Where the Sun Finally Set
THE BRITISH IN INDIA: A Social History of the Raj
BY DAVID GILMOUR
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 640 pp., $35
AMONG HIS MANY vanities, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, imagined that he had forged an entirely new relationship with Indians by decreeing upon his arrival in 1947 that they would henceforth make up half the guests at any viceregal soirée. One doubts that his forebear David Ochterlony, the early-19th-century British resident in Delhi, would have been much impressed. As David Gilmour informs readers in his authoritative new study of three and a half centuries of British life and rule in India, Ochterlony shared his home with 13 Indian wives, each of whom had
