A stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century British in India, which might be characterised as one of deliberate isolation and segregation from their surroundings, has recently been complemented by one evoking a high degree of integration and closer co-existence in the eighteenth century. Focusing on a period which straddles this apparent shift, this book explores a variety of ways in which British residents in India represented their lives through visual material, and reveals a more nuanced position. Consideration of these images, which have often been overlooked in the scholarly literature, opens up questions of identity facing the British population in India at this time and facing colonial societies more generally, and issues about the role of visual culture in negotiating them. It also underlines the fragile and contested nature of identity: the colonists’ self-fashioning encompassed not only expressions of difference from their Indian setting, but also what distinguished them from their compatriots back in Britain, as well as engaging with metropolitan attitudes towards, and prejudices about, them.

Chatterjee analyzes how writing over the period of a century justified and was affected by the introduction and extension of British domination of India, demonstrating the link between written representations and the ideological, economic and political climate and debates. By showing how the representations of Britons in India, Indian religion and society and government evolved over the period 1740 to 1840, the author fills the gap between the early colonial 'exotic East' and the later 'primitive subject nation' perceptions.

This is the first anthology to be devoted exclusively to light verse composed by British authors in undivided India, plus a few items illustrating parallel experiences in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Written overwhelmingly by the junior ranks of the military and civil service, these works constitute a ‘running commentary’ on the Raj from below. The typical subaltern liked to picture himself as unduly put upon, unfairly ignored, and inexplicably underrated. Before departure for India, the impressionable heads of young recruits could all too easily be filled with stories of immense fortunes to be easily made by ‘shaking the Pagoda Tree’. Once in India, such dreams quickly evaporated for a variety of reasons – the climate, the isolation, the slow pace or complete lack of career advancement, illness, or untimely death. Whatever the authors may have lacked in technical skill and refinement of poetical expression, they more than made up for by the vast range of subject-matter tackled and the outspokenness of the reactions recorded – amusing, surprising, shocking, scurrilous, abusive or otherwise thoroughly distasteful. As witnesses to both attitudes and events, these verses are of enormous value to social and cultural as well as political historians of nineteenth-century India.

Deirdre David here explores women's role in the literature of the colonial and imperial British nation, both as writers and as subjects of representation. David's inquiry juxtaposes the parliamentary speeches of Thomas Macaulay and the private letters of Emily Eden, a trial in Calcutta and the missionary literature of Victorian women, writing about thuggee and emigration to Australia. David shows how, in these texts and in novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, and H. Rider Haggard's She, the historical and symbolic roles of Victorian women were linked to the British enterprise abroad. Rule Britannia traces this connection from the early nineteenth-century nostalgia for masculine adventure to later patriarchal anxieties about female cultural assertiveness. Missionary, governess, and moral ideal, promoting sacrifice for the good of the empire—such figures come into sharp relief as David discusses debates over English education in India, class conflicts sparked by colonization, and patriarchal responses to fears about feminism and race degeneration. In conclusion, she reveals how Victorian women, as writers and symbols of colonization, served as critics of empire.

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.

This two-volume reset edition draws together a selection of Anglo-Indian poetry from the Romantic era and the nineteenth century.