SHORTER NOTICES
THIS is a story of the childhood of a girl member of 'a great Hindu family in the Punjab. Having come to London at the age of eighteen to study medicine—and incidentally broken the tradi- tion of her clan—Savitri Devi Nanda looks back, possibly with some nostalgia, on the calm withdrawn life, the wealth and rich clothes, the stately festivals, the many relations behaving with prescribed courtesy to one another, the idealistic moral teaching of her youth. Her father, however, insisted that she should go away to a boarding-school for wealthy Indian girls, and here, also in charm- ing surroundings, she !molt to read English literature with pleasure and " geometry and algebra . . . in a' grove where the scent of purple violets was wafted on the breeze." The book is an involuntary comment on the things that the urban Western world has sacrificed—the sense of stability, the love of Nature, the feeling of having a duty as part of a group. But after the girl had lost her mother and had attended Lahore University, she found that the traditional ways were too narrow ; that her life Was to be a life of learning. The book is slow-moving, warm-hearted, full of vivid scenes, and it gives a detailed picture of a side of India hidden, from Europeans. Oddly, there is hardly a hint of poverty or strife.
Previous page
