- South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870–1950: A Sourcebook ed. by Ruvani Ranasinha
The appearance of this document collection is a major event in the historiography of global imperial Britain. For someone like me, who started in the field of multiracial British history thirty years ago—when all that existed on the subject between covers was Rozina Visram’s pioneering Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (Pluto, 1986)—the book is both welcome and long overdue. The organizers have gathered a wide range of documents that testify to the relentless, restless presence of people of South Asian origin in Britain proper. The archive they have selected captures the range of experiences and contributions that diasporic Indians made to the making of greater Britain between the 1870s and 1950, which was arguably the most significant extended moment of “empire at home” in the modern period. Scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will find evidence of the empire’s domestic influence in matters large and small. From the battlefields of France to the East End docks, from the war cabinet to the kitchen cabinet, from the stage to the street—Indians were there, whether traveling through, studying, settling, or claiming their right to equal citizenship. Taken together, the documents collected here illustrate the demographic impact of colonial migration and mobility on Britain in ways that are made accessible to students at all levels of the curriculum and to readers in the general public as well. [End Page 181] In that sense, the volume is both a capstone and a jumping-off point—the grounds for a whole new set of histories of Indians in Britain.
Just as notable is the obvious care with which the volume has been assembled. Edited by Ruvani Ranasinha, it has in-depth introductory essays authored by Rehana Ahmed, Sumita Mukherjee, and Florian Stadtler. Each does a tremendous job of setting up the documents in the specific subsections (citizenship, war, literature and the arts, and spectacle). And each synthesizes the growing body of work that has emerged in the field over the past three decades, situating documents in their complex historical context and offering interpretive direction to readers and especially to teachers of the volume. This feature, together with the thoughtful introduction by Elleke Boehmer and Susheila Nasta and the equally reflective final essay by Rozina Visram herself, means that the book feels as much “curated” as “collected.” This effect is, in turn, the result of the book’s origins. It’s one of several book productions to have emerged from an Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant, “Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870–1950” (full disclosure: I attended and presented at the main conference in fall 2010). These origins help to give the collection its spine: It revolves around a fully elaborated, multipronged commitment to extending our understanding of the history of imperial Britain and the role of Indians in its unfolding in the pre-post-colonial period. An enormous and equally carefully curated database is one other notable result of this project (http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/asianbritain/making-britain/making-britain-database). Readers of the edited collection will want to make use of it as they peruse the various sources collected here, as it is a wonderful visual and spatial companion to the stories this archive tells.
The collection itself has photographs, some of which will be familiar and others, like the one of the Indian family standing by their air raid shelter in Hither Green in 1917 on the cover, will be a revelation. Beyond the sheer richness of the sources themselves, what’s appealing about this collection is its rhetorical intentionality. Not content for it to be merely a compilation, the editor and contributors are clear about their conviction that the archives they have curated compel new narratives of local, national, imperial, and global history—not just about or for people of South Asian origin but for “native” Britons of all kinds...