The understanding of anthropologists

Women of the Raj by Margaret MacMillan. I found this in a used bookstore with the price tag in British Pounds and a receipt inside indicating that it was purchased June 18, 1994 at Blackwell's on Broad Street in Oxford, UK. I am fascinated by bookish ephemera and the most often hidden genealogy of used books.

The book looks to be a fascinating history of a world that existed up to 75 years ago and yet now is so completely vanished as to seem to have existed centuries past. From the Introduction:

Sometimes they were magnificent. Sometimes, on the other hand, they were awful, as only people who are frightened can be. When a conviction of superiority goes with the fear, then the arrogance is heightened and sharpened. The memsahibs (roughly translated 'the masters' women') - even those who know nothing of the history of the British in India have heard of them. They stride through that history in their voluminous clothes which denied the Indian climate, their only concession to the heat the graceless solar helmet, the topi, which protected their rose-petal cheeks from the alien sun.

[snip]

British women in India certainly behaved badly; they also behaved well. They were brave in ways that are difficult to comprehend today. They might say dreadful things but their actions were often quite different from their words. They did not, it is true, conduct themselves in India with the patience of saints, the understanding of anthropologists. They were merely, most of them, ordinary middle-class women put into an extraordinary situation.

Extraordinary, indeed. The various accounts of the Great Mutiny I have read highlight just how extraordinary. I am looking forward to reading Women of the Raj.