̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - colonialism

Pacific curators restore Indigenous voices to colonial-era collections

ta385 — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 23:00:00 +0000

'Fault Lines', a new exhibition at MAA, offers an intimate exploration of Pacific cultures guided by Indigenous curators and contemporary artists from Hawai‘i, the Torres Strait, Bougainville and the Salish Sea

Britain's first colonial anthropology experiment revealed

ta385 — Sat, 12 Jun 2021 06:00:00 +0000

A new exhibition at MAA examines the pioneering ethnographic archive assembled by Britain’s first colonial anthropologist, Cambridge alumnus Northcote Thomas.

Another India exhibition gives voice to India’s most marginalised communities

sjr81 — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 13:59:14 +0000

Putting on display never-before-seen objects from the Museum’s historic collections, as well as stunning, newly-commissioned works from contemporary Adivasi sculptors, Another India tells the stories behind a remarkable collection of artefacts while confronting head-on the role played by Empire and colonialism in the gathering together of this material. ̽��ֱ��exhibition also features 23 works acquired by its curator Mark Elliott, using a New Collecting Award from Art Fund.

“This is an exhibition about the India – or the many Indias – that most people in the UK don’t know,” said Mark Elliott. “It’s about 100 million people of Indigenous or Adivasi backgrounds who are marginalised by majority populations and the state. It’s an exhibition about identity, diversity and belonging; and the role that objects play in creating a sense of who we are.

“These are issues that affect all of us, particularly now when Identity – who we are, where we come from and where we belong – is being fought over here in Britain. Another important story is how these things came to Cambridge in the first place. Many of the artefacts were acquired through colonialism: sometimes fair exchanges, sometimes gifts, sometimes not. This is about legacies of empire for people in the UK and India.”

Among the objects going on display are a head-hunters skull, pieces of the Taj Mahal and a snake-charmer’s flute. Ten new sculptures, specially commissioned by Elliott after working closely with Adivasi and indigenous artists at workshops across India, will also take pride of place in Another India, thanks to the prestigious New Collecting Award from Art Fund. ̽��ֱ��workshops took place from Gujarat in the west to Nagaland, right on the border with Myanmar (Burma) in the North east.

̽��ֱ��sculptures, the largest of which is 13 feet (3.9m) high and the heaviest of which is almost a tonne, have been shipped from the sub-continent and will sit alongside stunning photographic portraits of Indigenous Indians – from the late 19th century to the 21st. ̽��ֱ��most recent works include photos of Naga men in their 80s and 90s proudly displaying their tattooed faces and bodies.

“We are trying to make this less of a show about dead white guys by living white guys,” added Elliott. “We showed artists across India some of our collections and said ‘here’s the stuff we have from your place, what do you think? What would you make now if we asked you?’ ̽��ֱ��whole brief was to produce new works in response to the collections we have.”

Ruby Hembrom, an Adivasi writer and activist, who has worked closely with Elliott and MAA on the planning of the exhibition, said: “Another India is the only India we Adivasis know. Identity is belonging and we belong to this India. We belong to the objects of this India and belong to the feelings they trigger and emotions they evoke. ̽��ֱ��India that ‘others’ use is the one where we are confronting hatred, racism, sexism, exploitation, brutality, dehumanisation and stereotyping in our everyday lives.

“No matter how much we’ve talked of or engaged in social and political change, very little has changed for us. This is not the India our ancestors sacrificed for, or hoped for us, and this is not the one we want for our descendants.”

Among the historic objects going on display at MAA is a coin necklace from the ‘Criminal Tribes’ settlement in Maharashtra which was collected by Maguerite Milward in 1936. Milward went on expedition to make portrait sculptures of Indigenous and Adivasi men and women. ̽��ֱ��necklaces show how Adivasis whose lives were transformed by colonialism, reappropriated and repurposed coins issued by the British Raj as jewellery, signs of wealth and status.

̽��ֱ��head-taker’s skull meanwhile comes from Nagaland and was worn on the chest by a Konyak warrior who had captured an enemy head. ̽��ֱ��monkey skull, with red, white and black hair woven into the crown, was collected by JH Hutton, Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills and later a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, who put it in a glass jar and kept it in his office until he retired.

Headhunting was a popular but ambivalent topic of anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. It was an aspect of Naga culture that the British sought to eradicate but found fascinating, and which despite the coming of Christianity, remains a hugely important part of Naga identity today.

“Another India is talking about a very different India to most people’s expectations in Britain and possibly India too,” said Elliott. “We didn’t want to do a show about Bollywood, saris and curry, but instead highlight a massive body of marginalised people – numbering nearly twice the population of the UK – who to a great extent aren’t seen as having culture, heritage and history of their own.”

Many of the objects going on display – whittled down from the 10,000 plus Indian objects in MAA’s collections – are the product of an extraordinary industry of exploration, survey and classification whose advance started with the East India Company and continued under the Crown until independence in 1947.

By the mid-19th century, scholars and administrators were working through masses of linguistic, economic, ethnographic and criminological data to decode the demography of India, defining groups of people as distinctive on the basis of shared language, customs, religious belief and ‘racial’ characteristics.

