British Raj In India Research Articles

Aden's Strategic Position in the British Empire and its Relations with the British Raj in India

Aden, a port city in present-day Yemen, held a pivotal position in the British Empire, particularly in relation to British India. Its annexation in 1839 marked the beginning of a period of significant transformation and strategic importance. Aden served as a crucial coaling station, military base, and commercial hub, facilitating British control over maritime routes and regional trade. This paper investigates Aden's integration into the British Empire, its role in British colonial strategy, and its connections with British India, highlighting the intertwined histories and mutual influences. This research paper explores Aden's strategic significance within the British Empire and its intricate relations with British India during the British Raj. The paper delves into Aden's history under British rule, its role as a key military and commercial outpost and the socio-economic and political dynamics that shaped its interactions with British India. By examining primary sources, historical documents and scholarly analyses, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of Aden's place in colonial history and its enduring legacy.

Women of the Empire at Ajmer's Dargah: Negotiating Sacred and Civic at a Prominent Sufi Pilgrimage Site, 1900–1920

AbstractThis article examines the experiences of four colonial and imperial women at the Sufi tomb complex of Muin al‐Din Chishti (d.1236 CE) in Ajmer during the latter years of British Raj in India. It specifically looks at the ways in which pre‐modern sacred sites and their male custodians were implicated in various municipal and legal apparatuses of the early twentieth century through petitions, complaints and patronage of women as pilgrims, visitors or family members. We first look at the complaints of a courtesan from Lucknow, who petitioned the British Government to claim maintenance from the Sajjada‐Nashin (the biological descent of the Sufi saint buried there). Then we move on to Muslim lady who complained to the colonial officials about being tortured and ill treated by her Sufi in‐laws. The third incident pertains to the wife of the British Chief Commissioner of Ajmer, whose molestation by Khadims (keepers of the shrine) was deftly brushed under the carpet by the local administration. The fourth is Queen‐Empress Mary herself, who granted royal patronage to the shrine by donating money which was then used to build an ablution tank and called the Victoria Tank. Tracing these fragmentary stories of their visits, this article argues that colonial and imperial women negotiated parallel forms of spiritual and political authorities at sacred spaces in order to fulfil their personal and public obligations. Their encounters with the bustling burial complex, its keepers and administrators also urge us to ponder on broader issues of gender, sexuality and race as they played out in such significant nodes across colonial South Asia.

Indian Muslim Theologians’ Response to British Colonization of India and Introduction of Modernization: A Study of Deoband School of Thought

During the nineteenth century, the Muslims of India suffered from severe political decline, as the Mughal Empire was abolished in the wake of Great Revolt 1857. The British started a process of modernization of institutions as well as that of social setup. The Muslim theologians realizing it a serious threat to their religio-cultural values and norms resisted it through militant struggle, setting up educational institutions, making political parties and participating in democratic process, and forming missionary and reformist organizations. This paper explores and evaluates the contribution of the Muslim theologians who founded Darul Ulum Deoband movement and advocated for the orthodox religious educations by adhering to the religious and educational philosophy of Shah Wali Allah. It attempts at evaluating the socio-political circumstance of South Asia which became the rationale of this movement and identifies the major historical landmarks of this movement during the British Raj in India. It examines the factors which helped Deoband school of thought emerge to be one of the dominant sect of Islam. The paper however argues that although the Deoband theologians were severe critics of British imperialism and its initiatives towards modernization of Indian society and culture, yet they adopted British bureaucratic setup for the educational advancements, and gradually got convinced to be the part of democratic process demonstrate the political strength of South Asian Muslims. The methodology employed in the discourse is descriptive, analytical, and normative.

The Transformation of the Indo-Tibetan Trade in Wool, 1904–1962

During the first half of the twentieth century, the wool trade articulated new political and economic relationships between Tibet and the British Raj in India and the world beyond. Kalimpong, the Eastern Himalayan town in North Bengal, flourished on the basis of India’s frontier trade with Tibet for about five decades. By placing the trans-frontier wool trade of colonial India at the centre of analysis, this article seeks to highlight the material history that existed on its landed periphery. An attempt will be made to understand the emergence, pattern and significance of India’s trans-frontier trade with Tibet in the light of major geopolitical changes in this region and the world in the twentieth century. The article will argue that the channelling of trade through the Kalimpong–Lhasa route was driven by multiple colonial interests, as well as commercial considerations. In particular, safeguarding the empire and producing a unified sovereign space in the newly established Himalayan frontier constituted a major concern of the British Raj.

