and other residents describe journeys out from Britain, domestic arrangements, work, leisure, hill stations, cantonments and the formal conventions of Anglo-Indian society.

Their reminiscences are personal rather than comprehensive, and the perspectives belong largely to the colonial community itself. That limitation is also what makes the book a distinctive source: it captures how participants remembered the Raj as the generation with direct experience of it was disappearing. Allen arranges the voices into a vivid social history of a system approaching its end in 1947.