ERH303WX-01 Empire Writing Assignment – Historical Trauma, Memory, and Fiction

British Rule and Indian Culture

During the peak of the British Empire, Britain’s rule extended all across the globe. The phrase that modern people know today, “the sun never sets on the British Empire”, truly applied back then and was not just a saying – it was the truth. With this extensive rule across the lands and being the highest in command, the British people started to see themselves as simply higher up on the totem pole than the countries they conquered, whom they deemed “inferior” to themselves. The most advanced in technology, the most educated, the most powerful of all the nations, Britain looked at countries such as India with feelings of prejudice and pride, and took it upon themselves to conform these societies to the British structure as much as possible.

When it came to depicting India in media outlets, advertisements, and even in children’s storybooks, the British, possibly unintentionally, had a way of describing Indians that modern society would coin racist to say the least. One example being “Pears’ Soap”, a popular soap brand in Britain, would use Indian people in their advertisements. In the ad, it shows a dark skinned Indian hopping into a tub of water, using Pears’ Soap, and upon exiting the tub is a miraculous, gleaming white skin color. The advertisement even states “The first step towards lightening ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is through the virtues of cleanliness.” This literally states that the British not only believe the Indians to be a filthy, ignorant people, but that going along with the changing of the skin color, they believe that anyone of dark skin color is dirty and lacking virtue.

Another example of a flawed depiction of Indians in popular culture is found in the children’s storybook, An ABC, for Baby Patriots (1899). The title alone is telling of how nationalist this storybook is, and a look inside its pages will only confirm one’s presumption. Each page, containing a letter for the child to pronounce and learn, is propaganda for supporting the British Militia. When the reader gets to the letter “I” however, the letter “I” is for “India” where a very stereotypical and prejudiced drawing of the land of India is shown. A British man is depicted vacationing in the land, is laying in a carriage on top of an elephant (an animal of Africa, not of India), and is being fanned off by a man in a turban. This shows how little the British thought of Indians at the time, even alluding them almost to the level of slaves in this depiction.

Along with looking down upon the Indian peoples in a prejudiced sense, the British also saw them as literally an inferior race, a group of savage people needing order and education. Because of this, the British took it upon themselves to send missionaries and volunteer time to go over to India and try to conform the people to the British style of living, because in their minds if they’ve conquered half the world’s countries, they must be the supreme race. It was an extremely flawed view, as they were being very condescending to these people they were teaching, as if they were animals, when the Indians had been around for thousands of years with their own culture and own styles of living. Rudyard Kipling, a British poet at the time, has a very famous poem in relation to this era, titled, “White Man’s Burden.” This is essentially how the British thought of this situation, as a burden they must deal with, a burden they put upon themselves, because they are the supreme race of Whites and must save these “inferior colored people.”

In conclusion, the British, the high horsed, oh-so-smart people they believed to be, were absolutely wrong and awful to think of the Indian people in this fashion. They had such a flawed view of reality after being what they considered the greatest people for such a long period of time, that it was not until they were humbled by other growing countries, like the United States, that they got put back in their place and realized that other ways of living may just be suitable as well. The British in the peak of the British Empire saw themselves as the supreme people, with an extremely prideful and prejudiced view to the people they conquered.

 

Work Cited/Help Received

Ames, Ernest. An ABC for Baby Patriots: Old House Books, 2010.

Boehmer, Elleke, and Rudyard Kipling. “The White Man’s Burden (1899).” Empire Writing: an Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870-1918, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 273–274.

Pears’ Soap Advertisement given out in class

 

Help Received:

  • In-class discussion
  • Sources listed above
  • Easybib.com

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