Very interesting. Those old photos are most evocative and really do let us peep into a very different world.
My grandmother is in the late 80s now and is probably one of the last few living examples of the British Raj. She was born in Burma to an Irish (Brigadeer, career soldier)father and mother and raised in India, where her father was posted.
She there met my Grandfather, another Irish career soldier, who served in the Ghurkas, ending his service as a colonel. She had two children in India in her early 20s and expected to live her life there as the wife of an officer in the Raj and all the priviledge and lifestyle that went with it; all she had known, in fact.
When the Brits got kicked out of India in 1947, she was shipped back to England, a country she did not know and had to start life all over again in the austerity of post-war Britain.
As a young woman, she knew Jim Corbett and his sisters, often visuted them and saw Jim's early cine films of tigers in the wild (certainly the first ever taken).
My father is trying to record her reminiscences of her life in that very different world of a generation past, when the British ruled half the world, India was full of wild game and a tiger in the hills was a daily threat, not an endangered species.
