British India and Victorian Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Offering a unique cross-cultural study, this book provides a detailed account of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. Vasunia shows how classical culture pervaded the minds of the British colonizers, and highlights the many Indian receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Defining a distinct style of painting produced in India during the British period and influenced by European artistic norms, this catalogue of Company Paintings in the TAPI (Textiles & Art of the People of India) Collection is a unique illustration of the social milieu prevailing in India in the nineteenth century. Tracing the origins and evolution of this genre of painting, the volume shines a fresh beam on subjects commissioned to be painted by officials of the East India Company, such as occupations, customs, dress, bazaars, festivals and daily life of ordinary people, a world removed from the elite and princely environment that was the chosen subject of Indian miniature artists. The catalogue of the TAPI Collection of Company Paintings highlights works from the major regions where such paintings were produced - Murshidabad, Calcutta, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Punjab, Kutch, Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madras, Kerala and the Andhra Coast. It comprises a rich and accurate record of the diverse modes of dress and manners of the people before the advent of photography. This catalogue documents the first-ever exhibition on the subject to be held in India, being a collaboration between TAPI and CSMVS (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India).

Thousands of British women lived in India during Victorian times. They first went out as wives, mothers, sisters; others followed as teachers, doctors, missionaries. What they did and how they responded to their strange environment were seldom thought worthy of record, and writers have handed down to us a fictional image of the typical 'memsahib' as a frivolous, snobbish and selfish creature flitting from bridge to tennis parties 'in the hills'. For the most part, these clichés bear little resemblance to the truth; many women loyally and stoically accepted their share of the responsibility with endurance, courage and resilience. This story is developed around a number of women who wrote in an entertaining and intelligent fashion about their Indian experiences, starting with the arrival on the scene of one of the wittiest and cleverest of them all - Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland who was Governor-General from 1836 to 1842. It ends with Maud Diver, who maintained that the random assertion made by Kipling about the 'lower tone of social morality' in India was unjust and untrue. The dramatis personae of the book include Vicereines, wives of Civil Servants and missionaries struggling to break down the subservience of women throughout the vast sub-continent. Through women's eyes we witness the principal historic events at the time - the Afghan conflicts, the Mutiny - as well as the daily routines in very different cantonments and some of the British personalities who made their mark on nineteenth-century India - Honoria Lawrence, Flora Steel, Lady Sale. In this vivid account, Pat Barr evokes the sights and smells of Victorian India, its teeming masses, its problems so impossible, it seemed, for Englishwomen to solve.