In colonial India, the British were sojourners rather than settlers. They ruled over millions that were, in general, culturally, racially, and religiously distinct from Europeans. From the late eighteenth-century, after the establishment of colonial rule from 1757, the British began to segregate themselves, culturally, socially and spatially, from ...
(Show more)In colonial India, the British were sojourners rather than settlers. They ruled over millions that were, in general, culturally, racially, and religiously distinct from Europeans. From the late eighteenth-century, after the establishment of colonial rule from 1757, the British began to segregate themselves, culturally, socially and spatially, from their entanglements with native populations in the subcontinent. A constant of the colonial governance of India was the desire to keep the cost of governance to a minimum. Thus, the colonial government limited its responsibility for the care of the millions they ruled over. Native charity and philanthropy were expected and encouraged to wholly or partially pay for the religious, medical, charitable, and educational infrastructure for natives. In contrast to this infrastructure for the native inhabitants of the subcontinent, how was a sojourner population expected to establish an infrastructure for Europeans? Who would take care of the European poor? This paper focuses on native charitable contributions for the benefit of Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in western India. In doing so, it reveals that native charitable gifting practices contributed to the creation of an European religious and charitable infrastructure for what I call, in contrast to settler colonialism, sojourner colonialism.
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