Families, children, and memories: Britons in India, 1857-1947.

Abstract

This dissertation explores how British middle-class families residing in India between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries raised their children and conducted private life. The sanctity of the domestic sphere and the importance of family intimacy that symbolized the ideal bourgeois household in Britain were complicated by the perceived need to send young children away from this setting in India. Most parents believed India's hot climate and racially inferior population posed cultural and physical threats to white children. In addition, education in the metropole was considered essential if children were to possess a high cultural, social, and racial status as adults, and many therefore left India when their schooling began. Some parents could not afford to send their children back to Britain for their entire education, however, and temporarily had them taught at home or enrolled them at schools in India established for European and mixed-race pupils. Because of their clientele's racial and social diversity, these Indian schools lacked prestige and limited the opportunities of children attending them. Children who went to school in Britain often returned overseas as adults to embark upon colonial careers or marriages resembling those of their parents. Both preexisting family connections with India as well as the British schools they attended helped perpetuate traditions of Indian work and residence. Multigenerational colonial life in turn contributed to the way members and descendants of such families have glorified lengthy associations with India after it became independent in 1947, contributing extensive oral and written commentary featuring prominently in media productions of imperial nostalgia popular in the late twentieth century. Source materials consulted for this analysis include published manuals on raising British children in a colonial setting, case studies of schooling options in both Britain and India, and personal narratives such as letters, diaries, and retrospective oral and written renditions of childhood and family life. This project contrasts these modes of representation and reviews the claims and valuable material offered by each.Ph.D.Asian historyEuropean historyIndividual and family studiesModern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131173/2/9840509.pd