The British in India: A Social History of the Raj

by David Gilmour Narrated by Michael Page

Overview

An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence

Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all?

Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company's first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Isaac Chotiner

…a broad-ranging but precise and intimate examination of the British men and women who served and lived on the subcontinent. A historian of Italy and Britain, a biographer of Kipling and the onetime viceroy of India, Lord Curzon…[Gilmour] is ideally suited to the task. But this is not a book about the evils of colonialism; the devil is not in these details. What interests him, in this book at least, are not the larger questions of politics, or economics, or the global position of Britain…but instead the often gritty, colorfully distinct stories that constituted the individual British experience. He is also fascinated by the social relations among and within classes, and how mores changed over a vast era…Part of the pleasure of this book is that Gilmour has clearly spent eons of time scouring archives for diaries and letters, and has a real feel for domestic life. Some of the best sections concern relations between the sexes.

From the Publisher

"Dazzling . . . Gilmour’s command of detail is both scholarly and endlessly engaging . . . The result is a complex vision of the colonial era that feels both immediate and distinctly new." —The New Yorker

"Marvelous . . . Mr. Gilmour orders The British in India thematically . . . the structure’s success owes as much to its simplicity as to Mr. Gilmour’s remarkable feel for detail, perspective and proportion . . . The erudition, balance and wit of The British in India are in keeping with Mr. Gilmour’s superb Anglo-Indian biographies." —Maxwell Carter, The Wall Street Journal

"Hugely researched and elegantly written, sensitive to the ironies of the past and brimming with colourful details." —Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times (UK)

"The British in India is an exceptional book . . . David Gilmour’s canvas is British India and he provides the answers in a penetrating and vivid portrait of the British men and women who ran the show from the mid-18th century to 1947. Gilmour writes with wit, detachment and grace. The range of his research is impressive . . . The British in India is a wonderful memorial to the men and women whose legacy is the administrative, legal and educational framework of today’s India." —Lawrence James, The Times (UK)

"[The British in India] is the best kind of history: meticulously researched, elegantly and entertainingly written, and as wide in its sympathies as it is long in its reach." —Peter Parker, Spectator (UK)

"David Gilmour, in his highly readable social history The British in India, … takes apart diaries, memoirs and piles of ribbon-bound letters and creates a fluid narrative detailing how the civilians and soldiers, memsahibs and missionaries, planters and box-wallahs, “pig-stickers” and prostitutes lived, loved and died in a strange, faraway and at times hostile land . . .The narrative is studded with nuggets that illuminate the relationship between Britain and the sub-continent . . . A magisterial work." —Navtej Sarna, Financial Times

"This impressive book from David Gilmour, an old hand at Raj history, describes this tribe of British conquerors, administrators and merchants who lived in India from shortly after the death of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II . . . This is a rich and nuanced social history that does not treat every British footstep on the subcontinent as if it were a step on the way to the Amritsar massacre. That does not make it an imperial whitewash." —Jad Adams, New Statesman (UK)

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator Michael Page’s pace may be a bit faster than your ear cares to follow, but this is a text that requires a brisk delivery. David Gilmore’s narrative isn’t a chronological history of one nation’s domination over another, but dozens of individual histories of the British experience in India, stretching over centuries. The accounts are vivid, and what emerges is a highly detailed kaleidoscopic picture of Britain’s long occupation. However, minus a central narrative, this is a text the mind can easily drift away from. Here, the narrator’s voice is the sustaining element, and Page’s precision and command of language, and his sheer stamina, are as expressive of British mettle and tenacity as the stories Gilmore tells. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2018-09-17

Engaging study of the intersection of British and Indian lifeways during the long history of the Raj.

Who changed the most, the British who came to India and ruled for 350 years or the Indians who encountered and accommodated the British? Historian and biographer Gilmour (The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, 2011, etc.), who writes here of Britons who "lived in India from shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II," offers countless examples of an interchange that altered both. Some Britons found themselves in a kind of sexual Shangri-La; some devoted themselves to trying to win the people to Christianity, causing Queen Victoria to sigh that she "wished the Mohammedans could be let alone by missionaries." Some arrived wanting to learn, some with an eye to having it their way. The author writes spryly of the eccentrics among the British contingent who are remembered in the phrase "going native," including the explorer Richard Francis Burton, "whose research into the homosexual brothels of Karachi had been deemed too diligent for an officer of the Indian Army." As Gilmour makes clear, many of the Britons were there by accident: soldiers who, having enlisted, found themselves posted to the Raj; or the children of mixed marriages left behind in hilltop orphanages; or more fortunate children, such as the actress Joanna Lumley, who carried happy memories of the place, and Norman Wisdom, who shipped off to India to escape an abusive father and found himself in an army band, where he found he had the aptitude for music and showmanship that would later make him famous. As for the Indians: Their encounters were sometimes accidental, too; though, as the author acknowledges, the imperial exchange was not always respectful or friendly, it endowed India with institutions that, as one Indian economist opined, "have served our country exceedingly well."

