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Preface
Appears in
Published 1990
To My Father Major-General
This is an intensely personal book. It celebrates the food, people and places of the British Raj in India. You are what you eat but your choice of food is also determined by what you have become. What follows, therefore, is my tribute to the sense of adventure and wonder in all of us.
As both a child and grandchild of the British Raj in India, and a member of that rapidly dwindling, anachronistic group, it is inevitable that, one day, I would turn again to the misty island which bore me, and to that other vivid and exotic country in which I was raised, to recapture and record what that long-ago life was like: how the colonialists and empire-builders lived; why they worked, struggled and often died far away from their own land; what they did in their daily lives; how they entertained and what they ate.