Discussion Post: The Crooked Man
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Crooked Man and the chosen topic is The British in India.
A few facts (it’s a complex subject, so probably best to think of this post as a starting point):
ऄ The East India Company… was an English and later British joint-stock company [a company in which different stocks can be bought and owned by shareholders], which was formed to pursue trade with the East Indies but ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and Qing China. ...the company rose to account for half of the world's trade, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre, tea and opium.
The company received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600… Wealthy merchants and aristocrats owned the Company's shares. The government owned no shares and had only indirect control.
The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its own private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858 when, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India in the form of the new British Raj. [Wikipedia]
ऄ The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to rein it in by the late eighteenth century. ...after 1834 it worked as the government's agency until the 1857 Indian Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control. The East India Company went out of existence in 1873. [George P. Landow]
ऄ The rich displays of Indian art and design shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and at subsequent exhibitions influenced a number of British designers and commentators in the second half of the 19th century. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ India influenced British fashion in the Victorian era. Firstly, the materials accessible through British trade with India, for instance cotton and silk, led to [the] increase of such materials in English clothes… Secondly, Indian textile characteristics influenced English fashion with patterns and motifs. [Reframing the Victorians]
ऄ Flowering plant designs from Indian art were a popular source of inspiration for British designers and manufacturers in the 19th century. British shawls based on Indian designs were popular throughout the 19th century. The elongated leaf motif [which] was a commonly used pattern… became known as 'paisley' in Britain because one of the leading manufacturing centres of such shawls was Paisley in Scotland. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ Indian tea culture made the establishment of tea rooms, tea shops and the tradition of afternoon tea in Victorian England possible. The Government of India Act 1858 gave the British Crown the control of trade with India… The Queen expanded the production of tea in India and increased the tea trade to Britain. As a result, tea prices in Britain became cheaper, which made tea an essential part of British life. [Reframing the Victorians]
ऄ In 1863 Samuel Bourne gave up his job as a bank clerk and moved to India, establishing a photographic firm in Simla, near Delhi. Bourne's detailed studies of the architecture and peoples of India proved very popular… Bourne's visual documentation of the expanding British Empire appealed to people in Britain eager to see images of 'exotic' India. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ The departure of young men from Britain to try their luck in the expanding empire… raised the challenge of where [they] were to find an outlet for their sexual and romantic needs. In the early days in India, they seem to have made their own arrangements, often on a commercial or semi-commercial basis… Sexual relations were quite as exploitative as the East India Company’s other relations with India. But significant numbers of early British visitors made more permanent arrangements and took Indian wives and mistresses, who seem to have occupied a recognised position in society. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain… A great many such [fair-skinned] mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent. Much, however, depended on skin colour… [William Dalrymple]
ऄ This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 40s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis [mistresses] quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared… The mutiny of 1857 merely finished off the process. [William Dalrymple]
ऄ From now on, the races would maintain some distance. The decision that henceforth India would be run not by the East India Company but by the British government meant greater involvement by elected politicians, and required administration on a much more formal basis. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ Soon there was no need for soldiers, officials and traders to keep a mistress in the bibi house. They could live, instead, a tropical replica of life in England, an existence which did not so much embrace India as defy it… Even those men who had arrived in the country as bachelors had only to wait for the start of the longed-for cold season and the arrival of what became known as the Fishing Fleet – young women from the home country out to net themselves a husband from among the single men serving in India...
