The British Political Agent as the Perennial Outsider: Paramountcy in the Rajputana States (original) (raw)

1990, Presented to the Annual Meetings of the American Historical Association, New York, NY, December 1990

Without exception, those Europeans who served in India during its brief period-just two hundred years-of British rule were-and remained-outsiders. Unlike India's Turkic conquers of several centuries before, the British never had to confront the Mongols sacking London (as they had Baghdad), severing thereby their external link with "home" and forcing the foreign rulers back upon their own Indic cultural resources. While the Gurhids, Khaljis, and their successors became increasingly "Indian", the British remained perpetual outsiders in an alien land where colonization on the Canadian, Australian, or South African model was discouraged consciously. Conceptually, these transient Anglo-Indians (in the earlier meaning) tried to make India somewhat less alien by imagining it into a cultural and historical reality of their own devising, creating thereby such dubious offspring as feudalism, communalism, "Martial Races", Curzonian orientalism, and a census-specific subcontinental incarnation of caste. Yet-as this panel addresses-there were within this imperial structure Europeans who were, even within the norms of Anglo-Indian society, special outsiders. There were some-perhaps many-British officials who we can readily imagine awakening early on some dark morning, asking themselves "Why are we here?", and being unable to return to sleep secure in an easy The research presented in this paper bas been supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Foreign Currency Program of the Smithsonian Institution.