A Note on the Taxonomy and Typification of Eastern Himalayan Felt Fern Pyrrosia boothi (Hook.) Ching

Pyrrosia boothii is a rare fern of Eastern Himalayan sect with a narrow distribution and listed under the different categories of IUCN. During British Raj in India this species was reported only from Bhutan. Though there are some collections from Sikkim but they remain unnoticed for nearly a century, furthermore, there is no collection of this species from Sikkim by subsequent Indian workers. Recently present author recollected it from Sikkim after the gap of nearly 125 years. During the typification Hovenkamp cited Holotype but the species was published with syntypes which is corrected here. In present communication history, collection, taxonomy, nomenclature and typification of this rare fern are discussed in brief.

Development of Railways during the British Raj in India and its Demographic Impact

Development of Railways during the British Raj in India and its Demographic Impact

Still Too POSH to Push for Structural Change? The Need for a Macropsychology Perspective

My mother, who lived her early years in the British Raj in India, assures me that POSH referred to the well-to-do European's wish to travel “Port Out, Starboard Home” on ships to and from India, which meant enjoying the predominantly shaded side of the ship, protected from the ravaging heat that “ordinary” folk had to endure. What an apt, provocative, and profound analogy Gloss, Carr, Reichman, Abdul-Nasiru, and Oestereich (2017) have given us in their description of the primary focus of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology on “Professional, Official, Secure, and High income” work.

Revivalist Style Churches of 19th Century in Ambala Cantonment: An Insight to Holy Redeemer Church Ambala Cantonment

The British Raj in India led to different types of developments in various parts of the country owing to their physical, social and cultural needs. The Cantonments were one such significant development under British rule in 19th century. Out of the different typology of buildings made by the British settlers in cantonments, the most popular and most ornate structures are the Churches found across the country. In particular the churches built in the 19th century exhibit more or less similar architectural character and style as the whole world was experiencing the Revivalist Gothic style. The paper looks into the construction of such Revivalist Gothic churches in the newly formed Cantonment at Ambala during the same time period and analyses the architecture and construction of one of the oldest church of the cantonment. The paper brings to light the first Catholic Church in Ambala Cantonment, Ambala, India that is 100 years old and has survived the test of time and continues to be in use. It is an exemplary built heritage reminiscent of the British era that needs to be adaptively reused seeing it as an important typology of building exhibiting the Revivalist style in India. The present research was done as part of a project undertaken in Masters of Architecture under the able guidance of Prof Kiran Joshi.

Notes on the Zionist passage to India, or: The analogical imagination and its boundaries

This article provides an outline of an alternative narrative of the Zionist road to statehood by reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the British Raj in India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem. After reviewing some of the recent scholarship on the subject, the article demonstrates how the reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors can contribute to the understanding of the roots of partition politics transnationally. Lastly, it points at the way in which the analogical perspective became part and parcel of the bureaucracy and legislation developed post-partition by the new states.

Daniel Hudson Burnham and the American city imperial

Architecture, landscape architecture and urban design are seldom merely benign aesthetic propositions. With its victory in the Spanish-American War (1898), the United States unexpectedly found itself in possession of an empire. Within a volcanic climate of patriotic fervour, Washington’s new imperial status galvanized interest in improving the city in a manner commensurate with its enlarged role. On the strength of his work at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), celebrated architect Daniel Hudson Burnham took the lead in Washington’s transformation (1901–2) and urban design became his medium for imperialist expression. This potent mechanism’s deployment would not be confined to the imperial hearth. The United States soon set its sights on modernizing, that is ‘Americanizing’, Manila, the antique capital of its newly-acquired Philippine colony, and similarly charged Burnham with the task (1904). Overtly emulating the British Raj in India, he was also to design a wholly new summer capital there. This essay canvasses Burnham’s work at the American and Philippine capitals, along with his vicarious hand in the design of a new model American town in the Panama Canal Zone, considering it through the lens of imperialism. The location and imperial purpose of these projects also reminds us that – at least from an antipodean perspective – in the early 20th century, Great Britain held no monopoly on empire.

