At the point where I finally go back to Devon, and it may have been a decade at this point, I will need you has my guide....Also, thanks for the book review - a detailed history of partition, the end stages of the Raj this is on my list for the sweetherafter. The Indian Stores out here get their Mishtis and Namkin's from Devon, or the same supplierse

I say nothing when I am (mercifully) infrequently regaled with tales of the glory days of British colonialism and more frequently how Gandhi magically won India's independence. The British were very practiced (by way of atrocities committed upon the Irish) when it came to just starving people outright having undermined their whatever capacity for self-sufficiency previously stood. While I am glad Churchill defeated Hitler, he was a murderous racist thug of a different kind and lower scale.

There isn't a person in my parent's generation of Indians that considers Gandhi the saint he is revered as in the West. This doesn't make them right-wingers, they would simply note other instances ( of not quite as breath-taking) naivete and suggest that his final hunger strikes fanned the flames of partition violence.