MEMSAHIBS AND THE “SUNNY EAST”: REPRESENTATIONS OF BRITISH INDIA BY MILLICENT DOUGLAS PILKINGTON AND BERYL WHITE

Millicent Pilkington, the daughter of a Lancashire industrialist in her early twenties, arrived in India in December 1893 and returned to England December 1894. We know about her trip, or her Year's Frivol in the Sunny East as she calls it, from the sumptuous album orné or commonplace book she compiled filling it with water colour sketches, photographs, autographs, dinner invitations, newspaper clippings, etc. The material is carefully arranged over forty-five album pages, is often framed by elaborate, hand-painted decorative borders, many of them in an Indian style. We know of the album because it was deposited in the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge University by a descendant.