About the book

Dr. Tristram moves easily among the people whom his fellow Europeans often view from a distance. The opening places him beside an Indian storyteller before turning to the social anxieties of the British community at Gaya. News that a professional dancer is coming as the rajah's guest prompts speculation about respectability, while Tristram's own unceremonious habits provoke affectionate criticism and concern. Wylie builds a romance around competing ideas of duty, belonging, and the right to choose a life beyond prescribed social roles. The Indian setting is filtered through a British colonial imagination, with the inequalities and stereotypes that entails. Within that framework, the doctor's practical compassion provides a point of comparison against the judgments by which the surrounding society protects its boundaries.

Compassion and convention
Colonial social boundaries
Freedom and respectability

Why read it

The change from storytelling beside the village fire to gossip on a colonial veranda establishes two different ways of relating to the same place.

English G. P. Putnam's Sons edition of 1916

Contents and reading sections

About the book

Why read it

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