By the end of that century, such groupings had been consolidated into a fundamental distinction between ‘castes’ and ‘tribes’. Tribes were identified as groups of people who were separated geographically, socially or both from ‘mainstream’ caste society. Often living in more isolated territories away from large population centres such as hill and forest regions. These groups were defined first as being outside the caste system but furthermore as ethnically or culturally distinct, often being described as ‘primitive’.

While the constitution of India identifies these groups as Scheduled Tribes or ‘Tribal’, this term is widely seen as derogatory with connotations of primitivism, backwardness and even savagery. In truth, all the categories are remarkably slippery. Indigenous, Adivasi and Tribal identities are still fiercely contested.

“ ̽��ֱ��objects on display resist pigeonholing, just as people do,” added Elliott. “ ̽��ֱ��identities presented here are ambiguous and contested. But this is not just an historical exhibition, the artefacts and the stories they tell are the stories of communities who are living, struggling and thriving today.

“Putting together this exhibition has brought me and the museum into contact with extraordinary people: scholars, activists and artists and more – from the tribes, groups and communities that we are incredibly proud to represent here in Cambridge.”

Another India is the centrepiece of the ̽��ֱ��’s wider celebrations entitled India Unboxed. To mark the UK-India Year of Culture 2017, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden, are hosting a shared season on the theme of India with a programme of exhibitions, events, digital encounters, discussions, installations and more within the museums and the city of Cambridge. Rooted in the Cambridge collections, the programme will explore themes of identity and connectivity for audiences in both the UK and India.

For further information, visit the Another India website.

Hundreds of objects which tell the story of 100 million of India’s most marginalised citizens – its Indigenous and Adivasi people – are to go on display for the first time in a ground-breaking exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from today.

We didn’t want to do a show about Bollywood, saris and curry, but instead highlight a massive body of marginalised people.

Mark Elliott

A head-hunter's skull from Nagaland which was worn on the chest of a Konyak warrior who had captured an enemy head.

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Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies

amb206 — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000

In the mid-17th century, a French missionary called Pierre Pelleprat visited several Caribbean islands before travelling to French Guyana and the South American mainland. In an infamous account of his travels, he described the blacks of the Caribbean as “so hideous and misshapen that they fill you with horror”. Tellingly, however, he did not consider this ugliness to be beyond salvation: “I do not know whether my eyes were charmed, but I usually found [the negroes] better shaped and more pleasant after their baptism.”

Pelleprat was part of a generation of Europeans who began to travel widely, crossing oceans to encounter people whose cultures seemed alien and uncivilised. Arriving on the shores of the tropical islands of the Caribbean after a long and perilous sea voyage, Pelleprat and his compatriots would have met for the first time large native populations of Caribs as well as Amerindians and Africans. Many were enslaved to white settlers making fortunes in commodities such as sugar and tobacco.

̽��ֱ��missionary's words make shocking reading. But, says Dr Mélanie Lamotte (Faculty of History and Newnham College), it is worth exploring the beliefs that underpinned them. Lamotte is a researcher whose work focuses on colour prejudice and interethnic antagonism in the early modern French empire. A French national, educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Cambridge, Lamotte has a personal reason to be interested in the experiences of enslaved people. On her mother’s side, she is the descendant of a slave who, in the 18th century, was taken from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

A project to trace her own family ancestry took Lamotte on an often frustrating journey into archival materials. Accounts written by slaves are few; for generations, they were denied the opportunities afforded by education and literacy. She says: “I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies whose history has long been neglected or twisted by analysts – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.”

Research into the various ways in which race has been understood has generally taken the 18th century as its starting point. Encounters between people with different cultures have, of course, taken place for millennia – and it is hard to know how such differences were registered by those who experienced them. Lamotte suggests that records of 17th-century encounters between Europeans and inhabitants of distant lands reveal something remarkable. She says: “Rather than focusing on race as something inborn, early European travellers saw difference as something more fluid – and often as something that could be corrected by imposing ‘civilising’ influences.”

On the basis of her extensive work on underexplored archival material, Lamotte argues that before the 18th century, “race didn’t matter” in the same way that it came to matter when ideas of racial differences became more fixed, most famously by laws that prohibited marriages between different groups. Accounts from travellers in the French empire reveal that, although notions of blood and breeding were powerful in French society (for example in the preservation of the lineages of French nobility), the non-whites encountered by France’s empire-makers were initially not seen in the same terms.

Lamotte has looked in detail at records relating to the French empire in three contrasting locations: the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, Ile Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, and Louisiana in the former French colonies of north America. In making direct comparisons between these widespread colonies, her research extends existing scholarship to a global scale and also reflects the fact that many travellers sailed throughout the French empire. Their ideas circulated too – including the notion that non-Europeans could be schooled out of ‘backward’ customs.

In arguing that “race didn’t matter”, Lamotte does not suggest that prejudice did not exist (it most certainly did) but rather that it took forms dictated by the preoccupations of a society concerned with behaviour, dress and manners – and, of course, with religion. During an era in which the outward signs of politesse were paramount, newly-encountered people were judged, and categorised, in terms of their level of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ or (at the other end of the scale) ‘civilisation’.

