The British diaspora in India, though comprising only 37,700 British nationals in 2006, [1] has had a significant impact due to the effects of British colonialism. The mixing between Britons and native Indians also gave rise to the Anglo-Indian community. [2]
In the centuries before the "Second" British Empire, the motives of British individuals arriving in India generally centred around gaining wealth. [3] One example of contemporary British views of India can be found in Shakespeare's writings, whose mentions of India paint a picture of a mysterious, wealthy land. [4] [5] The Indian perspective of European travelers was less flattering, as they were seen as "wondrous" yet "untrustworthy"; [6] Emperor Akbar described them as an "assemblage of savages", and had considered trying to civilise them. [7]
When the East India Company, formed in 1600, began to trade with Indians, its officials generally showed respect towards Indian society, though in some cases they may have suppressed their criticisms as a way of facilitating trade. [8] Britons who went to India in this time period were apt to learn the local culture, as they were coming from a weaker polity and generally were only able to marry Indian women; [3] [9] British women were initially banned in Company settlements, being seen as distractions. British women started to come to India after the 1661 British acquisition of Bombay because of the need to populate the islands. [10] They came in much greater numbers after the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, which enabled a faster journey between Britain and India; by then, British men's dalliances with the local "bibis" were seen as improper, and were being expunged from official records of earlier generations. [11] British men outnumbered the women to a substantial degree for the entire period up until India's independence, with gender and racial identities having a role in determining hierarchies. Some men enjoyed the ability to unconstrainedly flex their masculinity in a foreign land, and British families in India stratified based on how white (non-Indian) they were and how frequently they were able to visit Britain. [12]
Two centuries of effort and achievement, lives given on a hundred fields, far more lives given and consumed in faithful and devoted service to the Indian people themselves. All this has earned us rights of our own in India.
Winston Churchill (1931),
As the Company came to rise in Indian politics, a greater level of contemptuousness became apparent amongst Britons, [8] and they came to isolate themselves to a substantial extent from the local population. [13] The trauma of dominating a colonised population was a factor in pushing some British officials to isolate themselves from Indians' day-to-day life; [14] the failed 1857 Rebellion also played a role in encouraging tensions and racism, as it increased fear of the locals. [15] The rise of evangelicalism, encouraging negative views of non-Christian cultures, was another factor. [10] However, children raised in India were fonder of the local culture, and even though they were generally sent to Britain to receive education, they often returned as adults. [16]
By 1921, at the peak of the British Empire, 20,000 civil and military personnel had established themselves in India. [1] The British related their exploits in India to those of classical empires; they saw themselves as inheriting the Greco-Roman heritage, and compared their efforts in civilising India to those of the Romans in ancient Britain. [17] On the whole, they did not seek to settle on a permanent basis or to own land; as late as the 1860s, there were even arguments against opening up the sale of "waste" land, because it might encourage excessive European immigration. [18]
India's 1947 independence from British rule saw the departure of British troops; the last regiment left in February 1948. [19]
Food played a role in how the British adapted to the local climate; a variety of "sick food" guides were available. To counter the high rate of death to tropical disease, Britons used the medicinal quinine; however, to mask its taste, they would mix it with soda and sugar, giving rise to "tonic water", a natural complement to gin. [20]
During the Raj, soldiers would play British sports as a way of maintaining fitness, since the mortality rate for foreigners in India was high at the time, as well as to maintain a sense of Britishness; in the words of an anonymous writer, playing English sports was a way to "defend themselves from the magic of the land". [22]
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies, and later with East Asia. The company gained control of large parts of South Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British Army at certain times.
East India Company rule in India was the rule of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced between 1757 and 1773. The East India Company ruled India until the company was dissolved in 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Government of India Act 1858, the India Office of the British government assumed the task of directly administering India in the new British Raj.
