Light from eastern windows
If the popular idea of the men who founded the British Raj as a lot of brutish pig-stickers and greedy nabobs who despised the Indians they exploited and thought their civilisation of no account still persists, this fascinating, well-researched book should be enough to dispel it. At the end of the 18th century, when the East India Company was consolidating its power and extending its possessions, a number of its officials, civil and military, struck by the splendours and mysteries about them, impressive even in their day, began to seek for knowledge of India's past.