I'd read somewhere a long time ago that apparently there were Indian prostitutes hired specifically to serve British soldiers during colonial India.
Is that true? How long was this practice going on?
I've tried looking up details of this online but wasn't sure how legitimate or accurate the information was.
Was there any concern about the state facilitating a potentially exploitative industry? It seems quite noticeable to me that the practice ended in colonial territory (French Guiana is technically a région of France but it's a relic of the empire) nearly 20 years after ending in the metropole. Why'd that happen?
I have been interested in Wargaming ever since I can remember but I can not find any starting points. I am interested in playing Colonial Period of India. I need some general guide to wargaming and then some specific wargaming guide for the period of interest. I also need some recommendations for terrain and figures.
I want to read up more on the supposed historiographical debate on this topic, but I don't even know how to learn more, so I was hoping I could be corrected that there is no serious debate, or directed to some literature about it at least.
Basically I want to read something set in real historical setting preferably set in pre partition India or set during partition of colonial India into India and Pakistan. books set in colonial India would also work
I apologize for grammar mistakes, English is not my first language
Hey, I have a seminar project going on, which in one chapter I talk about the hijras in pre colonial India. I read some university papers and some education sites which are from the Federal Agency for Civil Education. My problem is that these two contradicting each other a little. They contradict each other especially by the definition what a Hijra actually is. On the Federal Agency of Civil Education's website, they say, hijras are more like (for better understanding) a intersexual, while the university papers definition sounds like they are transgender/non-binary. That project is very important and I'm afraid if I write down false information. And in general I don't know which papers I should trust more or not
One of the most common criticism of Hinduism is the "caste system". which is often refuted by the claim that caste system (at least in the form we know it today) is a British construct ? How true is the claim?
I’m interested in reading something that really makes you feel like you’re there and shares the love of India set at this point in time.
Bonus points for nonfiction memoirs or contemporaneous fiction from someone who actually lived there at the time. British perspective is okay, but I’d be especially interested in something from the POV of an Indian person. I also always find the female perspective interesting in historical works.
(Colonial might be a dirty word here and French Guiana is techincally a région of France but it's a relic of the empire)
I was talking with my mother about my grandmother's life in India. She was raised in a town called Poona (now Pune) and had a fortuitious upbringing. British serving military and officers had decent living conditions in India at the time, and it wasn't unheard of that they had servants too if they were raising a family of their own. I was only 12 when my Grandmother passed away, and she was like a second mother to me. As an adult I ache of what I could have learned of her experiences in her life (she at one time worked in a bomb manufacturing factory during WW2).
However she did impart quite a few stories to my mother (her daughter). They had quite a religious upbringing, even more so my Great Grandparents and their family in which religion had an even stricter imposition on their early life.My great-grandfather in 1911, a Sgt Major in the Royal Horse Artillery Division
Story 1: My grandmother remembered that when she was around 6 or 7, there were many mirrors around the house, but at one point her mother started covering them. Unsure of the reason, she decided one afternoon while playing with her dolls to take down the silk covering the mirror in her mother's bedroom. She carried on playing with her dolls and at one point turned to the mirror and laughed because she could see a multitude of violets being thrown in the reflection of the mirror. Thinking it was someone playing a trick on her, she turned round but nothing was there. Then she turned back again and they were still falling down in the mirror in her words like a confetti explosion. She ran downstairs and gleefully told her father who at once told her sternly not to touch the coverings.
The following morning the family awoke to find that the servants had all vacated the property. This was highly unusual and a few hours later one of the servants arrived to tell them that something terrible had been witnessed by many of them. My grandmother never elaborated on what they saw, but as soon as my grandfather heard he went straight upstairs and on a hunch started knocking on the walls. It wasn't long before the knocks turned into the sound of hollow thuds.
He instructed one of the servants to fetch some heavy duty tools and then started breaking into the wall. Shocked gasps were uttered by the whole room as the clay and mortar broke away to reveal a skeleton in a sari. They carefully extracted the remains and my great grandfather reported it at once to h
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