Doff your Mysore peta to Benjamin Lewis Rice, the administrator-turned antiquarian/ historian who documented our state.Benjamin Lewis Rice (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS) Benjamin Lewis Rice (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS) 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’s history, and given rise to its most distinguished men, Greece, Palestine, England and others being quoted as instances, Mysore, it seems to me, may fairly claim a place in the category. She is the peculiar home of the sandal and also of teak, a special haunt of the elephant, rears a famous and superior breed of horned cattle, supplies as the staple food of her people the nutrient grain of ragi, was the cradle in India and is still the chief garden for coffee cultivation. Thus in every department of the natural world she may claim some pre-eminence.”