A Lady’s Attack on Baroda.

AN English friend has favoured us with a clipping from Lady’s Pictorial of May 27, containing a review of Mrs Norah Rowan Hamilton’s book, Through Wonderful India and Beyond. We find from the excerpts given by the reviewer (who by the way is the well-known Punjabi publicist) that the book, which is said to contain a tourist’s “pen-pictures” of India, is marred by many off-hand and offensive remarks on men, manners and customs. 

This is what the reviewer has to say of her impressions of Baroda: She is hypercritical of the palace of the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda. She describes it as “a veritable hotch-potch of architectural styles”. She did not like the statuary, paintings and ornamentation of the audience chamber. She says that electric light fittings, telephone arrangements and even the lift, are prominently displayed, and regarded as things “of joy and beauty”, instead of being hidden. She goes on to say that the bedrooms are furnished in “the worst taste of Toltenham  Court-road”, and that the Maharani’s boudoir “is such a gilded cage that even a Maharani has not the temerity to sulk in it”. 

She caustically observes: “Money has evidently been lavished throughout the palace: how pitiable it is that money cannot buy or command taste, and that the generality of Hindu princes seem to possess so little natural taste that they are attracted inevitably by the gaudiest objects in the English market.”