Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World 1138214736, 9781138214736

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of contributors
Introduction
A world of commodities
Reading commodities
The cultures of commodities
Notes
SECTION I: Making and showing
1. Mughal Delhi on my lapel: The charmed life of the painted ivory miniature in Delhi, 1827–1880
The last Mughal souvenir: Mughal subversion of the colonial image-gift
From connoisseur to consumer: Mughal miniatures in Anglo-Indian Delhi
Contextualizing Mughalerie
Afterlife: The Delhi ivory miniature in the marketplace
Notes
2. Plates and bangles: Early recorded music in India
Notes
3. The Overland Mail: Moving panoramas and the imagining of trade and communication networks
Notes
4. Exhibiting India: Colonial subjects, imperial objects, and the lives of commodities
Notes
SECTION II: Place and environment
5. The composition and decomposition of commodities: The colonial careers of coal and ivory
Coal
Ivory
Notes
6. Profaning water: The sacred and its others
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
7. Settling the land: The village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa
Linearity and commodification
Origin stories and history
Pre-lapsarian economies
Naturalizing the settler
The sea in geological time
Realism and ethnography
Notes
SECTION III: Labour and migration
8. (Re)moving bodies: People, ships and other commodities in the coolie trade from Calcutta
Notes
9. Anxiety, affect and authenticity: The commodification of nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters
Becoming print
Emigrant tokens
Producing authenticity
Notes
10. Towards a genealogy of the village in the nineteenth-century British colonial world: Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Sumner Maine
The village tale
Village communities
Village spectacles
Notes
SECTION IV: Texts in motion
11. Indigo and print: The case of the ‘Indigo-Planting Mirror’
Notes
12. Al jabr w’al muqabila: H.S. Hall, Macmillan and the coming together of things far apart
Notes
13. Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’: Transporting Tennyson with H.M. Stanley and Edwin Arnold
Tennyson’s explorers
Stanley’s poets
Edwin Arnold’s African epic
Notes
14. The traffic in representations: The case of Kipling’s Kim
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World

Commodity, culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. This book analyses the transformation of local cultures in the context of global interaction in the period 1851–1914. By focusing on episodes in the social and cultural lives of commodities, it explores some of the ways in which commodities shaped the colonial cultures of global modernity. Chapters by experts in the field examine the production, circulation, display and representation of commodities in various regional and national contexts, and draw on a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. An integrated, coherent and urgent response to a number of key debates in postcolonial and Victorian studies, world literature and imperial history, this book will be of interest to researchers with interests in migration, commodity culture, colonial history and transnational networks of print and ideas. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Josephine McDonagh is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Brian H. Murray is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at King’s College London. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at New York University.

Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University/ Calcutta; Michael Fisher, Oberlin College; Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Ruby Lal, Emory University and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University /Bangalore

This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and thirdly, between colonial and postcolonial histories, which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its selfrepresentation over the centuries. While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and cross-colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young as well as established scholars that challenge the limitations of inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period. 9. Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought The Radical Unspoken Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh 10. Unarchived Histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey 11. Islam and Nationalism in India South Indian contexts M.T. Ansari

12. A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965 John Solomon 13. Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World Edited by Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian H. Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World

Edited by Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian H. Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Edited by Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian H. Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Chaudhuri, Supriya, editor. Title: Commodities and cultures in the colonial world / edited by Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian H. Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Intersections : colonial and postcolonial histories ; 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009091 | ISBN 9781138214736 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315111766 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism--Economic aspects--History--19th century. | Imperialism--Social aspects--History--19th century. | Imperialism in literature. | International trade--History--19th century. | Great Britain-Colonies--History--19th century. Classification: LCC JC359 .C654 2018 | DDC 306.3/40917124109034--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009091 ISBN: 978-1-138-21473-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11176-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments List of contributors Introduction

vii ix xi 1

SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI, JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH, BRIAN H. MURRAY AND RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN

SECTION I

Making and showing 1 Mughal Delhi on my lapel: The charmed life of the painted ivory miniature in Delhi, 1827–1880

13 15

YUTHIKA SHARMA

2 Plates and bangles: Early recorded music in India

32

AMLAN DAS GUPTA

3 The Overland Mail: Moving panoramas and the imagining of trade and communication networks

43

JOHN PLUNKETT

4 Exhibiting India: Colonial subjects, imperial objects, and the lives of commodities

58

SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI

SECTION II

Place and environment 5 The composition and decomposition of commodities: The colonial careers of coal and ivory STEPHEN MUECKE

75 77

vi

Contents

6 Profaning water: The sacred and its others

88

RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN

7 Settling the land: The village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa

100

ROCHELLE PINTO

SECTION III

Labour and migration 8 (Re)moving bodies: People, ships and other commodities in the coolie trade from Calcutta

113 115

NILANJANA DEB

9 Anxiety, affect and authenticity: The commodification of nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

129

FARIHA SHAIKH

10 Towards a genealogy of the village in the nineteenth-century British colonial world: Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Sumner Maine

145

JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH

SECTION IV

Texts in motion

161

11 Indigo and print: The case of the ‘Indigo-Planting Mirror’

163

ABHIJIT GUPTA

12 Al jabr w’al muqabila: H.S. Hall, Macmillan and the coming together of things far apart

174

RIMI B. CHATTERJEE

13 Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’: Transporting Tennyson with H.M. Stanley and Edwin Arnold

184

BRIAN H. MURRAY

14 The traffic in representations: The case of Kipling’s Kim

199

ISOBEL ARMSTRONG

Selected Bibliography Index

211 214

Illustrations

1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1

Warner’s Ivories: Shah Jahan (a) and Mumtaz Mahal (b) set in a silver and garnet encrusted frame, ca. 1875. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. Artworks 03.043 and 03.044. Watercolour on ivory. Oval 4.6 x 3.6 cm; in silver frame 7.6 x 6.4 x 1.3 cm The Mughal emperor Akbar II (1806–37), on an elephant with Prince Mirza Salim, Delhi, 1827. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IS.59–1964. Watercolour on paper. 18 x 12 cm. Formerly in the collection of Lord Amherst, Governor-General of Fort William (1823–1828). Portrait of Akbar Shah II formerly mounted in a bracelet depicting Indian rulers, ca. 1860. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. Ivory 2.5 x 2 cm. Earrings: Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r.1799–1839) left and Prince Akbar Khan (d.1848). Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IM.26A-1924. 3.1 x 2.2 cm. An unidentified Mughal lady, ca. 1860–70. Given by Dr. W. L. Hildburgh. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IS.532– 1950. ‘Putting a panorama around the earth’, Punch, 25 May 1850, 208. Frontispiece, The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850). ‘Central Station,’ The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850). ‘The Dead Camel’, The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850). Hardy Gillard’s Great American Panorama, c.1874, EXEBD12797. Indian carpet weavers at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, South Kensington, 1886. © Illustrated London News, 17 July 1886. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

16

19

21

24

25 48 49 50 51 55

67

viii

List of illustrations

4.2

Rudolf Swoboda, Portrait of the Indian potter Bakshiram, 1886. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust. 9.1 Example of Sockett’s introductory description of emigrant tokens. Thomas Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants, who Sailed from Portsmouth (London: John Phillips, 1833), p. 8. 9.2 Example of Sockett’s introductory description of emigrant tokens. Thomas Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants, who Sailed from Portsmouth (London: John Phillips, 1833), p. 45. 10.1 Occupy village, London, December 2011 (author’s photograph)

68

138

139 156

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume began life as papers delivered at workshops hosted by the ‘Commodities and Cultures in the Colonial World, 1851–1914’ International Research Network, between 2010 and 2013 in London, Kolkata and New York. We would like to express our gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support of our activities through the award of a Leverhulme Trust International Research Network Grant, and to Simon Gikandi and Catherine Hall for kindly supporting our application for the award. We thank Regenia Gagnier, Isabel Hofmeyr and Devleena Ghosh, who, alongside Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, conceived and co-directed our programme of activities; and King’s College London, the Museum of London Docklands, Jadavpur University, the National Library of India, the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, and New York University, for their support in hosting these events. We are particularly grateful to our series of exceptional research facilitators, Sarah EasterbySmith, Alison Wood, and Fariha Shaikh, who as well as Brian Murray, organised our events with efficient panache. The workshops brought together scholars from around the world and we would like here to express our appreciation for all those who contributed to them. In addition to the authors and editors of this book, they include: Tanya Agathocleous, Arjun Appadurai, Rangana Banerjee, Ujjayan Bhattacharya, Hardik Brata Biswas, Elleke Boehmer, Zeynep Celik, Aritra Chakraborti, Swapan Kumar Chakravorty, Partha Chatterjee, Mia Chen, Deepkanta Lahiri Choudhury, Patrick Deer, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Hasia Diner, Kat Foxhall, Margot Finn, Elaine Freedgood, Regenia Gagnier, Toral Gajarawala, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Devleena Ghosh, Heather Goodall, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Liz Gunner, Ting Guo, Piyel Haldar, Martin Harries, Ian Henderson, Isabel Hofmeyr, Priyanka Anne Jacob, Samia Khatun, Andy Liu, Mark Ravinder Frost, Chandrika Kaul, Marget Long, Adam McKeown, Swapan Majumdar, John Maynard, Joseph Napolitano, Chandreyee Niyogi, Siddharth Pandey, Gabriella Petrick, Clare Pettitt, Jude Piesse, Rochelle Pinto, Judith Plotz, Tara Puri, Anupamo Rao, Fanny Robles, Modhumita Roy, Rohan Deb Roy, Rangeet Sengupta, Rabia Shahzad, Tilottama Tharoor, Mark Turner, Jini Watson, Alex Werner, Paul Young, Robert Young, Sujit

x

Acknowledgments

Sivasundaram, Michael Uwedemino, and the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly. We also thank Kerishma Vidya Panigrahi for her valuable assistance in copy-editing the manuscript. We believe that the success of the network can be judged by the new research collaborations, on both modest and large scale, that have been inspired by the workshops, and by the many friendships that have developed between participants in far-flung locations. These have enriched both our research and our lives. We are delighted that Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World appears as part of the ‘Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories’ series, and would like to thank Gyanendra Pandey, the General Editor of the series, and Dorothea Schaefter, Senior Editor at Routledge, for their interest in and support of our collective work. Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Contributors

Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair) at Birkbeck, University of London, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, a Fellow of the British Academy and Hon Foreign Scholar of the American Academy. Her Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (2008) won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. She is currently revising Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) for a new edition. Her latest book, Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Rimi B. Chatterjee is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Empires of the Mind (OUP India, 2006), an academic history of Oxford University Press’s relations with India before 1947, won the SHARP de Long Book Prize for that year. She has also published novels, short stories, and poems. Her second novel, The City of Love (Penguin India, 2007) is set against the backdrop of piracy and the spice trade in sixteenth-century Bengal and was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award. Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her specialisations include European Renaissance literature, modernism, Indian cultural history, fiction, translation, and theory. Among recent publications are chapters in A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Blackwell, 2016) and Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge UP, 2015). Amlan Das Gupta is Professor of English and Director, School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His research interests include classical European thought, early Christianity, the European Renaissance, North Indian classical music and digital archives. Nilanjana Deb is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. Her postdoctoral research work focuses on the traffic in labour through the colonial port of Kolkata to various sugarcane-producing

xii

List of contributors colonies of the world from the 1830s to 1920. Her areas of research and teaching interest include postcolonial literatures and oratures, subaltern literatures, cultures of protest and diaspora studies.

Abhijit Gupta is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Jadavpur University, and Director, Jadavpur University Press. He is co-editor of the Book History in India series, and has compiled an online bibliographical database of printed Bengali books from 1810 to 1914. Josephine McDonagh is Professor in the Department of English, University of Chicago. She is author of De Quincey’s Disciplines (1994), George Eliot (1997), and Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900 (2003), and has co-edited a number of volumes of essays, including with Sally Ledger and Jane Spencer, Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (1994), and with Colin Jones and Jon Mee, Charles Dickens and the French Revolution (2009). Stephen Muecke is Jury Professor at the University of Adelaide. He has written extensively on Indigenous Australia, especially in the Kimberley, and on the Indian Ocean. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. A recent book is The Mother’s Day Protest and other Fictocritical Essays (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). Brian H. Murray was Lecturer in Nineteenth-century English Literature at King’s College London. He is currently editing a new edition of H.M. Stanley’s travelogue In Darkest Africa and has recently published articles on Dickens’s travel writing, the literature of African exploration, and the reception of Christian relics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, co-edited with Mary Henes, was published in 2015. Rochelle Pinto was research fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, for the period 2015–17. The area of her research is ‘Land and narrative – the culture of economy in colonial Goa’. Her book, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa, was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. John Plunkett is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. His publications include Queen Victoria – First Media Monarch (2003), Victorian Print Media: A Reader (2005) co-edited, with Andrew King, and Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship 1820–1910 (2012) co-edited with Joe Kember and Jill Sullivan. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled, Picture Going: Popular Visual and Optical Entertainments 1820–1914. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at New York University. She has taught earlier at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. She works in the areas of postcolonial studies, feminist theory, gender, law, and religion in South Asia, British

List of contributors

xiii

Victorian literature and the Anglophone novel in India. Her publications include Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (2003) and the co-edited volume Crisis of Secularism in India (2007). Fariha Shaikh is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. The chapter in this volume is part of a larger project on the textual cultures of settler emigration in the nineteenth century. Her research interests are in the relationship between Victorian globalisation and literary form. Yuthika Sharma is Lecturer in Indian/South Asian art history at the University of Edinburgh. She was the co-curator with William Dalrymple for the exhibition Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857 (Yale University Press, 2012) that explored the artistic culture of Anglo-Mughal society in Delhi before the dissolution of the East India Company. Yuthika also served as an AHRC postdoctoral fellow on the project, the East India Company at Home, with Principal Investigator Margot Finn, run by the department of History at University College London. Her recent work has looked at artistic knowledge and cultural exchange in British administered Mughal India.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh, Brian H. Murray and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

The essays in this collection are about commodities, their attendant technologies and human agents, and their shaping role in the British colonial world in the period 1851 to 1914, from the Great Exhibition to the outbreak of the First World War. Our starting point is the understanding that commodity culture – or what we call ‘the cultures of commodities’ – and colonialism are intimately related and, in this period, mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion, at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations, and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. By focusing on episodes in the social and cultural lives of commodities, these essays explore and analyze some of the ways in which commodities shaped the colonial cultures of global modernity. The idea that things had social lives was proposed by Arjun Appadurai, who, in his pioneering volume, The Social Life of Things (1986), opened up the commodity to dynamic new forms of analysis. The essays in his volume – all by social historians and anthropologists – broke new ground for the way in which they reappraised the cultural significance of the commodity across space and time: they emphasized consumption (‘the demand side of economic life’1) and the circulation, rather than the production of goods, and explained the political (rather than abstract) nature of the relationship between value and exchange. The commodity emerged from this work as an eloquent object of cultural analysis: it could reveal how hierarchies of privilege were established and breached within communities; but also, as an item of exchange between different groups, the commodity mediated forms of cross-cultural encounter between communities of vastly different size and technological knowledge and expertise. The collection sparked wide interest in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, especially in cultural studies, inspiring a generation of scholars to turn to the commodity as a privileged object of cultural analysis. From coffee and tea to cotton and coal, commodities featured in studies of cultures past and present, near and far, by analysts of the practices and fabric of everyday life.2 Thirty years on from the publication of The Social Life of Things, the commodity still retains its fascination for cultural critics. But now the agenda has

2

Introduction

expanded exponentially. Indeed the commodity today stands at the intersection of a diverse range of current theoretical and political concerns. These include questions of globalization, mobility, migration and environmentalism; ‘thing theory’ and the new interest in material culture; histories of the body, the emotions and the senses; questions of scale; and not least Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which provides new ways of understanding the ‘assemblage’ of the social.3 New work in commodity studies follows Appadurai in considering the commodity as ‘a thing in certain circumstances’,4 but these new theoretical frameworks lay more stress on the symbiotic relationship between the ‘thing’ and its ‘circumstances’, and the transformations that both undergo in the course of their encounters. There is thus a heightened emphasis on the environment, on local ecosystems of bodies and emotions, and the intermediary roles that commodities play within these. Moreover, recent studies of commodities retain Appadurai’s interest in commodities as mediators of scale, but they now broaden the focus, extending from the economic realm of value and exchange to more widely drawn arenas of contact, engagement and exploitation. Recent studies have thus expanded our understanding of the commodity – beyond the ‘thing in certain circumstances’ – to include all objects of social exchange, monetarized or otherwise. Under this new, more inclusive heading, the commodity includes processes (such as education or travel), places (such as villages), and people (such as coolie labourers). The present volume emerges from, and speaks to, this new confluence of interests in the commodity. While widening the theoretical horizon, we nonetheless narrow the historical view to focus specifically on the high period of British colonialism. In these years, European colonialism decisively extended the local contexts of what had originally been a metropolitan phenomenon, into the global arena. The exchange of raw materials, manufactured goods, artifacts and services, between colony and metropolis was not limited solely to economic transactions. The contact, or clash, of cultures that came about as a result was far-reaching in its impact, and it was reciprocal. In postcolonial studies, the commodity is a lens through which to examine with some precision instances of such clashes. In this volume we focus on the complex and tense intersections of the global and local in the specific venues of colonial cultures. We emphasize the impact of mobility and migration as destabilizing factors in the careers of commodities; the affective and sensory regimes of commodities; and the double role of technologies of communication, especially print, as both commodities in their own right, and forms of mediation that enable, organize and exhibit commodities. They are concerned with the economic, the environmental, and the aesthetic, and the pervasive regimes of representation and display that commodity cultures engender.

A world of commodities In the period on which we focus, commodity culture changed the world. It drove technological innovation and social and environmental change, and

Introduction

3

played a decisive part in the emergence of a recognizably colonial world. Even in areas that were not formally colonized until late in the century – including much of the African continent – Britain took an active political, diplomatic and military role in preserving so-called ‘free trade’. In these mercantile contact zones, Europeans encountered long established economies and trade networks. As the products of industrial Britain– for example, glass beads and dyed cottons – were exchanged for exotic commodities like ivory, metropolitan economies of cultural capital impacted in turn on global markets and local environments, sometimes in surprising ways. In the case of ivory, for example, the massive demand was spurred by the large-scale production, from Melbourne to Manchester, of cheap upright pianos. The period from 1851 to 1914 also saw the large-scale commodification of travel itself, and in this volume we feature journeys by explorers, merchants, migrants, and tourists. Elaborate networks of travel, transport and telecommunications both stimulated the production of, and were enabled by, colonial commodities. The dramatic expansion of the telegraph network, for instance, radically transformed the global transmission of news and information from the 1860s, but it could not have occurred without the discovery of the insulating properties of the Malaysian tree sap, guttapercha. As submarine telegraph cables wound their way around the globe, telegraph companies placed escalating demands on an indigenous ‘cottage industry,’ and caused the deforestation of the Malay Archipelago.5 It is also the heyday of print, and the period witnessed an explosion of printed artifacts. Printing presses everywhere, from London to Calcutta and beyond, produced a cornucopia of texts that circulated widely and mingled indiscriminately: everything from religious texts and works of literature and scientific discovery, to newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and the ephemera of everyday life, including advertising bills, calling cards, and all the printed forms of colonial bureaucracy. A striking example is the Bible, the ‘greatest commodity of all’. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Bibles in 130 different languages were exhibited as part of a triumphalist display organized by the British and Foreign Bible Society. During the London Exhibition, almost half a million religious tracts and 382,971 Bibles were distributed to domestic and international visitors. The mass printing, publishing and dissemination of texts on a global scale were both a cause and an effect of the expansion of empire and, in this case, the expanded ambition of Christian missions. But as many of the essays in this collection demonstrate, print networks created by missionaries and imperialists were also channels by which radical critiques of colonialism – and Christianity – found their way back to the metropolis. Networks of print could be both mechanisms of colonial power and effective sites of anti-colonial resistance.6 Commodities thus played highly complex roles in shaping not only the material world, but also social relations and natural environments. Understanding the ways in which they operated is fundamental to any examination of global modernity. Karl Marx, who devoted the whole of the opening

4

Introduction

chapter of the first German edition of Capital in 1867 to his analysis of the commodity (die Ware), presented a particularly compelling analysis of the commodity form. For Marx the wealth of societies based on the capitalist mode of production ‘appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.’7 In consequence, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy is founded on his understanding of the relations between human beings and commodities, and between commodities themselves. The first might be understood as use-value, linked to the object’s intrinsic nature (linen is useful for making clothes), and the second as exchange-value, only a ‘form of appearance’ in relation to other commodities, and endlessly mutable and variable (linen may be exchanged for money, which can be used to purchase a Bible).8 In his famously anthropomorphizing rhetoric, Marx describes the commodity as ‘a born leveler and cynic, always ready to exchange not only soul, but also body, with each and every other commodity.’9 The process of exchange, and the circulation of commodities in a money economy, has other implications as well. Commodities are produced by human labour, but as a result of the alienation (Entfremdung) of labour under capital, and the identification of the commodity itself with value, ‘the definite social relation between men themselves’ assumes, with respect to the exchange-value of commodities, ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’. In a much-discussed section of his first chapter, Marx calls this fantasy a form of fetishism.10 Society persists in masking the actual basis of economic activity by objectifying value in the ‘commodity-form’, viewing things as bearers (träger) of value, actors on the economic stage whose origin in human labour is conveniently obscured while the market is credited with its own laws.11 The operation of European capital in the long nineteenth century can therefore be read as a relentless pursuit and multiplication of commodities, driven as much by the demands of fashion and leisure as by practical human needs. In fact, as Walter Benjamin pointed out while reviewing the world fairs of the nineteenth century, such as the Great Exhibition in London, the fetishization of commodities explains the useless accumulation of objects in domestic interiors, and the emergence of the collector, worshipper of the fetish Art, as the true denizen of the bourgeois interior.12 But this is a special application of Marx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities, which is better served by seeing major commodities in the global colonial economy – tea, sugar, tobacco, silver, opium, ivory, Manchester cloth, coal, labourers – as bearers of fetish-value, and the ideology of free trade, with its worship of the market, as masking the human cost of production. Commodities are of course primarily material objects. They are also objects thoroughly infused by culture. The customs and manners, practices and beliefs, needs and desires of a community – its culture, in short – dictate what objects get made, how they are made, and in what ways they are used, misused, discarded, preserved or transformed. And reciprocally, commodities shape culture by defining not only social practices of labour and leisure, craft

Introduction

5

and technology, production and consumption but also – and arguably at a more profound level – epistemologies, world-views, affective processes, and ideologies. The Industrial Revolution that provoked the intensification of commodity production in the nineteenth century is deemed ‘revolutionary’ precisely because of the dynamic exchange that was sparked off between culture and commodity. No human activity remained untouched by its spreading influence. Rather than the expected stability of custom and tradition, and the collective identifications of nation, race or ethnicity that it made possible under other circumstances, culture in capitalist modernity is marked by rapid motion, unprecedented change, ‘difference’, hybridity, adaptation, and incongruence. As human beings set out to exploit natural resources, invent new technologies, ‘improve’ their surroundings, understand the meanings and uses of foreign imports, and as they struggle over the possession of commodities, and fall prey to new forms of dispossession or define themselves by the accumulation of wealth, culture becomes the site of both conflict and creativity. No wonder Marx and Engels described the unleashed force of capitalism in the exhilarating rhetoric of revolution in the Communist Manifesto.13

Reading commodities The essays in this volume seek to disclose the cultures of commodities as historical sites of global struggle. The documentation, analysis, and cognitive grasp of the dynamics of this global and continuing narrative must be regarded as a major and ongoing intellectual project, one that cannot be encompassed by any single account, however comprehensive. The collaboration of many scholars across disciplines and locations, and the publication of their varied writings within the covers of this single substantial edited volume, have therefore been dictated by the nature of the project itself. In keeping with the dynamic rather than static notion of culture in colonial-capitalist modernity, the essays are predominantly anthropocentric, emphasizing human agency and the operations of the forces of (human) history. Although diverse in their sources and themes, together the essays collected in this volume represent a fresh and distinctive approach to the commodity as an object of enquiry. There are four strands to our approach, each of which builds on existing scholarship in the field. First, we follow those historians and anthropologists, including the authors in Appadurai’s Social Life of Things, who have revealed the important connections between commodity culture and colonialism. Significant here are Fernando Ortiz’s seminal study of tobacco and sugar in Cuba, Cuban Counterparts, first published in 1940, which broke new ground for the way in which it figured tobacco and sugar as characters, both responsive to and agents of change within Cuba’s history of colonization; and anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1985), which grasped the potential of a commodity – in his case sugar – for

6

Introduction

understanding the impact of the global markets on the daily lives and bodies of both consumers and producers throughout the world. Together with the essays in Appadurai’s volume, these works have provided a context and methodology for a profusion of single commodity studies, which analyze the complex cultural work of commodities, as both sites of labour relations, and producers of regimens of taste and consumption. The essays in the present volume contribute to this literature, but tend to be more focused in their interests on issues of transculturation – for example, appropriation and adaption – rather than production and consumption, stressing the provisional and makeshift nature of commodity cultures. Second, and in distinction from these historical and anthropological studies, the present collection emphasizes in particular the realm of representation as the habitus that above all others is decisive in making the character of the commodity. In this, we build on the work of literary scholars who have emphasized either, like Thomas Richards in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1991), the spectral domain of the spectacle, the world of advertising, exhibition, and display which the commodity of this period inhabited; or, like Elaine Freedgood, literary representation of commodities. The novel, in particular, is a genre which in the Victorian period holds commodities in special regard, as both a privileged theme, and a realist technique. For Freedgood in The Ideas in Things (2005) the everyday commodities that are represented in Victorian novels – mahogany wardrobes, tobacco, calico curtains – carry with them the residues of the colonial power, violence and exploitation of their contexts of production. Following Freedgood, therefore, our essays frequently turn to literary sources, and consider literary texts as heightened interpretive environments in which represented commodities encrypt complex colonial histories. Finally, and in contrast to both Richards and Freedgood, our attention in this volume is refracted away from the metropole to take into account a much broader range of commodities, cultures, and geographical locations. While the time period is defined by the history of British colonialism, our different points of geographical focus, especially the emphasis on the Indian Ocean and its regions, shifts the spotlight away from the metropolis in order to bring into light other determining factors, such as geographical proximity and economic opportunity, in the licit and illicit traffic in people and goods. Britain’s role is not denied, but neither is it considered the sole or major determining agent in the formation of colonial commodity culture. In this way we hope to capture the transversal, colony-to-colony activity that is often lost in metropolitan focused studies.

The cultures of commodities In the progress of this investigation, four sets of thematic issues have emerged and these provide the principle of organization. The essays in the first section, ‘Making and showing,’ address the performative elements of commodity

Introduction

7

cultures in this period, and the intriguing ways in which commodities display themselves, often in the processes of their own production. From finely crafted ivory miniatures which exhibit the virtuosity of their own making, to the grand international exhibitions that took place throughout the colonial world, whose primary purpose was the presentation of commodities as objects for display, commodities in this period consistently produce cultures in which there is an unusual relationship between making and display. The essays in this section examine these elements of self-reflexivity in commodity cultures as a distinctive element of colonial commodity cultures, and interpret their effects. Yuthika Sharma, writing on the nineteenth-century Delhi ivory miniature, shows how it drew upon traditional skills of painters trained in the Mughal court at Delhi, but redirected them towards the demands of a commercial, even tourist market. The ivory miniature’s transition from gift to souvenir allowed Mughal ideas, sites, and themes to become part of the English domestic interior, and served to maintain a bodily link with the European experience of Mughal India, while the ivory base was a reminder of the global flows of colonial commerce, through which African ivory reached the port of Bombay. Amlan Das Gupta’s chapter on early recorded music looks at a crucial moment in the history of sound recording in India, when the availability of a new technological medium transforms musical practice and practitioners. On the one hand this is a history of loss, as each new technological development leads to the obsolescence of earlier ones and the loss of recorded material. On the other, new forms of livelihood and new musical practices are initiated by the opening up of the market for recorded music and the limitations of the recording medium. John Plunkett’s essay on ‘The Overland Mail’ argues that moving panoramas were an important means by which mid-Victorian popular culture conceptualized the global circulation of goods, information and people. Many popular panoramas and dioramas took their audiences on a whistle-stop global tour, following an identifiable route, a narrative path that reproduced a major trade and communication route, and thereby orientated their audiences to the global world they were living in. The last essay in this section, by Supriya Chaudhuri, examines, from the perspective of Indian colonial subjects, some of the material and affective investments in and responses to the world fairs of the nineteenth century. Looking at the exhibition catalogues compiled by Trailokyanath Mukharji, the essay argues for a connection between Mukharji’s practical and affective investment in a revival of Indian crafts and agriculture, and nationalist efforts by Tagore and Gandhi to rehabilitate the artisan and craftsperson and to rethink the vexed relation between labour and the commodity. The commodities discussed in Section I are objects manufactured in workshops and factories. In Section II, ‘Place and environment’, by contrast, we turn to commodities that are extracted from nature – in mines (like coal), from rivers (like water), or from animals (like ivory). The essays in this section

8

Introduction

trace the processes by which place and environment, as specific material aspects of our surroundings, came to be recast as commodities in the age of empire. In what ways did culture inflect the transformations to which they were subject and by which they came to acquire new meanings and uses? In ‘The composition and decomposition of commodities: the colonial careers of coal and ivory,’ Stephen Muecke follows the trajectory of these natural resources as they emerged into new significance in the period. Coal was of course the primary resource that energized the Industrial Revolution, fuelling the imperial fantasy about the domination of nature. Ivory too was a key commodity in the Indian Ocean, gaining value by being culturally reworked and aestheticized, and contributing considerable wealth to that early global market. In Latourian fashion Muecke argues that affects are key agents in a chain of associations that have transformed the careers of ivory and coal as ‘vibrant matter’, from their original living sources to their lively appreciation by humans. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan delineates a particular history of water through the material and symbolic senses of the word ‘pollution’ as they have accreted around the river Ganges in India. In ‘Profaning water: The sacred and its others’, she tracks the shifts in the value of water effected by colonial secular modernity within the two discursive domains that the Ganges straddles, one a Hindu religious discourse as part of the modernist address to caste in the colony, the other a public welfare discourse articulated in terms of the ‘purification’ of water for consumption. Her essay questions the environmental politics of the ‘sacred’. She turns to Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the profane in order to subvert the ‘religion’ of capitalist commodification, examining actual historical instances of profanation and its implications for emancipating human consciousness of the material world. The third essay in this section, by Rochelle Pinto, identifies the epistemological shifts reflected in the understanding of land within the literary genre of the novel produced in Portuguese Goa. Framed by the contradictory pulls of debates on utilitarianism, agricultural science and caste equality, the metaphors through which questions of land would be debated were clarified and disseminated through the medium of print. Titled ‘Settling the land: The village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa’, Pinto’s essay analyzes Leopoldo Dias’s novel Os Maharatas (The Marathas, 1894), to suggest that the persistence of the communidade, a land system that was resistant to private property, functions as a disruptive element in the narrative structure of the novel. In Section III, ‘Labour and migration’, we turn our attention to labour, and the patterns of migration of different populations, as the drive for commodities necessitated a mobile work force. The essays in this section address the consequences of the large scale demographic shifts that the quest for commodities incurred: notably, the removal of thousands of coolie labourers from South Asia to plantations and other sites around the world, and the emigration of white working-class Europeans to settler colonies. These essays

Introduction

9

share a concern with the unforeseen or unplanned consequences of migration. In ‘(Re)moving bodies: People, ships and other commodities in the coolie trade from Calcutta’, Nilanjana Deb interrogates the material world of coolie migration – sailing ships and their stores, medicines and botanical extracts, food, ventilators and deck disinfectants – on journeys from Calcutta to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Mauritius, often in vessels adapted from the slave trade. Deb’s analysis highlights the extent to which the economic pressures to preserve the lives of the most valuable ‘commodities’ – human labourers – on board ship, stimulated the production of other commodities, especially in relation to ventilation, hygiene, and the production of branded medicines. Maintaining the health of coolie migrants, however, was an expensive task, and it was not long before colonial governments realized the advantages of encouraging coolies to settle with their families in plantation colonies, grow their own rice and raise poultry and cattle. Fariha Shaikh, on the other hand, looks at working-class British and Irish emigrants to Australia, and shows how their nostalgia for home is appropriated, and transformed, in print commodities of the day. Emigrants’ letters were published and sold as part of official campaigns to stimulate European emigration to the colonies. Shaikh is interested in the formal effects of the transition from personal letter to print commodity, and the transmogrification of the traces of human feeling once inscribed in the letter, into a preoccupation with modes of authentication within the printed document. The various strategies for authenticating the letter produce a distinctive ‘realist’ aesthetic that sheds light on other print genres of the time. In ‘Towards a genealogy of the village in the nineteenth-century british colonial world’, Josephine McDonagh argues that even as the direction of traffic has tended to be from country to city in the inexorable flow of populations in modernity, the idea of the village as a stable, traditional, rural, face-to-face community has had a remarkable persistence. She examines the construction of the ‘village’ in the influential work of two British writers of the nineteenth century, Mary Mitford and Henry Maine, and in the reconstructed village of ethnographic displays that toured the western world in late-nineteenth-century exhibitions, as a way of thinking about the ways in which the local was ‘produced’ in the context of demographic change and colonial commodity exchange. The final section, ‘Texts in Motion’, focuses on printed commodities which, we argue, have a privileged role in the commodity cultures of the period, as lucrative commodities in their own right, and powerful agents in the transoceanic transmission of knowledge and beliefs. Rather than reduce literary texts to quantifiable units of cultural capital, however, the essays in this section trace patterns of transmission, exchange and mutual influence between the aesthetic and economic realms, by carefully situating a series of mobile texts within a broad colonial context. Abhijit Gupta begins with the so-called ‘Indigo disturbances’, a series of peasant revolts in mid-nineteenthcentury colonial Bengal. Like most plantation crops, the farming of indigo was also a history of brutality, forced cultivation and violation of farmers’

10

Introduction

rights. But Gupta’s focus is the affective turn brought about in the indigo uprisings by the intervention of print, in particular Dinabandhu Mitra’s 1860 play Nil-Darpan, translated as The Indigo-Planting Mirror. By seeking to ascertain the role played by print in either furthering or diminishing the interests of the oppressed farmers, the chapter questions the extent to which print served as a spur to the indigo uprising. Rimi B. Chatterjee next introduces schoolbooks as both lucrative commodities and sites of intercultural intellectual exchange. In India, the Western schoolbook opened up a space where ideas and skills could be imparted without reference to religious or social sanction. At the same time, these texts formed part of the influx of goods and services which constituted the commercial relations of India with the Raj. Through the lens of commercial activity we see how these ideas are packaged and re-transmitted back to the lands from which they originally emerged. Continuing the focus on travelling texts, Brian H. Murray examines the literary networks of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and the journalist, poet and orientalist Edwin Arnold, paying particular attention to how exchanges between the two men were mediated by the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Focusing on Stanley’s own verse ‘translations’ of Swahili oral poetry and Arnold’s Africa epic, The Voyage of Ithobal (1901), the chapter explores intersections between the English literary canon, imperial discourse, and the nascent market for ‘indigenous’ African poetry in Britain. Stanley and Arnold’s exchanges offer a fresh perspective on the myriad ways in which the cultural life of the Indian Ocean (from Arnold’s India to Stanley’s East Africa) was recreated, reinterpreted, and reconceived in late-Victorian Britain. Finally, Isobel Armstrong turns to Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, exploring its powerful critique of the popular ‘traffic in representations’ between Britain and India. Kipling understands the ideological and orientalizing reading of representations, but considers the possibility of a hybrid and non-uni-directional passage of images and representations through the dual identity of his main character. By examining two powerful occasions when the novel dramatizes an interchange of objects, Armstrong argues that Kipling refuses the uni-directional domination of images, while remaining sceptical of a ‘pure’ Indian identity. In its attention to the subtle complexity of Kipling’s text, Armstrong’s essay draws together some of the concerns of this volume. These essays do not aim to produce a homogenous or unanimous account of commodities and culture in this period. Nonetheless Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World provides an integrated, coherent and urgent response to a number of key debates in fields of postcolonial studies, Victorian studies, world literature and imperial history.

Notes 1 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value’, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63 (58).

Introduction

11

2 There are a host of examples. See, for example, Erika Rappaport, ‘Packaging China: Foreign articles and dangerous tastes in the mid Victorian tea party’, Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 125–46; Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jonathan Curry-Machado, ed., Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach, Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995). Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Leo Drollas and Jon Greenman, Oil: The Devil’s Gold (London: Duckworth, 1989); Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2003); Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (New York: Grove Press, 2001); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (London: Penguin, 1997); Inga Saffron, Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy (New York: Broadway Books, 2002); Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003 [1988]). For a critique of commodity studies, see Bruce Robbins, ‘Commodity histories’, PMLA, 120 (2005), 454–463. 3 The literature here is too vast to document in full, but we have found the following especially influential in shaping our sense of this field. On migration, exile, and diaspora, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). On mobility see Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). On colonial communication networks see Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On things see Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For phenomenological studies, see especially Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On sensory studies see Constance Classen and David Howes, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (London: Routledge, 2013). On scale see Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4 Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 13. 5 John Tully, ‘A Victorian ecological disaster: Imperialism, the telegraph, and guttapercha’, Journal of World History, 2009, 20 (4): 559–579. 6 For a selection of illuminating case studies in this area, see Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr eds, Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 7 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 125. 8 Marx, Capital, 126–7, 199.

12 9 10 11 12

Introduction

Marx, Capital, 179. Marx, Capital, 165. Marx, Capital, 178–9. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century’, in Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32–49. 13 ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’. From the Preamble to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 98.

Section I

Making and showing

This page intentionally left blank

1

Mughal Delhi on my lapel The charmed life of the painted ivory miniature in Delhi, 1827–1880 Yuthika Sharma

When Herman Jackson Warner (1831–1916) of Boston bought two miniature ivory portraits (Figure 1.1) of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) and his wife Mumtaz Mahal (d. 1631) in Delhi in the 1880s, he was buying souvenirs of a past Mughal age.1 In nineteenth-century India Shah Jahan was remembered as the patron of the Taj Mahal at Agra, a grand marble mausoleum built to commemorate his beloved queen, Arjuman Banu Begum popularly known as Mumtaz Mahal. At Delhi, Shah Jahan’s memory lived on in the white marble palace and red sandstone citadel of Shahjahanabad, the erstwhile Mughal seat of power that was home to his successors and the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ (r. 1836– 1857). The ivory miniatures of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal were then ideal souvenirs for Warner not only because they symbolized romantic longing and commemorative zeal, but also because these portraits were, for all practical purposes, Mughal works of art. That Warner had the ivories set within ornate metal frames inset with ruby-coloured stones further suggests a vital perception about later miniatures featuring Mughal themes – as objets d’art invested with the artistic labor, technical skill, and an unwavering attention to detail that were considered fundamental to the creation of Mughal art.2 This essay addresses the contemporaneous reception of the Mughal miniature within and outside Mughal court culture in nineteenth-century Delhi (1827–1880), the city that served as the home of the last three Mughal emperors as well as the key diplomatic outpost of British governance in India. It provides a context for understanding the role of painted miniatures within courtly and popular practices in nineteenth-century Anglo-Mughal Delhi. Finally, it addresses the concept of a demise of quality and workmanship, inherent in perceptions of the absorption of miniature painting into the marketplace.

The last Mughal souvenir: Mughal subversion of the colonial image-gift A popular element of the gift-economy of the early modern Mughal court since Akbar’s reign (r. 1556–1605), the painted portrait miniature was in

16 (a)

Yuthika Sharma (b)

Figure 1.1 Warner’s Ivories: Shah Jahan (a) and Mumtaz Mahal (b) set in a silver and garnet encrusted frame, ca. 1875. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. Artworks 03.043 and 03.044. Watercolour on ivory. Oval 4.6 x 3.6 cm; in silver frame 7.6 x 6.4 x 1.3 cm

continued use in the subcontinent in the eighteenth century. With the rise of political interests of the East India Company (EIC), the traditional notions of gifting in the late Mughal and regional courts – both nazr, tribute offered by subordinates, and khilat, the bestowal of the honorary robe – were questioned and pre-empted by British policymakers in India.3 Khilats were often awarded as a reminder of the subsidiary status of the recipient in relation to the donor, and served to maintain the hierarchical structure of Mughal imperial rule.4 This tangible association between gifting and the body was a means of ensuring political allegiance, such that ‘the recipient was incorporated through the medium of the clothing into the body of the donor.’5 Other rituals entailed the gifting of portrait miniatures as part of a ceremonial of devotional allegiance to the sun known as the shast wa shabah, a ceremonial, devised to initiate disciples in the emperor’s service, that would have involved a full prostration at the ruler’s feet, followed by the disciple receiving a turban ornament, a medallion embossed with a sunburst, pearl earrings, and a miniature portrait of the ruler to be worn on the turban.6 Gifts of the imperial seal or ring along with the imperial likeness functioned as important markers of royal discipleship and were limited to those closest to the emperor’s circle of trust.7 Portrait miniatures in the Mughal court of Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) that were often exchanged and served as diplomatic instruments for Jesuit and EIC emissaries to obtain permissions for missions and trade rights in the subcontinent, also served to express an underlying competition between the two painting traditions.8 Such gestures were part of the orchestrated civility

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

17

that formed the foundation of early modern Mughal court culture, an idea that was carried through in the EIC’s dealings with the later Mughal court.9 Even so, Mughal courtly rituals were more often than not viewed with suspicion, as signs of despotic governance – those that also implicated the Company employees in practices of bribery, coercion, and favoritism.10 The resultant ban on courtly gifting, as Natasha Eaton has shown, encouraged hybrid notions of the colonial tribute-gift to emerge, exemplified in the notion of the ‘image-gift.’ Promoted by Governor General Warren Hastings (1773–1785), the image-gift intercepted European and Indian ideas of gifting and was formulated to counter or subvert the Indian gifting patterns of nazr and khilat, at times eliminating the obligation for reciprocal gifting altogether.11 Thus by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the politics of the image-gift formed the undercurrent for most Anglo-Mughal interactions. At Delhi, the EIC was able to exercise both political and financial control over the Mughal house based in the Red Fort, having gained sway over Mughal territories from Emperor Shah Alam (r. 1759–1806) from 1803, and taking up the day to day management of Mughal affairs.12 This allowed them to exert tighter control on the portrayal of the Mughal emperor’s regal demeanor, which would have been viewed as an attempt to reassert Mughal sovereignty and superiority over their British counterparts. A key aspect of this symbolic assertion had been the continuing prerogative of the Mughal house for disbursing khilats and receiving nazrs, which advocated servility and subservience to the emperor.13 The terms of Anglo-Mughal diplomatic encounters were therefore still determined through Mughal codes of civility, an aspect that was considered unfavourable by the EIC unless some sort of diplomatic ‘equality’ could be achieved.14 In this context, the colonial image-gift re-emerged for a final time as a key diplomatic element of political negotiations between the Mughal court and the EIC towards the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The very last meeting to occur between a Governor General and a Mughal emperor was an exercise wilfully conducted on an ‘equal footing’ marked by an absence of nazr and khilat rituals. On February 15, 1827, the Mughal court of Akbar Shah II (r. 1806–1837) was the venue for the visit of the Governor General Lord Amherst, William Pitt (1773–1857), to Delhi en route to the Northern provinces. The orchestrated meeting reflected a modified Mughal court ceremony where Amherst was received by the emperor’s sons Mirza Abu Zafar (1775– 1862) and Mirza Salim (1799–1836) at the Lahore Gate and led to his private chambers: Lord Amherst paid the Emperor a visit: he was received by him in the hall of audience, which both parties entered at the same moment, and, after an embrace, the Emperor ascended the peacock throne, and the Governor General sat down in a state chair on his right hand. After an

18

Yuthika Sharma interchange of compliments, and the usual form of presenting attar had been gone through, Lord Amherst took leave and was conducted by the Emperor to the door of the hall. On a subsequent day, the Emperor returned the visit with similar ceremonies.15

Amherst’s decision to meet Akbar Shah in response to a formal invitation had been conditional on the perception of a shared power-equation between the British administrator and the Mughal king. While this meeting set an important precedent for diplomatic equality between the court and the Company, it was followed by other debilitating injunctions against ceremonial and courtly conventions.16 These involved the abolition of presentation of nazr by lower ranked Company officers to the emperor,17 the disallowance of conferment of titles to them,18 and the revision of the epistolary format for royal address.19 This flagrant denial of the traditional right of the Mughal emperor to assert his superior status as the symbolic superior of state was also designed to discourage the nominal fealty towards the Mughal court to which successor states such as Avadh and Hyderabad continued to adhere.20 During his visit to the court, Amherst acquired a number of paintings, of Akbar II and his favourite son, Mirza Salim. The translation of Persian inscriptions on the now lost frames of the paintings, comprised the traditional titular invocation of Akbar II and his son Mirza Salim by the celebrated painter Ghulam Ali Khan (fl. 1817–55).21 The auspicious Portrait of His Majesty, exalted as Jemshid, whose attendants are like angels, the shadow of the Almighty, the Asylum of the Mahomedan faith, the promoter of the true religion, the glory of Islam, the ornament & representative of the house of Timour, the mighty Emperor, the renowned Sovereign, the Patron of the arts, my Lord & Master, Aboo Nasser, Moyeen ood Deen, Mahommed Akber Shah Padshah, Ghazi, may the Almighty grant him long life & prosperity, & continue to Mankind the benefits of his grace & favor. Dated the 22nd year of His Majesty’s reign. By His Majesty’s devoted faithful servant Gholam Ali Khan Painter. (A very good likeness of the Great Moghul as I saw him at Delhi in February 1827. A.)22 Though there is no official record of the exchange of the portraits, the very act of their acquisition by Amherst suggests a personal desire to commemorate his meeting with Akbar Shah. The portrait miniatures were collected as image-souvenirs rather than exchanged as image-gifts; however, Amherst’s translation of the painter Ghulam Ali Khan’s tribute to the Mughal emperor and his annotation recalling his royal meeting, brings elements of the shast wa sabah to the fore, indirectly implicating him in a donor-recipient relationship. Furthermore, the pairing of Akbar Shah and Mirza Salim in the paintings also conveys the considerable

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

19

extent to which the Mughal emperor was able to assert his long-standing views on royal succession. The portraits served to reinforce the emperor’s personal preference for Salim as successor in clear opposition to the Company’s choice of his eldest son Abu Zafar as Prince-in-waiting. In another painting of Akbar Shah riding an elephant, also acquired by Amherst in 1827, the coveted spot of the mahout or elephant rider is taken up by Salim indicating a position of trust (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 The Mughal emperor Akbar II (1806–37), on an elephant with Prince Mirza Salim, Delhi, 1827. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IS.59–1964. Watercolour on paper. 18 x 12 cm. Formerly in the collection of Lord Amherst, Governor-General of Fort William (1823–1828).

20

Yuthika Sharma

From connoisseur to consumer: Mughal miniatures in Anglo-Indian Delhi What Amherst acquired as personal souvenir in 1827 became a popularly sought objet d’art in the decades to come. At the time of Amherst’s visit to Delhi in 1827, Delhi painters had begun to explore the commercial potential of portable miniatures featuring subjects from portraiture to architecture and scenes from Mughal courtly life. Such miniatures reflected the altered sensibility of later Mughal court painting at Delhi that combined the Mughal imperial style with conventions introduced by the city’s European patrons. Painted ivories utilized the established technique of gouache, the opaque application of water-based colour, through a minor modification of pigments and technique to yield a ‘soft, rich, and effective’ result on ivory.23 Twotoned paintings in Indian ink that rendered the subject in light and shade were also popular. Images were drawn on a palm-sized or smaller ivory sheet, usually oval, that could be mounted onto a decorative base. Mounts varied, from a frame for holding portraits (as in the case of Warner’s ivories), a leather book cover, a piece of furniture such as a writing table or an ebony or sandalwood casket, to a piece of jewellery or clothing accessory such as a bracelet, stud, or lapel pin.24 The transposition of Mughal scenes from paper to ivory suggests that ivories had become a means of the Mughal miniature’s perpetuation into the wider commercial sphere. For example, extant versions of an ivory plaque painted with a court scene, showing Akbar II at court with the British Resident David Ochterlony (1758–1825) in attendance25 indicate that it was replicated by different painters at Delhi.26 They marked important events such as the accession date of the emperor, religious festivals, and the bi-annual movement of the Mughal court to the Delhi suburbs, all part of the courtly and cultural life of the Mughal court.27 Such compositions, designed to highlight the experience of Mughal pageantry and ceremonial, were essential to maintaining the outward projection of Mughal authority at Delhi. The fashion for courtly images on furniture and jewellery provides another dimension to understanding the outreach of images from courtly life into the popular sphere. The imperial procession of Akbar II, for instance, featured on a writing cabinet as well as a diamond brooch.28 Akbar Shah’s portrait, when painted on ivory, was infinitely adaptable to suit the varying needs of collectors, travellers, and tourists alike (Figure 1.3).29 By virtue of their ambulant nature ivory miniatures, set within frames or lockets, could travel cross-continental distances as carriers of sentimental and commemorative value for European travellers in India. Their production history offers a view into familial and social links forged by miniatures within Anglo-Indian society. Delhi painters were often commissioned to make copies of existing portraits that functioned as familial mementos. On February 20, 1839 Emily Eden had a number of her sister’s and her own paintings, including a likeness of her father, copied onto ivory by Delhi artists.30 She also sought painters like Raja Jivan Ram (active 1820–40), who worked in Delhi and Meerut, and

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

21

Figure 1.3 Portrait of Akbar Shah II formerly mounted in a bracelet depicting Indian rulers, ca. 1860. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. Ivory 2.5 x 2 cm.

were known for their skill at drawing miniatures from life. On February 19, 1838, Emily wrote, I treated myself to such a beautiful miniature of W.O. There is a native here, Juan Ram, who draws beautifully sometimes and sometimes utterly fails, but his picture of William is quite perfect. Nobody can suggest an alteration, and as a work of art it is a very pretty possession. It was so admired that F. got a sketch of G. on cardboard, which is also an excellent likeness; it is a great pity there is no time for sitting for our pictures for you.31 There is little doubt that the gift and exchange of portrait miniatures on ivory was an important means of sustaining the emotional economy ‘by which Anglo-Indian men and women established and maintained social and political relations across distance and time in the Romantic era.’32 Ivory miniatures with Mughal subjects resonated within the same circuit of circulation amongst the European population but their place within personal networks of

22

Yuthika Sharma

collecting and commemoration is less understood. Take for instance, a group of portrait miniatures of Indian subjects collected by James Baillie Fraser (1783–1856), an avid traveller and artist and older brother of the Delhi-based EIC officer William Fraser (1784–1835).

Contextualizing Mughalerie In January 1818, Fraser sent a number of miniatures back to his family in Scotland: The ivory miniatures are of a better sort – and they are really facsimiles from old native pictures of the persons they represent. I have seen a great many and all are alike – the natives are famous for copying and altho’ the Drawing be very bad, the execution is wonderfully good, particularly the cloaths and jewells and considering the cost but 4 Rupees each. The paintings of the women were done at my particular request – they represent the ladys of rank Moosulmans and Hindoos in their proper costumes – the former in their ugly trousers, tight above and loose below and the really graceful Do-putta or wrapping cloth above the head and shoulders which the shawl is made to imitate. The Hindoos are also attired above with the Doputta or Saree, and below with a dress very much, indeed wholly resembling a petticoat, of which I forget the name – The drawing of these is very bad as you will remark, but the painting particularly of the cloaths and jewellery is very fine. The Hindoostanee features are well expressed – they are very like these women.33 Fraser’s letter provides an important insight into the commercial production of ‘native’ themes on ivory for Europeans in early nineteenth century Delhi. James was a traveller and prolific artist who, along with his brother William, was instrumental in laying the foundations of genre portraiture in Delhi, drawing a number of artists away from the Mughal court into his employ.34 Fraser’s perception of the ivory miniature as an inauthentic portrayal of earlier Mughal works problematically recasts the ‘native’ version as an unsophisticated copy, successful only in rendering colours and details. His statement highlights a possible distinction between European portraits made by artists such as Jivan Ram versus ‘native’ copies of Indian subjects created by local painters. Is it possible to assume that these native copies existed within a continuum of later Mughal painting? Or were they simply part of a tourist trade for Mughaleries?35 Let us consider the ramifications of the latter term. Mughalerie is employed here as a way of classifying objects that were alternative media for the dispersal of Mughal painting much like Warner’s ivories that were made decades after the demise of Mughal rule. Although designed to represent Mughal ideas, they were temporally, thematically, and historically removed from the circuits of Mughal art and patronage, thus inhabiting a quasi-Mughal field.

