Dehradun, June 1 -- Book Review

Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and other Forgotten Lives

Circa 1800: This was the time when the port city of Kolkata was an El Dorado - the first city of the very prosperous British East India which attracted Caucasian settlers of all manners and types - missionaries, traders, mercenaries, adventurers, fraudsters, treasure hunters, administrators and impresarios. Some made a fortune and a reputation, others lost all of theirs, but they all had their own repository of tales to recount. While those of Governor Generals and members of his Council have been archived, what of the vast majority of those who were the sinews of the Empire - the wives and the barmaids, the hotelier, the farrier, the haberdasher, the crime...