ABSTRACT
“English men and women in India are, as it were, members of one great family, aliens under one sky,” wrote Maud Diver, a best-selling Anglo-Indian novelist who had herself been born in India and lived there for many years as the wife of a military officer. 1 The familial community imagined by Diver and her fellow Anglo-Indians differed from the Victorian domestic idyll of home and family as a haven from a heartless world that was to prove so influential in metropolitan Britain in the nineteenth century and after. 2 Rather, from the late nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-Indians constructed an idea of family that was, both literally and metaphorically, the foundation for the business of British imperialism in India. In thus reimagining the relationship between the family and the world, Anglo-Indians were compelled to reconsider, as well, the operation of gender in both family and empire. In addition, the family as both an organizational structure of the Raj and a crucial metaphor for British imperialism in India served to distance Indians from the business of empire and to disinherit them, at least until 1947, from their rightful national patrimony.
