Nineteenth Century British Views of India- Crystallisation of Attitudes

of India Crystallisation of Attitudes Udayon Misra This article forms the introductory part of a broader study which deals with British attitudes towards India of the first half of the nineteenth century and their reflection in the major works of Anglo-Indian fiction of the period. White all these attitudes were but different expressions of the ideology of the empire, it is interesting to note that as we move into the nineteenth century, India, Britain's largest colony, became the battleground of several conflicting ideologies which had grown in the course of the Industrial Revolution and which in many senses overlapped. The strength and practicability of thought-trends like Utilitarianism and Evangelicalism were tried out on Indian soil but not without resistance from those who held that the imposition of Western morals and institutions could be of little benefit to India.