How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#2[flagged]
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#3[flagged]
You are not aware of the Large cemeteries full of dead British who went out to India also in many other colonies.
Also the British got their foot hold as Indian princes hired British and French mercenaries and had not read Machiavelli
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#4Hindu Stuart is well worth reading about
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#5[flagged]
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#6[flagged]
It's not "tactless drivel" to accurately state what actually happened. The British in colonial India were a highly privileged class, and they did a lot worse than just making their punkahwallahs sweat.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#7[flagged]
> so genetically different
Well, it seems likely they were less-well adapted to local diseases than the locals. But I'd guess that childhood exposure may be enough to explain this, plus cultural adaptation? They certainly died in large numbers, in early days; IIRC, only 10% of Company employees made it alive to retirement back home. (I presume, but don't know, that more upper-class Mughals survived to equivalent age.)
Also, as TFA mentions in passing, many of these were the same strategies as practiced by upper-class locals: "adopted punkhas from the Mughals", swung by servants of course, wore light clothes, adopted a schedule designed around heat, not around far-northern winter daylight hours.
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#8Apparently Britishers had snow pits for refrigeration in Shimla (a northern hill station) that are being revived now for tourism [1].
[1] https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/snow-pits-to-breathe...
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#9[flagged]
Citation needed. The British certainly viewed Indians as expendable, and many decisions during (say) the Bengal Famine made squarely favored military wartime supply at the expense of the local population, but I don't think anybody has seriously proposed that the British intentionally created the famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Historio...
Re: How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
#10[flagged]
I'm no expert on Indian history, but that seems implausible. Famines would only serve to increase unrest and undermine the stability of British rule. The famines seem to be more a result of neglect and mismanagement than active efforts.
Furthermore, India in the 1800s-1900s was not exactly like the Americas, Australia or South Africa. The population was much larger, and social, economic or cultural structures were much more robust, long-standing and harder to dismantle.