No one could have invented John Beames, whose vibrant and original memoirs were discovered by chance in an attic almost a century after they were written. He arrived in India in 1858, the year after the Mutiny, and worked there as a civil servant for the next thirty-five years, defending powerless peasants against rapacious planters, improvising fifteen-gun salutes for visiting dignitaries, and presiding over the blissful coast of Orissa. His acquaintances...