Calcutta in the Cotswolds

David Gilmour

Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India by Elizabeth Buettner
Oxford, 324 pp, £25.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 19 924907 5

‘Certain families,’ Kipling wrote in his story ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’, ‘serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open sea.’ It was common indeed for three generations of the same family to spend their careers in India; often it was four, sometimes five, occasionally six. A number of Britons (or Anglo-Indians as they were called) could boast that both sides of their family had been in India for more than a hundred years. For the Scottish Wedderburns, the Indian Civil Service had become ‘a sort of hereditary calling’ in the 19th century, replacing the hereditary calling of the previous century, which had been to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian nationalism and serving two terms after retirement as President of the Indian National Congress.

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Vol. 27 No. 5 · 3 March 2005 » David Gilmour » Calcutta in the Cotswolds (print version)
Pages 14-15 | 2542 words

Letters

From Moira Dustin

To read David Gilmour’s piece (LRB, 3 March) is to enter a familiar representation of empire in which Forster and Orwell have the last word. There is a story to be told about the British families who devoted their lives to the myth of empire, but you don’t need to be steeped in feminism, cultural studies and the post-colonialism Gilmour scorns to think this story should make more than a passing reference to the people who were the object of the civilising mission. Gilmour’s justification for Western brutality and economic exploitation has its echo now in Afghanistan and Iraq: white men saving brown women from brown men. A more pertinent analysis would ask why practices that identify women with culture in a restrictive way emerge so strongly at particular points in history. Uma Narayan, among others, has documented how sati was revived largely as a symbol of nationalist opposition to colonial rule. It might be helpful to look at practices specific to the West as cultural in the same way: one could start with bulimia and cosmetic surgery.

Moira Dustin
Brighton

From Subho Basu

David Gilmour defends the progressive role of the British Empire in shaping gender relations in India against the opposition of the conservative Hindu subject population (LRB, 3 March). From Gilmour’s account, it would appear that Indians were either hostile to such reforms or passive recipients of lofty progressive legislation. Gilmour ignores Indian reformers and their role in organising resistance to patriarchal practices, even though a number of Indian activists – ranging from Pandita Ramabai, Ranade and Gokhale, in the Bombay Presidency, to Ram Mohan Roy, members of the Young Bengal movement and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in Bengal – played a critical role in orchestrating debates, discussions and social movements demanding the prohibition of these practices. Indeed, the imperial bureaucracy after the rebellion of 1857 was far more sympathetic to ‘conservative Indians’ than to Indian social critics and reformers.

Subho Basu
Normal, Illinois