A good measure of self-interest fuelled the initially cordial relations between the colonialists and the inhabitants of lands seen to be rich in possibilities. In some cases, by forging alliances with the local population, the incomers were able to tap into the local trade networks that were vital to securing goods for export – fur from North America and spices from the East Indies.

Many of the early French settlers were men, and marriageable women were in short supply. In 1690 only 16 white women were recorded on Île Bourbon (now La Réunion), an island located in the Southwest Indian Ocean. Most European men on Ile Bourbon married non-white women – despite an ordinance issued in 1674 which forbade “Frenchmen to marry negresses” and “blacks to marry whites” in the colony.

In New France (Acadia, Canada, the Great Lakes and the Illinois Country), miscegenation (the mixing of groups) was pursued as a deliberate policy to assist integration. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain, French explorer and founder of the Quebec settlement, reportedly assured local communities that “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people”. From the outset of French colonisation in the Caribbean, the need to maintain a buoyant slave population created a comparatively more prejudiced and segregated ‘plantation society’.

Father Mongin, a Jesuit missionary who spent time in the French Caribbean in the 1680s, wrote that “some [negroes] do not lack intelligence and are capable of all sorts of arts and sciences, should they receive the right education”. Thousands of miles across the world, a surgeon named Sieur Dellon, who had spent some time on Ile Bourbon 20 years earlier, wrote in a similar vein that “among [Malagasies], there are some with common sense, quick witted, and who would be fit for the arts and sciences, if they were educated”.

Education in this context involved imposing all-important French rules of politesse, conversion from idolatry to Christianity, and the stamping out of “absurd” beliefs and “ridiculous” ceremonies. Non-Europeans were described as “sluggish” and indolent. Outrage was expressed when some French settlers in North America, rather than ‘Frenchifying’ the natives, became ‘Indianised’ themselves. In the early 17th century a French administrator complained that, living among the native people, the French coureurs de bois (woodsmen) behaved “like the savages” and enjoyed “an animal life”, doing little more than hunting and fishing.

̽��ֱ��start of the 18th century witnessed a change in attitude on the part of the colonisers. French administrators in North America began to argue against interracial marriages which “would mix good [French] blood with bad [Native American] blood”. In 1723 the colonial Council of Louisiana issued an edict forbidding “all Frenchmen and any other subjects of the king who are white to marry savage women”. ̽��ֱ��number of mixed marriages dropped, and in 1738 one governor observed that “the Illinois Indians do not invite the French to marry their daughters any longer, and the French do not think about this anymore”.

Children of mixed European and indigenous heritage (métis) were, by the middle of the 18th century, frequently considered to be inferior. French colonialists complained that métis children were “extremely swarthy” and “naturally lazy”. Dark complexions were seen as indicators of ‘racial’ inferiority – and the alleged licentiousness and brutishness that had long been attributed to the natives were increasingly believed to be ‘fixed’. Official documents listed colonial populations under headings such as Nègre (negro), Mulâtre (mulato), Métis (mixed) and Sauvage (indigenous).

“Ultimately, ‘racial’ discourses developed partly because the French needed to justify discrimination and segregation towards people who were viewed as a threat to French socio-economic and imperialist ambitions. These people included slaves who could claim emancipation, free peoples of colour who presented as economic competitors, and the large Native American population, unreceptive to French policies of ‘Frenchification’ and evangelisation,” says Lamotte.

“People continue to use language and ideas inherited from colonial times, for example, by using the term ‘nègres’ to designate blacks, and maintaining the image of blacks as lazy or violent. As the result of centuries of prejudice, many blacks in the Antilles consider themselves inferior to whites. A creole phrase often heard in Guadeloupe when a baby is born is ‘ti-moun la bien soti’, meaning ‘your baby looks good as he or she doesn’t have too dark a skin’. Exposing the ways in which such views took hold over the centuries, and telling the tales of those who lived with prejudice, is a powerful way of shaping a more equal world.”

As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave, is researching a brief period when European notions of ethnicity were relatively fluid. Early French settlers believed that non-white inhabitants of the colonies could be ‘civilised’ and ‘improved’.

I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.

Mélanie Lamotte

Image from Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles

Mélanie Lamotte: my family history

I was born in France, and my mother comes from the island of Guadeloupe, an overseas department in the French Caribbean. ̽��ֱ��history of France’s colonial empire was, until recently, largely absent from my country’s school curriculum. But I wanted to know more about my family. When I was 20 years old, I reconstructed my family tree, tracing it back three centuries to a slave called Anne Rose. My research inspired me to become a historian. From 2006 to 2015, I received grants from the EU and the UK government to study history at the Sorbonne and Cambridge. Today I’m a historian of slavery, ethnic prejudice and early modern French colonialism.

