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"British India Biography."
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The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family, prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women’s education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century. The Strachey Family examines the lives of Lytton Strachey, a well-known member of the Bloomsbury set, his nine siblings, and his parents. Richard Strachey worked in India, marrying Jane, the daughter of the Indian Chief Justice, in 1859. A successful imperial couple, they were progressive, following the ideas of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and the teachings of science. Their ten children were born over a period of 27 years and reflect the development and changes in a Victorian society moving to modernity. The richness of their letters provides a fascinating picture of a large, complex, and diverse family where attitudes to the family name, gender tensions, differing views on sexuality, ideas on modernity, and varying degrees of support for feminism all played a part. Dick Strachey, the eldest son, had an unsuccessful military career in India but a loving marriage, whereas Oliver announced to horrified parents that he wished to learn the piano and give music lessons, eventually finding success as a code-breaker in both world wars. Elinor, married to a man of wealth and position, devoted her life exclusively to family and social life, whilst Ralph, Chief Surveyor in India, married a woman who suffered emotional and nervous collapses and was unable to manage a family. Pippa, a full-time suffrage organizer and, in all but name, head of the family, combined the Victorian devoted single daughter with the twentieth century independent career woman, and James, a homosexual in adolescence, married Alix, one of the Bloomsbury cropheads who embraced sexual experimentation, psychoanalysis, and new patterns of domestic life. The remaining children, including Lytton, all had lives no less absorbing, and it is the examination of these lives, as well as relating the issues which they faced to wider society, which make Barbara Caine’s study so captivating and intriguing.
eBook
Sophia : princess, suffragette, revolutionary
\"In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into Indian royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, one of the greatest empires of the Indian subcontinent, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace, its grounds stocked with leopards, monkeys and exotic birds. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace and favor lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary. Sophia transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice and inequality, a far cry from the life to which she was born. Her causes were the struggle for Indian Independence, the fate of the lascars, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War--and, above all, the fight for female suffrage. She was bold and fearless, attacking politicians, putting herself in the front line and swapping her silks for a nurse's uniform to tend wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefields. Meticulously researched and passionately written, this enthralling story of the rise of women and the fall of empire introduces an extraordinary individual and her part in the defining moments of recent British and Indian history\"--Front jacket flap.
BOOK
Cutantirap pōril Tiruppūr tiyākikaḷ = Sudhantira poril Thiruppur thiyagigal
Biographical sketches of revolutionary freedom fighters of Tiruppur, India; covers the period, 1757 to 1947.
His majesty's opponent : Subhas Chandra Bose and India's struggle against empire
The man whom Indian nationalists perceived as the \"George Washington of India\" and who was President of the Indian National Congress in 1938–1939 is a legendary figure. Called Netaji (\"leader\") by his countrymen, Subhas Chandra Bose struggled all his life to liberate his people from British rule and, in pursuit of that goal, raised and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II. His patriotism, as Gandhi asserted, was second to none, but his actions aroused controversy in India and condemnation in the West.
Now, in a definitive biography of the revered Indian nationalist, Sugata Bose deftly explores a charismatic personality whose public and private life encapsulated the contradictions of world history in the first half of the twentieth century. He brilliantly evokes Netaji's formation in the intellectual milieu of Calcutta and Cambridge, probes his thoughts and relations during years of exile, and analyzes his ascent to the peak of nationalist politics. Amidst riveting accounts of imprisonment and travels, we glimpse the profundity of his struggle: to unite Hindu and Muslim, men and women, and diverse linguistic groups within a single independent Indian nation. Finally, an authoritative account of his untimely death in a plane crash will put to rest rumors about the fate of this \"deathless hero.\"
This epic of a life larger than its legend is both intimate, based on family archives, and global in significance. His Majesty's Opponent establishes Bose among the giants of Indian and world history.
eBook
Farzana
Amongst the riches of nineteenth century India, as the British fought their way across Mughal territory, an orphaned streetgirl ends up at court with the ear of the Emperor. That girl was Farzana, and she would become a courtesan, a leader of armies, a treasured defender of the last Mughal emperor and the head of one of the most legendary courts in history. In this beautifully written book, the author's last, Julia Keay weaves a story which spans the Indian continent and the end of a golden era in Indian history, the story of a nobody who became a teenage seductress and died one of the richest and most prominent women of her age. Farzana rode into battle atop a stallion, though only 4 1/2 feet tall, and led an army which defended a sickly Mughal Empire. She dabbled in witchcraft while gaining favour with the Pope, and died a favourite of the British Raj. Farzana is an evocative and moving depiction of one of the most remarkable, and least-known, historical lives of the nineteenth century.
eBook
Brown Romantics
Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry.
eBook