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

23

However, the set of Indian ivories commissioned by James Fraser were made by local artists who continued to work for the Mughal house while serving European clientele.36 As collectors of Mughal manuscript folios, James and William Fraser were part of a parallel circuit of production of copies and faux versions of seventeenth-century Mughal paintings on paper, created to embellish albums which were reconstituted to personal taste.37 So, while Fraser collected nineteenth-century copies of Mughal manuscript paintings, he also commissioned a number of subjects on ivory miniatures that were suited for cross-continental travel. How were paintings on ivory, which followed in the well-established tradition of emulating Mughal ‘originals,’ to be classified? As a standard practice in Indian painting, copies were an essential means of paying tribute to the ‘original’ while imbuing the new version with historical meaning.38 The view of ivory miniatures as Mughalerie presents a scenario of discontinuity where the subject matter, while loosely based on ideas from older portraits, was in fact often invented in the artist’s imagination. A favorite subject was the depiction of Mughal noblewomen based on conventionalized models derived from a stock set of images. These images were paired with other stock sets of images of Mughal rulers to constitute a group of genealogical portraits of Mughal emperors. Such thematic groupings featuring Mughal rulers and their ‘wives’ reinforced the notion of a Mughal history based solely from the point of view of Delhi, which had served as the seat of the later Mughals. Aimed at collectors, these sets were important means of visually accessing Mughal history within popular circles.39 In the recent past later Mughal rulers such as Bahadur Shah Zafar had sought to reconfigure Mughal dynastic history focused on the throne of Delhi. Most royal commissions of genealogical portraits (featuring male rulers only) under Zafar were prepared in large albums.40 In contrast, later sets of ivory miniature portraits did not follow any set format of depicting Mughal genealogy, but may have reflected the personal preference of the collector and their own interest in the subjects depicted. A set of portraits mounted on silver shields gifted (presumably by Gulab Singh (1792–1857), the ruler of Kashmir) to Honoria Lawrence (d. 1854), wife of Henry Lawrence (1806–1857), political agent at Lahore in the 1840s, pairs Sikh, Kashmiri, and Afghan rulers alongside the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, his wife, and other ladies of the court, illustrating Lawrence’s personal gamut of political achievements in India (for a similar example, see Figure 1.4).41 Lawrence had participated in the first Anglo-Afghan war (1839) and the Kabul expedition (1842) and was instrumental in negotiating the sale of the region of Kashmir to the ruler Gulab Singh in the aftermath of the dispersal of Sikh territories following the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–46). The shield mounts of these ivories recast the ivories as war medals, retelling Lawrence’s narrative of personal triumphs. This particularly sombre overtone to the personal gift is only softened by the inclusion of generic portraits of noblewomen, perhaps to forge empathy with the intended female recipient. The simultaneous pairing

24

Yuthika Sharma

of local rulers and their wives in this case transfigures the victory souvenir into an expression of marital love. Twenty years later in 1864, the civil servant William Herschel purchased a similar set of ivories encrusted in a gold bracelet as a wedding present for his sister.42 This time however, the female figure had been renamed as Nur Jahan (d. 1645), the wife of the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). Herman Warner’s similar purchase of ivory miniatures of Shah Jahan and his wife, as we noted at the start, featured the conventional Mughal noblewoman (Figure 1.5) as Mumtaz Mahal.

Afterlife: The Delhi ivory miniature in the marketplace By the time Warner arrived in Delhi in the 1880s, the erstwhile Mughal capital of Delhi was part of the Indian territories ruled by the British Crown. Following the Siege of Delhi in response to the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Mughal city had been barricaded, to a 500-yard radius around the Red Fort, to discourage outbreaks by its residents. The Mughal palace complex in the fort was partly demolished to create military barracks.43 Following the incarceration of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ who died in exile in Rangoon in 1862, the palace grounds of the Red Fort complex, now under conservation, functioned as part of the tourist circuit for visitors to Delhi.44 As later tourist manuals indicate, a routine Delhi itinerary included a half-day visit to the Red Fort.45 Moreover, by the end of the nineteenth century, prices

Figure 1.4 Earrings: Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r.1799–1839) left and Prince Akbar Khan (d.1848). Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IM.26A-1924. 3.1x 2.2 cm.

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

25

Figure 1.5 An unidentified Mughal lady, ca. 1860–70. Given by Dr. W.L. Hildburgh. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum. IS.532–1950.

of Delhi ivory miniatures had risen from Rs. 4 to Rs. 50.46 The range of ivory miniatures was ‘…executed in all sizes, from a tiny miniature, to be set in a stud, button or bracelet, to the larger size which is occasionally seen set in silver and mounted on a casket of carved ebony or sandal-wood.’47 There is ample evidence that a number of painters employed with the Mughal court now began to work independently or for dealers in Delhi who emerged as the new faces of Delhi’s curio market. Describing the arts of Delhi, B. H. Baden Powell (1850–1901) recorded that ‘…the best painters in Delhi at the time I am writing, are Ismail Khan [fl. 1870s] and Ghulam Hosain [fl. 1860s].’48 Both artists were related to the Delhi painter Ghulam Ali Khan, suggesting that the family-based workshop of the artist continued to flourish. Ismail Khan primarily worked as a copyist from photographs to watercolour, while Ghulam Hussain Khan was adept at modifying his technique and style to suit his patrons’ needs, as in his depiction of the Nawab of

26

Yuthika Sharma

Jhajjar (d. 1857), in a striking hunt scene attacking a lion. This was a direct copy from a painting by Ghulam Ali Khan and was displayed in the Punjab Exhibition in 1864.49 Ghulam Hussain was also a versatile miniature portraitist using watercolours on ivory, and copying portraits in oil on canvas. His half-length watercolour portrait of Sir Henry Lawrence dated 1847 shows the subject in full-face view with detailed accoutrements and dress and he may well be the artist of the ivory portraits gifted to Honoria Lawrence, discussed earlier.50 Ghulam Hussain’s skill is evident in his half-length oil portrait (76 x 63.5 cm) of Lt. Colonel James Skinner, possibly copied from an existing painting (ca. 1836) by William Melville, hanging in the vestry of St. James’s Church in Delhi. The portrait is signed by the artist on the lower left in ‘nasta’liq’ script.51 The examples also show that artists were adept at working on large canvases as well as small hand-held ivory base, this diversity of skill serving to keep them abreast of changing conventions of painting, whether on paper or on ivory. Delhi emerged as a prominent centre for the production as well as the distribution of ivory objects.52 Delhi merchants acted as middlemen for trade in pan-Indian decorative arts. Benares, Lucknow, Bareilly, Moradabad, and Saharanpur had thriving centres of ivory carving with their main market at Delhi. Amongst the best-known dealers of souvenirs in Delhi was the workshop of Lala Faqir Chand, in the Dariba Bazaar. Faqir Chand (fl. 1880–1920) employed a number of craftsmen in his employ working at his premises while also contracting ivory wares from other artisans.53 The description of Faqir Chand’s workshop in a contemporary source highlights the familiar tropes of ‘primitive’ working methods of the Indian artist: The workers are congregated in a small room along with the wood-carvers and the miniature painters; some sit on the balcony, some on the stairs, some by open doors and lattices, wherever they can obtain sufficient light to work by, surrounded by their primitive implements, the whole forming a scene of the Indian artist at work, the surroundings in which his work is done containing everything to make it difficult, yet the result is exquisite.54 Such descriptions of working methods of artisans were part of the narrative of a traditionalism that was often applied to design intensive crafts in colonial India and as Tirthankar Roy has discussed, focused less on innovative aspects of skilled crafts or on the role of artisanal enterprise.55 Yet the continued production of the quasi-Mughal miniature in a post-Mughal environment demands not only that we address the reconfiguration of Mughal painting within Delhi’s curio market, but also recognize the mutable skills of individual artists in adapting to the needs of ivory-based painting. The absorption of surviving court painters and their descendants into retail houses points to the distillation of popular taste for Mughal painting in nineteenth-century Delhi, expressed through the body of skilled renderings of faux-traditional subjects on ivory.

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

27

It is hardly surprising given the diverse skill sets of the painters that ivory painting remained resilient to competition from technological changes, especially the spread of photography. In 1872, Baden Powell wrote about the way in which photography was incorporated into the fabric of miniature painting on ivory resulting in the production of scenes that afforded easier replication of stock scenes as well as photographs. He also remarked on the ability of artists to transfer images from monochromatic photographs to a coloured version noting that ‘… Even by transmitting an uncoloured photograph, accompanied by a sufficiently careful description, a miniature may be obtained in about a month’s time.’56 Arguably, ivory miniatures had begun to repackage the ‘aura’ of Mughal manuscript and paper painting in an era of photography. The Benjaminian view that the aura of an original work of art is its socially and historically inflected presence in a unique time and space, sets an original apart from the realm of consumerist consumption.57 While the process of replication, as Benjamin understood it, was central to the idea of perpetuation of art, mechanical reproducibility in his view led to a loss of ‘aura’ and qualitative degeneration. Within the realm of later Mughal painting the place of replication, as discussed earlier, sits within an uneasy space delineated by precommercial and post-commercial spheres of artistic production – viewed as an acceptable practice in the former, and associated with market-oriented degenerate copies or faux Mughal paintings in the latter. The possibility that skilful replication could be a valid claim for artistic virtuosity within later Mughal painting, where authenticity of art was the product of individual artisanal enterprise, frustrates Benjamin’s thesis to a degree, while also offering a plausible direction for considering the role of Delhi painters as ivory miniaturists. Delhi artists were not only participants in the emergent visual culture of the period, they were actively engaged in perpetuating visual ideas within Delhi society. The increased pace of replication embodied in ivory miniatures must also be understood in the context of a broadened patronage base from Mughal elites to the nouveau riche of Delhi. When viewed as a means for repackaging the ‘aura’ of Mughal paintings, the significance of the ivories goes beyond the gift and emotional economies of the city, as markers of a sustained connection with the city’s Mughal identity. Rather than solely as tokens of capitalist commodity culture, ivory miniatures allowed for a selective continuity of Mughal ideas into a post-Mughal era, formulating a popularly accessible visual narrative of Mughal history. Thus, the Delhi ivory miniature was very much a multivalent entity, at once invoking ideas of history, continuity, materiality and artistic change. Moreover, the incorporation of ivory miniatures into decorative and wearable settings such as richly carved furniture panels, portable frames, lockets, jewellery and even clothing accessories such as buttons and lapel pins, propelled the Delhi ivory miniature into the domain of commerce.58 Within Delhi’s flourishing curio market in the late nineteenth century, the distinction between Mughal and Mughalerie, for all practical purposes, had sufficiently blurred.

28

Yuthika Sharma

Notes 1 Special Collection, Herman Jackson Warner Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 2 As explained by Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court historian: ‘The minuteness of detail, the general finish, the boldness of execution … now observed in the pictures are incomparable.’ Thus, the miniature’s materiality – the use of natural pigments, jewel colours, precious metallic hues, microscopic renderings of figures and landscapes, and unbounded detail – was a crucial marker of the artistry of Mughal painting. Such skill drew appreciation from imperial connoisseurs such as Jahangir who were known for their ability to recognize the work of various hands within a single work. See David Roxburgh, ‘Micrographia: Toward a visual logic of Persianate painting,’ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2003, 43: 12–30. 3 For the role of honorary robes as investitures see Stewart Gordon, Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave, 2001); for khilat in the Indo-British context see Gail Minault, ‘The emperor’s old clothes: Robing and sovereignty in late Mughal and early British India’ Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India, ed. Stewart Gordon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4 Gavin R. G. Hambly, ‘The emperor’s clothes: Robing and ‘robes of honour’ in Mughal India,’ Robes of Honour, ed. Gordon, 31–49. 5 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing authority in Victorian India,’ The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165–209 (168). 6 John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45. Sixteenth-century accounts from the Mughal emperor Akbar’s reign provide insights into the gifting of portrait miniatures as part of the shast wa shabah. 7 Richards, The Mughal Empire, 105. The use of portraits on presentation or nazrana coins reiterates the global outreach of miniature portraits as markers of power and patronage, and as symbolic elements of commemorative, diplomatic, and monetary exchange. Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) carried forward this convention, projecting the idea of the sun-infused and all-knowing monarch, adopting the honorific Nur ud-Din or ‘Light of Faith.’ See the David Collection, gold mohur with portrait of Jahangir, regnal year 1611 AD. For another nazrana coin from Jahangir’s reign with Akbar’s portrait see British Museum CM 1930-6-7-1 (Gift of the National Art Collections Fund and H. Van den Bergh). 8 The arrival of Sir Thomas Roe as English ambassador at Jahangir’s court initiated the fashion for miniature portraits in Jahangir’s court. See Natasha Eaton, ‘Between mimesis and alterity: Art, gift, and diplomacy in colonial India, 1770– 1800,’ Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 2004, 822–23. For cross-cultural interactions at Jahangir’s court, see Gavin Bailey, ‘Counter Reformation Imagery and Allegory in Mughal Painting,’ Ph.D. thesis (unpublished), Harvard University, 1996, 134. For Jahangir’s commissioning copies of a miniature by Isaac Oliver, presented to him by Roe, see William Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul 1615–1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), 213. 9 On accepted practices of civil conduct see Barbara Metcalf ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 10 The corruption emerging from abuse of the Mughal gift by Company officials was first addressed through the Regulation act of 1773 that banned the acceptance of land, money, and jewels from Indians.

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

29

11 Eaton, ‘Between mimesis and alterity,’ 831. For an analysis of the artistic exchange, and in particular, the practice of portrait-giving as nazar or diplomatic gift, see Natasha Eaton, ‘The art of colonial despotism: Portraits, politics, and empire in south India, 1750–1795,’ Cultural Critique 2008, 70: 63–93. 12 K.N Panikkar, British Diplomacy in North India: A Study of the Delhi Residency, 1803–57 (Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1968). 13 For instance, see the visit of Shah Haji, Akbar II’s close aide, along with Raja Sher Mal to Calcutta in 1808. The khilats, which were sent by the Mughal family, were refused and returned by the Governor General. Panikkar, British Diplomacy, 31–35. 14 Lord Bentinck and later Lord Auckland were unable to agree on the terms of the meeting with the Mughal emperor. Panikkar, British Diplomacy, 144–45. 15 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Carey, 1828) 1: 459n. 16 This display of equal footing, devoid of the principal nazr and entailing the emperor’s return visit, set a status quo that remained in place for succeeding administrators. Macnaughten to Thomas Metcalfe, January 26, 1838 (May 2, 1838), No. 22. Cited in Panikkar, British Diplomacy, 144. 17 IOR/F/4/1179/30741 Sep 1826-Jul 1828. Heber, visiting the court of Akbar Shah II, mentions the restrictions imposed by the Company on offering nazrs. See Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:466–67. 18 India Pol. 20 Sep 1837, draft 437/1837, E/4/752, 757–62. 19 Amherst revised the epistolary format of the arzee/petition for addressing the emperor to exclude any expressions of vassalage. Instead, letters now followed the style of wasikah/treaties, beginning with an invocation of prosperity, and were classified as ‘illustrious epistles.’ Panikkar, British Diplomacy, 147. 20 At Lucknow the tactical debasement of Mughal power at Delhi acted as a catalyst for the Nawab Wazir Ghazi ud-din Haider’s political self-fashioning as King of Avadh in 1819. This symbolic declaration of independence prompted a flurry of ‘coronation’ commissions, of paintings, furniture, and decorative objects chiefly designed by the English artist Robert Home, chief painter to Ghazi ud-din. See Major [E.C.] Archer, Tours in Upper India, (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 1: 19–24, and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ‘Portraits of the nawabs: Images from the Lucknow Court 1775–1856,’ Marg: A Magazine of the Arts, June 2008. 21 For the career of Ghulam Ali Khan see Yuthika Sharma, ‘In the company of the Mughal court: The Delhi painter Ghulam Ali Khan’, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857, ed. William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 41–51. 22 See British Library Collection Record for Add.Or.2538 (Amherst Collection). The frames are now lost, but records of their inscriptions exist. 23 B.H. Baden Powell, Handbook of the Manufactures & Arts of the Punjab (Lahore: Punjab Printing Company, 1872), 350. 24 For varying uses of ivory paintings, see Baden Powell, Handbook, 350. 25 Christie’s, Indian and Southeast Asian Art, September 23, 2004, Sale 1409. 26 See British Library Add. Or 3079; Christie’s Sale 5560, Indian and Islamic Works of Art, South Kensington, April 29, 2005. 27 See Margrit Pernau and Yunus Jaffrey, Information and the Public Sphere (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). 28 ‘Writing cabinet with ivory plaque of Akbar Shah’s procession,’ Christie’s, Islamic and Indian Works of Art, October 18, 2001, London, ivory panel 14 x 20 cm; ‘Diamond brooch with ivory inset of Akbar II’s procession,’ Christie’s, Islamic and Indian Works of Art, April 20, 2007, London, 5cm diameter. 29 See Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004) on the distinction between travellers and tourists.

30

Yuthika Sharma

30 ‘F. [Fanny] has had your likeness of my father copied.’ Emily Eden,‘Up the Country’: Letters Written to her Sister (London: Richard Bentley, 1867), 263–64. 31 Eden, Up the Country, 94. 32 See Margot C. Finn, ‘Colonial gifts: Family politics and the exchange of goods in British India c. 1780–1820,’ Modern Asian Studies, 2006, 40 (1): 203–31 (204) on using the word Anglo-Indian to refer to a community of Britons residing in colonial India. 33 Fraser collection, Inverness-shire, cited in Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992), 217. 34 Yuthika Sharma, ‘Village portraits in William Fraser’s portfolio of native drawings,’ Portraiture in South Asia since the Mughals: Art, History and Representation, ed. Crispin Branfoot (London: I.B Tauris, forthcoming). 35 The term ‘Mughuleries’ has been used by Ebba Koch to discuss the recreation of Mughal paintings in the cartouche collages of Millionenzimmer in the Schonbrunn Palace. In this essay, I use a variation of the term (Mughalerie) to refer specifically to the painted ivory miniatures that were commissioned as collectibles. See Ebba Koch, ‘The “Mughuleries” of the Milllionenzimmer, Schonbrunn Palace, Vienna,’ Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton, ed. Rosemary Crill, Susan Stronge and Andrew Topsfield (London: V&A Museum, 2004), 152–167. 36 Y. Sharma, ‘In the company of the Mughal court’, 41–51. 37 I concur with Rosemary Crill’s suggestion of the growing market for faux paintings in Delhi. Rosemary Crill, ‘A lost Mughal miniature rediscovered’ The V&A Album, London, 1985, 330–36 38 Vishakha Desai, ‘Reflections of the past in the present: Copying processes in Indian painting,’ Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past, ed. Catherine B. Asher and Thomas Metcalf (Oxford and IBH, 1994), 135–148. 39 Some examples of ivory portraits of imperial couples are in V&A, IS 03577 to 03588 and IS 257–1955. 40 For late Mughal genealogical albums featuring portraits of emperors see SDMA Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, 1990:405, ‘An Album of Mughal dynastic genealogy,’ ca. 1850, and Bonhams Sale no. 17823, Islamic and Indian Art, 15 April 2010 ‘Album leaf from Dynastic Mughal album, ca. 1850.’ See also Sharma, ‘In the company of the Mughal court,’ 50. 41 See National Army Museum, London, records 1960-07-197-1 through 7. The inscription ‘Presented by him (Ranjit Singh) to Honoria Lawrence’ is erroneous; Lawrence assumed office in the Northwestern Provinces after Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839. 42 British Library, APAC, Add. Or. 2603. 43 For changes in British Delhi, see Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981). 44 The Archaeological Society of Delhi was active from 1849 in planning the conservation of pre-modern and Mughal structures: see Journal of the Archaeological Society of Delhi, 1849–1850, and H.H. Cole’s report, The Architecture of Ancient Delhi, Especially the Buildings around the Kutb Minar (London: Arundel Society, 1872). 45 J. Maiden for the Maiden’s Metropolitan Hotel, A Short Guide to Delhi and its Immediate Vicinity (Allahabad: Liddell’s Press, 1904). 46 Baden Powell, Handbook, 350. 47 Baden Powell, Handbook, 350–51. 48 Baden Powell, Handbook, 350. 49 Baden Powell, Handbook, 351; Archer, Company Paintings, 131 and 158 for ‘A tiger hunt at Jhajjar,’ Ghulam Ali Khan, c.1820.

Mughal Delhi on my lapel

31

50 British Library, Asia and Pacific Collections, Add.Or.2409: half-length portrait in leather case with velvet lining. 51 See M. and W.G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British, 1770–1880 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 69. 52 Delhi merchants acted as middlemen for trade in pan-Indian decorative arts. Benares, Lucknow, Bareilly, Moradabad, and Saharanpur had thriving centers of ivory carving, but their main market was at Delhi. See [T.P. Ellis], Monograph on Ivory Carving in the Punjab (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1900), 8. 53 Ellis, Monograph, 7–9. 54 Ellis, Monograph, 8. The workshop was probably established before the uprising of 1857, and was the chief purveyor of ivory carvings in Delhi. 55 Tirthankar Roy, ‘Out of tradition: Master artists and economic change in colonial India,’ Journal of Asian Studies, 2007, 66 (4): 963–91 (964). 56 Baden Powell, Handbook, 350. 57 See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Levin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 21–27. 58 A parallel case in Britain can be studied in Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with brilliants”: Miniature portraits in eighteenth-century England,’ Art Bulletin, 2001, 83 (1): 48–71 (4).

2

Plates and bangles Early recorded music in India Amlan Das Gupta

This essay deals with some of the early developments in the first decade of sound recording in India (1902–1910), and their relation to the production and circulation of music as a commodity. Our focus here is principally on the history of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music. It is well known that the practices of Indian classical music were localized and discontinuous at the time that mechanical recording commenced in India, with both ethnic and geographical factors inflecting its many local traditions. The advent of new technology made possible new forms of production and consumption of music, and created radically new possibilities for dissemination and circulation. It also makes us aware of the fact that new technologies, of which the late nineteenth century is so prolific, lovingly eye colonial markets. From the point of view of the historian of music, the importance of this moment undoubtedly is that it is from this point that we can try to construct a history of sound, even though the project in the case of Indian music remains sadly incomplete. Yet the scratchy and unsatisfactory sounds that still emanate from the earliest surviving gramophone discs speak to us eloquently over the passage of a century, prompting us to consider deeply questions of reception, competence and repertoire – and above everything, that of taste. Let me start by summarizing some early developments.1 The Gramophone Company – known then as the Gramophone and Typewriter Company Ltd. – began its operations in India in 1902. The sequence of operations in the early years is easily summarized and discussed incisively by both Michael Kinnear and Gerry Farrell.2 Both Kinnear and Farrell have drawn attention to the fact that the Company had in fact recorded a set of recitations and songs in Indian languages in London, but they seem not have made much of an impact.3 J.W. Hawd, the agent of the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, had set up an office in Calcutta in 1901 to investigate the prospects of the company doing business in India. He recommended quick action, and accordingly a ‘Far Eastern recording tour’ with stops at Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bangkok and Rangoon was set up, with Frederick Gaisberg as principal recording engineer. A sophisticated recording machine was devised for the purpose and the party arrived in Calcutta in October 1902 on the ship Coromandel along with a

Early recorded music in India

33

supply of 7-inch and10-inch wax matrices for recordings. On November 8th, Gaisberg made his first commercial sound recordings in Calcutta.4 A local Englishman, W.S. Burke, was persuaded to make the first test recording (labeled in the catalogue as ‘Villikens and his Dinah’), but the first ‘native’ artists to record were two actresses from the Classic Theatre, Miss Soshimukhi and Miss Fanibala. Gaisberg thought poorly of their singing, and described them in his reminiscences as ‘two little nautch girls aged fourteen and sixteen years with miserable voices’.5 A few days later, probably through the good offices of a local connoisseur, Gaisberg was able to make his first set of important recordings. He recorded a number of songs sung by the leading female vocalist of the time, Bai Gauhar Jan.6 A number of other recordings followed, a few by exponents of Hindustani classical music, but far more of songs, recitations and orchestral pieces by members of two theatrical companies, associated with the Classic and Corinthian theatres. In fact only one other classical artist of note was recorded on this session: the amateur singer, Lalchand Boral. During his six-week stay in Calcutta, Gaisberg recorded some 550 matrices, both in 7-inch and 10-inch format. The recorded matrices were sent back to the Company’s pressing plant in Hanover, and finally the records arrived for sale in April 1903, and were released in the Indian market the same year. However, the records had apparently been packed badly and were in a bad condition. Many of the records were in fact unsellable: Hawd, after a long and frustrating correspondence with his superiors left the company and joined a rival firm, and was replaced by T.W. Addis.7 The records and the recording media thus made several long trips over the seas and this remained the practice for most of the ensuing decade. The Company returned in 1904 and 1906 for further recordings, and gradually increased its geographical scope. Recordings were now made in a number of major Indian cities such as Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow, Allahabad, Hyderabad and Madras; the engineers made approximately 1285 recordings in 1904–5, and 1350 in 1906–7. The same lengthy procedure of shipping the matrices back to the factory at Hanover was continued.8 Only after the setting up of a factory at Sealdah in Calcutta (operational in 1908) did the need for these long voyages across the sea become unnecessary. Interestingly, the Gramophone Company commissioned its first pressing plant in England very shortly after the Sealdah factory. Gauhar Jan sang at the inauguration at Calcutta; Nellie Melba did the honours at Hayes in England.9 It would be useful to reflect briefly on the conditions of the earliest phase of recordings in India. Such recordings, made primarily on flat discs made of hard shellac, or in some cases other media like aluminium, tinfoil and cardboard, were rudimentary in their techniques and media. Recording was done in informal surroundings, at hotels, or at the houses of wealthy patrons; later we hear of recording camps set up in villages or small towns at which artists congregated. The recordists had little understanding of the sounds that they were recording. William Gaisberg (Frederick Gaisberg’s brother and successor in the company as engineer) wrote later in an article:

34

Amlan Das Gupta I have painful recollections of our first singing party, which started about ten o’clock at night and lasted until the small hours of the morning … You must remember that we went to India to furnish records for the natives not for Europeans, so during our whole tour we were associated practically entirely with natives.10

He later writes: ‘Indian music … is not particularly pleasing to the European’s ear’.11 Whatever they may have felt about the content of their recordings, however, the fact that the first recording tour had been a success was amply clear. Michael Kinnear reports that the release of the discs made from the matrices recorded during 1902–1903 sold well and increased the sales of all kinds of talking machines.12 However, by the end of the decade, the Gramophone Company was facing competition from a number of other firms and entrepreneurs, both foreign and Indian. Other companies, such as the Nicole Record Company, had started making forays into the Indian market. Local entrepreneurs like H. Bose were using their contacts and knowledge of the field to engage the best talents, and working out collaboration with Nicole and Pathé. Pathé Freres issued about a hundred titles of well-known performers as centre-start Pathé discs; it is possible that the Gramophone Company did not have the same continued access to all these artists. The Gramophone Company returned repeatedly during the decade, every time spreading their net wider and wider; if they were not able immediately to attract the most eminent classical performers, it would be too harsh to say as Kinnear does, that they were picking up the crumbs.13 They were for instance able to record the most eminent women artists of the country, not just the celebrated quartet of Gauhar Jan, Malka Jan, Janaki Bai and Zohra Bai, but also the less known but equally brilliant Wazir Jan, Haidari Jan and Kali Jan. The overwhelming presence of women artists in the lists of the first decade is itself a subject for independent study. If they had mixed success in the case of male performers, it is a matter of fact that they did record a number of great artists whose music remained long in circulation such as Imdad Khan (sitar), Barkatullah Khan (sitar), Asadullah Khan Kaukuv (banjo), Abdul Karim Khan (vocal) and Maujuddin Khan (vocal), to name just a few. However, it is true that the Gramophone Company was in fact somewhat late in entering the Indian market for recorded sound. Before the advent of the gramophone, a number of companies dealing in phonographic equipment had started dealing instruments and recording blanks. These included both Indian merchants and foreign companies: M.L. Shaw and Dwarkin and Co. (of Dwarkanath Ghosh) were among the earliest dealers in Calcutta, and Vallabhdas Runchhordas opened an establishment in 1902 in Bombay. The earliest phonographs had aroused interest among the Calcutta intelligentsia, and as early as 1879 Samuel Harraden demonstrated a phonograph at the annual function of the Mahomedan Literary Society at the Town Hall in Calcutta.14 In 1888, Father Lafont, a Belgian Jesuit priest and teacher at St Xavier’s College, imported a phonograph from the United States and used it

Early recorded music in India

35

for scientific experiments. These phonographs used recording cylinders covered with soft wax which were used for both home recording and playback; apparently they were also reusable, and the wax coating could be scraped off and fresh recordings made. Referred to as ‘brown’ wax cylinders, these are different from the harder pre-recorded black (or blue) wax cylinders used later for commercial releases. These could not be erased or re-recorded. From the 1890s, dealers were offering buyers of phonographs ‘pre-recorded’ cylinders, not exactly commercial recordings, but songs by both amateur and professional singers recorded on individual cylinders. An article published in Mahajanbandhu, a Bengali trade journal published by the community of sugar traders in 1903 (Vol. 4 Issue 2, Chaitra 1310 BS) is a mine of information about the popularity of the phonograph. The piece is unsigned, bearing only the name of a trading establishment, Sukhasancharak Co. located in Mathura.15 It lists the various makes available in the Calcutta market, and comments on their quality and price: we learn that when an instrument was procured for Calcutta University, ‘some 21 years ago’, the price was reportedly 2000 rupees; now the Edison phonographs sell for 80 rupees. The German phonographs are only 15 rupees. The quality of the cheap German gramophones, the writer asserts, is poor as ‘one cannot distinguish between the sound of the rotating cylinder and the human voice’. ‘Not only music’ the writer says, ‘but laughter and tears, and if the cylinder is kept working late at night, one can even record the voices of thieves who enter the house’. Like the photograph, the cylinder also possesses forensic value: one could present a voice recording in court as incontrovertible evidence. The photograph cannot speak; the cylinder cannot depict. Prophetically, the writer says that if the bioscope and the phonograph could be combined, it would be called the ‘ultimate progress of humankind’.16 The close association in the same paragraph of different technologies of reproduction – those of sound, still image and moving image – signals a shift in consciousness, an awareness of radically new ways of organizing knowledge. Friedrich Kittler’s important book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter gives us a vivid sense of this time.17 The new technology appears to have become popular in India by the end of the century, and was used not only for casual recording but also to make recordings of eminent musicians – some of the greatest of the time. It is reported that Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, the great musicologist and systematizer of Hindustani classical music, made as many as 300 cylinder recordings of musicians whom he met and conversed with in the course of travels over the country.18 These cylinders became firmly etched in the minds of those who listened to them with wonder and frequent incomprehension; they were called in Bengal churis and in Maharashtra bangris, bangles, opposed to the thalas or plates as the discs came to be known. The cylinders continued to be in the market for nearly a decade after the arrival of the disc; some of the professionally marketed cylinders were themselves transferred on to disc and reissued in the market.

36

Amlan Das Gupta

But a much larger body appears to have simply disappeared. The pioneering Bengali entrepreneur who popularized the cylinder commercially was Hemendra Mohan (H.) Bose, perfumier and manufacturer of hair-oil and bicycles.19 By 1906, he was marketing cylinders in Calcutta, and had a wide range of contacts in Calcutta which allowed him to record a number of luminaries: most famous of these recordings was the patriotic song ‘Bande Mataram’ recorded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1905. Some (unfortunately, very few) of these cylinders made under the ‘H. Bose’s Records’ label were later (in 1908) transferred to vertical cut disc records on the Pathé label. But the fact that the phonograph could be used for private recordings resulted in many recordings having been taken on them by wealthy enthusiasts. The anecdotal history of Hindustani music is replete with stories of these marvellous recordings. One of them may give an indication of the value of the music that was actually recorded. In the late 1940s Bhurji Khan, the representative of the Jaipur-Atrauli school of vocal music, came to the residence of the princes of Jamkhandi for a concert, accompanied by his son Azizuddin Khan and his student Mallikarjun Mansur. The host entertained his guest by playing for him a bangri of Bhurji Khan’s father, the legendary Alladiya Khan; Azizuddin Khansahab, who has recounted this story, remembers well the magic of the occasion, and they were amazed to hear the youthful voice of Alladiya accompanied by his brother Haidar Khan singing the khayal in raga Poorvi ‘Dard ko safaya karo, Allahu akbar’.20 The recording had apparently been made at the time when the first phonographs had come to India and the ustads had been persuaded to record their voices at the residence of a wealthy patron. They also had the privilege of hearing the voice of the famous ‘Dulhe’ (Abdullah) Khan of Agra. Attempts to locate these records later have proved futile. A rare example of survival is the sound recordings attributed to the khayal singer Bhaskarbua Bakhale, apparently made on wax.21 They seem to be in poor condition, and it seems probable that given Indian climatic conditions, soft wax cylinders in general are on the whole unlikely to have survived unscathed, and that even if one were to stumble upon a hitherto undiscovered collection of cylinders (as recently seems to have been done), it may be difficult to extract very much from them. At the same time, it is true that many western archives (such as the British Library) have maintained archives of cylinder recordings in playable condition. Cylinders were in fact used by anthropologists and ethnographers well into the 1940s. The Arnold Bake collection at the British Library ranges from 1925 to 1946, suggesting their use for scholarly purposes until the advent of portable ferrograph and spool recorders. Bake used other media and equipment as well, including reelto-reel tape, but also the ‘Tefiband’, apparently an instrument for recording sound on movie film. The British Library also holds the Fox Strangways collection (1910–11) which contains recordings of Hindustani music. It must be said however that the knowledge of surviving Indian cylinders is changing rapidly. Suresh Chandvankar wrote somewhat despairingly in 2002, ‘no working cylinder machine or cylinder … [has been] found with any

Early recorded music in India

37

collector in India so far’. Very recently – in the last couple of years – a few cylinder records appear to have been recovered, some apparently of Bhaskarbuwa Bakhale himself. More importantly, there are reports of working phonographs and cylinders with private collectors. These cylinders have not come into public view, and one can only hear extracted sound in digital recordings. A far more substantial discovery has been reported in 2014, by A.N. Sharma and Anukriti Sharma in a volume titled The Wonder that was the Cylinder (Mumbai: Spenta, 2014). This volume documents a large collection of working brown wax cylinders, now named the Abha Collection, recovered from a scrap dealer in Mumbai. Additionally, there are descriptions of a number of other cylinders, of inestimable cultural value for the history of sound recording in India, containing the voices of singers like Gauhar Jan, Alladiya Khan and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar; the great Marathi theatre personality, Bhaurau Kolhatkar; and the pioneer of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke. The volume includes a disc containing clips from some of these records. All of these appear to have been privately made. There is no doubt that this discovery materially alters the history of Indian sound recordings, and one hopes that the recordings will at some point be placed in a publicly accessible archive. The Mahajanbandhu article cited earlier ends by comparing the respective merits of the gramophone and the phonograph as means of recording and playback. The gramophone suffers greatly by comparison: for one the gramophone record cannot be re-recorded as the phonograph cylinder can. The gramophone record is also said to be virtually indecipherable after a few rounds of playing – unlike the cylinder. There is also a somewhat garbled account of the ‘iron cylinder of the gramophone’ and the ‘diamond’ cylinder of the phonograph, ‘for which reason the record is long lasting and more expensive’.23 It may well be that the correspondent of the Sukhsancharak Co., the communicator of the article, had some interest in promoting the phonograph. However, over the next decade, the supremacy of the disc as the popular recording medium is complete. With the introduction of the medium of recording in India – the entry into the age of what Jacques Attali termed repetition as against the earlier age of representation24 – virtually every form of sound was recorded. Much of this has been lost irretrievably. Even apart from the sad indifference towards historical sound records generally in the subcontinent, there is also the question of technological obsolescence and company rivalry. Leaving out the private recordings, and considering merely the commercial releases, we find that the struggle between different forms of technology, with the ascendancy of one form over the other, led to large scale loss of musical material at every stage of technological development. The use of cylinders as we have seen waned towards the end of the first decade, with even H. Bose going over to the disc format. Yet even many of the other recording formats such as early Pathé discs are difficult to play today, for the simple fact that they used a technology that did not become popular in India: the centre-start vertical cut 22

38

Amlan Das Gupta

method. The disc would play from inside out rather than outside in. They played on proprietary gramophones rotating at between 90 and 100 rpm. Other media used for early Indian recordings included cardboard discs favoured by Nicole Records and Neophone, though its use for classical music appears to have been minimal. Most other companies dealing in gramophone equipment seem to have relatively short histories; the market from the beginning shows many players, and some companies clearly could not compete profitably. But even in their span of operations other companies managed to record many eminent artists. Playback equipment as much as techniques of reproduction fall into disuse after an initial period of experimentation; the real casualty is the music which becomes largely unplayable and thus unavailable to modern historians and archivists. The Gramophone Company, though late in picking up the Indian market, soon became the biggest player in it, recording and selling incredibly large numbers of discs on their recording tours. The successive tours show a sharply ascending graph of recordings taken: 553 in 1902–3, 1274 in 1904–5 and 1402 in 1906–7. A more steady increase is seen in the number of 10-inch records made (this fast emerging as the standard format) – 217, 821 and 1254. To give an idea of the volume of sales, the Company sold 388,401 discs and 6,227 gramophones between July 1910 and June 1911, with a turnover of Rs 1,146,900.25 In the seven decades of the existence of the 78 rpm record in India, the Gramophone Company and its subsidiaries produced something in the region of half a million titles; in comparison, all the rival companies together produced about 30,000 titles in the same time span. The large sales of their records meant greater room for experimentation with artists. Not surprisingly today Gramophone Company shellac discs overwhelmingly constitute the largest body of survivals. I would like to conclude by briefly considering some of the effects of early recording, a subject that I have written about at length elsewhere.26 One might start by observing that the first effect of the new technology is to erase the specificity of the different social spheres in which music operates in society, inaugurating, at least temporarily, a new material field, in which distinctions of social position, geographical location and religious belief are suspended. Even the Indian records might be thought of as part of a larger conglomeration: the recordings made in the Far Eastern Recording Expedition as a whole. Indian art music takes its place with other forms of sonic material in the homogenous space of the gramophone record. The value that these items claim in social life, their association with valorized spaces of production, with forms of pedagogy and spheres of influence, are held in suspension in the neutral materiality of the black shellac disc. The reactions of artists to the new medium varied widely; I think that the evidence that we have (for classical recordings) supports a qualified claim that the space of gramophone recording witnessed within a relatively short time a lack of male participation and then a cautious entry. Women hold centre-stage in the 1906–7 recording tour particularly, which leads to the only surviving recorded examples of a number of very powerful women artists. But one gets the

Early recorded music in India

39

feeling that before the decade is out, the establishment of male control over the domain is underway; even for classical artists, the field of recording is too important to be left to women. A well-known photograph, taken by Lala Deendayal in 1892, shows Nawab Ghalib Jung and his European friends listening to a phonograph.27 The machine is pedal-operated and a number of people are listening through tubes attached to it. The photograph brings together the two principal forms of mechanical reproduction in close proximity; the rapt attentiveness of the listeners prompts us to reflect on the way in which technological innovations are experienced as instances of the marvellous. Early accounts of photography in India are also replete with this sense of the miraculous. For artists who first engaged with the new technology of commercial recording, however, the situation must have seemed constrictive to the extreme. Singing into a recording horn, negotiating with engineers entirely unfamiliar with their art, and in most cases unappreciative as well, the fixed length of the recording, were all unprecedented. Hindustani music – or indeed any kind of song in the wide range of musical forms that were covered in the first three recording tours of the Gramophone and Typewriter Company – was not amenable to this kind of temporal abbreviation, and the worst affected were the genres of classical music. How then were the aesthetics of the recorded song to be determined? From available examples it seems that practitioners devise different kinds of solutions. Evidently artists were working out strategies of miniaturization, capturing the essence of a composition that might take an hour or more to render in concert in the confines of the gramophone disc. But as to what exactly constituted the essence of the song, there was no clear answer. It is important to remember that unlike in a concert in which different aspects of musical skill and knowledge can be located in the different compositions rendered, each record circulates as a separate unit, and needs to be self-sufficient in generating a comprehensive image of the artist’s musical personality. How this connects with the intense urge towards particularity that is central to the world of musical practices as it appears at the beginning of the 20th century is interesting. Artists like Gauhar Jan, or Janki Bai or Maujuddin Khan who recorded large numbers of songs at each session (reflecting in some way their standing in the musical world) seem to use the recording session as an opportunity for demonstrating their command over different genres, languages and singing styles. At the same time there appears to be a tendency towards emphasizing musical virtuosity in each separate unit. The Gramophone Company recorded only two Hindustani classical artists of renown in its first (1902) tour. One was Gauhar Jan, whose demeanour and poise impressed even the uncomprehending Will Gaisberg; the other the amateur singer Babu L.C. Boral, whose records, the Calcutta agent of the Gramophone Company reported agitatedly to the head office, ‘sold out within half an hour after the shop was opened.’28 The value of these recordings for the history of contemporary classical music is very great. Attitudes to

40

Amlan Das Gupta

the medium change rapidly. For the professional Gauhar Jan, who commanded high performance charges, the new technology at the outset appears mainly as an advertising opportunity. For her first set of records she chose to record in eight languages, presumably to reinforce an image of supreme musical virtuosity (including an English song ‘My love is like a little bird’). In subsequent sessions she still recorded many kinds of songs but there is a greater representation of classical and light classical pieces, the kind that related directly to her reputation as the pre-eminent tawayef singer of the time. I would tentatively suggest that the medium came to be taken more and more seriously, with artists willing to stake more of their reputation in the field. For the amateur L.C. Boral, whose connection was more with the aristocratic elite of the city, the first impulse seems to have been to assert his authority as a classical artist. His Bengali songs became very popular later, but on the first occasion he concentrated more on strictly classical pieces. The gramophone record became for artists a site on which to create images of their own musical ability and range. If many artists shunned recording, especially in the early phase, considering it trivial and demotic, unworthy of the musical traditions that they represented, others were quick to seize upon the medium as a powerful means of generating new musical identities. If in the case of Gauhar Jan in 1902, or Abdul Karim Khan and Maujuddin Khan in 1905, or Janki Bai in 1907, the gramophone record was a way of confirming a musical identity already well established, by the end of the first decade of recording, we note the emergence of ‘gramophone celebrities’, artists whose popularity and renown were entirely based upon their recording careers. The shellac disc remained the principal medium of commercial recording for more than half a century in India. Many of the greatest exponents of Indian art music of the first part of the 20th century, Hindustani and Carnatic alike, committed their art to this medium, and in doing so made it a witness to the greatness of their musical imagination.

Notes 1 I am dependent in this essay – as indeed all students of early recording in India are – on the research of the Australian record collector and historian Michael Kinnear, who almost single-handedly established the foundations of Indian discography – to use the term in a manner analogous to bibliography. I would also like to record my debt to the research findings of the late Amitabha Ghosh, partly published in his article ‘Pre-commercial era of sound-recording in India’, Indian Journal of the History of Science, 1999, 34 (1). The essay incorporates some material from an earlier article by me: ‘Representation and repetition: Early recorded music in India’, Yearly Review, Department of English, Delhi University, Special Issue, 2004–2005, Number 13. 2 Michael Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908 (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1994); Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 3 Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 114; Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 3–4.

Early recorded music in India

41

4 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 12–13. 5 Cit. in Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 11–12. 6 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 13; on Gauhar Jan generally, consult Vikram Sampath, My Name is Gauhar Jaan! The Life and Times of a Musician (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2010). 7 Addis was later involved in an exemplary litigation with the Gramophone Company (Addis v Gramophone Co. 1909) over wrongful dismissal. See: http:// e-lawresources.co.uk/cases/Addis-v-Gramophone.php (last accessed 13 April 2016). 8 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 23. 9 Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s Indian Recordings, 1908–1910 (Victoria: Bajakhana, 2000), 16. 10 William Gaisberg, ‘The romance of recording’, Article I, The Voice, 1918, 6–7, reprinted in The Record News, Mumbai, 1995, Vol. 17, 39–40. 11 Gaisberg, ‘The romance of recording’, Article 3, 6, The Record News, 17, 1995, 44. 12 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 21. 13 Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 22. 14 Information on early cylinder records has been sourced from Amitabha Ghosh, ‘Pre-commercial era of sound-recording in India’, Indian Journal of the History of Science 1999, 34 (1). 15 ‘Phonograph’, Mahajanbandhu, vol. 4, 1903. The issue of Mahajanbandhu is available on the SAVIFA portal, see: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/ 799/ (last accessed 13 April 2016). Translations are mine. 16 ‘Phonograph’, 33–35. 17 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 18 Sobhana Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to Music: A Historical Perspective (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1983), 83. Nayar however anachronistically speaks of ‘discs’ being used to record Ashiq Ali and Mohammad Ali. 19 On H. Bose see, Ghosh, ‘Pre-Commercial Recordings’, 51 ff., and Kinnear, First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, 42 ff. 20 Azizuddin Khan, private communication to the author, 2000. 21 In most cases what comes to public view are digital copies of the sound recordings, with reports in some cases of the original cylinders, which remain firmly in private possession. 22 Suresh Chandvankar, ‘Indian Gramophone records: The first 100 years’, see: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/indcent.htm (last accessed 13 April 2016). 23 ‘Phonograph’, Mahajanbandhu, vol. 4, 39. 24 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Sound, translated by Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 25 The figures have been compiled from Kinnear’s two volumes (1994, 2000): see Introductions to the volumes, passim. 26 See A. Das Gupta, ‘Representation and repetition: Early recorded music in India’, Yearly Review, Department of English, Delhi University, Special Issue, 2004–2005 Number 13; and also A. Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’, in Bharati Roy ed., Women of India (Delhi: Sage, 2005), Ch. 18, 455 ff. 27 Image available at the Lala Deen Dayal website; see http://www.deendayal.com/ htmimages/gr9955.htm (last accessed 13 April 2016). Reproduced in Sharma, The Wonder that was the Cylinder (Mumbai: Spenta, 2014). 28 See Chandvankar, ‘Gramophone celebrity’: In 1903, Thomas Addis, Calcutta agent of the Gramophone Company wrote to the head office in London, ‘Our stocks of Bengali records are insufficient. The public eagerly awaits the arrival of new records and they do not trust our assurances. Last week, three hundred

42

Amlan Das Gupta records of Lal Chand Boral were sold out within half an hour after the shop was opened, completely depleting our stocks. In India within 300 miles, there are changes in the dialect, language, province and culture. Therefore there is an unlimited scope for this industry. The population of this country is over 30 crores with about 150 spoken languages’, The Record News, 2003, 8.

