Happiness and quiet appear to me to exist nowhere in India save in Dak Bungalows: there they certainly do,” wrote Edward Lear, painter and nonsense bard of Victorian fame, in the journal he kept on his travels through India in the 1870s. He was not alone among his compatriots to take refuge in the dim, cool, hybrid travellers’ rest houses that came into being around India during the British empire. In a slim new book that brims over with historical research and anecdote, Rajika Bhandari celebrates the milieu of the dak bungalow, the caravanserais of colonial India, temporary homes to imperial officials, civil servants, and politicians visiting those parts of the country that aren’t quite a glint in the hospitality industry’s eye.
   

While many Indians who travel through small cities and pilgrimage towns will be familiar with government accommodation, the dak bungalow is something of a rarefied institution. Bhandari’s interest in these old, remote houses began as a child, when she accompanied her mother, a government official, on travels to small towns “where we had no relatives to stay with”. Bungalows which had begun life as shelter for travelling British functionaries continued to perform this service for the administrators of independent India. The dak bungalow, much like the railways, allowed hitherto undreamt-of connections within a vast subcontinent, while reinforcing British interests. But while the railways would come to assume an entirely Indian identity in due course, the dak bungalow retains the air of an older time, recalling, even today, notions of obedient servants, cutlets and kedgeree, and ghost stories told to explain away an unknown and frightening landscape.
  

Bhandari packs a great deal of research into this book, quoting liberally from 19th century sources and dak bungalow record books to compile chapters on how the cuisine, architecture and social relations of the dak bungalow began and developed. Much of the narrative pleasure of the book comes from these accounts of Britons familiarizing themselves with the hybrid atmosphere of these places, set in parts of India that alienated and sometimes terrified them, but where there was inevitably caramel custard on the table, and room and board for themselves and their families. British women discovered unexpected havens as they defied social convention to travel through rural India, and kept voluminous records from which Bhandari draws a great deal, apart from devoting a chapter to “memsahibs” and their experiences of dak bungalows.
  

Bhandari sometimes seems to write for an audience entirely unacquainted with India, interchanging “Muslim” with “Islamic” and writing establishing sentences like “…Chennai, formerly known as Madras, is the capital city of Tamil Nadu and the fourth largest metropolitan city in India…”. Her style tends towards reportage rather than storytelling, and for all its pleasures, The Raj on the Move: Story of the Dak Bungalow can be less than immersive. But as a book to dip into and read a chapter at a time, it is often an arresting social history of British India, or at least of those who were allowed to take shelter under its red roofs.