A colonial mentality is an internalized ethnic, linguistic, or cultural inferiority complex imposed on peoples as a result of colonization, i.e. being invaded and conquered by another nation state and gaslit, often through the educational system, into linguistic imperialism and cultural assimilation through an instilled belief that the language and culture of the colonizer are superior to their own heritage languages and cultures. The term has been used by postcolonial scholars to discuss the transgenerational effects of colonialism present in former colonies following decolonization. It is commonly used as an operational concept for framing ideological domination in historical colonial experiences. In psychology, colonial mentality has been used to explain instances of collective depression, anxiety, and other widespread mental health issues in populations that have experienced colonization.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east. The rebellion posed a military threat to British power in that region, and was contained only with the rebels' defeat in Gwalior on 20 June 1858. On 1 November 1858, the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, though they did not declare the hostilities to have formally ended until 8 July 1859.
Anglo-Indian people are a distinct minority community of mixed-race British and Indian ancestry. During the colonial period their ancestry was defined as British paternal and Indian maternal heritage; post-independence, "Anglo-Indian" has also encompassed other European and Indian ancestries. Anglo-Indians' first language is usually English. Prior to 1911, various designations like "Eurasian" or "Indo-Briton" were used to describe this community.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is an India-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
A hill station is a town located at a higher elevation than the nearby plain or valley. The English term was originally used mostly in colonial Asia, but also in Africa, for towns founded by European colonialists as refuges from the summer heat and, as Dale Kennedy observes about the Indian context, "the hill station (...) was seen as an exclusive British preserve: here it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider". The term is still used in present day, particularly in India, which has the largest number of hill stations, most are situated at an altitude of approximately 1,000 to 2,500 metres.
The Bengal Renaissance, also known as the Bengali Renaissance, was a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. Historians have traced the beginnings of the movement to the victory of the British East India Company at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, as well as the works of reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, considered the "Father of the Bengal Renaissance," born in 1772. Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate.
The British Raj was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent, lasting from 1858 to 1947. It is also called Crown rule in India, or Direct rule in India. The region under British control was commonly called India in contemporaneous usage and included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, which were collectively called British India, and areas ruled by indigenous rulers, but under British paramountcy, called the princely states. The region was sometimes called the Indian Empire, though not officially.
The Indian Political Department, formerly part of the Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India, was a government department in British India. The department looked after the diplomatic and "political" relations with the subsidiary states of the British Empire in India, and some states overseas. The nature of its work was indirect rule. The department was disbanded at the time of Indian independence and replaced by a newly formed States Department in the Government of India.
After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British Government took over the administration to establish the British Raj. The British Raj was the period of British Parliament rule on the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947, for around 89 years of British occupation. The system of governance was instituted in 1858 when the rule of the East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria.
India is one of the largest tea producers in the world, although over 70 percent of its tea is consumed within India itself. A number of renowned teas, such as Assam and Darjeeling, also grow exclusively in India. The Indian tea industry has grown to own many global tea brands and has evolved into one of the most technologically equipped tea industries in the world. Tea production, certification, exportation and all facets of the tea trade in India are controlled by the Tea Board of India. From its legendary origins to modern processing techniques, tea production in India delicately weaves together cultural heritage, economic prowess, and technological advancement.
The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States, the British Raj, and the African colonies. John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.
India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire is a 2016 book by British historian Jon E. Wilson, Professor of Modern History at King's College, London.
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, first published in India as An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, is a work of non-fiction by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and diplomat, on the effects of British colonial rule on India. The book has received mixed reviews. In 2017, Tharoor won the 2017 Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for this work.
The Zamindars of Bihar were the autonomous and semi-autonomous rulers and administrators of the Bihar Subah during Mughal rule and later during British rule. They formed the landed aristocracy that lasted until Indian independence in 1947. The zamindars of Bihar were numerous and could be divided into small, medium and large depending on how much land they controlled. Within Bihar, the zamindars had both economic and military power. Each zamindari would have their own standing army which was typically composed of their own clansmen.
Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019), is a book by Kim A. Wagner and published by Yale University Press, that aims to dispel myths surrounding the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that took place in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919.
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company is a 2019 history book by William Dalrymple. It recounts the rise of the East India Company in the second half of the 18th century, against the backdrop of a crumbling Mughal Empire and the rise of regional powers.
Jagat Seth was a wealthy merchant, banker and money lender family from Murshidabad in Bengal during the time of the Nawabs of Bengal.
There are 4.9 million foreign-born residents in India, accounting for 0.4% of the population. 98% of immigrants to India came from a previous residence elsewhere in Asia.