Word: raj
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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India's festering sun beat down impartially on New and Old Delhi-on the precisely geometric, grandly drab preserves of the British Raj, on the noisy, squalid, sprawling native town. A sweat-soaked British wallah might change his shirt four times before settling down to an evening burra peg of bad Australian whiskey in the garden of the Cecil Hotel. Even the calloused, naked feet of shirtless Indians burned as they padded along the teeming Chandni Chauk. In the brassy glare, the flowering trees near the Viceroy's residence seemed to bear sparks rather than blossoms. The rind...
...taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen-to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon and gentle Halifax. The Raj was finished: scarcely a voice...
...could buy. Then Gopal's family began to confect evidence for the defense. Both families finecombed their tenants and employes, singling out those whose lives depended upon their landlord's bounty, and ruthlessly training them as "witnesses." Others who yearned to stand in well with the British Raj or with the Congress Party were bribed with promises of political preferment. One clerk, who worked in the British magistrate's office, sold "evidence" to both sides so profitably that he "very nearly paid for the wedding of his second daughter." Genuine witnesses mysteriously disappeared, or were threatened with...
...armed might of the British Raj stood on the alert for further trouble. Although mutinous seamen returned to their duties, sympathy strikes broke out. Boiling India last week had cooled down to a simmer...
...improbably, Moslem and Hindu rebels could remain one, the British Raj was doomed to go down in violence...