The Tears of the Rajas

Ferdinand Mount

Simon and Schuster

784 pages, Rs. 799

This is a searing history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family, the Lows. Ancestors of the author, the Lows survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease. The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers—the massacre at Vellore, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral—but also their personal ordeals: bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, plagues and fevers, and the deaths of children. Mount writes a saga of the fragile and imperilled, as well as oppressive and devious, enterprise of the Raj.