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The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience Paperback – August 1, 2019

by David Gilmour (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 359 ratings
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A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR

'A richly panoramic exploration of the British experience of India ... hugely researched and elegantly written, sensitive to the ironies of the past and brimming with colourful details' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. Who were they? What drove these men and women to risk their lives on long voyages down the Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean or later via the Suez Canal? And when they got to India, what did they do and how did they live?

This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together with the lives of their families, recording the diversity of their work and their leisure, and the complexity of their relationships with the peoples of India. It also describes the lives of many who did not fit in with the usual image of the Raj: the tramps and rascals, the men who 'went native', the women who scorned the role of the traditional memsahib.

David Gilmour has spent decades researching in archives, studying the papers of many people who
have never been written about before, to create a magnificent tapestry of British life in India. It is
exceptional work of scholarly recovery portrays individuals with understanding and humour, and makes an original and engaging contribution to a long and important period of British and Indian history.

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    640 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin
  4. Publication date
    August 1, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    8.5 x 5.43 x 1.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0141979216
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0141979212
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (August 1, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141979216
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141979212
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 5.43 x 1.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 359 ratings

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David Gilmour

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
359 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Rod Speed
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2020
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Fascinating detail of Imperial India
One person found this helpful
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Geoff Crocker
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent on personal detail, but an imbalanced social account
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2018
From extraordinarily extensive research, David Gilmour delivers deep characterisations in a myriad of personal vignettes of how the British lived in India during the Raj. This is all interesting, and often moving. It is however a very partial treatment of its implied subject. The account is entirely endogenous by a British observer of the British experience. Only very limited Indian perspective of how the British lived, or India’s own experience of the British is included.

Gilmour does document the insensitive British response to plague in Bengal (p164), the hopeless inefficiency of the bureaucracy Britain claims to have bequeathed to India (p173), the ‘typical’ sneering disrespect of the Oxford educated magistrate in Madras who says ‘Your snake of an educated native I can’t abide. I’ve never met one that I respected. They’re a crawling round-the-corner sort of lot and no one ever knows what they’re really up to’ (p167). Gilmour offers no comment on this outrageous prejudice, which he admits is typical of the British in India, and later himself writes generically of the ‘corruption of Indian policemen’ (p205). His book focusses at length on every imaginable detail of British personal life, but allocates only half a page to the British atrocity in the siege of Delhi, though admitting it was ‘a terrible crime, the worst thing the British did in India’ (p260), as to Dyer’s infamous massacre at Amritsar (p97, with a couple of lines each on p73, 262). This renders Gilmour’s account flawed by imbalance of perspective.

As Gilmour admits, a positive Indian evaluation of the British in India, such as that he quotes from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is only possible because of ‘the magnanimity of the Indian character’ (p525). In his closing pages ascribing credit to the British for India’s evolution of liberal democracy and university education, Gilmour fails to consider how Indian society would have undoubtedly evolved without the Raj, perhaps with a superior outcome. Civilisation is possible without a patronising British contribution. The Raj was not initiated by altruism, but by the commercial exploitation of the East India Company enforced by British military suppression.
36 people found this helpful
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M. DeLeo
5.0 out of 5 stars On British India
Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2020
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Pretty good; a good read. I recommend it.
2 people found this helpful
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Richard Green
2.0 out of 5 stars Reasonably well-written, and contains a lot of interesting historical detail
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2020
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But it's meandering--lacks any clear narrative, a near-fatal flaw.
5 people found this helpful
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John Ziedonis
1.0 out of 5 stars Meaningless
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2022
Exhausting listings of whichever Brit ever set foot in India. Dullness beyond belief.
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Top reviews from other countries

Bird Lover
5.0 out of 5 stars Gift for my history buff son
Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2024
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The book was in good condition and arrived in timely manner.
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Richard Ellis
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterly survey
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2018
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This book is a masterly and fascinating survey of its subject. The author carefully describes its parameters in the introduction – it is not, he says, a book about the politics of the British Empire, still less a discussion of whether that empire was good or bad. He does not make judgements: he is chiefly interested, he says, in the motives and identities of British individuals in the Indian territories, in who they were and how they lived when they got there, and what they thought and felt about their lives on the Subcontinent. In his conclusion he says how he has tried, like Isherwood, to be a camera with the shutter open, though not as passive. The book is a social history rather than a political one, and about individuals rather than institutions, though he draws a few tentative conclusions at the end.

I came to it wanting to learn more about the context of the lives of the three generations of my family who spent significant parts of their lives in India, specifically in Madras (now Chennai), in the 20th century. Kipling was of no help here, because as Gilmour tells us Kipling never went to Madras or wrote about it. As a member of the Indian Civil Service quoted on page 316 says, the climate was enervating, and “emphatically does not run to Plain Tales from the Hills”.

The subject is treated thematically, so each part ranges across the three centuries. Early chapters deal with why the British went there, who they were and their motivations, which were many. At every point the text is illustrated by a rich stock of examples. The central section looks at what they did – civil servants, foresters, canal engineers, planters, soldiers, people in trade (box wallahs), missionaries and more. In contrast to the UK, where most people of all classes worked indoors, in India most British people worked in the open air.

I was surprised by just how few British there were in the Sub-Continent – I’d have expected it to be more, somehow. The first Indian census was in 1871, the last in 1931. In 1901 there were 155,000 British in India – about half of them soldiers – approximately 5 men to 2 women (the ratio was more even by 1931). There were 4,228 British in Madras. The Scots did well in India, the Scottish education system being more suited to life in administration and commerce there than the English one with its emphasis on the classics. The Scots in India were supported by kinship networks that did not exist for the Welsh “who did not make a mark on India”.

The last third of the book, titled “Experiences”, looks at the details of their personal lives. We learn that race relations were best at the end of the 18th century, when a lot of Brits were interested in Indian culture, had Indian wives or mistresses – he writes touchingly about the rise and fall of the “Bibi”. The arrival of English women, and missionaries, put a stop to that in the 19th century. The baleful influence of evangelicals like William Wilberforce, who claimed that the Christian conversion of India was even more important than the abolition of the slave trade, is discussed. Gilmour describes the rigid social structures and orders of precedence with which the British surrounded themselves, and the lack of interest in Indian art and literature from the 19th century onwards (in contrast to the 18th). As he says, ‘British society in India was anti-intellectual. Someone wondered “why we almost entirely lose sight of the aesthetic and fine art side of existence” ‘. We read about their leisure pursuits, at times bloodthirsty or stultifyingly boring The penultimate chapter deals with the subject of death – how the British died in India, and how death could be sudden.
We meet well-known names along the way, the first being Billy Connolly in the introduction. We find Eric Blair, later to become George Orwell, Richard Dawkins’s redoubtable grandmother, Tom Stoppard, Felicity Kendal and her Shakespeare-wallah father, Kim Philby and many more. The list of sources is encyclopaedic.

The book is handsomely produced with many fascinating and revealing photographs. It triumphantly achieves what it sets out to do.
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5.0 out of 5 stars nice
Reviewed in Australia on August 29, 2023
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good quality.
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Yasar Erdi Sasmaz
5.0 out of 5 stars Good
Reviewed in Canada on November 4, 2023
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Good
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Sudip Kishore Mookherjee
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good
Reviewed in India on May 26, 2021
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Very good
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