Cutch Or Random Sketches - PB

About the book:-The observations by the author during her stay in this area in the 1830s. This book is informative and describes the people and various important towns of the area. Mandovi, Bhuj, Anjar, the Runn are the towns described. Other chapters give important insights on Hindu tombs, a sati, religious ceremonies, religious sects, the harem, the military tribes, and castes in Cutch, infanticide, ruins, pilgrims to the graves of saints, workmen, minstrelsy, the bards and bardic literature, the arts and design, and the productions of Cutch. The book has 16 illustrations. This book is a reprint of the 1839 edition. About the Author:-Marianne Postans was born and raised in London, though little is known at present of her formative years. At the age of 22, at St. George, Hanover Square, she married Thomas Postans (1808-1846), an ensign in the 15th regiment of the Bombay native infantry, who would rise to Captain by the time of his death. They set sail bound for Bombay on the H.C.S. Farquharson and arrived later that year. In 1834, her husband was posted to Cutch, a western district of present-day Gujarat, India, and there she gathered the notes and made the drawings that would form the basis for her first publication, Cutch; or, Random Sketches. Taken during a Residence in One of the Northern Provinces of Western India; Interspersed with Legends and Traditions, published in 1839. Encouraged by the reception of that book, she published shortly after a 2-volume account of her residence in India, Western India in 1838 (1839), again accompanied by her own drawings and broadening considerably her geographical and ethnological purview to include Bombay, the Deccan, Surat, and the Saurashtra peninsula. Her second book also received plaudits, the reviewer for the Literary Gazette calling her ‘one of the most intelligent lady-travellers and pleasant lady-writers of the day’.