Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845
Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845

Author: Prasannajit de Silva

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1527514285

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A stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century British in India, which might be characterised as one of deliberate isolation and segregation from their surroundings, has recently been complemented by one evoking a high degree of integration and closer co-existence in the eighteenth century. Focusing on a period which straddles this apparent shift, this book explores a variety of ways in which British residents in India represented their lives through visual material, and reveals a more nuanced position. Consideration of these images, which have often been overlooked in the scholarly literature, opens up questions of identity facing the British population in India at this time and facing colonial societies more generally, and issues about the role of visual culture in negotiating them. It also underlines the fragile and contested nature of identity: the colonists’ self-fashioning encompassed not only expressions of difference from their Indian setting, but also what distinguished them from their compatriots back in Britain, as well as engaging with metropolitan attitudes towards, and prejudices about, them.

Anglo-India and the End of Empire
Anglo-India and the End of Empire

Author: Uther Charlton-Stevens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0197676510

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The standard image of the Raj is of an aloof, pampered and prejudiced British elite lording it over an oppressed and hostile Indian subject population. Like most caricatures, this obscures as much truth as it reveals. The British had not always been so aloof. The earlier, more cosmopolitan period of East India Company rule saw abundant 'interracial' sex and occasional marriage, alongside greater cultural openness and exchange. The result was a large and growing 'mixed-race' community, known by the early twentieth century as Anglo-Indians. Notwithstanding its faults, Empire could never have been maintained without the active, sometimes enthusiastic, support of many colonial subjects. These included Indian elites, professionals, civil servants, businesspeople and minority groups of all kinds, who flourished under the patronage of the imperial state, and could be used in a 'divide and rule' strategy to prolong colonial rule. Independence was profoundly unsettling to those destined to become minorities in the new nation, and the Anglo-Indians were no exception. This refreshing account looks at the dramatic end of British rule in India through Anglo-Indian eyes, a perspective that is neither colonial apologia nor nationalist polemic. Its history resonates strikingly with the complex identity debates of the twenty-first century.

The Travels of Dean Mahomet
The Travels of Dean Mahomet

Author: Dean Mahomet

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0520918517

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This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India—the first book written in English by an Indian—framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole. Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.

Archaeology of Babel
Archaeology of Babel

Author: Siraj Ahmed

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1503604047

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For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

A Concise History of Modern India
A Concise History of Modern India

Author: Barbara D. Metcalf

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-09-28

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1139458876

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In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India's modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India's huge advances in technology and the country's new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into Independence, the country has been transformed by its institutional structures. It is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century and paved the way for the modern success story. Despite these advances, poverty, social inequality and religious division still fester. In response to these dilemmas, the book grapples with questions of caste and religious identity, and the nature of the Indian nation.

Colonial Policy and Practice
Colonial Policy and Practice

Author: John Sydenham Furnivall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-08-21

Total Pages: 589

ISBN-13: 1108067980

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This influential 1948 study investigates the effects of colonial rule in Burma through comparison with the Dutch East Indies.