Spatiality, Semiotics and the Cultural Shaping of Children: The Boarding School Experience in Colonial India, 1790‒1955

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the colonial boarding house in India, 1790–1955. It explores these highly exclusionary sites that reified the mostly malignant products of empire in terms of racial, gender and class outcomes. Two categories of boarding house are examined. The first category was that for elites, where the class-bound etiquettes and born-to-rule mentalities of the metropole were transferred and adapted to meet the expectations of a mostly expatriate parent community in India. The second category was for the ‘orphan’, often with parents still living. This was a much earlier colonial incarnation that strongly shaped the body of the disempowered and racialised the boarder recipient. At this level, the changing macro-agendas of empire concerning race and gender keenly intervened. These agendas were not cognisant of the futures of these anonymised yet captured children, nor were they philanthropic. These boarders usually slipped from view into destitution as they became adults. The chapter imagines the semiotics of these respective boarding house spaces. It explores the mechanisms for child inclusion and exclusion and how this was actualised through the social experiments that these children were unconsciously part of, as well as through the food that they ate and the religion that they followed.