"When twenty-one-year-old Charles Stewart Hardinge went to India as private secretary to his father, Sir Henry Hardinge, the governor-general from July 1844 to January 1848, he was probably the youngest man ever appointed to that post. Throughout his stay, Hardinge kept up an extensive private correspondence, which Bawa Satinder Singh has gathered and annotated extensively.".

"Providing an intimate and privileged look at a British official's life in India during the mid-1840s, Hardinge's letters chronicle such diverse subjects as the Sikh war, the Kashmir insurrection, and the opium trade. Hardinge was an intelligent and engaging correspondent, and his letters vividly describe events, personalities, and ideologies at work in India in the 1840s - a critical period in the expansion and consolidation of British rule.".

"Of considerable historical interest to scholars of colonial India, imperial culture, and nineteenth-century Britain, the letters are also a fascinating study of the author's aesthetic sensibilities. Accompanying the text are Hardinge's own drawings of India."--BOOK JACKET.