3

The Overland Mail Moving panoramas and the imagining of trade and communication networks John Plunkett

In the nineteenth century, the moving panorama was an important means of helping British audiences envisage the global circulation of goods, people and information. The fictional Phileas Fogg was fortunate and wealthy enough to be able to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days; however, for the majority, a two-hour panorama show at their local town hall or mechanics’ institute was much more likely to shape their experience of the globalised, economically interdependent nation that industrial Britain was becoming. The moving panorama provided an embodied experience of the new global mobility of goods and people, and, as importantly, of a ‘mobile’ subjectivity that could range over continents and be simultaneously ‘plugged’ into discontinuous spaces. Tim Cresswell has argued that ‘ways of conceiving of mobility itself – not just mobility between nations, regions and places – are often informed by a desire to fix what is unfixable in order to make it knowable within a clear spatial framework.’1 The moving panorama was an aesthetic form that made knowable a modernity founded on movement and mobility, and it is no surprise that the height of its influence coincided with a rapid period of the opening up of global spaces and networks. It is no coincidence that some of the most popular shows of this period – the Overland Mail, the Pacific Railway from New York to San Francisco, Hamilton’s Excursions Around the World, the umpteen emigration panoramas – familiarised audiences with the international routes and networks that were facilitating the movement of so many commodities and people. The moving panorama was an important cultural form for ordering and assimilating the global into its audience’s sense of their imagined locatedness in the world. The moving panorama, however, did more than provide a picture of a world of interconnected global spaces. For audiences, they also provided an experience of the simultaneity – of being in multiple spaces at once – that seemed to go hand-in-hand with interdependence and new forms of timespace compression. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jonathan Crary, Michel de Certeau and Alison Byerly are amongst the critics who have linked ‘panoramic’ viewing to other new forms of mobile, visual experience such as that of the railway passenger.2 Panoramas and dioramas offered up a compressed frictionless, commodified version of the world. A frequent trope of panorama

44

John Plunkett

reviews was that it was a technology that enabled audiences to travel seamlessly between continents and be in two spaces at once: the comfortable environs of the town hall and the Californian gold fields or frozen Arctic wastes. It is this inhabiting of multiple spaces that made the panorama an experiential expression of a world where the local and global were increasingly integrated into each other. Alison Byerley has argued that, while there was often a comic knowingness towards the hyperbole of the panorama’s virtual travel, this needs to be balanced against the widespread belief in its potential to create a more open-ended sense of place.3 Writing of panorama audiences, Dickens approvingly declared ‘New worlds open out to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all.’4 Benedict Anderson has famously argued for the role of print culture in creating the nation as an imagined community. Yet the homogeneous, empty time Anderson associates with the newspaper, whereby its readers internalise the simultaneous yet disparate events found on any one page, is equally true of the panorama.5 At a time of uneven literacy, the moving panorama fulfilled a similar function through offering up the experience of traversing a simultaneity of spaces. Moving panoramas were large canvases wound between two rollers across a stage or performance space. As is well-known, the panorama was patented by the Irish painter Robert Barker on 17 June 1787; his patent conceived it as a large circular canvas exhibited in a specially designed rotunda with a darkened interior. Barker subsequently opened his rotunda in Leicester Square in May 1793. Practically, however, it was a severe logistical challenge to tour large, circular panoramas. The growth of panorama exhibitions, both in London and the provinces, thus went hand-in-hand with the development of a new portable format that could be moved from place to place. The moving panorama fitfully emerged to become the dominant exhibition mode from the early 1820s: showmen-artists toured extensively across British towns and cities, exhibiting at fairs, theatres, assembly rooms and mechanics’ institutes.6 At a time of uneven literacy and expensive newspapers, it had a significant cultural impact in bringing global events, landscapes and networks to local communities. Early touring panoramas tended to focus on maritime and/or military subject matter such as the Battle of Waterloo and the Bombardment of Algiers. However, the subject matter evolved; events such as the Crimean War, Indian Mutiny and American Civil War provoked an inevitable flurry of touring shows, but the most successful genre of exhibitions from 1840–1880 depicted what James Belich has described as the creation of the Anglo-world, the great global migration to, and settlement of, the American West, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.7 Up and down the country, audiences might enjoy a touring show of a panoramic journey across the American West one month, and the following month journey with a group of emigrants to Australia or New Zealand and see tableaux of their life in these far-off locales. While the popularity of the virtual panoramic journey is well known,

The Overland Mail

45

this format has only been tangentially connected to the burgeoning global circulation of goods and people. The expansionism of the Anglo-world was phenomenal in the period from 1830–1870. Settler Australasia grew from 12,000 people in 1810 to 1.25m in 1860; Western Australia and South Australia were founded as separate colonies in 1829 and 1836 respectively, while New Zealand was made into a British colony in 1840. The growth of the American West and British North America was similarly rapid. Ontario grew from 60,000 people in 1811 to 1.4m in 1861, while the number of inhabitants in the United States Old Southwest grew from 150,000 in 1810 to 4.65m in 1860.8 In a short story published in April 1850 in Household Words, Dickens recounts the exploits of an enthusiastic panoramic traveller, Mr Booley, who is able to travel the globe without ever being buffeted by the physical hardships of travel: Mr Booley’s powers of endurance are wonderful. All climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alternations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling, day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books. An intelligent Englishman may have occasionally pointed out to him objects and scenes of interest; but otherwise he has travelled alone and unattended.9 The moving panorama created a flattened, abstracted geo-political world picture that condensed it to the trading networks and conflicts that were key to British free-trade, emigration and colonial expansion. And yet it is notable that a number of panoramic shows drew attention to precisely the hardships and frictions of travel, albeit often showing how any difficulties were ultimately overcome. Given its predisposition towards regional and provincial exhibition, moving panoramas worked hard to demonstrate how their audiences were connected to the new global routes and networks that they depicted. Many in the audience would obviously have known a friend or family member who had travelled abroad for a better life. More than that though, the most successful shows were those that specifically orientated themselves around, and integrated themselves into local, everyday identities and concerns, often through astute strategies on the part of the showman. One example of this is a panorama of the Bay and City of New York that visited Bristol, beginning its run on 8 December 1838.10 It was exhibited in a new building especially erected in Bridewell Lane and tickets were 2s for boxes, 1s for the pit, and 6d for the gallery.11 The showman, J.B. Laidlaw, gave this particular panorama of New York a local significance by cleverly connecting it to the recent launch of the SS Great Western. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a transatlantic steamer and largely built in Bristol, the SS Great Western was part of a projected London-Bristol-New

46

John Plunkett

York route, which would provide an integrated transport network to London by linking with Brunel’s Great Western Railway, whose Bristol-London Paddington line was then under construction. The SS Great Western had departed for its maiden voyage from Bristol to New York just over seven months previously on 8 April 1838; it arrived on 23 April, with the speed of its crossing an engineering triumph. Laidlaw’s show played on this newfound closeness between Bristol and New York. A letter from three staff on the SS Great Western, all of whom were New York residents, was one of several published in the Bristol Mercury testifying to the panorama’s veracity.12 They congratulated him on exhibiting a scene now ‘so interesting to Great Britain by the introduction of steam vessels, but particularly so to the inhabitants of Bristol, from the frequent and quick passages made by the Great Western.’13 This letter, as with others published, may well have been a puff; nonetheless, it exemplifies the novelty of interconnected world being promoted. Upon the return of the SS Great Western from New York in February 1839, Laidlaw celebrated by giving all receipts on the day to Bristol Infirmary, together with a five pound donation by himself, and announced he would provide free admission to all Bristol charity schools ‘in order to hand down to posterity that the Great Western was one wonder of the world, and LAIDLAW’S PANORAMA OF NEW YORK another.’14 In associating his panorama with Bristol’s civic pride and industrial progress, Laidlaw makes the panorama part of local urban culture rather than just another touring show. The result is not parochial but rather the assimilation of New York and the new, global transport system Brunel was dreaming of, into the daily lives of Bristol’s inhabitants. By the end of March, upwards of 3000 children had reputedly seen the picture for free.15 The New York panorama finally closed on 3 May 1839, a run of just under five months, and was replaced by a panorama of Calcutta, another port with which Bristol was increasing trade. The Calcutta panorama was replete with romantic orientalism; one scene depicted the procession of an Eastern prince with his mounted elephants.16 As a traditional mode of transport, the elephants provide a telling contrast with the modernity of the steamships starting to ply their trade around the globe. The Bristol Mercury was in no doubt that the success of both shows was due to local interest in these far-off locations: The skill and enterprise of our citizens having brought New York within a fortnight’s sail of Bristol, the panorama became at once an object of the most general and intense interest, and was, consequently, visited by thousands; and now that Bristol occupies a more prominent part than she once did with reference to her East Indian trade, the same interest is, or should be, felt with regard to Calcutta, which every citizen now has an opportunity of becoming acquainted with at a trifling charge.17 The panoramas of Calcutta and New York contributed to Bristol audiences’ sense of their own global locatedness; they provided a visual materialisation

The Overland Mail

47

of the maritime node they inhabited in the global trading network. These faroff cities were now part of their everyday. Brunel’s Bristol-New York route was never as successful as hoped for, but one route that did take hold of the popular imagination was that of the Overland Mail to India. A key trade and communication route, it featured in panoramas, magic lantern lectures, plays and board games, and demonstrates the popular fascination with the movement of commodities across the colonial world. As early as December 1839, a diorama of the Overland Route to India was included in the annual pantomime of the Drury Lane Theatre.18 It was, however, two Overland Mail dioramas which opened in 1850 that did most to popularise the route in the public imagination; the first was The Route of the Overland Mail to India, from Southampton to Calcutta, which opened at the Royal Gallery of Illustration, Regent Street, in Easter 1850. It was almost immediately followed by the opening of Albert Smith’s Overland Mail at Willis’s Public Rooms, St James’s Square. The former show was one of the panoramas visited by Dickens’s Mr Booley. Soon joining him on the journey was Mr Punch, who celebrated the Overland Mail panorama as exemplifying the propensity for cheap panoramic travel. In May 1850, Punch declared that ‘Painting now moves with the rapidity of steam – and an artist, who has anything of the quickness of the fox with his brush, will paint you a Panorama, long enough to go round the Globe, in less time than ARIEL boasted of putting a girdle round it.’19 (See Figure 3.1.) Like railways and steamships, the panorama performed similar work in networking the globe; Mr Punch was shown ready to cross the desert as part of his journey on the Overland Mail route. The mythology of the overland mail route, and its various cultural iterations in shows, lectures, articles and prints, exemplifies the fascination with Britain’s position at the heart of a global commodities and trading network. The popularity of the two Overland Mail shows was given a fillip by the early death of Thomas Waghorn (1800–1850) on 7 January 1850, a man who claimed to have established the new, significantly shortened, route to India in the 1830s and 1840s. Freda Harcourt has characterised Waghorn as a mixture of liar, visionary and over-ambitious simpleton.20 In his own mind if not in that of his many detractors, he was an adventuring pioneer who fought against the lethargy of the East India Office to bring his vision to fruition. With the growing use of steamships for short sea voyages in the 1820s, Waghorn, then a second mate in the Bengal Marine Service, believed that this new maritime technology could be used to dramatically reduce journey times from Calcutta to Britain. After various failed attempts, he came to believe that he could coordinate a shortened route beginning with a steamship from Britain to Egypt; the journey then would continue overland to Suez, and then on again by the Red Sea before passing Sri Lanka and finally reaching Calcutta. This overland route cut the journey from 16000 to 6000 miles. Instead of taking three months to do the journey one-way going via the Cape of Good Hope, a round trip to India could be completed in the same time. Unable to persuade officialdom of his plan, Waghorn set up a

48

John Plunkett

Figure 3.1 ‘Putting a panorama around the earth’, Punch, 25 May 1850, 208.

private venture for transporting mail and passengers to India; by 1835, the English Post Office officially recognised it as the fastest and safest way to send mail. William Thackeray’s travelogue, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), celebrated Waghorn as a type of Phileas Fogg, a man to whom the boundaries of time and distance meant little: The bells are ringing prodigiously; and Lieutenant Waghorn is bouncing in and out of the courtyard full of business. He only left Bombay yesterday morning, was seen in the Red Sea on Tuesday, is engaged to dinner this

The Overland Mail

49

afternoon in the Regent’s Park, and (as it is about two minutes since I saw him in the courtyard) I make no doubt he is by this time at Alexandria, or at Malta, say, perhaps, at both. Il en est capable. If any man can be at two places at once (which I don’t believe or deny) Waghorn is he.21 Household Words similarly praised Waghorn’s efforts for supporting the conjoined activities of trade and colonialism, declaring that ‘when he projected a wonderful shortening of time and space, he at the same moment beheld the massive arm of England stretched across to govern and make use of her Indian territories, comprising a hundred million of souls’.22 The mythology around the new Overland Route was, however, underpinned by a more substantial trading enterprise. While Waghorn’s firm was forced to merge in 1841, and he eventually died destitute due to debts incurred in pursuing his sometimes outlandish visions, at the end of 1840 a Royal Charter established the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company. The Peninsular Steam Navigation Company had been established in 1835, itself an evolution of an earlier partnership, but it was only when the company was awarded a lucrative contract for a monthly steamship run to Alexandria that it began to evolve into the imperial icon of P&O. By 1843, P&O had steamships that could navigate the monsoon weather on the Calcutta to Suez portion of the journey (in this year it began a regular two-month steam service from Calcutta to Suez).23 Mail contracts were the backbone of its success; P&O’s successful running of the Overland Mail to India route helped to make both into cultural icons. The Route of the Overland Mail to India, from Southampton to Calcutta was principally the work of artists Thomas Grieve, John Absolon and William Telbin and consisted of over thirty full-size, painted scenes (Figure 3.2). P&O granted two artists free passage to Spain and Portugal

Figure 3.2 Frontispiece, The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850).

50

John Plunkett

Figure 3.3 ‘Central Station,’ The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850).

‘for the purpose of taking sketches’ and lent ‘oriental costumes’ for the actual performances.24 The diorama was a great success; it gave around 1600 performances before closing, and was reputedly seen by 250,000 people.25 The show started off at Southampton docks, with the first tableaux of a ship’s deck encouraging the audience to think of themselves as passengers. The audience journeyed past Gibraltar, Malta and Algiers, before travelling from Alexandria by canal until they reached Cairo; they then headed across the desert and onto Suez, before finally journeying across the Red Sea and onwards through the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal to reach Calcutta. The scenes and accompanying descriptive lecture created a narrative of British industrial progress overcoming the harsh and alien environments that the route travelled through. For example, one tableau (Figure 3.3) showed the central desert station in Egypt that was part of a network set up by P&O to aid the passengers traversing its inhospitable terrain. For the desert portion, the passengers were divided into small groups and travelled with the assistance of camels and horses; the tableaux of this part of the show also included a camel prostrate in the desert that had died on its way to supply water to the stations (Figure 3.4); other scenes included Egyptian women collecting water and Bedouin Arab tents and horses, with the commentary stressing their success in being able to survive in such inhospitable terrain. The success of the Overland Route at the Royal Gallery of Illustration was followed by the opening, two months later, of Albert Smith’s The Overland Mail. Smith described his show as ‘A literary, pictorial and musical entertainment’. It differed from that at the Royal Gallery of Illustration in that his

The Overland Mail

51

Figure 3.4 ‘The Dead Camel’, The Overland Route to India: Historic, Descriptive and Legendary (London: Atchley and Co, 1850).

panorama focused on only the return portion of the overland route, from Suez to London, and took not the route followed by P&O but ‘the one employed for the express, with which we are familiar in the newspapers as the “Anticipation of the Overland Mail,” via Marseilles.’26 Smith’s show derived its success from his skills as a raconteur; audiences enjoyed his non-stop mixture of impersonations, songs and comic anecdotes. Rather than offering up a series of dematerialised, frictionless, abstract spaces, he played up the physical and social experience of travel: the flies, fleas, donkeys, camels, cramped cabins, excess heat and hardships as well as the eccentricities and annoyances of his fellow English travellers. Thus, in his portrayal of the ‘Middle Station in the Desert’, instead of a celebration of the ingenuity of P&O, Smith provided a comic sketch of his Travelling Companions, described as ‘An irritable Anglo-Indian; a half-caste Talkative Lady; a Young Civilian; two Ayahs and the Babies – An Exchange for the worse – SONG, “The Camel Ride”’.27 The comedy of the pragmatic difficulties of traversing the globe can be seen, in part, as a response to the idealised journeying enjoyed by Mr Booley, but equally, a kind of extended, reflexive joke on the fact that the audience still remained safe and unflustered in London. The Overland Mail panoramas were part of a much broader public envisioning of this new route. There were periodical articles aplenty and both Overland Mail shows went on exhaustive provincial tours; there were also various imitation dioramas. Exeter, for example, was visited by three Overland panoramas in the early 1850s. First came Hamilton’s Diorama of the Overland Route in December 1850, followed in October 1851 by Albert Smith’s Overland Mail, then in May 1852, it was the turn of

52

John Plunkett

Messrs Carter and Co.28 It was a similar situation across the land; at York, for example, a touring show visited the theatre in 1854, which combined transparencies of the heavens with a panorama of the overland route.29 When Hamilton’s show was touring at Birmingham, large numbers of school children were given free entry towards the end of the run, including 700 from one group of schools alone.30 Every time one of those pupils, then or in the future, read a newspaper report sent via the Overland Mail, they would have a picture of the route it had travelled, orientating them to this global communication network. The Overland Mail panoramas exemplify one important way that nineteenth-century modernity assimilated individual and local subjectivities into the global. Popular fascination with the Overland Mail led to numerous spin-offs; a dioramic sequel was painted by Greive and Telbin, the Ocean Mail to India and Australia via the Cape, which opened at the Royal Gallery of Illustration in July 1853.31 There was also a Dioramic Board Game of the Overland Route to India, published by William Sallis in 1852, in which players competed to be the first to travel from Southampton Docks to Calcutta. Like the larger exhibitions, this game condensed and ordered the journey to a series of set nodes; in the game, you could only move from port to port as in the panorama the tableaux moved from scene to scene. Tom Taylor’s play, The Overland Route (1860), was a successful comedy based on the social and romantic encounters between travellers thrown together on the enclosed space of a steamship. The Overland Mail panorama also appeared as part of a theatrical burlesque by J.R. Planché, Mr Buckstone’s Voyage around the Globe (In Leicester Square), first put on at the Haymarket in Easter 1854. Poking fun at the volume of popular exhibitions that offered vicarious globe-trotting, including the Overland Mail and Wyld’s Great Globe, Mr Buckstone, in the character of lessee of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, prepares to circumnavigate the earth but ends up doing so without leaving Leicester Square. One of the characters in the play was the ‘Spirit of the Overland Route’, who confidently declares that ‘And has so oft the route to India shown,/That every step of it to her is known.’32 When the ‘Property Man’ complains to Mr Buckstone about his demands for settings evoking foreign climes; Mr Buckstone responds by noting that such shows were what audiences desired: No! I won’t rest till I’m again afloat; And with all canvas spread and flag unfurled, I’ll sail in search of fortune—round the world! AIR.—MR. BUCKSTONE.—‘All round my hat.’ All round the world, like a new Robinson Crusoe; All round the world, I will travel on the stage; And if anybody asks me the reason why I do so, I’ll say because geography’s becoming quite the rage.33

The Overland Mail

53

Buckstone’s desire to be a new Robinson Crusoe is telling; whereas Defoe’s hero spends much of his time fixed at one place, colonising his island, this new Crusoe is a man in constant global circulation. Just as communication and trade networks were international, so was the panorama phenomenon. It was not only audiences at the metropolitan centre who envisioned their place within them. The 1850 Christmas pantomime at Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre had its own diorama of the mail to Sydney via the Overland Mail Route.34 Revealingly, this version started in Portsmouth not in Sydney: Australian audiences would have had the experience that they were the end of the route rather than the beginning. Later, in 1872, Sydney had a touring show in residence for several months that included a diorama of the ocean mail route to India from Australia; a locally-painted Overland Mail panorama also exhibited in Tasmania in 1865.35 Lest it be thought that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 would in any way hinder existing shows, it merely provided opportunity for several ‘new’ touring overland mail shows, or perhaps repainted and updated versions of Hamilton’s original diorama. In 1876, at the Egyptian Hall, Hamilton’s could be found exhibiting their New Overland route to India, via Paris, Mont Cenis, Brindisi, and the Suez Canal, and a tour on the Hooghly and Ganges rivers from Calcutta to Benares. Over 80,000 people were claimed to have visited by the end of its run.36 There continued to be a crossover between P&O and such shows; in 1872, the Assembly Rooms, Plymouth, was visited by an ‘Overland Route Entertainment’ given by W.P.B. Manser, late of P&O Service, which was ‘Illustrated by Graphic Views and Enlivened with Music and Popular Songs’.37 Throughout this period, there were also various magic lantern shows of the Overland Mail; most large lantern slide suppliers had their own set, often with an accompanying pre-prepared lecture.38 That the Overland Mail panoramas were themselves part of a larger phenomenon is demonstrated by the concurrent exhibition of a number of American panoramas of the Mississippi during the 1850s and 1860s; these too were name-checked by Planché as part of mid-century fashion for geographic spectacles: A handsome squaw – but looking like a fury – Pray is she Mrs. Sippi, or Miss Ouri? – Because we’ve full length pictures had of both; Though to pronounce them like, I should be loth.39 The most famous of these American shows is John Banvard’s ‘three-mile long’ Mississippi panorama depicting 1200 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi to New Orleans. Banvard’s panorama had already been a huge success in America – reputedly playing to 400,000 people during its New York run – prior to its opening just before Christmas 1848 at the Egyptian Hall.40 Banvard

54

John Plunkett

inaugurated a craze for ‘monster’ American panoramas. Yet for all the appeal of its gargantuan spectacle, the real fascination created by its size was its ability to capture the glorious plenitude of life on the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers. Thanks to the advent of steamships, which were able to travel against the prevailing currents, these rivers became a great arterial transport network from the 1820s onwards and played a key role in facilitating the great American westward migration. Banvard’s souvenir programme declared that ‘There is no portion of the globe, where the invention of steamboats should be so highly appreciated, as in the valley of the Mississippi. This invention deserves to be estimated the most memorable era of the West’.41 Steamships cut journey times to one-eighth of what they had been previously; New Orleans, where Banvard’s panorama finished, saw a huge increase in size thanks, in part, to the great increase in goods being transported. When Dickens’ Mr Booley visits Banvard’s panorama, it is the teeming life of the river-highway which captures his attention: Mr. Booley found it singularly interesting to observe the various stages of civilization obtaining on the banks of these mighty rivers. Leaving the luxury and brightness of New Orleans – a somewhat feverish luxury and brightness, he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves – and passing various towns in every stage of progress, it was very curious to observe the changes of civilization and of vegetation too. Here, where the doomed Negro race were working in the plantations, while the republican overseer looked on, whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers in bloom … The river itself, that moving highway, showed him every kind of floating contrivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor Indian’s frail canoe. A winding thread through the enormous range of country, unrolling itself before the wanderer like the magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by wanderers of every kind, roaming from the more settled world, to those first nests of men.42 Much like Laidlaw’s panorama of Calcutta, Banvard created an implicit contrast between modernity and tradition, between the new steamships ploughing their way through the current and the time-honoured but less efficient Native American canoes. And while Banvard’s is the most famous Mississippi panorama, there were several others that were toured relentlessly through towns and cities during the 1850s. While the various Overland Mail and Mississippi shows are the most striking example of the way panoramas were often structured around emerging trade and travel networks, they were far from alone. Other transport networks were also turned into panoramas. In the early 1870s, Hardy Gillard toured extensively in both the USA and Britain with his panoramic journey across the recently completed Pacific Railroad from San Francisco to New

Figure 3.5 Hardy Gillard’s Great American Panorama, c.1874, EXEBD12797.

56

John Plunkett

York (Figure 3.5).43 As with Albert Smith’s comic descriptions of the foibles of English tourists, Gillard’s show played up the experience of travel. The show was as much about the Pacific railroad as the natural wonders of America. The Era declared that the audience came away crammed full of information about ‘the oil wells of Canada, snow-sheds, cow-catchers, Pullman’s palace cars, and the mighty trees of California.’44 The moving panorama was, of course, not alone in responding to widespread fascination with the specific global routes taken by commodities. Similar concerns pervade the nineteenth-century periodical press; in Household Words, for example, there was a genre of article devoted to far-flung commodities – coffee, spices, pearls, rice – which traced the global routes by which they arrived.45 Particularly in the period 1830–1880 though, the moving panorama was a significant and ubiquitous cultural form that fostered popular engagement with the dynamic movement of goods and people. Audiences rooted in their own locales could journey along international and national networks; they experienced a simultaneity that, in its own vicarious way, fashioned them as mobile subjects better able to comprehend the far-away spaces that were shaping their lives.

Notes 1 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 58. 2 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York, Urizen Books, 1979), 58 and passim; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 112; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 14; Alison Byerley, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 3 Byerley, Are We There Yet?, 71. 4 Charles Dickens, ‘Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller’, Household Words, 20 April 1850, 77. 5 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; London: Verso, 2006). 6 See Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2012); John Plunkett, ‘Moving panoramas c.1800–1840: The spaces of nineteenth-century picture going’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 17 (2013). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.674 7 See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 8 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 82. 9 Charles Dickens, ‘Some account of an extraordinary traveller’, 77. 10 ‘Panorama’, Bristol Mercury, 15 December 1838, 3. 11 ‘Panorama’, Bristol Mercury, 15 December 1838, 3. 12 ‘Panorama of New York’, Bristol Mercury, 2 March 1839, 3. 13 ‘To Mr Laidlaw’, Bristol Mercury, 12 January 1839, 3. 14 ‘Return of the Great Western from New York’, Bristol Mercury, 23 February 1839, 3. 15 ‘Panorama of New York’, Bristol Mercury, 30 March 1839, 3. 16 ‘Panorama’, Bristol Mercury, 18 May 1839, 2. 17 ‘Laidlaw’s panorama of Calcutta’, Bristol Mercury, 15 June 1839, 3.

The Overland Mail

57

18 ‘Drury Lane Theatre’, Theatrical Observer, 17 December 1839, 1. 19 ‘Putting a panorama around the earth’, Punch, 25 May 1850, 208. 20 Freda Harcourt, ‘Thomas Waghorn’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008). http://0-www. oxforddnb.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/view/article/28397 (accessed 13 September 2013). 21 William Thackeray, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), 256. 22 ‘The life and labours of Lieutenant Waghorn’, Household Words, 17 August 1850, 454. 23 See Freda Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 57. 24 ‘P&O Heritage: Overland route,’ http://www.poheritage.com/the-collection/galler ies/Paintings/Overland-Route (accessed 11 September 2013). 25 John Timbs, Curiosities of London (1855; London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 321. 26 Albert Smith, A Hand-book to Mr. Albert Smith’s Entertainment Entitled the Overland Mail (London: Albert Smith, 1850), n.pag. 27 Smith, A Hand-book to Mr. Albert Smith’s Entertainment, n.pag. 28 ‘Hamilton’s panorama’, Exeter Flying Post, 5 December 1850, 5; ‘Grand moving diorama’, Exeter Flying Post, 27 May 1852, 5. ‘Mr Albert Smith’, Exeter Flying Post, 2 October 1851, 5. 29 ‘Local news’, Yorkshire Gazette, 7 January 1854, 5. 30 ‘The diorama’, Birmingham Gazette, 10 May 1852, 3. 31 ‘Diorama of the Ocean Mail’, Morning Post, 23 July 1853, 5. 32 J. R. Planché, Mr Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (In Leicester Square) (London: Thomas Hailes Lacey, 1854), 16. 33 Planché, Mr Buckstone’s Voyage, 6. 34 ‘Royal Victoria Theatre’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1851, 2. 35 ‘Gourlay’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June 1872, 5. ‘The Overland Route’, Launceston Examiner, 14 December 1865, 3. 36 Hamilton’s Exhibition Egyptian Hall, 1876; British Library Evanion Collection 158. 37 ‘Overland Mail entertainment’, Western Daily Mercury, 15 February 1871, 1. 38 See Newton and Co., The Overland Route: Egypt, and the Wonders of the Nile. Descriptive Lecture of a Voyage from Southampton to Alexandria, Up the Nile, and Through the Suez Canal (c.1890). The UK Magic Lantern Society Slide Readings Library lists four different sets. 39 Planché, Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage, 18. 40 See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 204–6. 41 John Banvard, Description of Banvard’s panorama of the Mississippi river painted on three miles of canvas: exhibiting a view of country 1200 miles in length (Boston: John Putnam, 1847), 38. 42 Dickens, ‘Some account of an extraordinary traveller’, 78. 43 See Hardy Gillard’s Great American Panorama, c.1874, EXEBD12797. Gillard’s show opened at St James’s Hall in August 1873; see also ‘The American Panorama,’ The Times, 15 August 1873, 7. 44 Quoted on Hardy Gillard’s Great American Panorama, EXEBD12797. 45 See Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 120.

4

Exhibiting India Colonial subjects, imperial objects, and the lives of commodities Supriya Chaudhuri

In 1878, on his way to London at the age of seventeen, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore made a brief halt in Paris, where he visited the Turkish Baths and the Paris Exhibition. Physically wrung out by the former, he appears to have been mentally overwhelmed, to the point of nervous exhaustion, by the latter. Already dazzled by the city’s palaces, roads, fountains, and carriages, he found the Exhibition a city within a city, from which he carried away memories of picture-galleries, buildings, and objects that he could neither sort nor process: he saw, he says, everything and nothing. Restless and unsatisfied, he proceeded to London, which appeared to him in his unhappy state a place of darkness, full of smoke, mist, rain, mud and a press of people in a constant state of agitation.1 The Exhibition that Tagore saw was the third Exposition Universelle to be held in Paris, and the first to achieve financial success. Sixteen million people paid to enter, in addition to revenue and customs earnings.2 Like the other World Fairs of the nineteenth century, it generated enormous public interest, not simply in goods, but in the people who came with them and who were sometimes displayed with them. Among the most popular sights, apart from the head of the Statue of Liberty and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, was a ‘black village’ (village nègre) with 400 inhabitants: what we would today call a human zoo. It is unlikely that Tagore saw this, for he does not mention it. Intensely conscious of being stared at, he recalls the Parisian schoolboys who pursued their carriage, and the laughter and cries of ‘Jack, look at the blackies!’ that greeted them in London.3 But human zoos, or displays of exotic populations, were already popular in Europe: an Eskimo family was exhibited in Bristol in the early sixteenth century, and a Brazilian village constructed for Henry II’s entry to Rouen in 1550. Nearly thirty ethnological exhibitions, featuring Nubians and Inuit people, were put on at the Paris zoo between 1877 and 1912: a fraction of the history of human displays, individual or collective, caged or uncaged, over a couple of centuries. In 1853, after viewing a party of ‘Zulu Kaffirs’ exhibited ‘in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great beauty’ at the St George’s Gallery on Hyde Park Corner in London, Charles Dickens wrote an astonishingly racist diatribe against ‘The Noble Savage’ in his journal Household Words.4 Ethnic

Exhibiting India

59

displays remained part of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 1901 Pan-American exposition, and the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904, from which the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was brought to the Bronx zoo in 1906 by the ‘scientific racist’ Madison Grant, Secretary of the New York Zoological Society, to be exhibited in a cage with an orangutan, and labelled ‘The Missing Link’. These scandals of empire and anthropology have received due attention, not least in the context of a rereading of the ethnological exhibit as a fetish object of desire (like a shrunken human head).5 But occupying a more ambiguous place in the history of ethnological exhibits are two other kinds of displays: painstakingly mounted ‘villages’ of craftspeople plying their traditional occupations, and life-sized models of ethnic types, that is, members of the indigenous communities of Asia, Africa, or the Americas.6 Such representations, common in World Fairs and entering into museum culture from the nineteenth century to the present day, feed the insatiable appetite for looking that drove the exhibitionary apparatus of the colonial state. Their assumption of an epistemic, even pedagogic purpose opens up an ancient fault-line in the very idea of representation, and enables us to see World Fairs or Universal Exhibitions as sites where the ideas of network, commodity and fetish enter into complicated relations not always legislated by Marxist or Latourian theory. This may be why they fascinated Walter Benjamin, always drawn to whatever (the collector, the flâneur, the photograph) might arrest or interrupt the apparently ceaseless circulations and exchanges of the modern empire of goods. In 1935, Benjamin produced a set of parataxic reflections upon nineteenthcentury Paris, a ‘horizontal’ series that invites the reader to stroll from section to section of his text as from court to court at the World Exhibitions. Benjamin memorably describes these as places of pilgrimage to the fetish Commodity, citing Taine’s caustic comment, ‘Europe is off to view the merchandise.’7 Tempting as it is to linger on the historical irony that has converted Benjamin’s own work into just that array of irresistible quotations that forms the textual parallel to the commodity fetishism he describes – ‘the enthronement of the commodity, with its luster of distraction’ – I would like to examine another side of this phenomenon.8 The World Fairs and exhibitions of the nineteenth century were sites of display where colonial power offered itself for public admiration, and objects of material culture, denuded of social context and use-value, were accessible for consumption as spectacles. What went into the making of the spectacle, in affective, economic, and textual terms? Marx, writing about the exchange value of commodities, which he reads as a fetish value conferred by society for reasons of taste or fashion, notes that Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the possessors of commodities. Commodities are things, and therefore

60

Supriya Chaudhuri lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.9

Commodities are put on display by their possessors, but the typical exhibit is no more than a phantom, an image or sign of itself rather than a thing. This transformation of object to sign is concurrent with the rise of advertising, and, as Benjamin noted, with developments in photography, which ‘greatly extends the sphere of commodity exchange, from mid-century onwards, by flooding the market with countless images of figures, landscapes, and events which had previously been available either not at all, or only as pictures for individual customers.’10 Like other imperial shows including the Delhi Durbars of 1903 and 1911, exhibitions were in themselves a form of advertising (as Carol Breckenridge notes in her admirable discussion of India at world fairs), and they were prone to putting not only goods, but the producers of goods – humans and machines – on display.11 To the visionary town planner Patrick Geddes the 1900 Paris exhibition was itself a ‘device’: A World’s Fair – the idea was fresh and fascinating, for here, after the appearance of so many marvelous mechanical devices, was the device of bringing them all together.12 Thus in addition to objects, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at London’s Crystal Palace, and people, such as samples of exotic ‘natives’, exhibitions displayed traditional craft skills by actual artisans, or trading practices in a bazaar, side by side with serried ranks of ethnological models in clay. Even today in India, every large handicrafts fair includes representative artisans making pots, producing folk paintings, and engaged in weaving, spinning, and grinding by traditional methods. Behind the stalls, one may also encounter artisans hurriedly faking the processes by which the ‘primitive’ craft item is produced. By contrast, the ethnological models earlier passed on from the exhibition to the museum have largely been replaced by photographic or multimedial representations. In their earlier forms, however, such displays brought people and things together in complicated and ambiguous ways, causing both to migrate across colonial networks. Presenting things and people out of place, they invented new places to put them in. It may be asked whether putting the artisan on display produces a fetishization of labour itself, on the one hand attempting to reverse the ‘forgetting’ of labour implicit in the very notion of a commodity, and on the other, replacing actual labour by labour as sign, in a way that misrepresents the original conditions of production. The artisan on view, engaged in the task of producing the crafts item as a commodity, showcases both labour and the aesthetic value of design. These have fetish value, but although they are translatable as signs, they are not fully negotiable as commodities – just as the people on display, members of exotic races, are not pure commodities,

Exhibiting India

61

although they connote imperial possessions and imperial knowledge. In 1908, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his father about the opening of the Franco-British exhibition at Shepherd’s Bush: The daily papers, specially the halfpenny ones, are chanting its praises every day. It will be one of the finest ever held on earth, if one were to believe them. There is, by the way, going to be a ‘Typical Indian Village’ in it. I shudder to think what that will be like. A congregation of halfnaked people, I should imagine.13 Nehru’s prescient shudder, at this early stage of his life, might seem to be compounded equally of patriotic and class anxieties. Yet he went on to dedicate himself to a half-naked leader who used the sign of labour, the handoperated spinning wheel or charkha, to initiate a mass movement that he believed should be rooted in India’s villages, and symbolized through handspun cloth, or khadi. Representation is of critical importance in politics, and people can, in more than one way, be represented by things. As Saloni Mathur notes in her excellent account of ‘The Indian Village in Victorian Space’, comparing the failed display of Indian artisans by the retailers Liberty & Co. in London’s Battersea Park in 1885, with the more successful one at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886, the figure of the native artisan constitutes a historical and ideological crux in the ‘intertwined trajectories of modernity and national identity in India’.14 This figure’s complicated genealogy, especially as viewed in the grand colonial exhibition, can be traced on the one hand to the idealization of the Indian village economy by Charles Metcalfe and Henry Sumner Maine (and later by Karl Marx and M. K. Gandhi), and on the other to a sustained drive, over half a century, towards classifying and marketing traditional Indian handicrafts by colonial civil servants such as John Forbes Watson, George Birdwood, and George Watt.15 Following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the need to preserve and record Indian design led to the establishment of Indian art schools (which imposed an artificial division between ‘crafts’ and ‘fine arts’, the latter supposedly absent in India), the founding of the Journal of Indian Art and Industry by J. Lockwood Kipling in 1880, and treatises like Birdwood’s The Industrial Arts of India (1884) that influenced the Arts and Crafts movement in England. Against these romanticized visions, Mathur places Romesh Chunder Dutt’s critique of the colonial state’s deliberate ‘de-industrialization’ of the Indian economy, effectively pauperizing the peasant and traditional craftsperson. Dutt’s The Peasantry of Bengal (1874) directly influenced Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s account of peasant distress in his essay ‘Samya’ [Equality: 1879]. His Economic History of India (1902–04) contrasted opulent British displays of Indian craftsmanship in London and Delhi with the poverty that had prompted his Open Letter to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (1900). The French Catholic journalist Maurice Talmeyr, reviewing

62

Supriya Chaudhuri

the grand Indian palace at the Paris Universelle exhibition at the Trocadéro in November 1900, wrote: The idea of such an India, of India as a warehouse, however magnificent and partly true it may be, is true only partly, so partly as to be false; and these overflowing rooms, this forest of objects, of hangings, of commodities, of products, speak to me of nothing but an incomplete and truncated India, that of the accountants. And the other? That of the famine? For this land of enormous and sumptuous commerce is equally that of a frightening local decay, of a terrifying indigenous suffering. An entire phantom race dies there and moans in hunger. India is not just a tradingpost, it is a cemetery. The prosperous Englishman meets there the emaciated Indian. A field of death stretches out behind the shop.16 It was the perception of an India impoverished by a loss of its manufacturing traditions and forced to become a consumer of British goods like Manchester cloth that fuelled the swadeshi or home manufacture movement before and after the first Partition of Bengal in 1905. At a remove, this sentiment also underwrites Gandhi’s khadi (homespun) campaign and his promotion of the humble artisan and the Indian village economy. There were unresolved difficulties in both campaigns, not least because of their differing notions of ‘home’ manufacture and their insufficient assessment of the scope of industrial self-reliance, in the case of swadeshi, and the village economy, in the case of khadi. Gandhi and Nehru disagreed profoundly over the latter.17 But even earlier, the figure of the artisan, so prominently displayed with Indian products at colonial exhibitions, draws attention to a suppressed anxiety regarding the nature and scope of commodity production in the colony. John Forbes Watson’s massive twenty-set Textile Manufactures and Costumes of the People of India, each set containing 700 exactly similar specimens of Indian textiles in eighteen volumes, was actually compiled to instruct British mill-owners on export requirements. In the catalogue, Watson wrote: The twenty sets of volumes may thus be regarded as Twenty Industrial Museums; illustrating the Textile Manufactures of India, and promoting trade operations between the East and the West … The interests of the people of India, as well as those of the people at Home, are concerned in this matter, and both interests must be considered … What is wanted, and what is to be copied to meet that want, is thus accessible for study in these Museums.18 Recognizing that India had at one time clothed the west, Watson argued that she could now become a ‘magnificent customer’ for British cloth, especially of the ‘plainer and cheaper’ sort.19 Yet the specimen-book itself, as well as the lavishly illustrated folio catalogue where Watson describes types of fabric and workmanship that ‘everyone will call beautiful’, produces instead the

Exhibiting India

63

impression of unmatchable design and variety. Watson is forced to conclude that certain products, such as brocades and embroidery, require the specialized skill of the Indian craftsman, though plain mill-made cloth may be sold to ‘the hundreds of millions in the lower grades’. In effect, therefore, India should remain a land of handicrafts workers and of raw materials (though Watson acknowledges the possible ‘extension of the mill-system in India’), consuming finished products from Britain. For Watson, this offers a means of redressing the trade deficit, since ‘India never buys from us what will repay our purchases from her, and the consequence is that we have always to send out the large difference in bullion, which never comes back to us, disappearing there as if it had been dropped into the ocean.’20 Clearly there are other anxieties at work here, linked to the China trade and fears of depleted bullion reserves. Watson misrepresents economic facts by echoing the familiar complaint about India’s hunger for gold and silver, since payment for Indian goods by the East India Company in the form of bullion had largely ceased by the end of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth, India had been forcibly converted from a major world supplier of textiles and spices to an exporter of raw materials such as cotton, opium and indigo. These fed the Industrial Revolution in Britain at the cost of technological development in India. The Indian craftsman at international exhibitions, a curiously ‘non-industrialized’ practitioner of an ‘industrial art,’ is both material and symbolic: a maker of commodities and himself a commodity. Mathur notes that the artisans on display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886 were with few exceptions recruited from the Agra Central Jail (jails were established producers of carpets, for example), while one had voyaged to London on his own account to seek redress from the Queen in a land dispute. In her brilliant account of the fortunes of the petitioner Tulsi Ram, and her striking juxtaposition of the Exhibition with other sites housing Indian-origin destitutes in Victorian London (such as the lascar quarters in the East End), Mathur produces a rich and nuanced picture of empire at work. In passing, she also cites the loyal enthusiasm shown by Trailokyanath Mukharji, an Indian servant of the Crown who had travelled to London as an expositor of the exhibits and left an account of his travels in A Visit to Europe, published after his return to Calcutta in 1889.21 In considering what went into the making of these exhibitions, I would like to focus on Mukharji (1847–1919), an important and neglected witness, not so much for his travelogue, but because of a lifetime spent documenting Indian botanical, agricultural and crafts products for museums and exhibitions. Beginning in 1866 as a Second Master in the Education Department in Bengal, Mukharji progressed to the Central Revenue and Agricultural Department, ending as Assistant Curator of the Indian Museum (founded in 1878), in charge of the Bengal Economic and Art Museum collections. He prepared exhibits for the international exhibitions at Paris (1878), Melbourne (1879–80), Amsterdam (1883), Calcutta (1883), London (1886), and Glasgow (1888), writing substantial descriptive catalogues of art objects, ‘raw

64

Supriya Chaudhuri

materials’, and agricultural implements. He also wrote monographs on Bengal pottery, glassware, and brass-work, ending as a Fellow of the Linnaean Society. At the request of Sir Monier Monier-Williams, he identified the objects collected for the Indian Institute at Oxford. Having worked in the Revenue and Agricultural departments, Mukharji was also keenly interested in economically profitable crops, submitting a report to the Famine Commissioners on carrot cultivation in the North-Western Provinces. He is remembered today as a brilliant writer of Bengali prose fiction and fantasy. What was the investment of the indigenous artisan, the native supplier of commodities and specimens, and the colonial official, in these costly international shows? In important respects such collections of ‘economic products’ and ‘art-ware’ bear witness to the taxonomic mode of colonial knowledge production. Listing by material, classifying by region, attempting to bring order into a botanic wilderness, they demonstrate the movement from the collection to the list, to the exhibition catalogue, to the guidebook or dictionary, and finally to the museum. Birdwood’s Industrial Arts of India was written as a guide to the collections of the East India Company’s India Museum when they were transferred to South Kensington in 1880. George Watt, sent out to India as Professor of Botany, was inducted to ‘bring into scientific order a valuable collection of Bengal products at the Provincial Economic Museum in Calcutta’. He enlarged both the Imperial and Provincial lists ‘with the assistance of Babu Trailokhya Nath Mukharji’, who had collected the agricultural specimens for exhibitions in Paris, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Calcutta, and London between 1878 and 1886. ‘The collections above referred to were all made’, wrote Edward Buck, then Secretary of the Department of Revenue and Agriculture, in his preface to Watt’s sixvolume Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, ‘under the direction of the undersigned, by Babu Trailokhya Nath Mukharji, now the officer in charge of the Exhibition Branch in the Agricultural Department of the Government of India, and their formation led to the gradual compilation of a list of the more important Economic Products of India, which was illustrated by a series of samples, or specimens arranged in glass-fronted tin cases designated the “Index Collection”.’22 One such ‘T.N. Mukharji economic botany collection’ of plants and seeds survives to this day in the Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Although there was an international exhibition at Melbourne in 1880, this collection of over 750 specimens, recorded in the register of acquisitions for 1887, was not received from it, but sent by the Bengal Government to the Industrial and Technological Museum in Melbourne (as Museum Victoria was then called) after the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1884, in return for exhibits obtained from the South Australian Court. The Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Calcutta International Exhibition 1883–84 states that ‘the collections contributed by the various Government departments of Victoria were presented at the close of the exhibition for distribution amongst the Imperial museums, educational institutions, and other public

Exhibiting India 23

65

bodies. For all of these suitable exchanges were promised.’ As museum historians have noted, objects displayed at exhibitions were exchanged, bought or donated by colonial officials in charge of exhibition committees, thus entering into a kind of circulatory network of display. Exhibitions were obviously short-lived, ephemeral occasions, yet the nature of the exhibits, many of them quite valuable, sometimes demanded a more permanent repository – such as the museum, in a period when museum culture was also in the process of formation. As a result, many colonial exhibits are now located in museums around the world. Exchanges occurred not only between the colonies and Britain (the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew hold Mukharji’s collections of agricultural specimens from the 1886 Exhibition) but between colonial cities such as Calcutta and Melbourne. The display of Indian crafts and raw products at such exhibitions did not reverse the general state of economic stagnation and industrial decline in India through the nineteenth century, countered only partly by twentiethcentury entrepreneurship. Discussing the Great Exhibition of 1851, Carol Breckenridge suggested that British imperial ambitions in India were already on display through ‘robes, crowns, jewels, thrones, and weapons’.24 Yet to Mukharji, a loyal servant of the Crown, the grand exhibition was an enormous repository of commercial interests, bringing together the work of botanists like Joseph Dalton Hooker and Nathaniel Wallich (first director of the Indian Museum, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, and pioneer of tea cultivation in Assam), and numerous local committees whose names are carefully noted in the exhibition catalogues. Mukharji obviously shared the fears of his nationalist contemporaries regarding Indian agricultural and industrial decline, and colonial exhibitions sought to promote ‘hard’ trade and business, rather than a crafts revival. Nevertheless, a close reading of the catalogues of the Indian division suggests a persistent blurring of distinctions between the ethnological or cultural exhibit, and the tradeable commodity. For example, Watson’s catalogue for the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition lists not only mineral, botanic or agricultural specimens, textiles and art-objects, photographs and models of Indian scenes, but also (in Group XXVI, under ‘Education, teaching and instruction’, amid the welter of schoolbooks and maps), such items as a ‘Hindu baby’s bed’, complete with the infant’s dress and toys.25 The Vienna Exhibition put on display 132 items from Watson’s own ‘People of India’ photographic series, an enormous project of documenting the races and tribes of the subcontinent, like the ethnological models in clay created for the Calcutta, London and Glasgow exhibitions. If ‘India made consumption and its orientation to the human body central’, as Breckenridge writes, the human body was also itself an exhibit.26 The juxtaposition of saleable commodities and ‘objects-on-display’ requires us to assess the motives of colonial officials like Mukharji, whose writings convey not just support for traditional crafts or useful agriculture, but affective investment in persons and their representations. This is an important sub-text

66

Supriya Chaudhuri

in Mukharji’s catalogues, undercutting grand imperial statements by inserting glimpses of the poorest classes of cultivators and craftspersons into taxonomic lists. Repeatedly, he speaks of the revival of lost arts, such as the weaving of Dacca muslin, now known to only two elderly women, and of bidri work, once flourishing all over India.27 Many agricultural implements were personally collected by him for the Calcutta exhibition, and he recommends new inventions such as a sugarcane press, and a spinningmachine invented by Babu Prankristo Mukharji of Baidyabati.28 In the descriptive catalogue of economic products sent to the Amsterdam Exhibition, he hopefully includes – with full details of its cost-effectiveness – the proposal of one J. Deveria of Manbhum to make paper out of an unknown wild grass called dhadka.29 In the Handbook of Indian Products compiled for the Calcutta exhibition of 1883, he describes his purpose as being ‘to interest European visitors at the Exhibition in the old Indian arts, which have of late attracted so much attention for the beauty of their design, the excellent selection and arrangement of colours, the minuteness of patterns and the high “finish” displayed in their execution, and to invite the attention of mercantile gentlemen to the innumerable raw materials which abound in every part of India, many of which are capable of being developed into articles of commerce.’30 Yet when Mukharji finally overcame his caste taboos and travelled to London to become an encyclopedic and patient expositor at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, he knew that he was as much on display as the exhibits, using the pronoun ‘we’ to identify himself with the ‘Hindu and Muslim artisans’ in the Indian Bazaar: A dense crowd always stood there, looking at our men as they wove the gold brocade, sang the patterns of the carpet, and printed the calico with the hand. They were as much astonished to see the Indians produce works of art with the aid of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago, as a Hindu would be to see a chimpanzee officiating as a priest in a funeral ceremony and reading out Sanskrit texts from a palm leaf book spread before him. We were very interesting beings no doubt, so were the Zulus before us, and so is the Sioux chief at the present time (1887). Human nature everywhere thirsts for novelty, and measures out its favours in proportion to the rarity and oddity of a thing.31 A report in the Illustrated London News of July 17, 1886, carries several images of Indian craftsmen – carpet-weavers, brocade-makers, wood-carvers – at work in what purported to be an Indian palace courtyard (see Figure 4.1). Contemporary observers remarked on both the dexterity of the workers and the authenticity of the spectacle, despite the implicit knowledge that it was staged for their benefit (and, as Mathur notes, by prisoners trained for useful service, rather than by village artisans). Aviva Briefel comments on the simultaneous objectification and humanization of the craftsman’s body in

Exhibiting India

67

Figure 4.1 Indian carpet weavers at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, South Kensington, 1886. © Illustrated London News, 17 July 1886. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

these reports: the labouring body is a spectacle, but it is also an index of human skill and speed.32 Some of the ambiguities inherent in such viewership are, I would suggest, powerfully conveyed through the eight portraits of craftsmen at the Exhibition commissioned by Queen Victoria from the Austrian painter Rudolf Swoboda. By what seems to be a conscious stylistic choice, the images convey an impression of artisanal dignity, self-possession, and profound melancholy, as in the countenance of the potter Bakshiram, stated to be over 102 years old (see Figure 4.2). The sad gravity, even displeasure, with which Bakshiram looks back at the painter seeks to establish him as the type of the traditional artisan absorbed in his craft. But it might also be interpreted as a mark of long incarceration and the irritation of being on display, a condition assigned to him by art and history. Swoboda’s portrait of Bakshiram, now in the Royal Collections, was the ‘face’ of the Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past Exhibition organized at the Tate Britain Gallery in London from 25 November 2015 to 10 April 2016. Mukharji, sent to London to look after the exhibits, appears to tolerate the gaze of the European spectator, and the narrative of his visit is a curious blend of obsequious rapture, ironic humour, observations on the British ‘caste system’, and anxiety about the Indian economy. While the genre of the travelaccount might be expected to generate a substantial narrative, this discursive thrust also appears in his descriptive catalogues. Art-Manufactures of India, prepared for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, offers brief

68

Supriya Chaudhuri

Figure 4.2 Rudolf Swoboda, Portrait of the Indian potter Bakshiram, 1886. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016. Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust.

histories of individual arts, citing classical texts as evidence for a rich indigenous culture of artistic production. Noting the formation of a public taste for Indian art-objects, Mukharji emphasizes the ‘originality’ and creative excellence of the artists, who are not mere copyists. A collection of art-objects from the Indian Court of the exhibition is now housed in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. But the anecdotal and affective quality of

Exhibiting India

69

Mukharji’s catalogues is most deeply invested in the human figure modelled in clay. In the handbook for the Calcutta Exhibition of 1883, he writes, Models of native life in clay, of full size or in miniature, have of late acquired great celebrity. Five images of this kind were sent to the Amsterdam Exhibition and they proved to be one of the most interesting objects at that Exhibition. … Jadunath Pal, the maker of the Amsterdam models, has been entrusted with the work of modelling the different races of India to be shown at the Calcutta Exhibition.33 In the fuller Glasgow exhibition catalogue, he traces the Krishnagar modelling industry to the making of divine images for worship, names the four most notable artists of the Pal family, and defends them against the charge of ‘ingenious toy-making’ by ‘introducing pieces of real fabrics in the clothing [and] actual hair and wool in the figures’.34 ‘A row of native shops with lifesize figures’ was sent to Amsterdam, and Jadunath Pal was engaged to produce life-sized ethnological models, seventeen of which travelled to Glasgow.35 Even Museum Victoria has a collection of intricate clay figures from Bengal, dressed in local costumes and representing different castes and occupations, received from the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.36 Such models, created through months of painstaking labour, are educational exhibits for the colonial archive, on display, but not precisely for sale: vivid tokens both of colonial power and of colonial knowledge. Created to serve the classificatory apparatus of the colonial state, the ethnological model reduces the human person to an exhibit more effectively than actual displays of working artisans. Mukharji’s notes confirm his own role as interpreter and documenter of native culture; Peter Hoffenberg argues that such experts were enlisted so that colonial subjects might participate in the ‘construction, circulation, and evaluation of knowledge’ within the empire.37 Moreover, the curators and artisans displaying Indian crafts and products are to some extent caught and transfixed, with the commodities of which they are the guardians – though not the owners – in a spectacle that distorts, even fetishizes, the labour that produces them. Discussing the compound of evolutionist curiosity and ‘colonial fear and sexual desire’ in British reactions to the models of Andaman Islanders at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, Claire Wintle enlists Mukharji’s support to conclude that ‘the clay models could not complain, embarrass, or reverse the European gaze, but were a secure, static option that could only accept the terms of their representation.’38 But Mukharji’s account goes beyond this, testifying to the impossibility of treating the labour and human investments that went into the mounting of such exhibitions as feeding no more than the European knowledge economy. Wintle ignores Mukharji’s drily ironic comparison of the ‘savage’ Naga warrior with ‘civilised men in Europe’, and his contrast of both with Hindu ideals of non-violence. She also blunts the powerful anecdotal thrust of his

70

Supriya Chaudhuri

descriptions.39 For even in the instrumental and obsolescent textual form of the exhibition catalogue, we cannot miss the excess of feeling attaching to these dead pieces of earth and straw, and the sympathy with which Mukharji imbues the figures and their stories. Indeed the affective power of the textual account exists almost as a kind of surplus, something that cannot be fully absorbed by the figure, but lingers in the anecdotal life of the text. For example, Mukharji identifies the life-sized model of a religious mendicant sent from Jaipur to the Glasgow exhibition as one Gobind Das, a holy man who purchased, for the sum of five rupees, a bed of nails. He practised sleeping on this, and immediately drew the admiration of the public. Much venerated wherever he went, he over-indulged in good food and charas. In Jaipur, he became ill, and ‘desired earnestly to return to Muttra to die. He parted with his bed for a small sum and left Jaipur’.40 As textual gloss for an image unable to report its own history, the narrative thus extends the function of the exhibition catalogue from taxonomy to story-telling. The swami and his bed of nails might offer a peg on which to hang some reflections about the representation of the native artisan and artisanal products in colonial exhibitions. In some ways Mukharji’s affective investment in indigenous art, craft and agriculture evidences a new kind of sensibility, central to the programme of renewal and revival undertaken by nationalists in the later nineteenth century. Similar displays of indigenous crafts, shorn of the grand settings of colonial commodity production, classification, improvement and display, were part of the Hindu Mela founded by Nabagopal Mitra in 1867 and endorsed by the Tagores, at the very beginnings of the swadeshi movement in Bengal.41 Later, it has been argued, the nationalist imaginary reappropriates colonial visual representations of the native craftsman as a ‘body at work’ (through images of Gandhi spinning cotton, for example).42 The indigenous artisan continues to be at the centre of debates about modernization and tradition in contemporary India, where individual craft revivals coexist with decline and loss. At the same time, it is important to note that the two remarkable Indians who articulate the need to place the artisan at the heart of the nation do so in clear rejection of the commodity culture of colonial exhibitions. Like Tagore in 1878, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi visited the World Exhibition in Paris in 1889, and retained no more than a ‘confused impression of grandeur’, though he ascended the Eiffel Tower several times to view the city. As modern Indian social reformers, Tagore and Gandhi were repelled by the grand exhibition as a site of display, and devoted their lives to creating an alternative model of social living and artisanal production: Tagore in his rural reconstruction project known as Sriniketan, and Gandhi in his advocacy of handspun cloth or khadi. Despite their aesthetic sense, which was considerable, and their instinct for symbolic self-representation, which was equally unerring, they were both deeply uninterested in fashion. Beneficiaries of the major intellectual networks, the cross-currents of ideas, made possible by the global transactions of colonial modernity, they resisted the influx of

Exhibiting India

71

new commodities into material life, while at the same time they rejected an ‘orientalizing’ taste. This resistance may be seen as rooted in their perception that the whole course of the nineteenth century had produced a profound imbalance in economic life, not only distancing commodities from labour, but creating fetish-values that could not even be translated back into economic benefit. It was as if both these reformers were trying – unsuccessfully, but bravely – to rethink the question of value itself, to start from the human actor and work their way up. Neither of them could alter economic realities. Objects and ideas are always, to use Finbarr Flood’s phrase, objects of translation, and modernity demonstrates the extent to which we change, and are changed by, the material objects by which we are surrounded.43 But unusually, they did compel us to think again about objects and their use, about commodities, knowledge and value, and in this they demonstrated a unique and compelling radicalism.

