M.J. Akbar was once the rockstar among the English journalists in India. He launched, as editor, India's first political weekly news magazine, Sunday (1976), and two daily newspapers-- The Telegraph (1982) and The Asian Age (1994). Many of us grew up on Anand Bazar Patrika's weekly staples of Sunday and Sports World (edited by M.A.K. Pataudi, the rockstar among cricketers !) and its daily prim and proper fare of The Telegraph.

Akbar's later avatar of a full-time BJP politician and the controversy surrounding the #MeToo allegations against him might have eroded part of his fan following, yet the diehard reader continues to be enthralled by his writings. One of the reasons the diplomat turned author TCA Raghavan picked up this newest book is "the simple pleasure of reading MJ Akbar who writes like Mark Knopfler playing the guitar". I, for one, can't agree more.

As the subtitle suggests, the book looks at racial relations between India's last foreign invaders and their native subjects. The starting point is the analysis of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled during the Mughal period. The book heavily draws upon the memoirs of the Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, whose 'Mogul India 1653-1708 gives a striking account of the people and power during the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, and the French traveller Francois Bernier's Travels in the Mughal Empire 1656-1668. Unlike the Mughals, the British were rarely in sync with Indian sensibility. Even though they began as invaders, the Mughals learnt to adapt to the culture and kinship of their subjects. The British dressed differently, thought differently, ate differently and carried the deeply ingrained conviction of 'white superiority'.

The book is choc-a-block with a multitude of delightful anecdotes about the British East India Company's rule in India, that effectively began with the Battle of Plassey (1757), and the British Raj that roughly started after the Rebellion of 1857. The author digs deep into the archives and draws upon memoirs, journals and letters to describe the pompous attitude of “White Nabobs" vis-a-vis their Indian subjects,  despite the fact that they utterly failed in saving millions of lives lost to drought and famine.

The book depicts the debauchery of the British who drank plentifully and fornicated wantonly, yet they wanted 'to regulate the passions of the natives': “Some over-optimistic Victorian army commanders thought that they could ‘sweat the sex out’ of the soldier with rigorous drill and endless football games. Neither the football nor the morals improved,” Brothels instead sprang up close to the cantonment areas in Calcutta, Delhi, Agra, and Bombay. The persistent reach of racism touched this sector too and the white clients demanded women of their own colour. According to official records of Calcutta in 1872, there were 437 Europeans in a list of 6,871 prostitutes.

The Doolally Sahib of the book's intriguing title is derived from Deolali, a transit camp situated in Nasik. Many English soldiers had Indian lovers but they seldom chose to marry their Indian paramour. These men, says Akbar, wanted the comforts of betrothal but without the ‘plague’ of marriage to the Indian women they consorted with. When such soldiers returned home, farewell parades were held where beer, whisky and music was available aplenty and the they soon turned into drunken escapades.

“From the Indian side of the pageantry, a wail would be heard, the cry of abandoned girlfriends and their parents.” Cursing the solider, a distraught father laments thus, “Oh Doolally sahib, fifteen years you’ve had my daughter, / and now you go to Blighty, sahib; / May the boat that takes you over sink to the bottom of / the pani, sahib!” The author finds this reference from Charles Allen’s Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (1975).

Corruption comes out as a major by-product of British engagement in India. Robert Clive, the first Governor of Bengal presidency, was tried by British parliament for his financial misdemeanors. Warren Hastings, the governor-general, was impeached on charges of corruption.  Members of Hastings's Council were equally notorious for their corrupt ways. But, alas, "For an establishment in search of an alibi, the easy answer was to blame unscrupulous 'Asiatics' for infecting lily-white Englishmen with their corrupt ways!".

Indo-British relations prospered most when Company officials and the new Indian elite ('Macaulay's Children' !) co-operated in corruption. Gobindaram Mitra, the deputy collector of Calcutta between 1720 to 1726, was anointed the first 'Black Zamindar' by his British masters. The author says: "Mitra became Calcutta's first Godfather of white-collor crime: inflating tenders, fudging accounts, manipulating auctions for public works". His cudgel-wielding goons were let loose on the citizenry and 'Gobindoramer chhodi' (Gobindaram's stick) entered popular parlance as as a metaphor for callous power.

The English language and literature was greatly impacted by the British engagement. Akbar says, "The British created an English with Indian characteristics, while Indians translated their own language and diction into a continuous sting of English words merged into Indian syntax and even grammar". The most memorable specimen of this Anglo-Indian engagement is the great dictionary of the British Raj, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, a classic that has never got out of print since it was first published in 1886. Checking words in my copy of Hobson-Jobson further enhanced the pleasure of reading this book.

The English language could have been an effective bridge between the British and an influential middle class, but the two seldom conversed fully. The Sahibs conversed with servants at home and subordinates at work. Servants knew a smattering of English words, while their memsahibs obliged with similar hotchpotch in native lingo. Sample this hilarious conversation before parting:

'Boy, how are master's socks so dirty?'

'I take, make e'strain coffee'.

'What, you dirty wretch, for coffee?'

'Yes, missis; but never take master's clean e'sock. Master done use then I take'.

(The reviewer Ajay Kumar Singh is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand.)