A Steel man in India. By John L. Keenan. Introduction
by Louis Bromfield. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.)
Tins is a rollicking story of the cosmopolitan crowd of engineers who went out to run the famous Tata Iron and Steel Works at Jamshedpur. It was an uphill battle, and forty years previously a British capitalist had sworn that he would eat every pound of steel rails produced in India. But Jamshedjce Tata was a man with a vision. The first World War gave him his chance, and today Tata's have the largest and most up-to-date steel plant in the British Empire. Without it, the defeat of Japan would have been emost impossible. Jack Keenan, like his companions, worked hard, played hard and drank hard, and between horse-racing, elephant fights and tiger shoots he managed to see a good deal of both Indians and Europeans and to form a shrewd estimate of their characters. It would, of cotme, be unfair to‘take too seriously the yarns that he and Gin Bill and their cronies swopped when they foregathered at Blood Tub, as the local pub was appropriately named.- The-Maharaja-of Bikanir can hardly have offered to 'raise a million soldiers for,tfie war, as that is more than the total population of the State. ri is, to say the least of it, unlikely that the Nizam of Hyderabad threatened to behead his chauffeur, or that King George. V was turned away from -the Bombay Yacht Club because he brought a Maharaja along with him. Best of all is the tale of Shining Way, the famous racehorse, who found his way into -the compound of the Little Sisters of tIte-:".Poor at Calcutta,, and w&as hailed by the good nuns as an answer 4their prayers aricl'harne&Sed to the ci;ukverii buggyt—Re:adirs w* want a vivid and amusing picture of India from an unusual-angle`' "should turn to Jack Keenan's awn pages.
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