After a gap of many years, Margaret and Percival Spear returned to India to recall and reflect on the life they had together spent in this country during the twenties, the thirties and half the forties of this century. The two remember India with a whiff of nostalgia and tell their story in a language that is soft and moving. ‘Reminiscences’, they write in the Preface, ‘could not only record events but could also describe something of a vanished world. Who would believe today, for example, that the New Delhi of the thirties was one of the quietest, most spacious and traffic-free cities in India, that the Delhi of the twenties was still in essence an old-world provincial city, with a sprawling but empty suburb to the south, and a cold weather incursion of ‘high-ups’ to the north, longing to escape from their tents and temporary quarters to the coolness of Simla each March-April’. The Spears had indeed loved their India—with Percival trying to keep pace with the mad swirl of events following Gandhi’s release from jail in 1924, and with Margaret watching the everyday drama of human life ‘set in a framework of flowers and trees, birds and animals’.
March-April 1981, volume 5, No 3/4