Paul Asbury Seaman

I read this book as part of my research about the Azad Jammu & Kashmir, NWFP and other areas where the British Raj had their summerhouses. This is a poignant memoir about teaching, learning and adapting to a foreign land. What of curious, novel things? Technology, animal and plant species, food, drink and architecture? There is little recounting of any of these. There is a listless, isolated quality to Seaman’s writing so the scenes seem narrated in slow motion. As memoirs go, it projects honesty though lacks the sense of adventure and youthful exuberance I seek. I finished the book with a vague sense of a colonial world more interesting, bigger and more assertive than Seaman’s depiction but only because he wrote of his time on the Indian subcontinent as overwhelmingly dominant and how it diminished his development.… (meer)