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At first the heart longs
For the absent familiar
Cosmopolitan Hong Kong
Its chaos, its anomalies, its power
Or England, my other world
Or some landmark somewhere
(Louise Ho, “Migratory”, 1997)

1This issue focuses on the historical, literary and cultural links between Great Britain and two of its former colonies, India and Hong Kong. This field has hardly been studied in France so far. Although a number of recent works focused on the links between India and China, especially in the political, economic and strategic fields, little attention has been paid to the study of the wide range of cultural exchanges that took place between Britain, India and China. Thus, the part played by Britain in the exchanges between India and China is only dealt with indirectly in Madhavi Thampi’s works (2017), Anne Cheng and Sanchit Kumar (2020), or the Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations (Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho & Manjari Chatterjee Miller, 2020). In the same way, the work of Gal Gvili (2022), focused on the image of India in Chinese literature in a decolonial perspective. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding (2017) studied the aesthetic and artistic aspects and the material culture of the exchanges between Britain and China within the British Empire.

2Despite considerable geographical distance, India, China and Britain experienced interdependence and simultaneous interactions within the context of the British Empire. The charter granted to the East India Company on 30 December 1600 by Queen Elizabeth gave it a monopoly on the trade with the Indian subcontinent and a vast area of Southeast Asia in particular. Following the setting up of trading posts along the Indian and Chinese coasts, exchanges developed from the early 17th century. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the East India Company became a state within the state in the Indian subcontinent whose control it gradually took over, although British India only officially became a colony in 1858. In the Far East, commercial exchanges with China, which were strictly limited and controlled by the Chinese imperial administration, soon came to be seen as unsatisfactory by the British who, having won the First Opium War (1839–1842), retained Hong Kong in 1842. To this colony were adjoined Kowloon in 1860 and the New Territories in 1898. The exchanges between Britain, the Indian subcontinent and Hong Kong as well as the development of means of transport and communication resulted in the economic, then political integration of these territories into the British Empire. Migrations of populations, literary, linguistic, cultural and religious transfers ensued.

3Interactions between India and China started centuries before British ships entered the Indian Ocean and the China seas. By comparison, the period during which Britain was an influential intruder both in India and in China and in their mutual relationship is short, basically starting in the early 17th century to end in the late 20th century. Several decades have now elapsed since both India and Hong Kong severed ties with Britain. It is expected that a dispassionate attempt at assessing the cultural heritage of the interactions that took place over those four centuries and later, is possible. The rich literary production by Indian, Hong Kong and British writers (many of whom are former migrants or descendants from Indian or Hong Kong migrants) of the past decades bears testimony to the many ways in which the three territories, their inhabitants, languages, religions and cultures mixed and evolved.

4Today, for reasons of domestic and foreign political considerations, India and China may not be willing to emphasize the cultural legacy that has derived from forced contact in the imperial era. Yet this influence is obvious in many areas, and studying instances of mixed cultural heritage is a way of strengthening the bonds between peoples, countries and continents rather than focusing on a single, supposedly unquestionable identity. Quasi instantaneous means of communication and transport make the latter choice increasingly difficult to defend anyway. Acknowledging mixed identities and a shared heritage is more fruitful, while not denying specific cultural or religious influences.

5British imperial maritime expansionism in Asia, motivated by commercial, political and strategic reasons, originally relied on a steady flow of mostly male Britons, traders, civilian administrators, diplomats or soldiers, who looked for opportunities they did not have in the British Isles. But neither the Indian subcontinent nor Hong Kong after it was seized became population settlements.

  • 1 Cf. Ter Minassian Taline (2016), “Apcar Line : un empire maritime arménien au xixe siècle”, L. Dakh (...)
  • 2 Cf. Thampi (2005) and Thampi & Saksena (2009). Cf. also Dr Leilah Vevaina’s paper: “To Hong Kong an (...)

6The age‑long country (regional) trade frustrated the East India Company’s attempts at fully enjoying the trade monopoly granted by Queen Elizabeth, and some of its representatives ended up involved in it as well. Once the British position was firmly established in the Indian subcontinent, representatives of the East India Company as well as country traders of various nationalities took part in the flow of trade and money that circulated between India, China and Britain. Armenians1 and Indians, especially Parsis,2 were also to be found among the traders and ship-owners involved in this commercial network.

