Nautch

It’s Friday! Let’s go out dancing!

A, C, H, L, T, U, and center N (all words must include N)

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know that nautch can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

In 1765, the British artists and writer James Forbes traveled to India. He had been hired by the British East India Company to write about that country. And write he did! Forbes scribbled up 52,000 (yes, thousand!) pages with notes and drawings about everything he saw. He was also one of the first Europeans to ever see the Taj Mahal, visiting it in 1781.

After returning to England, he published his memories in several volumes beginning in 1813. The book was called Oriental Memoirs, and it was subtitled selected and abridged from a series of familiar letters written during seventeen years residence in India: including observations on parts of Africa and South America, and a narrative of occurrences in four India voyages.

That’s why today we simply refer to it as… Oriental Memoirs. Despite the fact that “oriental” is considered an offensive term nowadays, the book remains a valued record of the culture, flora, and fauna of India at the time Forbes lived there.

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