In the 18th century, Anne Rose was transported from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation in Guadeloupe. White planters were making fortunes in commodities such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and indigo. One of Anne Rose’s children, a man named Quidi, moved to Pointe Noire, Guadeloupe in 1794. My extended family still lives in that same town. Slavery was officially abolished in the 1790s, in the aftermath of the French revolution. Records suggest that Quidi was freed and, remarkably for a former slave, lived for nearly 100 years. He had a daughter, Demoiselle Anne Rose, in 1799. ̽��ֱ��title ‘Demoiselle” suggests that she may have been of relatively high status.

Slavery was permanently abolished in the French colonies in 1848, and blacks in the French Caribbean began to use the names of their slave ancestors as their family names. My family on my mother’s side is still called ‘Annerose’. ̽��ֱ��grandson of Demoiselle Anne Rose was my granddad’s grandfather. My granddad was told that his grandfather had been homeless, and lived on a beach called ‘Plage Caraïbe’ in Pointe-Noire.

Slavery is a significant part of French history. ̽��ֱ��four French overseas departments (former French colonies) are ranked among the poorest regions of the EU. Researchers have shown that this economic distress is in part a consequence of the slavery. ̽��ֱ��French government has been working to raise the profile of Atlantic slavery in French consciousness. ̽��ֱ��Law of May 2001 declared slavery and the slave trade to be ‘crimes against humanity’. May 10th is now an annual day of commemoration of Atlantic slavery in France.

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Opinion: Pirate, turncoat, survivor: the life and times of Anthony Knivet, a Briton in 16th-century Brazil

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 08:10:44 +0000

On a dark night late in 1592, a group of Englishmen was massacred on the island of São Sebastião, off the southeast coast of Brazil. Most had deserted the infamous English privateer Thomas Cavendish less than two weeks before in the hope they could find a living in Brazil. But this was not to be. A band of Portuguese and their allied Indians from Rio de Janeiro set upon them in the early hours: they were dragged to the shore, where their skulls were smashed with “fire brands”.

At the time, English subjects were considered enemies of Spain and Portugal, “heretic Lutherans” who were officially forbidden to set foot on the Iberian colonies in the New World. But Cavendish’s men were not innocent: only a couple of months earlier they had besieged towns, burned down mills and plundered villages along the Brazilian coast.

̽��ֱ��massacre in São Sebastião would have remained unknown, had it not been for one who managed to survive and later write what would become the earliest extensive account of Brazil written by an Englishman. This man was Anthony Knivet, a young soldier from Norfolk with few scruples and a great desire for fortune.

In country

Knivet would spend the next nine years living in Brazil – mostly in or around the incipient village of Rio de Janeiro – working as a drudge for the ruling Portuguese. After all, the only reason he escaped being killed in São Sebastião was his swift offer to trade information on the English in exchange for his life. This would be the first of many brushes with death that Knivet would experience in Brazil. He would also, while serving the Portuguese as a slaver, travel vast portions of a territory then virtually unknown by Europeans, encountering a myriad of native tribes, many of which would have been destroyed by the following century.

From the vantage point of an outsider, Knivet witnessed first-hand several aspects that characterised Brazilian colonial society in its very beginnings: the harsh life at the early sugar-mills – the “engenhos” – the multiracial settlements, the political disputes, the exploitation of labour and the violent expansion towards the unknown “interior”. Though we do not know exactly how he managed to finally extricate himself from the hands of the Portuguese, we know that he arrived back in England in 1601, and in 1625 the remarkable story of his adventures came out in print as ̽��ֱ��Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Antonie Knivet, who went with Master Thomas Cavendish to the South Sea, 1591.

Slaves working the sugar mill at an engenho. John Carter Brown Library’s Archive of Early American Images

Published in a compendium of travel accounts, the Admirable Adventures had not attracted much sympathy or credence until recently, and remained mostly unknown to the broader public. It received its first single annotated edition in English only last year.

One reason for this lasting disregard may have been Knivet’s obscure background, his poor writing skills, together with allusions to mermaids and “glistening mountains”. Even his original editor, Samuel Purchas, was reticent about endorsing some of his descriptions. However, on close inspection and when verified against Portuguese documents, several events, names and descriptions in the narrative turn out to be surprisingly accurate.

Portrait of a survivor

Perhaps there is another aspect that has kept Knivet’s story obscure: in a seeming endless string of narrow escapes from death, Knivet emerges as someone whose only loyalty is to saving his own skin at any cost, even if it meant betraying the English, the Portuguese or the Indians. In the ruthless world of colonial disputes and bloody encounters, Knivet became a master of survival, a skillful improviser who aptly manipulated cultural tensions to his own advantage.

Knivet tells us how, after breaking off from an expedition along with 12 young Portuguese, he encounters a tribe of Tamoio living deep in the hinterland. Knowing of the enmity between Tamoio and Portuguese, Knivet aptly declares himself French before all his Portuguese companions are executed and ritually devoured. ̽��ֱ��ensuing year is spent living with the tribe until he convinces his hosts to engage in a mass migration to the coast in search of fisheries and French trading ships.

What Knivet tells his readers (but did not tell his hosts) is that he in fact longed to find a safe passage back to England. In truth, Knivet led the tribe straight to a notorious slave-trading post kept by the Portuguese on the coast. As a result, the last known tribe of Tamoio to have escaped Portuguese conquest in the 1550s was then either massacred or enslaved.

