Life in India

The structure, and some of the contents, of this article follows the website British Voices from South Asia which contains material from an exhibition which was held in Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University, April 8 to August 6, 1996. The exhibition marked the acquisition by the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU of a series of taped interviews with British people who lived and worked in India before Independence in 1947.

Also see Society reading list

FIBIS Resources

• Bombay Golf Club Members

Guides

• The East India Vade-Mecum or Complete Guide To Gentlemen Intended for The Civil, Military or Naval Service of The Hon. East India Company by Captain Thomas Williamson 1810 Google Books Volume 1. Volume 2
• The General East India Guide And Vade Mecum: For The Public Functionary, Government Officer, Private Agent, Trader Or Foreign Sojourner, In British India, And The Adjacent Parts Of Asia Immediately Connected With The Honourable The East India Company . Being a Digest of the Work of the late Capt. Williamson, with many Improvements and Additions by John Borthwick Gilchrist 1825 Google Books
• A Handbook for India: Being an Account of the Three Presidencies, and of the Overland Route; intended as a guide for Travellers, Officers and Civilians. Part I Madras by Edward B. Eastwick, published by John Murray 1859 Google Books.

The Passage to India

	The FIBIS Google Books Library has books tagged: Overland Route Travel

Also see Maritime Service for descriptions of some sea voyages to India.

The Suez Canal was opened for navigation on the 17 November 1869.

• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 1 LSU Interviews, Chapter 1
• This India List thread discusses the “overland route” from London to India.
• India List post transcribing a letter in The Times Thursday, 29 July, 1858 praising the captain of the Peninsula and Oriental Steamship Candida, travelling from India and China, with signatories, an India List response and a further India List transcription of a letter in The Times 5 January 1859 regarding the “evils and annoyances” experienced on the transit through Egypt to board the Peninsular and Oriental Company's steam vessel Ceylon,(for travel to India), with signatories
• The story of Thomas Waghorn, at one time in the Bengal Pilot Service, who first developed the overland mail route between England and India MichelHoude.com
• "Transport of Troops to India" by Frederick Engels from the New-York Daily Tribune, 13 August, 1858 states that some troops were sent from England by the overland route from 1857. This route became permanent some years later - "The New Overland Troop Service to India" Colburns’s United Service Magazine 1867 Part 3, page 226 Google Books
• “Three British Travellers to the Middle East and India in the Early Seventeenth Century” by Clifford Edmund Bosworth (April 2005?) Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It includes details of Thomas Coryate, an Englishman who walked from Aleppo in Syria to India, via Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan, arriving at Amjer, Rajasthan in July 1615 after a ten month walk.
• “Remarks and Occurrences in a Journey from Aleppo to Bassora by way of the Desert" by William Beawes, Esqr 1745 from The Desert Route to India by Douglas Carruthers from Sylvia Volk’s Page of Asia
• “Account of a Journey from Basra to Aleppo in 1748” by Gaylard Roberts from The Desert Route to India by Douglas Carruthers from Sylvia Volk’s Page of Asia
• "A Journal from Aleppo, over the Desert to Basserah, October 21, 1771" by Mr Carmichael, the appendix to A voyage to the East Indies: Volume 1 by John Henry Grose 1772. Google Books. Mr Carmichael had been dismissed from the East India Company and was refused a passage to India on board any of the Company's ships. This book commences with a description of a sea voyage to Bombay in 1750
• Journal of a route across India, through Egypt, to England, in the latter end of the year 1817, and the beginning of 1818 by George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence (1st Earl of Munster) 1819 Google Books. Book of the Month by Kings College London Library

Work

• Camping out in the country with the Collector of Kaira (Bombay Presidency) 1875 from Modern India and the Indians : being a series of impressions, notes and essays, page 30 by Sir Monier Monier-Williams 1891 Archive.org
• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 2 LSU Interviews, Chapter 2

Marriage and children

• This India List thread discusses under age marriage.

• This India List thread mentions a marriage performed by an Army Adjutant in 1809, with remarriage by a clergyman in 1812. Only the second marriage appears in the records.

