Journey Back to Peshawar

Pradip Sarbadhikari is a professor of political science at Lakehead
University in Thunder Bay.

In 1987, after half a century, Rona Murray returned to India, where she
had spent her childhood. This book, in which she reflects on the country
where her father and grandfather had lived during the heyday of the
British Raj, is a haunting mixture of anecdotes and social commentaries
drawn from her father’s memoirs, interspersed with tales from friends
whose forefathers formed the elite classes of British India. As a
complement to the past, the author provides a schematic
travelogue-cum-social analysis of India today.

What could have been a fascinating study of India is marred by the
author’s need to justify Britain’s colonial rule while at the same
time giving undue emphasis to the darker side of Indian culture and
civilization. Its limited vision aside, the book contains factual
inaccuracies and innumerable typographical errors, and frequently lapses
into incoherence. Nevertheless, it will probably suit believers in
Kipling’s “white man’s burden” just fine.