A unique record of the last seventeen years of the British Raj, as seen through the eyes of a young officer of the Indian Political Service.

Taken from Norval Mitchell's own original memoir, written in 1975, his son, David, carefully edited the work to produce an account of a man for whom improving the lot of the masses, those quiet people of India, met with ever-increasing frustration by the 'dead hand' of British and Indian bureaucracy.