Notes 1 Rabindranath Tagore, Europe-prabashirpatra [Letters from Europe], in Rabindra Rachanabali [Complete Works], 1 (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 1939), 540–41. 2 See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 33–37. 3 Tagore, 1, 548. 4 Charles Dickens, ‘The noble savage’, Household Words, 7:168 (June 11, 1853), 337–39. 5 See J. Zetterstrom-Sharp, ‘Fetish modernity, Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm’: Review, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 2 (2014): 184–189. 6 On the village, see Josephine McDonagh’s essay in this volume. 7 ‘Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003); 3, 1935–38 (2002), 36. 8 Benjamin, 37. 9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), Chapter 1, 178. 10 Benjamin, 36. 11 Carol A. Breckenridge, ‘The aesthetics and politics of colonial collecting: India at world fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:2 (April 1989), 195–216, esp. 201. 12 Patrick Geddes, ‘The closing exhibition – Paris 1900’, The Contemporary Review, 78 (November 1900): 662. 13 Jawaharlal Nehru, Letter to Motilal Nehru, 7 May 1908, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Series, ed. S. Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1972–82), 1, 53. 14 Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011), 29. 15 For Maine and Birdwood, see McDonagh. Birdwood planned the India pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1878, and produced his two-part guide to the Industrial Arts of India in 1884. John Forbes Watson, ‘Reporter on the Products of India to the Secretary of State for India in Council’, later Director of the India Museum, compiled catalogues for the London International Exhibition of 1862 and the

72

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

Supriya Chaudhuri Vienna International Exhibition of 1873, as well as the 8-volume photographic record of The People of India. George Watt compiled the official catalogue of Indian art shown at Delhi in 1903, in addition to his Dictionary of the Economic Products of India in 6 volumes (1885). Maurice Talmeyr, ‘L’École du Trocadéro’, Revue des deux mondes (Novembre 1900), 201: ‘La notion d’une Inde pareille, d’une Inde magasin, si magnifique et si partiellement vraie qu’elle soit, n’est vraie que partiellement, trop partiellement pour ne pas être fausse, et toutes ces salles regorgeantes, toute cette forêt d’objets, de tentures, de marchandises, de produits, ne me disent qu’une Inde incomplète et tronquée, celle des comptoirs. Et l’autre? Celle de la famine? Car ce pays d’énorme et somptueux commerce est également celui d’une effrayante dégénérescance locale, d’une misère indigène affreuse. Toute une race-fantôme y meurt et y gémit dans la faim. L’Inde n’est pas seulement un dock, c’est un cimetière. L’Anglais prospère s’y rencontre avec l’Indien décharné. Un champs de mort s’étend derrière la boutique.’ [Translation mine.] Both Marx and Gandhi believed the Indian village economy to be self-sustaining. On this, see M. N. Srinivas and A. M. Shah, ‘The myth of the self-sufficiency of the Indian village’, The Economic Weekly, September 10, 1960. Nehru was sceptical of Gandhi’s trust in the Indian village, writing on October 9, 1945: ‘I do not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and non-violence. A village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment. Narrow-minded people are much more likely to be untruthful and violent.’ Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Series, 14, 554. J. Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1867), 1–3. Note Watson’s use of the term ‘museum’: he was later a passionate advocate of a dedicated Imperial Museum for India and the Colonies. On Indian textiles, see How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500 – 1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Watson, 5–7. Mathur, 52–79. E.C. Buck, preface to George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, in six volumes (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1885), 1, iii–iv. Cited in Cherie McKeich, ‘Botanical Fortunes: TN Mukharji, international exhibitions, and trade between India and Australia’, in ReCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, 3, no. 1 (March 2008), online, accessed at: http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_3_no_1/papers/botanical_fortunes_tn_m ukharji Breckenridge, 204. J. Forbes Watson, Vienna Universal Exhibition, 1873: A Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Indian Department (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1873), 224–25. Breckenridge, 204. T. N. Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, specially compiled for the Glasgow International Exhibition, 1888 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1888), 319, 181. T. N. Mukharji, A Catalogue of Agricultural Implements collected for the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), 1–4. T. N. Mukharji, Descriptive Catalogue of Indian Produce contributed to the Amsterdam Exhibition, 1883 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1883), 67.

Exhibiting India

73

30 T. N. Mukharji, A Handbook of Indian Products: Art-Manufactures and Raw Materials (Calcutta: Star Press, 1883), ii. 31 T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman & Co., 1889), 99. 32 See Aviva Briefel, The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 54–8. See also Mathur, 88. 33 Mukharji, Hand-book, 15. 34 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures, 59. 35 Mukharji, Art-Manuactures, 59–67. 36 On a collection of such figures donated by individuals to a museum in Salem, Massachusetts, see Sria Chatterjee, ‘People of clay: Portrait objects in the Peabody Essex Museum’, Museum History Journal, 6:2 (July 2013), 203–21. 37 Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 48. 38 Claire Wintle, ‘Model subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886’, History Workshop Journal, 67:1 (2009): 194–207. 39 Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, 72–74. 40 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures, 73–74. 41 See Jogesh Chandra Bagal and Shubhendushekhar Mukhopadhyay, Hindu Melar Itibritta (Calcutta: Talpata, 2009), 25–26. 42 See Deepali Dewan, ‘The body at work: Colonial art education and the figure of the “Native Craftsman”’, in Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, ed. James H. Mills and Satadru Sen, 118–134, esp. 131. 43 Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

This page intentionally left blank

Section II

Place and environment

This page intentionally left blank

5

The composition and decomposition of commodities The colonial careers of coal and ivory Stephen Muecke

Coal Coal is a fungible commodity because it is almost 100 per cent carbon, but this purity and substitutability is deceptive, for in its relations it is unique and even institutionalised, as in the imposition of a carbon tax to offset its destructive effects on ecosystems. Value is added or taken away from it in the process of extracting it from ‘nature’ and turning it into a tradable commodity. My attempt to theorise the commodity will involve engaging with the materiality of the commodity, the stuff that makes it up, like simple carbon atoms. But beyond materiality, I am also interested in the composition of commodities, how they are ‘made up’ in more fanciful ways. In this, the composition of the commodity is hybrid, for it is packaged into a network of relations that move the object around and give it life – vibrancy, as Jane Bennett would say of the ‘political ecology of things’– particularly in relation to those human beings who are connected with such commodities.1 So not only is the commodity composed in its being by packaging, desires, functional articulations, ideologies and forces of labour, it is also mechanically reproduced in quantifiable units, and this multiplication of items distinguishes it from unique object-events, and more or less guarantees its distribution, giving each commodity a temporal career. The speed of its movement through space and time, its transportation through markets where it gains or loses value and is traded for other items of value: this is what articulates the commodity with time, it is what makes the two concepts inextricable from each other. But in a second movement I want to attend to the undoing of those materials, forces, signifiers and so on that compose the commodity. As this compositional analysis attends to the elements that make up the hybrid, networked commodity, it becomes a useful critical procedure for unhitching those relations. This is what I mean by decomposition. For why should we assume, as is often popularly done, that everything ‘in the world’ is inevitably heading towards commodification, that it is only a matter of time before the next thing in the free-for-all ‘natural’ commons is swallowed up by processes of possession and exchange. In fact, there are processes of decomposition of

78

Stephen Muecke

commodities going on all the time: ‘banning’ (as we shall see with ivory), ‘use by date’, ‘out of fashion’, ‘passé’, ‘antiquated’ (so many are to do with time!). Allen Shelton writes: But what I had ignored, and what Marx had neglected as well, is that commodities cool off, come out of the market, get stranded in space and time, virtually die, become gifts, and are collected into memory palaces surrounded with a different kind of liquid than that which floats active commodities. The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss had to resort to words and concepts outside of the contemporary European frame to approximate this world. He employs a variety of interrelated concepts drawn from the Pacific Islands and Aboriginal Australia.2 Some commodities are more stable over time than others, yet they all decompose into their component parts, eventually, and you can marvel at how they even managed to generate their unity, once you examine all the links and workings. The lesson here is not to assume relentless commodification under the pressure for market-formation, as if capital must always win out. In fact, markets are constantly dealing with processes of commodities turning into other things, returning to nature, as it were. Sometimes this is because a commodity is deliberately zapped by a counter-spell, as Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers would say, that takes away its aura.3 We shall see later how aligned to colonialism ivory’s career was and how a ‘save the elephant’ environmentalist movement was the ‘counter-spell’ that decommodified ivory and put a ban on its sale, taking it completely out of the legal market. So it is with this in mind that I would like to turn to the first of two examples: coal and its distribution in the Indian Ocean of the nineteenth century. Coal, of course, along with other carbon derivatives, was the primary resource that energised the industrial revolution. It is a ‘mass’ resource, and largely fungible. For global oceanic trade, it became, with the rise of steamships, the commodity that provided the energy to transport other commodities. Steamships were more reliable, supposedly, and in the Indian Ocean traders would no longer have to rely on the annual cycle of monsoon winds to move things around by sail: The early steamers with single combustion engines required vast amounts of coal. They carried as much as they could, but this meant that they were limited to carrying only mail and passengers, there being no room for freight. In 1856 Ida Pfeiffer went from the Cape to Mauritius in a new steamer, of 150 horse power. It cost a massive £500 a month to run, not counting the cost of coal, which was very considerable. The ship gobbled up more than a ton every hour, yet coal cost £2/10s a ton at the Cape. The steamer was relatively efficient, for some of the early steamers used up to 50 tons of coal a day. The consequence was frequent stops at places on the way – Cape Town, Aden, Galle – to pick up coal. In the 1850s

The colonial careers of coal and ivory

79

Galle imported 50,000 tons of coal a year, most of it coming from far away Cardiff. In these early days much of the coal was taken to these depots strung around the Indian Ocean in sailing ships.4 50,000 tons of coal a year, from Cardiff to Sri Lanka, in sailing ships? Am I missing something here with this story of coal depots? Couldn’t it be the case that this commodity, coal, is also fuelling a fantasy about the domination of nature, and about imperial figures in topees showing off their modernity to the natives? And it is true, coal and steamships, initially, did not pay for themselves at all. They were subsidised by the British Government by way of mail contracts, because, as historian Michael Pearson goes on to say: [It] was essential to have means of regular communications between [the empire’s] different parts, so that trade could flourish, security be enhanced, and troops and war material be moved as needed … Very large sums were involved. Between 1840 and 1867 the contracts yielded £4.5 million, and £6 million between 1868 and 1890. Overall the support given by the British government was about 25 per cent of the total capital …5 Technologies improved such that these subsidies could be reduced and phased out, at least for the mail runs, but we still have a dirty inefficient fuel moving large inefficient ships for many years on the strength of a story, a story retold by Michael Taussig, with Primo Levi: ‘I wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon,’ said [Primo] Levi. What stories they would tell, fairytales and ghost stories like we’ve never heard before. For that is where the story of carbon can take you, carbon, ‘the element of life,’ now better known as I write these lines as that which is going to kill us off through global warming. Element of life, indeed! What stories they could tell! Nothing compared with what they are going to tell! To date, this story has been occupied territory and called the domination of nature, but – who knows – if the storyteller got it right, then might not something else emerge? Therefore, if it is the poetry that does the hard work, combining the manmade with the natural so that there is no longer much of a difference, the poetry to which I refer and defer being the join, then I shall abjure the stepwise story, this happened and then that happened, and try as best I can to nudge some of the things-in-themselves into speech such that they manifest their disjointedness no less than their joint.6 I would say they manifest their composition as much as their decomposition, the things being hybrid-in-themselves and hybrid in the heterogeneous environments which provide life-support for them, hybrid markets being one case in point:

80

Stephen Muecke Economic markets are caught in reflexive activity: the actors concerned explicitly question their organization and, based on an analysis of their functioning, try to conceive and establish new rules for the game. This reflexivity is evident mainly in the proliferation of hybrid forums in which the functioning and organization of particular markets … are discussed and debated.7

So that is one kind of story about the composition of the commodity, in this case coal, where part of the composition – a rhetorical but essential part – is a narrative about industrialised modernity. Without this story, coal would not be able to sustain itself in the market. But of course, I have only looked at early steamships. Carbon, the ‘element of life’ has found its new source in coal’s cousin, oil, and is now in everything we use; all sorts of consumable energy, plastics, chemical products and so on. Carbon itself may not be decomposable, but its individual products are being decomposed in a piecemeal fashion, the campaign against plastic bottles, for example, that links to the commodification of water.8

Ivory Picture this: a group of elephants in the Roman Circus Maximus about 55 BCE facing death at the hands of the gladiators. For the Roman Consul, Pompey the Great, the animals provided a spectacular theatre of cruelty. But they turn to the crowd for help, and Pompey faces a kind of popular revolt, as reported by Pliny the Elder: Pompey’s elephants, when they had lost all hope of escape, tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing. So great was the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honour, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey for which he soon afterwards paid the penalty.9 Here the elephants exhibited the charisma of the large mammal that links them in an affective chain to humans in a similar way to the way they are linked today, a way that saved them yet again. By the twentieth century elephants will have survived the ivory trade, which burgeoned through the colonial period transforming a natural substance (elephants’ teeth) into a cultural one (ivory), a ‘primitive’ resource into a complex set of commodities with a diverse array of functions and meanings. As we shall see, affect was a key element in the composition and decomposition of ivory as commodity. Ivory, in this process, was transformed in the course of what I would like to call its political career. Ivory is not just a ‘natural substance’, it acquires a second nature in its relations with other things and other beings. Further,

The colonial careers of coal and ivory

81

these relations give it an agency, and the complex of relations intersecting create a particular character for that agency, hence the politics.10 So ivory was never passive: only a complex disarticulation and rearticulation of its relations to other beings and things can turn it into a passive substance, passive to the will of human beings to procure, distribute and craft it. To make ivory, one has to first disarticulate it from elephants, those very beings whose articulateness saved them, apparently, in Pompey’s circus. ‘Tusks’ have to be translated into ‘ivory’. The elephant – let’s start with the elephant as a composed being – uses its incisor teeth to dig for water, strip bark, move things around, poke enemies and display for courtship. Tool-like, the tusks already seem to extend the purely natural (except there is no such thing as the ‘purely natural’, everything is evolving and changing subject to forces, some of them affective). Because the elephant uses its tusks to articulate relations, the political career of ‘ivory’ has already begun: tusks are part of an elephant’s power, if you like. After the hunt, this power is wrenched away with their teeth, and the political career of ivory continues. But does this go in a straight line, from the so-called natural to the cultural, to the worlds where human mammals compose things for their advantage? It is important, I think, not to see this as a one-way street, from nature to culture, primitive resource to complex commodity. Because if my story only makes one point, it will be that ‘nature’ will return to give the elephants a voice (trumpeted by human advocates), a voice demanding elephant survival. The story will participate in the turning around of ivory and its political career, changing its configurations of value. Clearly, that value is not made by raw material alone, but also by the magic of the stories spun about it. Matter thus ‘vibrates’ in the liveliness of its relations, while our lives are also crafted into matter: all beings, all things have their political spokespersons gathering alliances to their causes. I am trying to grasp the wonder of ivory here, taking the risk, like Bruno Latour, like those misguided medieval folk, or primitives, who believe ‘in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimate matter producing its effects’.11 This is a rationalist reduction, which is starting to look even stranger, because it treats objects as if they are dead, while our actual practice is constantly to take them up in lively relations, as Jane Bennett argues in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Ivory was initially wrested from elephants in an atmosphere of fear. Early Ethiopian hunters used poison-tipped arrows shot from powerful bows and they supplied the ancient Middle East and Europe with ivory. Some African tribespeople were traditional elephant hunters, but they took risks: a wounded elephant could trample people in a hunting party, and such risks continued through the colonial period, even when big bore elephant guns became available. Human fear and elephant fear and rage characterised the theatre of the hunt. Then there was the slaughter and butchering of the elephant’s head, cutting back into the jaw so that the invisible one third of the tusk could be wrenched out by several men with a final great creaking pop. When this is

82

Stephen Muecke

done on a large scale and the elephant meat ignored, then the extraction of ivory starts to look, well, inhuman. These terrains became killing fields, especially in the early seventies when the price of ivory increased ten-fold.12 An affective relation of man to elephant is then further reproduced in the inhumanity of man to man, in the cruelty of slavery. The value of ivory now being forged in human as well as elephant blood, the porters of tusks who stumbled on their way to the Ivory Coast would be left to die and replaced by others. That slavery is sometimes called ‘black ivory’ is no accident. These were the two great commodities being extracted from Africa from the precolonial through the colonial periods. This was a harvest of death as well as ivory; ‘an animated image of death’ is how Conrad describes Kurtz being carried out on a stretcher towards the end of Heart of Darkness, ‘an animated image of death carved out of old ivory’.13 Yet the substance, the very qualities of the material of ivory, made it such an object of desire that all these lives could be sacrificed in abundance for its extraction and global distribution. It is ductile to carve, highly durable, strong, a beautiful creamy white and sensually smooth to the touch; these are also lines of affect that relate it to humans, human industry, human ritual. Death sanctifies this process of transformation of elephant dentine into beautiful panels carved by Romans, thrones for ancient kings and queens, a huge number and variety of artefacts amplified after industrialisation in Europe. The sacrifice imparts a magical quality to the substance, then further enhanced by its refashioning into cultural objects, of which more anon. But ponder Conrad again: ‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it’.14 Hunters, traders, middlemen, all driven by a lust for wealth, sure, but it is more than Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’: ‘they were praying to it’, says Conrad. It was like a perverse religion without a church where the parishioners become the carcasses of elephants and slaves, and the office-holders are the white hunters driven mad by obsession, the very meaning of obsession being that any subtle values fall away. Single-mindedness reduces the complex of relations that matter, like a certain rationality hell-bent on making objects inanimate. It is a mad story, is it not? Born of death, ivory takes on a life of its own ‘as a product readying itself for the market’.15 It has its own inherent qualities, to be sure – ductile, durable and smooth – and in its various lifelines, its political trajectories, its liveliness will be enhanced by all sorts of other cultural transformations and connections. And at each turn affective forces give the relations a vector. So how do you sell ivory? Or to be more in tune with our idea of lines of transmission of affect, what does it feel like to trade and sell ivory in the colonial period? We know something of the fear of the hunt, and the horror of the dead who have never been counted, the people even less than the elephants. Now the ivory arrives in the godowns of Zanzibar or Mombasa for distribution around the world. Here, the experts class it into types, with loving

The colonial careers of coal and ivory

83

caresses of the smoothness of the material. The experts know how the ivory can be cut, they look for the Schreger pattern that only elephant ivory has: a delicate pattern of loosely woven lines, ‘like stretched netting or soft circumflexes’, a ‘weave of intersecting lines reminiscent of fussy banknote engraving’.16 The expertise is elaborated in discourses, animated by the same love of the stuff that makes its Japanese carvers serenely happy and makes it preferred to this day by piano players who feel its warmth, sweat-absorption, the slight adhesion of fingers on keys. At this stage of ivory’s history the pianist is not thinking of elephants or slavery: ‘the animal product and its source species occupied different worlds’ says John Frederick Walker. ‘Ivory was being removed, transported, and reshaped far from its “original ecological context,” allowing the elephant to become conceptually distanced, even uncoupled, from its own teeth’.17 Ivory billiard balls became ‘vital to the game’ by 1700 in Europe, replacing the hardwoods used earlier. ‘Ivory was the only material that had sufficient elasticity or resiliency – “life” as it was called – to permit the full range of physical interactions between colliding balls’.18 That satisfying click as they strike each other. Billiards put a premium on small tusks, ‘scrivelloes’, from female elephants usually; a set of premium billiard balls was offered for sale in 1908 for $176, and by 1922 it was estimated that 4,000 elephants a year were being killed for the trade. And by 1913 the US was importing two hundred tons of ivory annually simply for the thin facings on piano keys. What else was ivory crafted into? ‘Doctors’ ladies’, Chinese figurines of naked women used by female patients too modest to use explicit language with their doctors, Japanese Hanko, or business seals, combs, straight razors, ivory chudas (bangles) for Hindu marriages, boxes, elaborate decorative spheres within spheres, parlour bell pulls, Victorian cane heads, knitting needles, chopsticks, ivory dust for black paint, handles for ham bone holders, cucumber saws and grape snips, backgrounds for miniature painting, dominoes and dice, rulers, knobs for scientific instruments, Chinese cricket cages, cuff links, false teeth, hip replacements, dildoes. Ivory was the plastic of its age. Nancy Cunard, the jazz-age shipping heiress, was photographed by Man Ray wearing massive clunky ivory bangles. She was disinherited for her affair with a man of African descent, as the artistic elite of her generation pursued its exoticisation and eroticisation of Africa in the early twentieth century. The title of the photograph, ‘Ivory Shackles’, is perhaps an ironic comment. The erotic is one of the strongest forms of investment of affect in the commodity, and for ivory it extends, in the Western canon, from the Song of Solomon’s ‘thy neck is as an ivory tower’ to Nabokov’s ‘The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita’.19 There is a poetics, then, which is replete with the racial force of whiteness and purity, and more, for ivory as colour is not just ‘whiteness’; its rich allusions assure its embeddedness in a kind of sacred mythology, as in John Frederick Walker’s list:

84

Stephen Muecke Ivory suggests age, antiquity, importance, dignity … it is the colour of diplomas, decrees and proclamations. Ivory is the colour of German taxis and the underparts of the largest breed of domestic cats, the Ragdoll. It’s the description given to the centre portion of lesions as well as to the rind of ripe casaba melons. Ivory is the tint of the clouds given off when ice water is added to a glass of aniseed flavoured Turkish raki and it the lightest acceptable colour of authentic Swiss Grade A Emmentaler cheese. It’s the colour a bride would choose for her gown if she wanted a traditional look for her wedding.20

It can’t be then, as he says, ‘just another name in the colour wheel’ because of all this cultural embeddedness. But what he is alluding to is the final change in fortunes and a realignment of affect that took place in 1989 when the ban on the trade in ivory took place. Today, if you search for ivory on eBay, you only get the colour, because trade in actual items is banned. The disarticulation of the lives of elephants and ivory that was in place in the colonial period ceased, as environmentalist discourses were able to re-establish the link, forged by that powerful feeling of compassion for the charismatic species. I won’t go into the role of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in bringing about the ban, the debates about illegal poaching, the rise in elephant numbers and the postcolonial arguments about Western environmentalist lobbyists who put elephant lives ahead of the needs of farmers in Africa whose crops and lives are threatened by uncontained elephant herds, not to mention the tons of vegetable food needed to sustain elephant populations which can wreak havoc in African national parks. There are stockpiles of ivory that some African countries seek to sell for the monetary value alone, but some environmentalists want to deny them this right for the sake of elephant numbers. Without affect, there is no doubt the de-commodification of ivory would not have taken place; it was a complex of affects: compassion, outrage, and some moral righteousness: most of it coming from the West. The colonial configuration of power that gave us the ivory trade is still largely in place to the extent that African voices are not heeded, for instance an African politician’s offer to those advocating a total ban on ivory. ‘Sure, you can burn our ivory stockpiles, if you pay for it.’ An offer that is yet to be taken up. John Law, of the Latourian school of thought, has made a case that the expansion of European economic power via oceanic trade in the sixteenth century can only be understood if the ‘technological, the economic, the political, the social and the natural are all seen as being interrelated’.21 And now we would have to add the affective to that list. And we would have to wonder what kind of writing (or methodology) can incorporate the technological, the economic, the political, the social and the natural and the affective in the one text, and we might have to conclude, that because of the affective, the text would not only be interdisciplinary, but also novelistic.

The colonial careers of coal and ivory

85

We are familiar, now, via Latour and the Actor Network Theory school, with the democratising tendency to welcome the agency of things into human networks and to dismantle the proscenium which has Man playing out various cultures on a stage with Nature as a uniform backdrop.22 So I have highlighted ivory and given it a career, which is to say a kind of life. In being alert to the forces at work in real time in shaping this life, I notice different kinds of agency, which lead me to endorse the idea of objects being animated. Not that they are autonomously alive, but that they are animated in every relationship that gives them function, meaning and affect. What attracted me in the narrative about ivory was what at first looked like a reversal and a return to Nature, as ivory was banned in order to save the elephants. But this about-face in ivory’s career was not in any sense a return. It was a reconfiguration of the natural-cultural assemblage. The political configuration changed to solve a problem; some of ivory’s friends and enemies fell away and it gained new ones. It was decommodified, but not necessarily defetishised as such, because a new kind of sacred was installed that was a strong affective driver. This is, of course, the edenic conception of the purity of Nature, a concept at the heart of Western modernism: the classical nature-culture bifurcation which, according to Latour and anthropologist Phillipe Descola, and earlier Whitehead and James, has gotten us into so much trouble. So, first conclusion: no ‘return to nature’, just a redistribution of agency, which is precisely what happens when commodities become recycled, creating new materials and commodities (glass is recycled as glass fibre insulation, plastic bottles become cloth) as well as employment. My second conclusion is that while ivory’s colonial career moved it into industrialisation and commodification, this modernisation has not necessarily meant decolonisation. Nations in Africa have political independence, but their continued dependence on an asymmetrical global trade in commodities points us to a colonisation continued by economic means. Ivory is an interesting case study in this area because its decommodification left a set of colonial power relations in place, but this time they are organised around the kinds of moralistic arguments driving organisations like CITES; only ‘responsible’ Western countries can trust themselves to care about the right kinds of things. An old colonial moral pedagogy is thus still in place. My third conclusion is about the passions surrounding ivory. I have tried to illustrate their diversity, from the responsiveness of the human hand to smoothness, to the satisfying click of a billiard ball, to the more complex articulation of machines, exoticism, pride in a craft skill, collectionism, exhibiting desires, and so on. One last example concerns the development of lathes for turning ivory into beautiful objects. From the end of the seventeenth century, Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, had a collection of ivory turning lathes, which he worked himself. Walker tells us Peter the Great had ‘a passion for putting on a workman’s apron, picking up a chisel and spinning a piece of tusk on a mandrel, sometimes far into the night’. The Czar turned out ‘goblets and candlesticks, measuring instruments and sundials, openwork

86

Stephen Muecke

pyramids with polygonal stars inside, sceptres, columns, engraved snuffboxes and polygons’. He wasn’t unique in his passion. For some two hundred years, as historian Kraus Maurice has detailed, the crowned heads of Europe – in Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Italy, France, Denmark – spent untold hours at their lathes turning ivory.23 Less Eurocentric examples, stories from China and India, would reveal different sets of passions, with different assemblages of humans and nonhumans. My point is that the passion for ivory takes many forms, and that its poetics is not just in the object, but in the relations that give the object life. Each little enthusiasm sustains ivory in the relations that push its many careers along. The poetics of ivory is not about its powers of representation, though these play a part. The beautiful carved figurine is an image of beauty, but how it got there is equally important as it is created through a chain of transformations. We can follow those transformations back down the line, from display case, to shop, to workshop with its lathe and specialised tools, to the merchant’s trading house, to its transport as cargo, to the trader back in Africa, to the hunting party with its guns, to the savannah and the herd of elephants, to the particular elephant having its tusks violently wrenched out. What is also on that chain of transformations and translations is a chain of human affect being translated, transformed, and sometimes reversed. I also want to go back to coal, to carbon, the quintessential fungible commodity, the ‘element of life’. It is its relation to fire, its consumption with oxygen that makes it release its energy. This attribute also puts it in a special relationship with human cultures and their use of the transformative power of fire. Fire rather rapidly decomposes things, and we have learnt to harness this energy in machines which work for us. Normally with commodities we have to labour to transform them into items for the market – no less for coal, which, seemingly a simple element, nevertheless has to be mined and transported with value-adding labour. In its decomposition, in its combustion/consumption, it returns the complement with its labour, working for us as an energy source. And with this energy we power our cities where we, lucky ones, pursue our post-industrial forms of labour in air-conditioned rooms with plenty of computers, brought to us by creative invention, not just the market. Let us remember that the market is perhaps not a Durkheimian ‘total social fact’, but more of a ‘reflexive game’;24 it is a hybrid forum where government subsidies can play the role of promoting a substance like coal against the logic of the market itself (in the nineteenth century) and against ecological logics and calculations (in the contemporary era). It is in this reflexivity that events are open to the opportunities of intervention. There are stories that can be told that are not in the financial languages of market inevitability, as in stories of the domination of Nature bequeathed by the nineteenth century. If we pay attention to the decomposition of commodities and the forces that disenfranchised them; then we become aware of counter-spells that burst the bubbles of capitalist enchantments: the market is not necessarily all-consuming. Stories, then, but also forms of analysis. How can an analysis

The colonial careers of coal and ivory

87

work as a counter-spell? Not, I think, by critique as denunciation, where the critic is like a disempowered marginal character at the gates of power. Not as an inflammatory critique, but a cooler one that proceeds by way of tracing the relations between things, that decomposes these relations in such a way that decision-making processes are slowed down (rather than rushing to the usual conclusions via the usual transcendent concepts). Combine inventive storytelling with a more cautious analysis, then, in a poetry that decomposes and recomposes things in their lively relations.

Notes 1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 2 Allen Shelton, Where the North Sea Touches Alabama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 165. 3 Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4 Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 202–3. 5 Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 203. 6 Michael Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 225–6. 7 Michel Callon, Cécile Méadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa, ‘The economy of qualities,’ Economy and Society, 2002, 31 (2): 194–217. 8 Gay Hawkins, ‘Packaging water: Plastic bottles as market and public devices,’ Economy and Society, 2011, 40 (4): 534–52. 9 Pliny, Natural History 3, trans. H. Rackham, (London: Heinemann, 1940), 19–22. 10 Charis Thompson, ‘When elephants stand for competing philosophies of nature: Amboseli National Park, Kenya’, Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. John Law & Annemarie Mol (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 166–90. 11 Bruno Latour, ‘An attempt at writing a “Compositionist Manifesto,”’ New Literary History, 2010, 41: 481. 12 Thompson, ‘When elephants’, 168. 13 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bantam, 1969) 101 14 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 37. 15 Michael Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred, 153. 16 John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009), 24, 23. 17 Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 60. 18 Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 102. 19 ‘The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita – full the feel of her preadolescently curved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her.’ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), 67. 20 Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 105. 21 John Law, ‘On the methods of long distance control: Vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India’, Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 234–263. 22 Bruno Latour, ‘The recall of modernity – anthropological approaches’, trans. Stephen Muecke, Cultural Studies Review, March 2007, 13: 11–30. 23 Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 76–77. 24 Michel Callon et al., ‘The Economy of Qualities’, 194–5.

6

Profaning water The sacred and its others Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

I A commonplace paradox about the condition of India’s holy river, the Ganges, is formulated thus: ‘How can the world’s most famously “sacred river” be regarded as pure and life-giving in one semantic domain but deadly toxic with human pathogens and heavy-metals, and hence life-threatening in others?’1 The posing of the problem in this way presupposes that the opposing claims are made across an abyssal divide of meaning, tradition-and-modernity, India-and-the-West, the sacred-and-the-secular, faith-and-reason. As the anthropologist Kelly Alley puts it, there is a conflict of ‘cultural logic’ between the scientific and administrative view of pollution and the traditional belief in the Ganga’s purity.2 The sacred geography of the Ganges, its source in the high Himalayan glaciers, the confluence of rivers it feeds into, the temples and cities along its banks which are centres of pilgrimage (most famously Varanasi) are aspects of the river that constitute an important dimension of Hindu religious belief.3 The immemorial belief of the Hindus that the Ganga cannot be polluted is challenged by the incontrovertible fact that it is – and is consequently in crisis, on its way to drying up and disappearing. The widespread popular resistance among Hindus to ‘blaming the river’ also means that the Indian government has largely failed in its ‘modern, secular, scientific’ approach to cleaning up the Ganges.4 The paradox, which also translates into a problem, arises from the two different contexts in which the word ‘pollution’ circulates. On the one hand there is its familiar invocation in connection with the environment to refer to the contaminating effects of the by-products of industrial modernity – chemical, human and manufacturing waste and urban trash – on nature’s lifegiving resources, water, air, and earth. On the other hand ‘pollution’ is also associated with religion, naming one kind of threat to the sacred. In a narrowly specialist if not esoteric sense it is specific to Brahminical Hinduism, as the antithesis of ‘purity’. More generally ‘pollution’ in this context resonates with the sense of ‘sacrilege’ or ‘profanation’. It is this double sense of pollution, material and symbolic – but also not merely symbolic since Brahminical pollution is effected by touch, a problem to which I shall return – that creates

Profaning water

89

the dilemma in addressing, conceptually as well as practically, the problem of the pollution of the Ganges.

II The pollution of the Ganges – in both senses, the environmental and the religious – is associated with the newly secular uses to which the river began to be put in the colonial period. Under the assault of modernity, an assault even more palpable in the colonies, ‘all that is holy is profaned’, as Marx and Engels so eloquently observed in the Communist Manifesto. Partha Chatterjee opens his introduction to the volume Texts of Power with a parable of colonial modernity. The gods descending on Calcutta in 1880 are met with a weeping Ganga complaining of being unbearably burdened by the bridge built across her body, the boats plying over her surface, the smoke of industry and the noise of traffic, and the taxes levied on the people for the use of her waters. The sorry fate of the river, Chatterjee explains, was part and parcel of the unprecedented growth of the city as an imperial capital. ‘Secular’ water created yet another problem. Since it was brought into homes through modern pipes, orthodox Hindus felt it was ritually polluted; they therefore resorted to mixing it with a few drops of ‘muddy but holy’ Ganges water before drinking it. In Chatterjee’s view this ingenious solution illustrates how native ‘claims of conscience’ and colonialist ‘strategies of power’ were negotiated in Indian subjects’ encounter with the ‘intellectual project of modernity’.5 The shifts in the value of water that secular modernity effected occur, as we can see, within the two discursive domains that the Ganges straddles, as also in two distinct geographical locations: one a Hindu religious discourse as part of the modernist address to caste in the colony; the other a secular – here, civic or public health – discourse in terms of the ‘purification’ of water in an industrializing world. While both relate water to purity and pollution, one uses the language of ritual, the other of scientific process. Both deploy the affect of nostalgia, recalling water in its earlier ‘natural’ condition, pure and pristine, now irrevocably polluted by the changes brought about by the pervasive effects of modernity. Historical researches have uncovered the extent to which European rule and the demands of the new industrial capitalism combined to alter the physical landscape of colonial territories and deplete their resources. These projects involved both destruction – the vigorous extraction of minerals or the cutting down of forests for timber – as well as construction – of railways, roads, bridges and canals. So-called construction itself of course invariably involved major clearing, damming, blasting and other forms of destructive enterprises. Colonial administrators and so-called ‘experts’ were engaged in the domestication of nature: they dammed and diverted rivers, ‘fenced the forests’, and extensively surveyed and mapped the land.6 In order to do so, and in the process, colonialism disseminated new knowledges and a vastly

90

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

different system of values, producing the complex epistemologies and experiences that we know as ‘modernity’. Where water management was concerned, the colonial state brought irrigation, sewage systems and water supply under its sole control, entrusting a centralized bureaucracy and technocracy with the formulation of policy and the execution of major construction projects. Historians are divided about the impact of these, between those who maintain that the British increased agricultural production (in some areas), and those who blame them for causing famines and massive environmental damage (in others).7 Development was uneven and unequal in any case. The point to note is that ‘British colonial policy in the nineteenth century drew from an international discourse of water engineering, which had its roots in the transformation of water into a commodity.’8 State control over water and land meant also increased control over the population, leading to colonial India being named a ‘hydraulic society.’9 The term has found more expansive application in works like David Worster’s Rivers of Empire (1985), serving as a broad critique of the capitalist domination of nature driven by imperializing agendas. These discussions of sovereignty are united in emphasizing the nexus between water and power. In the most general terms therefore, a relationship of domination over nature, a world-view implicitly or explicitly attributed to the theological anthropocentrism of Christianity, has spurred the west’s capitalist-colonialist exploitation of natural resources for profit, especially following the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The consequences of this perspective are responsible, arguably, for the environmental degradation of the planet today. Environmental pollution, scarcity and commercialization have encouraged the commodification of water, like that of many other natural resources. The secularization of its semiotics is equally a reflection and a result of these processes. As Amita Baviskar has observed, ‘struggles over water are simultaneously struggles for power over symbolic representations and material resources.’10

III Environmental activists and academics have understandably therefore begun to urge a return to a pre-modern, non-European epistemology and practice of the sacred as an antidote to the commodification of natural resources and its consequent ecological problems. The following argument by Mary Evelyn Tucker, professor of religion and ecology at Yale, urging a solution in terms of a ‘synthesis of science and religion’, is typical of contemporary movements that may be identified by the broad rubric of ‘spiritual ecology’: ‘The world’s religions provide a variety of examples of how water has been regarded as part of a sacred life process, not simply another product for consumption. At the same time our increased comprehension of the story of evolution as understood by science gives us a renewed appreciation for the role of water in sustaining life. To see water as a source of life, not merely a resource, is the challenge of a new synthesis of science and religion in our times.’11

Profaning water

91

While with the diagnosis of the problem and its solution in such general terms one can have no quarrel, the development of the ‘sacred’ as the central concept and value that is oppositional to the ‘commodity’ as such should give us some pause, particularly when it emanates from a specific – as opposed to a generalized – religious cosmology, for instance that of a contemporary hegemonic Hinduism.12 The terms of this debate in India are given by Vandana Shiva on the one hand, the most influential global exponent of ‘dharmic ecology’, and Meera Nanda on the other. Nanda represents an uncompromising left-secular scientific position in her stand against the influential indigenist and anti-Enlightenment trends evident in contemporary radical theory, of which Shiva is a leading representative.13 Both their viewpoints are too well known to require elaboration. Briefly Shiva’s philosophical and activist message is that western technology and statist developmental projects have been uniformly destructive in their impact; that the ‘spiritual, ecological, cultural and social significance of resources have been eroded’; and that society must recover its religious impulses and environmental activism must activate a popular religious idiom in its cause. In her recent book Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit – the title in effect says it all – the chapter on the rivers of India is titled ‘Sacred Waters’. Shiva interprets the Hindu legends about the descent of the Ganga in rational scientific terms, and validates the ‘miracle’ of the Ganges’ purity, i.e. its ability to break down cholera viruses in hours.14 All religions in their beginnings held water to be sacred, she holds; it was Christianity that labeled water worship ‘pagan’ and forbade the worship of fountains and rivers as ‘idolatry’. Giving ‘market values to all resources’ cannot be a solution to the ecological crisis; it is instead ‘the idea that life is sacred [that] puts a high value on sacred systems and prevents their commodification.’15 Meera Nanda objects to the use of a populist Hindu religious idiom for mobilizing the people, even if it be only strategic. She challenges the assumption that ‘if people worship nature as embodiment of shakti, Shiva, Krishna (or in more philosophical, Vedantic terms) Brahman, they will naturally be inclined to take care of it, use it lightly, sparingly, with reverence.’ The ‘sacredness of nature does not protect nature. Just because people venerate trees and rivers does not mean that they will take care of them,’ Nanda argues. (The degradation of the Ganges that continues despite its putative sacredness is a case in point.) More importantly Nanda perceives a threat in the ‘Hinduization of politics and culture’ via environmentalism. She clubs together Hindu religious environmentalists with a movement that she labels ‘neo-paganism’ in Europe. She ends with the sturdy assertion that ‘most poor people participate in environmental movements for secular reasons’: ‘the primary motivation of the poor people to take action on behalf of the trees, rivers and land is their interest in a better life materially for themselves and for their children.’16 I am not interested in taking sides in this debate as a matter of simply announcing a political stance, although I have no hesitation in aligning myself

92

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

with Nanda’s. What has particular resonance in this context is her opposition to the perception of the sacred (nature/origin) as the unquestioned ‘other’ of various contemporary ills coded as ‘secular,’ scientific, or capitalist/commodity (and as the solution to them).

IV The ‘sacred’ produces a particular kind of affect compounded of fear and veneration in response to a person, phenomenon or object.17 These are feelings caused by the literal and figurative distance that is established between the sacred and the beholder, as also by its assignment to a world different from that of the everyday. The epistemic reign of the sacred, or the affect produced by it is not easy to overthrow. Grounded as it is in a long civilizational tradition, its effects have a tenacious hold on the human psyche. Even if a sacred thing is shifted from traditional to modern, religious to secular, and symbolic to commodified epistemes, it is likely that the ‘aura’ of its original affective domain would not be altogether dispelled. Diana Eck explains that the Ganges, for instance, like other symbols ‘shaped by geography’ (tirthas such as Kashi), does not lose its appeal to the religious imagination. Geography is slow to change: ‘The particular myths and stories may come and go; the narrative may change or be forgotten; but the hilltop, the pool, and the grove remain …. while the story and the names have changed, the place attracts its worshippers as much as before.’18 Several essays in the landmark volume The Social Life of Things (1986) are interested in ‘decommoditization’, the process through which certain things resist commodification. ‘In every society there are things that are publicly precluded from being commoditized,’ Igor Kopytoff observes.19 Arjun Appadurai describes these as ‘enclaved commodities’ since their commodity potential is ‘carefully hedged’.20 They include ‘sacra’ (ritual objects), gifts, and royal monopolies. In refusing common commodity status, or in other words by being placed outside the ‘promiscuous spheres of exchange’, certain things seek and attain exclusivity. Kopytoff identifies ‘culture’ as that which provides the ‘counterdrive’ to commoditization. Through discrimination certain things resist the homogenization of the commodity. Kopytoff’s interest lies in the schemes of ‘valuation and singularization’ which co-exist in a complex society alongside commoditization.21 Kopytoff’s analysis allows us to see that sacralization is the product of subjective and social meaning-making, the cognition of objects in terms of value (or in this case the transcendence of value, which is of course also itself a valuation), rather than an inherent attribute of an object or the effect of a radically different sphere of existence it occupies. There is however a long Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself, of reading capitalism as analogous to a religion, based on the fusion of the commodity with sacred object (‘fetish’). In his essay Profanations (2007) Giorgio Agamben offers a productive and provocative reading of capitalism’s commodity

Profaning water

93

22

fetishism in continuation of Marx, Benjamin and Debord. Agamben develops Benjamin’s identification of capitalism as a religion in which ‘everything has meaning only in reference to the fulfillment of a cult, not in relation to a dogma or idea’ (80). He excoriates the tendency to ‘separation’ which characterizes both capitalism and Christianity: ‘We could say that capitalism, in pushing to the extreme a tendency already present in Christianity, generalizes in every domain the structure of separation that defines religion …. In the commodity, separation inheres in the very form of the object, which splits into use-value and exchangevalue and is transformed into an ungraspable fetish … everything is exhibited in its separation from itself … spectacle and consumerism are the two sides of a single impossibility of using’ (81–82). And again following Benjamin and other theorists of the contemporary society of the spectacle, Agamben attributes to the commodity a rarified ‘exhibition value’ which aspires only to a display of itself: ‘Exhibition value … is not use value, because what is exhibited is, as such, removed from the sphere of use; it is not exchange value because it in no way measures any labour power … it shows nothing but the showing itself’ (90). The commodity becomes that which is (only) viewed, preferably at a distance and behind glass. Museums, zoos, parks, buildings, and whole countries turned over to tourism, all permit looking without touching, exhibition without use.23 Agamben’s provocative contribution lies in his proposal to turn to profanation as the route to return things to use – or uselessness, as the case may be. As one commentator puts it, ‘profanation is the logical solution to the hegemonic curse of the commodity.’24 If ‘religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere … [then profanation is] a touch that disenchants and returns to use what the sacred had separated and petrified’ (74). Agamben is somewhat hazy about what things may be profaned and how, although the idea of ‘play’ holds possibilities for a subversive use of and attitude towards things.25 He has little to say either about the consequences of profaning, such as the punishment that necessarily and swiftly follows transgression, acknowledgment of which would allow us to read profanation as a politics and site of struggle.

V Agamben’s ideas may be extended, I suggest, by looking at actual historical instances of profanation and their implications for human emancipation. I have argued that both an ontology of the sacred that is constructed in binaristic opposition to the commodity, and strategic efforts to decommoditize the object by ‘enclaving’ it, are of questionable political value. The investment of an object with sacredness (‘consecration’ is Agamben’s word) is not a guarantee of use; on the contrary it establishes exclusivity. It is even a means by which exclusivity may be ensured. That which you want to remove from common use you first render sacred. This is how water is denied to untouchables. In order to be made exclusive to caste Hindus it has first to be made sacred (consecrated). The sacredness of

94

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

water inheres in its multiple functions and meanings: in its primordial origins as Gangetic water, as the ritual medium of cleansing pollution, and as privatized resource. Traditionally even the incorruptible Ganges was said to be contaminable by the touch of outcastes: the ‘untouchables’ (asprisya-sudras) are defined as castes whose touch is ‘so impure as to pollute even the Ganges’, and hence ‘their contact must be avoided.’26 The concept of untouchability is subjected to rigorous phenomenological scrutiny in contemporary scholarship, in order to explain how the ‘aura’ of the sacred is achieved.27 The ever-present threat of pollution legitimizes steps towards ‘enclaving’ water within the order of the sacred. While vulnerable to pollution, water is at the same time the purificatory medium by which pollution is removed (from the sacred person of the Brahmin or the idol). And as a lifegiving and often scarce natural resource it validates hoarding. Prohibiting promiscuous access to it ensures caste monopoly over water in specific contexts. Not only containers of all kinds, but also varied water bodies, manmade as well as natural such as wells, tanks, ponds and rivers, are declared out of bounds to outcastes. Separation in the sense of segregation (a sense not intended by Agamben but not alien to it) ensures that untouchables do not share water with caste Hindus. But as caste relations move into a new order of modernity, political and epistemological, the ‘sacred’ as aura and prohibition becomes vulnerable to the newly mobilized meaning of touch. If for the untouchable to touch the Brahmin or (his) water is to pollute it however inadvertent the contact, then such touch when performed deliberately can become an act of overt subversion or active aggression. The powerful symbolic resonance of ‘water satyagraha’ was exploited by B. R. Ambedkar when he led untouchables to take water from Mahad tank in 1927. This act can be read as profanation in Agamben’s sense, in the return/reduction/release of the commodity from sacredness to (common) use. It is important to clarify that the politics and psychology of profanation in this sense are different from iconoclasm, although both may consist in the performance of acts of desecration. Profanation seeks a demystification whose effects are diffusive; the iconoclastic act intends the more extreme and limited effect of degradation or insult as a sign of rejection. Profanation functions as means to an end, iconoclasm is its own end.28 Profaning the sacred object results in simple empirical ‘proof ’ of the emptiness of the edict of religious prohibition, both as to its ineffectiveness (‘no supernatural power could prevent us after all’) and as to its inconsequentiality (‘no supernatural catastrophe followed as a result’).29 (It is of course another matter that both prohibition and punishment might very well be and indeed often are enforced by human agents.) Profaning consequently enables untouchables to enter the realm of freedom. There is a second and important way in which profanation might feature as political act, and that is by invoking the secular-modern political language of rights to contest religious prohibition. Access to water, as already mentioned, is an important dimension of caste struggles, which have deployed the idiom

Profaning water

95

of rights to lay claim to it as an essential – life-giving – and ‘public’ resource. Upendra Baxi applauds the first ever judgment of the Supreme Court penalizing caste Hindus for denying low castes access to water from a village well, in 1992. Citing the Civil Rights Protection Act, the court invoked civil rights to overcome the ‘disability’ of caste. The case went back to 1978 when caste Hindus in Malikwadi village sanctified a new bore well financed by the government by ‘performing pooja and taking water for doing abishekha to a temple deity’ as soon as the bore well began to spout water. When the mahars went to fetch water, they were prevented by the upper castes; one of the accused even brandished a gun to prevent the ‘defilement’ of ‘their’ well. In his judgment the Additional Sessions judge held that the well was a ‘place of public resort’ and that it was therefore an offence to deny access to anyone to it, a judgment that the Supreme Court upheld.30 The judgment effected an epistemic shift by dismissing the consideration of water as (sacred–private) (non-)commodity, instead identifying the well as (public–secular) space. Such a displacement points to one of the strategies of profanation, a refusal to remain within the terms of the hegemonic discourse – in this instance a juridical overwriting that was achieved without recourse to direct confrontation over caste practices. In addition to transgression and its opposite, rights or rightfulness, a politics of profanation also seeks recourse to a recharged discourse of the ‘commons’. As natural resources are being increasingly privatized to generate profit and power, environmental politics has become a crucial site of struggle to reclaim the commons. ‘Commons’ refers to resources of nature that are shared, communal and public, to which the claims of private property were at one time alien but which have come increasingly under the sway of exclusive ownership. Michael Hardt has drawn attention to what he describes as the ‘powerful contradiction’ which lies at the heart of capitalist production, between ‘the need for the common in the interest of productivity’ and ‘the need for the private in the interest of capitalist accumulation.’31 In different parts of the world today, people rise up to protest the attempts to privatize the common under neoliberal reforms. Hardt mentions as an example the successful popular protests against the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000 which, together with other forms of struggle, sought to maintain control over the common ‘in terms of natural resources, the forms of life of indigenous communities, and the social practices of the peasants and the poor.’32 The counter-claims of the common resist the commoditization and capitalization of natural resources caused by the privatization of natural resources. And finally there is Agamben’s prescription of ‘play’ as the profane method of resistance par excellence. I will end with an account of Bhopal activists seeking to implicate Dow Chemicals for the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in 1984.33 In 2009, marking the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, activists from Bhopal joined a London-based group, the Yes Men, to drive home a point about corporate responsibility. The stunt revived, playfully

96

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

and provokingly, the suggestion of the ‘trial by ordeal’.34 In attractively designed bottles bearing the label B’eau Pal the group peddled water to passers-by in London outside Dow Chemicals’ head-office in the U.K. In ironic acknowledgment of the cachet of branding, a top design firm in London had provided its services free for the bottle and label. The bottles themselves contained contaminated Bhopal water filled from a source that the labels identified as a ‘handpump from Atal Ayub Nagar.’ In response the Dow office closed down for the day, choosing not to confront the activists (or perhaps to have to drink the proffered water themselves). By offering the water in bottled form, the activists made the point that while in its commoditized/exhibitionist form the container may be privileged over the content, the real test of safety lies in the water to be consumed. The efficacy of the pranksterist mode of publicity adopted by the Yes Men as well as the politics of their openly anarchist methods are of course open to debate.35 What the episode illustrates for our purposes is the coming together of issues relating to capitalism, environmental pollution, and the privatization and commodification of natural resources, pitted against a form of popular protest that resists each of these. Like untouchable communities contesting caste exclusivity by claiming rights to public space, these movements have more to gain from restoring natural resources to the sphere of the common and the profane than enshrining them as sacred.

Notes 1 Peter Nabakov, review of Kelly D. Alley, On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater meets a Sacred River (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002) in Journal of Anthropological Research, 2004, 60 (3): 442–444, esp. 441. 2 Kelly Alley, ‘Ganga and Gandagi: Interpretations of pollution and waste in Benaras,’ Ethnology, Spring 1994, 33(2): 127–45, esp. 141. 3 See, for example, Diana Eck, ‘Ganga: The goddess Ganges in Hindu sacred geography,’ in Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 137–153. 4 The Ganga Action Plan (GAP) inaugurated in 1985 is the government of India’s most concerted project to combat the pollution of the river. An NGO called the Sankat Mochan foundation has had greater success in its campaign to clean up the river. Headed by a Benares resident Veer Bhadra Mishra, who is both a hereditary mahant (head-priest) of a temple in Varanasi and a hydraulic engineering professor at Benares Hindu University, the foundation’s Clean Ganga campaign has adopted a two-pronged strategy in keeping with the dual persona of its founder and of the river itself. In association with American experts Mishra promotes scientific solutions for the river clean up, but in the equally important mission to educate the people he uses the language of religious affect. See Alexander Stille, ‘The Ganges’ next life,’ The New Yorker, January 19, 1998: 58–67. 5 Partha Chatterjee, Introduction to Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, edited by Partha Chatterjee (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 5, 8. 6 See, for instance, Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–1914 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical

Profaning water

7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

97

Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). Rohan de Souza, ‘Water in British India: The making of a “Colonial hydrology”,’ History Compass, 2006, 4/4: 621–628. De Souza cites Dying Wisdom, a report produced by the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi in 1997: ‘Colonialism … by instituting private property, commodifying land, commercialisation, pursuing highly extractive revenue agendas and dismantling community control over natural resources caused the impoverishment of the rural populace at large and led to the decay and destruction of indigenous water harvesting systems’ (623), but points out that: ‘Subsequent scholarship, however, has questioned whether colonialism did indeed have such a sweeping impact on traditional water structures’ (624). On these questions, see David Gilmartin, ‘Models of the hydraulic environment: Colonial irrigation, state power and community in the Indus Basin’, Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, ed. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 210–236; David Hardiman, ‘The politics of water in colonial India: The emergence of control’ in Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Robert J. Wasson eds, Water First: Issues and Challenges for Nations and Communities in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008), 47–58; David Mosse, The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology, and Collective Action in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Farhat Naz, and Saravanan V. Subramanian, Water Management Across Space and Time in India, Centre for Development Research, ZEF Working Paper Series 61 (Bonn, 2010), 5 (emphasis added). ‘Hydraulic society’ (or ‘hydraulic civilization’) is a term coined by Karl Wittfogel to describe a form of political authority that controls a population by controlling the supply of water. Wittfogel derived the notion from Marx, who held that ‘artificial irrigation by canals and water-works’ ‘formed the basis of Oriental agriculture and of Oriental despotism.’ Where the necessity of ‘an economical and common use of water, … drove private enterprise to voluntary association in the Occident, it … necessitated in the Orient … the interference of the centralizing power of Government.’ Marx, ‘The British rule in India,’ New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853; MECW, Vol. 12, 125. Wittfogel does not limit ‘hydraulic civilization’ to so-called Oriental despotism but extends it to all governments that institute centralized land and water management. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Introduction to Amita Baviskar ed., Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007). Mary Evelyn Tucker, 2001 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. For example, Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker eds, Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Meera Nanda is author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), among other books. Shiva, Water Wars (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), 133–34. Shiva, Water Wars, 136–38. Nanda, ‘Dharmic ecology and the Neo-Pagan International: The dangers of religious environmentalism in India’, talk given at the European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies in Sweden in 2004, online at www.sasnet.lu.se/ EASASpapers/15MeeraNanda.pdf (accessed 20 November 2013). On the sacred and profane, see especially Durkheim (1912), ‘The division of the world into two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane, is the

98

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28

29

30

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan hallmark of religious thought … There is no other example in the history of human thought of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another.’ Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 36–38. Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin, 1983), 36. Igor Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process,’ in Arjun Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value’, Social Life of Things, 24. Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things’, 73. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). See especially chapter 9, ‘In praise of profanation.’ All further citations are identified by page references indicated in parentheses. Salman Rushdie’s dystopic fiction, ‘At the auction of the ruby slippers’ in East, West (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1994) represents the commodity’s apotheosis. The famous slippers worn by Dorothy, the heroine of the film Wizard of Oz, are put up for auction. The crowds gather to gaze upon them. ‘See: behind bullet proof glass the ruby slippers sparkle. We do not know the limits of their powers. We suspect that these limits may not exist’ (88). The auction as a mode of commodityexchange highlights the supreme irrationalities of valuation. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, ‘On Giorgio Agamben’s Profanations,’ Lacanian Ink, 2006, 27; excerpt online at www.lacan.com/lacinkXXVII5.htm (accessed 18 November 2013). Agamben’s examples of profane behavior: a child at play, a cat playing with a ball of wool, a pornographic model facing the camera without expression, displaying no erotic pleasure in her partner, etc. Benjamin describes the art of the Dadaists in terms of their anti-auratic agenda, a description that closely resembles Agamben’s profanation. See ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,’ Illuminations; Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 237–8. G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (London: Gegan Paul and Co, 1932), 8. See Sundar Sarukkai, ‘Phenomenology of untouchability,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 12 September 2009, 44 (37): 39–48. The Dravida movement in southern India led by Periyar (E.V. Ramasamy) was iconoclastic – Hindu idols were desecrated, garlanded with shoes etc. In contrast, the well-known episode of the untouchables’ handling of the sacred shaligrama in U.R. Anantha Murthy’s novel in Kannada, Bharatipura (1973), may be seen as an act of profanation. Jagannatha, the Brahmin landlord and instigator of the act, intends the touching of the shaligrama by his untouchable tenants to demystify its powers (for both the watching upper-castes and the untouchables themselves), producing empirical proof that nothing would happen as a result of the touch. In other words, it is intended as a form of consciousness-raising. Two contemporary writers of the sub-continent have confessed to childhood ‘tests’ of religious prohibition: Anantha Murthy writes of urinating on a sacred stone, and Salman Rushdie of eating a ham sandwich. These acts exemplify the temptation that young people experience to engage in acts of profanation to test the existence of the higher powers. U. R. Anantha Murthy, ‘Why not worship in nude? Reflections of a novelist in his time,’ Bahuvachan (Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1988): 95–117; S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 377. Upendra Baxi, Mambrino’s Helmet? Human Rights for a Changing World (New Delhi: Har-Anand, 1994), 145–46.