  • 3 Cf. Bayly Susan, “The Evolution of Colonial Cultures: Nineteenth Century Asia”, A. Porter (ed.) (20 (...)
  • 4 Bickers Robert (2012), The Scramble for China. Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 [2011], (...)
  • 5 Cf. Marshall (2001: 287).

7Apart from the flow of ideas—the “invisible empire”3—(one of them being free trade, whose gradual adoption resulted in the East India Company losing its monopoly on the trade with India in 1813 and with China in 1833), of religions, commodities and money, a key feature of the British imperial era was migration. There was a flow of native soldiers and sailors of diverse origins, many of them Indian, between countries and even continents as the East India Company’s army was often sent on expeditions to other parts of the British Empire or of the world by the London government, much against the wishes of the government of India in some cases. Indentureship was another major feature of the period, after slavery was abolished in 1833—in 1843 in India. Workers, but also convicts, from India and Hong Kong4 embarked for other parts of the British Empire or of the world, often never to go back to their original country. There was also a large number of ‘free’ Indian and Chinese migrants, many of whom settled in their new countries. In the case of Hong Kong, the colony became a city-state with a plural society.5

  • 6 Osterhammel Jürgen, “Britain and China”, A. Porter (ed.) (2001), The Oxford History of the British (...)
  • 7 Tagore Rabindranath (1925), Talks in China: Reports of Lectures Delivered in China in April and May (...)

8As a result of these migrations, literary, cultural and religious transfers between Britain, India and Hong Kong developed in the colonial era. Jürgen Osterhammel views Hong Kong as one of those “frontier cities in zones of inter-cultural compromise”.6 A literary network employing many varieties of English, sometimes through translation, resulted from those transfers. Among such works may be mentioned the narratives of Anglo‑Indian and British travellers and reporters about India and Hong Kong (Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 1887–1889; W. H. Auden & Christopher Isherwood, A Journey to a War, 1939), aimed at European readers. A foundational moment for the poetical and political development of the Pan‑Asiatic ideology was the 1924 visit of Bengali artist, philosopher and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore to China, where he presented his universalist philosophy, which appealed to Chinese anti‑colonial nationalists, as it included a critical response to European imperialism. These lectures7 increased Tagore’s influence on writers belonging to the New Culture Movement, such as Xu Dishan in the 1920s–1930s.

  • 8 Other examples of transcultural exchanges in the field of cinema are noticeable in the intersecting (...)

9When India became independent in 1947 and Hong Kong was retroceded to China in 1997, such networks were not interrupted but underwent change. The genre of the historical novel has become very popular in the postcolonial era, as it explores the colonial past in a retrospective manner. Among those, Amitav Ghosh’s celebrated Ibis Trilogy narrates migrations within the colonial context of the 1830s and of the First Opium War (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire, 2008–2015), furthering two crucial objectives of postcolonial Indian literature—the literary exploration of history authorizing imaginative empathy, and the questioning of national identity. In contrast with British publications which often exoticized Hong Kong (Richard Mason, The World of Suzie Wong) or, conversely, represented the city as an impersonal global hub bearing no specificity (John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy), many contemporary anglophone authors tend to observe its multicultural dimension and political situation in a realistic light, like the Hong Kong-born poet Louise Ho (Sheung-Shui Pastoral, 1977), the American travel writer Paul Theroux (Kowloon Tong, 1997), or the Sri Lanka-born Hong Kong novelist Nury Vittachi (The Feng Shui Detective, 2000). In the field of visual arts, the productions of the Indian diaspora in Hong Kong bear witness to these enduring exchanges, not only in the fine arts, but also in cinema: links can be established between the movies of the Hong Kong New Wave (by directors Allen Fong, Wong Kar Wai or Fruit Chan) and the Indian crossover movies (by directors Mira Nair or Deepa Mehta) presenting migration, shifting identities and the way traditional lifestyles become westernised.8

10The studies in this volume only reflect a few of the numerous interactions between China, India and Britain, focusing primarily on the fields of history and literature. The first two papers deal with the beginning and the end of the British presence in India and Hong Kong.

