A compact 1960 study of the political and cultural ties linking Britain and India
Britain and India is a short English-language book by Humayun Kabir (1906–1969). It runs to only 39 pages and was issued in Calcutta by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, with Orient Longmans acting as sole distributor. The author is the twentieth-century Indian writer Humayun Kabir, not the medieval devotional poet of the same name.
The Anglo-Indian Relationship as the Book’s Subject
What the work deals with is recorded plainly in its cataloguing. The subject headings attached to it name the relations between Great Britain and India, and they specify two dimensions of that connection: the foreign-relations side — Britain’s relations with India and India’s with Britain — and the cultural-relations side of the same pairing. The book is thus framed around the two countries as they stand toward one another, rather than around either nation considered in isolation.
A Work Filed Among Studies of Relations
Libraries have placed the book where writing on this theme belongs. Its Dewey number, 301.230954, sits in the sociology schedule devoted to relations between groups, with the digits for India attached; the Library of Congress call number, DS450.G7, falls in the range for India’s foreign relations with Great Britain. Together these classifications confirm the picture given by the subject headings: the book belongs with works that treat Britain and India as a single field of contact and exchange, social and cultural as well as diplomatic.
Because the volume is so brief — a pamphlet-length text rather than a full treatise — it is best understood as an essay-sized contribution to that field, issued under the imprint of a body concerned with India’s cultural outreach and circulated through a major commercial distributor. Its concern is the relationship itself: how Britain and India have met, what they have meant to one another, and how that meeting registers in both the political and the cultural record.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison catalog gives the book’s height as 22 cm and supplies the OCLC number ocm04869649. Duke University’s record locates a copy in the Rubenstein Library, Library Service Center, Rare Books, 8vo, under the call number DS450.G7 H84 1960 c.1, with the status “Available – Library Use Only.” The NITI Aayog Library record assigns item number H918B and barcode 32415, lists the item type as Books, and records 02/04/2019 as the date acquired. The Munshi Saraswati Mandir Granthagar record gives the call number 954.08/KAB/37719 and marks the item available for loan.
