Colonial encounters: white, middle-class, British citizens in Late-Colonial India

Abstract

This research into the Special Collections Archive at Exeter University and India Office Records at the British Library, explores everyday life for white, middle-class British citizens in India between 1914 and 1941. Building on existing scholarship and methodologies outlined by Ann Laura Stoler (1995; 2009), Antoinette Burton (2003) and Homi Bhabha (1984), this project considers the ways late-colonial gender and class identities inform constructions of otherness; exemplified by case studies, vignettes and recollections of homelife and leisure, local communities and professional obligations in India. Drawing on records from the late-colonial period this thesis explores the specific experiences and articulations of three individuals who grew up in Britain, spent decades in India, and later returned to Devon, South West England. The collections are records of the complications of establishing a family, socialising with peers, controlling domestic spaces and employment in India. Through immersion into the archive (Stoler 2009) and close reading of a diverse range of source material, including correspondence, memoir, articles, lecture notes and legal papers, I aim to nuance our understanding of colonial relationships by considering individual narratives. Exploring the memoir of Violet Fulford Williams, and her husband, Henry’s private ‘India Notes’, we see that while their experiences were chronologically similar, the couple had substantially different responsibilities, and engaged in very different negotiations and recollections. In this case, gender, class, memory and narrative style all play a part in articulating their encounters with India. Likewise, through court papers and correspondence we see how one High Court Judge, Sir Leonard Costello, became responsible for ruling on the identity of an Indian Subject, and promoted his own self-interest through retirement and law-making in both the UK and India. At the micro-scale Costello, Violet and Henry display classic colonialist attitudes as well as a sensitivity towards the colony, where they built their homes and careers. I demonstrate how their commentaries and categorisations exemplify the complexity of living in India as members of colonial leadership, mediated through their professional/familial obligations, race, gender and class. Bibliography: Bhabha, Homi. 1984. ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 28: 125-33, <doi:10.2307/778467> Burton, Antoinette. 2003. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India, 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, (North Carolina: Duke University Press) -- 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press)