Migrant Races

Migrant races is a study of image, identity and mobility in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the career of Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who migrated from India to England as a teenager in the 1880s and returned to India in 1907, the book unravels the significance of this racial misfit living in a colonial society. Whilst in England Ranjitsinhji rose to the heights of sporting hero, becoming a star of the English cricket team and one of the best-known athletes in the British empire. He subsequently became a ruling prince in India, a soldier in France and a diplomat at the League of Nations. In each of these roles he functioned as a repository for contemporary imperial notions of racial, political and gendered subjectivities whilst he in turn used his unique position to negotiate, expand and test the limitations of these meanings. Ranjitsinhji was a man uniquely positioned between colony and nation, a 'migrant self' who enables the exploration of a range of imperial identities.