Throughout the cold season – of which Christmas was the high point – the young men and women circled each other at parties, dances and sports events, sizing up who might make a decent marriage partner. Women who failed to find anyone suitable went back to England, nicknamed “returned empties”. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ Later generations have endowed the memsahibs [the British wives in India] with an unappealing reputation, as superficial snobs and irredeemable racists who ended an era of happy coexistence. But, they must have been a varied bunch. There were plenty who never bothered to go beyond learning “Kitchen Hindustani” in order to shout instructions at servants. But there were others who developed a genuine affection for the country, founded orphanages, taught in schools and sacrificed their own health to improve the health of Indians. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth… the British were more or less welcome… until the Mutiny of 1857-58. Its immediate cause was the cartridge for the new Enfield rifle, which had to be bitten before it was loaded: Rumors spread that the cartridge was greased with cow-fat and pig-lard; and since the cow is sacred to the Hindus and the pig considered unclean by the Moslems, both religious groups were offended. [David Cody]
ऄ In May 1857 soldiers of the Bengal army shot their British officers, and marched on Delhi. Their mutiny encouraged rebellion by considerable numbers of Indian civilians in a broad belt of northern and central India - roughly from Delhi in the west to Benares in the east. For some months the British presence in this area was reduced to beleaguered garrisons, until forces were able to launch offensives that had restored imperial authority by 1858. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ British public opinion was profoundly shocked by the scale of the uprising and by the loss of life on both sides - involving the massacre by the rebels of captured Europeans, including women and children, and the indiscriminate killing of Indian soldiers and civilians by the avenging British armies. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ The 1857 rebellion… had several chief results:
a year-long insurrection that changed attitudes -- both British and Indian — towards British rule of India;
dissolution of the British British East India Company;
beginning of the British Raj, the period during which the U. K. directly ruled the Indian subcontinent;
the end of the Mughal Empire after the British exiled Emperor Bahadur Shah to Burma [George P. Landow]
ऄ Any attempt to explain the revolt of 1857 as traditional India's rejection of modern reform is far too crude… In Bengal and in the south, which had long been under British rule, there were no revolts. In the areas that did rebel in 1857, the British seem to have succeeded in creating disaffection, and deposed noble Indians from their thrones, without as yet attracting significant support. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Northern India had a long tradition of spasmodic disorder and resistance to government… [That] could have been contained if the British had not alienated a group of people on whom their security depended. These people were the soldiers, or sepoys, of the Bengal army, whose mutiny eventually set off the 1857 rebellion. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ When the soldiers refused to acknowledge British authority, the way was left open for disaffected princes and aristocrats, and for village and town people with grievances, to revolt alongside the soldiers. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ The deeper causes of the Mutiny were resentment over the Westernization of India and fear that native customs, religions, and social structures would be lost. The India Act (1858), which abolished the East India Company and transferred its powers to the Crown, represented by the Viceroy, did nothing to alleviate those fears… In 1947, after a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (the Mahatma, or great soul), England gave independence to the colony, which was divided into India, an officially secular state with a largely Hindu population, and Pakistan, an officially Muslim state. [David Cody]
ऄ After the rebellion had been put down, the new royal government of India that replaced that of the East India Company promised that it had no intention of imposing 'our convictions on any of our subjects'. It distanced itself further from the Christian missionaries. A stop was put to the deposing of princes, and greater care was shown to the rights of landlords. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Until the rebellion, [the British] had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on suttee by Lord William Bentinck. It was now felt that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows). [Wikipedia]
ऄ Indian society changed much more rapidly in the second half of the 19th century than it had done in the first. Imports of Western technology had been limited before the 1850s. Thereafter a great railway system was constructed - 28,000 miles of track being laid by 1904 - and major canal schemes were instituted that more than doubled the area under irrigation in the last 20 years of the century. The railways, the vastly increased capacity of steamships, and the opening of the Suez Canal linked Indian farmers with world markets to a much greater degree. A small, but significant, minority of them could profit from such opportunities to sell surplus crops and acquire additional land. Some industries developed, notably Indian-owned textile manufacturing in western India. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in 1857, just before the Rebellion. By 1890 some 60,000 Indians had matriculated, chiefly in the liberal arts or law. About a third entered public administration, and another third became lawyers. The result was a very well educated professional state bureaucracy. By 1887 of 21,000 mid-level civil service appointments, 45% were held by Hindus, 7% by Muslims, 19% by Eurasians (European father and Indian mother), and 29% by Europeans. Of the 1000 top-level positions, almost all were held by Britons, typically with an Oxbridge degree. [Wikipedia]
ऄ Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, most of them opened by Indian initiative. They did not produce replica English men and women… but Indians who were able to use English in addition to their own languages, to master imported technologies and methods of organisation and who were willing to adopt what they found attractive in British culture. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1876. In the minds of the British public the Queen was particularly associated with India, although she never visited the country. She did, however, declare great interest in India and even learnt Hindustani with her Indian secretary Abdul Karim. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ The Great Famine of 1876–78… affected south and southwestern India (Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Bombay) for a period of two years. In its second year famine also spread north to some regions of the Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces, and to a small area in the Punjab…. The famine occurred at a time when the colonial government was attempting to reduce expenses on welfare…
The mortality in the famine was in the range of 5.5 million people… The Great Famine was to have a lasting political impact on events in India. Among the British administrators in India who were unsettled by the official reactions to the famine and, in particular by the stifling of the official debate about the best form of famine relief, were William Wedderburn and A. O. Hume. ...they would found the Indian National Congress [the political party] and, in turn, influence a generation of Indian nationalists. Among them were Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt for whom the Great Famine would become a cornerstone of the economic critique of the British Raj.
