From the history of Anglo-Indian political satire of the XIX century: "India in 1983" by T. Hart-Davis

Abstract

The subject of this article is the Anglo-Indian community - a stratum of the population of British India consisting of Englishmen born in India or permanently residing in it. In the early 1880s, the community faced a new factor in political life - the rapid development of Indian nationalism, and the community's reaction to new trends was reflected in the political satire of the period under study - in particular, in Thomas Hart-Davis's pamphlet "India in 1983" The pamphlet describes a hypothetical society of India of the future, which was freed from British rule, but proved incapable of independent existence. As a result of the conducted research, it was concluded that in the early 1880s the Anglo-Indian community was a closed, isolated stratum of the population, which negatively reacted to the demands of the Indian intelligentsia to expand the rights of the indigenous population in the governance of the country. Criticism of the demands of the nascent national movement found expression in political satire, one example of which was T. Hart-Davis's pamphlet "India in 1893", which reflected the ideas of the Anglo-Indian community about the immaturity and groundlessness of the political demands of the figures of the Indian National Congress and the national movement as a whole.