India, Aug. 13 -- Given that we celebrate Independence Day in August, it becomes fashionable to villainise the British. However, even the most ardent nationalist in this state will doff their Mysore peta to Benjamin Lewis Rice, the administrator-turned antiquarian/ historian in whose memory stands a church on Avenue Road in the heart of Bengaluru, the city where he was born all the way back in 1837.

Rice was educated in England, and held many posts in the Kingdom of Mysore. It was a land he loved and wrote about. Consider this paragraph in his monumental 1897 Mysore Gazetteer: "If there be any truth in the observation that small countries with diversified and distinctive physical characteristics have played the greatest part in the world...