A solid work of social history, full of insight into how empire shaped Anglo-Indian culture.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172551765
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	12/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,018,658

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Numbers

The association of India with riches has a long literary history. Andrew Marvell imagined his coy mistress finding rubies on the banks of the River Ganges, while Alexander Pope endowed his 'Goddess' in The Rape of the Lock with a 'casket [of] India's glowing gems'. Earlier, and more earthily, Shakespeare's Falstaff envisaged Mistress Ford as his East Indies and her well-filled purse (or rather, her husband's) as his 'exchequer', and the same playwright compared Henry VIII's lustful enjoyment of Catherine of Aragon to having 'all the Indies in his arms'. The Subcontinent's riches had a more melancholy effect on Othello, who, suddenly contrite after murdering his wife, likened himself to 'the base Indian' who threw away a valuable pearl. In the generation between Shakespeare and Marvell, oriental jewels dazzled a courtier of Charles I, the Earl of Denbigh, who brought sacks of them from the East in 1633 and commissioned Van Dyck to paint him in his smart Indian pyjamas.

Speaking at the Crystal Palace in 1872, Benjamin Disraeli admonished his Liberal opponents for attempting to 'effect the disintegration of the Empire' by claiming 'there never was a jewel in the crown of England that was so truly costly as the possession of India'. Disraeli's meaning was slightly altered by other people so that the phrase 'jewel in the crown' – or sometimes 'the brightest jewel in the crown' – came to refer to the Indian Empire not as an expensive possession but as a precious, glamorous and prestigious one. Paul Scott, a perceptive witness of the last years of British India, called the opening novel of his Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown, while in the 1980s Granada Television adopted the same name for its magnificent production of the quartet.

India shone most brightly in the British imagination after 1876 when Disraeli, by then prime minister, gratified Queen Victoria's wish to be made Empress of India. Memories of the Rebellion of 1857 had receded, the recent opening of the Suez Canal had made India seem closer, at any rate in time, and photographers were sending home exotic and uplifting glimpses of life in the East, of maharajas and elephants, of railway bridges spanning vast rivers, of intrepid district officers in sola topis seated under a banyan tree dispensing justice to a benighted populace. The British public grew avid for books with titles like 'My Life on the Frontier' or 'Forty-two Years in Bengal'. It had begun to recognize India's value to Britain, especially as a source of imperial pride, and in economic terms too, for the Subcontinent absorbed much of Britain's overseas investment, notably in the age of railway construction. It also became aware of India's growing military significance, how Indian troops had contributed to the establishment of British paramountcy and how the Indian Army was now being deployed to help the empire on expeditions to Persia, Africa and the Far East. Such interventions may seem insignificant compared with the role played by Indian soldiers in the world wars of the twentieth century, but at the time they were important. The sense of India's value to Britain was conveyed by George Curzon, the last Victorian viceroy of India, when he wrote, 'While we hold onto India, we are a first-rate power. If we lose India, we will decline to a third-rate power.' On another occasion, in Birmingham Town Hall, he told his audience that the loss of empire would reduce Britain to the status of 'a sort of glorified Belgium'.

Plenty of people were at hand, in Parliament, in the universities and in India itself, to justify the conquest and acquisition of vast territories thousands of miles away on another continent. The British, it was often argued, should not feel guilty about being invaders, because India was always being invaded (though usually from the north-west, through the Khyber Pass, rather than from the sea, whence the Europeans had come): India was what V. S. Naipaul called in the 1970s 'a wounded old civilization', 'a land of far older defeat'. Nor should the British worry about being foreigners because Indian dynasties were often foreigners to their subjects and because the inhabitants of the Subcontinent were also foreigners to each other: a Bengali in Bombay was as much a foreigner as a Welshman in Rome. A 'Native of Calcutta,' argued Sir John Strachey, a formidable provincial governor in Victorian India, was 'more of a foreigner to the hardy races on the frontiers of Northern India than an Englishman' could be. In any case, insisted Strachey, Britain's role in India was primarily benevolent, at least by then: it resembled a guardian or trustee working for the good and the improvement of the native inhabitants. According to William Hunter, an historian and civil servant, the British had rescued the Subcontinent from the chaos caused by the decline and disintegration of the Mughal Empire, and their rule was now 'wielded in the joint interest of the races'; without it, India would quickly be torn apart by antagonistic forces, both racial and religious. What India needed, declared Sir James Stephen, a jurist and friend of Strachey, was Englishmen to rule with the qualities of their ancestors, 'the masterful will, the stout heart, the active brain, the calm nerves, the strong body'. With similar arrogance the viceroy Lord Mayo told Sir Henry Durand, whom he had just appointed lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, 'Teach your subordinates that we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.'

