My Indian Peregrinations: The Private Letters of Charles Stewart Hardinge, 1844-1847

At Fatehpur Sikri there is a gateway about 120 feet high, the largest in the world. The city is now a picture of desolation—a sad remnant of the fallen grandeur of the Moguls. Ruins meet the eye in every direction for miles, and you see the wild jackals inhabiting the marble tombs which once could boast of lofty minarets.—To Sarah, November 5, 1845Charles Stewart Hardinge was twenty-one when he went to India as private secretary to his father, Sir Henry Hardinge, the governor general, from July 1844 to January 1848. Throughout his years in India, the younger Hardinge kept up an extensive correspondence with his family in Europe. Bawa Satinder Singh has brought Hardinge’s letters together in an extensively annotated edition, providing an intimate and privileged look at a British official’s life in India during the mid- to late 1840s. Chronicling such diverse subjects as the Sikh war, the Kashmir insurrection, and the opium trade, My Indian Peregrinations provides both immediacy and context to scholars of colonial India, imperial culture, and nineteenth-century Britain. Hardinge vividly describes events, personalities, and ideologies at work in India during this critical period in the expansion and consolidation of British rule. Because Hardinge was also an accomplished artist, the letters are a fascinating study of his aesthetic sensibilities, which Singh augments with previously unpublished sketches from Hardinge’s years in India.