The North-Western Provinces of India

Abstract

THIS book professes to be “an attempt to tell the story of one of the greatest of our Indian Provinces from the social point of view”; and no one who reads it will deny that the attempt has been completely successful. The author has had vast experience as an Indian official; he is well known as an authority on Indian religions and folk-lore (see the review in NATURE, April 22, 1897, of his work on “The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India”), and, as Superintendent of the Ethnographical Survey of the N.W.P., he has had unique opportunities of studying the life and customs of the people. Lastly, he possesses the enviable faculty of being able to express the results of tedious and painstaking observations in a most readable form. In fact, we have here, in a nutshell, an amount of information which could only be obtained otherwise either by a similar experience or by a diligent study of many ponderous Blue-books. The style is easy and pleasant, and possesses no small merit from the literary point of view. The keen intelligent interest of the writer in his subject communicates itself to the reader, while his sympathy with the beauties of nature gives to the book something of the charm which characterises Bishop Heber's diary.

The North-Western Provinces of India.

By W. Crooke. Pp. 361. (London: Methuen and Co., 1897.)