• “Returns of Marriages at Outstations in the Madras Presidency, Recorded in the Register Book of St Mary’s, Fort St George, between 1783 and 1805” by F.E.P. gives background details of marriages by Civil Residents and Commanding Officers (from The Genealogist, Volume 22 1906, page 248 Archive.org)

• The following letter from Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, written in 1826 to the Archbishop of Canterbury sets out the situation applying to Army soldiers and permission to marry. In Church records of marriages, marriage is by licence or by banns. In India, at least in this period, marriage by banns included marriage under the conditions mentioned by Bishop Heber. From Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825; (With notes upon Ceylon,) an Account of a journey to Madras and the southern provinces, 1826, and letters written in India, Volume 2 Page 251 Google Books
  • This letter also contains the wording “...while the miseries and dangers to which an unprotected woman is liable in India are such as to make it highly desirable that widows and female orphans should remain as short a time unmarried as possible”. (page 252)

• On the Strength: Wives and Children of the British Army, a Canadian website. Some of the information, particularly in respect of physical work performed, may not be applicable to India.

• The Army Children Archive (TACA) contains information about British Army children and wives, with themes such as Accomodation and On the Move. There are references to India in a number of the themes.

• Indian Tales by Patrick O‘Meara (born 1930) describes his childhood in India, spent in Army cantonments. His father was in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC). Indian-tales.com
• Peshawar Remembered by Walter Reeve (born 1934) whose father was in the Indian Army. The recollections of an English schoolboy growing up in Peshawar around the time of partition

Life in the Bungalows

• India Album Kings College, London . "'A daughter of the Empire': Edwardian life in India, 1901-03", looks at the life of Beryl White, a member of the British ruling class. Her father, John Claude White, was the first British Political Officer in Sikkim, refer Photographer - Books
• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 3 LSU Interviews, Chapter 3
• Anglo Indian Cuisine Wikipedia
• Anglo-Indian Food from Anglo-IndianFood.blogspot.com
• "“A Feeling of Absence from Old England:” the Colonial Bungalow" by William J Glover Home Cultures Volume 1 Issue 1 pages 61-82 2004(?)
• Review of the book The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, a reprint of the 1898 edition,(first published 1888) Washington Times Friday, 4 June 2010 ; Extract about camp life; India List thread about the 1904 edition. This book is available through Amazon,co.uk from the FIBIS Shop
• "The Landour Community Centre Cookbooks: From the 1920s to the 1960s and the present" by Katharine (Kittu) Parker Riddle. An article dated 1 July 2003
• This British Raj List thread led to a British Raj list post with a transcription of a newspaper report about the Lillywhite family, poisoned by arsenic by the family cook in Mandalay, Burma, c 1899, resulting in three deaths.

Historical books online

• "Curry & Rice," on Forty Plates; or, The Ingredients of Social Life at "Our Station" in India by George Francklin Atkinson. Third edition (1860?) First published 1858. Archive.org. The author was in the Bengal Engineers, in the Umballa Division
• Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book: comprising numerous directions for plain wholesome cookery, both Oriental and English, with much miscellaneous matter, answering all general purposes of reference connected with household affairs likely to be immediately required by families, messes, and private individuals, residing at the presidencies or out-stations by R. Riddell 5th edition 1860 Google Books
• The Indian Cookery Book, published by Thacker, Spink & Co, Calcutta. First published 1880. Project Gutenberg Australia
• Behind the Bungalow by EHA [Edward Hamilton Aitken] 10th edition 1911. First published 1889. Archive.org
• Flowers And Gardens In India: A Manual for Beginners by Mrs R Temple Wright 1902 Archive.org
• Indian life in town and country by Herbert Compton, 1904 has six chapters called "Anglo-India Life" from page 183 Archive.org
• The English Bride in India by Chota Mem ((Junior Memsahib, [Mrs. C. Lang]) 1909 Archive.org. The author is mentioned in "Cooks of the British Raj: In the Shadows of the Cantonments" from Cynthia Bertelsen’s Gerkins and Tomatoes
• The Khaki Kook Book: A Collection of a Hundred Cheap and Practical Recipes Mostly from Hindustan by Mary Kennedy Core 1917 Project Gutenberg. The introduction indicates the author was an American missionary.

