A set of light-hearted vignettes from the past, which holds up a mirror to a vanished milieu-a particular sort of anglicised Indian family, which was proudly Indian, proudly Christian and both directly influenced by and resisting the British customs of undivided India. A milieu that took cultural hybridity unconsciously for granted. Images of school, home and social life in pukka Colombo, fun loving Lahore and changing Madras, of holidays across the country, flow by from before independence till after 1947. Then we see the still largely white mercantile society of early post-independence Clive Steet Calcutta, the emerging breed of brown sahibs and the pomp and circumstance that had traditionally marked British cultural life in Calcutta. All succeeded by a new sort of cultural mixture. Various cultures and subcultures from part of a colourful, variegated mosaic and these sharp-eyed observations on day-to-day cultural tensions and fusions evoke the flavour of South Asian life in a period of major transition.
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