LADY NUGENT'S EAST INDIA JOURNAL:A CRITICAL EDITION Edited by Ashley L. Cohen, Oxford, Rs 1,495

Almost two hundred years ago, General George Nugent was made commander-in-chief of the British forces in India. While the man himself has been relegated to the back pages of history, his wife, the Lady Maria Nugent née Skinner, has accrued a great deal of interest in academic circles. This is mostly because of her engaging and detailed journals written in both Jamaica and India. The journals were first published by her husband and children after her death in 1839. While the West India journal has been in publication for well over a hundred years, the East India journals have had no such luck. This volume, edited and introduced by Ashley L. Cohen is a critical edition which attempts to present the East India journal with all the necessary scholarly attention it deserves.

The journals recount the Nugents' journey across the ocean to Calcutta in 1812. It relates how Sir George and Lady Nugent set out for an inspection of the territory under the British rule, which at that time extended all the way up to Haridwar. Their tour included the cities of Delhi, Benaras, Murshidabad and Lucknow. We come to know how the Nugents travelled in style and comfort, on ships afloat the Ganges, and afterwards via the land route from Lucknow. It is interesting to learn how Lady Nugent herself was carried across India on the shoulders of natives in her own personal tonjon, a type of palanquin, and sometimes even on elephants. Appended to the journals is a selection of letters from the Nugents to their friends in England. Cohen has added copious footnotes on each page, introducing the various personages the Nugents meet on their way up the river.

Lady Nugent perhaps never thought that her journals would be read beyond the select circle of family and friends. She wrote them not as a private diary but as a travelogue whose purpose would be to entertain her children, whom she had left behind in England, with tales of India. Her journal reveals a mind that is open to the wonders and mysteries of this unfamiliar new land. But her mind also seems to be dominated by racial, religious, and sectarian prejudices. In many ways, this is due to the fact that she travels through a world full of contradictions. The very men who carry her in her palanquin refuse to touch the food offered to them for fear of losing their caste. The nawabs and rajas she meets strike her as savage: possessing intelligence comparable to that of animals - yet their courts abound with rituals and etiquette that the British monarchs themselves would later imitate. One can at times wonder that the entries seem to be written by a Jane Austen in a howdah. There are balls, and dances, gossip and matchmaking, while in the background are the typical Indian scenes - from snake-charmers to regal nawabs, widows burning themselves on funeral pyres as also grand religious festivities. Since Lady Nugent was one of the few British women who had come with her husband to India, her perspective is important. Though she managed to occupy an almost exclusively masculine space, the entry of women like her marks the end of an era where British men had open relationships with Indian women. Lady Nugent has attitudes which on the surface seem to be quite conservative - such as constantly comparing native men to animals and even attempting to convert her servants. Yet the modern reader must understand that such attitudes were not just commonplace but accepted in her time. Her journal is the work of a sensitive and talented writer who was able to absorb the sights and sounds of the new world and faithfully record her impressions in prose.

On her travels Lady Nugent meets many historical figures. They range from Munni Begum, the wife of the infamous Mir Jafar, to Nawab Sadat Ali Khan of Awadh and even the Mughal emperor, Akbar Shah, though she finds his court shabby and his fabled opulence much diminished. All the entries meticulously describe every little detail about the world she sees, from court rituals to dress, food and customs. The Taj Mahal however exceeds her expectations so much that she has to switch to verse to express herself. Her initial enthusiasm does not survive the onset of the summer - a lot of entries deal exclusively with the heat and the troubles associated with the tropical climate, and many detail the monotonous dining arrangements of that particular day. Lady Nugent never attempts to conceal that her husband took up the position of commander-in-chief for pecuniary reasons. Yet attached to that is also a belief in the beneficial aspect of the British conquest, "for India's glory, India's pride", as she writes. Being one of the few British women in India at that time, Lady Nugent was aware that this gender imbalance often led to inter-racial unions. She took it upon herself to protect the honour of British men from falling into the hands of what she calls 'half-caste women', or women of mixed blood. India was a land which was not just dominated by itinerant fakirs, snake-charmers and tyrannical nawabs, but also by the rigid caste system that divided society into multiple impermeable categories. Thus, it was just a matter of time before the British too began to institute their own order amidst this sensory and cultural chaos.

The journals record a journey through a world that is still obstinately in flux between the old and the new. They also portend the institutionalization of racial and cultural hierarchies, which would go in congealing not just categories but also the imagination. We can see in her journal how the fantastic becomes the familiar, and then finally, the tiresome. However for the modern reader, Lady Nugent's journal can never cease to fascinate with its window into our past. Her journal is more than just a document of those long dead, for the perusal of historians. The past might be a foreign country, and they certainly do things differently there. Lady Nugent may thus be for us in both senses a foreigner. Yet her sober and sensitive voice turns out to be our guide and companion into a land which is at the same time foreign and familiar.