Published: Pioneer, 4 July 1885.

Attribution: In ‘Summary of the Years Odd Work’ at end of Diary, 1885. In Scrapbook 2 (28/2, p. 64).

Text: Pioneer.

Notes: This is the first item in this edition from the Pioneer of Allahabad, a paper owned by the proprietors of the Civil and Military Gazette.

The actors in this scene are leading figures from the past of British India. Job Charnock (1630?–93) was head of the East India Company's affairs in India. In 1691 he founded what became Calcutta, from ‘three small villages on an inhospitable tract of riverbank’ (ODNB). Robert, Lord Clive (1725–74) was the military commander in the service of the East India Company whose victories over French and native forces established the civil authority of the Company in India; he was afterwards Governor of Bengal. Warren Hastings (1732–1818), Governor-General of India (1773–85), preserved and extended Clive's conquests in India. Both Clive and Hastings are subjects of celebrated essays by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), the historian, who served as the Legal Member of the Supreme Council of India (1834–8); in that office he wrote the Indian Penal Code and helped to establish Western learning in English as the basis for government-supported education in India.

The unstated subject of this fantasy is the annual migration of the Supreme Government from the damp heat of Calcutta (Kolkata) to the mountain air of Simla, high in the foothills of the Himalayas and far removed from Calcutta, the regular capital. The government of the Punjab also made Simla its hotweather base. Those left behind in Calcutta or on the plains of the Punjab of course resented ‘The Exodus’, as it was called, and others thought it an indefensible indulgence on the part of the administrators. Simla was imagined as ‘Capua’, all luxury and no work.

‘Dis Aliter Visum’ was reprinted in the United Services College Chronicle, 15 December 1887, and in Harbord, i, 568–75. The title, which may be translated ‘The Gods will otherwise’, is from the Aeneid, ii, 428.