The writers and readers of the British community in India occupied a complex set of relationships to ‘home’: they were set apart from familiar locations and individuals by physical distance, differences of experience and perception, and the time elapsed and yet to elapse before a possible return might be contemplated; and united by their experience of exile. Their literary works, and the envisaged and actual readerships of these works, reflect these relationship in a dual focus, looking outwards at India – in a gaze shaped often by the fact of being enacted at least partly for the benefit of distant private and public readerships – and also back to the homeland, in a nostalgic recreation of distant scenes and relationships which serves the dual purpose of reminding the exile of the lost ‘home’, and reminding those at ‘home’ of their importance to their distant loved ones. The first of these literary representations, the depiction of India, has been, for obvious reasons, the main concern of scholars working on the literature of British India. The nostalgic vision of ‘home’ is, however, often of equal interest. Writers who produced picturesque visions of India wrote of their homeland in the same picturesque mode, developing an image of ‘home’ as shaped by the colonial encounter. Writers who produced comic or dystopian accounts of India did so sometimes in counterpoint to a nostalgically idealised ‘home’, but sometimes also brought the lens of satire to bear on the homeland. The image of ‘home’ developed in these writings is many- faceted, often contradictory: ‘home’ is a space of domestic comfort and remembered bliss, land of childhood and innocence; and also a land of cold, loss, senescence, and the anticipation of death.

The importance of ‘home’ to exiles over the entire period of the British presence in India is a point that has been noted throughout scholarship in this area. Elizabeth Buettner argues that the fact of absence, even though it distanced expatriates from Britain, also functioned to maintain their connection to the homeland, and to others in the expatriate community, producing ‘nostalgic sentiments that kept them mentally anchored within Britain even while living far away’.