Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian

No one could have invented John Beames, whose vibrant and original memoirs were discovered by chance in an attic almost a century after they were penned. He arrived in Indian in 1858, and worked there as a civil servant for the next forty-five years, defending powerless peasants against rapacious planters, improvising fifteen-gun salutes for visiting dignitaries and presiding over the blissful coast of Orissa. His acquaintances spanned from lofty Rajas to dissolute Englishmen. Vivid, candid and without fear of authority, Beames was a defiant individual in a huge bureaucracy. He writes with the richness of Dickens.

John Beames (1837-1902) was a civil servant in British India and an author. He served in the Indian Civil Service from 1859 until his retirement in 1893. He was also a scholar of Indian history, literature and linguistics. His great work was a comparative grammar of Indo-Aryan languages, and he poured his extensive experience of India into his Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian.