Empire Families Britons and Late Imperial India

by Buettner, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780199287659
• ISBN10: 0199287651
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-12-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

While social and cultural historians of imperial India have enhanced our knowledge of how British men and women made their lives and careers in the Empire, the wider family practices that lay behind Britain's presence in India have received scant attention to date. 'Empire Families' bringsthese to the fore by focusing on child-rearing patterns and family experiences taking place on both British and Indian soil, as well as the life course these men and women took. Family conduct is significant in the class, racial, and cultural dimensions of the colonial community between the late nineteenth century and decolonization in 1947. What is more, it helps explain how, and why, so many families developed multi-generational histories in India without becomingpermanent settlers. Repeated travels between metropole and colony punctuated the life course: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. Transience andformative metropolitan experiences distinguished better-off Britons not only from the colonized but also from the social inferiors from their own diverse community, racially ambiguous 'domiciled Europeans', and Anglo-Indians. Yet 'coming home' simultaneously reinforced their awareness of culturaldifferences and alienation from British middle class society. Nostalgia for childhood and adult years in India was common among repatriates, and indeed finds private as well as public expression in Britain well into the post-colonial era. In this first study of family life in colonial India,Buettner highlights the social significance both of growing up in the raj and of the itinerant colonial lifestyle.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xiii
List of abbreviations	xiv
Introduction Making `British-Indians': Children, Family Traditions of Indian Service, and Cycles of Migration	1	(24)
Danger and Pleasure at the Bungalow: British Children at Home in India	25	(47)
Debility and degeneration: `expert' voices on colonial children	29	(16)
Comparing prescription and practice: family renditions of childrearing and childhood	45	(17)
`A halcyon time': Indian childhoods, metropolitan transitions, and the garden metaphor	62	(10)
`Not Quite Pukka': Schooling in India and the Acquisition of Racial Status	72	(38)
Schools for `children of European descent' and the uncertainty of racial divides	74	(16)
Boys' schooling and the closing of careers	90	(7)
Girls' education, social graces, and the meanings of women's employment	97	(7)
Persistent rejections and denials: wartime schooling alternatives	104	(6)
Separations and the Discourse of Family Sacrifice	110	(36)
Imperial families divided and reconstituted	114	(7)
The Kipling paradigm and retrospective analyses	121	(9)
Long-distance intimacy: family letters and imperial relationships	130	(9)
Articulations and silences: comparing contemporary and retrospective stories of separation	139	(7)
Sent Home to School: British Education, Status, and Returns Overseas	146	(42)
Gender, class, and schooling possibilities in Britain	147	(7)
Schools for missionaries' children	154	(9)
British boys' schools and imperial opportunity	163	(17)
The pull of family ties	180	(8)
From Somebodies to Nobodies: Returning Home to Britain and Perpetuating Overseas Connections	188	(83)
Castles in the air: domestic fantasies	192	(4)
Exiled from glory: domestic disappointments	196	(13)
Transplanted empire fragments: colonial communities in Britain	209	(30)
Retiring overseas	239	(6)
Returns to India	245	(7)
Conclusion Plain Tales and Family Romances: Remembering the Raj in Post-Colonial Britain	252	(19)
Bibliography	271	(30)
Index	301