Profaning water

99

31 Michael Hardt, ‘Politics of the Common,’ ZNet, July, 2009, online at http:// zcomm.org/znetarticle/politics-of-the-common-by-michael-hardt/ (accessed 10 June 2017). Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have addressed the question of the ‘common’ in several works, including Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009). 32 Hardt, ‘Politics of the common’. 33 Although there is no consensus on the exact figures, many thousands are estimated to have died as a result of the accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, and many thousands more have suffered and continue to suffer from deformities and illnesses caused by the long-term environmental damage, including groundwater contamination. Union Carbide paid a pitiful compensation to the Government of India, its officials escaped punishment, and neither the company nor Dow Chemicals which bought it in 2001 has cleaned up the toxic wastes. 34 ‘Trial by ordeal was an ancient judicial practice by which the guilt or innocence of the accused is determined by subjecting them to an unpleasant, usually dangerous experience. Classically, the test is one of life or death and the proof of innocence is survival. In some cases, the accused was considered innocent if they escaped injury or if their injuries healed.’ See: Wikipedia entry on ‘Trial by ordeal’, online at en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal (accessed 22 November 2013). Many years before this Bhopal activists had recommended, only half-jokingly, that Union Carbide officials who denied that Bhopal groundwater was contaminated by toxins be forced to drink the water themselves. 35 See: ‘Yes Men’ blog, ‘Dow runs scared from water,’ July 13, 2009, theyesmen.org/ blog/dow-runs-scared-from-water (accessed 25 November 2013). The blog recalls an earlier intervention by the Yes Men: ‘Five years ago, the Yes Men impersonated Dow Chemical live on BBC World Television and announced that after 20 years, the company was finally going to clean up its mess in Bhopal. That hoax … temporarily knocked two billion dollars off Dow’s share price …’ Dow Chemicals has however not budged from its position.

7

Settling the land The village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa Rochelle Pinto

The novel Os Maharatas, published in 1894 in Goa and written in Portuguese, is the unfolding of a tale narrated by an old man embittered by the times in which he finds himself.1 Disavowing the contemporary, he declares that the nineteenth century had avenged itself on the previous one with its decline from all cherished principles. Pulling up his sleeve, he avers that the blood that flowed through his arm was royal blood, shared with the Marathas who had, along with the current generation, forgotten their lineage and had departed from their true character. At the end of the initial chapter, the narrator (the auditor of the tale) declares that the old man propitiously and momentously died the day the railway sent its sonorous cry ringing through the villages of Goa, in the November of 1886. Leopoldo Dias, the author of this novel, did not write the last two volumes of what was to be a threevolume series.2 He died in 1902, eight years after Os Maharatas was published in the village of Betalbatim, where it is situated.3 On first reading, this appears to be a familiar narrative transaction with modernity, effected early on in the novel. Along with the old, die old principles of lineage, governance and economy; in exchange we receive the newness of technology. Yet the rest of this novel is scarcely a coherent account stabilized by this narrative of decline. It merely secures the narrative with an interpretive hold on the present, in order to reconcile the past, associated with the beginning of Portuguese colonial rule in Goa in the sixteenth century, to the period in which the novel opens. This period was chequered with varieties of rebellion and conflict involving revenue and land issues in the eastern territories of Goa, many of which involved those whom the title refers to as Marathas (Maharatas), though this wouldn’t always be the most accurate term for those in confrontation with the colonial state. The term Maharatas referred to the empire that the Portuguese combated on the west coast of India, as well as to those who continued resisting interventions in revenue arrangements once territories had been secured from neighbouring empires in the course of the eighteenth century.4 Though we may expect this novel to be a historically referenced narrative of these disputes, a large part of the text is instead devoted to narrating the arrival of Christianity through colonialism, as the outcome of a clash of

Settling the land

101

civilizational forces. Transitions from the past to the present are marked by momentous temporal and spatial discontinuities, drawing on the temporal expanses of legend and myth rather than history and events, and causality and action do not unfold within empirically or historically continuous structures of space and time. The incompleteness of this work (only the first volume is available) in part explains the unresolved plot sequences and possibilities opened up by different sections of the novel. It does not however, entirely explain other levels of incommensurability within this story of a Goan landlord, his tenants, and the cross-class (and implicitly, cross-caste) romance between his daughter and the son of a fisherman. This has not gone unnoticed in the literary historiography of Portuguese novels produced in Goa. Though no full-length analysis of this novel exists, critical studies mention its publication between the appearance in 1866 of Os Brâmanes by Francisco Luís Gomes, and a popular satire, Jacob e Dulce, in 1896.5 Literary histories see a lag in the appearance of an unalloyed romance in ‘Indo-Portuguese’ literature, and suggest that it was in part an effect of a continuing feudal structure with a petit-bourgeois moral code that had not as yet been fully explored as a narrative structure for novels.6 Other studies of such early novels have taken the ambiguity over genre and literary form as a starting point to offer particularized readings of their representational structures, rather than categorize them as misfits in a chronology and typology that universalizes European literary history.7

Linearity and commodification While Os Maharatas is mentioned in passing in these discussions, there is a near universal critical consensus that it least resembles a novel.8 The consensus draws from the appearance of repetitive patterns in chapters that read like biblical texts, fusing orientalist and western mythic structures that alternate uneasily with sections that develop the domestic narrative of the landlord and the village economy. I would suggest that these disjunctions within the novel are symptomatic of contemporary ways of understanding and inhabiting the economy of land in Goa; contradictory modes that hinder a linear history of the commodification of agricultural land and the labour of its owners and tenants. A sign of the dominance of political economy as a worldview in the nineteenth century was the way it reorganized objects, agency, and social processes in novels. In Goa, it was one among many discourses through which the relationship between land and people was defined. English novels also absorbed the social logic of capital through graduated and conflicted ‘models of value’ as John Vernon’s Money and Fiction suggests, in which, for instance, financial instruments that preceded the circulation of money appear in the plot to retard ‘the free flow of capital’.9 Novels, he says, gave social form to the transition from viewing land as a form of wealth to money as its predominant signifier: ‘In Jane Austen’s world the chief characteristic of land is

102

Rochelle Pinto

that it cannot be purchased. Land already exists. It spreads its continuity into the past and (presumably) into the future as well’.10 Novels, like economic theorists in the past, would sometimes posit the resistance to commodification as an intrinsic property of land.11 As an instance of the opposition between land and money as structures for desire and choice in the social world of the novel, Vernon adds, ‘Land, like marriage, means release from desire … Money on the other hand means enslavement to desire’.12 Os Maharatas quite explicitly depicts the commoditization of agricultural land as a degraded contemporary offshoot or a corruption that developed out of the assumed antiquity of the comunidade system, in which land was assumed to be inalienable from the time it was settled by its original dwellers. The seeming incommensurability of these two discourses, both of which emerged from the colonial state’s perception of the relation between land and political power, is however insufficient to account for what seem like entirely different conceptions of the world in the novel. This is not the case in the sections of Austen’s novels examined by Vernon, in which social and economic disordering are existentially contained and made legible and transitive, within a rationalized social economy. In Os Maharatas, the fracture between realist and mythic modes of representation may be read as an attempt to absorb incommensurable discourses relating to land into a singular narrative. Discourses that valorized the comunidade (called the gaunkaria in Konkani) as an antithesis to private property, contested its conversion into private land via state policy. A parallel and linked development was the increase in privately held land concentrated in the hands of the figure that is reviled in many early novels in India, the village landlord. Character (the landlord) and plot (securing private land) however, do not reconcile mythic time to realism in the novel, for that would occur in a structure in which the mythic has been subordinated to an empirically perceptible realm of the social. Instead, narrative strategies that struggle to reconcile the existence and origin of society with that of the physical universe and its spiritual and civilizational beginnings, become legible only if we read the novel in relation to prevalent myths of origin of caste groups, of the village and village deities that were a composite part of how political legitimacy and economic entitlement was conferred and recognized. Social space is rationalized therefore, but only by fracturing novelistic form to retain those elements that empirical description would omit, or domesticate into realism.

Origin stories and history Human action and cataclysmic natural force in Os Maharatas are symbols of contesting civilizational principles that are resolved when nature is calmed and space is ordered as a sign of the victory of Christianity. Once this is achieved, the world in the novel gives way to the vexed intersection of caste status and land rights. It would be the work of narrative to suggest a plausible

Settling the land

103

transition for the latter conflict to burst through to the present as a historical necessity. The brahminical mind, we are told, is made up of both superstition and an ‘epicurean-pantheist philosophy’: ‘Across the centuries the gentile reigned in a peace that was intertwined with the vapours of incense, with the enervating ideas of their epicurean pantheist philosophy, with minds rendered almost languid with the intoxicating smell of jasmine, night-jasmine and mogra.’13 The Christian world’s intrusion into this universe does not coincide with the entry into realism, but is instead a force introducing politico-philosophical principles other than Hinduism and Islam: ‘The barrier which had been erected in between, making the Orient unknown to the Occident, lost its enchantment. The curtain that for so long was considered as an unbreakable column, was torn … (T)he fury of Adamastor was conquered, and torments converted to hopes.’14 An array of classical legendary figures is summoned as counterpart to those of Hindu and Semitic legends. Christian symbols also appear as harbingers of miracles, and conversions occur voluntarily. The political past is represented in a cluster of Semitic and local cultural symbols, myths, and historical occurrences that merge in hazy high-Orientalist epical action where they collide as natural forces do, until the conflicts resolve themselves in favour of contemporary Christianized political and spatial forms, into the present. The historical specificity of conquest is elided but the presence of violent evangelical forces has to cede in the narrative, to the voluntary surrendering of prevailing beliefs in favour of Christianity, for the religion to retain legitimacy in the narrative. There is a significant movement in the novel from vast mythscapes alluding to or naming Christ and Vishnu, to dramatizing conflicts between local deities and Catholic priests and saints, signaling a local and relatively contemporized scale of political negotiation.15 The details in these chapters that may be corroborated with historical accounts, such as a church mentioned in the novel, that still stands in the village of Betalbatim, do not work merely to validate the novel as history. By incorporating foundational legends and myths attached to villages, both Hindu and Catholic, sometimes on the same temporal plane as it does the erection of a church, the novel synthesizes the composite structure of belief that legitimizes the village, albeit subordinate to a Christian worldview. This synthesis is sometimes illegible if read solely within the norms of realism. The legends that would be absorbed as the hoary beginnings to economic history in Goa and inflect the discourse of commodification, are the origin stories of villages which usually narrated the vicissitudes in the path of a founding member and his eventual recognition by the village deity, which led to the construction of a temple, a point of consecration that also legitimized the presence of other caste members as descendants of his clan. The origin story mutually sacralized the rights and relationship of the temple and the members of the village over village land.16 These narratives were subject to change as an index of changing fortunes, and it is uncertain at which point clan or caste deities sometimes overlapped with village deities. The

104

Rochelle Pinto

persistence of certain elements of the narrative such as the simultaneous founding of the village land with the village temple indicates that being included in such narratives was politically vital as it constituted public recognition of sovereignty and status. These stories have been reinserted into the history of the comunidade by anthropologist Manuel Magalhães who emphasizes that the Foral, a document circulated at the time of the initial intervention of the Portuguese into land administration, was possibly the influential source of official mythmaking for the claims of antiquity and uniqueness attaching to the history of the comunidade system in Goa.17 More pertinently, he suggests that it tried to sever the temple from its ritual links with the economy of the comunidade system in the villages of the Old Conquests of Goa. Magalhães not only details how origin myths referenced historical events, though not with the chronology or causality that can be termed historical, but he also indicates how from the Foral of 1526 to economic treatises of the late nineteenth century, popular perception, caste origin myths and economic theory intersected to form texts that were read as valid economic histories. The figuring of the past in the novel therefore, not only alludes to the polarization of communally administered and private land, or to the conjunction of legality and legend, but to Catholic and Hindu rituals of sanction and entitlement through which village identity, the past and entitlement were sacralized and transmitted into modern forms of administration and ownership. As a set of practices, they exceeded historical time and empirical space, but just as law and economic history had both displaced and contained them, the novel would find a way to accommodate them. While earlier periods of the quasi-historical past in the novel are characterized by the violent displacement of temples and their communities, in the origin story that follows, the founder (gram purusha) of the village Cortalim is drawn to Christianity seemingly by his own volition. The chapter recounts ‘a pagan chronicle’ of an inhabitant of ‘Kasy’ from Bengal called Cortalo who set off on his travels, having received a divine sign that he would find his place of rest when his cow bathed the ground with milk.18 This spot grew into a black rock, taken to be a form of the prominent god Manguexi, associated with upper castes in Goa.19 This narrative in which the gram purusha, village deity (gram-devta), and the village itself simultaneously come into being, is followed by an account of a priest, Fr. Pero Mascarenhas, who celebrates the first mass at a makeshift altar and attracts Cortalo, who becomes the first convert of the village.20 One can find mention of Fr. Pero Mascarenhas in local histories of the church of Cortalim, but the combination of the two narratives draws the historical into the realm of legend, endowing the founding moment of the church in each village with the same affective intensity associated with stories of the gram-purusha. The voluntary conversion of the gram-purusha signals the supremacy of the Christian faith, a narrative strategy that simulates prevalent rituals to signify and legitimize the dominance of one ritual tradition by enacting the (in)voluntary absorption of a local

Settling the land

105

tradition into its idiom. The absorption into Christian tradition simultaneously renders the story of the gram-purusha as history. Thus, if money and empiricism had succeeded in delimiting political conflict and individual action within a formal configuration of the real in the novel in England, the political pertinence of the gram-devta (village deity), the gram-purusha (founder), and the plausibility of the Catholic miracle or legend in constituting the political being and economic organization of the village delayed the hegemonization of novelistic space through an exclusive or singular schema of representation.

Pre-lapsarian economies The insistence on the antiquity of the comunidade in contemporary history is the second aspect that commands narrative exegesis to reconcile the system eventually to a commodified present. The comunidade was legitimized through claims that it was based on a moral economy of communal care and had always existed, though contemporary scholarship suggests that the colonial state may have negotiated its permanence with contemporary elites when it circulated the revenue-fixing document, the Foral, in the sixteenth century.21 Economic history could represent pre-capitalist economies as a golden age from which contemporary practices were a decline, or as the past that had to be rejected so that societies could be propelled into an exploitative future or into progress, depending on the nature of the narrative.22 In economic theory, certain forms of agricultural labour and economy in the colonies were represented as ideal, static and autonomous from other entities.23 Literary theories of the pre-modern in the European context also posit a distinct pre-capitalist culture as a precursor to the appearance of the novel, which becomes a sign of the conflicted relation of modern cultural forms to power. J. M. Bernstein in The Philosophy of the Novel recalls, According to Lukács, and in this he has been followed by Habermas, precapitalist or traditional societies did not have ideologies in the modern sense because civilisation always functioned within the parameters dictated by culture, that is, cultural forms themselves grounded the institutional framework of the society as a whole.24 This did not imply a conflict-free relationship. Instead, ‘(a)ll that such harmony denotes is a congruence between cultural expressions and the actual forms of social life.’25 And when this congruence is disturbed, we are likely to see forms such as the novel, which ‘both expresses and is the crisis of the culture of capital.’26 The relationship of the novel to capitalism or modernity does not travel easily to societies imagined as partially pre-capitalist and unchangingly premodern. The comunidade, to explain its working briefly, administered sections of cultivable land, apportioning the proceeds to pay those who performed

106

Rochelle Pinto

varying duties for the village, auctioning the rights to cultivation and dividing the proceeds as payment to the members of the comunidade. In each village, these members belonged to groups of hereditarily fixed lineages of families called vangods, comprising the male members alone. Membership in the comunidade, aside from the economic benefits, was a substantive sign of the prestige of the constituent families within the village as the institution retained a ritual relationship to the village temple and caste identities of members.27 Over the centuries, legislative changes had created layers of dividend and shareholders who did not, however, belong to the vangods as these lineages remained fairly stable.28 Occasional orders prohibiting the sale of the land gave a legal quality to the inalienability of the comunidade land, but various legislations over the years diminished the power of the gaunkars, while the farming out of shares allowed the accumulation of capital through which agricultural land was purchased as private property.29 Despite or because of this gradual commodification of the structure, the idea of antiquity and communal care gained visibility through the nineteenth century, in direct contradiction to policies advocating the theory of political economy.30 Maine and Metcalfe’s popularization of the idea of the village republic consolidated the notion of stasis and self-sufficiency, prompting the recognition of these traits in institutions like the comunidade. The dissolution of the comunidade was represented by those advocating its continuity, as a corrosion of the sanctity of the village to which, it was believed, all land originally belonged. As the rights of gaunkars were diluted through law, the comunidade came to embody the sign of continuing culture and collective economic rationality for its beneficiaries, and began to be represented as an ancient village institution on the brink of becoming a commodity.31

Naturalizing the settler Os Maharatas naturalized the truism about the timelessness of the comunidade by merging it with its corollary, the idea of an original settler community and their rights over land, a notion that was invested in settled agriculture as a sign of the beginning of civilization. A cultural form that echoed this model was the origin story described earlier, which converged with the idea that original settlers (the descendants of the gram-purusha) had acquired a natural claim over it devolving from the labour they had put into making it cultivable.32 Further, caste origin narratives such as the story of Parshurama, an avatar of Vishnu, raising the western coast from the sea and transforming its inhabitants into brahmins, circulated among both Hindu and Catholic groups.33 This was a narrative that had begun to circulate as a brahmin myth of self-origin, as did brahmin migration narratives, linking brahmins of the east and north to those of Goa (the legend of Cortalo, described earlier, is an example of this). Thus the origin story of Cortalo in the novel resonates with both, stories of brahmin migration, of the founding

Settling the land

107

of the village and the notion of an original settler claim on land. Disputes over land always carried allusions to these tropes that spoke simultaneously of caste, of economic history, and of the ritual consecration of the village economy, and this was perhaps a central temporal and spatial discursive structure that was synthesized, through print, with the discourse of economic history in the nineteenth century.34

The sea in geological time Os Maharatas did not merely replicate economic arguments, but to the weave of origin stories added the land and sea as historical and animate entities. The natural landscape in the novel is alive to both spiritual commands and evolutionary impulses, from which social structures, however conflicted, emerge without human agency, as elemental and natural beginnings. The novel resurrects the sea in a land-centric discourse, its agency drawn from myths of genesis and evolutionary history: ‘it is inanimate, but it speaks, it has no teeth, but devours, it has no arms but attaches itself with the grip of hooks, no stomach, but it digests all …’35 The narrator describes the sea quieted by the priest’s oration and the collective prayer of the parish. The sea recurs throughout the narrative, sometimes uncontrollable and destructive, reshaping the land through its floods and inundations. The insertion of the human in his proper place in this terrain is through a series of catechism-like questions that reassert the relative powers of divinity and the human in stabilizing space: ‘who can command the sea – God can. Who can fight it – man can; who in forty days and nights commanded the sea, river, ponds and springs? Who gave St. Francis Xavier the power to calm the sea?’36 Geological analysis works as a temporal bridge between the trans-historical past inscribed with miraculous signs, and a sea that is the bearer of time and space, with the power to define, shape and mark land in visible ways. Geological evidence furnishes the movements of the sea as recorded by the earth, by the shape and contours of the land and fossils: ‘(I)t is said that the sea of India in remote times ran through the ravines of the ghats (Os Gathes). Shells and other fossils that were discovered at those heights, it is said, are the evidence.’37 After each storm, the receding waters left silt that produced rich vegetation: [T]he water of the sea returns to the sea. The ravages held in abeyance by bunds, the water drawn into channels to irrigate fields. If the water were not to be controlled and contained, the plough would lie in a corner rusting, the barns would lie empty. On this occasion, as the storm raged, the people sheltered in a cove facing the sea.38 Land is created through a natural force, but the mode of narration that grounds it has an unmistakably biblical cadence, reconciling the primary presence of a supra- and pre- human power to its physical being. Only then is

108

Rochelle Pinto

it available to be channeled and laboured on by the human subject who recognizes their mutual provenance: it appears as though the sea threatens to reclaim its old territory from time to time, choosing different villages to assault with high waves. The little village of the author was in remote times the recipient of a violent assault by the sea, which occasioned an important change in the organic pact of the community.39 This account naturalizes enriched cultivable soil as a gift of the water to land, and by extension, naturalizes labour, and the ‘organic pact of the community’, the system of social organization that will govern the cultivation of this land: the system that came to be called the comunidade. Both a settler myth and a governable system, the comunidade appeared as a natural social formation, marking the moment of origin when the land surfaced from the sea. The fusion of Christian flood and Goan origin story is settled into historical time by the naming and enactment of post-flood labour in the villages of Gandaulim and Bethalbatim (as it is spelled in the novel). Bethalbatim, the little village of the narrator, was ravaged by the sea. The helpless villagers appealed to the village council (gauponn, the decision making body of the comunidade) of Gandaulim for help. The gauponn realized that substantive help could only be extended if the skilled villagers of Gandaulim relocated themselves permanently, which they would only do if they were assured rights and status in the village comunidade. The visitors from Gandaulim were accepted into the village to rebuild Bethalbatim on the condition that they would enjoy the same economic rights, but would not have the right to vote or administer.40 And so was born a subordinate rank within the comunidade. Labour, hierarchy and subordination come into being through a mutually acceptable structuring of human assistance in a time of crisis. Land is settled into realism through historical necessity and a naturally evolving social hierarchy.

Realism and ethnography When a conventional realistic account of landlord-tenant relations appears in the novel, it is restricted to a social world that is a corruption of the comunidade. We are introduced to the landlord by his name: The owner of the house with a child swinging in a cradle was called Diogo Manoel Vasconcellos Rodrigues. The people did not know this name and would not care if it were this or something longer. The people do not like long names. They usually have nomenclature that is their own, for their use. So they gave him the name Digú … Dreadful are these popular names; they express instincts, qualities. [They are] laconic phrases implying entire biographies. The

Settling the land

109

people are not often tricked … Their diminutives are significant. They can have their moments of kindness. They also have their times of anger. In times of peace their conceptions are like prophecies; when angry, like a savage beast, they surge up like a furious wave.41 This passage marks the first moment in the novel when the realm of the social is presented as already embattled through language and naming. The congruence between subject and predicate, between property and proper name in the first sentence is destabilized by the diminutives usually thrown up by popular usage. Digú is known not just through the impersonal social convention that reflects his status, but also through the more tenacious familiarities of the socially subordinate. Yet a little later in the chapter, the status of the landlord is restored, as despite his display of power, he was emulated and his name resounded through the villages: ‘The poor are like moths, they love the light that burns them.’42 A twenty-four-page chapter on how Digú acquired his land describes the physically unremarkable landlord, and through the troubles of characters belonging to the village, suggests that the hierarchy inherent in the comunidade is produced through the money-lending practices of landlords and is in turn productive of the poverty that furnished victims for him. An empirical account of agricultural life in the penultimate chapter is intertwined with the secret rendezvous between Aurú, the landlord’s adopted daughter, and her lover, and in its enumerative detail recalls ethnographic accounts and compilations of the uses and customs of the colonies that colonial states produced. This protrusion of empirical description could be viewed through Marc Angenot’s description of ‘bourgeois gnoseology’ as a way of managing or stabilizing antagonisms through narrative modes such as the novel’s ‘typical-inductive ways of knowing that do not allow for any critical transcendence.’43 This economy of knowing that was never completely stabilized as Angenot points out, may have more successfully ordered other genres of knowledge production but not the early novel. Social discourse, as Angenot terms it, in representing and transforming the epistemological bases of different ways of claiming the village and its land, had not yet equalized land and ways of owning or belonging to it so that it could circulate as did other commodities, in a homogenized social world in the novel. Perhaps we could read the fusion of narratives about origin in the novel as a sign of the tenaciousness of local elites who deployed these narratives successfully alongside legal and economic discourses, to retain and reinvent their position in the village and regional economy. The descriptive chapter, ‘O Arrozal’ or the paddy field is an account of the time of the harvest, an account of crops, their distribution, tools, the method of sowing, ploughing, and the songs sung while at work.44 The account, aside from its enumeration, romanticizes the unity of familial cooperation in agrarian labour, and the visual distance built into the description of labouring bodies renders the agricultural field as a whole into a visual object. The

110

Rochelle Pinto

depiction of the agricultural cycle is as an idealized activity, recorded before its passage into the imminent past – a past that had not yet materialized but was being idealized in fictional and other representations. The imminent disappearance of agricultural life, a temporal state that is evoked in more than one novel, does not however, have any correspondence to the history of agriculture in Goa and therefore probably speaks of other forebodings that find expression through this symbol. Within the incomplete novel that is Os Maharatas, the momentary suspension in time of the labouring tenant through song, enumeration and visual distance, perhaps tries to elude the imminent collapse of the idea of communitarian labour through which the comunidade was valorized. By bifurcating private property as corruption from the ideal of a mutually beneficial system, the comunidade became a narrative buffer against the time when the story of the landed and the landless could not but be opposed to each other. Os Maharatas complicates the relationship of the novel to capital not only because the value of land was still embedded in forms of power that were not fully incorporated into an economy of exchange, but because capital had differentially historicized some forms of property as a remnant of another time. The novel stands out for its synthesis of foundational narratives about land, privileging the perspective of the Catholic gaunkar by adding further narratives to the timeless historicism in which the comunidade was embedded, years after gaunkars had begun to be economically displaced from their position, and a year before the most tumultuous rebellion against the state by dispossessed revenue chiefs cut through the divide between the Old and New conquests of Goa.

Notes 1 Translations from the novel Os Maharatas and from the thesis, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras Culto, Poder e Estatuto na Índia Ocidental’ by Manuel João Magalhães are mine. Leopoldo Dias, Os Maharatas: Paisagens Indianas (Typographia Luso-Oriental, 1894). I thank Sandra Ataíde Lobo for initial access to this novel and Nuno Grancho and Paul Melo e Castro for help with queries. 2 The publisher’s advertisement on the last page of the book advertises volumes two and three. 3 Aleixo Manuel da Costa, Dicionário de Literatura Goesa: A-F (Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1997). Dias was a lawyer by profession, practised in the district of Quepem, contributed to periodical publications and is said to have taught French at the Lyceum in Goa. Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra, A Literatura indoportuguesa (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1971), 200; Costa, Dicionário de Literatura Goesa, 342. 4 For a similar usage of the term, referring to a significant revolt that occurred a year after the novel was published, see Visconde de Villa Nova d’Ourem, A Revolta dos Marathas em 1895 (Lisboa: Mattos Moreira e Pinheiro, 1900). 5 Everton V. Machado, ‘Vida, Paixão e Morte da Literatura Indo-Portuguesa’, Encontros Lusófonos, 2010, 17–27. Everton V. Machado, ‘Christianisme, castes et Colonialisme dans le roman Les Brahmanes (1866) du Goannais Francisco Luis

Settling the land

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26

111

Gomes (1829–1869)’ (Université Paris IV – Sorbonne/ L’Université de São Paulo, 2008), http://www.theses.paris-sorbonne.fr/These-EVM.pdf. Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra, A Literatura indo-portuguesa, 193–215. Melo e Castro explores the context for the appearance of the short story at particular junctures in a society’s transformation. Everton Machado traces the range of novel types (roman à these, etc.) that would best accommodate a novel like Os Brâmanes that seems to draw on more than one literary form. Paul Melo e Castro, ‘Small bursts of sharp laughter: The form and content of satire in Jacob e Dulce’, Portuguese Studies, 2012, 28 (1): 32–49; Machado, ‘Christianisme, castes et colonialisme’, 203. Critics have alternatively suggested that it resembles a draft novel, or that the novelistic structure is a thin device to shoulder its load of moral and historical deliberation. Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra, A Literatura indo-portuguesa, 80. John Vernon, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142. Vernon, Money and Fiction, 55. Brett Christophers, ‘For real: Land as capital and commodity’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2016, 41(2): 134–48. Vernon, Money and Fiction, pp. 55–56. Dias, Os Maharatas, 23. The phrase, ‘The fury of Adamastor’ draws from Camões’ 16th century epic, Os Lusíadas, in which the Portuguese overcome the challenge of natural forces such as stormy seas, and reach the lands they were to conquer. Dias, Os Maharatas, 23–24. The accommodation of Christian practices to indigenous ones through a calendar of church feasts and in particular the range of popular saints and their associations has been interpreted in texts such as Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (California: University of California Press, 2012). Rosa Maria Perez, The Tulsi and the Cross (New Delhi : Delhi: Orient Blackswan Private Limited, 2012), 84–100. Magalhães, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras.’ Magalhães details a range of stories to indicate the absence of any single trajectory for the origin of villages, and to suggest how different castes were interpellated in relation to each other. Dias, ‘Christianismo em Salsete’, Os Maharatas, 179–180. Dias, ‘Christianismo em Salsete’, Os Maharatas, 179–189. Details within the chapter, such as the name of the deity Manguexi, or the comment that the villagers of Cortalim were often employed as scribes (escrivães), suggests that this village narrative is concerned with brahmins as a social group. Magalhães, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras’; ‘Foral dos Usos e Costumes dos Gancares e Lavradores da Ilha de Goa e outras Anexas de Afonso Mexia’, in Arquivo Português Oriental, ed. by Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara (Nova Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1857), V, DOC. 58, 120. Prathama Banerjee, Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ And History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). For the Tamil region, see Ravi Ahuja, ‘Labour relations in an early colonial context: Madras, C. 1750–1800’, Modern Asian Studies, 2002, 36 (4): 793–826; Eugene F. Irschick, ‘Order and disorder in colonial south India’, Modern Asian Studies, 1989, 23 (3): 459–92. J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 83. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel, 83. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel, 84.

112

Rochelle Pinto

27 Magalhães, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras Culto, Poder e Estatuto na Índia Ocidental.’ The significance of the comunidade did not diminish until after the Liberation of Goa in 1961. 28 Rui Gomes Pereira, Gaunkari: The Old Village Associations, trans. by Angelo das Neves Souza (Panjim, Goa: A. Gomes Pereira, Printwell Press, 1981), 14–15. 29 Magalhães, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras’, 89–98. 30 Francisco Luis Gomes, A Liberdade da Terra e a Economia Rural da India Portugueza (Lisboa: Typografia Universal, 1862). 31 Filipe Nery Xavier, Bosquejo Histórico das Communidades (Bastora: Tipografia Rangel, 1903); Filipe Nery Xavier, Defensa dos direitos das Gão-carias, Gão-cares, e dos seus privilégios, contra a proposta de sua dissolução, e divisão das suas terras (Nova Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1856). Gomes Pereira, Gaunkari, 45. 32 Origin stories could differ quite radically from each other, but the ones that gained visibility in economic treatises are those that narrated the circumstances by which a particular group had settled the land. 33 Madhav M. Deshpande, ‘Pañca Gauda and Pañca Dravida: Contested borders of a traditional classification’, Studia Orientalia, 2010, 29–58; Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, ‘What makes people who they are? Pandit networks and the problem of livelihoods in early modern Western India’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2008, 4 (3): 381–416. 34 For an analysis of the various possible interpretations of relations between political authority, the economy of land and ritual since the framing of the Foral of 1526, see Magalhães, ‘Pequenos Reis e Grandes Honras’, 71–74. 35 Dias, Os Maharatas, 142. 36 Dias, ‘Os Karot-Kanducares’, Os Maharatas, 159. 37 Dias, Os Maharatas, 144. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 The following passage from Rui Gomes Pereira’s history of the Gaunkari seems to detail this episode as a historical event though it is unclear if the narrative, as was the case with the origin of the comunidade in general, had gained acceptance through circulation in prior histories: ‘The gaunkars of the third vangod of the community of Gandaulim of Salsete came to be simultaneously zonkars of the community of Betalbatim, also for the valuable help they rendered to this community in the repairs to their bunds. They were called kharvot khandikars and were experts in the art of preservation of the bunds. Apart from having acquired right to zons, they succeeded in securing the right to tender the first vote in the resolution of that association.’ Gomes Pereira, Gaunkari, 34. 41 Dias, ‘Digu’, Os Maharatas, 80. 42 Dias, Os Maharatas, 81. 43 Marc Angenot, ‘Social discourse analysis: Outlines of a research project’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2004, 17 (2): 199–215. 44 Dias, ‘O Arrozal’, Os Maharatas, 238–275.

Section III

Labour and migration

This page intentionally left blank

8

(Re)moving bodies People, ships and other commodities in the coolie trade from Calcutta Nilanjana Deb

In Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), a dying woman hands a cloth bundle to Deeti on board the Ibis, a former slave ship bearing coolies from Calcutta to the plantations of Mauritius. Sarju’s bundle appears similar to the ones that other coolies carry, ‘not much more than a few old clothes, maybe some masalas, and perhaps a couple of copper utensils’, but it contains certain unusual things as well.1 Three small pouches contain the seeds of ganja, datura and the ‘best Benares poppy’, the source of the opium that brought wealth to some, and agony to many across the British Empire and China. Sarju’s bundle is a potent symbol of the ‘world of things’ that coolies carried with them, intelligent provisioning for the future that belies the image of the indentured labourer as a helpless victim. The seeds gifted by Sarju are linked not only to the opium trade with China, but also to the forced shift in Indian agriculture from food crops to cash crops, to the history of botany and indigenous medicine, and to the traffic in commodities such as rice and salt that spanned the globe from Trinidad to Fiji. Amitav Ghosh’s recounting of the objects coolies carried with them allows us to understand the binary of the coolie as an agent of his or her history, and the coolie as a ‘commodity’ for which orders were placed by plantation owners to recruiters in Calcutta. This binary has characterized representations of the coolie in both history and literature. Even as I examine colonial texts and records that reveal traces of the coolies’ agency and resistance, I seek to understand the economy that viewed the coolie as a ‘commodity’, dependent on other ‘enabling’ commodities, including the ship itself that bore the coolies overseas. The abolition of slavery in 1833 triggered a severe shortage of labour in the sugar-producing colonies of the British and French Empires. Planters in the Caribbean and Mauritius seeking an alternative and cost-effective workforce after Emancipation, sought to replicate the success of South American planters indenturing Chinese coolies from Macao. Plantations in Mauritius, Demerara, Trinidad and other areas began to place large orders for Indian coolies. Given Calcutta’s access to northern and eastern India’s densely populated hinterlands, it was but natural that the river port would develop into a major labour recruitment centre for overseas British- and Frenchowned plantations by the mid-nineteenth century.

116

Nilanjana Deb

Many of the men and women who were recruited had never seen the sea, let alone travelled on it; even the journey to and stay in Calcutta from the rural depots resulted in trauma, illnesses and mortalities. Thousands would have to be shipped safely to the overseas plantations each year; deaths during the voyage translated into heavy losses for the investors. A wide range of facilities would be required in order to support the transportation of coolies on such a large scale. In Calcutta, which had seen the rapid development of ship building, docking and repair facilities from the late eighteenth century onwards, the necessary infrastructure for coolie transportation was in place by the 1830s.2 After the first batch of coolies was dispatched to Mauritius in 1834, the export of coolies through Calcutta began in earnest, eventually becoming one of the largest displacements of labourers in history after the slave trade. The ship itself was the ‘mega-commodity’ essential for this trade, which in turn transported not only labourers but a wide range of goods needed to sustain the coolies on the outward journeys and on the overseas plantations. These ships were the spaces that the coolies inhabited for the long voyages to ‘Chinitat’, ‘Damraila’ and other islands across the oceans, and their designs, shipboard equipment and regimes evolved to accommodate the coolies, and keep them ‘khush’.3 The coolie trade, actively supervised by officials of the Raj, became one of the most vivid examples of how individual and collective lives were subject to technological and political intervention in the colonial period. Most early coolie ships were ‘sailers’ made of wood, a legacy of the era of the slave ships. The early coolie export trade to Trinidad and Demerara from Calcutta, for example, was dominated by the famous Blackwall teakwood frigates.4 Iron ships had begun to be built by the 1850s; for example, the coolie ship Thomas Hamlin was built in 1851 at Newcastle by Coutts and Parkinson. Early iron ships were built of extremely heavy plates and it took great skill to handle these vessels, especially when they were carrying full cargoes of railway iron to India. Most ships in the nineteenth century, ‘sailers’ and steamships alike, were composites of wood and iron. Steel ships were built in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and they eventually replaced the iconic sailing ships that had dominated the coolie trade for so long. The earliest shipments of labourers were on ships by which planters in the island colonies used to order rice and other commodities from India. These vessels could accommodate 150 to 200 coolies, but larger vessels began to be employed once the demand for coolies increased. When the supply of coolies to Mauritius, the West Indies and Guyana became a flourishing business in the 1850s that required more efficient ships, British shipyards responded to the demand. Sunderland, Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle shipyards built many of the ships that were commissioned in the coolie trade.5 The size of the ships increased as the years passed, since ship owners found larger ships generally more economical for the carrying trade. In the 1850s, sailing

The coolie trade from Calcutta

117

ships generally carried 300 to 400 migrant workers. By the early 1870s, however, vessels of over 1000 tons and transporting between 400 and 500 people were becoming the norm. Sailing ships dominated the coolie transportation business because they were larger and usually better-manned compared to steamships. Vessels going round the Cape of Good Hope for Trinidad from India showed less mortality if they were sailing ships, than if they were steamships or clippers, because the longer voyage gave more time for the coolies to acclimatize. Since reducing mortality among the coolies was more important than speed, steamships did not gain a foothold for a long time.6 Merchant firms found it useful and profitable to start their own coolie carrying fleets. The Mauritius coolie trade was one of the earliest to be established, and John Allan’s fleet, which had ships mainly built by Briggs of Sunderland, provided the transport required for the purpose. Not all the John Allan ships were made in Britain; some ships were also built in the 1850s at Bombay, Cochin and Moulmein, where teakwood was plentifully available. It was natural for John Allan’s firm to make the transition to transporting coolies, as they already had ships from the slave trade era. These were large ships ranging from 600 to 1000 tons; many had cramped space between decks.7 Sandbach, Tinne and Co. made a similar shift from dealing in Gold Coast slaves to the coolie carrying business. Like John Allan’s ships, the early Sandbach ships were not good for coolies, since the space between decks was too low. Later, the firm began investing in ships with spacious ‘coolie decks’, such as the Pandora, built in 1864.8 The reason for making ships with ampler decks was linked to the changing regulations of the coolie trade itself. The coolie carrying capacity of a ship was measured in covered deck space, one person for every 72 superficial feet; hence it became more profitable to build more spacious ships.9 The 1860s saw the gradual rise of another coolie transporting fleet in the Calcutta-West Indies-Guyana sector. This was the fleet of Captain James Nourse, who assembled one of the last great fleets of sailing ships before steam ships took over. Nourse invested in a series of clippers created by Sunderland builders, and also bought ships from Elder of Glasgow and the Woolston yard in Southampton. He acquired older ships, for example, jute clippers that had served in the Indian trade.10 In the 1890s, Nourse was one of the first to invest in new 1800-ton steel ships built by Charles Connell.11 The coolie trade from Calcutta to the West Indies was the basis of the Nourse Line’s success, so that abolition of the coolie trade in 1914 was a major factor in the company selling out in 1917 to P&O.12 The commodities that the coolie ships carried helped to recover costs and register profit. For example, salt and iron rails were among the main goods that the Allan and Nourse fleets loaded for the outbound journey to Calcutta from the East India Dock on the Thames. The ships unloaded at Calcutta and Madras. After two or three trips to Mauritius with coolies and rice, John Allan’s ships returned from Calcutta or Madras loaded with jute, indigo and

118

Nilanjana Deb

other raw goods for unloading at the West India Dock. Alternately, the ships loaded sugar at the colonial ports after depositing the coolies and headed directly for London or other European ports. Nourse line ships would take on board a cargo of rice and a consignment of coolies from Calcutta for the West Indies. From the Caribbean, the ships would sail for the east coast of North America, in order to load grain or case oil for Europe. Sometimes, a ship would sail back to Calcutta from the West Indies, with returnees who had completed their indenture contracts. Ships that operated between Calcutta and Fiji often triangulated their Indian Ocean passages in order to transport commodities and passengers to and from Australia. Thus, ships going to Fiji usually returned to Calcutta with cargoes of coal from Australia.13 The shipping lines also increased profits by transporting Indian foodstuffs and other commodities required for coolies already settled into plantation life in the island colonies.14 In Fiji, Indian coolies were guaranteed a daily allowance of rice, dal, coconut oil or ghee, curry stuff, sugar and salt. The availability of Indian foods was one of the inducements used by recruiters to convince potential emigrants from eastern India to cross the ‘dark waters’ of the ocean. With coolie populations going up to tens of thousands in the island colonies, the import of rice from India by the plantations became as important as the coolie trade itself. These cargoes created a unique set of problems. Rice cargoes could make ships unbearably hot, as rice has a tendency to retain heat and, as James M. Laing noted, ‘gives off a nasty steam which should not be allowed to escape into the ’tween decks’.15 But there was little that could be done in this regard; rice was essential for plantations running on Indian labour.16 Ships carrying salt cargoes had a tendency to be damp, causing illnesses such as pneumonia when coolies travelled on them. The Botanist recorded the highest mortality rate for a ship transporting coolies from Calcutta in 1877–78; the ship’s surgeon said that this was due to the dampness of the vessel, as it had been used on the previous run for transporting salt from England to Calcutta. Techniques for drying the areas between decks were eventually developed for ships that carried salt cargoes, using hot sand and stoves to dry the decks. More problematic than rice and salt cargoes were combustible cargoes. Coal cargoes were prone to spontaneous combustion. The most combustible cargo was jute, and one of the best known coolie carriers, Avoca, had to be abandoned at sea in 1895 on a return run from Calcutta to Boulogne due to the jute on board spontaneously catching fire.17 Ship owners upgraded safety measures on the coolie ships after a fire on board John Allan’s ship Shah Allum in 1859 caused the death of 399 Indians. After this, every ship was expected to carry five to seven serviceable boats, including life-boats. All ghee and oil stores for the coolies’ consumption were carried on the upper deck, and the carriage of inflammable cargo was strictly forbidden on coolie voyages.18

The coolie trade from Calcutta

119

The most important ‘cargo’ being transported by the ships was the coolie, the labourer who had contracted himself or herself to years of hard labour across the ‘dark waters’. Initially, planters themselves employed various agency houses of Calcutta to procure coolies. Such was the massive expansion of the coolie trade that in 1843, the East India Company’s Court of Directors instituted the post of a Protector of Emigrants at Calcutta, and began to exercise stricter control over the process of recruitment and transportation. Garden Reach on the Calcutta waterfront was the site of coolie depots for the colonies, where potential coolies could be kept till ships arrived to take them overseas. People arriving from regional depots were made to bathe on arrival at the Calcutta depot, and issued with new articles of clothing that subjected them to a process of deculturization: All were issued with standard clothing, not unlike that worn by Indian convicts … a cap, and a ‘Guernsey frock’ (a kind of jersey). For the West Indies and Fiji, warm clothing was issued … a pair of wool trousers, a wool jacket, a red woollen cap and shoes … The women, too, were issued with unfamiliar articles of wear: two flannel jackets, a woollen petticoat, worsted stockings, and shoes, as well as a sari.19 Coolies would stay in the depots for periods ranging from a few weeks to a year, for reasons as diverse as non-availability of ships, labour surplus, disease and lack of fitness in the coolies. It was considered essential that coolies be put on the ships as soon as possible, as longer detentions in depots invariably translated into greater mortality, especially when the cholera season struck Calcutta. Cholera often caused deaths at the Garden Reach depots largely because of the use of Hooghly river water for cooking and washing. The contaminated Hooghly water was loaded onto ships at Calcutta for the long sea voyage; consequently, early voyages recorded high mortality rates due to cholera.20 Attempts to regulate the quality of the river water being loaded onto coolie ships began after 1860. Many ships by this time were fitted with Normandy’s distilling apparatus; this allowed a reduction by one-half in the quantity of water on passenger ships sailing from England, and one-third in the case of vessels sailing from India. In addition, tank-boats were specially built for use by the emigration service to collect fresh water from twenty to thirty miles above Calcutta, bypassing the ‘cholera patch’ alongside the city.21 By 1885, water was being supplied to coolie ships from Calcutta’s hydrants, and chemical tests before embarkation were applied to detect impurity in the water.22 Moreover, it was decreed that during the ‘cholera season’ from 1st November to 15th June each year, no water from the Hooghly would be taken on board the coolie ships.23 Mortality on ships seemed to be linked to the unhealthy atmosphere between decks; hence ventilation on board became a major concern. The gradual evolution of shipboard technologies was largely linked to the need to

120

Nilanjana Deb

keep the coolie alive and well for ‘delivery’ to the colony that had placed an order for him or her. Most ships provided only 5.5 feet in height between decks, which resulted in congested and dank living conditions.24 Ship surgeons felt the urgent need for some means of efficiently displacing the foul air with a constant and uniform supply of fresh air particularly when coolies were confined between decks area due to bad weather conditions and could not be brought above decks. They developed new products for providing artificial ventilation on ships. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the government caused great confusion by making artificial ventilators compulsory for ships, and then revoking the order. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, many naval ships had begun to use Perkins’s automatic ventilator. Only in the last two decades of the nineteenth century were mechanical ventilators contemplated for long distance coolie ships. Thier’s automatic ventilator was the first device to be used on coolie ships, using the same ingenious principle as Perkins’s ventilator, of harnessing the natural rolling of the ship on rough seas to create a vacuum and suction system that would draw out foul air from the hold and between decks.25 The catch was that the machine would not work in calm seas. The voyage of the Sheila to Surinam from Calcutta in 1882–3 was a case in point. The weather was unusually calm; Thier’s ventilator was of no use, and there was high mortality on board due to cholera.26 Some ships experimented with Boag’s ventilator, which did not depend on the vagaries of waves for its working. The favourable reports of ship surgeons convinced the government of the efficacy of Boag’s ventilator on long voyages, indicating the power that the surgeons had in the matter of shipboard acquisitions.27 To minimize mortalities, surgeons at the mofussil and Calcutta depots tried to screen emigrants for diseases, but there was no way of ensuring that there would not be an outbreak of illness once the voyage had begun. The medical stores and dietary material carried on board ships for coolies constituted an important part of the commodities being transported across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the ‘coolie era’. The 1855 booklet, Instructions to Surgeons of Vessels conveying coolies from the West Indies to India, indicated that surgeons had to supervise the arrangements for vaccination, rationing scales, sickbay, the selection of support staff such as cooks and sweepers, as well as overseeing the daily shipboard regimes for the coolies, including bathing and exercise. The ship’s supplies of food and medicines were in the charge of the surgeon, and their management required skill and experience.28 Since the primary task on board a coolie ship was keeping the ‘human cargo’ alive and healthy, the surgeon on board had as much power as the captain. If he ran out of stores on the longer voyages, he could insist on stopping at the nearest port for refilling his medical supplies and comforts. Pumpkins, yams and potatoes kept well, and were carried for the coolies’ meals from Calcutta; fresh vegetables would be stocked when the ship stopped at a port en route to its destination. For example, the diary of Dr. Wiley, the surgeon on board the Delharree transporting coolies from Calcutta to Port of Spain mentions that

The coolie trade from Calcutta

121

half-way through their voyage, their ‘ship arrived in Table Bay, and took on fresh mutton and medicine, as all that had been embarked at Calcutta was finished.’29 The kind of food given to coolies was the primary line of defence against mortality during voyages. Illnesses often occurred because of the sudden change in the emigrants’ diet, or because inexperienced ship surgeons gave out too much or too little food to the coolies, most of whom were unused to sea voyages. Providing better infant food became essential, as child mortality was quite high on the early voyages of the coolie ships. Small children were often not screened for illness, because it was necessary for recruiters to fulfil the ratio of forty women to hundred men stipulated for every voyage, and many women would refuse to go without their children.30 In 1837 William Newton patented a vacuum drying process which made possible the provision of milk for infants and children during long sea voyages. By the 1850s most emigrant ships stored on board Anglo-Swiss condensed milk along with Grimwade’s milk powder, patented in 1855. For children between the ages of two and six, an additional stock of suji, oatmeal, sago and arrowroot were taken on board as medical comforts, to be dispensed at the rate of ‘six chhataks daily’.31 Another means of reducing the probability of epidemics on board was by emphasizing hygiene and cleanliness on board. Indian topazes of the so-called ‘lower castes’ were well paid because the work of cleaning the coolies’ quarters was hard; they scrubbed the main and coolie decks with holystones and sand, sprinkling chloride of lime to prevent epidemics.32 The labour of the topazes was important for implementing a number of reforms in the shipboard regime, such as the provision of a clean sick bay, and increased attention to disinfection, ventilation and the purification of bilge.33 The inventories of coolie ship stores indicate the growing obsession with disinfection in the wake of epidemics. Sir William Burnett’s disinfecting fluid was made mandatory for bilge purification on all coolie ships departing from Calcutta, but competing products soon began to be used as well.34 The use of certain hygiene products on long-distance ships actually became part of those products’ advertising campaigns. Condy’s fluid, used for the treatment of scarlet fever, was listed in most ships’ stores. Advertisements that appeared in the Kingston newspaper The Gleaner during the 1860s and 1870s proclaimed that Condy’s fluid was strong enough to be used ‘To purify Bilge Water in a Ship’s Well To parity with the Interior or Hold of a Ship’.35 Phenol, too, began to be used as a deodorizing disinfectant on ships in the 1850s. These products proved invaluable to surgeons in dealing with epidemics, helping to minimize shipboard mortality by the turn of the century. The kinds of severe limitations under which the ship’s surgeon worked and the problems he faced are revealed not only in lists of ‘medical comforts’ stocked on coolie ships, but also in records of the reactions of the coolies to treatment. Captain Swinton, despairing at the high mortality rates on the Salsette, writes in his log that coolies would ‘pine and die’ because the ship’s surgeon had no ‘country medicine (i.e., herbs)’.36 Not only do the changing

