Indias of the Mind

Abstract

The British Empire, and particularly India with which Britain had a close and long relationship, and which reached its zenith when Queen Victoria assumed the title Empress of India in 1877, was a major component in the English people’s sense of their own cultural identity.1 Despite the domestic reformulations of Englishness in this period, much of the power, buoyancy and confidence which still attached to Englishness both at home and abroad was dependent on the presence of the colonies. There is, however, no consensus about the effect on the English psyche of the relinquishing of empire about which there are a variety of possible historical interpretations from minimal at one extreme to catastrophic at the other.2 As Simon Featherstone puts it: ‘The sense of Englishness as an identity penetrated and destabilised by the consequences of empire had been active since the late nineteenth century. However, it took the dissolution of that empire to demonstrate the range of challenges that imperialism brought.’3