̽��ֱ��Admirable Adventures renders the interplay between fact and fiction even more problematic as we deal with a narrator who can be disconcertingly frank while remaining unnervingly opaque. Apart from its fascinating glimpse into an under-documented time in colonial Brazil, Knivet’s account tells us a lot about the interplay of truth and fiction in early modern travel writing.

̽��ֱ��author will be giving a talk on Anthony Knivet as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas from October 17 to 30.

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá, Lecturer in Portuguese Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) discusses the life and times of Anthony Knivet, a young soldier from Norfolk who spent nine years living in Brazil in the 16th century. She will be discussing Knivet's life on 22 October as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

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«Dança dos Tapuias», célebre quadro do pintor neerlandês Albert Eckhout

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̽��ֱ��illiterate boy who became a maharaja

amb206 — Tue, 31 May 2016 14:25:57 +0000

In May 1875, an illiterate 12-year-old boy was chosen by the British to become the Maharaja of Baroda, the most important princely state in western India. He left his village and travelled some 300 miles to the state’s capital, where he was given a new name and a new family. For the next six years, he underwent rigorous academic and physical training in a school set up for the express purpose of making him into a prince.

A photograph in the archives of the British Library shows the diminutive Maharaja Sayaji Rao III shortly after arriving in Baroda. He wears a heavily brocaded outfit and holds a full-length sword. Only a few months earlier, he had been running barefoot in the fields. Brought up speaking Marathi, he was now learning to read, write and speak in English as well as in the principal languages of his subjects – Gujarati and Urdu.

̽��ֱ��extraordinary efforts undertaken by British colonialists to shape young Indian princes into rulers who would be unswervingly loyal to the British crown (while remaining visibly loyal to Indian traditions) are revealed in research undertaken by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge PhD candidate Teresa Segura-Garcia. She will present her research in a talk in Cambridge tomorrow (1 June 2016).

̽��ֱ��education of Indian princes in the colonial period is an under-explored topic. Segura-Garcia’s pioneering research into archival material shows that the late 19th century heralded the beginning of an era when the British realised that future rulers needed to be rooted in their own culture as well as equipped to operate on a global stage.

By the 1870s the majority of India was a British colony. But 500 princely states, home to two-fifths of the Indian population, enjoyed political autonomy. Their independence was, however, nominal and they were subject to varying degrees of British control. Interference in their affairs included playing an active part in the education of Indian princes.

In many of these states, the British took a leading role in developing and overseeing educational programmes for future leaders – such as the intensive routine designed to bring young Sayaji Rao up to speed – that aimed to produce an Indian elite politically aligned with imperial rule and prepared to suppress anti-colonial resistance.

“ ̽��ֱ��British knew that the future ruler of a state as powerful and wealthy as Baroda needed to follow Indian traditions of kingship and to be highly visible in the environment he was destined to rule over. This is why Sayaji Rao, an outsider to the court, was not sent to the Indian boarding schools that catered to Indian princes from lesser states. Rather, he was educated within the confines of the court at Baroda,” says Segura-Garcia.

“His education was devised to prepare him to hold his own in a variety of settings. ̽��ֱ��growing tensions between India and Britain meant that he was under close scrutiny on both sides - in terms, for example, of his friendships and activities – which put him under considerable pressure as young man.”

Segura-Garcia’s close examination of primary sources shows just how deep the British transformative endeavour went. Not only were young Indian aristocrats tutored in gentlemanly pursuits but they were encouraged to embrace ‘virtues’ such as punctuality, diligence and discipline – qualities that British administrators thought to be alien to the ‘backward’ Indian character.

A fluent grasp of English was vital for a prince destined to be a modern ruler – a ruler who was to travel widely and showcase the civilising influence of Britain’s empire. Sayaji Rao also learnt arithmetic (he performed poorly). Academic study was accompanied by tutoring in horseriding and Indian physical exercise, including pehlwani (a form of wrestling) and gymnastics. Essential too was an appreciation of European culture.

̽��ֱ��way in which Sayaji Rao was plucked from obscurity to become one of India’s most powerful rulers was nothing short of a social experiment. ̽��ֱ��British selected him from a number of possible candidates related to the deposed Maharaja of Baroda, who in 1875 had been ousted by the British for alleged misrule. Sayaji Rao was judged to be the right age and, with no formal schooling, he represented an attractively blank slate.

“Education was central to Britain’s civilising mission in India,” says Segura-Garcia. “And the notion of education as a means of transformation was nothing new. By the early 19th century, the East India Company had begun subtly to alter the education of Indian princes. Motivated by the need to forge alliances with local allies, the Company singled out Indian aristocrats to prove that education had the power to civilise.”

̽��ֱ��most notable proponent of this view was Thomas Macaulay, an influential member of the East India Company. Macaulay argued for the creation, through the education of elites, of a class of ‘interpreters’ who would act as bridge between the Company and the millions it governed. He described such people as “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.

It was against this backdrop that Sayaji Rao arrived in the walled city Baroda and entered the privileged milieu of the court. He wasn’t entirely removed from his family circle, as he was accompanied by one of his brothers and by a cousin. He was adopted by the deposed Maharaja’s sister-in-law, with whom he had breakfast every day.

