"In The Feringhees, Elizabeth Hamilton, herself born in India, reveals through the medium of her husbands great-great-grandfather, Sir Robert Hamilton, and her own father, Sir William Barton, the Indian Civil and Political Services at their best. Both men served against a background of momentous-Sir Robert in the uprising of 1857-8 and Sir William in the first 30 years of the twentieth century, when the movement for self-government was gaining momentum. They served their apprenticeship as District Officers, learning to survey the land, to avoid confrontations, and, above all, to respect the people. Later, as Politicals, they experienced the pomp and pageantry in the princely states of Indore, Mysore, and also Hyderabad, where Sir William was helped by his earlier experiences in the remote areas of the North-West Frontier that had introduced an element of steel into his character, enabling him to put the regime of the autocratic, immensely rich, but miserly Nizam on a less corrupt footing. Each of the men was supported by a wife who, like him learned to love the country in spite of hardships and sadness, which included the loss of children. Throughout the two volumes, a rich panoply of people enters the story-viceroys and generals, dewans and elders, tribesmen and villagers, Brahmins and outcastes, rebels and extremists, maharajas and begums, including the women rulers of Bhopal and the legendary Rani of Jhansi.
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