Bear-hunting in Bundelkhand, riding a yak through an 18000 foot pass into Chinese Turkistan, putting down mutiny in Peshawar, exchanges with Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan - Lionel Jardine, as a British colonial officer in India, had plenty of the stuff of which autobiographies are made. But this book is not a string of windy reminiscences.
Rather, in precise British understatement, it makes a specific point from the experience of Mr Jardine - a point which is as pertinent for post-independent Indians and post-colonial British as it was in those turbulent days of 1914-1947 It is what made him a somewhat exceptional ‘Impeccable Imperialist’.
An idea changed the life of Lionel Jardine. It was during the days of the British Raj, when Jardine was a member of the Indian Civil Service. Later he became British Resident in Baroda.
ln the words of an Indian independence fighter, something transformed him from ‘an absolute autocrat to an actual servant of the people’.
Mahatma Gandhi met him, and later checked the stories of his change. Finding them to be true, he said that such a change in a British administrator was ‘the greatest thing happening today’.
What made Jardine different?
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