The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre

The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre
Author: Michael Herbert Fisher
Publisher:
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

The descendent of European mercenaries and their Indian concubines, raised by a stepmother who began as a courtesan and became the Catholic ruler of a cosmopolitan kingdom, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre (1808-1851) defies all classification. Sombre took advantage of the sensual pleasures of privilege but lost his kingdom to the British. Exiled in London, he married the daughter of a Protestant viscount and bought himself election as an MP, only to be expelled for corruption. His treatment of his life led to his arrest as a Chancery 'lunatic'. Sombre then spent years trying to reclaim his sanity and fortune. In this captivating biography, Michael H. Fisher recovers Sombre's unconventional life and its implications for modern conceptions of race, privilege and empire.

Migration and Mental Health

Migration and Mental Health
Author: Marjory Harper
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137529687

The relationship between migration and mental health is controversial, contested, and pertinent. In a highly mobile world, where voluntary and enforced movements of population are increasing and likely to continue to grow, that relationship needs to be better understood, yet the terminology is often vague and the issues are wide-ranging. Getting to grips with them requires tools drawn from different disciplines and professions. Such a multidisciplinary approach is central to this book. Six historical studies are integrated with chapters by a theologian, geographer, anthropologist, social worker and psychiatrist to produce an evaluation that addresses key concepts and methodologies, and reflects practical involvement as well as academic scholarship. Ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, the book explores the causes of mental breakdown among migrants; the psychological changes stemming from their struggles with challenging life circumstances; and changes in medical, political and public attitudes and responses in different eras and locations.

Subaltern Lives

Subaltern Lives
Author: Clare Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 110701509X

This fascinating book uses biographical fragments to shed new light on colonial life and convictism in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean.

Wellingtons Dearest Georgy

Wellingtons Dearest Georgy
Author: Alice Marie Crossland
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1911397044

Using a wealth of unpublished sources, this book tells the story of Lady Georgiana Lennox and the unique friendship she cherished with the 1st Duke of Wellington. Georgy first met the Duke on his return from India when he was serving under her father the Duke of Richmond who was then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The Lennox family moved to Brussels in 1813 and Georgy's mother threw the now legendary Duchess of Richmond's Ball the night before the Battle of Waterloo. Georgy had a front row seat to the battle, and remained in Brussels afterwards to help the many wounded soldiers who returned from the front. Georgy was a beautiful and immensely popular young lady with many suitors during her youth. She and the Duke enjoyed a flirtatious early friendship, which blossomed into an intimate friendship in later years. At twenty-nine Georgy married the future 23rd Baron de Ros who became a diplomatic spy and later Governor of the Tower of London. Georgy had three children, and died at the impressive age of 96, by which time she was one of the last people alive who had been a personal friend of the Iron Duke.

Anglo-Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia

Anglo-Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia
Author: Uther Charlton-Stevens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2017-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131753834X

Anglo-Indians are a mixed-race, Christian and Anglophone minority community which arose in South Asia during the long period of European colonialism. An often neglected part of the British Raj, their presence complicates the traditional binary through which British imperialism is viewed – of ruler and ruled, coloniser and colonised. The book analyses the processes of ethnic group formation and political organisation, beginning with petitions to the East India Company state, through the Raj’s constitutional communalism, to constitution-making for the new India. It details how Anglo-Indians sought to preserve protected areas of state and railway employment amidst the growing demands of Indian nationalism. Anglo-Indians both suffered and benefitted from colonial British prejudices, being expected to loyally serve the colonial state as a result of their ties of kinship and culture to the colonial power, whilst being the victims of racial and social discrimination. This mixed experience was embodied in their intermediate position in the Raj’s evolving socio-racial employment hierarchy. The question of why and how a numerically small group, who were privileged relative to the great majority of people in South Asia, were granted nominated representatives and reserved employment in the new Indian Constitution, amidst a general curtailment of minority group rights, is tackled directly. Based on a wide range of source materials from Indian and British archives, including the Anglo-Indian Review and the debates of the Constituent Assembly of India, the book illuminatingly foregrounds the issues facing the smaller minorities during the drawn out process of decolonisation in South Asia. It will be of interest to students and researchers of South Asia, Imperial and Global History, Politics, and Mixed Race Studies.

Chinese and Indian Warfare - From the Classical Age to 1870

Chinese and Indian Warfare - From the Classical Age to 1870
Author: Kaushik Roy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 623
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 131758709X

This book examines the differences and similarities between warfare in China and India before 1870, both conceptually and on the battlefield. By focusing on Chinese and Indian warfare, the book breaks the intellectual paradigm requiring non-Western histories and cultures to be compared to the West, and allows scholarship on two of the oldest civilizations to be brought together. An international group of scholars compare and contrast the modes and conceptions of warfare in China and India, providing important original contributions to the growing study of Asian military history.

