‘Brothers of the Empire?’: India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–251

摘要

An examination of the reactions of Indians to the British Empire Exhibition suggests connections between the imperial languages of the nineteenth century and those of the twentieth, a bridge between the Victorian era of unquestioned dominance and emerging discourses of colonial development and ‘race relations’ that would gain ascendancy after the Second World War. The organization of the exhibition in India provides a key to understanding how ‘race’, formerly a marker of British self-confidence, was increasingly a subject of contestation and negotiation between Britain and colonized subjects, and illustrates how changes in ‘racial’ boundaries occurring in imperial culture were a response to challenges mounted by colonized people.