Imperial Diversions: The Club, the Hills, the Field

• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 4 LSU Interviews, Chapter 4
• Royal Bombay Yacht Club 1910 Postcard from Images of Asia
• The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj by Dane Kennedy, 1996 University of California Press online edition.
• Van Ingen and Van Ingen were master taxidermists who processed many tigers, leopards and other animals. For further details, refer Mysore, where their factory was located.

Historical Books Online

• Sketches of Social Life in India CT Buckland: 1884 considers the lives of differing sectors of society.Source: Archieve.org.
• Glimpses of Old Bombay by James Douglas, JP has a section on Bombay Clubs and can be found at Archive.org.
• Oriental Field Sports Volume 1 by Captain Thomas Williamson 1807 Google Books. With coloured illustrations
• Sketches of Indian Field Sports: with Observations on the Animals by Daniel Johnson 1827 Google Books
• The Old Forest Ranger, or, Wild Sports of India on the Neilgherry Hills, in the Jungles and On the Plains by Walter Campbell 1853 Google Books
• Wild Men and Wild Beasts Scenes in Camp and Jungle by William Gordon-Cumming, 1872 Archive.org
• Shikar Sketches, with Notes on Indian Field-Sports by J Moray Brown, late 79th Cameron Highlanders.1887 Archive.org
• Tent Life in Tigerland with which is incorporated Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier : being twelve years' sporting reminiscences of a pioneer (indigo) planter in an indian frontier district by James Inglis 1892. Archive.org. Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier was first published 1878.
• Days and Nights of Shikar by Mrs W W Baillie 1921 Archive.org
• Sonepore reminiscences. Years 1840-96 by Harry E Abbott 1896. Archive.org Horse racing at Sonepore (a native state, South-West Frontier of Bengal, now Orissa state)

Railway Life

• Railways of the Raj Exploring Railway Life in Anglo India
  • Pam and the antique stove
• Railway Colonies in India by John Alton Price
• Among the Railway Folk by Rudyard Kipling 1888. Web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide. Jamalpur E.I.R.
  • Article Among the Railway Folk from Kipling.org.uk
• "Race, Railways and Domiciled Europeans" by Deborah Nixon Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol 3, No 1 February 2008
• Ajmer 1933-40 Life in a railway colony from An Indian Childhood by Eugene Blanchette born 1933, from his website.
• Grandpa’s Story. Percy Morris joined the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway (MSM) as an Assistant Locomotive Superintendent in 1925. He became Chief Mechanical Engineer, and later Director of the Railway Board, until he retired in 1955. Blog by his granddaughter of 1986 interviews in 15 parts. Scroll to the bottom for part 1 Indian service commences part 2.

Death

• This India List post advises “Personnel of all ranks were usually buried on the spot, with what to some today think of as unseemly haste, but it must be remembered that there was then no refrigeration and the human body does not last long in tropical heat."
• This India List post and this post and response refer to the preservation of bodies after death at sea.

Indo-British Relations

• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 5 LSU Interviews, Chapter 5

Departure and Connections

• British Voices from South Asia, LSU - Chapter 6 LSU Interviews, Chapter 6
• "The Curious Exclusion Of Anglo-Indians From Mass Slaughter During The Partition Of India". Experiences in India During 1947 of some who went to New Zealand by Dorothy McMenamin in 'The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies Volume 9, Number 1, 2006.
• Bloody memories for child of the Raj Express and Star dated 30 March 2009. Also see Biographies reading list for more details of Farewell Raj: Witness to End of Empire by Tony Hearne

Miscellaneous

• "Identifying Domiciled Europeans in Colonial India: Poor Whites or Privileged Community?" by Dorothy McMenamin The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies Volume 6, Number 1, 2001. Details four formal oral histories which are lodged at University of Canterbury [N.Z.] Library.
• The University of Cambridge - Centre of South Asian Studies has a collection of oral histories and home videos, as detailed in this Times On Line article. Access the Oral History Collection. The interviews are available to listen to, or a transcript may be read.
• This Indian Express article describes the book Mehtars and Marigolds by Barbara Dinner 2009, about four generations of her family from 1874, starting in Simla, available from the FIBIS Shop This link also discusses the book.

See also

• Polish Refugees in India 1942-1948