Customer Reviews

A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent 1765-1856

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This book by K.K. Dyson (a British scholar hailing from India, I understand) is an analysis of the attitudes, opinions and lifestyles of British men and women in India from the period of Clive's rule in India to just before the Mutiny. Why start at 1765? I am not really sure, except that this might have been the starting point of one of the diarists and memoirists.

The book draws upon some famous British figures - Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta and a minor poet; Eliza Fay, a contemporary of Warren Hastings; and Richard Burton, the travellor, author, and so forth. There are diaries and memoirs kept by military men, by administrators, by their wives, and by clergymen. There is considerably more material available post-1818, than for the period before then.

This review will confine itself to a general description. The book is not divided into time periods (as far as I could tell) but by the diarists and memoirists and the time they spent in India. Thus Fay comes early in the book, Heber in the middle, and Burton towards the end. Dyson does try to break up each section by analyzing not just the authors' impressions of India (the sights, the festivals, the people) but also their attitudes towards Indians and the growing Eurasian community. Some of this comes across more clearly than others, because of the nature of the material available.

The semi-chronological nature of the book allows the casual reader to understand how British views of India changed across time. However, this same method of analysis means that the views of different memoirists across time cannot be contrasted on a particular subject. For example, how did Eliza Fay's attitudes towards the status of native (Indian) women compare to the attitudes of male memoirists in the same period, or in a different period? That is not really addressed in this book, although Dyson does provide biographical sketches of the principal memoirists selected with some reference to their background, their education, and their expectations of India. [The attitudes of young society ladies visiting a relative in India was very different from the attitudes of a missionary's wife].

One problem I had with this book was a failure to provide an appendix listing all the major diarists and memoirists whose materials were used, together with biographical sketches. Given that Dyson provided two other appendices (of extracts from memoirs, letters and diaries), I might be asking too much. But this would have helped understand why some diarists were chosen and others omitted, and which diarists or memoirists made an impact on the reader back in England via publication.