An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad

An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad
Author: Benjamin B. Cohen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2019-07-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674987659

The dramatic story of Mehdi Hasan and Ellen Donnelly, whose marriage convulsed high society in nineteenth-century India and whose notorious trial and fall reverberated throughout the British Empire, setting the benchmark for Victorian scandals. In April 1892, a damning pamphlet circulated in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, the capital of the largest and wealthiest princely state in the British Raj. An anonymous writer charged Mehdi Hasan, an aspiring Muslim lawyer from the north, and Ellen Donnelly, his Indian-born British wife, with gross sexual misconduct and deception. The scandal that ensued sent shock waves from Calcutta to London. Who wrote this pamphlet, and was it true? Mehdi and Ellen had risen rapidly among Hyderabad’s elites. On a trip to London they even met Queen Victoria. Not long after, a scurrilous pamphlet addressed to “the ladies of Hyderabad” charged the couple with propagating a sham marriage for personal gain. Ellen, it was claimed, had been a prostitute, and Mehdi was accused of making his wife available to men who could advance his career. To avenge his wife and clear his name, Mehdi filed suit against the pamphlet’s printer, prompting a trial that would alter their lives. Based on private letters, courtroom transcripts, secret government reports, and scathing newspaper accounts, Benjamin Cohen’s riveting reconstruction of the couple’s trial and tribulations lays bare the passions that ran across racial lines and the intimate betrayals that doomed the Hasans. Filled with accusations of midnight trysts and sexual taboos, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad is a powerful reminder of the perils facing those who tried to rewrite society’s rules. In the struggle of one couple, it exposes the fault lines that would soon tear a world apart.

Woman's Eye, Woman's Hand

Woman's Eye, Woman's Hand
Author: D. Fairchild Ruggles
Publisher: Zubaan
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9383074787

With independence, India experienced a dramatic social rupture but also a recuperation of political autonomy and a new sense of optimism that promised opportunities. The country became a crucible for experimentation in modern and utopian architecture with new buildings, cities and museums giving public face to the nation. Indian architects and architectural projects claimed international attention, and a generation of women entered professions such as architecture and design that had previously been closed to them. They emerged as a pronounced political force, and important patrons of art, architecture and public space. The mid-19th and 20th centuries saw a significant increase in women acting as arbiters of taste and shapers of the built environment. The emerging groups of female designers and female patrons were enabled by new norms for women. The essays in this volume address these developments, posing the important question: did, and do, women produce art and architecture that reflect a feminine perspective? How did women, otherwise invisible and denied attention in the public sphere, gain voice? The writers look at these questions through both the political frame of gender as well as through family lineage and dynastic connections, and their importance in women’s patronage of the arts. Published by Zubaan.

Indians in London

Indians in London
Author: Arup K. Chatterjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9354354092

In September 1600, Queen Elizabeth and London are made to believe that the East India Company will change England's fortunes forever. With William Shakespeare's death, the heart of Albion starts throbbing with four centuries of an extraordinary Indian settlement that Arup K. Chatterjee christens as Typogravia. In five acts that follow, we are taken past the churches destroyed by the fire of Pudding Lane; the late eighteenth-century curry houses in Mayfair and Marylebone; and the coming of Indian lascars, ayahs, delegates, students and lawyers in London. From the baptism of Peter Pope (in the year Shakespeare died) to the death of Catherine of Bengal; the chronicles of Joseph Emin, Abu Taleb and Mirza Ihtishamuddin to Sake Dean Mahomet's Hindoostane Coffee House; Gandhi's experiments in Holborn to the recovery of the lost manuscript of Tagore's Gitanjali in Baker Street; Jinnah's trysts with Shakespeare to Nehru's duels with destiny; Princess Sophia's defiance of the royalty to Anand establishing the Progressive Writers' Association in Soho; Aurobindo Ghose's Victorian idylls to Subhas Chandra Bose's interwar days; the four Indian politicians who sat at Westminster to the blood pacts for Pakistan; India in the shockwaves at Whitehall to India in the radiowaves at the BBC; the intrigues of India House and India League to hundreds of East Bengali restaurateurs seasoning curries and kebabs around Brick Lane... Indians in London is a scintillating adventure across the Thames, the Embankment, the Southwarks, Bloomsburys, Kensingtons, Piccadillys, Wembleys and Brick Lanes that saw a nation-a cultural, historical and literary revolution that redefined London over half a millennium of Indian migrations-reborn as independent India.

Working-Class Raj

Working-Class Raj
Author: Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2023-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009356585

Explores what happened to working-class men and women when they left Britain and travelled to India after the Rebellion of 1857.