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell has returned to examine characters who were bit-players in her first book Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, 1993). By reconstructing the common origins, connected if divergent careers and interests, and the strikingly different personalities and opinions of the Sanskritist John Muir and the Arabist and Islamist William Muir, Powell makes an empirically substantiated argument regarding the complexity of Orientalist scholarship and its fraught relationship with the power dynamics of imperialism. In continuity with her lifelong interest in inter-cultural and inter-religious contact, especially between evangelically-minded British Christians and Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of north India, the book connects these two scholar-administrators with their Scottish intellectual heritage on one side, and their Indian interlocutors on the other, thus also making a significant new contribution to the much-studied field of Islamic modernism in India, and its best-known exponent, Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan. The book begins with a reconstruction of the Muir brothers' origins in the dense networks of familial relations, patronage, globalized commercial links and imperial rule, and their education within the Scottish Academy and University systems, where the traditions of Enlightenment scholarship lingered into the nineteenth century. The book then proceeds to trace the origins of their Orientalist interests through a deft reconstruction of the linguistic training provided at the Haileybury College for East India Company recruits. The story then moves to India where the distinct interests and personalities of the brothers emerge. While both brothers articulated a religious commitment to the moral improvement of India, and both asserted the need for the acculturation of pedagogic schemes and material, John Muir emerged as the reclusive Sanskritist with a distaste for inter-cultural denunciation, while the more careerist, combative but also sociable William Muir became the Evangelical Arabist, using his specialist knowledge to engage in public debates over the relative values of Christianity and Islam. In their respective mid-nineteenth-century magnum opus, each scholar-administrator is shown to have expressed his fully-developed social vision--John Muir rejecting, on the basis of linguistic theories popularised in the eighteenth century, the biological racism of the mid-nineteenth, and William Muir expressing the doctrinally rigid view that Islam was a false religion preached by a deluded, if historical man whose increasing personal degeneration set the pattern for the institutionalisation of an irredeemably socially damaging set of religious values. Their lives and careers diverged more widely around the time of the rebellion of 1857, with John retired and already ensconced in a life of scholarship in Edinburgh, while William remained to observe and comment on one of the biggest challenges to British rule and India, and formulate educational and social policies in post-pacification northern India. …

The Indian Civil Service and the Raj: 1919-1950

The Indian Civil Service (ICS) was the administrative arm of the British Raj in India, and was closely identified with colonial rule. One picture of the ICS is summed up in the title of Philip Woodruff's famous history -- The Men Who Ruled India (a title echoed by David Gilmour's recent book, The Ruling Caste). The image of the ICS officer as ruler runs through many British accounts of the Raj.Indian ICS officers are curiously absent from Woodruff's account, even though they formed more than half the service at Independence. Even more curiously, Indians who wrote about their experiences in the ICS routinely emphasized their role as servants rather than as rulers, in memoirs with titles like Under Two Masters. These memoirs are carefully constructed to disavow their association from the Raj. The image presented is of ambivalent but diligent civil servants, whose did their job despite their nationalist sympathies.Not surprisingly, the ICS was the target of nationalist sentiment before Independence: what is surprising, perhaps, is that the newly Independent Indian state chose to retain the ICS structure and personnel more-or-less unchanged after 1947. My paper is a study of how this came to be -- how was it that the colonial administrative structure survived more-or-less intact through a major change of political regime? My paper addresses three questions in particular: (1) just what was the role of the ICS with respect to the nationalist movement? (2) how did Indian ICS officers experience, and then present, this role? (3) how was it that the ICS structure was left unchanged after independence, in the face of great hostility and opposition?Along the way, I attempt to elucidate the elusive notion of bureaucratic neutrality, and assess the role it actually played in the story of ICS transition.

Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneer Woman Lawyer. A Biography, by Suparna Gooptu

Cornelia Sorabji, a Parsee Christian convert, was ‘a pioneer in more ways than one’ (p. 1). She achieved many firsts, or near firsts (she was not actually, as is commonly believed, the first Indian woman to be called to the bar, but the second), and so can be rightly regarded as a path-finder at a time when strong racial and gender biases shaped the colonial professional world. Her senior bureaucratic role, as a lawyer with responsibility for protecting the interests of Indian women who lived secluded lives (purdahnashin, confined to the female quarters, or zenana), underlined her capacity to work with the system and her readiness to challenge particular aspects of it. However, as this biography highlights from the outset, Sorabji moved at a tangent to her time. Rather than going with the flow of the rising tide of Indian nationalism, she was politically and socially conservative in outlook, which translated into ardent, if often unpopular, support for the British Raj in India. Indeed, her choice ‘not to question existing structures of authority, based on British racial superiority and patriarchal authority’ (p. 67) made her ‘a rarity among educated Indians of her time’ (p. 3) and helped to marginalise her in terms of mainstream historiography.

Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India (review)

Reviewed by: Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India Markus Vink Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India. By Gijs Kruijtzer. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009. 324 pp. €45.00, $63.50 (paper). The "lives and times" approach, the use of individual portraits as a medium to depict a panoramic view of a particular region and time period, has been one of the most venerable genres of history writing. The current volume, based on the author's 2006 Leiden University dissertation, focuses on the Deccan Plateau in central and southern India in the seventeenth century and is part and parcel of this long-standing tradition. If not modeled after Richard M. Eaton's A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761 (2005),1 it inevitably draws a number of comparisons with Eaton's work. Where Eaton used eight Indian lives—a maharaja, a Sufi shaykh, a long-distance merchant, a generalissimo, a slave, a poet, a low-caste rebel, and a dowager—as a vehicle to illuminate social processes fundamental to the history of the Deccan between the early fourteenth and mid eighteenth centuries, Kruijtzer weaves together six cases of conflict centered around a Dutch painter, a Bijapuri queen, two Brahmin brothers at Madras (Chennapatnam), a Maratha king, an English rebel, and a Golkonda prime minister into a rich narrative [End Page 146] tapestry as an expedient tool to explore the identity claims and clashes of the set of people finding themselves in this "carousel region" (p. 3) between North India, South India, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal in the seventeenth century. Moreover, where Eaton set out to reclaim for history subject matter that, having been largely abandoned by professional historians, has been eagerly appropriated by politically motivated myth makers, Kruijtzer challenges both the academic silence on precolonial conflict between Hindus and Muslims and the emphasis on harmoniousness of Western (mainly American) scholars and what he calls the "heritage view" of the past of Hindu nationalists, seeing groups in a more or less far away past as ancestors of modern groups and in effect identifying the two (pp. 10-11, 280). These two "extremist views" converge with the "blame paradigm" representing the reverse side of the "heritage paradigm." Kruijtzer opines that modern academic discourse has made a "Whitean tragedy" out of the putative emergence of caste and the Hindu-Muslim divide in the colonial period. He notes a strong tendency among academics such as Nicholas Dirks2 to assign the blame for present divisions of Indian society to British colonialism, and an equally strong tendency among Hindu nationalists such as Arun Shourie3 to assign the blame for many things to the Muslims (pp. 9, 280-281). Thus, Kruijtzer warns the reader in his opening sentence, Xenophobia is not a history of love but of hatred, the fearful distrust of the strange(r) (p. 1). On the issue of identity and identity formation, Kruijtzer assumes a middling position between primordialists, emphasizing rigidity and autonomy, and historicists and constructionists (including Bernard Cohn and the "Chicago school" of ethnohistory focusing on the role of Orientalism and the "colonial project"4), emphasizing fluidity and contingency of identities. Reversing the causal relationship, Kruijtzer asserts that communalism preceded colonialism and contributed to the advance of the British Raj in India. It was no coincidence, he argues, that by 1798 all of the former Mughal successor [End Page 147] states—Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad, and Arcot—were more or less under British control, whereas the western qaum-based (nation-based) states of the Marathas, Afghans, Jats, Sikhs, and Rajputs came under British control only later and in a manner involving more physical violence (pp. 277-279). More specifically, Kruijtzer argues that the roots of modern communalism (the antagonism between "communities" of Hindus and Muslims) can be found in a decade demarcated by the visit of the Maratha king Shivaji (r. 1674-1680) to the sultan of Golkonda, Abul-Hasan Qutb Shah (r. 1672-1687), in 1677 and the fall of the Qutb Shahi state to Mughal forces in 1687. Shivaji exported the implosion stemming from the factional strife between the Deccanis and Afghans to the remainder of the Deccan and the Karnatak with his discourse on Deccani patriotism...

