Excerpt from The Mad Rani: And Other Sketches of Indian Life and Thought

Some of your friendly criticisms are before me at this moment. While you envy my wide knowledge of native life and my first-hand material, you are inclined to deprecate my direct unvarnished manner and close adherence to the truth. You exhort me to be more imagin ative and dramatic, and to work up deliberately to a tremendous climax - the unexpected if possible. You like the treatment of the later sketches in the series better than that of the earlier, because you think they show a much surer touch. You are probably right but from my own point of view the reason for this preference of yours is simply this: the first nine or so are facts, plain and almost un adorned, and I have drawn on practically nothing but my memory while the later stories, though based on experi ences equally true and almost as vivid, are woven together with some imagination, the coherence and development of the plot being in some cases invented. To illustrate your criticism of my discursive treatment, you even took the trouble to re - write one of my stories, The Mad Rani, in the accepted sensational manner, with due regard to atmosphere, impressionism and dramatic climax. The story itself is, as you know, true I have more than once told it to select hearers in India, and I have tried to relate it here almost exactly as it occurred. Your rendering of the same story is a most exciting piece of sensationalism, and I enjoyed it immensely but I scarcely recognised my own experience and indeed, to confess the truth, I do not think I am capable of treating any of my facts in that arresting manner, though I am quite sure that you are.

But apart from your example and encouragement, I have another and more serious motive in publishingthese sketches. The constitutional reforms in India are now well advanced in the experimental stage you and I saw more than a littleof their inception before we left India last year. The ultimate responsibility for confirming or abolishing, en larging or restricting, this devolution of powers to the children of the soil, lies with the British Parliament. It is therefore of great importance that the British public should see something more than the troubled surface of Indian political life, should dive into the quieter and less advertised depths below, should appreciate, with some understanding and sympathy, the unfamiliar mentality of the great Indian population, should in a word do what is so often impressed upon the patient bureaucrat, that is, get under their skin.' In these stories I am trying to show to anyone who will read them, how the Indian mind actually and habitually works. Their religious, philosophical and moral conceptions are different from ours: you may say, if you like (indians often say it themselves with pride), that their ideals are spiritual, whereas ours are material at any rate they are different. Their standards of thorough ness in industry, of accuracy in the spoken word, of courtesy, honour, and sincerity in social behaviour, are difficult for us to understand. I do not say they are inferior. Anyone who reads The Honour of Caste, The Gate of Bathing, or Satti, will I think acquit me of any want of sympathy with Indian ethical feelings indeed one friendly critic, to whom I have shown these sketches, has rather reproached me because in depicting oriental ideals I have omitted to exhibit a better way, a higher light - the way and the light of Christianity. But my object is not to apportion praise or blame, still less is it to proselytize it is simply to under stand, and help the reader to understand, how India actually thinks, feels, speaks and acts and I hope and believe that these stories, if recognised as substantially facts and not as sensational fiction, will show, in a sufficiently interesting manner, how profoundly diflerent the mind of the East still is from the mind of the West.