Some useful resources:
British India Index for several articles. On The Victorian Web.
British India By David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College, on The Victorian Web.
The British East India Company — the Company that Owned a Nation (or Two) By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University, on The Victorian Web.
The Company Story The story of the East India Company on the British Library website.
East India Company On Wikipedia.
Indian Influence in the Victorian Era On the Reframing the Victorians blog.
Style Guide: Influence of India On the Victoria and Albert Museum website.
Exhibiting Imperialism at the Great Exhibition By Siobhan McErlean on Victorian Visual Culture.
White mischief By William Dalrymple on the Guardian website. Concerning marriages and relationships between British men and Indian women in the early part of the 19th century.
Jeremy Paxman on the British Empire: where men went to run wild On the Telegraph website.
Marriage in British India By Merryn Allingham on her own website.
British India and the 'Great Rebellion' By Professor Peter Marshall on the BBC website.
The 1857 Indian Mutiny By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University, on The Victorian Web.
British Raj On Wikipedia.
Timeline of major famines in India during British rule On Wikipedia.
The British Empire On The Victorian School.
The British in India By Merryn Allingham on her own website.
British Army during the Victorian Era On Wikipedia.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts (it’s a complex subject, so probably best to think of this post as a starting point):
ऄ The East India Company… was an English and later British joint-stock company [a company in which different stocks can be bought and owned by shareholders], which was formed to pursue trade with the East Indies but ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and Qing China. ...the company rose to account for half of the world's trade, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre, tea and opium.
The company received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600… Wealthy merchants and aristocrats owned the Company's shares. The government owned no shares and had only indirect control.
The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its own private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858 when, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India in the form of the new British Raj. [Wikipedia]
ऄ The company's encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to rein it in by the late eighteenth century. ...after 1834 it worked as the government's agency until the 1857 Indian Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control. The East India Company went out of existence in 1873. [George P. Landow]
ऄ The rich displays of Indian art and design shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and at subsequent exhibitions influenced a number of British designers and commentators in the second half of the 19th century. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ India influenced British fashion in the Victorian era. Firstly, the materials accessible through British trade with India, for instance cotton and silk, led to [the] increase of such materials in English clothes… Secondly, Indian textile characteristics influenced English fashion with patterns and motifs. [Reframing the Victorians]
ऄ Flowering plant designs from Indian art were a popular source of inspiration for British designers and manufacturers in the 19th century. British shawls based on Indian designs were popular throughout the 19th century. The elongated leaf motif [which] was a commonly used pattern… became known as 'paisley' in Britain because one of the leading manufacturing centres of such shawls was Paisley in Scotland. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ Indian tea culture made the establishment of tea rooms, tea shops and the tradition of afternoon tea in Victorian England possible. The Government of India Act 1858 gave the British Crown the control of trade with India… The Queen expanded the production of tea in India and increased the tea trade to Britain. As a result, tea prices in Britain became cheaper, which made tea an essential part of British life. [Reframing the Victorians]
ऄ In 1863 Samuel Bourne gave up his job as a bank clerk and moved to India, establishing a photographic firm in Simla, near Delhi. Bourne's detailed studies of the architecture and peoples of India proved very popular… Bourne's visual documentation of the expanding British Empire appealed to people in Britain eager to see images of 'exotic' India. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ The departure of young men from Britain to try their luck in the expanding empire… raised the challenge of where [they] were to find an outlet for their sexual and romantic needs. In the early days in India, they seem to have made their own arrangements, often on a commercial or semi-commercial basis… Sexual relations were quite as exploitative as the East India Company’s other relations with India. But significant numbers of early British visitors made more permanent arrangements and took Indian wives and mistresses, who seem to have occupied a recognised position in society. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ In the more loving relationships of this period, Indian wives often retired with their husbands to England. The Mughal travel writer, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journey to Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain… A great many such [fair-skinned] mixed-blood children must have been quietly and successfully absorbed into the British establishment, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-19th-century prime minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent. Much, however, depended on skin colour… [William Dalrymple]
ऄ This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 40s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis [mistresses] quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared… The mutiny of 1857 merely finished off the process. [William Dalrymple]
ऄ From now on, the races would maintain some distance. The decision that henceforth India would be run not by the East India Company but by the British government meant greater involvement by elected politicians, and required administration on a much more formal basis. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ Soon there was no need for soldiers, officials and traders to keep a mistress in the bibi house. They could live, instead, a tropical replica of life in England, an existence which did not so much embrace India as defy it… Even those men who had arrived in the country as bachelors had only to wait for the start of the longed-for cold season and the arrival of what became known as the Fishing Fleet – young women from the home country out to net themselves a husband from among the single men serving in India...