11Hugues Didier studies the privileged relationship between England and Portugal since the 12th century. It can be partly accounted for by the threat represented by neighbouring Spain, which was more powerful. This concern also led Portugal to rank among the first European countries to launch into maritime expansion towards Asia, on the one hand, and towards the south of the American continent, on the other. From the early 16th century, the Portuguese started navigating the Canton-Malacca-India-Arabia route, competing with long-established regional traders. They settled on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent, especially in Goa, and were eventually allowed to settle in Macao. The Estado da Índia was born. From the early 17th century, the English followed in the tracks of the Portuguese ships not only in the Indian Ocean but also as far as China. The East India Company’s commercial activities and territorial expansion in the Indian subcontinent were buttressed by the seizure of strategically located stations. British power and presence increased as the Estado da Índia declined. Nevertheless the latter’s most symbolic possessions, Goa and Macao, endured, as did the friendly relationship between Britain and Portugal. Conversely, the East India Company faced hostility from the Dutch and the French. Dutch presence in the subcontinent had disappeared by the end of the 17th century. The French threat was dispelled following the Seven Years’ War. Owing to its singular legal status and, paradoxically, to Portugal’s lesser power, Macao was handed back to the People’s Republic of China in 1999. Conversely, Hong Kong, which had become British as a result of military conquest, was a strategic and commercial location as well as a gateway both to China and to the British Empire and the wider world, was returned earlier, in 1997.

12Madhavi Thampi explores an episode of the relationships between India, China and Britain that occurred during World War II. She studies the plight of the thousands of Chinese sailors employed in foreign merchant shipping who, when their contracts ended, could not be sent back to Hong Kong and China, owing to Japanese occupation. Shipowners, who had to incur the cost of their support until their return became possible, dropped them in Indian ports, Calcutta in particular, where living costs were cheaper than in western countries, expecting them to take on new jobs. The British colonial government of India as well as the Chinese nationalist government also expected the sailors not to remain idle, or worse, in Indian ports. To keep them orderly and busy, they tried to integrate them into a marine corps ready to support the war effort. Those attempts were defeated by the sailors who both fought for their rights as workers and opposed the scheme that meant to turn them into soldiers. Other reasons for the failure of the Chinese Seamen’s Wartime Service Corps were the respective reservations and objectives of the Chinese, Indian and British governments in terms of domestic but also foreign policy within the context of the world war. The episode associated industrial action and diplomatic relationships in wartime. The paper reveals how its economic, social and racial aspects were intertwined with considerations of domestic and international policy.

13Three papers explore literary and cultural connections in the postcolonial era: the first presents Dom Moraes (1938–2004), a poet, memoirist and journalist from Bombay who questioned his Indian identity as he travelled to Britain and across Asia in the postcolonial context and during the Cold War. The second and third deal with indentureship and its impact, in the imperial era, as explored by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (1956–) in his novels.

14Manon Boukhroufa Trijaud examines the tribulations of Bombay-born author Dom Moraes—from India to Britain, Hong Kong, and back to India—as an emblematic instance of postcolonial interrogation of identity, in the context of the dislocation of the British Empire, when new nations were created and anglophone Asians had to reinvent their identities. The first section details a paradox: Moraes was first celebrated in London, placed by the Establishment within the English poetic canon and, in the post-independence era, criticized in India for his Anglophilia; however, he was later reclaimed by critics as an Indian poet and published in Indian anthologies. The evolution of Moraes’s editorial journey and critical reception needs to be contextualized: it is in part due to political changes of perspective in India, and to the poet’s own change of discourse. Manon Boukhroufa Trijaud then considers the impact of the upper‑class British education that Moraes received in India and in the United Kingdom, and his later realization that he must distance himself from a British identity that he had idealized. Finally, Moraes is shown to have experienced a variety of anglophone cultures by writing prose (scripts for the BBC and journalistic texts for American publications) and by living and working in Hong Kong as a member of the Far East press circle. The article argues that these experiences of a nomadic lifestyle and of prose writing led Dom Moraes to invent a cosmopolitan anglophone identity for himself, a specifically postcolonial kind of Asian Englishness that can be interpreted both in stylistic and personal terms.