Before he began his career as a novelist, Paul Scott served in the British Army in India and then Malaya at the end of the Second World War. In Malaya he felt homesick not for England but for India, and on his return home to suburban north London he realized, as he recalled thirty years later, that 'India was also my home. It is difficult to describe but I think in a curious way India in those days was every English person's home, even if it had not been visited. Because we ruled it and benefited from it, it contributed to our well-being and upbringing. It was mysteriously in our blood and perhaps still is.'

As this passage implies, India could dominate the imperial imagination even of people who did not go there. And the numbers of people who did go were remarkably few. In the second half of the nineteenth century millions of Britons left their islands to begin new lives overseas. More than a million went to Australia and New Zealand; another million went to Canada and southern Africa; and over 3 million, the majority of them Irish, emigrated to the United States. Yet at the end of that century the entire British population of India – that is, the territories later consisting of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (now Myanmar) – numbered no more than 155,000, far fewer than the inhabitants of Newcastle at that time and about a fifth of the size of the Glaswegian populace. Many of them, moreover, had not chosen to go there, including, most obviously, children born on the Subcontinent as well as thousands of soldiers who had enlisted in York and Dublin and elsewhere without knowing that their regiments would later be sent out to India.

It was as if the British, at almost every level of society, were proud to have India as their jewel but did not want to spend much time admiring the object: it was just nice to know it was in the bank and to be able to boast about it. The monarchy was the chief exception to this. Although Queen Victoria, Empress of India, never went east of Berlin, she cared passionately about her Indian subjects, especially the two classes she was acquainted with, visiting maharajas and her own servants. Her grandson toured India as George V, and he, his father and his eldest son also went there as princes of Wales. The higher aristocracy was by contrast indifferent. Apart from the Duke of Buckingham, who was governor of Madras in the 1870s, no peer who had inherited a dukedom or a marquessate stooped to govern either of the Indian provinces he could aspire to (Bombay and Madras),* even though such places were surely of a size and importance worthy of patrician proconsular attention. (In 1900 the population of the presidency of Bombay was 25.4 million and that of Madras 38.6 million, while that of Great Britain was 38 million.) Politicians too were reluctant to concern themselves with India: debates in the Victorian House of Commons often emptied the Chamber and led to a stampede towards the tea room. Even those hoping one day to govern India from Westminster and Whitehall were unwilling to visit it, although Curzon went there twice as a young man because he hoped to be viceroy on his way to becoming foreign secretary and prime minister. No future prime minister before Clement Attlee travelled to the Indian Empire at any stage of his political career, although the future Duke of Wellington went there as a colonel of infantry in 1796, and Winston Churchill followed, a hundred years later, as a subaltern of hussars.

Even men whose duty it was to administer India from London were disinclined to acquaint themselves with the territories associated with their work. Arthur Godley, a wily and phlegmatic bureaucrat, spent twenty-six years running the India Office in Whitehall without ever visiting, or showing any inclination to visit, the place to which he had dedicated his career. This attitude was imitated by a number of his officials. E. C. Winchester joined the India Office as a junior clerk in 1878 and retired from it forty-two years later as a staff clerk. Outside office hours, India seems to have played no part in his life. He occupied his spare time, no doubt agreeably, playing the organ and composing church music, including nine chants for the Te Deum laudamus. Another curious example was John Maynard Keynes, a young man interested in a vast range of subjects that did not happen to include India. After passing the civil service exams in 1906, he joined the India Office because it was prestigious, because it had short working hours and because his preferred ministry, the Foreign Office, would have sent him abroad, far away from his friends in Cambridge. Twenty months later he resigned to become a university lecturer and later a fellow of King's, his beloved Cambridge college. In the meantime he had acquired sufficient interest in the Subcontinent to make it the subject of his first book, Indian Currency and Finance.

