By Dr Ellen Smith, Senior Research Associate, Department of History
Continuing our South Asian Heritage Month focus, Dr Ellen Smith tells us about her project which explores how the personal correspondence of British families in India shaped public opinion of empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project received an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and runs until October 2025.
On 8th September 1857, The Times reported on the unfolding events of the ‘mutinies’ in India that had erupted in May. Correspondence from British fugitives in places like Delhi and Sealkote, were sent into the newspaper, which it reprinted. One of these letters came from Wilhelmina Murray, affectionately known as ‘Minnie’, the wife of an officer in the Indian Army in which she provides first-hand accounts of the uprising of one of the ‘native’ contingents in Gwalior, located in one of India’s Princely States, and her escape to a fort at Agra.

Minnie’s letters were highly revealing, and they feature in the book I am currently writing on ‘Imperial Letters’. The book focusses on the letters that British families were writing and sending across the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the embodied experiences of writing letters in the far-flung spaces of empire at this time. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) have generously sponsored me to write this book as part of a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Bristol. The book draws on letters from men and women like Minnie who lived and worked on the Indian Subcontinent, separated for years from family and friends in the British metropole.

Letters, I show in the book, were not just a means for individuals to navigate the emotional challenges of these separations and absences, but often these letters contributed to the political, economic, and cultural work of the imperial endeavour itself. Minnie’s letters, for instance, spread news and intelligence, reaching broader readerships through publication in newspapers and other platforms. The contents of the letters fed the ideological machinations of the empire, which had recently proved itself to be occupying an exceptionally fragile position: its subjects had mobilised in resistance against British authority and its cultural interference in local customs and religion. I write more about Minnie’s letters in my recent article for the Journal of British Studies, but in the book I will expand on Minnie’s role in creating narratives about the excessive violence of Indian men, or the valour of British officers.
This summer, I have been lucky enough to have an undergraduate research intern, Sam Hennessy, join the project. He will be helping me expand my investigation into recently widowed women in India, and how their letters explored the contours of imperial masculinity and broader British identity. Sam is in his second year of university at Bristol, studying History. He will be transcribing letters, locating and reading published volumes of letters and hopefully even researching letter collections at archives like the India Office Records and Private Papers at the British Library. Sam offers his thoughts about the project:
“I am so privileged to be able to work on a project such as this. I am interested in public memory, and how several concurrent narratives entangle to form a predominant, collective memory, both historical and contemporary. What really piqued my excitement in this project was how impactful letters, especially attached with heavy emotions such as those surrounding death and mourning, fed into wider social sentiments regarding imperial rule. With newspapers like The Times using these letters as means of coverage, they hint at an overall feeling of discomfort with British imperialism, a sense of vulnerable anxiety.

Much too often, women are left out of history, their role and social impact under-represented. When imperial service carried with it the real possibility of premature death, how did the wives of men in service to the Empire deal with this emotional stress? And how did they react, when their worst fears became reality? How did all these emotions feed into social anxieties towards empire and women, particularly when the monarch at the time (Queen Victoria) was seen as an archetypal widow? These are some of the many questions I’m very much eager and excited to explore in this project.”
Interested in getting involved as well? Have you recently found or inherited letters written by ancestors who went out to India in the 1800s or 1900s? Please get in touch with me if you would be willing to share your family histories or letters, as part of this research project. I’m always keen to hear these stories!
Dr Ellen Smith is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities. She is interested in cultures of communication in the British Empire, particularly colonial South Asia, as well as the historical construction of gender, and increasingly, the politics of colonial family history and archiving. She can be contacted at ellen_c_smith@hotmail.com and you can follow her on Bluesky and Linkedin.