PREFACE THE title of this book proclaims at once its privileges and its limitations. It offers a picture of India which but a score of men in a generation have a chance of seeing, a picture of the old romantic magnificent India, which it is very possible may never be again on view. On the other hand, so disturbing is the influence of a Royal Progress, that its chronicler is glad to be able to plead it, even in a title, in extenuation of his deficiencies. There is a dislocation, a disintegration almost, in the life of every place on which the honour of entertaining Royalty may fall. Not only does it break out in flags-though that may be sufficiently distressing-but it breaks out in itself; it becomes a sort of decorated and accentuated, and often an anything but improved version of what it commonly is. Its own social standards are nailed up for display, just like the dreary bits of bunting that deface the roadway. The display is of real interest, but its value is for the novelist, the serious student of humanity; its effects are merely confusing to the circumforanean observer. All this one asks the title to plead; to save one from the scorn of the critic who could never appreciate if he had not experienced the disabilities inseparable from such a progress:—the wasted time, the undesired opportunities, the disguised realities, the forced note of festival. How different in her office hours India is from the bedizened reveller we met in the streets, one had now and again an opportunity of discovering, and it is hoped that in a part of this book some use of that opportunity may be discerned. The more serious aims of it have, for the reader's convenience and avoidance, been as far as possible consigned to its concluding chapters. If there be lapses elsewhere into a too important manner, the defect may generally be remedied by a turning over of the page. Some system has been attempted in the spelling of Indian words and names, an effort which the map-makers and historians do their utmost to embitter. The Burmese transliterations have nothing to commend them but the hardihood of despair. |