This reprint of a 1930 edition comes at a time when the mood is one of nostalgia for the days of the Raj. The picture presented here, however, is of the unrest and turmoil among the Indian peoples t the time. Devoid of the sympathy and understanding that many enlightened Britishers of the time held for the nationalist leaders in India, the author traces the roots of this unrest not to the mass of the people but to the corrupt and rebellious minds of a few irreconcilable intelligentsia. According to Captain Ellam who prefaces his work with a brief and summary history of India since the advent of the Aryans, the Swaraj movement designed to further the cause and support the ascendancy of the Brahmins in this country. In the course of his extra ordinarily prejudiced and parochial narrative Ellam refers to the Indian Press as the most ignorant to the illiterate in the world whose seditious gutter filth was daily being poured out in India. As Lord Brent ford of Newick puts it in his foreword to the book, it was in India own interests that she be governed and controlled by Great Britain, and by that wonderful Civil Service which has done so much for India, and of which we are all so proud. Ellam object was to show that centuries earlier, the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus had arrived at a high state of civilization. Late, however, certain influences, developing within that civilization, destroyed it, and so lowered the morale of its people that they fell a prey to successive waves of foreign invasion. The establishment of the British Empire was thus inevitable. Ellam Swaraj: The Problem of India is in the direct line of succession to Miss Mayo well known sanitary inspector report It is interesting to note that 1930 was the year of the famous Dandi March and the establishment of the Swaraj movement on a sound footing. Mahatma Gandhi was by then the undisputed leader of the Indian masses. This paean of praise for the British administration should be useful to all those interested in modern Indian history, political science and administration.
