Description
INDIAN SUMMER is a witty and affectionate evocation in pictures and letters of the last days of the British Raj and of the early years after the independence that divided India into several parts.
For eight years during and after the Second World War India was April Swayne-Thomas’s second home. There, usually with her husband, Geoffrey, but sometimes alone when travelling to paint murals, she came to love the great country: but not uncritically. Readers of this book will find that she has hard things to say about poverty, ignorance, superstition and the later enmity that grew between different parts of the population. Nor does she gloss over the shortcomings of the less sensitive members of her own community. There is much more than that. Wherever they went April and Geoffrey made friends. In one letter April will give an account of their staying as guests in a princely palace; in others she will tell how they came to know and like – and help – an old potato-seller, or an ancient tailor, or, in the very best traditions, their own servants. Alongside, there is an abiding compassion for animals, many of which feature in this book.
Later, April and Geoffrey left India for five years, three of which they spent in Australia, but they returned and passed three years in Sind, now part of Pakistan. Their experiences and adventures of that time provide the material for Part Two of the book.
All of the illustrations, some of them studies for larger works such as murals, are taken from the drawings made by the author during the periods covered by the letters that form the text. Some drawings are not directly related to the text but they are included because they beautifully capture the Indian subcontinent that April so keenly observed and loved.
Very good preloved condition, a few minor marks throughout