15Florence Labaune-Demeule examines how Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy employs a variety of points of view to avoid the traditional hegemony of the Eurocentric stance used in anglophone literature about the colonial period. Ghosh’s series of historical novels set in the 1830s and 1840s give a representation of India as a confluence of cultures, a space defined by the movements of commerce, migration and war. The essay analyses the characters’ trajectories via the points of view of Indians of diverse origins and from all walks of life; it thus observes Ghosh’s narratological and poetic treatment of their travels away from the Indian countryside and Calcutta, towards the factories and the colonial barracks, and ultimately to Hong Kong. In Ghosh’s trilogy, Florence Laubaune-Demeule shows that India is at the same time the strategic centre of the maritime networks of the period, a place of global cultural mixing and an imagined space on which all project their personal and communal representations. The motif of the ship is the focus of the article’s second section: in the trilogy the water element is omnipresent and ships are presented as instruments of displacement and metamorphosis. The fluid images used in the novels aptly convey the ever‑changing identities and trajectories, globally across the oceans or locally on the rivers. Whether the ship transports slaves, opium or troops, its journeys give a cartographic dimension to the novels; as a moveable and unique space, it also enables the passengers’ metamorphosis and self‑invention away from caste and class, thus developing the metanarrative dimension of the motif. Finally, the narrative strategies of the trilogy are studied to show how Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial novels play with the canon of the epic: while following many of its characteristics, the trilogy rejects the unicity of the epic narrative thread and replaces the proper epic hero with subaltern characters who are, for once, given the occasion to speak in their idiosyncratic voices. These displacements generate a postcolonial narrative that forces the reader to face alterity as it decentres the text geographically, generically and ideologically.

16Sabine Lauret-Taft dedicates her study to two of Amitav Ghosh’s novels, River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), in which the opium trade stands out. She explores how the novels convey the British and Indian representations of China as a place to be consumed and exploited. In the context of the First Opium War (1839–1842), the novels analyse the triangle of trade between Britain, India and China as being driven by greed and hunger for goods, land and people. Sabine Lauret-Taft first argues that opium is not only introduced as a reference developing the reality effect of the novels; it is the most significant of the many goods that are traded between India and China and introduces an orientalist representation relegating Asia to a mere marketplace dominated by the British and their Indian associates. The ideological and political complexities of the period are explored by Ghosh, who debunks the feigned moral justifications of exploitation voiced by some of his narrators, for instance the doctrine of free trade or the deceptive distinction made between smuggling and honest trading. The Chinese point of view is given indirectly but clearly, presenting opium as a means of colonial subjugation. The second section of this study focuses on the connection drawn between economic greed and the orientalist desire for Eastern pleasures. This desire leads to the sexualization of Indian and Chinese people by Britons, whose Victorian norms of morality seem forgotten in the East. However, the Chinese denunciation of opium pushing as a distinctly British sin comes as a counterpoint. The paper finally studies how the elaborate yet coarse British hunger for the East is presented through stories of scientists and artists cataloguing, drawing, defining China, but also through stories of battle, in which colonial conquest appears in its brutality, in particular for the Indian soldiers who die on Chinese soil to satisfy British greed.

17To finish the issue with an echo of these connections on the contemporary art scene, these five academic papers are followed by an interview with Riya Chandiramani, a Hong Kong artist of Indian origin, born in 1994. In the postcolonial and post-retrocession era, many artists from India, Hong Kong and the anglophone world more generally interrogate the notions of identity and nationality and how they are experienced in a multicultural metropolis like Hong Kong. Among them, Riya Chandiramani’s art undeniably stands out as an expression of the contemporary issues at the heart of the present ILCEA journal issue. In her answers to this interview, Riya Chandiramani’s fluid and cosmopolitan conception of her place in the art world finds its expression in her practice of collaging iconography from Hindu folklore, communist propaganda and globalised western pop culture. This enables Chandiramani to raise the universal issues of gender roles, imperialism and consumerism, while exploring the very specific layering of imagery which occurs for her in Hong Kong.