122

Nilanjana Deb

contents of ‘medical comforts’ on board emigrant ships mark the fascinating transition that was being made in shipboard medicine from generic substances to branded ones in the nineteenth century, they also indicate the way in which indigenous and alternative medicines from the colonies would eventually find their way into surgeons’ medicine chests because of the coolies’ demands. Inevitably, medicines for stomach disorders and fevers were the most numerous in the medical supplies on board. While surgeons usually had to make do with the remedies touted in Victorian home remedy manuals, such as Gentian extract, vinegar of squill, acacia gum, tincture of kino, lead acetate, castor oil and linseed oil, the influence of ayurvedic and unani medicine and South American herbal knowledge on emerging western shipboard medicine was evident: tincture of cardamom, chiretta, asafoetida, extract of logwood, copaiba, bel, colocynth were sourced from the colonies. Among the most important drugs drawing on raw material from the colonies was tincture of opium, or laudanum. Tincture of opium was a popular cure-all drug favoured by most ship surgeons; apart from providing relief from aches and pains, it was mixed with chalk powder and administered to coolies during cholera epidemics.37 Dr. Mouat strongly urged after his inquiry into the mortality on coolie ships in 1856–7, that the quantity of opium carried on board be doubled.38 A specific use of laudanum was treating the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction. Its liberal use on board coolie ships draws our attention to the peculiar emergencies that could spring up on board due to the ‘opium Raj’ in northern and eastern India: an uncertain number of Indian emigrants are confirmed opium eaters … Before leaving Calcutta, the surgeon in charge should carefully ascertain the quantities of those narcotics likely to be required for the journey, and should provide himself with them by formal application to the Emigration agent.39 In other words, surgeons were instructed to carry narcotics on board rather than risk unruly behaviour due to the withdrawal symptoms of opium-addicted coolies. Apart from narcotics, brandy and port wine were liberally distributed to coolies before and during voyages to ensure that they could literally ‘stomach’ the long and harsh overseas journey. Thus, Dr. Wiley on board the Delharree recorded alleviating the coolies’ sea-sickness with alcohol.40 Similarly, when the Clarendon left Calcutta in March 1861 during a cholera outbreak and amidst ceaseless rain, all the coolies on board were given a glass of brandy before they went below decks on the orders of the Protector of Emigrants.41 Most substances listed as ‘medical comforts’ were, in nineteenth-century medical parlance, ethical drugs, i.e., generic drugs that were commonly known and could be prepared by the medical community. As James Laing mentions in his Handbook, ‘these medicines are supplied direct from Apothecaries’ Hall and their quality is thus assured.’42 The only patent or

The coolie trade from Calcutta

123

‘branded’ medicine listed in most ships’ official stores was, interestingly, the popular English drug Chlorodyne. Chlorodyne was invented in the 1850s by Dr. John Collis Browne, a doctor in the British Indian Army. Its original purpose was in the treatment of cholera, but it was advertised widely as a treatment for diarrhoea, insomnia, neuralgia, migraines, in fact, almost anything. Comprising an addictive mixture of laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform, it readily lived up to its claims.43 Ironically, while ship surgeons struggled to deal with opium and cannabis abuse by coolies, the same substances were part of the drug most commonly administered to patients of all ages for a wide range of ailments during the sea voyages. The Protector was the supervisor of all the changes that were wrought in shipboard regimes for the well-being of the coolies through the second half of the nineteenth century. He ensured that there would be adequate space for the coolies, and that equipment such as chronometers, barometers and ventilators, fire-fighting equipment and other safety measures were in order on board. He verified that the prescribed dietary, water and medical comforts were present on board in sufficient quantity for the voyage, and that the European or Indian doctor was qualified to deal with the peculiar emergencies on board coolie ships. Most importantly, he kept records of the various returns and lists of the voyage. It is from these records, and the writings of ship surgeons and captains that we often get glimpses of the coolies whose lives were regulated by this vast machinery from the moment they agreed to cross the ‘kala pani’. According to Ameena Gafoor, scholars of Indian origin are bringing out new editions of such writing in an attempt to retrieve the rarely heard voice of the coolie: While we do not expect Captains and Surgeons of the coolie-carrying ships to see through the eyes of their wretched cargo, these eye witness accounts form the main part of colonial discourse. A tradition is emerging of reclaiming these first hand narratives.44 The act of reading colonial narratives and archival records ‘against the grain’ is complemented by the fictional reconstruction of coolie voyages and histories by writers ranging from Amitav Ghosh to Harold Sonny Ladoo and Ramabai Espinet, rendering visible the uncommemorated pasts of the coolies of the former plantation colonies of the British and French empires. Thus, Amitav Ghosh dwells on the kind of things the coolies themselves carried across the ocean. Indo-Trinidadian novelist Ramabai Espinet mentions in The Swinging Bridge that the coolies carried vessels and implements for cooking, belnas (rolling pins), tawas (frying pans), lotas (water pots), calchuls (ladles), even clay chulhas (ovens), bedding, such as hammocks, women carried their nakphuls (noserings), chandahar (necklaces) and churian (bangles), their very bodies becoming repositories of family heirlooms. These objects, along with their songs and memories,

124

Nilanjana Deb

became their heritage as the ‘dark waters’ robbed them of their old caste identities, their jaat.45 Musical instruments, as well as cultural knowledge travelled with the coolies, along with the more mundane objects of everyday life. The entry for the 21st and 22nd of June 1858 in the diary of Captain Swinton, for example, mentioned that the coolies on board the Salsette were ‘very musical’ and performed ‘some native games and war dances.’46 Hugh Tinker throws light both on the objects the coolies carried and the problems these could cause: One rule stated: ‘Coolies must be encouraged to amuse themselves by harmless diversions and should be allowed to play on their drums, etc., till 8 bells.’ From time to time there were entertainments – dancing, singing, wrestling, and single-stick play … A glimpse of the early days is given in a narrative prepared by Dr. J.E. Dyer after a voyage on the Sydenham in 1860 … He deplored that ‘continued quarrels and disturbances occur among the coolies from some having lost their lotahs or plates, accusing others of having stolen them, two or three men claiming the same article’ (he recommended numbering the utensils) …47 The Calcutta coolies were not compliant masses of men and women. They protested when their religious sensibilities were not taken into consideration by the crew, especially the surgeon responsible for disbursing ‘nutritious’ foodstuffs from the ship’s stores. Dale Bisnauth records: on November 22, 1891, some twenty-two Muslims on the Grecian refused to eat mutton from a sheep that had been slaughtered by a Hindu and was therefore not halal, and in September of the following year … emigrants attempted to get their fellows to refuse their food on the ground that they had been served pork and beef.48 Coolies did protest when the ship’s crew harassed or exploited them. In one of many such recorded instances of resistance, coolies on board the Ailsa were found to be on the verge of mutiny when the ship reached St. Helena in 1876. They threatened to kill the ship’s European surgeon because he had allegedly sexually assaulted three of their women.49 The sense of agency was even more visible in returnee emigrants, men and women who survived the ordeal of the kalapani, fulfilled the terms of their indenture, returned to Calcutta and chose to travel again to another overseas plantation. David Northrup states in Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism 1834–1922, ‘it seems fair to conclude that most Indians returning from a period of indenture had managed to better their financial status by labouring abroad’.50 Photographs of the women coolies who had completed their indentureship, often show them laden with silver jewellery. Captain W.H. Angel’s description of one such Indian on board the coolie ship Sheila headed for Trinidad gives us a richly detailed picture of the objects that coolies

The coolie trade from Calcutta

125

carried, often on their persons, and the kind of power they could exercise. It is perhaps apt to end with this image of the returnee passenger, a contrast to the impoverished Sarju of Sea of Poppies, whose bundle contained only a few clothes, wooden spoons and seeds. Captain Angel writes of the ship’s maiden voyage from Calcutta to Trinidad and Demerara in 1877, with six hundred people on board: Amongst our coolie passengers (she paid her own passage money down), was a fine looking woman about forty years of age. She had returned to India from Trinidad, having completed her term entitling her to a free passage. She got the name among us of the ‘Queen of Sheba.’ She had made quite a considerable fortune in the island, partly by judicious marriages, and partly in her widowhoods, and as a trader, for as such she had a natural inclination; but in time a longing came over her to return to the land of her birth, but a short experience was enough for her … The lady was a sight to look at when she was fully dressed, according to her ideas. For one thing she was loaded with jewellery all over her person – immensely heavy silver bracelets from the elbows to the shoulder, also from the wrists to the elbows on both arms; similar from ankles to knees; a kind of diadem on the forehead; a lot of rings of all sorts on her toes and her fingers; a pendant nose ring; and the ear-lobes were pierced with holes big enough to admit bottle corks, which were the customary adornment at ordinary times, but in cases of ceremony, the holes were decorated in the same manner as the rest of her person.51 The ‘Queen of Sheba’ commanded admiration from Europeans and Indians alike during the voyage. She was a re-emigrating coolie, carrying her considerable overseas savings on her person, her elaborate silver jewellery made by melting the shillings she had received on paydays. Having rejected India because of the fuss made over her ‘loss of caste’ when she returned, the woman had found a new identity in the comradeship of fellow coolies, her jahaji bhais and behens. Captain Angel noted that when the ship stopped midway at the remote island of St. Helena, the woman bought up all the local fishermen’s catch for the day, as a special treat for her fellow coolies on board.52 Coolies were clearly conducting their own transactions during the voyage, buying, selling, sharing and carrying a ‘world of small things’. These transactions were framed by other larger transactions on a regional, even global scale – the buying and selling of ships, the replenishing of ships’ stores, the marketing of patent medicines, and the profiteering of recruiters. The ‘minor’ objects they carried, ranging from the ganja, datura and poppy seeds carried by Sarju, to the jewellery of the ‘Queen of Sheba’, filled the interstices of the vast ‘global assemblage’ that had taken shape around them, from sailing ships to sugar mills, from mofussil depots in Bihar to the market of St. Helena, from the shipyards of Moulmein and the Malabar to the docks of Calcutta and London.53

126

Nilanjana Deb

Notes 1 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009), 450. 2 Calcutta developed as a ship building hub after British private investors put capital into the development of infrastructure. By 1840 there were twenty-nine major shipbuilding units in the area. The facilities for refitting and repairing ships gave a fillip to the maritime carrying trade from Bengal. 3 ‘Chinitat’ and ‘Damraila’ were the Bhojpuri terms for ‘Trinidad’ and ‘Demerara’. ‘Khush’ or ‘happy’ was part of a limited stock of Indian words that most British officials in the coolie carrying business kept handy as a kind of shorthand for communicating with the coolies. 4 See Basil Lubbock, The Blackwall Frigates (Glasgow: James Brown and Son, 1922). See also Dale Bisnauth, ‘Crossing the Kala Pani’, in The Settlement of Indians in Guyana (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2000), 52; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (London: Hansib Publishing Ltd., 1993), 146–147; L.G.W. White, Ships, Coolies and Rice (London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co., 1936). The works of Basil Lubbock and L.G.W. White on coolie ships form the main source of information about the coolie ships in this essay. While it is necessary to problematize the tone in which they write, it is important to remember that Lubbock and White base their work on contemporary sources, including the records of ship surgeons. Colonial sources such as works by Europeans involved in maritime activities are also used by scholars of indentured labour: Indo-Fijian scholar Brij V. Lal, for example, quotes the Handbook written by Surgeon Superintendent James Laing in entirety in his Crossing the Kala Pani: A Documentary History of Indian Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1998), 9–48. 5 Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers, 28 (Glasgow: James Brown, Son and Ferguson, 1935). 6 Ibid., 81. 7 Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers, 27–28. See also White, Ships, Coolies and Rice. 8 Dave Hollett, Passage from India to El Dorado: Guyana and the Great Migration (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 167–175. 9 J. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration from India (Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873), 34. 10 See F.W. Perry and W.A. Laxon, Nourse Line (Gravesend: World Ship Society, 1991). 11 Charles Connell was one of the most prodigious ship designers of his day and designed many of the best known coolie ships of the Nourse Line. 12 Shipping contracts for coolie transportation to the West Indies and Guyana were the subject of intense competition between the firms of Nourse, Sandbach, and G. D. Tyser. In 1888, however, James Nourse secured a hold on the coveted CalcuttaCaribbean contract until the abolition of the indenture system. 13 See Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers and L.G.W. White, Ships, Coolies and Rice for a detailed account. 14 S. Swiggum, ‘Nourse Line’, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/nourse.shtml (accessed 11 March 2009). 15 James M. Laing, Handbook for Surgeons Superintendent of the Coolie Emigration Service (Colonial Office, March 1889) as quoted in Brij V. Lal, Crossing the Kala Pani, 12. 16 T.N. Thomas writes that one of worst cases was the Whitby, bound for Guiana, with 280 coolies in a 350 ton vessel, with a rice cargo underneath. T.N. Thomas, ‘Indians overseas – A guide to source materials in the India Office Records for the

The coolie trade from Calcutta

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

127

study of Indian emigration 1830–1950’ (London: India Office Library and Records, British Library, 1985), 16. Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers, 98. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 31. Hugh Tinker, A New System, 140. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 27. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 37. J.G. Grant, ‘Report on the emigration from the Port of Calcutta to British and foreign colonies 1884–5’ (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1886). Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 28. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 53. J.G. Grant, ‘Report on the Emigration from the Port of Calcutta to British and Foreign Colonies 1883–4’ (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1885). IOR/L/PJ/6/91, File 245, ‘Emigration to Suriname: Report on serious mortality amongst Indian immigrants on board the British ship Sheila arriving at Fort New Amsterdam (cause of mortality said to be cholera), 20th January to 13th February 1883.’ J.G. Grant, ‘Report on the Emigration from the Port of Calcutta to British and Foreign Colonies 1880–1’ (Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1882). Tinker, A New System, 145. Dr. Wiley’s diary forwarded by J. Mackenzie, Bengal Government, to Government of India (no. 2966) (5 August 1873) as cited in Tinker, A New System, 161. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 55. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 55. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 58–59. Extract from letter to Govt. of Bengal, no. 2146, dated 23 September 1858, quoted in Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 26–28. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 27. Advertisement, The Gleaner, Saturday, 6 October 1866. Capt. and Mrs. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Emigrants from Calcutta to Trinidad, ed. James Carlisle (London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1859), as cited by Tinker, A New System, 4. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage, 9. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 26–28. Geoghegan, Note on Emigration, 21. Dr. Wiley’s diary, as cited in Tinker, A New System, 160. Colonial Office to India Office (30 September 1861): enclosed, letter from Emigration Agent, Jamaica (Calcutta, 20 March 1861) (Public Department, Home Correspondence). James M. Laing, Handbook for Surgeons, 23. Terry M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820–1930 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 34–35. Ameena Gafoor, ‘The Kala Pani: The Black Waters’ in Kaiteur News Online, 14 September 2008, http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2008/09/14/the-kala-pani-theblack-waters/ (accessed 11 May 2016). Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2003), 278, 294. Capt. and Mrs. Swinton, Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Emigrants from Calcutta to Trinidad, ed. James Carlisle (London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1859), as cited by Tinker, A New System, 159. Tinker, A New System, 156. Bisnauth, The Settlement of Indians in Guyana, 53.

128

Nilanjana Deb

49 Sir James Longden, Trinidad, to Secretary of State for the Colonies (5 March 1876), enclosing ‘Report of Inquiry’ and entries from logbook of the Ailsa, as mentioned in Tinker, A New System, 150. 50 David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism 1834–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137. 51 Capt. W.H. Angel, The Clipper Ship ‘Sheila’, 185–6. 52 Captain Angel’s text was edited and republished in 1995 by B. Samaroo and K. Ramchand, who wrote an introduction and afterword that privileged the IndoCaribbean perspective. Samaroo and Ramchand’s edition had the photograph of the ‘Queen of Sheba’ printed on the front cover, deliberately foregrounding free woman ‘coolie’. See Mark Tumbridge, ‘Networks of empire and the representation of the “Queen of Sheba” in W.H. Angel’s The Clipper Ship “Sheila”’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 2012, Issue 6, https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/december2012/ journals/Tumbridge.pdf (accessed 4 May 2016). 53 See A. Ong and S.J. Collier, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3–21. I am thankful to Dr. Katherine Foxhall, University of Leicester, for pointing out the possibilities of reading the changing technologies of the coolie carrying trade in the light of Ong and Collier’s work.

9

Anxiety, affect and authenticity The commodification of nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters Fariha Shaikh

In 1833, a man by the name of Frederick Hasted left his home in Midhurst, Sussex, for Adelaide, Upper Canada. In his former life, Hasted was wellknown as a hawker, travelling with his small carriage drawn by dogs through Sussex, Hampshire and their adjacent counties selling books, newspapers, and other printed matter. Agricultural Sussex had been hard hit by the recession of the 1830s and Hasted had been indirectly affected by the crippling poverty in the area.1 Tired of eking out a living and frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity in the area, he took the passage out with his daughter to make a new life for himself as a labourer in Upper Canada. He initially settled in Adelaide, where there was a sizeable number of emigrants from Sussex. The presence of familiar faces provided him with a ready community in a foreign environment,2 but Hasted was unwilling to relinquish his former relationships altogether. Despite the fact that the cost of sending letters to England came ‘heavy’ to him, he was an avid letter writer to his friends back home. In the first nine months after he arrived at Quebec, he wrote at least four letters to friends, telling them of the colony and outlining his hopes for the future. ‘[A]s I had forgot something of material consequence to you’, he writes near the beginning of his fourth letter, ‘I thought I would spend 2s. 2d. more for your sake’. Hasted writes specifically to retract an offer of ‘some land for house and garden’ that he had made to his friend. But he envisages another important function for his letter. He ends with the following proposition: For the good of the poor, and the satisfaction of my friends, and all, whom it may concern, I shall be glad if Mr. Tripp, Mr. Sockett, or some one else, would have this letter printed, either in bills, books, or newspapers; bills I think would be best, as they could be sold at 1d. each, or given away.3 As Hasted knew well, there was a lively market in letters from emigrants at this time, as both sources of information and topical entertainment. ‘Mr Sockett’, referred to here, was the man who designed and oversaw a parish-assisted emigration scheme from Petworth, Sussex with which many of

130

Fariha Shaikh

Hasted’s neighbours in Adelaide had travelled. Supported by the Earl of Egremont, between the years 1832 and 1837, Thomas Sockett sent eighteen hundred men, women and children to Upper Canada. To encourage participation in this scheme, he published collections of edited emigrants’ letters: the most notable one is Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants (1833). As Hasted did not travel out with the Petworth emigrants, his letter was not included in these particular collections,4 but nonetheless it was published, and in print, gained a life that Hasted had not imagined. It was reprinted twice: as a pamphlet, bound with another emigrant’s letter, published by William Marchant of Fenchurch Street, London; and in the Brighton Herald.5 Hasted’s desire to publish his letters continues well after he has settled in Canada. In 1839, six years after he arrived, he ends another letter to his friend writing, ‘I also request you to send this by the Petworth postman, to Mr. Sockett, and I should be obliged, if he would have the kindness to get it printed, and send a copy of it to each of the undermentioned persons […]’.6 Hasted was evidently keen for his letters to break out of intimate circles and circulate in the more open world of print. Although he posits this as a benevolent gesture, a move that is for ‘the good of the poor’, the ‘satisfaction of [his] friends’,7 and because he is a ‘welwisher [sic] to the country’,8 the desire for English fame may also have been a desire to be remembered by being kept in the public eye. In reality, however, Hasted’s letter joined hundreds of thousands of other emigrants’ letters that were flooding the nineteenth-century print market. Emigration was an ever-constant topic in the nineteenth century: as Alexander Murdoch asserts, it ‘touched the lives of everyone, everywhere’ in Britain.9 Even if one did not emigrate oneself, it was more than likely that a family member or friend had done so. Stories from the colonies and America filled periodicals and newspapers; roadside walls in villages and hoarding boards in towns were plastered with advertisements of emigration schemes and details of the next ship out; emigration manuals and guidebooks tutored emigrants on where to go and what to take. Publishers, keen to cash in on and feed the public’s growing appetite for information, produced a huge range of emigrant guidebooks, manuals and memoirs. John Barnes et al. argue that, ‘produced non-commercially by settlement agencies and religious organizations, the books that hundreds of thousands of emigrant readers took with them served to make this little-regarded genre one of the most remunerative areas of publishing in the nineteenth century’.10 James Belich echoes this when he argues that ‘the sheer scale’ of publishing in emigration literature ‘was impressive’: ‘we must be talking about thousands of books, one of the largest genres in nineteenth-century English literature’. These ‘books, pamphlets, newspaper and journal articles, lectures and advertisements’ produced the ‘ideology’ of what Belich calls ‘settlerism’: the ‘formal’ tenets and principles that underpinned the mass movement of so many people away from Britain to the colonies. These principles ‘varied over time and space, yet remained broadly consistent throughout the long nineteenth century’.11 A highly gendered ideology, settlerism stressed the importance of masculinity,

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

131

hard work and national pride; it gave emigrants the sense that they would be directly involved in creating Britain’s emerging colonial empire if they were prepared to work hard and re-make the colonies in the image of Britain. It held out the promise of success in the colonies, the possibility of breaking out of the limiting class structure in Britain and of becoming one’s own man. Letters from emigrants formed a substantial part of this output of emigration literature and participated in propagating the ideology of settlerism. Like Hasted’s letter, some emigrants wrote their letters with publication in mind; in other cases, publishers collected and printed letters received by families of emigrants. They were published in pamphlets and collections, magazines and newspapers, and emigration society reports and emigrant guidebooks. Perhaps because they assert an ideology, critics have sceptically viewed printed letters as texts which tamper with reality and provide a skewed version of the truth. Despite the ready availability of emigrants’ letters on the print market, contemporary scholars have consistently eschewed them in favour of manuscript letters. As a result, much of the scholarship on settler emigration and letters has focused on making manuscript letters available in scholarly editions.12 Charlotte Erikson argues that, whereas ‘[m]anuscripts of emigrant letters constitute a unique historical source’, ‘[r]eliance on government documents, pamphlet literature, and the immigrant and trade union press’ leads to ‘a distorted picture’ of emigration.13 In his collection, David Gerber argues that checking for potential ‘mischievous editing’ of printed letters is both ‘imposing and time-consuming’:14 as the original manuscripts of printed letters have rarely survived, cross-examination to study the transition is virtually impossible.15 Printed letters are rarely seen as a subject of study in their own right, but are always tethered to their manuscript origins. When they are included in collections, it is through force of circumstance, rather than choice. Wendy Cameron et al. only include printed letters in their edited collection because of the ‘small amount of extant correspondence from poor immigrants who went to early nineteenth-century Upper Canada’ which does not offer ‘that luxury’ of working solely with manuscript letters.16 Their words border on lament here, an elegy for the aura of manuscript that print can never replace. While tracking the small differences between the print and manuscript counterparts of each individual letter is neither feasible nor interesting, studying the transition to print in broad, generic terms provides a rich enquiry into the kinds of cultural work that printed emigrants’ letters perform. Printed emigrants’ letters speak of the migrant experience, but they also migrate themselves. This ‘migration’ is not only in the sense of the text’s physical movement in space through time. Isabel Hofmeyr argues that, ‘when books travel they change shape. They are excised, summarized, abridged, and bowdlerized by the new intellectual formations into which they migrate’.17 In other words, a text’s migration of place is simultaneously a migration of form. In the case of emigrants’ letters, when they arrive in England, they are seized upon by a ready, growing market for emigration literature, keen to pique

132

Fariha Shaikh

interest in emigration by publishing first-hand accounts and also by emigrants themselves, keen to achieve local fame. As emigrants’ letters enter the market and begin circulating as printed texts, their function is ‘fundamentally changed’: whereas manuscript letters bridged the spatio-temporal divide between separated family members, printed letters ‘contributed to the marketing of migration and diffusion of information’.18 This diffusion was not disinterested: printed emigrants’ letters aimed to increase the general reading public’s awareness of the advantages of emigration, and to encourage them to make the move for themselves. The problem for readers, however, was how to determine if this information was true. Printed letters mediated between the realities of a colonial time and place and those of Britain. How were readers who had never been to Australia, or who had seen Canada only in etched drawings, to know if the stories that they were being sold were not fabricated? How was the publisher, keen to make a profit, to impress upon the reader the authenticity of their material? The particular irony of the situation, therefore, is that while printed emigrants’ letters have been neglected by contemporary scholars on account of their dubious authenticity, these are texts that are desperate to authenticate themselves. This chapter seeks to uncover how, in the process of commodification, anxieties over the text’s authenticity become compounded as manuscript letters move from one global network – that of the international postage system and kinship ties – into another – the print market.

Becoming print In 1829, Edward Rainford, a bookseller and publisher based in High Holborn, London, published a collection of emigrants’ letters, Twenty-Four Letters from Labourers in America to Their Friends in England. Benjamin Smith, the editor, and on whom we have no further information other than that he was a ‘gentleman in Sussex’,19 explains that in order to obtain the letters, he ‘sent out two persons in opposite directions, with orders to call at all the cottages where they had reason to think that letters had been lately received from America’. Having collected the first twenty-four, he prints them ‘without any other alteration than a little improvement in the spelling, where it was so bad as to render the sense obscure’.20 The volume contains collections of letters from three families, along with a few miscellaneous letters. The emigrants in Smith’s volume most likely emigrated independently of any scheme, parishassisted or otherwise. Just as Hasted’s letter was published in a number of different places, so too were the letters in Smith’s volume. Their afterlife points to the re-printable and self-replicating nature of the print market when it came to emigration literature. In the same year, the radical figure William Cobbett reproduced the letters in his Emigrant’s Guide.21 Considerable portions of them were also re-published in the Westminster Review.22 This circulation and re-circulation of emigrants’ letters in print points to their adaptable and mutable nature as they become appropriated for different uses.

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

133

In his preface, Smith justifies the production of his volume because ‘[n]o method of conveying the knowledge of these important facts to the working poor of England seems more effectual, than that of publishing a fair specimen of […] letters’. The ‘natural consequence’, he writes, of the ‘considerable’ number of emigrants from Sussex is ‘a frequent interchange of letters between the two countries’ of England and America.23 This comment suggests a oneway relationship between emigration and letters, where letters are produced as a result of emigration. However, the production of his own collection and the organization of letters within it suggests a more dialectical relationship between the two: emigration produced letters, but, in turn, letters also stimulated emigration. The Watson family letters is by far the largest collection in this volume, covering the years 1819 to 1827 and containing twelve letters. The first few letters are from John and Mary Watson to John’s father. In 1823, John writes home, ‘We wish very much to see brother William and Stephen: if they come they cannot be in a worse situation than we were when we landed, and for many months after; but then their prospects would be better than by remaining in England’.24 Presumably, John receives news that Stephen will follow, as two years later (the next letter to appear in the collection), he writes home anxiously: ‘As for brother Stephen, we should like to know if he is gone back too; for we expected him this last winter, but have been disappointed; we are rather uneasy at not receiving a letter before this’.25 After six letters from John and Mary, the first letter from Stephen and his wife Elizabeth appears writing back home to his parents. There appears to have been some miscommunication between members of the family as both had arrived in New York in 1823, with their son, Thomas, and their daughter, Mary Jane. Thomas, has been ‘taken’ – presumably for an apprenticeship of some sort – by a certain ‘Mr. William Fisher’, while Mary Jane has been adopted by a ‘Quaker gentleman in Connecticut, who has taken her as his own’ and will ‘keep and clothe and […] send her to school’.26 In 1825, Mary Jane sends her first letter home, signing it as ‘Watson’; by 1827, she has married and become Mary Jane Coulson. The Watson collection is arranged in a seemingly neutral chronological order, but the suggestion of change and progress is all the more powerful for it. As the years go by, the collection of voices writing back from America grows. The accumulation of Watson family members in America suggests that rather than being broken, the family unit is sustained and preserved through emigration. Part of the reason why the Watsons are able to persuade their family over to America is because they stress over and again the positive aspects of life there. John Watson writes, ‘I look forward with a confident and well-founded hope to the time, as not far distant, when I shall be a freeholder […] What others have done why may not I accomplish?’27 Importantly, such stories were not complete fabrications: in the letters that never made it to print in the nineteenth century, emigrants were also keen to assert that their material conditions had changed for the better. William Corlett, for example, who had

134

Fariha Shaikh

emigrated in 1827 at the age of 44, wrote home in an unpublished letter to his brother in 1842, ‘I am not sorry I came out here […] Permit me to say amore as I have said before, that the country is a good country & no one need be poor here if he or she is well & endustrious [sic]’.28 Not all emigrants were so encouraging in their personal correspondence. Isabella Wyly, a young emigrant to Australia, for example, dissuaded her sister-in-law from following her: ‘There is such a dale of comp[et]ition that some times you think People would not let one another live if possable [sic]’.29 In another letter, Isabella’s aunt explains that, ‘Isabella has no idea of inducing Mary or Bessie to come out here’, as ‘they would only be a burden to her or us if out of situations’.30 Printed letters almost never contain these sentiments: editors either edited them out, or discarded such letters from their collections altogether. Wherever they appeared, printed emigrants’ letters resounded with stories of success. Joseph Silcox, for example, writes that he and his family ‘are enjoying a very good state of health and spirits, and are doing extremely well. We have planted and sowed to oats, potatoes, and Corn, about 18 acres’.31 Letters frequently contained comparisons between the quality of life in England and that in the settlements. Some were explicit about the benefits of emigration, such as those made by William Voice: ‘We have got our house very comfortable’, he writes, ‘we have got a cow, and the calf we fatted and killed, four young sows, six hens, and a cock, and a large fat hog, […] if we had stopped in England we should not had so much’.32 Or they compare food: ‘My wife bakes excellent loaves, so that if you were here, you would not require to hurt your gums with hard cakes’.33 Emigrants were keen to stress that their material success was not so much driven by avarice, but by the desire to reduce hardship. ‘We have exchanged a life fraught with care and anxiety, a life of hubble and bubble, toil, and never-ceasing trouble, for one in connexion with which there is no care, no anxiety, and no dismal forebodings as to the future’, writes one settler.34 ‘I feel as a bird liberated from its cage, having been pent up myself in a dark cell all year round’,35 writes another. ‘I don’t repent leaving England […] I wish we had come years ago’.36 By printing letters from emigrants who openly encouraged their family members to follow them, editors ensured that a very particular, excised experience of emigration was put into circulation: overlapping with the truth, but not the whole truth. It is easy to see where the appeal of printed emigrants’ letters lies: their personal tone offered a fresh change from the dry statistics or lengthy expositions on climate or soil that were a standard feature of most government publications or emigrant guidebooks.37 As one review of Counsel for Emigrants (1834) and its Sequel (1834) wrote, ‘these little books recommend themselves by letters of various style, not a few of which are abmirable [sic] and well seasoned with humour or sentiment’.38 Personal stories circulating in print did more than provide light entertainment. As the reviewer of Smith’s volume, Twenty-Four Letters, wrote, the volume provided ‘a peep at labouring life’: the ‘unadorned view so obtained of the feelings, habits, and lot of the emigrants [in the volume] is always curious, and often diverting’.39 Printed

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

135

emigrants’ letters thus provided interested readers with a vicarious experience of emigration for those who did not know what life in the colonies was like. Letters were thus important for stimulating chain migration because of their personal overtures. By positioning the reader as voyeur, they provide an insight into the material and emotional investments required by emigration. Such personal stories openly circulating in print construct the notion that success is available to everyone, if only they make the move. Volumes of printed letters, such as Twenty-Four Letters, draw on the presumed success of family letters in stimulating people to emigrate: they aim to replicate in the broader, public sphere what emigrants were achieving in smaller, intimate, family circles. But my argument is not that printed letters simply perform similar work to the manuscript letters but in the broader reading community of the public. Manuscript letters can maintain family connections: print cannot and does not. Printed letters are a more anxious genre. As the manuscript letter becomes print, the text’s mobility, both of movement and form, accrues different kinds of anxiety. In the tussle for a ‘correct’ reading, editors and readers alike become embedded in these multi-layered structures of anxiety, which are an integral part of the reading experience.

Emigrant tokens In The Postal Age, David Henkin argues that the era of postal communication comes into being through a slow, quiet series of changes, rather than as a sharp break from the past: ‘[c]ompared to the laying of a transoceanic cable or the first journey of a steam-powered train, the spread of mail practices and mail culture unfolded discreetly in countless scenes that barely obtrude on the historical record’.40 Studying the postal age, he argues, allows us to enquire into how ‘users adapt their understanding of the world they inhabit to changing social expectations, norms and desires’. In other words, it allows us to see how ‘ordinary people negotiated a modern communications network’.41 Emigrants’ letters provide an important insight into emigrants’ distrust of this emerging postal communications network. In 1832, Mary Holden, a parishassisted emigrant from Petworth, Sussex, wrote to her family alerting them to the fact that her letter may have been tampered with: you may understand that all the letters be all opened, before they go out of this Country, to see that there is not any falsehood sent; and if there is any thing in them, against the country, they are kept back.42 Writing at a later date, but in the same letter, Holden revokes her earlier statement: we have enquired about the letters, to know the fact and truth about their being opened by the head gentlemen. So that we are now sure that they are not opened, until you receives them [sic].43

136

Fariha Shaikh

But after sealing the letter, Holden opens it again. In order that her recipient realise that Holden, and not an outsider, is responsible for the tell-tale signs of opening, she adds hastily at the end, ‘I was obliged to open the letter again, to put in the right direction, that you should direct to us’.44 Holden’s initial belief that emigrants’ letters were tampered with before leaving the country is a common misconception amongst people in England. Her reassurance that this is in fact not the case is a strong feature in emigrant correspondence with their families. Cornelius Cosins, for example, wrote home dismissing the notion completely: ‘Some people in England think that letters are opened, but there is no such thing’.45 Similarly, John Watson emphatically denied that the stories of their success were handled by officials who handled the mail: Tell William we are astonished at him doubting the truths of our letters: we can assure him the letters don’t get altered before they reach him. America is as good as we have stated before; and he would find it so if he had heart enough to come.46 While there were laws against opening letters addressed to other people, nevertheless emigrants’ letters were by no means a one-to-one form of correspondence. International rates of postage remained high throughout much of the century, and letters were often compiled over months and co-authored, or addressed to more than one person. They were also sometimes read aloud to groups of friends and neighbours, or by literate people to those who were illiterate.47 Emigrants’ letters thus clearly do not conform to the model of a sealed epistle between two correspondents: the networks of circulation in which they were moved overlapped with the family networks in which emigrants were embedded. Nonetheless, the idea that someone else outside this network was reading and intercepting their letters was – naturally – hugely disturbing. In order to circumvent such unwanted interference in correspondence, emigrants and their families developed various strategies in order to ensure that the letter the family in England received had not been tampered with. Thomas Sockett highlights the various practices that arose in an attempt to overcome the suspicion of the postal age: The paper on which letters from Canada were written, was prepared in England, either by a heading in the name of a friend, a name written across, certain mystical holes pricked with a pin, or, what was more general, a sort of tally, formed by a corner of the paper being scrawled upon, and then torn off, the piece torn away being carefully preserved at home. In one instance, a very small, and peculiarly shaped, crooked pin, placed under the seal, came back from the ‘far west;’ with especial directions, that this infallible proof should be again returned thither. These directions have been complied with, and the crooked pin, is now once more on its voyage.48

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

137

‘Mystical holes’, ‘carefully preserved’, ‘peculiarly shaped, crooked pin’: the marking of letters, or the presence of any accompanying object evidently works as a code language, providing ‘infallible proof ’ of the letter’s authenticity. Loosely, such markings come under the category of ‘emigrant tokens’: objects or markings, that signify the affection between the emigrant and receiver.49 Sockett’s words are gently mocking here, as though he is amused by the length to which emigrants and their families will go in order to ensure that their communication remains untampered. But, for publishers and editors of printed collections of letters, this lack of trust in the post was problematic. Not only did they have to convince an already sceptical public that editorial interventions had been minimal in the transition from manuscript to print, they also had to show that their source material was authentic. The problem of proving the authenticity of the printed letter was thus doubly compounded. In order to convince people that little had been changed in the transition of manuscript to print, some editors offered viewings of the original manuscripts. William Cobbett, for example, informed his readers that he went to the emigrants’ families to ‘obtain the originals’50 and that they will be deposited at Fleet Street, for one week after the publication of this book [his Emigrant’s Guide]; and, when that week is passed, I shall return them to the parties from whom I have received them. I shall lodge them at Fleet Street, for the purpose of being inspected by any gentleman who may have the curiosity to do it; and I do it also to the honour of the parties who have written the letters.51 It is difficult to determine whether or not the opportunity to check the published letter would have been taken up, or how often, but the mode of authentication is interesting. It is not so much that seeing is believing, but that the possibility of seeing is believing: the offer to attend a viewing of the manuscripts at a specific date and time is an authentication strategy where the veracity of the published letters is endorsed by the possibility of seeing the originals. While there was a means of convincing sceptical readers of the smooth transition from manuscript to print, conveying in print the authenticity of the manuscript letter was more difficult. Print does away with manuscript features, such as torn corners and marks on the paper. Whilst it replicates the text of the letter, it cannot replicate any accompanying token – and indeed, to do so would beat the objective. But it is imperative to editors of printed letters that their audience realize that the printed letter comes from an authentic source. In his edited collection, Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants, Sockett put introductory lines before letters describing how they were marked. For example, he writes above one letter, ‘The two following letters were both written on a sheet of paper, from which a corner had been torn, and left with

Figure 9.1 Example of Sockett’s introductory description of emigrant tokens. Thomas Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants, who Sailed from Portsmouth (London: John Phillips, 1833), p. 8.

Figure 9.2 Example of Sockett’s introductory description of emigrant tokens. Thomas Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants, who Sailed from Portsmouth (London: John Phillips, 1833), p. 45.

140

Fariha Shaikh

a relation in England’ (Figure 9.1).52 Above another he writes that the original letter had the lines ‘“From Thomas Adsett, who went from North Chapel Sussex, to the Rev. Robert Ridsdale, Rector of that parish” written on it by Mr. Ridsdale before Thomas went away’ (Figure 9.2).53 The families in England would know if the letters they received were authentic or not if the corner of paper left behind matched the corner of the letter, or if the letter had the lines that had been written in England across the top. A decade later, the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm used a similar authentication strategy in her two pro-emigration pamphlets, Comfort for the Poor! (1847) and Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered (1847). By the late 1840s, Chisholm had become deeply interested in emigration. In anticipation of setting up an emigration scheme, she collected hundreds of ‘statements’ from new settlers in Australia. Unlike Sockett’s letters, there was no textual antecedent for these statements: they are interviews, but with all the questions removed and the answers collected together in a paragraph.54 In order to lend credence, each statement is ‘attested [to] by the relators, by some little family token or incident known to their relatives at home’.55 One of the emigrants Chisholm interviewed, John H―, sends a piece of coal with his name ‘engraved’56 on it back home. His brother’s reply is printed below his statement: The person you mention, John H―–, is my father’s son, and brother to me. If you have any news to communicate from John, [I] should feel very much obliged if you will do so. I am the brother you mention who engraved his name on a piece of coal; he emigrated from Liverpool about six years ago, and have had only two letters from him during that time.57 Given as a gift and returned as a token, the piece of coal is the material artefact through which these two brothers trace themselves back to each other after a period of six years. The shared nature of the pin under the seal, the corner of the torn letter, or the piece of paper with lines written on it that is passed back and forth, opens up the opportunity for an affective discourse based on an imagined realm of touch. The lines on top of the paper and the engraved coal that Sockett and Chisholm respectively write of indicate emigrants’ anxiety that their kinship ties are being tampered with as they extend over time and space. But in the printed letter, there is another kind of anxiety that exists alongside the emigrant’s anxiety: that of the editor as the emigrant describes the presence of the now-absent token.

Producing authenticity In his essay ‘The reality effect’, Roland Barthes argues that the naked relation of ‘what is’ (or has been) thus appears as a resistance to meaning […] it suffices to recall that in the ideology of our time,

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

141

obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’ […] is always brandished like a weapon against meaning, as if, by some statutory exclusion, what is alive cannot signify – and vice versa.58 In other words, he feels that, all too often, concrete details are read as insignificant and that we overlook them in our readings; we assume that beyond an acknowledgement of their presence within the text, they require no further interrogation. Barthes’s frustration is that once the ‘non-functionality of detail’ is relegated only to denoting ‘“what took place”’, ‘“concrete reality” becomes the sufficient justification for speaking’:59 All this shows that the ‘real’ is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any notion of ‘function,’ that its ‘speech-act’ has no need to be integrated into a structure and that the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech.60 Barthes argues against this mode of reading, adopting instead a reading position that opens up the work of the material world in the text. He argues that ‘just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it’61 and in this process, small concrete details in the text come to signify ‘the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents)’.62 Pointing to the ‘category’ rather than the ‘contingent contents’ allows us to understand the material world of the text as working collectively to create ‘the reality effect’: the illusion that we are in the real world when we read the realist novel. The material world in the printed letter signifies the category of ‘the authentic’, but, crucially, it does so with reference to the ‘contingent contents’ of the letters – the specific details of the emigrants’ tokens. Indeed, the history of the text – the ‘having-been-there’ of things as Barthes puts it – is fundamental to creating the effect that the printed letters are authentic. The work performed by the material world of emigrants’ tokens – the torn piece of paper, or the engraved piece of coal – thus lies at the complex juncture between gesturing toward the ‘concrete’63 reality of the material world and, simultaneously, producing an ‘effect’. Thus, although Chisholm refers to the emigrants’ tokens as ‘family tokens’,64 whatever part these statements and tokens had to play in maintaining family bonds is overtaken by a different imperative in printed letters; the real purpose of mentioning emigrant’s tokens – the pin, the torn corner and the piece of coal – is to make the reader believe that the happy stories of emigration in the statements, or the letters, are true. This sense of authenticity is fundamental to the commodity status of the printed emigrants’ letter; authors, editors and publishers needed the consuming public to believe that the stories of emigration in their collection were reliable accounts if they were to sell successfully. In choosing to buy a collection of printed emigrants’ letters, readers were also choosing to believe a version of authenticity.65 The

142

Fariha Shaikh

stress on family and continuity in printed emigrants’ letters exists side by side with the fear of an altered transmission from sender to recipient and from manuscript to print. As objects, people and texts become untethered from their moorings and enter global networks of circulation, the need for authenticity – or the feel of it – becomes paramount. Like the hundreds of other publishers of emigration literature, Sockett and Chisholm both need to convince a sceptical reading public and consumer audience that they are selling ‘true’ stories; if emigration literature is to sell, readers need to believe that the tales of success are not fabricated, but are tangible, achievable results of emigration. Settlerism stressed an ethic of hard work and national pride, but the authenticity effect is also an integral part of it; instead of discounting printed emigrants’ letters as propaganda, engaging with the genre’s own anxieties over its authenticity sheds light on how people in the nineteenth century understood a text’s ability to mediate a sense of place in a fluid and mobile world.

Notes 1 On rural protest as a context for emigration from Sussex, see Wendy Cameron and Mary McDougall Maude, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project, 1832–1837 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 26–27. 2 As letters included in Wendy Cameron, Sheila Haines and Mary McDougall Maude eds, English Immigrant Voices: Labourers’ Letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000) show, Hasted was well-known to the emigrants he travelled out with. He frequently bought and sold land from them and offered them work. Not all relationships were congenial, however, and he was sometimes forced to move because of disagreements with neighbours. See 151, 255, 274, 281, and 381. 3 Letter dated 7 February 1834, in Letters from Settlers in Upper Canada (London: Marchant, [1834?]), 1, 3, 3, 6. 4 However, a copy exists in Toronto Library where Hasted’s letter has been bound with a volume of Petworth emigrants’ letters published by Sockett. See Cameron et al., 384. 5 Brighton Herald, 17 May 1834. See Cameron et al., 384. 6 Cameron et al., English Immigrant Voices, 390 (15 December 1839). Sockett evidently took a strong interest in printing Hasted’s letters. In another letter to the commissioner of crown lands, Hasted mentions that he has enclosed ‘a copy of a letter I sent to a friend in England, which the Revd. T. Socket [sic] Rector of Petworth got printed, and sent me two copies back last spring’ (25 January 1841). See Cameron et al., 384. 7 Letters from Settlers in Upper Canada, 6 (7 February 1834). 8 Cameron et al., English Immigrant Voices, 384 (25 January 1841). 9 Alexander Murdoch, British Emigration 1603–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6. 10 John Barnes, Bill Bell, Rimi Chatterjee, Wallace Kirsop, and Michael Winship, ‘A place in the world’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1830–1914 Volume 6, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 595–634 (602). 11 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 153.

Nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters

143

12 Examples of scholarly edited collections of printed letters include Cameron et al.’s English Immigrant Voices (2000); Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Patrick James O’Farrell and Brian Trainor (eds.), Letters from Irish Australia, 1825–1929 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press; Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1984). 13 Erikson, Invisible Immigrants, 1–2. 14 Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 10–11. 15 William Jones is one of the few critics to study printed letters. See Jones, ‘“Going into print”: Published immigrant letters, webs of personal relations and the emergence of the Welsh public sphere’, in Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke eds, Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (London: Palgrave, 2006), 175–99. 16 Cameron et al., English Immigrant Voices, xxi. 17 Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2–3. 18 Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 26–7. 19 ‘Letters from emigrants to Canada and the United States’, Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1832, 239–40. 20 Benjamin Smith ed., Twenty-Four Letters From Labourers in America to Their Friends in England, 2nd edn. (London: Edward Rainford, 1829), 2. 21 William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide: In Ten Letters Addressed to the TaxPayers of England Containing Information of Every Kind, Necessary to Persons who are About to Emigrate including Several Authentic and Most Interesting Letters from English Emigrants, Now in America, to their Relations in England (London: the author, 1829), 45–84. The emigrants in Twenty-Four Letters have a strong pro-American bias: this is probably the reason why they appealed to Cobbett, but there is little evidence to suggest this was definitely originally the case. 22 ‘Art. VI – Twenty-four letters from labourers in America to their friends in England’, Westminster Review, 15 July 1831, 138–42. 23 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 2. 24 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 13 (26 April 1823). 25 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 14 (9 March 1825). 26 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 17 and 19 (5 October 1823). 27 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 9 (13 August 1820). 28 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 108 (9 November 1842). 29 Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 127 (19 October 1858). 30 Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, 130 (19 November 1858). 31 G. Poulett Scrope ed., Extracts of Letters, From Poor Persons who Emigrated Last Year to Canada and the United States (London: James Ridgway, 1831), 19 (26 May 1831). The radical beliefs of James Ridgway clearly shape the form and content of this volume. See Ralph A. Manogue, ‘James Ridgway and America’, Early American Literature, 1996, 31(3): 264–88. 32 Letters from Settlers in Upper Canada, 6 (27 October 1834). 33 Counsel for Emigrants, and Interesting Information from Numerous Sources; with Original Letters from Canada and the United States (Aberdeen: John Mathison, 1834), 67 (20 December 1833). 34 Copies and Extracts of Letters from Settlers in Upper Canada (London: Marchant, Printer, 1833), 7 (21 July 1833). 35 Counsel, 33 (21 January 1833).

144

Fariha Shaikh

36 Charles Barclay ed., Letters from the Dorking Emigrants who went to Upper Canada in the Spring of 1832 (Dorking: Robert Best Ede, 1832), 16–17 (26 August 1832). 37 See for example, Alexander Buchanan, Official Information for Emigrants Arriving at New York and who are Desirous of Settling in the Canadas (Montreal: Printed at the Gazette Office, 1834). 38 ‘Counsel for emigrants, &c.; with original letters from Canada’, Monthly Review, May 1835, 145–46 (145). 39 ‘Art. VI – Twenty-Four Letters 139. See also Sequel to the Counsel for Emigrants, Containing Interesting Information from Numerous Sources with Original Letters from Canada and the United States (Aberdeen: John Mathison, 1834). 40 David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15. 41 Henkin, Postal Age, xi. 42 Thomas Sockett, ed., Emigration: Letters From Sussex Emigrants, who Sailed from Portsmouth (London: John Phillips, 1833), 44. 43 Sockett,Emigration, 44. 44 Sockett, Emigration, 44. 45 Barclay, Letters, 15. 46 Smith, Twenty-Four Letters, 24. 47 O’Farrell, Letters, 3. 48 Sockett, Emigration, viii. 49 See Michele Field and Timothy Millett eds, Convict Love Tokens: The Leaden Hearts the Convicts Left Behind (Kent Town: Wakefield, 1998). 50 Cobbett, Emigrant’s Guide, 42. 51 Cobbett, Emigrant’s Guide, 43. 52 Sockett, Emigration, 8. 53 Sockett, Emigration, 45. 54 Chisholm’s statements, therefore, deal with the transition from orality to print; this undeniably opens up a whole different set of questions, but nonetheless, her work is apposite in this chapter, which is concerned with the anxiety that circulates in print over the authenticity of the emigrant’s account. 55 Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered. In a Letter, Dedicated, by Permission, to Earl Grey, third edn. (London: John Ollivier, 1847), 18. 56 Caroline Chisholm, Comfort for the Poor! Meat Three Times a Day! Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales Collected in that Colony by Mrs. Chisholm in 1845–46 (London: John Olliver, 1847), 6. 57 Chisholm, Comfort, 7. 58 Roland Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 141–149 (147). 59 Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, 146. 60 Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, 147. 61 Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, 148. Original emphasis. 62 Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, 148. Emphasis added. 63 Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, 147. 64 Chisholm, Emigration, 18. 65 For an alternative reading of the relationship between authenticity and commodification, see Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

10 Towards a genealogy of the village in the nineteenth-century British colonial world Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Sumner Maine Josephine McDonagh The nineteenth-century growth in the global trade of commodities stimulated demographic change on an unprecedented scale, and transformed people’s experience of their environment. The direction of traffic tended to be from country to city, from village to town, to such a degree that from the late eighteenth century onwards, images of rural depopulation served as a ready emblem of the effects of modernity. Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770), for example, was a reference point for later writers evoking the varied impacts of land enclosure, industrialization, and urbanization. The process seemed unstoppable: two centuries later, in his study of the effects of agrarian capitalism, The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams predicted that eventually we would all be city dwellers. While his forecast has not yet come true, we are moving in that direction. Since 2008, more than half the global population lives in towns and cities for the first time in world history.1 As nineteenth-century people moved, however, villages stayed in their minds. Migrant labourers from all countries travelled with village memories and mentalities. As Nilanjana Deb’s chapter in this book shows, coolie labourers in the Indian Ocean carried with them material traces of village life. Likewise, Fariha Shaikh demonstrates that nineteenth-century British emigrants’ letters suggest the extent to which migrants remembered the village from which they came. A striking idée fixe of colonial settlement is the anecdotal account of an encounter with a former neighbour in a distant place, as though the colony were in some way a displaced village, only stretched and distended across a new and strange environment.2 But villages were more than memories. A complex and diverse literature about villages shows that rather than residual places, they were a medium through which people situated themselves in the modern world. A survey of these texts shows us the ways in which the village was understood, and how conceptions of the village migrated around the world. In this light the village is not so much a living environment as an idea of one that circulated in print. One influential version in Anglophone print culture derived from the village tale, a genre popularized by the English writer, Mary Russell Mitford. This

146

Josephine McDonagh

had its heyday in the 1820s and 1830s, but continued to exert an influence throughout the century and across the Anglophone world, with new editions and adaptations being produced up to the 1890s and beyond. A second account of the village came to prominence in the work of the legal historian Henry Sumner Maine in the 1860s and 1870s, and is academic and analytical in its conception. In Village Communities East and West (1871), Maine claimed that village communities in India preserved forms of village life that had existed in medieval Europe, including England. This work placed the village community at the centre of new theories of colonial governance, new ideas about arts and craft, and new ways of objectifying different peoples of the world. By the 1890s, under the spell of Maine, villages had become the favoured format in which to present living spectacles of native peoples – socalled ‘human zoos’ – in the popular international exhibitions that were a feature of urban culture throughout the world. In their various incarnations in printed texts, villages were highly mobile, extremely adaptable, yet always potent carriers of ideas and beliefs. This essay unravels these, and sketches a genealogy of ideas about villages in British and colonial print cultures until 1900.

