• 31 Dec 07
  

  jillmarie khouri

  britain british empire india literature

  • The Literature of British India

      

    J. K. Buda

      

    Introduction

     

      At the height of its glory, the British Empire encompassed nearly a quarter of the earth's land mass and a quarter of its population. Of all its possessions, none was more precious than India, the 'jewel in the crown' of Victoria's Empire. Other possessions may have been larger or more profitable, but with none of them was there the same deep relationship as that which existed between Britain and India, a relationship whose essence was so perfectly captured by James Morris:  

     

      India was different in kind from the rest of the Empire — British for so long that it had become part of the national consciousness, so immense that it really formed, with Britain itself, the second focus of a dual power. If much of the Empire was a blank in British minds, India meant something to everybody, from the Queen herself with her Hindu menservants to the humblest family whose ne'er-do-well brother, long before, had sailed away to lose himself in the barracks of Cawnpore. India was the brightest gem, the Raj, part of the order of things: to a people of the drizzly north, the possession of such a country was like some marvel in the house, a caged phoenix perhaps, or the portrait of some fabulously endowed if distant relative. India appealed to the British love of pageantry and fairy-tale, and to most people the destinies of the two countries seemed not merely intertwined, but indissoluble. [1]  

      

      This unique relationship found expression in a large body of English literature, so large as to constitute a genre in itself.

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