18Much remains to be done to assess the legacy of four centuries of interaction between the three territories.

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Notes

1 Cf. Ter Minassian Taline (2016), “Apcar Line : un empire maritime arménien au xixe siècle”, L. Dakhli & V. Lemire (eds), Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne.

2 Cf. Thampi (2005) and Thampi & Saksena (2009). Cf. also Dr Leilah Vevaina’s paper: “To Hong Kong and Back Again: Parsi Charity and Building Bombay”, presented at SSPIZS, SOAS, 30 April 2024.

3 Cf. Bayly Susan, “The Evolution of Colonial Cultures: Nineteenth Century Asia”, A. Porter (ed.) (2001), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century [1999], Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 447–469.

4 Bickers Robert (2012), The Scramble for China. Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 [2011], London: Penguin Books, pp. 159–160. Cf. for instance “‘Those 4 years’: A Journey into the Lives of the Chinese Who Came to India around the Middle of the 19th Century”, by Dr Joe Thomas Karackattu (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India), about those Chinese who went to work in India and settled there.

5 Cf. Marshall (2001: 287).

6 Osterhammel Jürgen, “Britain and China”, A. Porter (ed.) (2001), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century [1999], Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, p. 149.

7 Tagore Rabindranath (1925), Talks in China: Reports of Lectures Delivered in China in April and May, 1924, Calcutta: Karunabindu Biswas, <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.23996/page/n1/mode/2up> (25 June 2025). R. Tagore had received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913; he was the first non‑European Nobel laureate in any category.

8 Other examples of transcultural exchanges in the field of cinema are noticeable in the intersecting aesthetic influences of Hong Kong action movies and Bollywood on western action movies and musicals, as well as more direct exchanges—for instance, Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975) was inspired by the Hong Kong style, and later remade by John Woo (A Better Tomorrow, 1986).

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Nadine André et Élodie Raimbault, « Foreword »ILCEA [En ligne], 61 | 2026, mis en ligne le 26 janvier 2026, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/24762 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15k4f

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Auteurs

Nadine André

Univ. Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, 38000 Grenoble, France
 
Nadine André est maître de conférences en anglais à l’Université Grenoble Alpes (section d’anglais LLCER, UFR SoCLE). Elle enseigne l’histoire et la civilisation de la Grande‑Bretagne. Elle est l’auteur d’une thèse intitulée Politique territoriale et enjeux stratégiques sous le mandat de Lord Dalhousie en Inde (1848‑1856), soutenue en 2003 à l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 et publiée en 2007 sous le titre L’Inde de Lord Dalhousie, 1848‑1856. Le sous-continent indien, nation en devenir. Ses recherches et publications portent sur l’Inde britannique, les relations entre l’East India Company et la Chine et plus largement l’expansionnisme britannique en Asie au xixe siècle.

Élodie Raimbault

Univ. Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, 38000 Grenoble, France
 
Élodie Raimbault est MCF en littérature britannique à l’Université Grenoble Alpes, membre du laboratoire ILCEA4 / LISCA. Ses recherches portent sur les représentations cartographiques, politiques et géopoétiques dans la littérature coloniale et postcoloniale. Elle s’intéresse aux liens entre texte et image et à la représentation de l’espace matériel en littérature, en particulier dans la littérature populaire et d’aventure coloniale chez Kipling, Conrad, H. G. Wells et Maugham. Elle étudie aussi ces problématiques dans la littérature postcoloniale qui fait écho et interroge les œuvres de ces auteurs victoriens et édouardiens (S. Rushdie, H. Kunzru, A. Gurnah). Son ouvrage de 2021 intitulé Le Géomètre et le vagabond : espaces littéraires de Rudyard Kipling (UGA Éditions) aborde les liens entre littérature et géographie dans l’œuvre de Kipling, notamment à travers la question des représentations cartographiques.

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