ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the ways in which the conjunction between promotion as biographical publicity, self-promotion and career promotion may have been a matter of historically specific struggles over the definition of manliness even, or perhaps especially, when the writers and readers involved were themselves Anglo-Indian officials. It explores evident in the reception of Philip Meadows Taylor's posthumous The Story of My Life. Taylor's Story, is a colonial memoir proccupied with rank and advancement, a memoir, furthermore, far from innocent of the self-congratulation Parry discerns in the self-writing of Anglo-Indian administrators of the Victorian period. The Story, like many of Taylor's novels, depicts a subject 'open to the heteroglossia of colonial life', to borrow Nancy L. Paxton's phrase. Taylor's demise is thus taken to mark a watershed in the history of colonial masculinity: the breaking of 'a link between the past and present of India'.
