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 careers of Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who arrived in England as a teenager in the 1880s and returned to India in 1907, the book unravels the significance of the lives and roles of a misfit living in a colonial world.Whilst in England, Ranjitsinhji rose to the heights of sporting heroism, becoming a start of the English cricket team and one of the best-known athletes in the British Empire. He went on to become a highly controversial ruling prince on his return to India, a soldier in France, and a diplomat at the League of Nations. In each of these roles he functioned as a model on which contemporary observers based their ideas about racial, political and gendered identities in the empire. Ranjitsinhji in turn used his unique position to negotiate, expand and test the boundaries of these meanings, for he was a man uniquely positioned between colony and nation: a 'migrant self' whose evolution demonstrates the possibilities and limits of imperial identities.In examining the collaboration of British, Indian and other agents in the construction of the mobile imperial man, and focusing on the remarkable life of one who leaves the colony and then returns, this fascinating study will be of interest to students, lecturers and enthusiasts of the history of the British Empire and Indian nationalism, diaspora studies and sports history.
