First written for the Times of India, these sketches take the household of a British official in the Bombay Presidency one servant at a time: the boy, the dog-boy, the syce who keeps the horse, the butler, Domingo the cook and the man of lamps. The humour is affectionate and sharply observed, but it is the master’s humour, and its colonial attitudes are those of the 1880s.
Long read as a classic of Anglo-Indian comic writing, and now equally interesting as a document of the Raj’s domestic life. Download the free EPUB.