The India Office was a government department presided over by a secretary of state. Its precursor was East India House in Leadenhall Street in the City, which was staffed by officials of the East India Company until 1858 when the Government of India Act transferred the administration of India from the Company to the Crown. East India House had certain similarities to its successor, among them the ease with which its employees were able to separate their jobs from their interests and pursue parallel careers, often literary ones, without the distraction of visiting India or even thinking about it outside the office. Charles Lamb, essayist and critic, entered the accountant's office as a clerk in 1792 and spent his entire working life in Leadenhall Street. So did Thomas Love Peacock, the poet and novelist, who retired in 1856 as chief examiner of correspondence after thirty-seven years at East India House. His successor in the examiner's office was John Stuart Mill, who also spent over thirty years in the building, although his particular outside interest was philosophy.

Men who allotted their free time to writing about almost everything other than India might understandably be reluctant to visit the place. But the same excuse cannot be made for James Mill, the philosopher's father, an impatient and bad-tempered figure unable to appreciate the humour of his easygoing colleague Peacock. Yet another head of the examiner's office, Mill had written his very long History of British India before establishing himself at East India House. Although he had never been to India and knew no Indian languages, he had considered himself equipped to write a history demonstrating the barbarism of the Subcontinent, its peoples, cultures, customs and religions. Many British officials in India regarded the work as offensive and ignorant, yet it enjoyed extraordinary success in Britain and became an important text at Haileybury, the college in Hertfordshire where civil servants of the East India Company were trained. The historian Macaulay, who believed the answer to India's problems would be the anglicization of its leading classes, regarded Mill's efforts as 'the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since that of Gibbon'. Yet The Decline and Fall would surely not have been quite so great if its author had never been to Rome.

* * *

Established by royal charter at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the East India Company was by 1615 trading on India's west coast at Surat and on its eastern shore at Masulipatnam. The two settlements there were followed over the next four decades by some thirty others, known as 'factories', in the south-east of the Subcontinent and in Bengal on land belonging to the Mughal emperor or to various local rulers. The factory at Madras, built in 1640 on the Coromandel Coast, was the first territorial possession of the Company. A later one was Bombay, which King Charles II acquired as part of the dowry of his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, and which he then leased to the EIC for ten pounds a year. By the end of the century the Company's most important factory had been founded on the River Hooghly in Bengal and was known as Calcutta. Although these three places became great imperial cities, they cannot be seen as part of a nascent empire at that time. They were just three among a considerable number of European settlements and not in any way pre-eminent. Down the Coromandel Coast from Madras were French Pondicherry, Danish Tranquebar and Dutch Negapatam; up the Hooghly from Calcutta were Danish Serampore, French Chandernagore and Dutch Chinsura.

The Company's servants were carefully graded and salaried, from Writer (the most junior) to Factor and thence to Junior Merchant and Senior Merchant. Their lives were both isolated and restricted. The gates of the factories were shut at night, and their inmates led a collegiate life, dining communally until the eighteenth century, their routines presided over by a governor (or agent) and his councillors, titles that sound grander than their job descriptions: the 'second in council' was in fact the book-keeper, the 'third' the warehousekeeper. For decades the settlements' populations could be counted as often in scores as in hundreds. Even when the number crept over the century mark, the mortality rate often cut it back again: in Bombay in the year 1700 there were fewer than a hundred Britons. Madras at that date had only slightly more: ninety-five men, eleven widows and eight 'maidens'. The males were divided between Company servants, other traders known as 'free merchants', a few 'seafaring men' and a handful of guards; there were also a chaplain and a surgeon. By 1740 the settlement had a British civilian population of 168 plus a company of soldiers in a garrison of some 300 men consisting mainly of 'topazes' or Indo-Portuguese.

The British population of India expanded from the middle of the eighteenth century as a result of military success and the consequent extension of the Company's trade and administrative opportunities. The EIC at that time was competing not so much with the fratricidal Mughal dynasty (whose members suffered three generations of extremely low life expectancy) but with rivals disputing the imperial spoils, notably French colonists and Indian princes. France's capture – and brief tenure – of Madras in 1746 resulted not only in the creation of Britain's Indian Army but also in the arrival of royal troops from England. A new battleground had been found for an ancient rivalry. Although the Company raised its own forces to counter the traditional foe, these would not have been enough to win the contest without support from home. Several regiments were sent out during the Seven Years War (1756–63) and several more, half of them Scottish, to combat Indian enemies in the 1780s. As the Company's control reached beyond its main settlements into Bengal and in the south into the Carnatic, the numbers of British soldiers in India increased from a few hundred in the 1740s to 18,000 by 1790. Even so, they remained a small number of men spread over a vast area. Most of the troops involved in the acquisition of territory in the Mysore wars (between 1767 and 1799) and Maratha campaigns (between 1775 and 1818) were in fact Indian soldiers (known as sepoys) led by British officers.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The British in India"
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