The period from 1900 to 1950 seems firmly entrenched in my mind in black and white.

From the 1960s onwards, color images are mixed together with black and white ones. Color television and washed out Agfacolor take over in the 1970s. By the 1980s glossy Fujicolor reigns supreme.

So it is a pleasant surprise to see color footage from 1906 and the Delhi Darbar of 1911, some 30 years before color film became more common with the invention of Kodachrome. Color footage from the 1930s is mostly amateur or artistic, because the newsreels - the source of so much material today - were still using black and white.

The British Empire in Colour (available for rent from Netflix.com) was first broadcast by the BBC in 2002 and recently made available on DVD. It opens a new chapter of Raj memories.

This delicate assemblage of images also covers more than India. It was revealing to see the extent of violence in Independence struggles from British rule in Africa and Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s; 1947 was far from the end of colonialism. The rise of Australia is another colorful and racist chapter covered by the series.

The narrator is the superb actor Art Malik, who made his name in The Jewel in the Crown, the first great color fiction series about the Raj. A highly recommended, unusual peek at the Raj with rare shots of such leaders as Nehru and Jinnah in color before Independence.

(For a look at some rare color footage on the web by a Punjabi doctor who brought back a Kodachrome camera back to British India in the late 1930s, check the Shah Collection.)