Nabobs and sahibs
Charles Allen
IMPERIAL BODIES: THE PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE RAJ, 1800-1947 by E. M. Collingham
Polity, £15.99, pp. 239, ISBN 0745623700
Published doctoral theses rarely make for a good read. They exist chiefly to demonstrate how well their authors have learned the hermetic codes of their interlocutors. Over-egged, larded with the dropped names of obscure Frenchmen, garnished with footnotes in every paragraph, they are trophy books. No trophy; no fellowship. Never mind the quality, feel the weight of the leaden prose.
The author of Imperial Bodies is a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. The book is based on her PhD thesis. With a sinking heart, one begins to read the introduction and sees there all the accoutrements of the trophy book: two footnotes per para, wise nods to Pierre Bournieu, Marcel Mauss, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault et al, and killer sentence piled upon killer sentence, as, for example: Foucault's argument that bodies become increasingly disciplined is perhaps more convincing if we see if we view his discourses of power as akin to the blind structures which Elias links to changes in personality structure. Elias's conceptualisation of configurations allows the balance power to be seen as in a state of fluctuation...
And then, mercy of mercies, in the middle of page five the fog of sociobabble lifts and we find ourselves slipping easily into the clear waters of a first-rate read. The ritual obeisances are done — well, almost — and E. M. Collingham can reveal herself as a dab hand at the gathering and presentation of first-hand evidence on her subject: the British body in British India.
Plenty of social histories of the British in India have been written but none that have focussed so exhaustively on the human frame. This is the history of the Raj
written on the Anglo-Indian physique, from the boils, mosquito bites and the altered composition of the fibres and tissues of the body, to the colonist's characteristic clothing and confident demeanour.
Of course, there has to be a central thesis, which is that in line with the political shift towards rule in a British idiom, India was edged out of the
bodily practices of eating and clothing. Metropolitan signifiers of respectability were subtly transformed within the colonial context and reformulated as distinctively AngloIndian signifiers of Britishness.
To put it simply, the British in India changed their habits as they became more powerful, becoming more distinctively British and less open to Indian culture. This change is symbolised in Collingham's study by two images: that of the nabob and sahib — the first being a perjorative term used to describe the East India Company man who returned to Britain with a large personal fortune, the second an Arabic honorific that was increasingly associated with the Briton in India.
The transformation from nabob to sahib involved a process of bodily closure,' declares Collingham. The nabob came to India with an open mind and allowed his body to be 'Indianised'. He adopted loose Indian garments, smoked hookahs, took Indian wives or mistresses, ate Indian food, rode on elephants and palanquins and generally let himself go. He became, in a word, lax. Then a combination of middle-class morality, utilitarianism and the Evangelical movement kicked in. The omnipotent Anglo-Indian became both an ornament and instrument of rule, and the body of the nabob was anglicised into the uniformed, buttoned-up, top-hatted or sola-topeed sahib, together with all the impedimenta of cholera belts, spine-pads and puttees. The word 'tight-arsed' comes to mind. Finally, as Indian confidence in British imperialism diminished so Indians rejected these British emblems of the British body in favour of their own.
Put like that, Collingham's thesis sounds very much like a reinforcing of the stereotypical view of the British in India, and there is much here that the dwindling band of old koi-hais and mems who experienced British India at first hand would disagree with — for example, the fantasy that a politicised India rejected British dress in favour of home-spun khadi (the Westernisation of Indian dress went hand in hand with urbanisation, as the photographic evidence shows, pace the Mahatma). It should also be noted that Collingham (like any good advocate) ignores a great deal of firsthand evidence that runs against her case — the heroically Hogarthian eating and drinking habits of the British in India during the nabob period, for example, or the later replication of Mughal court ritual and Hindu caste in the heyday of the Raj.
But that is to pick at leeches. What makes Imperial Bodies such fun to delve into is the mass of fascinating social detail that its author has uncovered and assembled: by turns medical, biological, culinary, sartorial, sexual, even scatological, drawn from sources as diverse as advertisements for soft flannels in The Englishman, Chota Sabib's Camp Recipes for Camp People (Madras, 1890) and the Whipping Bill of 1864. In sum, a fine body of work.
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