On June 23, in these columns Sunanda K. Datta-Ray wrote about the arrival of a new type of ingabanga, who were quite different in class and taste, from those of a previous generation. As if to physically mark this change, on the previous day came the news of the death of Romola Sinha. For many who knew her or even knew of her, the death of Romola Sinha will seem like the passing of a generation and an age which Datta-Ray evoked from the position of some one born in the heartland of the older ingabanga set. Romola Sinha, who was 97 when she died, was a remarkable woman by any reckoning. She was born to privilege and was married into even greater privilege. The Sinhas of Raipur could at one time consider themselves to be one of the elite families of Calcutta. Their status in the more recent past fell somewhat as the family was shaken by accident and scandal, and when it became common knowledge that the last Lord Sinha had died in a bedsit in North London in near-destitute conditions. But all this did not touch the graciousness and the work of Romola Sinha. The former was more than apparent to all those who met her and the latter was there for all to see in the institution she built, the All Bengal Women's Union. I want to take the work of Romola Sinha to articulate some of the values and virtues of this generation of westernized Bengalis. In the egalitarian world in which we now live, there is a tendency to decry this generation and this particular group. Often such criticism is justified. The class was marked by its loyalty to the raj. Their lifestyles and even their sensibilities were invariably European. Many of them were not particularly well-educated despite their public school and Oxbridge educations. (I knew an old man who was very proud of his engineering degree from Cambridge. Someone had to tell him politely but firmly that there was nothing to be proud of since Cambridge was not especially well-known for its engineering faculty.) They could also be incorrigibly snobbish and some of them stupid as well. In all this what is often forgotten is that their loyalism was punctuated by acts of courage. Datta-Ray has recalled how B.L.Gupta closed his court for the day and proceeded straight to Presidency Jail when he heard that his friend, Surendra Nath Banerjee, had been arrested. Brajendranath De, one of the earliest members of the heaven-born (as members of the Indian civil service were known) and a formidable scholar of Arabic and Persian, fought the racism of his superior. Romesh Dutt's refusal to politically challenge the right of the British to rule in India cannot take away from the courage and the conviction that informed his economic critique of British rule. There are many such instances. Romola Sinha's husband, an ICS officer, earned the anger of the official establishment because he had adjudicated against a Briton. There was other aspects to the work of this class. Everyone knows of S.R. Das, law member of the viceroy's council, who founded the Doon School. But very few know that his sister, Sarala Ray, set up Gokhale Memorial Girls' School and another sister, Abala (wife of Jagadish Chandra Bose), was involved in Bethune School. Romola Sinha's work with poor and deserted women came out of a similar commitment to the society and the city in which she lived. It is a distortion to see such people only in terms of their lifestyle and thus label them as aliens in their country. It is also easy to denigrate this kind of work as meaningless do-gooding carried out by women of affluent families as a salve to their conscience. But at least such women were utterly selfless, did not look for honours or for political mileage at the expense of the underprivileged. They may not have preached the message of social and economic transformation but that is no reason to undervalue their work, especially in an age in which most radical messiahs have been shown up to have feet of clay. Another indirect impact of this class should not pass unnoticed. This was the formation of a particular sensibility which, for the lack of a better word, can only be called European. This sensibility was conveyed through an ineffable osmosis and it reached an educated Bengali middle class which was not in any way identified with the westernized Bengali elite to which the Sinhas, the Dases and the Guptas belonged. One has in mind people like the poets Sudhindranath Dutta and Bishnu Dey, the historian Sushobhon Sarkar, the educationist Apurba Chanda, the scholar Nirad C. Chaudhuri and of course Satyajit Ray. The cultural tastes of these men were European even though their lifestyle, except perhaps in the case of Sudhin Dutta, remained strongly Bengali. It was common at one time for such people to rub shoulders with the westernized elite in western classical music concerts, a preserve of the sahibs, native and real. I do not want to unduly emphasize the serious side of the westernized elites' activities by ignoring the utterly frivolous aspects of their existence. Dancing at the 300 Club, Guy Fawkes Day parties and inane socializing occupied a large part of their leisure hours. But there was in them a great sense of fun and the guts to fight. One story should illustrate the last quality. In the Seventies, the late Moni Mullick took on the then British deputy high commission over two mongrels she kept in her garage. The deputy high commissioner, who lived across the road, had a running cold war with her because, according to him, the dogs made too much noise. He made the fatal error of having the dogs picked up and packed off to Howrah Station. This, so far as Moni Mullick was concerned, was a declaration of war. She wrote to the high commissioner and mobilized influential public opinion. The high commissioner, in his wisdom, decided to intervene and asked his subordinate to get the dogs back. After they arrived, an attempt was made by none other than Bob Wright to broker a peace. Moni Mullick initially refused to meet the deputy high commissioner. After much persuasion she agreed. When her opponent said, 'Mrs Mullick, I've no intentions of souring Indo-British relations,' she replied, 'So far as I'm concerned they are not sour but rotten.' Having said that she rose and walked to the door like a galleon in full sail, she stopped at the door and delivered her Parthian shot: 'Mr ..., when the young ICS officers came out to India, they were told beware the water and the women. Obviously no one gave you this warning.' The story illustrates many things about the westernized elite: their tenacity in whatever they believed in, their refusal to be cowed down and also their wit. It was a confidence born out of privilege. There was something charming in all this. Whoever makes human beings does not make this brand anymore. Their time in Indian society has passed. But some of the institutions they built and nurtured survive and have become a part of our lives. Those who debunk this class should pause to ponder if their own institutions will have the same staying power.