Photographs From India

The Families in British India Society tells Alan Crosby about a project to capture our ancestors’ graves

- Alan Crosby

For over three centuries the histories of Britain and India have been entwined, for better or worse. As British rule over the subcontinent tightened in the late 18th century, a large military presence became inevitable, and this remained the case until independence and Partition in 1947. During this period of almost 200 years, many thousands of people from the British Isles went to India, as part of the armed forces, as civil servants and administrators, as businessmen and traders, or as wives and children. Many eventually returned to Britain, others died in India (the climate and tropical diseases were notoriously problematic for Europeans), and still others settled there permanently, marrying within the British community or outside it.