‘White Todas’: the politics of race and class amongst European settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c.1860–1900
The Nilgiri Hills lie in the north-western corner of what is now Tamil Nadu, and was formerly part of the Madras presidency. Before 1799 the Hills had formed a rather detached part of Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore. Although they do appear to have paid revenue, their various tribes lived in comparative isolation, broken only in 1819 when the first European bungalow was constructed on the lower slopes near Kotagiri by the collector of the Coimbatore District. From the 1820s onwards the Hills, and particularly Ootacamund (Ooty), the chief sanatorium, became a popular resort for invalid Europeans, revelling in the ‘half-English’ weather of the plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level. From the 1850s they became fashionable, as well as a health resort, and by 1870 Ooty was acting as the summer capital of the Madras presidency, the seat of government for four to six months of the year. Nevertheless, with an average population density of no more than 127 per square mile in 1901, less than any other district in Madras, and a main town, Ootacamund, of only 18,500 inhabitants, the Nilgiris were of minor economic and demographic significance, and have accordingly attracted little attention from historians since the publication of Sir Frederick Price’s voluminous history in 1908. With or without the familiar diminutive, Ooty is always belittled by the associations of the term ‘hill station’. In imperial and nationalist mythology this implies a place apart, Kipling’s ‘abode of the little tin gods’, divorced from the everyday concerns of the ‘real’ India on the Plains. Dane Kennedy’s The Magic Mountains and Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla are the principal detailed studies of this peculiar urban form, and show clearly that hill stations were no different from other Indian towns in depending on Indian capital and enterprise for their maintenance and development. Despite this, Kipling’s grass-widows and dashing young subalterns still hold centre stage in the popular perception of the hill station, obscuring not only the Indians who made this brittle existence possible, but the substantial numbers of Europeans who came to the hills not to play, but to work. Together with the presidency towns, but for somewhat
Письма Почтальона: Дистанционная Интимность и Семейная Жизнь Индийских Колонизаторов
SUMMARY: The article by Elizabeth Buettner investigates intimate life of “empire families” in British India as an expression and a formative area of British colonialism. The first part of the article examines intimate life and behavioral practices of British families whose imperial lives more or less accorded with what were commonly asserted to be standard forms of behavior. In the second part Buettner argues that paying attention to a broader colonial social spectrum – groups which, because of their lower status, are only gradually receiving the historical scrutiny they deserve – enables the wider meanings and importance of family practices to imperial rule to be rendered fully comprehensible. There she focuses on “empire families” whose life not wholly corresponded with standard assumptions, showing how much scholars have to gain through comparing different kinds of Raj family histories. The article is based on close reading of family letters which simultaneously reflected, enhanced, and created forms of long-distance intimacy, illustrating the realities and implications of family separation, the meanings of the divide between metropole and colony, and how this was bridged. When written during the interwar years, they attested to family attachments, helping ensure these were not severed across the twin expanses of time and space. Equally important, they also helped families maintain a British, or “European,” identity via direct communications with the metropole - both with the people they knew residing at home, and with “home” more broadly construed. Members of India’s diverse colonial community thereby maintained a direct connection with the colonizing power – with the heart of the empire – that was empowering on racial, socio-economic, and cultural levels. Buettner shows that long after these letters were written, posted, received, and read, they could survive to provide an enduring material testament to the ways Britons experienced their nation’s overseas presence.
Foreign Private Investment in India 1920–1950
Overseas investment by developed nations in the less industrialized economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America is an important part of modern international economic history. Such investment has long been recognized as a potent force in integrating the international economy. It has also been placed at the heart of most theories of the expansion of European empires in the nineteenth century and it is seen as a major part of the ‘neo-colonialism’ that is widely thought to have characterized the world economic and political structure since 1945. This article will examine private foreign investment in India in the first half of the twentieth century, spanning the gap between the ‘imperial’ and the ‘neo-colonial’ epochs.