Gender and Violence in British India - by R McLain (Hardcover)

About the Book

"By the outbreak of the Great War, conventional wisdom in the British Empire held that the Briton alone possessed the 'manly' traits of logic and self-control necessary for good governance. Coupled with this was the belief that India's western-educated nationalist elite suffered from a crippling effeminacy of body and mind that precluded political power and independence. During the First World War, however, the colony sent over one million troops abroad to fight, fundamentally upsetting this symmetry and allowing Indian nationalists to challenge the tenets of colonial masculinity. What had been a moment of imperial unity in 1914 deteriorated into an increasingly bitter dispute over the relationship between 'native' effeminacy and India's postwar fitness for self-rule. In this groundbreaking, carefully argued study, author Robert McLain demonstrates that this dispute assumed a rhetorical ferocity that culminated in the actual physical violence of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, when British led troops shot hundreds of unarmed Indian civilians. In this way, the Empire's reliance on gender as an ideological apparatus was deeply interwoven with the use of violence as an inherent and persistent feature of imperial power"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In British India, the years during and following World War I saw imperial unity deteriorate into a bitter dispute over "native" effeminacy and India's postwar fitness for self-rule. This study demonstrates that increasingly ferocious dispute culminated in the actual physical violence of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919.

About the Author

Robert McLain is Associate Professor of History at California State University Fullerton, USA.