For the first few months of his schooling, the young Maharaja was given intensive tuition by two Indian teachers. When this failed to bring the desired results sufficiently quickly, the Resident – the British representative in Baroda – set up a small school that became known as the Prince’s School.

Crucially, the Resident hired a “British gentleman” to take charge of the prince’s education. ̽��ֱ��new tutor, Frederick Elliot, a graduate of Oxford, reported that his first impression of Sayaji Rao was not promising: the 12-year-old was, in his opinion, “apparently and actually dull”. Interestingly, tutor and pupil (and their respective wives) went on to form a genuine and lasting bond of friendship – a development that British administrators viewed with the utmost suspicion, and which hindered Elliot’s career in the Indian Civil Service.

In the households of Indian royal courts, children were traditionally brought up within the zenana, the women’s secluded inner quarters. ̽��ֱ��British took a dim view of an environment to which, as men, they had little access. They believed that Indian noblewomen were unintelligent and superstitious, which made them unfit to bring up young rulers.

Sayaji Rao’s days were structured by a relentless routine imposed by his tutor, who had to squeeze 12 years’ learning into half that time. ̽��ֱ��prince rose at 6am and exercised for two hours before breakfast. Six hours of lessons followed (sadly no detailed records of his curriculum have survived). Once the school day was over, there was more exercise and preparations for the next day’s studies.

̽��ֱ��choice to educate Sayaji Rao within court circles rather than send him to boarding school (where he might be exposed to undesirable influences, notably homosexuality) allowed his mentors to put him on display in Baroda as a young ruler undergoing an education that incorporated elements of both Indian and British traditions.

Each morning the teenage Maharaja was taken, accompanied by a military escort, from the royal palace to the Prince’s School, on the edge of the city – a daily and highly public reminder of his presence and the power invested in him. Sayaji Rao was fond of riding and took part in the traditional aristocratic pursuit of hunting – an opportunity to show off his physical prowess from the back of a horse and exhibit his mastery over nature.

Elliot noted that his protégé learnt slowly but fortunately he “refused to forget much of anything which he has once learnt”. When, as an adult, Sayaji Rao was asked about his education, he remembered the “good and useful books” in the palace library (which housed more than 20,000 volumes) which he read “devoutly and zealously” to acquire as much knowledge as possible.

In 1881, Sayaji Rao reached the age of 18; his formal education ended and he assumed full ruling powers of the state of Baroda. Six years later, he took an initial European tour – and later travelled widely in North America, East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In all, from 1887 until his death in 1939 he undertook 28 overseas trips that ranged in duration from eight to 14 months – an astonishing achievement even at a time when major Indian rulers were becoming very well-travelled.

Becoming increasingly independent of his British minders, Sayaji Rao made use of the intellectual capital afforded by his education to develop far-ranging links that sometimes bolstered and sometimes worked against the interests of the British empire. “ ̽��ֱ��British hoped that Sayaji Rao would be a poster boy for colonial India,” says Segura-Garcia. “But, thanks to his education, he was more than that: during his travels he met with, and supported, the Indian exiles who were actively resisting British colonialism.”

Teresa Segura-Garcia will talk about ‘Princely education in India in the age of colonialism: the education of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda, 1875-81’ at 5pm tomorrow (1 June 2016) in Seminar Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT. All welcome.

As they struggled to maintain their grip on India as the jewel in the colonial crown, the British attempted to mould the character of India’s princes. Research by Teresa Segura-Garcia into the remarkable story of Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja of Baroda, reveals the thinking behind his education and its practical implications. She presents her work in a talk tomorrow (1 June 2016).

̽��ֱ��British knew that the future ruler of a state as powerful and wealthy as Baroda needed to follow Indian traditions of kingship and to be highly visible in the environment he was destined to rule over.

Teresa Segura-Garcia

Bourne & Shepherd, Album of portraits and views in Baroda, Photo 30/(19) © ̽��ֱ��British Library Board

Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda, aged twelve, November 1875

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Package tour to Mecca? How the Hajj became an essential part of the British calendar

tdk25 — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 07:10:47 +0000

Modern customers are more likely to book seven nights in Tenerife or a last-minute deal in the Algarve, but back in the 19th century, Thomas Cook’s premier package tour was a pilgrimage to Mecca.

In the 1880s, Britain’s colonial Government in India found itself under fire. With more of its Muslim subjects than ever before travelling to the Arabian Holy City to perform the annual pilgrimage known as the Hajj, concern about the exploitation and insanitary conditions that the journey often involved had reached breaking point.

Facing media outrage, the British authorities decided to call in the professionals. Thomas Cook & Son, the original package holiday entrepreneurs, were approached – and promptly became the official travel agents for the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam.

̽��ֱ��story is one of many captured in a new study of Britain’s relationship with the Hajj during the age of Empire, written by Dr John Slight, from the Faculty of History and a Research Fellow at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Contrary to its remote, even exotic image, he argues that the pilgrimage, which millions of Muslims are undertaking from September 20 – 25 this year, was a matter of major British concern. Leading historical figures, and the general public, became fascinated by the ritual, as the business of running a vast Empire impelled Britain to behave as if it was a Muslim power in its own right.

