1 - Family Histories and Remaking Class in British India

Summary

This chapter introduces five families whose histories each exemplify parts of the British non-elite experience of India. The Keen and Wonnacott families experienced opposing forms of social mobility in India where their social status, bolstered by the presence of native labor and constrained by the strictures of military hierarchy, changed dramatically. John Brand waited with his regiment for a conflict to fight in, experiencing India, like many other soldiers, as a place of stasis and sickness. Ned Crawford, who came to India as his search for work along the east coast of Britain failed and expanded to the empire, sought to maintain connections to both his brother and British political culture. And George and Lucy Cole, whose marriage suffered when George sought employment in India, reveal the effects Indian service could have on family units across imperial distance. These themes of upward and downward mobility, attempts to create community, both local and intraimperial, and the fallout of Indian and imperial separation on intimate relationships recur throughout the book.