"Curry and Rice", On Forty Plates, or the Ingredients of Social Life at "Our Station" In India (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from "Curry and Rice," On Forty Plates, or the Ingredients of Social Life at "Our Station" In India

Before you can be landed on the sunny shores of Ind, a tedious voyage must be overcome; so, in like manner, before you are transported into the scenes depicted in the following pages, a preliminary voyage, in the way of a Preface, has to be encountered. Allow me, then, to improve the occasion by a few sober words of exhorta tion, that I may dissipate at once and for ever some of those fallacious opinions and crude notions that you persist in entertaining regarding that land called India.

Allow me, first, to impress upon you this geographical fact, that India is about the size of all Europe and, moreover, that the British possessions are subdivided into distinct governments, each a kingdom in itself; and that Bengal, Madras, and Bombay are as different and far more disconnected than are England, Ireland, and Scotland so that that eccentric idea, that floats so persistently in your imagination, of jumping to the conclusion that because dear Charley is going to India, he must infallibly meet dear Willy, who is already there, is slightly illogical; for dear Willy, if I mistake not, belongs to the Bengal Presidency, and is stationed at the very North-west boundary of the empire, at the foot of the Himalayas, close to Cashmere; while dear Charley is bound for imadras, and you may probably hear from him at Cape Comorin, when there will be only the trifling intervening distance of some miles between them.

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