“That's the Modern Girl”: Missionary Women and Modernity in Kolkata, c. 1907 - c. 1940

In 1923, three young single western women—Margaret Read, Iris Wingate, and Eleanor Rivett—made an adventurous summer trip riding and trekking from Kalimpong in West Bengal, right up to Sikkim. Read and Wingate, both wearing riding breeches and with hair bobbed, were somewhat more adventurous, continuing their trip to Tibet. This was a holiday from their work in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the great cosmopolitan city of the British Raj in India. Surely these independent and mobile women were reminiscent of “the Modern Girl” that has been “singled out as a marker of ‘modernity’”. However, these women were not in the sites where “the Modern Girl” has hitherto been located, for they were working in the Christian missionary movement in India. Eleanor Rivett, an Australian and the oldest in the trio, was principal of United Missionary Girls High School (UMGHS) while Iris Wingate and Margaret Read, both British, were working with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Kolkata.

Fingerprints and Citizenship: the British State and the Identification of Pensioners in the Interwar Period

At a time of ever increasing state encroachment on privacy through the development of intrusive techniques and technologies for personal identification, it is important to place these developments in an historical context. This article looks at why proposals in the interwar period to fingerprint British welfare claimants were rejected by state officials. The proximate reason was that fingerprinting was associated with criminals. However, this was linked in turn to a much more fundamental distinction in England, going back centuries, between the identification of the juridical person – the citizen/welfare claimant – and the criminal. The juridical person was identified by what he or she possessed or could do (seals and signatures for example), and the welfare claimant via the community or documentation. It was only the deviant who was identified via the body, whether through branding, photography, or fingerprinting. The latter, a technology of the British Raj in India, also carried racial overtones. With the rejection of fingerprinting, traditional means of identification were retained, if in more bureaucratic form. Contemporary proposals to introduce general systems of identification based on biometrics efface, therefore, cultural distinctions spanning millennia and continents.

Lessons of Empire: Britain and India

Recent interest in nineteenth-century European colonialism as a model for promoting state-building and development in parts of the contemporary Third World has rehabilitated the idea of imperialism. Proponents of this imperialism as state-building idea have pointed to the British Raj in India as proof of empire's positive legacy. But the latest historical research does not support this view of the Raj as an agent of centralization, economic development, and secularism. Current research suggests that, if anything, the British promoted the "traditionalization" of India, halting many of the indigenous impulses toward modernization present in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, this legacy continues to play itself out in the political and economic problems of contemporary South Asia. In particular, the legacy of the colonial tendency to rigidify and, in some cases to create, a set of fragmented and competitive group identities has seriously impeded the achievement of an integrated state, full liberal democracy, and a successful economy. These problems were neither the result of specific conditions in India, nor of mere policy errors by the British, but are the likely consequence of any imperial relationship, making imperialism an inappropriate model for even the best-intentioned contemporary state-builder.

The Secret Garden: On the loss of nannies in fiction and life

This article focuses on The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel for children. British childcare customs of the upper-class parents of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven in Victorian-Edwardian England and the British Raj in India are underscored. Overlooked psychoanalytic data on developmental consequences of the loss of early primary maternal surrogates and the arrest of mourning are applied to the novel's main protagonists.

The Oxford Anthology of Raj Stories

This definitive anthology brings together literature written about the British Raj in India by authors such as Kipling, Orwell, and Woolf. The pieces provide a portrait of colonial India and impressions of the interaction between British rulers and their Indian subjects in a mix of ironic andentertaining stories.

Imperial imaginary: Photography and the invention of the British raj in India

(2000). Imperial imaginary: Photography and the invention of the British raj in India. Visual Communication Quarterly: Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 10-16.