Pune

"It was not till June that it was really fashionable to be in Poona. . . . This was the Poona Season. Everyone in Bombay who was anyone came up to Poona for week-ends during the Season, or, in the case of wealthy merchants, rented bungalows for the Season and installed their wives there to avoid the tiresome climate of Bombay during the monsoon. . . . The correspondents of Bombay newspapers kept their reader informed about the trend of fashion in the ballroom or on the croquet-lawn. New-comers to the Poona Season were warned not to "do too much", and above all not to eat too many mangoes, which in the first half of the June are most luscious and enticing. Too many mangoes gave one diarrhea, or a it was carefully called "Poonaitis". . . . While the ladies drove to the Gymkhana soon after tea, the gentleman drove there straight from office so as to be able to put in a full hour or two hours at tennis or croquet. Many of the ladies played croquet too, but others preferred to sit on basket chairs in the veranda and sew.

. . . They would visit the Club Library, but would be unlikely to find any books there. . . . No one under the rank of a Collector's wife had a hope of securing one except by luck. So they would content themselves with gossip about the last ball at Government House, the delinquencies of their servants and the health of their children. And indeed what else should they talk about? There were no theatres or cinemas and only an occasional concert. . . Their children rolled and crawled and played on the lawn that was of almost English thickness and was bordered by the banks of many-coloured cannas for which Poona was justly famous and by the blue-grey shrubs of sensitive plants. . . . There were a few English and Eurasian nurses and these kept rigidly to themselves sewing like their mistresses and nodding together over the events at the Sergeants' Dance on Saturday night—those dances at [which] the girl's reputation was gone if she were not returned to her parents by her partner as soon as each dance was over."

Source: Charles Kincaid. (1938) British Social Life in India (1608–1937). London: Routledge.