It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.
This anthology of humorous prose and verse presents the lighter side of British life in India during the Raj. It comprises writings culled out of a huge variety of books, journals, and newspaper clippings. These have been thematically grouped into such chapters as: People; The Station; TheSocial Setting; The Climate; Servants; Sport; Epigrams; Bon-Mots, Eating and Drinking; Birds, Insects and Animals; Translations; Some Portraits; Nostalgia. The authors range from Rudyard Kipling to bored memsahibs and housewives. This anthology will delight all readers who wish to savour the zest, the elegance, the condescension, the charm, and the delightfully casual outpourings of white men and women who needed to unburden themselves of their woes and joys and observations in India.
Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period by Mildred Archer
Call Number: ART ND2047 .V53 1992
ISBN: 0944142176
Publication Date: 1992-05-01
Forging the Raj: Essays on British India in the Heyday of Empire by Thomas R. Metcalf; Sarah Kailath
Call Number: DS479 .M48 2005
ISBN: 0195667093
Publication Date: 2005-03-10
This set of essays written over a span of forty years from 1961 to 2002, examines the structure and working of the British Raj in India during the first half of Crown Rule (1858-1914). The essays are grouped under three general headings: land tenure and land policy, colonial architecture, and migration. Two themes dominate. One is an assessment of what the British thought they were doing in India, and second, how India ought to be ruled. In these essays, Thomas Metcalf examines British policies towards India and the way the British, as rulers, endeavoured to sustain and legitimate the imperial structure. He also explores the consequences of the ideas and policies as they affected the lives of ordinary Indians, from the landed elite to lowly policemen and labourers. Many of the essays- both those that examine policy and those that assess its consequences- take as a central turning point the revolt of 1857. The essays provide insight into varied ways in which the massive structure of the British Raj in India functioned in the heyday of empire. They give the reader some sense of the Raj as a functioning imperial government, and at the same time attempt to critically assess the various strategies that it devised to justify its rule.
From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India, 1757-1930 by Pratapaditya Pal; Vidya Dehejia
Call Number: ART N6764 .P27 1986
ISBN: 0801493862
Publication Date: 1986-08-14
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the British established a presence in India that was to last almost two centuries. Throughout these years of British control, exciting moments of discovery occurred as the two cultures interacted. From Merchants to Emperors, a collection of drawings, watercolors, photographs, prints and sketchbooks together with a fascinating narrative written by two eminent authorities on India, provides a record of the lives of the British in their adopted land.
The tremendous pictorial richness of rare prints, engravings, lithographs, and maps which had a wide market in 18th- and 19th-century British India are featured here. This book covers a wide range of interesting subjects: the peoples of India, costumes, customs, eating habits of the British in India, architecture, landscape, flora and fauna, to mention only a few.
A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia,Indian Inkexamines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India by Hermione de Almeida; George H. Gilpin
Call Number: ART N6766 .D36 2005
ISBN: 075463681X
Publication Date: 2006-02-01
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second – Indian – Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism.
Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India by Nandini Bhattacharya
Call Number: PR129.I5 B49 1998
ISBN: 0874136121
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
British fiction, ethnographies, and other travel narratives on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India are examined in this book. British male and female colonialist discourses that constructed Indian women as spectacular, physical objects of the western gaze and as signifiers of indigenous cultural crisis are compared. The British documents examined are from the early 1600s to the 1830s.
Strangers in the Land: The Rise and Decline of the British Indian Empire by Roderick Cavaliero
Call Number: DS463 .C38 2002
ISBN: 1860647979
Publication Date: 2002-09-07
The British in India, first as adventurers and traders, and finally as rulers through the India Office in London and the Viceroy's Government in India, oversaw all aspects of Indian life. All was recorded in detail, yielding the rich sources which, together with a vast library of traveler's tales and personal memoirs, underpin this study. This is not a traditional history, but a narrative social and cultural history, naturally framed by the political and military story and the imperial context.