The village tale In 1820s England, Mitford authored a popular series of ‘sketches of rural character and scenery’, known collectively as Our Village. Between 1822 and 1824 her ‘sketches’ were published serially in the Lady’s Magazine. They were subsequently collected and supplemented in volume form, eventually extending to five volumes, by a London publisher, George Whittaker at two year intervals between 1824 and 1832. Through seasonal topographical descriptions, usually presented in the form of the narrator and her greyhound dog’s ‘walks in the country’, combined with anecdotally-styled narratives about local people, Mitford presented a mundane world of everyday life within a small rural community, in which nothing much of note happened. Perhaps the most striking elements of the stories, besides even their extremely sunny and optimistic portrayal of country life, is the unexceptional and small-scale character of their contents: rather than plot-driven narratives, Mitford emphasizes routine events and repeated, even ritualized activities, preferring the bathetic mode over more sensational narrative forms.3 Even so, the stories drew an enthusiastic readership. Mitford transformed the sleepy village into a dynamic print commodity. Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) talks about village stories as a nostalgic genre that ‘peaks’ with Mitford in the 1820s before falling into irrelevance.4 This is misleading. Precedents for stories set in villages in earlier English literature certainly exist: Elizabeth Le Noir’s Village Anecdotes (1803), for instance, and Elizabeth Hamilton’s best-selling novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808).5 Yet Moretti overestimates the extent to which Mitford’s tales both conformed to the model of an established genre and

The village in the British colonial world

147

prefigured its decline. Instead Mitford’s village tales vitalized a genre that would influence writers across continents throughout the century. As well as British pastoral modes, Mitford drew inspiration from the American writer, Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819), and despite their avid localism, her stories wore a more cosmopolitan and commercial mantle than Moretti suggests.6 Mitford presents a village that is modernizing (e.g. she discusses the ‘macadamisation’ of the roads), in which the population is mobile (as she puts it, ‘we are generation of runaways’), and whose typical readers are as likely resident in Calcutta as in Colchester (e.g. ‘my young friend Emily’ who writes to her from India for village news).7 Her stories make mention of contemporary events, such as the Swing Riots (agrarian protests about the mechanization of farm labour in 1830), although the stories deflect their significance.8 Rather than an isolated backwater, Our Village presents a community adapting to the conditions of modernity, and addresses a readership beset by the same challenges: long-distance migration, changing employment patterns, and new technologies of transport and communication. In the newly energized, post-war literary market place of 1820s Britain, Mitford’s village stories were successful enough to provide Mitford and her publishers with a significant income. Her commercial success was tied to the formal innovations that she developed in her village stories. Initially prepared for magazine publication, their format as distinct, and easily separable, articles, connected to a larger whole, made for multiple reprinting opportunities. Individual episodes appeared in all the major annuals and gift books, such as, for instance, Forget-Me-Not, and Friendships Offerings;9 they were pirated in American magazines; and collected repeatedly in volumes in Britain and America, the contents reorganized, and sometimes illustrated. The independence of each episode was an important factor in accelerating their diffusion in a variety of print contexts on different continents. Mitford’s narrative voice, confidential and gossipy, addressed her readers with the same familiarity which she bestowed on the village inhabitants, turning her widely dispersed readers into a print version of a village community. Indeed Mitford’s style tended to make villages moveable. Through formulaic repetition between episodes, Mitford distilled her account of village life into a set of formal elements: repeated practices (for example walks in the country), an observational mode, and a group of eccentric country types, presented through the eyes of a friendly female narrator – all elements that could be recreated in new circumstances. Although based on Three Mile Cross, the Berkshire village in which Mitford lived, the village in these texts nevertheless is condensed into a set of rituals and behaviours, a group of characters, and a style of landscape, all detachable from their origin, and moveable around the world, mirroring the portability of the print commodity itself.10 Mitford’s village stories were emulated widely and in various hues. Tim Killick notes in one decade a glut of village titles: for example, the anonymously authored Village Incidents: or, Religious Influence in Domestic Scenes (1828), Amelia Barstow’s Village Walks: A Series of Sketches from

148

Josephine McDonagh

Life (1834), and Catherine Monkland’s Village Reminiscences by an Old Maid (1834).11 Among the most revealing of these is a comic novel named My Village Versus ‘Our Village’ (1833) by the Irish writer Thomas Crofton Croker. This replays Mitford’s script, but emphasizes the centrifugal effects of the kind of mobility which characterizes Mitford’s village life. As in Mitford’s Our Village, yet felt more sharply, the threat of dispersal is everywhere: as machines displace human labour, characters commute to distant counties or migrate to Australia. An intrinsic part of the genre is the awareness that, rather than isolated or self-contained units, villages are places within a global network of relations. As print commodities, Mitford’s tales travelled easily. They were especially popular in America and the British dominions, and were read by British residents in India. The stories had a ready appeal for recent emigrants, probably stirring memories of home. But equally likely is the possibility that they were read by settlers as a kind of manual for living in a new country. In this way they were adapted by writers in new settlements, such as the American novelist Caroline Kirkland, who styled herself as the Mrs Mitford for Michigan. In her novel, A New Home: Who’ll Follow?, published in New York in 1839, she observed ‘that Miss Mitford’s charming sketches of village life’ had been her model.12 The ritualistic walks, the formulaic encounters with country characters, the close observations of flora and fauna: Kirkland borrowed Mitford’s techniques for living and applied them in a new country. Mitford had provided a script for settlement. Her village captured the imagination of a migrant world. In Britain Mitford’s village tales shaped the British provincial novel of the mid-century: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851), Ellen Wood’s ‘Johnny Ludlow’ series (1874–99), and Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels (1855–64) all owe something to Mitford’s village tale. George Eliot drew on its conventions throughout her work, from her early Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), set in the village backwater of Shepperton, to Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871). Although Middlemarch takes its name from a provincial town, much of the action occurs in the neighbouring villages of Lowick and Freshitt. In Middlemarch, the village was emphatically incorporated into a mesh of places that stood at the centre of a network of imperial connections.13 It perhaps marks the end of the dominance of Mitford’s form of village tale. As Mitford’s village limped on into the twentieth century, it did so in a different style. The village tale was now a residual form, harking back to an earlier phase in the history of print media. Hence perhaps the violence and sensationalism that marks some twentieth-century versions of the village tale: in detective stories (Agatha Christie’s Miss Marples, for instance, a morbid reincarnation of Miss Mitford), and a multitude of village-based radio and television soap operas. In these village tales in which nothing used to happen, there were now murders aplenty, along with fires, robberies, adulteries, and extra marital affairs: all the crimes and misdemeanours of modern day melodrama.

The village in the British colonial world

149

Village communities A different way of thinking about villages began to appear in printed texts in the 1860s. It did not immediately displace Mitford’s village, but in the course of the 1870s, as Darwinist ideas began to shape almost every aspect of human understanding, this new village – which was in fact an ancient village – became dominant. Its principal conceptual architect in England was Henry Maine, a lawyer, academic, and colonial administrator, who placed the village at the centre of his theories about the evolutionary development of modern societies.14 Maine discussed village communities in his book Ancient Law (1861). As a lawyer and legal historian, Maine’s special focus was the development of legal conceptions, which he characterized as a progression from status, or customary law, to contract, or civil law. In ancient societies, before the Roman codification of law, he claims, law was instituted through customary practice rather than through written codes. These were the customs of society in its most primitive form, which Maine held to have been based on the patriarchal family, in which ‘[t]he eldest male parent […] is absolutely supreme in his household.’ One consequence of this was that property was held communally rather than individually; it was of a ‘representative rather than a proprietary character’.15 ‘Property once belonged not to individuals, nor even to isolated families’, wrote Maine, ‘but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model’ (AL, 222). These ‘larger societies’ were an ‘aggregate of families’, or a ‘corporation’, in which families were considered to be ‘perpetual and inextinguishable’ (AL, 104). This was the makeup of the ancient village: a customary society built on simple and unchanging rituals and hierarchy, and whose keynotes were stability and continuity over time. Such villages had existed in Europe in the medieval, pre-feudal past; yet they were also to be found preserved as living organisms in India.16 As societies became more complex, Maine noted, they developed abstract contractual agreements, which gradually transformed the nature of both law and society. In contrast to customary law, contracts were universally valid and not tied to particular local circumstances. With contracts came nations, in which individuals owned property, and in which ownership of land was related to political power – hence, according to Maine, the history of land enclosure in England. The ‘progress’ that Maine describes in Ancient Law is precisely that which Raymond Williams describes in Country and the City, yet from the other side of the fence: not as the diminution of the rights of common people, but rather as the procurement for a few of individual rights to own land and territory. Maine conceptualized this progress from status to contract as a gradual ‘disentanglement’ of absolute from communal property, and of individual from collective rights. In his later work, Village Communities, he expresses this as ‘a slow unwinding’, as though the history of property were something like a ribbon, gradually uncoiling to its full extent.17 For Maine, the process was teleological, a natural progression from a primitive

150

Josephine McDonagh

state of stagnancy or knottedness, to the unraveled national civilization of his own day. In India, however, the ancient village community persisted as ‘an organized patriarchal society and an assemblage of co-proprietors’ (VC, 216). Maine’s descriptions of slow, custom-bound family life in India, dominated by allpowerful patriarchs, and in which fortunes remained intact, were appealing to readers of the day for whom themes such as property, inheritance and dynastic family life were familiar from their reading of contemporary novels.18 George Eliot, when composing Middlemarch (1871), drew not only on the format of the village tale popularized by Mitford; she also took detailed notes on the Hindoo village from Maine’s Ancient Law as the source for her depictions of English families and their struggles over inheritance.19 For Eliot, the hierarchies and exclusions of the Oriental family, as described by Maine, were even closer to home than Maine had reckoned. Middlemarch captured a pivotal moment when Mitford’s village tales overlapped with the new evolutionary village of Maine. The success of Ancient Law led to Maine’s appointment in 1862 as Legal Member of the Governor General of India’s Council in Calcutta.20 During his seven-year tenure in that position he had ample opportunity to study Indian law at close hand, and his work was influential in reshaping modes of colonial government. His belief that native society, preserved in village communities, was in its foundations ‘diametrically opposed’ to modern society, according to Karuna Mantena, ‘provided an alibi for permanent, protective rule’.21 It presented the basis of a new regime of so-called ‘indirect rule’ in India and elsewhere in the British Empire for the next several decades. In India Maine shifted attention away from the colonial factory towns of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta to villages in the interior, where laws were ‘never reduced to writing at all’ (VC, 34), and where the ‘council of village elders … merely declares what has always been’ (VC, 68). For a colonial administrator in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the idea that the authentic India was an unchanging, customary society, persisting over thousands of years, offered a powerful vision of stability and order.22 For the previous generation of Utilitarian British rulers, the Indian village had been an impediment to progress and obstructed the free market in land and goods. Maine’s work, on the contrary, re-valued (a version of) native culture, which through indirect rule, it would preserve and fix in a ‘primitive’ form.23 His work thus stimulated the collection of a vast repository of information about village customs through extensive settlement reports. This provided the foundations of the academic study of native communities, spawning learned societies, publications and lectures in the anthropology of India.24 Maine’s attitude was paternalistic and conservative, and at the heart of it all was an image of a village.25 On his return to England in 1869, Maine was appointed Professor of Jurisprudence in Oxford. Ensconced among a remarkable group of thinkers all interested in the comparative development of societies, from Max Müller (the

The village in the British colonial world

151

comparative philologist) to Andrew Lang (the mythologist), E. B. Tylor (the anthropologist), and William Stubbs (the medieval historian), Maine lectured on the evolution of the law.26 His Village Communities is an assemblage of six lectures which drew equally on his experience in India and his theoretical speculations regarding the historical development of legal conceptions of property and inheritance. He argued that the communities that had existed in Anglo-Saxon England (VC, 10) persisted as ‘a living, not a dead, institution’ (VC, 12) in India. ‘Sometimes the Past is the Present’, he writes with a flourish; just ‘removed [from us] by varying distances’ (VC, 7). The book attempted to close these gaps of history and geography, to reconstruct the ancient village in English history from its remnants discoverable in both the landscape and legislature, and, in parallel, reassemble the shards of an ancient society that was still to be found in present day India in the customary practices of the village. Village Communities presents a pursuit at once anthropological, archaeological, and historical, drawing East and West together in a beguiling mix of observation, legal theory, and a kind of mythopoeic speculation. As with Ancient Law, Village Communities addressed a more general reader than its academic apparatus might suggest. This may explain the lyrical aura that imbues Maine’s accounts of both medieval European and Indian villages. In describing the history of land tenure in England, he finds poetry in the words that describe it, revelling in both their sounds and their complex meanings: ‘When the soil is arable, they are most usually called “common”, “commonable”, or open fields, or sometimes simply “intermixed” lands. When the lands are in grass, they are sometimes known as “lot meadows,” sometimes as “lammas lands”, though the last expression is occasionally used of arable soil.’ And like poems, these ancient words convey complex and debatable meanings. Here they speak of shared ownership, common property, and redistribution by casting lots: the several shares in the arable fields, sometimes, but very rarely, shift from one owner to another in each successive year; but this is frequently the rule with the meadows, which, when they are themselves in a state of severalty, are often distributed once a year by casting lots among the persons … (VC, 86) By obscuring the measure of periodicity (‘sometimes’ ‘but rarely’; ‘frequently’, ‘often’, ‘once a year’) the depiction assumes mythic timelessness. What is most alluring for Maine, though, seems to be that the traces of this past have a new vitality in the readily observed landscape of modernity: ‘the footprints of the past were quite recently found close to the capital and to the seats of both Universities’ (VC, 89), he writes, in one case observable from the tracks of the Great Northern Railway. This is a familiar trope: the railway as an archaeological tool, its extreme modernity revealing an equally extreme past.27

152

Josephine McDonagh

Maine’s approach to India is similar. In Village Communities, the Indian village, in its earliest stages, had a kind of kinetic vitality. Then it was organic, self-enclosed, and adaptable, ‘a nearly complete establishment of occupations and trades for enabling [the villagers] to continue their collective life without assistance’ (VC, 125).28 Trades were hereditary, passed on from father to son: a Headman, or Council, Blacksmith, Harness-maker, Shoemaker, a Brahmin for performance of ceremonies, and ‘even a Dancing girl, for attendance at festivities’. This ensures not only stability but also the transmission, and refinement over time, of skills and expertise. Yet the village also includes those outside the group: traders, for instance, who ‘bring their goods from distant markets’ (VC, 126–7), and the more troubling presence of ‘outsiders’, or ‘outcasts’, whose function is to mark the boundaries of the community. In time, the village organism loses its capacity for absorption, and turns from an adapting group into a ‘stagnant’ one. Maine included among the factors that hastened this transformation contact with British colonials. He thus infused the work with a melancholic awareness that the British had participated in the village’s decline, a wistful regret about the (seemingly) unavoidable costs of modernity.29 Maine’s ideas about village communities had a wide sphere of influence. J. S. Mill had a measure of their significance when he congratulated Maine for observing that ‘the system under which nearly the whole soil of Great Britain has come to be appropriated by about thirty thousand families – the far greater part of it by a few thousands of these – is neither the only nor the oldest form of landed property’, from which he muses that ‘there is no natural necessity for its being preferred to all other forms.’30 These were powerful ideas and insinuated themselves into contemporary debates and policy, and not only in India. In Ireland, for instance, through George Campbell’s The Irish Land (1869), Maine’s ideas shaped British policy on Irish land reform.31 Campbell, a long-serving administrator in British India, who had overlapped with Maine in Calcutta, on his return to Britain in 1868 undertook a tour of Ireland. It is hardly surprising that he would see in Ireland something like he had witnessed in India in terms of the whittling away of customary rights of local peasants under a colonial regime. Campbell argued for the legal recognition of Irish tenants’ traditional rights as a way of restoring order in the troubled context of anticolonial struggles. But driven by a vision of a pre-feudal Irish peasant village society, in contrast to the modernity of British land markets, British attempts to reform Irish land were fraught with contradictions and singularly unsuccessful in stemming the tide of Irish revolt. Second, Maine’s account of village labour, and the preservation of craft through the hereditary transmission of skill and technique, fed into new and in some cases radical ways of thinking about labour. In particular it appealed to thinkers in the Arts and Crafts movement interested in developing alternative modes of production to the factory system of modern industrial cities. For William Morris and John Ruskin, for instance, who also looked back to

The village in the British colonial world

153

England’s medieval past for new models of labour, Maine’s ideas had an obvious appeal. Morris in particular was drawn to Maine’s account of the Indian village in which craft workers enjoyed ideal conditions of labour.32 Third, Maine’s romantic account of the Indian village helped to intensify British and American interest in Indian aesthetic styles in the late nineteenth century, and the new taste for oriental consumer goods. This is most clearly demonstrated in the influential work of George Birdwood, a colonial administrator in India who developed a special interest in Indian arts and crafts. His two-volume The Industrial Arts of India (1880), initially prepared as a popular guide to the East India Company’s India Museum when it moved to the Science and Art Department at South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1880, promoted an interchange between European designers and Indian materials and methods of design, and became a handbook for European connoisseurs of Indian handicraft at the turn of the century. For Birdwood, the key to Indian aesthetic refinement lay in the organization of labour within the Indian village as described by Maine. It was this everyday environment, supposedly unchanged for millennia, that had created the conditions for the production of exquisite works of art: outside the entrance of the single village street … the hereditary potter sits by his wheel moulding the swift revolving clay by the natural curves of his hand. At the back of the houses … there are two or three looms at work in blue and scarlet and gold, the frames hanging between the acacia trees, the yellow flowers of which drop fast on the webs as they are being woven. In the street the brass and copper smiths are hammering away at their pots and pans; and further down, in the veranda of the rich man’s house, is the jeweller working rupees and gold mohrs into fair jewellery.33 Like Maine, Birdwood emphasized the longevity, repetition, and customary nature of life in the village. And like Maine, he also emphasized its sensual aspects, its intense colours and scents, the rhythmic sounds of the brass and copper smiths, and the tactile qualities of the revolving clay. Birdwood’s picturesque view of ritualized village life in some ways even recalls Mitford’s English village. Like the English village, Birdwood’s Indian village is also threatened by the diasporic pressures of industrialization and the expansion of global markets. He describes how ‘these hereditary handicraftsmen’ are lured into leaving their ‘democratic village communities in hundreds and thousands into the colossal mills of Bombay, to drudge in gangs, for tempting wages, at manufacturing piece goods, in competition with Manchester.’34 Poised on the brink of extinction, its refined creations always about to be overwhelmed by the coarser and more plentiful products of mechanized labour, the village, as a place of the production, is further reified. The village environment and its way of life are integral parts of these Indian crafted objects, and a crucial element in their value. Hence the significance of regional variation: the second volume of the work includes a map of India

154

Josephine McDonagh

and a ‘trustworthy index of every district and town in British India where manufactures of any special quality were produced’.35 The formal features of the works relate directly to their local conditions of production, as though to appreciate an object’s value, one must also understand its village origin. Although he includes a critique of the social and cultural impacts of industrialization and global commodity culture, Birdwood paradoxically also aims to energize another kind of international trade in commodities: the market in oriental luxury goods, made more affordable by the ever-decreasing costs in transportation. His book contains advertisements for London emporia where such goods could be commissioned and purchased, suggesting that even middle-class consumers, the likely readers of this book, could command Indian peasant labourers from the comfort of their British armchairs. In doing so, they would make some small contribution to the continuity of thousand-year-old traditions. Yet his overall emphasis on form and technique turned craft works into fine art objects and detached them from their village origins. No longer a living community, the village is now the guarantor of value in the market for affordable art. At the turn of the twentieth century, women readers may well have perused the new, illustrated editions of Mitford’s very English Our Village, such as for instance, a selected edition illustrated by Hugh Thompson, and published by Macmillan in 1893. As they did so, they may well have been wearing Indian jewellery, and have been sitting in rooms decorated with Indian rugs and ceramics – commodities bearing the traces of their Indian village manufacture. In the commodity market of late nineteenth-century colonial Britain, two such different, and distant, villages converged.

Village spectacles A third version of the village which was no less moveable, and which also owed its existence to the colonial expansion implicit in Maine’s work, emerged in the context of international exhibitions, and circulated in the printed ephemera of exhibition culture: postcards, photographs, advertisements, programmes. This was the use of a constructed village as a backdrop to ethnographic display. Ever since the presentation of Indian weavers in a confected village setting in the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in London in 1851, international exhibitions favoured artificial village backdrops as a device for the display of people from other cultures. But while the Great Exhibition presented Indian craftsmanship, later exhibitions placed greater emphasis on the display of racial difference, in which the village props evoked something less like a dynamic workshop and more like Maine’s ‘stagnant’ village community. Take for example ‘le village nègre’ at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889; or the very popular ‘Stanley and Africa’ Exhibition in London in 1890, where the main attraction was a life-sized model of an African village with genuine ‘natives’, two boys from Swaziland who entertained visitors by playing music and dancing by a hut that was ‘fitted with

The village in the British colonial world 36

155

native weapons, domestic utensils, and agricultural implements’. The village was the standard backdrop to racial display. People from all parts of the world – Africa, Polynesia, Japan, native Americans, as well as the European Celtic fringe – Bretons, Savoyards, highland Scots, and Irish – all were presented in imaginary native villages, which ironically, were remarkably similar to each other: flimsily made out of theatrical props – a grass hut, a palm tree, some crude cooking implements or tools – which served as a backdrop to the performance of ‘primitive’ behaviour. Postcards and other printed memorabilia from the exhibitions showed villages in the process of assemblage, suggesting that the labour of constructing this artificial habitat was as much part of the display as the finished product itself.37 Village props sometimes even transferred between exhibitions so that, for instance, the huts that served for a Senegalese village in one venue could find themselves doing service in Dahomey in another.38 They provided a stage for performances of native behaviours, frequently scantily clad dark-skinned people, dancing or singing, jumping in and out of water, but more often sitting and staring into space, while fully-dressed, white people look on. In film footage recorded at the exhibitions, the fragile artificiality of the village and the slow motion of the repeated actions of the native actors contrast with the hypermodernity and speed of the city behind it. The rickety props that represent the village in these ethnographic displays provide perhaps the most extreme example of characteristics that are in evidence in all the versions of the village that I have outlined in this essay. All are mobile rather than rooted in particular geographies, and all derive their characteristic form from the conditions of global commodity exchange in which they emerged. For Mitford that meant a village constructed within – and productive of – the contours of new, internationally circulating forms of print, such as the serial and the annuals or gift books: ritualized practices, repeated over time, and adaptable to new spaces of colonization. For Maine, in contrast, the ‘primitive’ nature of the village community served to fix the colony outside, yet in subordination to, the modern metropole, making it, paradoxically, amenable to a number of different relationships to commodity forms. After Maine, the village might provide a space of radical critique, an alternative to absolute property and industrial labour relations. In India in the twentieth century, largely through the influence of Mohandas Gandhi’s writings and experiments in village collectives in India and South Africa, the village became a potent place of anti-colonial struggle, spawning its own distinctive literary manifestations in a tradition of village novels by Indian writers in English, notably Raja Rao (Kanthapura [1938]), R. K. Narayan (Swami and Friends [1935]) and Mulk Raj Anand (The Village [1939]).39 But in British colonial works of the late nineteenth century it would more likely create the conditions for commodifying human difference itself. In the exhibition, the village became a thing in itself to circulate, exchange, and from which to make a profit.

156

Josephine McDonagh

The village lives on into the twenty-first century as an entity that has a peculiarly close relationship to global capital: theme parks, suburban housing complexes, wealthy consumer precincts of major cities, complete with luxury brands and international cuisine, places in which local attachment is at once fabricated and fetishized. These trends are global, and not confined to western countries. Ann Grodzins Gold notes a five-star hotel in Rajasthan, called ‘Chokhi Dhani (“Swell Hamlet” in Rajasthani)’, whose website advertises the opportunity for tourists to make ‘a memorable visit to the enticing interiors of the state … Clinching the same arcadian looks, [the Rajasthan government] has created a hangout that still nurtures the age-old culture and traditions of Rajasthan, while efficiently catering to almost every [need] of an international traveler.’40 This is a vision of an ancient village, frozen in time, redolent of Maine’s village community. From the opposite ideological perspective, however, it is worth remembering, in the spirit of Raymond Williams, that villages still also provide a conceptual space for resistance to global capital. For activists in the Occupy movement, for instance, protesting against the social and economic inequalities created by global corporate finance, the village has provided a literal base – a tent community, complete with food, drink, and even a university for campaigns in Zucotti Park, New York (2011), St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London (2012, see Figure 10.1), and around the world. And in the richly affective domain of the postcolonial novel – from Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy (2008–2015) of novels based on the opium wars, to Colm Tóibín’s eloquent Irish-American drama, Brooklyn (2009) – the village persists as the

Figure 10.1 Occupy village, London, December 2011 (author’s photograph)

The village in the British colonial world

157

primary venue for human connection, even as it is dispersed, and syncopated, across continents.

Notes 1 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973); population statistics from Population Reference Bureau, http://www.prb.org/ Publications/Datasheets/2008/2008wpds.aspx (accessed 13 June 2015). 2 See for example [Thomas Sockett], Emigration. Letters from Sussex Emigrants who sailed from Portsmouth, in April 1832.On board the ships Lord Melville and Eveline for Upper Canada, second edn. (John Phillips: Petworth; Longman: London, 1833). 3 The best description of Mitford’s style is by Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 122: ‘a cross between domesticized picturesque description … documentary fiction of manners … and newly relaxed style of contemporary personal essay.’ See also Tim Killick, British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 93–96; also Josephine McDonagh, ‘Rethinking provincialism in mid-nineteenth-century fiction: Our Village to Villette’, Victorian Studies, 2013, 55 (3): 399–424. 4 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005), especially 63: ‘for every genre comes a moment when its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality’. 5 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (New York: Longman, 1989), 86–89. 6 See Martha Bohrer, ‘Thinking locally: Novelistic worlds in provincial fiction’ in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener eds, The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 89–106, and McDonagh, ‘Rethinking provincialism’, 404. 7 Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (London: Whittaker, 1824–32), Volume 1: 253, Volume 3: 1. See McDonagh, ‘Rethinking provincialism’, 405–407. 8 On her deflections, see Helsinger, Rural Scenes, 130–131 and Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 59–64. For another view, see McDonagh, ‘Rethinking provincialism’, 408. 9 Andrew Boyle, An Index to the Annuals, Vol. 1: The Authors, 1820–1850 (Worcester: A. Boyle, 1967), 93. 10 McDonagh, ‘Rethinking provincialism’, 409. Cf. John Plotz in Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 174: ‘cultural portability generates definitions of “neighbourhood” that have become detached from geography, so that “local space” can itself become a portable notion.’ Villages take on many of the characteristics of the objects in Victorian novels discussed by Plotz; like portable objects, they carry the affective charge of home, while also being eminently moveable. 11 Killick, British Short Fiction, 102. 12 Caroline Kirkland [Mrs Mary Clavers], A New Home – Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (New York: Francis, 1841), 6. 13 Josephine McDonagh, ‘Imagining locality and affiliation: George Eliot’s villages’ in Amanda Anderson, and Harry E. Shaw eds, A Companion to George Eliot (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 353–69. 14 My account of Maine’s conception of the village draws on, inter alia, Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Clive Dewey, ‘Images of the

158

15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

Josephine McDonagh

Village community: A study of Anglo-Indian ideology,’ Modern Asian Studies, 1972, 6(3): 291–328; S. B. Cooke, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi: Sage, 1993), 68–78; and C. A. Bayly, ‘Maine and change in nineteenth-century India’ and Gordon Johnson, ‘India and Henry Maine’, in Alan Diamond ed., The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 389–397 and 376–388. Ancient Law; its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 102. Henceforth AL. Maine was influenced by the German medieval historians of institutions, G. L. Von Maurer and Nasse of Bonn, with whose works he aimed to familiarize British readers. His ideas about the significance of medieval social forms, especially the village, were widely shared by scholars in Britain and Europe in this period. These extended to Karl Marx, who became fascinated with the village in the forms of the German Mark and the RussianMir, as an ancient form of communal society which persisted in some residual forms in contemporary Europe. On the significance of this in Marx’s late work and Marx’s differences from Maine, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2016), 904–937. Village-Communities in the East and West. Six lectures delivered at Oxford (London: J. Murray, 1871), 15. Henceforth VC. George Feaver, From Status to Contract: a Biography of Sir Henry Maine, 1822–1888 (London: Longmans, 1969), 44–5, cites American historian John Fiske in a letter to his fiancée in1861: ‘no novel that I ever read ever enchained me more’. See John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (eds), George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ Notebooks: A Transcription (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 204–6. See also McDonagh, ‘Imagining locality’, 366–7. Feaver, From Status to Contract, 65–73. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, esp. Ch. 5. Citation on p.149. See also Mahmood Mandani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). On the longer history of British colonial approaches to the Indian village, see also Dewey, ‘Images of the village community’. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 1, 4–5, 50. Maine instigated a new attitude towards caste, seeing this as a strategically necessary source of social cohesion. Dewey, ‘Images of the village community’, 364. C. A. Bayly points out that there was a ‘counterpart among Indian intellectuals’ in a group of nationalists, who shared Maine’s historicist and conservative outlook – Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Raja Shiva Prasad, and Gandhi – and his celebration of the Indian village. Bayly, ‘Maine and change in nineteenth-century India’, 393. Feaver, From Status to Contract, 111. Michael Freeman, Prehistoric Victorians: Tracks to a Lost World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 41–51. Dewey points out that similar descriptions exist in an earlier literature by British officials, in particular in the Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, 28th July 1812, vol. 2, 157. Dewey argues that, unlike these earlier commentaries, Maine’s analysis is part of a wider understanding of the systematic nature of land use and ownership. Dewey, ‘Images of the village community’, 296. See also Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 141. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 138–145. Mantena argues that Maine’s view that the crisis in the Indian village had been precipitated by colonial government added moral force to his case for indirect rule. See 150–152. J. S. Mill, ‘Maine on Village Communities’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. IX (1 May, 1871), 543–56. On Maine’s contribution to nineteenth-century European debates

The village in the British colonial world

31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38

39

40

159

about alternative forms of property, see Paolo Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property: Collective Property in the Juridical Consciousness of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Sarah Maurer, The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth Century Britain and Ireland (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 128–130; Cooke, Imperial Affinities, 78–81. Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) traces the complex patterns of influence between Maine and Ruskin and Morris, and extending to Indian nationalists at the end of the century, including Gandhi, whose swadeshi movement included the heroic vision of the patriot craft worker. See also Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A postindustrial prelude to postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Ghandism’, Critical Inquiry, 1996, 22 (3): 466–85. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1880), II, 135. See also Mathur, India by Design, ch.1. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, II, 135. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, I, vi. Brian Murray, ‘A tourist over an unknown country: Travel, tourism and spectacle’, in unpublished PhD dissertation, Henry Morton Stanley and the Literature of Exploration: Empire, Media, Modernity (King’s College London, 2011). See, for example, a postcard from the Lyon Exposition of 1914, depicting the installation of ‘le village noir’ reproduced in Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep eds, Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (Arles: Actes Sud, Paris: Musée du Quai Branly, 2011), p. 212. Blanchard et al., Human Zoos. Pascal Blanchard has argued that such human displays, which were a mainstay of the major universal and colonial expositions at the end of the century, and toured capital cities and provincial towns across Europe, America, and the colonies, should be seen within a longer western tradition of displaying human difference in racist and objectified ways. For a rich discussion of the ways the Indian village becomes a site through which to envisage anti- colonial resistance, see Anupama Mohan, Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012). The relationship of this distinctively Indian literature to the colonial treatment of the village is beyond the scope of this essay. ‘Holiday in Chokhi Dhani’, http://www.shubhyatra.com/rajasthan/choki-dhani.htm l (accessed 23 December 2008). Ann Grodzins Gold, personal email. On villages in contemporary Rajasthan, see her ‘Scenes of rural change’ in Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13–29.

This page intentionally left blank

Section IV

Texts in motion

This page intentionally left blank

11 Indigo and print The case of the ‘Indigo-Planting Mirror’ Abhijit Gupta

The Neel Darpan of Mr Long is accurate and true Our peasants’ scanty coins have disappeared into the blue. With sorrow spent the poor lament the soreness of their plight Of their woes in purple prose does Harish Chandra write. Grant and Eden, men of reason, righteous and fair Try to ease the farmers’ lot and lift them from despair. The Indigo Report perusing, who can keep from swiftly losing All good humour at the rumour of Wells’s unjust decree? Guiltless Long stood in the dock while Wells and Jackson and Peacock Whom mere confinement failed to please, fined him a thousand new rupees. Muttering against the swine, good Singha-babu paid the fine. So then they set on Walter Brett with cries of ‘Treachery!’ Hear us, British-Goddess pale! Puisne judges’ cunning hail! ’Tis all too plain the legal brain is prodigiously shrewd. Calcutta, unhappy city, ruled by this ferocious deity Is now a place of butchery and race-hatred and feud. Like Bedlamites on courtroom benches, judges dance with shrieks and blenches. Pausing now and then, however, to demand when men as clever As themselves e’er pounded gavels midst our motley throng. O prescient Peele and sapient Seton, matters grave you legislate on With such flair that in despair we suffer every wrong. Mighty Queen, in this dark hour, we beg protection of your power Save us from their sins, O Queen – thus Dheeraj ends his song.1

I begin with a song which may never have been sung, but, which in the summer of 1861, appeared in the pages of the periodical Somprakash as a brief chronicle of the times. By then, the focus of the so-called ‘Indigo disturbances’ in Bengal had shifted from the countryside to the city of Calcutta, in the form of a much-publicized trial concerning the English translation of a Bengali play excoriating the misdeeds of the indigo planters. In the first stanza of the song, the names of Long, Harish Chandra, Grant, Eden, Wells, Jackson, Peacock, Singha-babu and Walter Brett, alternately praised and reviled, appeared in quick succession while the second stanza encompassed an

164

Abhijit Gupta

appeal to the ‘British-goddess pale’ and the ‘Mighty Queen’ of England by the peasants of Bengal, praying for the protection of her power. The songwriter, going by the name of Dheeraj, also provided the raga to which the song was to be sung should anyone have wished to perform it. This was not the only song to be written or sung during the indigo agitation, for versifying and singing seemed to come naturally to the inhabitants of the lower delta of Bengal, and songs and ballads were a staple of the traditional modes of Bengali cultural expression as well as more recent modes such as the theatrical stage. But this intersection between performance, print and protest was something new, unprecedented in the political life of the subcontinent. In this essay, I propose to look at a particular episode from the indigo agitation as an instance of a commodity entering into a field of cultural production and generating a cultural economy with its own currency and rules of transaction. Thus the deeply divisive and brutal commerce of indigo led to a secondary, social life of the commodity in which the negotiations over its fate touched on a hitherto invisible realm of emotion and affect. In their attempts to shape the subsequent career of indigo, the various stakeholders – planters, peasants, the government, missionaries and the local intelligentsia – all entered into a complex negotiation whose unit of currency was chiefly the printed word, mobilized variously in books, periodicals, newspapers and plays. This essay will consider generally various genres of print that appeared during the indigo disturbances, but particularly the English translation of Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Nil-Darpan, titled The Indigo-Planting Mirror.2 In the history of the commodities that were traded between Britain and colonial India, the case of indigo is unique. Indigo is not a finished product in itself but a vegetable extract which is used as a colouring agent. It is therefore an additive, and a messy one at that, which is not valued in itself but for the value it imparts to textiles. Due to the large returns it fetched, nearly twenty million square kilometres were dedicated to the cultivation of indigo plants in the nineteenth century, chiefly in India. But like most plantation crops, the farming of indigo was also a history of brutality, forced cultivation and violation of farmers’ rights. According to Blair Kling, the years between 1834 and 1847 had seen the indigo trade at its most prosperous in lower Bengal and in 1842, indigo had accounted for as much as 46% of the total value of goods exported from Calcutta. This prosperity, however, was fragile. The Union Bank of Calcutta, which had bankrolled most of the Bengal planters since 1839, failed in 1847, leading to a sea change in the system of operations of the indigo trade. According to Kling, the number of European planters managing small marginal concerns decreased, while the remaining concerns established ‘local indigo seignories’ and expanded their operations. The additional underpaid Indians and Eurasians hired to supervise production increased the burden of extortion on the peasants while the owners demanded greater economies and authorized less liberal advances to the cultivators. In effect, the fall of

Indigo and print

165

the Union Bank led to a more oppressive system of indigo planting in Lower Bengal.3 Disquiet over such oppressive practices began to be aired in the periodical press from the mid-1850s, in Bengali as well as English. By the end of the decade, the protests against the indigo trade had become a full-scale movement, in which the ryots’ cause was taken up by a loose coalition comprising the Bengali intelligentsia, the vernacular press, European missionaries and a section of the government. The Calcutta Missionary Conference of 1855, for instance, levelled a range of charges against the indigo planters, which were indignantly refuted by the English-language press of Calcutta. Then the Sepoys rose and fell, and for the time being, the indigo question was consigned to the back-burner. But after the assumption of the crown’s rule over India in 1858, the pot began to simmer once more. In 1859, John Peter Grant, who was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, calculated that the ryot lost 7 rupees per bigah (one-third of an acre) when he cultivated indigo in place of another crop. More understanding of the ryots’ grievances than his predecessor, he was instrumental in passing Act XI of 1860 which contained two key provisions: a measure to enforce the fulfilment of indigo contracts so that planters could complete their spring sowings, and a provision for the appointment of a commission of inquiry. By this time, it was common practice for planters to choose the most fertile lands for indigo planting, often compelling cultivators to accept forced cash advances or entering into forged contracts with them, which resulted in the ryot being in a state of perpetual indebtedness to the planter. Following the submissions of the Indigo Commission in 1860, a war of words broke out over indigo in every conceivable print genre – newspaper reports, pamphlets, letters, books, minutes, government reports, plays and even songs were deployed on both sides of the indigo divide. In 1860 for example, a volume titled Rural Life in Bengal appeared under the imprint of W. Thacker of Newgate, London. Reviewing the book, The Calcutta Review, usually not noted for its pro-ryot sentiments, remarked: There can be no doubt that the cultivation of indigo goes against the grain of a ryot … the ryot finds it more profitable to sow paddy. Facts are stubborn things. Rice is more profitable than indigo. Now we would very much like to know where the author … ever succeeded in buying the commonest and coarsest rice at 14 annas a maund. Elsewhere, the reviewer notes, The ryot never knows where he stands with the planter. He is continually taking fresh advances, and he never knows how much of his debt has been paid off by his labour of the past year. In this state of uncertainty he works on, but never finds himself better off than he was when he first

166

Abhijit Gupta began. Like Sisyphus he succeeds in rolling the stone up the hill, only to see it roll down again. Like Ixion he is chained to a wheel which rolls and rolls and never stops. Like Tantalus…,

and so on, the reviewer at this point getting somewhat carried away by his classical allusions.4 All this had become common knowledge in 1859–60, thanks to the sustained campaign waged against the indigo planters by periodicals such as the Hindoo Patriot, edited by Harish Chandra Mukherjee, and repeated intercessions by the missionary lobby. Among the latter, the Rev. James Long had been particularly active, along with the Rev. Bomwetsch: in 1859, Long himself had been instrumental in urging the Church Missionary Society Central Committee to go before the parliamentary committee on European colonization in India to expose the tyrannical conduct of the indigo planters. In April 1860, he called on the lieutenant-governor to discuss plans for the proposed indigo commission, after the disturbances over indigo literally arrived at his doorstep. In a letter to London, the missionary wrote: Last Friday morning [20 April 1860] while quietly reading a Sanskrit MSS with my pandit 50 ryots presented themselves at my door who had fled from Nuddea and Jessore districts to escape the oppression of the planters, they brought me a letter from Mr. Bomswetch … so I went down to consult Mr Duff on the question and he called at my house a meeting of some missionary friends to consult what was to be done … we came to the conclusion unanimously that it was our duty as missionaries to do what we could do for the poor people … that we repudiate taking up the question on any political ground but simply that Indigo planting interferes with our own work as much as the slave trade does with Mission work on the coast of Africa …. The men Musalmans and Hindus gave their evidence before us and we were all struck with their straight-forward, honest tone – the evidence has been taken down in Bengali, Dr Duff will have it translated into English and copies will be sent to England.5 This was a crucial encounter as far as Long was concerned, for, according to his biographer Geoffrey Oddie, he had managed to preserve, even during the heated controversies of 1856, some semblance of impartiality and restraint in his public comments on the indigo question. But as a result of this encounter with the ryots in April 1860, he seems to have found it almost impossible to suppress any longer his feelings of anger and indignation. Five days later, he wrote a letter to the editor of Bengal Hurkaru under the pseudonym of ‘A Missionary’.6 Long had in the meantime also been appointed to a sub-committee of the Calcutta Missionary Conference to gather evidence on the indigo question,

Indigo and print

167

and it was in this capacity that Long started first corresponding and then meeting with Lieutenant-governor Grant. The two men discussed arrangements for the proposed indigo commission, and Long also conveyed the views of the missionary sub-committee. The indigo commission convened in May 1860 and called 134 witnesses, of whom 15 were officials, 21 planters or explanters, 8 missionaries, 13 zamindars and talukdars, and 77 ryots. While the commission was hearing the depositions, Dinabandhu Mitra, an inspector of the post-office department was busy writing a play exposing the tyrannies of indigo planters. This play, Nil-darpan, was published from Dacca in September 1860 and immediately galvanized public opinion.7 In his famous essay on the play Nil-darpan in 1974, the historian Ranajit Guha delivered a stinging rebuke to those who had mythologized the play as a radical gesture, and argued that the play did little more than comfort the bad conscience of a liberal-humanitarian bourgeoisie.8 Guha sought to locate the true epicentre of the uprising in the various armed insurrections that had broken out among the peasantry in various districts of rural Bengal but noted that the radical potential of such responses was surrendered in ‘an immense hinterland of compromise and conformism’ into which the liberal retreated ‘from a direct contest of power with the colonial masters’ (the word liberal is used a total of 41 times in his essay). Guha also wonders why such a mediocre work by a mediocre author became such a phenomenon. About Dinabandhu he wrote: He was one of the young men, patronized by Ishwarchandra Gupta, who seemed to have some bad prose and worse verse published in the Sambad Pravakar between 1853 and 1856. Then he seems to have disappeared from the Calcutta literary scene altogether for a number of years, until he surfaces again, in 1860, with a play published, far from the metropolis, in Dacca.9 Guha is of the opinion that though the play was published in September 1860, it was not until May 1861 ‘that the Calcutta intelligentsia began to take any serious notice of it’.10 While this is true, Guha seems to pay curiously little attention to the factors that made this possible, and dismisses them by saying: During this eight months a number of things happened due to an apparently accidental lapse in communication between the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal and the Secretary to the government of Bengal on what was indeed a routine administrative matter, and culminated in the planters’ decision to make the play a cause for libel. It was at this point that the literati of Bengal came to realise that the defence of Nil-darpan could be made to look like the defence of the peasantry without anyone risking his head at the hands of the planter’s lathials.11 What Guha glosses over as a ‘routine administrative matter’ was in fact a remarkable instance of print becoming a key battlefield in staging the indigo

168

Abhijit Gupta

question, a proxy terrain on which the chief actors hid behind their surrogates. But while the controversy excited by the play took the agency of the movement further away from the ryots – and placed it in the hands of the liberal bourgeoisie – it is perhaps simplistic to tar the entire liberal establishment with the same brush. Certainly, Guha is able to show how Dinabandhu’s play excoriated the planters only to elevate the Raj, and how the ultimate effect of the play was instrumental in reinforcing the notion that British rule was a good thing for India. At the same time, to read the play solely in terms of its textual datum is to miss the equally significant roles played by the material processes of the book’s production and distribution. It is not clear whether Dinabandhu Mitra sent his play to Long, or whether the Reverend came across it himself. Both are equally likely, since Long acted as a kind of unofficial clearing-house for publications in Indian languages. At the trial – about which more later – Long would say: My time has been spent chiefly among the Natives, engaged in Vernacular teaching, in the charge of a body of Native Christians, and in the promotion of Christian Vernacular literature … I have aimed for the last ten years in my leisure hours to be an exponent of Native opinion in its bearing on the spiritual, social and intellectual welfare of Natives of this land; as for instance, when applied to, on the part of the Court of Directors, seven years ago, to procure for their Library copies of all original works in Bengali, or as when, lately, I sent to Oxford by request copies of all Bengali translations from Sanskrit; or when I have procured for missionaries, Government, Rajas &c., Vernacular books of all kinds. … Almost every week I receive new Vernacular Books, and I make a point of bringing them to the notice of Europeans on various grounds.12 In this case, the person to whose notice Long brought the play was Walter Scott Seeton-Karr, secretary to the government of Bengal, who in turn took the play to the lieutenant-governor. According to a minute later released by the lieutenant-governor: Mr Seton-Karr, several months ago, mentioned to me that he had been informed that a curious Bengali play had been written, the subject of which was indigo, – a genuine native production, – a translation of which may be made by a private hand, and some copies printed off at a trifling cost. I wished to see the work, partly as a curiosity, and partly because I thought it likely that it would show what the real popular feeling was on the subject better than anything else.13 And then, significantly: I thought it probable that, besides any value the work might have as a work of literary curiosity, it might prove to be such that a few copies

Indigo and print

169

might with propriety given to friends in official and private positions, with the same object as that which made me wish for an opportunity of seeing what the work was like myself … Mr Seton-Karr’s ideas on this point were the same as mine.14 This is a crucial admission, for there would be much confusion later about who exactly was responsible for commissioning the translation. Grant’s statement makes it clear that the lieutenant-governor and his secretary were the prime movers but the actual task of getting the play translated and published fell to Long. The title page of The Indigo Planting Mirror informs us that it was translated by ‘a native’. The name of the native was strangely never brought up during the trial though subsequently it was revealed to be none other than Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the foremost poet of the day. The printer was given as C.H. Manuel of the Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press. While the lieutenant-governor was away on a provincial tour, Long and Seton-Karr placed a print order of 500 copies with Manuel. The printing bill, according to Manuel, came to Rs 300. Long and Seton-Karr also drew up two lists of recipients of the book. Long’s list was a mix of members of parliament (Bright, Cobden, Dunlop, Digby Seymour), old India hands, various advocacy groups (such as the Aborigines Protection Society, Peace Society, Reform Association) while the Bengal Office list was dominated by MPs and government officials. Twenty copies were sent to the Secretary of State and crucially, seven copies to English and Indian editors within India. Taken together, the two lists account for 202 copies – i.e. just over 40% of the print run. However, according to a later statement by Seton-Karr, only 14 of these 202 were circulated in India, including the seven sent to the newspaper editors. ‘No copies were sent to any newspaper or any public body in Calcutta’, he deposed, ‘because it was considered that to make selections would be invidious, and that, on the whole those who had taken one side or the other in the Indigo crisis were hardly in a position to form a fair estimate of any such popular representation of native feeling.’15 During the course of the trial, a ‘minor official’ testified that another 200-odd copies remained undistributed in the possession of the Bengal Office. Two features stand out here: first, the government’s willingness – nay, zeal – to foot the bill for the printing of a play so openly critical of the planters as well as the government; two, the use of the government machinery to distribute the book. After the lists had been drawn up, the 202 copies were distributed under the official frank and seal of the Bengal Secretariat through the post-office. While this may appear to be an extraordinary and even unprecedented act on part of Seton-Karr, the reasoning behind it appears to be quite plain. Obviously, Seton-Karr did not wish the work to be freely available to the European community in Bengal, and especially the planters’ lobby. Passions were running high over the indigo commission and the easy availability

170

Abhijit Gupta

of such a work might have stoked them further. Seton-Karr took what appears to be a calculated risk to further embarrass the planters. His move, however, misfired. One of the Indian recipients of the translation, the editor of the Lahore Chronicle, sent a copy to Walter Brett, the editor of a Calcutta newspaper, the Englishman. It may be mentioned here that the Englishman and the Bengal Hurkaru – another Calcutta daily – were two of the most strident supporters of the planters’ cause. This was also hinted at in the preface of the play, where the author addressed the planters thus: The Editors of two daily newspapers are filling their columns with your praises; and whatever other people may think, you never enjoy pleasure from it, since you fully know the reason of their so doing. What surprising power of attraction silver has! The detestable Judas gave the great Preacher of the Christian religion, Jesus, into the hands of the odious Pilate for the sake of thirty rupees; what wonder then, if the proprietors of two newspapers, becoming enslaved by the hope of gaining one thousand rupees, throw the poor helpless of this land into the terrible grasp of your mouths.16 Libel, cried the editors and the planters in one voice. On May 25, 1861, the secretary of the Landholders and Commercial Association, W.F. Ferguson wrote an indignant letter of complaint to the government, alleging a ‘foul and malicious libel on indigo planters’.17 In reply, the secretary to the government, E.H. Lushington, made light of the charges: ‘The publication … he [the lieutenant-governor] finds is no libel, and does not, as far he is aware, infringe the law … It does not appear to the Lieutenant-Governor that even the original Bengalee drama, judging from the translation, is likely as the Association supposes, to be of a tendency to excite any class of persons to seditions or breaches of the peace’.18 Not surprisingly, the planters were far from satisfied at this explanation and the Association resolved to institute legal proceedings to ascertain the author, publisher and translator of Nil darpan. The first person to be indicted was the printer Manuel but he was authorized by Long to reveal that the missionary was responsible for the publication of the translation. Charges against Manuel were dropped but the government chose to remain silent, much to the chagrin of the planters who had been hoping to reap the publicity of a high-profile action against none other than their old adversary, Seton-Karr himself. Thus, it was not Seton-Karr but Rev. James Long who was indicted and tried for libel before the Calcutta Supreme Court on July 19, 1861. The presiding judge was the detested Sir Mordaunt Wells, who had a few years earlier stated from the bench that the Indians were a nation of forgers and perjurers. It should be pointed out here that the planters did not involve themselves directly in the prosecution of Long. The complainant was not the Landholders and Commercial Association but Walter Brett, the editor and managing proprietor of the Englishman, though, in the words of the prosecuting

Indigo and print

171

attorney Peterson, ‘the prosecution had been instituted at the desire and the entire concurrence of the Landholders’ Association of British India and the general body of indigo planters’.19 Long was indicted on the following counts: first, that the play had slandered the two editors; second, the play had slandered planters as a group: and third, the play also slandered English womanhood represented by the person of the planter’s wife, who, it implied was involved in intimacies with the magistrate. The other noteworthy feature of the case was the status of libel in Indian courts. Under libel laws existing in India at that time, Long was not permitted to state his own case unless the plaintiff applied for ‘criminal information’. This procedure had already been dropped from British legal practice in 1843 by Lord Campbell’s Act. This point was made at length by the defence attorney Eglinton: The prosecutors had thrown this matter before a jury without giving Mr Long a chance of opening his mouth on his own behalf … This was not the state of the law in Westminster Hall; for sixteen or seventeen years ago an Act was passed to enable a defendant to enter into the question of the truth of the charge. The learned Counsel was sorry to say, the Act had not been extended to this country, but that state of things now existed here, which existed in England at the close of the last century when political animus ran high.20 Long’s attorney could also not benefit from section six of the act which provided that ‘on the trial of any indictment or information for a defamatory libel, the truth of the matters charged would amount to a defence provided the matter was published for the public benefit.’21 This was a major inroad into the common law rule that truth was no defence to a charge of criminal libel. It is not possible to go here into the details of the proceedings of the trial, which ended with Long being found guilty of libel and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. He was also fined one thousand rupees, which was paid on the spot by Kali Prasanna Singha, one of the leading lights of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’. While the prosecution made much of the government collusion in the distribution of the book, the defence went in for more straightforward literary exegesis, comparing the book, among others, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work Uncle Tom’s Cabin was another instance. If the prosecutors in this case had cause to complain, surely the slave-holder had greater cause of complaint. The American law allowed actions for libel, yet none had been instituted, because Legree was not accepted as a type of the slave-holding population; so also Wood and Rose could not have been meant by the author as an embodiment and type of the indigo planter.22

172

Abhijit Gupta

Analogies of this kind would soon become fairly common among defendants of proscribed books in British India, as Robert Darnton has shown in an article in Book History.23 After the publicity given to the libel action, it was open season on indigo in both Indian and English periodicals. Long himself compiled a tract called Strike, but hear! in 1861, bringing together an extensive range of documents pertinent to the case.24 A host of English periodicals, such as the British Quarterly Review, Household Words and so on continued to report on the indigo questions till the mid-1860s. On 26 March 1862, the Hindoo Patriot stated with approval: ‘The London SPECIAL of the Harkaru states Messrs Simpkin, Marshall and Co. has published the Nil darpan in London. Pity the justice of Sir Mordaunt Wells cannot reach these enterprising publishers.’25 If we step back from the details of the trial, we will see how there is not one but several theatres of war between the various parties involved in the indigo question. The planters, the government, English newspapers, vernacular newspapers, missionaries, the Bengal intelligentsia and not the least, the ryots themselves were all part of a complex network of protests and counter-protests. And with the possible exception of the last group, all the other groups mobilized the printed word in every possible way. Newspaper reports, pamphlets, letters, books, minutes, government reports, plays and even songs were deployed on both sides of the indigo divide. In this deafening war of words, the voice of the ryot is seldom heard but often his actions spoke louder than words. Shortly after assuming office, John Peter Grant was returning from an official tour along one of the innumerable river tributaries of lower Bengal: [A]s I steamed along … for some 60 or 70 miles, both banks were literally lined with crowds of villagers, claiming justice in this matter. Even the women of the villages were collected in groups by themselves; the males who stood at and between the riverside villages in little crowds must have collected from all the villages at a great distance from either side. I do not know that it ever fell to the lot of any Indian officer to steam for 14 hours through a continuous double street of suppliants for justice.26 Such passive supplication was of course a far cry from the massive, wellorganized, armed uprising of the peasantry which would soon break out over as many as nine districts of rural Bengal, especially Jessore, Nadia, Fareedpore and Pabna. Seen in the context of a human spectacle of such dimensions, the fate of a small book or that of a well-meaning missionary may appear little more than marginalia. Yet they all had their parts to play in bridging the almost inconceivable distance between the ryots on the banks of the Kaliganga and Whitehall.

