European orphans and vagrants in India in the Nineteenth century

Abstract

Current writing about the British in India would lead an otherwise un- informed reader to suppose that its European community consisted almost entirely of civil servants, army officers, planters and business- men. That, no doubt, was how the Raj chose to see itself. Apart from: Kipling's Kim, a rare if over-sentimental glimpse of a poorer European® world, the fiction of the period, as much as its winsome monochrome self-portraiture, maintains the illusion of an essentially elite European® community. The very marked degree of stratification within European colonial society has similarly been ignored by recent writers anxious to: rescue something romantic and heroic from Britain's imperial past. But the illusion of European colonial society as a relatively homogeneous; elite or ruling class has not been confined to the pages of popular im- perial history. Mary E. Wilkie, though she makes no claim to speak for: India, confidently asserts in describing colonial situations generally that there was a 'perfect coincidence in the colonial system between race and class.' The only anomaly which she sees stems from the appoint- ment of 'Natives to high status positions despite the low prestige; assigned to their race by the 'Colonials'. In her the 'Colonials' is confined analysis conflict among; to the sometimes opposing interests of administrators, businessmen and other sections of the colonial ruling group.