Book contents
- Working-Class Raj
- Modern British Histories
- Working-Class Raj
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Family Histories and Remaking Class in British India
- 2 Writing Family Together across Imperial Distances
- 3 Military Domesticity
- 4 Servants in Empire
- 5 Class and Colonial Knowledge
- 6 Fragmented Families
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Military Domesticity
Creating Working-Class Worlds in British India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2023
- Working-Class Raj
- Modern British Histories
- Working-Class Raj
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Family Histories and Remaking Class in British India
- 2 Writing Family Together across Imperial Distances
- 3 Military Domesticity
- 4 Servants in Empire
- 5 Class and Colonial Knowledge
- 6 Fragmented Families
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on the cantonment of Rawalpindi and its associated hill station of Murree, where we see working-class and elite ideas about family, respectability, sexuality, and race collide. Across British India, men, women, and children of different classes and races were thrown together in army cantonments. Military policy coded the physical spaces that comprised the cantonment – the Army barracks and civil lines, mess halls and married soldiers’ quarters, bazaars, and red-light districts – as sites of potential dissolution, destructive to British prestige. Thousands of soldiers, officers, camp followers, and army wives passed through these installations. As they did so, they created domestic worlds within militarized spaces. Domestication of military space did not, however, assuage official fears about the destructive potential of a population of non-elite whites, but rather expanded those fears to encompass not only single men but also families and children.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Working-Class RajColonialism and the Making of Class in British India, pp. 70 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023