An anglofied India?

[Norman]

You could have Bollywood with bagpipes...

Now this is a thought that truely shakes the foundations of the world.

 

[Faeelin]

Guys

How about that the EIC and later the British government don't discourage Christian evangelism and as a result there are large scale conversions from the lower castes and untouchables. Coupled with a continuation of the more flexible attitude to race by the earlier British rulers in the region.

Interesting, but how? (The race bit, I mean).

 

[Tom Veil]

Just a thought, is it plausable to have an anglofied India with "brown Englishmen" (a historicaly used term) as was envisioned by some?

If it is plausable what would need to be done to change history in this way, without changing history up to say the 1770's too much?

Frankly, when I visited the United Provinces a couple years ago, I was quite impressed with how English the place was already. Among the educated classes, the cultural differences between India and Britain today are not that much greater than the cultural differences between 1947 Britain and 2008 Britain. But there are a couple things that could have been done:

1. Encourage more local democracy & schools very early on. The British didn't because they were terrified about independence, but it could have had great short-term effects in undermining the power of India's independent states and long-term effects of creating an independent India whose working classes think more like Britain's working class.

2. Be quicker to punish the bad apples. Far too often, the message from Britain was that a little violence against the locals would be tolerated. But every incident made the popular support for independence stronger, and the willingness to understand British culture weaker.

3. Reform its own cultural sins. India in many ways had a much healthier, more modern attitude towards race and religion in the colonial period than the British did. I'm not saying India is not responsible for the sins of its modern-day religious strife, but if Britain's Post-WWII secularism and anti-racism had come about 50 years sooner, that just might have been enough to quell the Muslim separatist movement and make the common folk just as comfortable with secularism as the Congress bigwigs.

4. Better infrastructure. Britain did a ton to improve India's transport, water, and communications networks. But if it had done more, it would have been able to Anglicize even more of rural India.

The common thread: if Britain really wanted Indians to be more British, they should have treated the Indians more like fellow citizens. Is that historically possible? Yes, but not at all likely, because it demands a major cultural shift without the sense of extreme urgency that usually causes cultural shifts.

 

[stevep]

What if the English, sensing that the US will be a competitor-nation, chooses not to permit emigration of the Irish to the New World, and instead channels much of the 'excess population' caused by the potato famine into India along with many of the cpnvicts sent off to Australia? Perhaps not enitrely English (exactly), but the migrants would probably settle on English as a language of commerce. If the Irish are given favorable treatment, their families might be relatively large and within a generation they might form the basis of an anglo-leaning group.

Norman

I see a couple of problems with that. You would have to drastically change the attitude of the British ruling elite at that time as they were so tightly bound to laisse faire and minimal government.

Also I think there was a pretty high death rate on the emigration ships of the time. Don't forget this was before regular steam ships across the Atlantic and took a long time in pretty unsanitary ships. If you make the trip 3-4 times as long and include passage through the tropics not only will you make it considerably more expensive but death tolls will be even higher, probably by a sizeable amount. This could reduce the population growth of the US a little, until other immigrants move in, but is unlikely to have much of a demographic impact on India.

Furthermore what there is, is unlikely to be that favourable to the empire. Forced to go through such a long voyage to a distant land with a greatly different culture, in which there is already a high population of natives the Irish and convicts are unlikely to feel that friendly. Nor are the native population with such desperate refugees dumped on them.

Steve

 

[stevep]

Interesting, but how? (The race bit, I mean).

Faeelin

That's possibly the most difficult bit. Maintaining the 18thC attitude. Has been suggested that when the growing number of soldiers and civil servants were 1st able to bring wifes out to India there was a change to opposition to mixed marriages. Also possibly the growth of the Victorian attitude on social morals as compared to the far more relaxed [or often nearly non-existent ] Georgian one possibly made this inevitable. However even as late as the mutiny there were a number of mixed marriages and at some fairly high levels as well. Most famously that I'm aware of the military commander of the notorious Cawnpore seige was married to an Indian woman.

If you could have maintained such a viewpoint and at the same time have enabled suitable Christian elements [by that I mean ones not too social suck-up on issues of race and class] you might have managed to establish a significantly larger pool of people who identified with the empire and [equally importantly] were identified by it, at least to a degree and achieved a critical mass.

Steve

 

[Ak-84]

In OTL, there were thousands of Brits/Irish who had lived in India all their lives, and had been in India for two or three generations, who considered themselves Indian.

Gen Dyer of Amristar Massacre fame, grew up in Peshawar and his family spoke Urdu at home.

WWI seems to have killed them off.

You could have Bollywood with bagpipes...

Ahem, Ahem. One day in the Himalayas/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=44oSZrnOxsk

And at a wedding reception
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2XakG6nXc&feature=related