Established in the 1840s by the peripatetic British, dak bungalows forever changed the way officers of the Empire and their families travelled across the subcontinent and got to know the real India. With most of the British Raj perpetually on the move, whether on tour or during the summer migration to the hills, dak bungalow travel inspired a brotherhood of sorts for generations of British and Indian officers, who could recount tales of horrid dak bungalow food, a crazed khansama, and the time their only companion at the bungalow was a tiger on the loose. Today, too, PWD-run circuit houses and dak bungalows continue to occupy an important place in the lives and imagination of India's civil servants. In The Raj on the Move: Story of the Dak Bungalow, Rajika Bhandari weaves together history, architecture, and travel to take us on a fascinating journey of India's British-era dak bungalows and circuit houses, following, quite literally, in the footsteps of travellers who stayed in these bungalows over the past two centuries. Her search takes her from the early-19th century memoirs and travelogues of British memsahibs, to travelling from the original colonial outpost of Madras in the south to the deep interiors of Madhya Pradesh, the heart of British India. Evoking the stories of Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond, and filled with fascinating tidbits and amusing anecdotes, the book unearths local folklore about these remote and mysterious buildings, from the crotchety khansamas and their delectable chicken dishes to the resident ghosts that still walk the halls at night.

'At last, we have a study that tackles these questions, and does so with a wealth of learning, a poet's sensibility and a thorough theological literacy...Murray has given us a superb study.' Rowan Williams, Doctrine and Life 'His point of view is always that of someone practised in meditation, and his book is in consequence one of the half-dozen really valuable guides to Eliot's poetry.' Stephen Medcalf, Times Literary Supplement The story of the composition of Four Quartets, in relation to mysticism, constitutes one of the most interesting pages in modern literary history. T.S. Eliot drew his inspiration not only from the literature of orthodox Christian mysticism and from a variety of Hindu and Buddhist sources, but also from the literature of the occult, and from several unexpected and so far unacknowledged sources such as the 'mystical' symbolism of Shakespeare's later plays and the visionary poetry of Rudyard Kipling. But the primary concern of this study is not with sources as such, nor with an area somewhere behind the work, but rather with that point in Four Quartets where Eliot's own mystical attitude and his poetry unite and intersect.