̽��ֱ��book reveals that Queen Victoria, King George V, Lord Kitchener, Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill all took an active interest in the Hajj, debated its management, and pencilled it into their calendars. ̽��ֱ��pilgrimage even made its way into a Sherlock Holmes adventure, a Joseph Conrad novel, and inspired Britons across the Empire to convert to Islam.

Britain’s relationship with the Hajj is a topic that has not been fully studied by historians before. Slight’s research covered a period from 1865, when a cholera outbreak forced Britain to manage the Hajj more pro-actively, to 1956, when the Suez Crisis significantly reduced its capacity to do so.

For most of that time, Britain ruled over approximately half of the world’s Muslims, across an area that stretched from West Africa to Southeast Asia. In global terms, the Empire’s first religion was Islam, and the Empire contained more Muslims than any other religious group.

As a result, the Hajj – a mandatory religious act that must be carried out at least once in the lifetimes of all adult Muslims capable of doing so – became a British question. Churchill himself observed in a 1920 memo to the British Cabinet: “We are the greatest Mohammedan power in the world. It is our duty to study policies which are in harmony with Mohammedan feeling.”

Slight’s research reveals that Britain’s stewardship of the Hajj started with controls to prevent disease, but soon expanded into a full-blown bureaucracy. By the mid-to-late 19th century, the British authorities were increasingly obliged to manage the pilgrimage so as to be seen as a friend and protector of Islam.

“It was one of the most significant unintended consequences of Britain’s rule over a large part of the Islamic world,” Slight said. “Britain ended up facilitating the pilgrimage in an ultimately futile attempt to gain legitimacy among its Muslim subjects. Inadvertently, it ended up acting like a Muslim power.”

Slight found that a preoccupation with the Hajj went right to the top of the British State. Queen Victoria took a personal interest, for instance, after meeting some South African pilgrims. In 1898 she exhorted the British ambassador in Istanbul to urge the Ottoman Sultan, who controlled Mecca, to address the ill-treatment of British Muslim subjects who were performing their sacred duty.

Later, amid war with the Ottomans in 1915, Lord Kitchener stressed to the British War Committee the need to secure the “Mahommedan Holy Places” and with them British prestige in the eyes of its Muslim subjects. King George V also devised a scheme to arrange for Indian Muslim soldiers to perform Hajj on their way home after the First World War, intended to be a PR triumph, but the scheme had mixed results when the participants got into fights with the local Bedouins.

Thomas Cook was called in by the Government in 1886, after a scandal surrounding the near-sinking of a pilgrim ship that made the front page of ̽��ֱ��Times. ̽��ֱ��firm was given a contract to arrange tickets, train journeys, ships and other logistics enabling Muslims living in India, as subjects of the British Crown, to perform Hajj.

By 1893, however, the firm had made such a loss that it chose to pull out. “Some government officials said I am powerless to make any improvement,” John Mason Cook, Thomas’ son, remarked. “I reminded them that government officials have been to a great extent powerless in relation to that pilgrimage.”

His comments reflect one of Slight’s major findings, which concerns the little-studied, hundreds of thousands of destitute, “pauper” pilgrims, who made Hajj. Barely able to go in the first place, many of these people ran out of money by the time they reached Mecca and were stranded at the nearby port of Jeddah. Repatriating them proved an ongoing problem for the Empire and, Slight says, illustrates the limits of its power.

By the First World War, Britain was essentially underwriting the cost of taking these pilgrims home, at great expense. A system of IOU forms was attempted, but reclaiming the outlay frequently proved a forlorn hope. Slight’s search through the archives revealed that many illiterate pilgrims signed with thumb prints, others gave false names, or even fabricated the name of the village where they lived. ̽��ֱ��IOUs were rarely repaid.

̽��ֱ��plight of poor pilgrims also hastened efforts to employ more Muslims, capable of handling their needs, in the Hajj bureaucracy. By 1887, Bombay had its own Pilgrim Department, staffed by Muslims, and run by a Muslim “protector of pilgrims”. By the 1930s, the British consulate at Jeddah was so reliant on Muslim staff that the consul remarked that he never saw much of the pilgrimage at all.

“We have the idea that the British Empire was run through some sort of top-down imposition of power, but in fact it was a very haphazard enterprise,” Slight said. “Instead of an image of British officials in their pith helmets dispensing justice to colonial subjects, this is a story where the main actors on both sides were Muslims, who to some extent shaped Imperial policy.”

One effect of Britain’s role as a “Muslim power” was that other Britons were inspired to perform Hajj or convert to Islam. ̽��ֱ��most famous was the Victorian explorer, Richard Burton, who travelled to Mecca, which was out-of-bounds to non-Muslims, disguised as an Afghan physician. Arthur Hamilton, also known as “Hajji Hamilton”, was director of the Political Intelligence Bureau in British Malaya and who went in 1927, is one of several eminent converts also recorded in the book.