Throughout the cold season – of which Christmas was the high point – the young men and women circled each other at parties, dances and sports events, sizing up who might make a decent marriage partner. Women who failed to find anyone suitable went back to England, nicknamed “returned empties”. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ Later generations have endowed the memsahibs [the British wives in India] with an unappealing reputation, as superficial snobs and irredeemable racists who ended an era of happy coexistence. But, they must have been a varied bunch. There were plenty who never bothered to go beyond learning “Kitchen Hindustani” in order to shout instructions at servants. But there were others who developed a genuine affection for the country, founded orphanages, taught in schools and sacrificed their own health to improve the health of Indians. [Jeremy Paxman]
ऄ During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth… the British were more or less welcome… until the Mutiny of 1857-58. Its immediate cause was the cartridge for the new Enfield rifle, which had to be bitten before it was loaded: Rumors spread that the cartridge was greased with cow-fat and pig-lard; and since the cow is sacred to the Hindus and the pig considered unclean by the Moslems, both religious groups were offended. [David Cody]
ऄ In May 1857 soldiers of the Bengal army shot their British officers, and marched on Delhi. Their mutiny encouraged rebellion by considerable numbers of Indian civilians in a broad belt of northern and central India - roughly from Delhi in the west to Benares in the east. For some months the British presence in this area was reduced to beleaguered garrisons, until forces were able to launch offensives that had restored imperial authority by 1858. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ British public opinion was profoundly shocked by the scale of the uprising and by the loss of life on both sides - involving the massacre by the rebels of captured Europeans, including women and children, and the indiscriminate killing of Indian soldiers and civilians by the avenging British armies. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ The 1857 rebellion… had several chief results:
a year-long insurrection that changed attitudes -- both British and Indian — towards British rule of India;
dissolution of the British British East India Company;
beginning of the British Raj, the period during which the U. K. directly ruled the Indian subcontinent;
the end of the Mughal Empire after the British exiled Emperor Bahadur Shah to Burma [George P. Landow]
ऄ Any attempt to explain the revolt of 1857 as traditional India's rejection of modern reform is far too crude… In Bengal and in the south, which had long been under British rule, there were no revolts. In the areas that did rebel in 1857, the British seem to have succeeded in creating disaffection, and deposed noble Indians from their thrones, without as yet attracting significant support. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Northern India had a long tradition of spasmodic disorder and resistance to government… [That] could have been contained if the British had not alienated a group of people on whom their security depended. These people were the soldiers, or sepoys, of the Bengal army, whose mutiny eventually set off the 1857 rebellion. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ When the soldiers refused to acknowledge British authority, the way was left open for disaffected princes and aristocrats, and for village and town people with grievances, to revolt alongside the soldiers. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ The deeper causes of the Mutiny were resentment over the Westernization of India and fear that native customs, religions, and social structures would be lost. The India Act (1858), which abolished the East India Company and transferred its powers to the Crown, represented by the Viceroy, did nothing to alleviate those fears… In 1947, after a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (the Mahatma, or great soul), England gave independence to the colony, which was divided into India, an officially secular state with a largely Hindu population, and Pakistan, an officially Muslim state. [David Cody]
ऄ After the rebellion had been put down, the new royal government of India that replaced that of the East India Company promised that it had no intention of imposing 'our convictions on any of our subjects'. It distanced itself further from the Christian missionaries. A stop was put to the deposing of princes, and greater care was shown to the rights of landlords. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Until the rebellion, [the British] had enthusiastically pushed through social reform, like the ban on suttee by Lord William Bentinck. It was now felt that traditions and customs in India were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows). [Wikipedia]
