Crossing the seas: Problems and possibilities for queen Victoria’s Indian subjects

Abstract

Several years ago I stood on the shore at Cochin, an ancient port south of Bombay, and looked out across the Arabian sea towards the Arabian peninsula, and it became abundantly clear from the many craft, old and new in their design, that this was a gateway, and that the sea was a highway as much as a boundary. Many rulers of India and historians of the subcontinent have assumed that the Indian subcontinent is above all a great land mass - the size of Europe without Russia - and that control of India means control of land. This was not surprising as most premodern invaders made their way into India by land from the north. Even the British, above all a seafaring people, whose control of India depended on their global supremacy at sea, assumed that the heart of India was its villages, and that control of land and its resources, and alliances with groups who controlled those who laboured on the land, were the key to their empire. Moreover, they assumed that most Indians were a sedentary, settled people, tied to their natal villages by bonds of livelihood and emotion. Even as late as 1921 one of the most important European Indian civil servants involved in producing the decennial census that year drew on this long-held imperial assumption and noted ‘the home-loving character of the Indian people, which is the result of economic and social causes, and of the immobility of an agricultural population rooted to the ground, fenced in by caste, language and social customs and filled with an innate dread of change of any kind.’1.