The British in India formed a broad subject the parameters of which may seem clear enough at first glance, but which are in fact so multi-dimensional that it has been an academic area of interest in several quite distinct disciplines: history certainly, but also anthropology, literature, music, and the histories of the visual arts too – architecture, painting, photography and cinema. All have explored the complex relationships that have linked the British with Indians over recent centuries, through government, religion, scholarship, writing, theatre, tourism, even emigration and intermarriage.

There is no need to rehearse here the voluminously documented history of the relationship between two countries whose capitals lie some 4,200 miles apart. What this article does try to do is to fill in some local details; for, as a general impression, we can say that "the British in India" have been a social category there for the past couple of centuries without being much tied down by time and place. The point is that whether the British went to India as soldiers or as government servants, or just as family members of these men, they could be posted anywhere. A century ago, for example, you could find high-level police officers by the name of Cunliffe in Madras and in the Punjab, but not elsewhere. Every few years District Collectors were moved around from one city to another, and while all of them prior to 1947 would have been well-educated British males of the upper middle class, in individual cases they could turn out to be Scottish or Irish, Methodist or Catholic, graduates from Oxford or from Dublin; in other words, competent people of rather diverse backgrounds pursuing what they took to be a useful and fruitful life's career.

The recent publication of the Encyclopaedia of the Nilgiri Hills (Hockings, 2012*) throws much light on the day-to-day interactions between British officials, residents, planters and churchmen on the one hand, and the panoply of castes, tribes, and religious affiliations on the other. And what emerges from a study of this one small hill district in South India is just how deeply Europeans of all sorts became embedded in Indian society in pre-Independence times. They did not abandon their Western culture, their beliefs and biases, but did modify their habits greatly as they adjusted to life in these hills. The Encyclopaedia names the individuals and outlines their lives to provide details of the ordinary Europeans who made their homes in the Nilgiri Hills or who just came for a pleasant, extended stay during The Season in the mild climate here – and there were some not-so-ordinary Europeans too. At various times the hills were home to the rather notorious soldier-adventurer Sir Richard Burton who wrote his first book there; to Sir Neville Chamberlain, uncle of a future British Prime Minister and the inventor of the game of snooker (at the Ooty Club); to Johannes Hesse, the lacklustre evangelical father of the brilliant Hermann Hesse; and to Sir Ronald Ross, who discovered here the link between the Plasmodium parasite and malarial mosquitoes that soon won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And there were hundreds of other well-known short-term visitors too: Madame Blavatsky, Pandit Nehru, Nikita Khrushchev, Annie Besant, Madame Montessori, Sir Edward Arnold, Mahatma Gandhi, Edward Lear, Jiddu Krishnamurti, among many others.

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Who the British actually were is a slippery and rather unacademic topic that has been distorted in the minds of Indians, Westerners, and television producers alike, in favour of an image of paternalistic and distant rulers belonging to what some of them thought was "a master race". This was in pre-Independence days, of course. The view has been supported over the years by the practice of hundreds of senior officials or army officers writing their autobiographies or memoirs of their time in India late in their lives. We know that the British were a society organised into social classes with fairly rigid differentiations. However, while the content as well as the status of these classes, at least prior to 1939, was clear enough in Britain itself, the situation in India was much less clear, because of the contrast between the highly visible official ranks and the lower, unheralded, ordinary British who lived in all parts of India as shopkeepers, railway personnel, private soldiers, or retirees.

If we focus on a single district out in the mofussil (which is Hindi and Arabic for the boondocks, I suppose), we would usually find, in the period of British hegemony, just one or two dozen British people holding down a wide variety of pedestrian jobs until they could "go home" (as they fondly put it). Their numbers were so small that a picture of the class structure in any one district would be too uncertain to pontificate upon. Not so the Nilgiris District, however, for while this was an untypically small area of just under a thousand square miles it had a substantial European population for well over a century, from 1820 to 1950. Several of the censuses make this clear: in 1871, for example, the district held 1,339 Europeans, mainly British; in 1891 the number was 1,795; in 1911 it had become 4,627; and in 1931 the figure was 3,246. Comparable figures for the Eurasians (as they were then called) or Anglo-Indians in these four census years were 796, 1,237, 1,333 and 1,628 respectively. Taken together, their numbers were sufficient to support a depiction of the European class structure of what was indeed a stable, alien population.

Ootacamund was not only the largest of the five towns in the Nilgiris (the others, in order of size, being Coonoor, Kotagiri, Wellington and Gudalur), it was also for some seventy years the summer capital of the Madras Presidency, and was in those months flush with officials of every stripe, from the Governor on down. Ootacamund thus came to be the home of upper administration ICS officers and retired military personnel. Coonoor was much more the home of tradesmen ('boxwallahs') and planter society. Kotagiri, which was always quiet and slightly more remote, was the retreat of missionaries and retired churchmen. Wellington was a big military cantonment. So geography fostered a sort of lateral ranking of the British residents. But behind this lay a real class structure that was held together by agreed-up and long-held understandings about a person's obligations and his or her position in society.

(To be continued)

*Encyclopaedia of the Nilgiri Hills. (2 volumes. Edited by Paul Hockings. Manohar Publishers, New Delhi. 2012.)