Additional images: A Mecca pilgrimage ticket published by Thomas Cook & Son in 1886 / Title page from a Mecca pilgrimage booklet published by the company. Both images reproduced by permission of the Thomas Cook Archive.

Following the events in Mecca on Thursday 24th September, Dr John Slight discussed the complexity of managing the mass ritual in an article for the Independent. You can read the article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/hajj-stampede-managing-this-...

This week, millions of Muslims make the annual pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj. A new study reveals how, in the age of Empire, the spiritual journey became a major feature of British imperial culture, attracting the interest of Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and others – and resulting in one of the earliest Thomas Cook package tours.

Britain ended up facilitating the pilgrimage in an ultimately futile attempt to gain legitimacy among its Muslim subjects. Inadvertently, it ended up acting like a Muslim power.

John Slight

Wikimedia Commons

Pilgrims at the Masjid al-Haram on Hajj in 2008

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How the British treated 'hardcore' Mau Mau women

mjg209 — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��research, published in the Journal of Eastern African Studies, was conducted by Gates Cambridge Scholar Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and is the first study to make use of new material on a camp in Gitamayu used to hold "hardcore" female detainees.

̽��ֱ��treatment of the Mau Mau by the British has led to compensation claims in the courts. Last year the British government agreed to pay out £19.9m in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising in the 50s. Two of those involved in the recent case were women and further female compensation cases are pending.

Bruce-Lockhart is interested in the treatment of "hardcore" Mau Mau women in the final years of the Emergency Period, one that was marked by uncertainty, violence and an increasing reliance on ethno-psychiatry.

From 1954 to 1960, the British detained approximately 8,000 women under the Emergency Powers imposed to combat the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. ̽��ֱ��majority of female detainees were held in Kamiti Detention Camp and its importance has been widely acknowledged by historians. However, new documentary evidence released from the Hanslope Park Archive since 2011 has revealed the existence of a second camp established for women at Gitamayu, created in 1958 in order to deal with the remaining “hardcore” female detainees.

̽��ֱ��Archive contains over 1,500 files and was uncovered in 2011 by historians working on the London High Court case between the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Kenyan plaintiffs who were held in detention camps during the Emergency Period. ̽��ֱ��files were considered too sensitive to fall into the hands of the Kenyan government, and were taken out of Kenya by the British prior to independence. ̽��ֱ��files have been pivotal in the London High Court Case, as their contents show how senior British officials sanctioned the use of systematic force against Mau Mau detainees in the camps, stretching the legal limits of legitimate violence. ̽��ֱ��documents relating to Kamiti and Gitamayu reveal how this systematic use of violence was extended to hardcore women and the multiple ways colonial officials tried to hide it.

̽��ֱ��intensity of this struggle with hardcore detainees, and the trajectory it took, has been overlooked by previous scholarly works on Mau Mau women, which have provided a general overview of female involvement in the movement, as well as their detention at Kamiti. Much more is known about hardcore men, who have authored over a dozen Mau Mau memoirs and are the subject of extensive scholarly analysis. ̽��ֱ��stories and identities of these men, from Jomo Kenyatta to J.M. Kariuki, are well known. ̽��ֱ��hardcore male camps, such as Manyani, Athi River, and Hola, are remembered as the sites of intense struggles between detainees and warders. Recent work from historian David Anderson has detailed the British policy toward hardcore males, which became more brutal and systematic from 1957 onwards.

Bruce-Lockhart says: "In contrast, the history of women's detention has not been investigated in detail, especially in the latter years of the Emergency Period. Women's punishment broadly followed a pattern similar to that of their male counterparts, with increasing severity of treatment characterising the final phase of incarceration as the British endeavored to compel inmates to confess their crimes. But the story of the female detainees at Gitamayu and Kamiti also reveals unique elements that were determined by colonial ideas about female deviancy, these ultimately becoming the defining feature of incarceration for Mau Mau's hardcore women.

" ̽��ֱ��Hanslope archives reveal the strategies that the colonial administration employed to deal with hardcore women in the late 1950s. Whereas previously there was an assumption that women were malleable and could be easily persuaded away from the Mau Mau cause this expectation greatly diminished during this time, and was replaced with a discourse of madness, as certain elements of the colonial administration pressed for hardcore women to be classified as insane. This move was instrumental rather than genuine, meant to explain away women's physical ailments in order to cover up mistreatment in the camp."

She adds: "Debates about how to deal with this group of women engaged and perplexed the highest levels of the colonial administration, generating tensions between legal, political, and medical officials. At the centre of these debates was the question of the female detainees' sanity, with some officials pressing for these women to be classified as insane. Examining the British approach to these detainees illuminates how ideas about gender, deviancy, and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment."

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New research on the treatment of 'hardcore' female Mau Mau prisoners by the British in the late 1950s sheds new light on how ideas about gender, deviancy and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment.

̽��ֱ��story of the female detainees at Gitamayu and Kamiti also reveals unique elements that were determined by colonial ideas about female deviancy, these ultimately becoming the defining feature of incarceration for Mau Mau's hardcore women.

Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

AJ Tattersall

Mau Mau gang

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