24/09/2020

When I visited India I knew nothing about its history and connections with Britain. When the British finally left in 1947, Dehli was filled for days with smoke from the burning of papers in a fire designed to leave only material that supported the idea of a benign rule. It wasn't till I stared reading around, following hares, reading footnotes, that I began to get a picture of the British Raj. I came to be convinced that the contemporary emphasis in education on the World Wars was to stop people probing round in our horrible past, and that understanding this history helps how our modern society came to be constructed, and why people from other countries come to be here.

This is a fullish list of my reading around the British in India, Orientalism, colonialism photography and art in mid-19th century India, books I came across when I started trying to find out about how Indian people felt about the Raj, and about Colonialism, about which I knew nothing, had been taught almost nothing that adequately explained the relationship of the two places. Most shocking is Shashi Tharoor's account which came from his astonishing speech at the Oxford Union, deftly analysing what Britiain took from India in the way of wealth.


"Orientalism' by Edward Said: the great classic, giving a critical account of the West's attitude to the East

'Inglorious Empire' by Shashi Tharoor: An expansion of his famous speech given at the Oxford Union, laying out what the British Empire from the East india Company onwards had materially taken from India

The White Mughals' 'and 'City of the Djinns' by William Dalrymple . The story of the love between an East India Company man living in India and the Mughal princess he wed.

'Composing the Spectacle: Colonial Portraiture and the Corontion Durbards of British India, 1877 - 1911' by Sean Willcox: A paper about visual imagery used for political control in the raj

'Photography and Anthroplogy' by Christopher Pinney How Anthroplogoical photography was used to define Otherness in Eastern cultures

'Long Exposure: The Camera at Udaipur 1857-1957' by Pramod Kumar: Archive photographers from a pivotal time in the raj

'A Second Paradise: Indian Courtly Life 15990-1947' Paintings, photographs and culture of Mughal India

'Posing for Posterity: Royal Indian Portraits' by Pramod Kumar

'A Passage to India' E.M.Forster '

Jonathan Gil Harris 'The First Firangis' Stories of ordinary people who were early travellers to India

'Photographic Interventions and Identities: Colonising and de-Colonising the Royal Body' by Julie Codell: How photography was used to define and redefine Indian princes

'Eastern Encounters' Emily Hannamcatalogue from the Queen's Gallery of presents given her by Indian royals

'The Story of My Experiments with Truth' by Gandhi

'A Writer's People: Ways of Seeing and Feeling' by V.S.Naipaul

' Last Train to Pakistan' by Khushant Singh: A story about Partition

'Annals of Mewar' by James Tod: A 19th century account by a political agent Essays on Indian and british cultureof life in the court of Udaipur

'Flashman and the Mountain of Light' by George MacDonald Frazer: Historically accurate adventure novel

'The Spirit of Indian Painting' by B.N.Coswamy Overview of Indian and Euro-Indian art

"The Raj Quartet' by Paul Scott

'Hobson-Jobson' by Henry Yule and A.C.Burnell: A glossary of Ando-Indian word and phrases

'Lowlands' by Jhumpa Lahiri: A novel about terrorism