The Last Kasmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly (2001)

As Maria wrote in her note as she gave this to me for my birthday, this is not great literature, but the setting was definitely worth it. This is the first book by Cleverly from England. It fills in a piece of my big question about who did the English think they were declaring half the world their empire. This is about India in 1922, and the story goes back to 1910. It showed the life of the British in a military outpost in Bengal, and the relation to the local Indians. (American Indians were referred to as "red Indians.") I heard for the first time, or at least understood better, that the English were starting to divide the Muslims and Hindus (later Pakistan and India) which up until then had gotten along fine. The events in the book have the potential to be politically disastrous, as there are rumblings about Indian independence. Some of the British had grown up in India, and definitely considered it their home, even if they had to go study in England. Some of these knew Hindustani and other local languages and became friends with the Indians, though one of the points made in the book is that most British didn't even see the Indians around them, didn't look at them closely, couldn't recognize them, as they were just the servants. We get a glimpse of the Indian point of view from some of the Indian characters, but I'd like to get a better sense of this. When did their rage get big enough to struggle for independence"?

The book is full of foreign terms. I don't know if they are Hindustani or otherwise, but it took a while to get used to it. Sahib refers to an English gentleman, memsahib to a married English woman, ayah is a nursemaid. But there were times when I didn't understand the sentence, like "The burra sahib is in the kutch erry." A little dictionary would have been nice, but the language did contribute to the setting.

The story itself actually got better towards the end. A woman has supposedly committed suicide, but a friend of hers feels it was murder that is tied to the deaths of four other women in earlier years, so she gets her big-wig uncle to bring in Joe Sandilands from Scotland Yard. Joe goes around the town and countryside seeing where the deaths occurred, interviewing various people, which is how we learn their stories. From this he ties them all together, and in saving the last victim finds the culprit. Again it was the individual stories that I liked the best. How they got to India, how they lived, how men had local wives until they were forced by society to take English women as their wives and what happened to the others. Fascinating country.