The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience

Fascinating detail of Imperial India

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.

Pretty good; a good read. I recommend it.

But it's meandering--lacks any clear narrative, a near-fatal flaw.

Exhausting listings of whichever Brit ever set foot in India. Dullness beyond belief.