Word: sahibs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unable to make his rounds, which usually netted him $4 a day. Now broke, he is living off friends. He was forced reluctantly into his first pair of shoes. His family and neighbors were worried: "Will they let him come back to Pakistan?" "Will he bring back a mem-sahib [white wife]?" What was worse, the bewildered Bashir heard nothing from anyone in the U.S. about his trip. The reasons: the Digest backed out of sponsoring him; People-to-People was having second thoughts; Johnson's formal invitation unaccountably bogged down in the U.S. embassy in Karachi...
...begin his career as a naturalist. The regiment went to India instead. When his application for transfer to Africa finally came through in 1926, Ionides became successively an ivory poacher, a big game hunter, a game warden, and a devout herpetologist. Piecing all these lives of a non-pukka sahib together, Biographer Alan Wykes, a London magazine editor, has drawn a fascinating profile of a man with all the imperious instincts of an aristocrat and not an inhibiting trace of the code of a gentleman. Snake Man neatly blends action and memory, talk and adventure, snake lore and Ionides lore...
SOMETHING OF AN ACHIEVEMENT, by Gwyn Griffin (284 pp.; Holt; $4.95), suggests, as do a great many other contemporary British novels in this, the sahib's foulest hour, that the Pax Britannica was kept by boobs, boors and brutalitarians. British Novelist Gwyn Griffin is a onetime army officer in Africa who showed in By the North Gate (TIME, April 20, 1959), that he can turn his major dislike into minor but flawless literary art. Now he returns to the attack with the story of Cecil Spurgeon, a tired, self-pitying status-keeper in a coastal enclave of empire...
Author Griffin's insight into the gradations of genteel snobbery and the petty power ploys of aspiring bureaucrats reduces most sociological studies to the rank of kindergarten scribbling. Still, the sahib at sunset, whatever his stupidities, retains some of the pathos of an old family retainer sacked after a lifetime of bumbling but single-minded loyalty...