ऄ Indian society changed much more rapidly in the second half of the 19th century than it had done in the first. Imports of Western technology had been limited before the 1850s. Thereafter a great railway system was constructed - 28,000 miles of track being laid by 1904 - and major canal schemes were instituted that more than doubled the area under irrigation in the last 20 years of the century. The railways, the vastly increased capacity of steamships, and the opening of the Suez Canal linked Indian farmers with world markets to a much greater degree. A small, but significant, minority of them could profit from such opportunities to sell surplus crops and acquire additional land. Some industries developed, notably Indian-owned textile manufacturing in western India. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Universities in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established in 1857, just before the Rebellion. By 1890 some 60,000 Indians had matriculated, chiefly in the liberal arts or law. About a third entered public administration, and another third became lawyers. The result was a very well educated professional state bureaucracy. By 1887 of 21,000 mid-level civil service appointments, 45% were held by Hindus, 7% by Muslims, 19% by Eurasians (European father and Indian mother), and 29% by Europeans. Of the 1000 top-level positions, almost all were held by Britons, typically with an Oxbridge degree. [Wikipedia]
ऄ Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, most of them opened by Indian initiative. They did not produce replica English men and women… but Indians who were able to use English in addition to their own languages, to master imported technologies and methods of organisation and who were willing to adopt what they found attractive in British culture. [Peter Marshall]
ऄ Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1876. In the minds of the British public the Queen was particularly associated with India, although she never visited the country. She did, however, declare great interest in India and even learnt Hindustani with her Indian secretary Abdul Karim. [Victoria and Albert Museum]
ऄ The Great Famine of 1876–78… affected south and southwestern India (Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Bombay) for a period of two years. In its second year famine also spread north to some regions of the Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces, and to a small area in the Punjab…. The famine occurred at a time when the colonial government was attempting to reduce expenses on welfare…
The mortality in the famine was in the range of 5.5 million people… The Great Famine was to have a lasting political impact on events in India. Among the British administrators in India who were unsettled by the official reactions to the famine and, in particular by the stifling of the official debate about the best form of famine relief, were William Wedderburn and A. O. Hume. ...they would found the Indian National Congress [the political party] and, in turn, influence a generation of Indian nationalists. Among them were Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt for whom the Great Famine would become a cornerstone of the economic critique of the British Raj.
Some useful resources:
British India Index for several articles. On The Victorian Web.
British India By David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College, on The Victorian Web.
The British East India Company — the Company that Owned a Nation (or Two) By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University, on The Victorian Web.
The Company Story The story of the East India Company on the British Library website.
East India Company On Wikipedia.
Indian Influence in the Victorian Era On the Reframing the Victorians blog.
Style Guide: Influence of India On the Victoria and Albert Museum website.
Exhibiting Imperialism at the Great Exhibition By Siobhan McErlean on Victorian Visual Culture.
White mischief By William Dalrymple on the Guardian website. Concerning marriages and relationships between British men and Indian women in the early part of the 19th century.
Jeremy Paxman on the British Empire: where men went to run wild On the Telegraph website.
Marriage in British India By Merryn Allingham on her own website.
British India and the 'Great Rebellion' By Professor Peter Marshall on the BBC website.
The 1857 Indian Mutiny By George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University, on The Victorian Web.
British Raj On Wikipedia.
Timeline of major famines in India during British rule On Wikipedia.
The British Empire On The Victorian School.
The British in India By Merryn Allingham on her own website.
British Army during the Victorian Era On Wikipedia.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2016-10-23 12:05 pm (UTC)And I never knew that about the Paisley pattern.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-23 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-23 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-23 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-23 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-16 04:29 am (UTC)And goodness, but Darylrymple's account of Anglo-Indian race-mixing is fascinating, and not at all what I had expected. And it tallies interestingly against the common practice out here, during those very same decades, under the governance of the Hudson's Bay Company, of Scots taking 'country wives' and then securing company positions for their 'country-born' Metis children...
no subject
Date: 2016-12-16 11:54 pm (UTC)Darylrymple's account of Anglo-Indian race-mixing is fascinating, and not at all what I had expected. Me neither. I suppose I had in my head a picture of post-rebellion India when the races kept their distance from one another. And so interesting that there was the same sort of situation under the Hudson's Bay Company.
Going off at a tangent, I wonder sometimes now about Mary Morstan being Anglo-Indian. I mean, I assume she wasn't as she's described as blonde, and she would have been born in 1861, when a marriage between a Briton and an Indian would have been a lot less likely. But I just wonder what difference it would have made to her life.