Planters, Rubber, and the Lives Beyond the Cantonments There was a different kind of life lived on the edges of British India, far from the stations and the cantonments and the railway lines. It was the life of the planter, a man who held a…
One Family’s Witness In August 1946, as the British Raj entered its final months, a wave of communal killing swept through Bengal. In Calcutta, perhaps four thousand people died in four days of systematic violence, though some estimates put the number far higher. The event…
How the Lines Built the Anglo-Indian Community When the East India Railway ran its first train out of Howrah in 1854, no one could have imagined that this single line, climbing up the Ganges plain toward Delhi, would become the skeleton on which an entire…
Old passports are valuable family history records because they preserve much more than a person’s identity. They record where a person was living when the passport was issued, how they described themselves, and often where they travelled afterwards. My mother’s passport is important for another…
The history of ordinary families in the West Riding of Yorkshire is closely tied to the fortunes of local industry. For the Robinson family of Dodworth and Ardsley—ancestors of the present author—the domestic linen trade formed the central framework of economic life in the late…
My grandfather vanished. He walked out of his house in Madras one day and was never seen again. Someone said he was seen getting into a carriage with a young woman. Others thought he might have been mugged and murdered. My mother thought he had…
According to my grandmother, her father-in-law William Robinson had a falling out with one of the sons of his first marriage and this resulted in his will being contested. I’m not sure why anyone would want to contest a will like the one he left…
A silver-plated tea set has been in my family since the start of the 20th century (Figure 1). I will briefly examine its provenance and then discuss its personal and social significance. Finally, I will offer some thoughts about its possible future. The tea set…
A British Indian Passport and the Family Historian Old passports are among the most evocative family heirlooms. Birth certificates tell us when an ancestor entered the world and death certificates when they left it, but a passport captures a life in motion. It records where…
Our house in Wazir Munzil Road had a large garden and in the centre of the garden there was a bed of marigolds. Lying on my stomach in front of the marigolds I imagined them to be a forest, which indeed they were to a…