Excerpt from A Vision of India The materials on which the following pages are founded were collected, for the most part, during the progress of the Prince and Princess of Wales through the Empire of India, which I was permitted to accompany as Special Correspondent of the Standard, in the autumn and winter of 1905 and the spring of the following year. Of this interesting journey much might be written from the personal, the political, and the purely pictorial side. It is not, however, with these matters that I am chiefly con cerned. I deviated rather frequently from the route of the royal travellers, since it was my object to give some general idea of the conditions of life and society prevailing in India, rather than to furnish a circumstantial record of the tour, or to describe in detail those places of historical, antiquarian, and aesthetic interest which were included in the official itinerary. It has been my aim to reproduce something of the impression which our vast and varied dominion of the East - almost a world in itself - leaves on the mind, in its splendour and its contradictions, its colour and its mystery, its wealth and poverty, its medley of classes, creeds, and peoples: to hint at a few of the absorbing problems suggested by the contemplation of this strange and fascinating amalgam. I hope that my survey, partial and incomplete as it may be, will not mislead those who know India only from hearsay and. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.