Date for your diaries

The next SAALG conference will be held on Friday, 20th February 2009, at the Wellcome Library, Euston Road, London. Further details will appear on this blog in the next few weeks, as well as the usual email and snail mail contacts. Nice to have something to look forward to in the New Year!

The British Government and India

The National Archives have made another great resource available, The Cabinet Papers Online, 1915-1977. The section on colonialism in India will be of most interest to SAALG members. This is a JISC funded digitisation programme, and it's packed with information, photographs and maps on the workings of cabinet government at a fascinating period of UK history.

Respected Memsahibs

The Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, is pleased to announce the publication of Respected Memsahibs: an anthology / compiled by Mary Thatcher during her time as Archivist at the Centre. It is published by Hardinge Simpole, ISBN 1-84382-2148, price £18.95, and is available from Amazon.

It contains extracts from the letters, memoirs and narratives of nineteen women who lived and worked across the British Indian Empire between the First World War and Independence in 1947. These records form part of the archives of the Centre of South Asian Studies and form a unique record of life and work in the latter days of the British Raj.

Mary Thatcher began collecting material from former residents of different parts of British Asia in the late 1960s and assembled a large number of collections of papers and recorded interviews. She was particularly interested in the lives of women and encouraged many to write more memoirs of their time in India