Great Families of the Raj

...Thus he is able to intersperse contemporary impressions of those places with glimpses of their past, derived from his memories and the letters and diaries of others...

...He was bom in the Andaman Islands when his father, Walter, commanded the troops there guarding convict settlements that held many of India's freedom fighters...

...At appropriate points the author weaves a bit of family biography into his story, locating the Trevelyans, the Macaulays and additional imperial clans linked to them by events within the larger history of the Raj...

...Like most families, however, empires are less perfect than their images...

...after all, the terrors of thuggee, the threat of quick death by cholera or cobra bite, and barbarities like those committed on both sides during the 1857 mutiny are useful in producing the shadows that intensify the highlights...

...in the end the children rebel and the old home disintegrates...

...That the British Empire, and the Raj in particular, should be presented as a lost heritage of grandeur is therefore not surprising, however historically unenlightening it may be...

...The treatment is illuminating and not uncritical, nor does Trevelyan shrink from irony...

...Heavy though it is with the bittersweet fragrance of a vanished way of life, The Golden Oriole succeeds where the more unrelievedly nostalgic accounts of the Raj fail because it is rooted in experience and projected through the acts and statements of real people, past and present...

...Many had a sense of being hemmed in when their country finally became Little England and the exotic subcontinent no longer called to them...

...In the current wave of fashionable nostalgia for the Raj, this constructive side to British rule—its only possible justification in history—tends to get neglected...

...Look through the lists of governors general, viceroys and high civil servants and you will see the same names repeated generation after generation: Wellesley and Hardinge, Minto and Elgin, Napier and Lawrence, Strachey, Skinner and Trevelyan...

...In theory at least, the Great Moghul, King of Kings, Great White Queen, or whatever the ruler might be called, sits on the Peacock Throne or its equivalent and receives the homage of these peoples while providing them protection in return...

...Books and films on the era, mainly originating in Britain, play up the epic and romantic perspectives instead...

...His childhood was spent in Gilgit, a remote realm high in the Karakoram (and now part of Pakistan), where his father subsequently served as military adviser to the Maharaja of Kashmir...

...Happily, he also had access to a notable family archive of pictures, some of which are unusually good examples of early 20th century black-and-white photography...

...Even those in the antiimperialist camp must have felt somewhat diminished as the basis for their cause slipped away...

...Since much of the included materialletters, journals and photographswill be new to scholars no less than general readers, the book also makes a genuine and substantial contribution to our knowledge of the Raj while introducing us to one of the remarkable families that served and sustained it—and helped keep it from receding into mere tyranny...

...The author himself comes from a collateral line of the Trevelyans...

...The British Raj in India was no exception...

...Charles Edward held many high offices in the Raj, and his grandson, George Macaulay Trevelyan, was one of the great historians of Britain and its empire...

...Although now residing in London, he returned to India in the 1970s and '80s—half a century after his childhood—on a series of five pilgrimages to spots connected with the activities of the Trevelyans (and not merely his own branch of the family...

...This has been true ever since Persia's King Cyrus the Great realized 25 centuries ago that, with an efficient administration and a good road system, people of many cultures and races could be brought together in a single vast paternalistic organization without being forced into homogeneity...

...Given this familial aspect, it is understandable that beneath the royal lines themselves there should be imperial families who figure prominently as sharers of power and responsibility...

...Many of them, in fact, spent their lives pursuing schemes they truly believed would improve the lot of the Indian poor and transform Indian society into a working democracy...

...It was in the garden at Gilgit that Raleigh Trevelyan first heard the song of the golden oriole, the leitmotif for his book...

...They saw themselves as "servants," and not merely of the Queen Empress...

...I suppose a certain wistfulness about the Raj is inevitable for the British...

...The author ambitiously combines personal reminiscence, travel and history to make The Golden Oriole a satisfyingly thick and altogether pleasing work, none the worse for a few small vanities...

...Citizens trying to keep up appearances in the Roman Empire no doubt felt a similar affection for the great days of Augustus and even Tiberius...

...Trevelyan is a member of one of the Raj's great families, whose involvement in the subcontinent began in the 1830s with Charles Edward Trevelyan, the brother-in-law of Thomas Babington Macaulay...

...The bearers of these names were for the most part distinguished by dedication to their roles—quite a different breed from the old East Indian Company nabobs who had filled their pockets by "shaking the pagoda tree...

...Raleigh Trevelyan's evocation of the British experience in India, The Golden Oriole, is in several respects a very nostalgic book, yet the nostalgia is of a different sort—not vicarious, but intensely personal...

...Not that the horrors are entirely forgotten...

...To the middle class it had meant career opportunities and, if necessary, escape from disgrace and failure...