Remaking Anglo-Indian Men: Agricultural Labour as Remedy in the British Empire, 1908-38

Author(s):  
Jane McCabe
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-277
Author(s):  
Basudhita Basu

The present article is mainly concerned with Bengal, the first province to witness the rise of British Empire in India. The Bengalis were looked upon by the British as deficient in masculinity, yet ironically a large proportion of the Westernised bureaucrats through whom India was ruled were Bengali Clerks or Babus. They formed the prime example of effeminacy.2 It is very important to examine how this games ethic got injected into the veins of these ‘effeminate’ Babus. How much spontaneous or induced it was? What were the factors that played important role in the spread of games in Bengal? The study tries to highlight the various ways through which sporting culture circulated among the Bengalis. Instead of offering a monocausal explanation, it is important to underline the aspect of multiple causalities. In this article, weightage has been given to the efforts of Anglo-Indian schools and various colleges, such as Presidency College, Scottish Church, St. Paul’s College and St. Xavier’s College, in spreading the sports culture. After looking into various sources and college magazines, it can be concluded that much emphasis was given to the Western sports.


Author(s):  
Onur Ulas Ince

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s arguments on the Anglo-Indian trade and the British rule in Bengal. In contrast to the culturalist interpretations of Burke’s position on the British Empire, the chapter brings Burke’s political economic writings to bear on his efforts to maintain the empire in India while expunging its illiberal economic aspects. Behind Burke’s attempt to reform the Indian administration and impeach Warren Hastings, it is argued, was the East India Company’s systematic violation of the liberal economic principles that defined the British character as a commercial society. Burke openly castigated the illiberal extractive policies being used in India and sequestered them from the essentially liberal conception of British commercial society. His condemnation of Company policies in India can therefore be understood as an attempt to shore up the increasingly blurred distinctions between civilized commerce and unabashed pillage, between enlightened self-interest and unbridled rapacity, and between “imperial commerce” and “imperious commerce.”


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 181-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Finn

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the place of domestic slaves in British families resident in India,c. 1780–1830, and the ways in which the presence of slaves within these Anglo-Indian households challenged British understandings of slavery as a practice. Drawing upon probate data, private correspondence and the Parliamentary Papers, it suggests that the history of slavery in the British empire must be situated within wider histories of family, household and kin. Located within the family and often conflated with servants, domestic slaves in Anglo-India came to be seen as dependent female subordinates whose gender and status placed them outside the emerging politics of emancipation.


English Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Purcell

ABSTRACTYule and Burnell's 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary still fascinates and informs today. It is not the finest of Salman Rushdie's writings, but this is the first paragraph of his essay Hobson-Jobson (italics in original):“The British Empire, many pundits now agree, descended like a juggernaut upon the barbicans of the East, in search of loot. The moguls of the raj went in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sup toddy or sherbet on the verandahs of the gymkhana club, while the memsahibs fretted about the thugs in bandannas and dungarees who roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulish deeds.” (Rushdie, 1992:81)Rushdie points out that the italicised words all appear in the celebrated dictionary Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive by Henry Yule & A.C. Burnell, first published in 1886.This gem of a dictionary gives definitions and origins of words in common use by the British in colonial India in the late nineteenth century. Some of the entries won't be a surprise to readers – we all know that raj, mogul and memsahib are Indian words. But there are many words with their origins in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit or other Indian or Eastern languages, whose origin is perhaps not quite so well known.


Author(s):  
Suddhabrata Deb Roy

Kalimpong Kids is a rare book. Written by historian, Jane McCabe, this book recounts the history of a scheme which managed the emigration of mixed-race children from Kalimpong and North-Eastern India to New Zealand. The scheme, which began in 1908 at the insistence of Dr John Anderson Graham, went on till 1939, the view across this time being that ‘mixed-race people ... were “undesirable”’. The plan, however, did not go on continuously and was halted from 1929-1938 due to numerous governmental and geo-political reasons. The Anglo-Indian children were shifted from St. Andrews Colonial Homes which was later renamed into Dr Graham’s Homes. The first two graduates who found their way to Dunedin were Leonard and Sydney Williams. Although Dr Graham’s initial wish was to settle these children across the British Empire, New Zealand proved to be the only country where the Kalimpong Kids could settle down. 


Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Leroy Oberg

In August of 1587 Manteo, an Indian from Croatoan Island, joined a group of English settlers in an attack on the native village of Dasemunkepeuc, located on the coast of present-day North Carolina. These colonists, amongst whom Manteo lived, had landed on Roanoke Island less than a month before, dumped there by a pilot more interested in hunting Spanish prize ships than in carrying colonists to their intended place of settlement along the Chesapeake Bay. The colonists had hoped to re-establish peaceful relations with area natives, and for that reason they relied upon Manteo to act as an interpreter, broker, and intercultural diplomat. The legacy of Anglo-Indian bitterness remaining from Ralph Lane's military settlement, however, which had hastily abandoned the island one year before, was too great for Manteo to overcome. The settlers found themselves that summer in the midst of hostile Indians.


1905 ◽  
Vol 59 (1521supp) ◽  
pp. 24373-24374
Author(s):  
John Eliot
Keyword(s):  

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