During the course of governing India — the Raj — a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon. This book documents the words and terms that the British used to describe, define, understand and judge the subcontinent. It offers insights into the cultures of the Raj, through a sampling of its various terms, concepts and nomenclature, and utilizes critical commentaries on specific domains to illuminate not only the linguistic meaning of a word but its cultural and political nuances. It also provides literary and cultural texts from the colonial canon where these Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, terms and official jargon occurred.

For two hundred years India was the jewel in the British imperial crown. During the course of governing India – the Raj – a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon. This book documents the words and terms that the British used to describe, define, understand and judge the subcontinent. It offers insight into the cultures of the Raj through a sampling of its various terms, concepts and nomenclature, and utilizes critical commentaries on specific domains to illuminate not only the linguistic meaning of a word but its cultural and political nuances. This fascinating book also provides literary and cultural texts from the colonial canon where these Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, terms and official jargon occurred. It enables us to glean a sense of the Empire’s linguistic and cultural tensions, negotiations and adaptations. The work will interest students and researchers of history, language and literature, colonialism, cultural studies, imperialism and the British Raj, and South Asian studies.

This Palgrave Pivot revisits the topic of how British colonialism moulded work and life in India and what kind of legacy it left behind. Did British rule lead to India’s impoverishment, economic disruption and famine? Under British rule, evidence suggests there were beneficial improvements, with an eventual rise in life expectancy and an increase in wealth for some sectors of the population and economy, notably for much business and industry. Yet many poor people suffered badly, with agricultural stagnation and an underfunded government who were too small to effect general improvements. In this book Roy explains the paradoxical combination of wealth and poverty, looking at both sides of nineteenth century capitalism. Between 1850 and 1930, India was engaged in a globalization process not unlike the one it has seen since the 1990s. The difference between these two times is that much of the region was under British colonial rule during the first episode, while it was an independent nation state during the second. Roy's narrative has a contemporary relevance for emerging economies, where again globalization has unleashed extraordinary levels of capitalistic energy while leaving many livelihoods poor, stagnant, and discontented.

In this broad study of British rule in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sudipta Sen takes up this dual agenda, sketching out the interrelationships between nationalism, imperialism, and identity formation as they played out in both England and South Asia.

"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

A freedom fighter’s telling account of the exploitation of India by the East India Company. In 1929, Pandit Sunderlal’s original work in four volumes, Bharat Mein Angrezi Raj, was banned by the British because of its fearless criticism of their rule in India. In sharp contrast to narratives by British historians, who stressed that India was in a state of arrested development before the British arrived, Pandit Sunderlal’s books celebrated India’s past. In 1960, the Government of India brought out this history in two volumes: How India Lost Her Freedom and British Rule in India. The first volume How India Lost Her Freedom was published by SAGE earlier this year. It details how British traders penetrated the sub-continent and established the foundation of their rule. This second volume British Rule in India covers the period from 1805 (Second Maratha War), a turning point for the East India Company, to 1858, when the East India Company had to cede control to the British Crown. It details how the British acquired territories by sly and dishonourable treaties and how their rule led to extremely large-scale economic exploitation. It painstakingly traces the history of the deliberate destruction of Indian industry and the plundering that went on under the guise of development. Pandit Sunderlal was an eminent Gandhian and freedom fighter. 18th March 1929 First published 1,700 copies sold in 4 days 22nd March 1929 Banned by British Government 13th November 1937 Ban lifted; 2nd edition published 10,000 copies sold 1960 3rd edition published by Publications Division, Government of India, in two volumes 1963 4th edition published 1970 & 1972 The two books published by Popular Prakashan January 2018 How India Lost Her Freedom published by SAGE July 2018 British Rule in India hits the stores once again Note: Now this ISBN-9780856550676 has a new identity.

This book discusses the colonial history of Tribe-British relations in India. It analyses colonial literature, as well as cultural and relational issues of pre-literate communities. It interrogates disciplinary epistemology through multidisciplinary engagement. It presents the temporal and spatial dimensions of tribal studies. The chapters critically examine colonial ideology and administration and civilization of tribes of India. Each paper introduces a unique context of Tribe-British interactions and provides an innovative approach, theoretical foundation, analytical tool and methodological insights in the emerging discipline of tribal studies. The book is of interest to researchers and scholars engaged in topics related to tribes.

Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority. Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters. The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life. Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority. Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters. The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life.

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is 'India'. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

Britain's often rather ad hoc approach to colonial expansion in the nineteenth century resulted in a variety of imaginative solutions designed to exert control over an increasingly diverse number of territories. One such instrument of government was the political officer. Created initially by the East India Company to manage relations with the princely rulers of the Indian States, political offers developed into a mechanism by which the government could manage its remoter territories through relations with local power brokers; the policy of 'indirect rule'. By the beginning of the twentieth century, political officers were providing a low-key, affordable method of exercising British control over 'native' populations throughout the empire, from India to Africa, Asia to Middle East. In this study, the role of the political officer on the Western Frontier of India between 1877-1947 is examined in detail, providing an account of the personalities and mechanisms of colonial influence/tribal control in what remains one of the most unstable regions in the world today. It charts the successes, failures, dangers and attractions of a system of power by proxy and examines how, working alone in one of the most dangerous and lawless corners of the Empire, political officers strove to implement the Crown's policies across the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan through a mixture of conflict and collaboration with indigenous tribal society. In charting their progress, the book provides a degree of historical context for those engaging in ambitious military operations in the same region, seeking to increasingly rely on the support of tribal chiefs, warlords and former enemies in order for new administrations to function. As such this book provides not only a fascinating account of key historical events in Anglo-Indian colonial history, but also provides a telling insight and background into an increasingly seductive aspect of contemporary political and military strategy.