Indigo and print

173

Notes 1 I am grateful to Aparna Chaudhuri for translating this song at short notice, and for permission to print her translation in this chapter. 2 Dinabandhu Mitra, The Indigo-Planting Mirror (Edinburgh: Simpkin, Marshall, 1862). 3 Blair B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal 1859–1862 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1966), 23. 4 ‘The ryot in Bengal’, Calcutta Review, LXVII (March, 1860), 241. 5 Geoffrey A. Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Protest Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), 163. 6 Oddie, Social Protest, 111. 7 Dinabandhu Mitra, Nı-l-darpan Na-ttak (Dacca: Bangala Press, 1860). 8 Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel Darpan: the Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror’, Journal of Peasant Studies (1974), 2(1): 1–46; also see Nandi Bhatia, ‘Censorship and the Politics of Nationalist Drama’, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 19–50. 9 Guha, ‘Neel Darpan’, 1. 10 Guha, ‘Neel Darpan’, 2. 11 Guha, ‘Neel Darpan’, 2. 12 The History of the Nil Durpan, with the state trial of the Rev. J. Long, of the Church Mission (Calcutta: 1861), 34. 13 C.E. Buckland, Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors (Calcutta: S.K. Lahiri, 1901), 198. 14 Buckland, Bengal, 198. 15 The History of the Nil Durpan, 38. 16 The History of the Nil Durpan, 11. 17 Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, 31. 18 Amiya Rao and B.G. Rao, The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 158. 19 The History of the Nil Durpan, 10. 20 The History of the Nil Durpan, 19. 21 The History of the Nil Durpan, 19. 22 The History of the Nil Durpan, 21–22. 23 See Robert Darnton, ‘Literary surveillance in the British Raj: The contradictions of liberal imperialism’, Book History 4 (2001), 133–176. 24 J. Long, Strike, but Hear! Evidence Explanatory of the Indigo System in Lower Bengal (Calcutta: R.C. Lepage, 1861). Also see Sir Mordaunt Wells and Public Opinion in India (Calcutta: C.H. Manuel, 1863). For the opposing view, see Brahmins and Pariahs: an appeal by the indigo manufacturers of Bengal (London: James Ridgway, 1861). 25 Hindoo Patriot, 26 March 1862. 26 Buckland, Bengal, 192.

12 Al jabr w’al muqabila H.S. Hall, Macmillan and the coming together of things far apart Rimi B. Chatterjee

Schoolbooks are commodities: that is clear from the way they are bought and sold, and from the considerable revenues they generate for their manufacturers. At the same time, they are vehicles of ideas. Within the Indian colonial context after Macaulay’s Minute on Indian education was presented before Parliament in 1835, the textbook was burdened with a dual role: it was expected to be a tool of western acculturation while simultaneously imparting needed skills to the native population. The process of acculturation requires a breaking down of the barriers of foreignness that kept colonial subjects from adopting western habits and ideas, while skilling a population works best if the idiom and examples used are familiar from the population’s own culture. There is an incipient conflict at work here. In my study of Oxford University Press (OUP) in India, I found that texts in the humanities, particularly history and literature, tended to bear the burden of acculturation, while education in the sciences tended more towards skilling the colonial collaborators.1 In the field of mathematics we would expect to find skilling prioritised over acculturation, but the truth in the Indian context is somewhat complicated. One complication stemmed from the arguments of scholars like Shyama Prosad Mukherjee who attempted to find in ancient history a narrative that would ‘restore’ Hindu glory in philosophy and technology. A story endlessly repeated is that of the Hindu ‘discovery’ of the zero (shunya) and of cosmogonical cyclic time (kalpa). In practice, the idea of shunya (nothingness) and its operations is as old as Buddhism in the Indic tradition. It is not my plan here to trace the outlines of this complex debate. Instead, I will merely point out that the path of transmission of these concepts from India to Europe via the Arab world and China follows the routes of the spice trade. The spice trade was more than just a network of ports and ships routes: it was a culture within which ethnicities, creeds and languages coalesced. Ideas have as much value as spices and drugs. Trade provided the context for the transmission of Indian ideas to the west, since the churn of spices, drugs, rare woods, gemstones, incense, pottery and textiles provided a social and geographical context for the movement of scholars and texts in the ancient world. From the ninth century CE onwards, Persian and Arabic scholars came to predominate in this transmission, for historical reasons related to the rise of Islamo-Arab

The coming together of things far apart

175

dispersion and the parallel fall in participation by other spice-trading peoples. The Arab and Persian scholars who collected these trade-sent ideas did not merely record them, they also developed and tested them, and were therefore intellectual pioneers in their own right. One such commentator was Muhammad ibn Musa al Khwarismi, who took ideas from the Hindus, the ancient Mesopotamians, and the Greeks to put together his thesis on the solving of polynomial equations. Hence the title of his book Al jabr w’al muqabila (circa 820 CE) can be read in two different ways. It can mean the Art of Balancing and Completion, as it is often translated. Or it can mean the bringing together (muqabila) of things which are far apart (jabr). Al Khwarismi’s book was a major step in the direction pointed out by Brahmagupta of separating and abstracting mathematical operations from the quantitative numbers that they operated upon, that is, paying attention to the pure operations rather than the quantities operated upon. This new discipline of ‘al-gebra’ was Khwarismi’s synthesis of Arab and Hindu innovations. After the Crusades, the Mongol invasions of West Asia, and the rather chaotic cultural contact between Europe and the Arab world, the crossfertilisation of the Renaissance seeded Europe with these ideas, which grew into a new intellectual harvest. Ironically, when colonialism began to modulate contact between east and west, it was this transplanted outgrowth of eastern science that proved to be one of the most avidly sought-after treasures among the new Indian intelligentsia, along with patent leather shoes, oleographs and pianofortes. When Macaulay’s system of education as outlined in his 1835 Minute finally got the nod from the government, European mathematics was one of the knowledge systems to be exported to Indian soil in the hope (fallacious as it turned out) that science and technology would bring ‘heathens’ to believe in the only ‘scientific’ religion, namely Christianity. After Macaulay’s Minute and the defeat of the Orientalist school of thought on Indian education, the British rulers made acculturation their first priority; hence stories of nutting in May and poems about daffodils, such as were found in Thomas Nelson’s Royal Readers, flooded the syllabi.2 The physical sciences and technologies that were the source of Europe’s manufacturing power and current commercial ascendancy, such as shipbuilding, architecture, metallurgy and ballistics, were not so easily shared with the colonised, with one exception. Mathematics was an essential tool for land surveyors (the agents of taxation and revenue) and bookkeepers. Hence the craze for ‘Euclid’ in Indian schools: without a knowledge of applied geometry, a coveted job in the revenue department was out of reach. So this new mathematics, although sharing roots with the sacred mathematics of the ancients, came to India purely as a means to preferment and material success, as we shall see in the correspondence about mathematics textbooks that I have uncovered in the Macmillan archives.3 With the demise of the Mughal state and the defeat of various local Sultanates by the British, the educated middle class had lost its occupation, and its accomplishments in

176

Rimi B. Chatterjee

Persian and Arabic were now only poetical adornments. Government service under the British was both attractive and necessary, and Indian clerkly families set out to do whatever it took to get their sons comfortably settled in the pay of the new government. There was, of course, a glass ceiling, with senior posts in the services remaining closed to Indians till the late nineteenth century, but the junior levels beckoned. This meant, of course, that the schools that taught ‘natives’ had a sudden and ravenous need for books. Initially European missionaries such as William Carey of the Serampore Press stepped in to fill the need, but they were quickly overtaken by native booksellers and printers, and from the 1820s to the 1860s it was primarily local native industry that served Indian schools. There were inputs from overseas through wholesalers and importers, and the local printers weren’t above a little light piracy when supply could not keep up with demand.4 Western publishers were commercially active in India from the 1840s onwards, but trade happened mostly through the big wholesale houses like W. Thacker and Company of Newgate Street, who bought British books in London and sold them through a network of branches all over India. The development of an Indian reading public (whether compulsory as with schoolbooks or through choice as with the Colonial Libraries) did not reach a level which would support the British publishers until about 1870. Macmillan’s interest in India dates from 1875, when they published two books by Lal Behari Day and one series of Reading Books by Peary Churn Sircar. Sircar’s Reading Books became one of the most successful of the English language teaching series in pre-Independence India. Daniel and Alexander Macmillan had originally set up their operation in Cambridge in 1843, and though their head office was now in London, Alexander and his successors maintained ties with Cambridge University. Cambridge had a reputation for research and teaching in the sciences and mathematics, unlike Oxford which leaned towards the humanities. By the 1880s Macmillan and Company was one of the biggest and most successful publishing firms in Britain with a keen interest in expansion abroad. Maurice Macmillan, son of Daniel, took over the India business while George and Frederick, sons of Alexander, handled the home trade. In 1886 Macmillan’s Indian trade was not large but it was poised on the brink of expansion. The merchandise was almost entirely schoolbooks imported from Britain and sold in India by Indian firms, some run by Indians and some by Europeans. Maurice wished to know how these books were doing and what could be done to increase the profitability of the trade. With characteristic economy Maurice, having just got married, combined his honeymoon trip with a factfinding mission to India and Australia. While the Macmillans prepared for their voyage, the firm began negotiating with Henry Sinclair Hall of Clifton School near Bristol for the publication of a school algebra which Hall was preparing in collaboration with Samuel Ratcliffe Knight.5 Alexander had already published J.M. Wilson, the school’s headmaster, whose ideas had led to the general study of science in public

The coming together of things far apart

177

schools. Macmillan was extremely eager to get Hall as an author as they had heard very good things about him. However Hall seems to have been in two minds about publishing with Macmillan, and questioned closely every proposal they put to him. Then OUP attempted to poach Hall before the deal was closed. No record of the correspondence exists in the OUP files, but it seems Bartholomew Price, Secretary to the Delegates of the Press and a mathematician himself, wrote privately to Hall inviting him to Oxford to see the Press and discuss business. In the week following 21 November Hall accordingly went to see the Oxford University Press. He was shown around the Press, an experience that seems to have impressed him favourably, after which Price made him a counter-offer more generous than Macmillan’s royalty of 1/6 of the selling price on each copy sold or £500 down. Somewhat confused by these rival deals, Hall confessed to Macmillan:6 I had hardly posted my last letter to you on the 22nd inst. when I received a letter from Oxford requesting me to take an early opportunity of communicating with the Delegates of the Clarendon Press in person. I therefore went to Oxford two or three days ago and … had a long interview with Professor Price at the Clarendon Press. I was allowed to inspect their books and accounts, in order that I might form some idea of what had been paid to other authors, and from what I saw and heard I feel that I should not be acting fairly to Mr [Samuel Ratcliffe] Knight7 if I came to any decision without an opportunity of verbal discussion with him…. What struck me most forcibly about the Clarendon Press arrangements was the fact that as a book increases in popularity, when large editions are produced cheaply after stereotyping, the author’s royalty increases. In one instance a book which originally paid an author 4d on a 2s book now pays him 6 1/2d. There are advantages on both sides, & I am not blind to the possible advantages to be gained by accepting your terms. I should get a larger royalty with the Clarendon Press, but possibly a less extensive circulation. At the same time the sales of some of their school books are enormous, and if our Algebra reached the same popularity we should be quite content. At present I find it extremely difficult to decide …8 Unknown to Hall, these words opened old wounds for Alexander. Macmillan and Company’s connection with the Oxford University Press was a bit more than casual. In the 1870s, Alexander Macmillan had been ‘Publisher’ to the University, which in the Press’s eyes meant a kind of hired consultant. Alexander had however taken his title literally and had done his best to galvanise the antiquated and unwieldy Press into commercial activity. This had not made him very popular with the dons, largely because business practices that he regarded as nothing but common sense, like calculating one’s actual costs

178

Rimi B. Chatterjee

before setting rates of royalty on a book, were regarded by the dons as suspiciously modern and redolent of the counting house.9 Maurice Macmillan took the opportunity to bring up this history in his reply to Hall’s doubts, and added that ‘as all the books that they sold passed through our hands we have a fair idea of what the circulation of their books has been.’ He went on, ‘Without wishing to be invidious we think that we may say that we have a machinery for pushing the sale of educational books at least equal to that of the university.’10 Hall wrote back in conciliatory tones the following day, complaining of the inconvenience of the trains to Oxford and saying that as an assistant master he made it a rule never to absent himself from Clifton during term, which was as close to an apology for his dalliance with the Press as he would give. Macmillan went on to publish the Algebra without further incident and it rapidly established itself as a textbook of choice among mathematics teachers in England, but Hall himself already had his eye on the Indian market. In 1888 he wrote to Maurice, who was in the middle of relaunching Macmillan’s Indian operation, to say that he had met a Mr Henry Fo[r?]tey who has been an Inspector of Schools in India for many years, and who gave Hall a number of useful hints to make his book a success, namely: To send out leaflets on a large scale … He said the Hindoos were very enterprising and they would normally take up a new book very readily if they could buy it in the shops. In particular he said, ‘The Hindoo boys would buy your Algebraical Exercises in large numbers if they were more easily accessible; they are far more enterprising than English boys and they will buy any book that will help in their examinations.’ To send presentation copies to the ‘Directors of Public Instruction’ in each Province, and also to write a diplomatic letter to each. These men are over the School Inspectors and they practically decide what books shall be used in the government schools. He left me other details which I intend to make use of in due course, but the point he urged most emphatically was the necessity of making known where in India our books could be obtained …11 Hall ended by saying that the ‘extremely favourable reception’ of the Elementary Algebra in England could only mean that it had a ‘large and prosperous future in the Colonies’ waiting for it. He began sending out a considerable number of letters enclosing a prospectus. He was also at work on a set of geometry textbooks which he was preparing in collaboration with Frederick Haller Stevens, two of whose brothers were in the Bengal Service. Hall offered to pay for the printing of an 11 page prospectus for India, and Macmillan were to contribute the presentation copies. In May of the same year Maurice sent presentation copies of Hall & Stevens’s Euclid Part I and Hall & Knight’s Algebra to Mr A.M. Nash, Inspector of European Schools, Bengal12 and Mr Gurudas Bandopadhyay of the Calcutta High Court, then Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University.13 Maurice mentioned the Hon. A.M.

The coming together of things far apart

179

Bose as a man of influence in Calcutta, and Hall wrote back to say he was a friend from Cambridge whom he remembered well, and that he would ‘write to him at once and ask him to use his efforts on our behalf … I will draw his attention specially to the points in which I think our edition would be likely to meet the wants of Indian students and I think he will be glad to help if he can.’14 In April of 1889 J.T. Haythornthwaite, Professor of Elphinstone College and 17th Wrangler (that is, ranked 17th in mathematics honours in his batch at Cambridge in 1870), came to England on furlough; Maurice got him in touch with Hall to discuss the book’s promotion in Bombay. The following year Macmillan brought out a special edition of Hall & Stevens’s Euclid for India. Euclid’s Books I to IV were set for the Entrance or Matriculation at Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad. Only Madras set Books I to III. Maurice wrote to G.H. Stuart asking whether Madras could make its syllabus uniform with the rest of India. He promised the Euclid would be as cheap as possible.15 Stuart’s answer was not very encouraging, as Maurice informed Stevens,16 so he then wrote to H.B. Grigg, the Madras DPI, again offering to add a glossary in Tamil and Telugu if asked. He added that he felt the practice of prescribing books ‘should have for its object the exclusion of inferior books rather than the practical prohibition of equally good or even better books on the same lines.’17 A week later Maurice heard from C.C. Stevens, brother of F.H. Stevens and posted in Calcutta, of a proposal to set books for the Entrance Examination, especially in mathematics. He wrote to Charles Henry Tawney of the Bengal Education Department in Calcutta and sent him a long list of Macmillan’s mathematical textbooks featuring works by Hall, Stevens, Knight, Charles Smith and Lock; the cheapest books were 2s 6d in paper and were the Euclid, Lock’s Arithmetic for Beginners and Trigonometry for Beginners.18 From April of 1890 Maurice began his yearly practice of sending Hall a detailed breakdown of the mathematics syllabi in the five main universities: the three Presidencies, Lahore and Allahabad. Casey’s Euclid had been prescribed at Allahabad; ‘You should try to get that changed,’19 Maurice said. Asutosh Mukherjee, noted mathematician of Calcutta, father of Shyama Prosad Mukherjee, and later to be Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, wrote in January of that year to ask for samples of Macmillan’s mathematical books which they sent along with their monthly list of new publications.20 In July Maurice had this to say of him: [Mukherjee] is a very active man, a good mathematician and an influential member of the Syndicate of the University. … I heard this week from a man who holds a professorship in Calcutta and who knows all about the University that Baboo Asutosh and the present Vice Chancellor, Baboo Gooroo Das Banerjee [sic] were the two men to whom we are mainly indebted for your Euclid having been adopted. A native writer named Ghosh was nearly successful in getting his book prescribed together with yours and three others, but the two native mathematicians I

180

Rimi B. Chatterjee have named took exception to something that was in Ghosh’s Euclid and got it thrown out. The list was submitted to the Syndicate and your book which was at the head of the list was adopted, the words in the list being, ‘Elements of Geometry edited by Hall and Stevens and any other edition covering the same ground.’ We have sold a large number of the papercovered book. For the First Arts Examination ‘Hall & Stevens’s Edition’ is mentioned without qualification, and for this the 1s 6d book is required. It was by the merest chance that Ghosh’s and others did not get on, and no doubt Mr Ghosh will do his best to get the decision reversed, but I do not think he will succeed.21

With the letter Maurice enclosed three books by Ghosh. It must be noted that this kind of lobbying was the norm where textbook prescription was concerned. The organisation of Raj-era education in India was, by and large, a mixture of public and private endeavour. The government gave matching grants to philanthropists willing to set up schools, and the Director of Public Instruction was the government-sponsored manager in charge of piloting motley crews of Indians in the forms of textbook committees (for schools) and boards of study (for universities) through the business of public education. Private interest groups thus warred over the disposition of largely public funding, and the difference between success and failure for a publisher often depended on the presence or absence of native champions in this arena. Maurice went on to inform Hall of the nature of his customers, that is the students who bought these textbooks, and to explain why the more expensive titles found only a small market in India: [The students] are so poor that the cost … would deter them … and as a rule so unambitious that they will not read more than is absolutely necessary for the examination which is before them, and you doubtless remember that to the great majority ‘to have failed the matriculation’ is the goal of their ambition, and why should they trouble their heads with Quadratic equations until they know the results of the Entrance? Those who aspire to the F[irst] A[rts] will perhaps try the Elem. Algebra when they have passed the Matric. and I am sure it is among this class that your book has sold hitherto.22 Some explanation of the poor sales came in September when Maurice sent Hall ‘a Calcutta production which is probably stolen from your Euclid.’ He asked Hall to go through it carefully and mark the points of similarity with his own text. ‘This will take some time, but if there is good ground for proceeding against the compiler, we must do so. We have just won a copyright case in Calcutta, and on the strength of it can probably suppress the book by threatening.’23 By October sales in Calcutta had picked up due to the prescription, which made the necessity of stopping piracy even more urgent. F.H. Stevens suggested getting Madras to prescribe Books I–IV of Euclid so that

The coming together of things far apart 24

181

they could push the books there; Maurice asked if he could do anything in Allahabad.25 In the new year Maurice decided to try to beat the ‘notebook’ compilers at their own game, and urged Hall to complete the Key to his Euclid Books I to IV specifically for sale in India.26 He then wrote immediately to B. Banerjee & Co. of Calcutta refusing permission to publish a similar Key to them, saying he was about to bring one out himself.27 He reported to Hall: ‘We … shall not be sorry to keep the native “key” out of the market by the delay involved in sending it over. I am afraid we cannot stop a key, but yours will knock others out of the field.’28 Maurice even went to the length of refusing Banerjee & Co. a specimen copy of the Key when it finally came out, no doubt afraid it would be copied.29 Hall was working away meanwhile on the Algebra for Beginners. This would target the lucrative Entrance/Previous market, and Maurice was anxious to have it out. Maurice wrote: ‘I send you this price list [of a bookseller in Allahabad who styled himself “Publisher to the University”] to show you … that your Elem. Algebra which sells at Rs 2 13as 0p has to compete with S.C. Basu’s Part I and K.P. Basu’s Part I and P. Ghosh’s Part I, the prices of which are more than a rupee less. The same is probably the case in Calcutta and other Universities.’30 By the end of the year it had been provisionally decided that the ‘A for B’, as it was called, would be priced at 2s in cloth and 1s 9d in paper,31 roughly Rs 1 10as. Maurice also decided to print Indian examination papers in all editions of the A for B.32 Hall stayed on the Allahabad lists till 1893. Back at home Maurice was unhappy with his agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) who were printing Macmillan’s mathematics textbooks. He wrote to Hall: ‘You know that the Pitt Press [the science publishing arm of the CUP] is going in for mathematics books and I am most anxious not to give them a hint about India, or we shall have [W.W.] Rouse Ball bringing out a similar book and perhaps getting someone to help him with it.’33 Hall objected strenuously and refused to forgo Cambridge printing; Maurice backed down but stipulated that the prospectus had to be printed away from Cambridge.34 Macmillan’s fears over Cambridge competition proved to be unfounded, for CUP never really got off the ground in selling to the colonies before 1947, perhaps because OUP had already occupied the market. Over the next few years Hall’s books consolidated their position, yet both Maurice and Hall were aware of how easily their lead could dissolve. In 1893 Maurice remarked to Hall on the Calcutta prescription of his books: ‘Altogether this particular sale is one on which both you and we are too wise to count. But we will do our best to retain the book on the Calcutta lists, and I hope that the genuine sale in other parts of India will be increased.’35 To this end John A. Stagg, Macmillan’s manager-at-large, suggested they publish a Bengali translation of the Euclid by a man recommended by ‘a very influential inspector’, to be printed in Calcutta and priced in Indian money.36

182

Rimi B. Chatterjee

Sales of the Hall and Knight and Hall and Stevens titles continued into the twentieth century, and once the books were out of copyright in the 1960s they became even more popular, especially in West Bengal. At that time no high school student’s desk was complete without a paper-bound grey or brown edition of these books, sometimes with all the titles bound up together. Post liberalisation, their popularity has declined, no doubt because they have not been updated and still use obsolete measures such as ‘maunds’ or ‘hundredweight’. The boom in Indian publishing after 1991 has ensured that their phenomenal run has come to an end. British cloth was burned publicly by swadeshi activists, but rarely did they burn British books. As the ultra-cheap bindings and flimsy paper showed, Indian schoolbooks were disposable commodities qua material objects, but their contents were not: they were the magic keys to wealth and (comparative) power in the form of petty preferment, and, occasionally, they could be windows through which the light of knowledge penetrated. By being nothing more than secular, mundane, profane objects, they opened up a space for learning which was outside the policing of caste networks or esoteric traditions, and which was meant for anyone who could make it to a school or a bookshop. In this space, unsanctified by any spiritual context, the works of Burke and Paine, Byron and Shelley, Bacon and Aristotle rubbed shoulders with Al Khwarismi and Euclid in the modest ink and paper of nineteenthcentury mass-market publication. For the publishers, the making of these books was purely a business, but in the process of making their daily profits they unknowingly changed the world. These schoolbooks went directly against the exclusivist attitude to the written word that marks high-caste handling of knowledge in the Hindu traditions, and they also broke down the burden of remoteness and foreignness that the idea of the text carries for nonArabic speaking Muslim communities. The effects of this change took several generations to come to fruition, but it was only because of them that the space of debate that led to nationalism and Independence could open up in print and in thought. The humble textbook, simply by existing, gives one the powerful message that reading, writing and arithmetic are not esoteric disciplines for the privileged few, but skills and powers for all, made simple and accessible for a small sum of money. In the end, this idea was as damaging for the colonial masters as it was for the traditional keepers of privilege and power in Indian society. Perhaps it is in this that the truly transformative effects of these books lie.

Notes 1 Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of Oxford University Press in India under the Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2 See for example Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Viswanathan’s book is very detailed about the first half of the nineteenth century, but the very

The coming together of things far apart

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

183

different educational scenario of the second half is somewhat under-represented in it. The Macmillan papers are currently split between three repositories: outgoing correspondence and formal records are in the British Library, inbound correspondence and informal records in the University of Reading, and some papers in the Archives department at the Macmillan headquarters in Basingstoke. This makes stitching together any given correspondence particularly challenging. Rimi B. Chatterjee, ‘Pirates and philanthropists: British publishers and copyright in India, 1880–1935’, Moveable Type: Book History in India, ed. Abhijit Gupta and Swapan K. Chakravorty (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008). British Library Macmillan Archives General Letterbook Series, hereafter BLMA, 55418 fol. 1183 14 November, fol. 1193 17 November, fol. 1217 19 November, fol. 1240 21 November 1884. I have used the word ‘Macmillan’ as a collective name to refer to any one of the three brother-cousins, as they very often carried on each other’s correspondence. Hall’s collaborator in the algebras. Knight taught at Marlborough, then at Giggleswick School. BLMA 55175 H.S. Hall to Macmillan, 29 November 1884. Hall invariably begins his letters ‘Dear Sirs’. See for example Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) for an account of OUP’s startup troubles. BLMA 55418 fol. 1300 Macmillan to Hall, 31 November 1884. BLMA 55176 Hall to Macmillan, 21 February 1888. Nash replied favourably and promised to push the book, see BLMA 55428 fol. 411 Macmillan to Stevens, 5 April 1889. BLMA 55426 fol. 509 Macmillan to Gooroo Das Banerjee [sic], 11 May 1888. BLMA 55176 Hall to Macmillan, 6 March 1889. BLMA 55427 fol. 1362 Maurice to Stuart, 12 February 1889. BLMA 55428 fol. 368 Macmillan to Stevens, 1 April 1889. BLMA 55428 fol. 510 Maurice to Grigg, 12 April 1889. BLMA 55427 fol. 1466 Maurice to Tawney, 22 February 1889. BLMA 55430 fol. 948 Maurice to Hall, 24 April 1890. BLMA 55430 fol. 392 Macmillan to Mukhopadhyay, 28 February 1890. BLMA 55431 fol. 131 Maurice to Hall, 3 July 1890. BLMA 55431 fol. 148 Maurice to Hall, 4 July 1890. BLMA 55431 fol. 790 Maurice to Hall, 17 September 1890. The reference is probably to one of the Deb cases; see Chatterjee, ‘Pirates and philanthropists’, 26–77. URMA 50/55 Stevens to Macmillan, 16 October 1890. BLMA 55431 fol. 1111 Macmillan to Stevens, 22 October 1890. BLMA 55432 fol. 466 Maurice to Hall, 6 January 1891. BLMA 55432 fol. 488 Macmillan to Banerjee & Co., 8 January 1891. BLMA 55432 fol. 1230 Maurice to Hall, 26 February 1891. ‘Banerjee’ is probably not the bookseller. BLMA 55437 fol. 1364 Macmillan to Banerjee & Co., 20 September 1892. BLMA 55434 fol. 137 Maurice to Hall, 30 July 1891. BLMA 55435 fol. 620 Maurice to Hall, 18 December 1891. BLMA 55435 fol. 838, Maurice to Hall, 6 January 1892. BLMA 55435 fol. 308 Maurice to Hall, 1 December 1891. BLMA 55435 fol. 395 Maurice to Hall, 4 December 1891. BLMA 55438 fol. 1330 Maurice to Hall, 7 March 1893. BLMA 55440 fol. 638 Maurice to Hall, 26 April 1893.

13 Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’ Transporting Tennyson with H.M. Stanley and Edwin Arnold Brian H. Murray

In late December 1876 the Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley, leader of the Anglo-American Expedition across equatorial Africa, was stranded on the upper reaches of the Congo River. It had been months since he had been able to send messages back to London, where his dispatches had been appearing regularly in the Daily Telegraph. The beleaguered expedition had already been decimated by starvation, disease and desertion. Two of Stanley’s three white companions, Frederick Barker and Edward Pocock, were already dead. Of the roughly 224 local porters, guides and soldiers that Stanley had recruited in Zanzibar (including thirty-six women) only 149 remained.1 Arriving at the source waters of the Congo – just west of Lake Tanganyika – Stanley could either turn back eastwards along the relatively well-known Arab trade routes which led to the Indian Ocean or strike west and attempt to trace the river to its mouth at the Atlantic. In Stanley’s own published account, he delivers a rousing speech in an attempt to persuade his fellow travellers of the merits of the second and more perilous option: Into whichever sea this great river empties, there shall we follow it. You have seen that I have saved you a score of times, when everything looked black and dismal for us … Many of our party have already died, but death is the end of all; and if they died earlier than we, it was the will of God, and who shall rebel against His will? It may be we shall meet a hundred wild tribes yet who, for the sake of eating us, will rush to meet and fight us … Therefore, my children, make up your minds as I have made up mine, that as we are now in the very middle of this continent, and it would be just as bad to return as to go on, that we shall continue our journey, that we shall toil on, and on, by this river and no other, to the salt sea.2 Two years later, when Stanley came to write up his journals in his bestselling travelogue Through the Dark Continent (1878) he glossed this speech with a footnote, explaining that a ‘poetical friend on hearing this address brought to my notice a remarkable coincidence’.3 The poetical friend was almost

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

185

certainly Edwin Arnold, editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the ‘coincidence’ was the resemblance between Stanley’s speech and an existing dramatic monologue. Stanley’s footnote quotes the lines in question: My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me – That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.[…] Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.4 These are the closing lines from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, published in 1842 and written in 1833 shortly after the death of Tennyson’s closest friend Arthur Hallam, to whom the poem is partly a tribute. In this chapter, I take Stanley’s strategic appropriation of Tennyson as emblematic of some of the ways in which readers experienced the mobility of texts in the nineteenth-century colonial world. When ‘newly discovered’ lands were represented in European travel writing they often bore the mark of the poetic fantasies that preceded the documentary work of exploration. But the Victorian poetic imagination was itself continually formed and influenced by accounts of travel and literary representations of intercultural contact. The extensive travelling libraries of European explorers in Africa bear witness to the traffic in literary commodities between a perceived imperial metropole and ‘margin’. From the Bible and Bunyan to popular periodicals, a huge range of texts were consumed and deployed by European travellers in Africa – and later pressed upon colonial subjects and missionary converts.5 But in texts like Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent, metropolitan and colonial readers encountered fragments of canonical English poetry repackaged and presented in unfamiliar contexts. In such scenarios, English poetry returned to the metropole freighted with new significance and unanticipated meaning. By reading Tennyson in Africa and Africa in Tennyson, we begin to discern how the textual activities of the metropole and the margin are (in Catherine Hall’s terms) ‘mutually constitutive’.6 For as Mary Louise Pratt has shown, it is precisely the empire’s ‘obsessive need to present and re-present its

186

Brian H. Murray

peripheries’ which draws our attention to ‘the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis’.7

Tennyson’s explorers We need to be sceptical of Stanley’s assertion that the similarities between his speech and Tennyson’s poem are the result of mere ‘coincidence’. The rendition of the speech that appears in Through the Dark Continent is significantly re-written from an earlier (and distinctively less-Tennysonian) version that appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 22 November 1877. This original dispatch was written after Stanley’s arrival at Loanda on the Atlantic coast on 5 September 1877, a full eight months after the supposed date of the original address.8 His field journal for the same period contains no trace of the speech.9 Whether or not Stanley ever made his pledge to ‘toil on, and on’ to the Western sea, the oration – as recorded in Through the Dark Continent – is certainly a later invention and was possibly re-written in light of Arnold’s comparison with ‘Ulysses’. But what function does this interpolation serve in Stanley’s text, and what does the comparison with Ulysses tell us about Stanley’s self-image? Certainly Tennyson’s bedraggled, ageing navigator who ‘cannot rest from travel’, despite having ‘suffered greatly’ for his pains, reflects something of Stanley’s stubbornness in the face of ill health and the dangers encountered on his many journeys. There is also something of Stanley’s notorious braggadocio in Ulysses’ description of his own lengthy expedition, which comes across as a blend of ethnographic field-trip and military campaign. Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, […] And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.10 But Tennyson’s Ulysses is a complicated and conflicted hero. For Christopher Ricks the ‘poem conveys a dragging sense of inertia, of ennui, played against the vocabulary of adventure and enterprise’.11 Victorian critics had likewise noted Ulysses’ preference for melancholy procrastination over heroic action. The journalist and historian Goldwin Smith, writing in the Saturday Review in 1855, complained that Homer’s ‘man of purpose and action’ was transformed by Tennyson into ‘a hungry heart, roaming aimlessly … merely to relieve his ennui, and dragging his companions with him’.12 This ironic and iconoclastic reading of Tennyson’s hero is vindicated somewhat by the poet’s own use of epic antecedents. Tennyson’s primary source is not Homer but Dante’s description of Ulysses in Canto XXVI of The Inferno (when the Greek navigator delivers a similarly rousing speech to his mariners). The final voyage of Dante’s Ulysses, however, ends with death and disaster, and the

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

187

Homeric wanderer is condemned to the eighth circle of hell as a ‘fraudulent counselor’. These potentially tragic outcomes may even be reflected in the mood of reckless fatalism that characterizes Stanley’s own speech. His nonetoo-assuring sketch of the future (‘It may be we shall meet a hundred wild tribes’) echoes the uncertainty with which Ulysses pitches his own expedition: ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; / It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles / And see the great Achilles, whom we knew’.13 Yet as Matthew Rowlinson has noted, Tennyson’s Ulysses, who confers ‘unequal laws unto a savage race’, sounds less gung-ho adventurer and more ‘like a colonial administrator turning over the reins to his successor just before stepping on the boat to go home’.14 Ulysses seems to acknowledge the end of an heroic age of exploration when he passes the torch to his son Telemachus. The ‘common duties’ required of a provincial king – faced with the task of making mild a ‘rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees’ subduing ‘them to the useful and the good’ – are the responsibilities of the politician and lawmaker not the explorer.15 Yet this mildly deflating paradox, the notion that the explorer’s highest achievement is to render further exploration unnecessary, is also a generic trope of the African exploration narrative. Perhaps Stanley too foresaw the impending end of his role as pioneering adventurer. Shortly after the Anglo-American Expedition (1874–77), he was enlisted by Leopold II of Belgium to build what became the largest European colony in Africa: the Congo Free State. Did Stanley already have his eye on the job of colonial administrator as he battled his way down the Congo? Daniel Bivona suggests as much in his appraisal of Through the Dark Continent as ‘a mid-Victorian textbook in management, containing the whole science of how to discipline an unruly Africa’.16 In this sense, Tennyson’s poem provides a nostalgic reiteration on one of the key tropes of nineteenth-century travel writing: the gradual diminution of the ‘blank spaces’ on the map and the impossibility of exploratory adventure in an increasingly ‘known’ world. Tennyson’s own engagement with the heroic cult of the explorer began with one of his earliest compositions, ‘Timbuctoo’ (1829). This undergraduate prize poem, awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge, demonstrates an early engagement with the subject of African exploration and may have been influenced by accounts of contemporary explorers.17 The Scottish explorer Mungo Park had been killed on the way to Timbuktu in 1816 and his countryman Alexander Gordon Laing reached the city in 1826 but was subsequently murdered. The French explorer René Caillié became the first western European to return alive from Timbuktu in 1828 and the account of his journey was published in French and English a year after Tennyson’s poem.18 In Tennyson’s ‘Timbuctoo’, exploration and discovery are presented as inherently disillusioning. The poet may bask in an ‘Imperial El Dorado’ of glistening minarets and ‘tremulous domes’ but when the time comes for the imaginary city to render up its secrets to ‘keen Discovery’:

188

Brian H. Murray yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of her wand; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-walled, Barbarian settlement.19

The ‘opening up’ of Timbuktu to the European gaze disrupts the play of the imagination and replaces a phantasmagoric fiction with a grim reality. Tennyson was not always so cynical, however, and he frequently found poetic inspiration in the achievements, struggles and failures of contemporary travellers and explorers. There was certainly something of Ulysses’ determination in the poet’s uncle-in-law, the Arctic explorer and erstwhile colonial governor Sir John Franklin, whose ill-fated mission to find the North West Passage was a popular locus of literary sentiment throughout the period.20 In a brief epitaph written for Franklin’s tomb at Westminster Abbey in 1877, Tennyson set Franklin ‘passing on [a] happier voyage now / Toward no earthly pole’ – a journey which has strong shades of Ulysses’ final expedition to ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought’.21 While Tennyson was composing these lines for Franklin, Stanley was making his way down the Congo and although there is no evidence that Tennyson connected Franklin’s doomed expedition with that of Stanley, he had a good reason for associating the two explorers. Franklin’s widow, who commissioned the epitaph, was an enthusiastic follower of Stanley’s, and Tennyson had dined with Stanley at Lady Franklin’s London home in March 1874.22 Tennyson’s late poem ‘To Ulysses’ (1888) further emphasized the link between travellers ancient and modern by implicitly equating Homer’s voyager with his friend William Gifford Palgrave, author of the travelogue Ulysses, or Scenes and Studies in Many Lands (1887).23 Indeed Tennyson’s earlier and better-known ‘Ulysses’ was explicitly associated with Stanley’s expeditions by the appropriately-named Arthur Hallam Montefiore, who used the famous final line (‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’) as the epigram to his unauthorized biography of Stanley (1889).24 The line has since been evoked to hail the achievements of a diverse range of explorers, from Mungo Park and David Livingstone to the polar explorer Roald Amundsen.25 The memorial to Amundsen’s British rival Captain Robert Scott and his four companions on Observation Hill in Antarctica carries the same lines – originally scrawled on a wooden cross by Edward Atkinson and Apsley Cherry-Garrard.26 Despite the propensity of critics to find an undercutting irony in Tennyson’s poem, it continues to be appropriated as an inspirational maxim. For instance, the line was recently selected by a panel of judges as the official motto of the London 2012 Olympic Village.27

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

189

Stanley’s poets Stanley frequently urged his readers to look at Africa through the lens of English poetry. Over the course of his four major African travel books the explorer quotes Milton, Pope, Gray, Byron, Longfellow, Matthew Prior and Robert Browning, among others. During his search for the missionary David Livingstone in 1872, Stanley had paused to ponder how ‘a Byron’ might ‘poetize’ the African landscape before launching into a laboured pastiche of Childe Harold’s Spenserian stanzas. At the conclusion of his final exploratory epic, In Darkest Africa (1890), he reworked Robert Browning’s valedictory ‘Epilogue’ to Asolando (1889) as a congratulatory hymn to the perseverance of his white officers.28 Stanley’s travelling library included the works of Homer, Virgil, Milton, Cowper, Scott, Byron and Tennyson.29Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer were a particular favourite, and Stanley often saw the heroic age of The Iliad – with its indefatigable warriors, despotic monarchs and manly bonds of fellowship – reflected in pre-colonial Africa. In the village of Simbamwenni in 1871, Stanley had encountered pairs of spearwielding warriors manfully embracing like ‘Damon and Pythias, or Achilles and Patroclus’. Later in the same account, the Wahumba tribe of Tanzania are praised as the ‘Greeks of Africa’, fitting models ‘for the sculptor who would wish to immortalize in marble an Antinous, a Hylas, a Daphnis, or an Apollo’.30 Stanley’s insistent reading of Africans as the exotic, eroticized vestiges of a departed Homeric age turns Africa into what Anne McClintock has called an ‘anachronistic space’ – a zone in which colonized peoples may be constructed as ‘inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity’.31 But Stanley’s classical comparisons also reflect a new understanding of Hellenic antiquity and the Homeric inheritance in the period. As Simon Dentith has shown, for many of the poets and translators of the nineteenth century, the appropriate analogues for the great classical epics were ‘not the finished poetic products of the modern world but traditional and popular poetry, traces of which were still to be found, especially in rude or undeveloped regions’.32 Stanley makes similar comparisons between classical epics and ‘primitive’ poetry, and his books often feature his own verse ‘translations’ of Swahili lyrics. In one particularly Homeric sounding recitation from Through the Dark Continent, one of Stanley’s Zanzabari ‘mariners’ recounts the ordeals of the expedition as the caravan approaches the Atlantic: Murabo, the boatboy, struck up a glorious loud-swelling chant of triumph and success, into which he deftly, and with a poet’s licence, interpolated verses laudatory of the white men of the second sea. The bard, extemporizing, sang much about the great cataracts, cannibals, and pagans, hunger, the wide wastes, great inland seas, and niggardly tribes … at the end of each verse the voices rose high and clear to the chorus –‘Then sing, friends, Sing ; the journey is ended; Sing aloud, friends, sing to this great sea.’33

190

Brian H. Murray

Stanley assumed that a shared language was necessary for the effective command of an African expedition. Writing in 1891, he claimed there could be ‘no mutual sympathy’ between the explorer and his African recruits ‘until the Englishman became proficient in Swahili … and then all at once – the Gulf between them was bridged, & Englishman & native looked in one another’s eyes and knew one another’.34 But in the literature of European exploration, African narratives and African voices inevitably come to us second hand. In this sense, Stanley’s Swahili lyrics – translations without originals – are emblematic of the ever-present remove at which we encounter indigenous discourse in the European travel text. Yet despite these obvious limitations, Stanley’s ‘translations’ could also provide an evidential basis from which to critique Eurocentric myths of supremacy. In his Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel had famously described Africa as an unhistorical ‘land of childhood’ (Kinderland).35 And to the nations of nineteenth-century Europe, which increasingly defined themselves racially and culturally through shared historical narratives, the apparent absence of history – and epic poetry – was particularly damning. Unsurprisingly, many attempts to contest the established model of an ahistorical Dark Continent began with the search for indigenous African history and poetics. In 1882 the African-American soldier and historian George Washington Williams cited Stanley’s many Swahili ‘translations’ as evidence for his claim that Africans possessed ‘the poetic element in a large degree’. Williams’s History of the Negro Race was part of a larger revisionist project, which included his attempt to unearth the ‘the epic poetry of Africa’.36 To this end, he indulges in some anachronistic assumptions of his own, asserting that the ‘poetry of the primitive and hardy Saxon gives the reader an excellent idea of the vigorous, earnest, and gorgeous effusions of the African’.37 In his reading of Stanley, Williams pays particular attention to an ‘idyl, extemporized by one of Stanley’s black soldiers, on the occasion of reaching Lake Nyanza’, a recitation which Williams thinks ‘possesses more energy of movement, perspicuity of style, and warm, glowing imagery, than any song of its character we have yet met with from the lips of unlettered Negroes’.38 The Wanyamwezi song in question is, according to Stanley, ‘as literal a translation’ as possible; though somewhat suspiciously its theme is the munificence of Stanley himself: Kaduma’s land is just below; He is rich in cattle, sheep and goats. The Msungu [white man] is rich, in cloth and beads; His hand is open, and his heart is free. To-morrow the Msungu must make us strong With meat and beer, wine and grain. We shall dance and play the livelong day, And eat and drink, and sing and play.39

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

191

Stanley’s folksy tetrameter is here more balladic than Homeric and Williams is undoubtedly on to something when he observes that ‘in the last verse the child-nature of the singer riots like “The May Queen” of Tennyson’.40 In fact, it seems likely that Stanley has partially plagiarized Tennyson’s early lyric (‘There will not be a drop of rain the whole of the livelong day, / And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May’).41 Stanley’s own poetic experiments were not limited to ‘translation’. The explorer’s unpublished field journal from the Anglo-American Expedition includes an incomplete attempt at original verse: a lugubrious lyric on the quest for the sources of the Nile, abandoned in a flurry of deletions after a few faltering stanzas. In the final complete stanza, Stanley leads his reluctant mariners West across the inland sea of Tanganyika. Westward for Tanganyika shore We flew to the trial of might Determined to die or explore The wild lands which stood on its right.42 When the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887–1889) approached the Cape Coast in March 1887, one of Stanley’s officers, James Sligo Jameson, records that his reading of Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia was interrupted by Stanley’s own shipboard recitation of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’.43 A few months later, when Stanley demoted another white officer (Major Edmund Barttelot) to the expedition’s Rear Column, he offered some misquoted lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of Wellington’ as consolation: ‘Not once or twice in our fair island story / Has the path of duty been the way to glory’.44 When the same expedition ground to a halt amidst scenes of desertion, disease and death in the rainforests of the Congo in August 1887, Stanley again found solace in lines from Tennyson’s Princess (‘No man to nurse despair; / But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms / To follow the worthiest till he die’).45 ‘I wonder if Tennyson were here’, pondered the explorer, ‘what he would think of our state’.46 Another officer of the expedition, the young Canadian William G. Stairs, responded to the crisis in a similar manner, by drafting an African pastiche of Tennyson’s ‘Amphion’. In this case, Stairs’s experience of ‘hailstorms wild and native gangs, / With elephants twelve feet high’ stands in for Tennyson’s account of ‘months of toil / And years of cultivation’.47 As these explorers confronted the unruly otherness of the imperial frontier, Tennyson’s verses continually yielded fresh insights and renewed relevance. It seems significant that most of these citations invoke themes of struggle, adversity and endurance. Tennyson himself would later claim that ‘Ulysses’ encapsulated his ‘feeling about the need to go forward’.48 Yet as Herbert Tucker has pointed out, the poet’s phrasing is revealing. Tennyson ‘refers not to progress, nor to that rather different thing, a need for progress, but instead to a feeling about such a need’.49 While Ulysses might well feel the need to make a move, he is nevertheless static for the duration of the poem. In a

192

Brian H. Murray

similar way, while Stanley and his officers might acknowledge their determination to strive and not to yield, these rousing verse quotations are all deployed at moments of rest, inaction or delay.

Edwin Arnold’s African epic Stanley mentioned that he was alerted to the similarities between his motivational speech and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ by his ‘poetical friend’ Edwin Arnold. Arnold had joined the Daily Telegraph as a promising young leader writer in 1861, and when he was appointed editor-in-chief in 1873 the paper had the largest circulation in the world, significantly outselling its nearest rival in Britain, The Times.50 In 1874 Arnold sponsored the Anglo-American Expedition, securing Stanley a commission of £6,000 from the Telegraph and brokering a deal with the editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, who contributed a further £6,000 in exchange for exclusive rights to Stanley’s dispatches in the United States. Arnold’s own literary career was not restricted to journalism, nor were his achievements confined to Britain. At Oxford in 1852 he won the prestigious undergraduate Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ and in 1857 he was appointed principal of the Deccan Sanskrit College at Poona near Bombay. In 1879, shortly after the success of Stanley’s expedition, Arnold achieved widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of The Light of Asia (1879). This hugely popular verse biography of Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was composed, according to Arnold, ‘to aid in the better mutual knowledge of East and West’.51 The Song Celestial (1884), featuring translations from the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita was a more modest success but consolidated his status as poet and Orientalist. Both poems attracted the attention of the young émigré lawyer, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had little knowledge of Sanskrit verse prior to reading Arnold’s translations. Gandhi would later praise Arnold’s Orientalist collections as poems ‘of priceless worth’. In 1891 Gandhi even invited Arnold to join the committee of his first radical venture, the West London Food Reform Society, a vegetarian club based in Bayswater.52 Stanley read Arnold’s poetry during his African expeditions and he was receptive to the literary advice of his ‘poetical friend’. But the explorer also exerted a significant influence over Arnold’s poetic compositions.53 Stanley had read The Light of Asia before its publication and was impressed with Arnold’s efforts, but advised that a sequel with ‘the Christ as the central figure’ would be an even greater success.54 Whether or not Stanley’s intervention was decisive, Arnold did indeed produce a Christian sequel to The Light of Asia. The Light of the World (1891) was, however, a critical and commercial failure and even Stanley was disappointed with the result, confessing that Arnold’s profession of earnest Christianity was far less convincing than his evident sympathy with Buddhism.55

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

193

Arnold’s final epic, The Voyage of Ithobal (1901), which recounts a legendary African odyssey, also bears the mark of his friendship with Stanley. Taking his inspiration from a short passage in Herodotus, Arnold relates the story of a Phoenician expedition sent by an Egyptian pharaoh to circumnavigate the African continent. But whereas Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ had distilled the drama and emotion of his source material – the Iliad, the Odyssey, and a canto from Dante – into seventy lines of taut pentameter, Arnold expands a comparatively brief passage of ancient prose into a seven-book blank-verse epic. Arnold’s hero Ithobal – an aging Phoenician sea-dog with a poetic disposition and insatiable wanderlust – certainly cuts a Ulyssian figure and critics were quick to point out Arnold’s reliance on Tennysonian cadences and repetitions. Despite its antique trappings, however, much of the poem was actually a pseudo-archaic reworking of the adventures of contemporary explorers. The itinerary of the voyage (Egypt, Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, Victoria Falls, the sources of the Nile) replicated the beaten tracks of the British explorers Livingstone, Speke, Burton, and Stanley. Certain details, such as the trading of cloth and beads and the discovery of the pygmy tribes on the Congo, are taken directly from Stanley’s prose narratives. Footnotes in the text map the action onto the modern geography of Africa and identify mythical birds and beasts with recently discovered animals like the okapi and manatee.56 Arnold’s insertion of modern geographical knowledge into an epic poem divided critics. The Review of Reviews approved, asserting that Arnold had ‘dexterously availed himself of more recent knowledge to fill in the great unknown … there is a very close resemblance between the Africa of Ithobal and the Africa of to-day’.57 The poet William Canton, however, was dismayed by these anachronistic gestures: ‘The Africa which Ithobal discovers’, he complained, ‘is the Africa of the absolutely up-to-date geographer. The narrative from this point of view is one long anachronism, crowded with uncouth place-names, and notes on natural history written in the light of modern science’.58 The most blatant example of the intrusion of the modern into the ancient world occurs when Arnold allows Stanley a surprise cameo near the climax of the poem. Ithobal and his followers are gathered round the campfire when the navigator’s African lover Nesta falls into a reverie and begins to translate the sounds of the night into a prophecy on the future of the continent: The lions know that down this stream will come A white man bringing to the darkness dawn As doth the morning star; opening the gates Which shut my people in, till good times hap, When cattle-bells, and drums, and festal songs Of peaceful people, dwelling happily, Shall be the desert’s voice both day and night: The lions know and roar their hate of it.

194

Brian H. Murray Hark! Ist-a-la-ni! Ist-a-la-ni! cries The Marsh Hen : knowing what will come at last; And wolves snarl – dreaming of ‘the Stone-Breaker.’59

The biblical voice crying in the wilderness had directed believers to ‘make straight the way of the lord’ and prepare ‘a highway for our God’, but Arnold’s howling beasts herald a new imperial order and the coming of commerce and civilization.60 The Stone Breaker – as a footnote dutifully informs the reader – was Stanley’s Swahili nickname: Bula Matari. Stanley’s Phoenician equivalent was a romantic navigator in the Homeric vein, but this Stone Breaker is – like Tennyson’s visitors to Timbuktu – a dispeller of darkness and a prosaic modernizer. Although critics and readers baulked, there is something oddly appropriate about the modern explorer invading the space of the epic poem. As Dentith has argued, the epic was dialectically constructed by ideas of past and present. For the Victorians the Homeric poems constituted both instantly recognizable products of antiquity and battlegrounds for that most modern of intellectual endeavours: historical criticism. ‘In this tradition’, suggests Dentith, ‘the epic becomes the foremost evidence of the historical alterity of the barbaric world; by the same token, it becomes the principal indicator of our own modernity’.61 Stanley’s expeditions, facilitated by the most recent breakthroughs in engineering, medicine, and weapons technology, were – to use Bram Stoker’s phrase – ‘nineteenth-century up-to-date with a vengeance’.62 Yet paradoxically, these journeys were also presented as romances and epics from an heroic era, all the more urgent for their anachronistic persistence in the age of electricity and steam. Much like the epic hero then, the explorer embodied an ambivalent role as both primitive archetype and modern exemplar. Stanley and his peers produced texts that glamorized the savage wilderness of so-called ‘blank spaces’. But they also collected, tabulated and disseminated the forms of pre-colonial ‘knowledge’ which made European dominion over Africa possible. In this sense, the ‘primitive’ frontier of empire was a zone in which the semi-barbarous explorer could continually enact ‘modernity’.63 By 1901 Arnold was blind and partially paralysed – the result of long-term illness – and he wrote Ithobal entirely by dictation.64 In a letter to Arnold, Stanley congratulated the poet on the completion of his final epic, making much of Arnold’s struggle with illness. What most appeals to my imagination on hearing this news is that sightless as you are, & so awfully afflicted, you should have been able to hold the image of the scene where your bold navigator recounts the marvels he has beheld … I personally shall never, never forget the conditions under which the poem has been produced, not the pictures of the blind poet, straining his faded eyes to see the long ago times,

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

195

the hero’s exploits, and his antique ship, the marvels of the unknown sea & land … If your readers could but have seen you as I saw you at work upon it, could but be aware that behind all this warm rapture of the poet there lay so many awful distresses of mind & of body. Their hearts I am sure would be unspeakably full of that sympathy you deserve.65 Ithobal may not have been a great poem, but Stanley was determined to view its composition as a feat of epic endurance. In this emotional letter, he casts Arnold in a great tradition of the blind epicists: from Homer to Milton. Arnold’s choice of a seafaring hero also allows Stanley to add something of Tennyson’s Ulysses here: the ageing navigator straining his ‘faded eyes to see the long ago times … the marvels of the unknown sea & land’. Arnold clearly appreciated Stanley’s tribute and he forwarded a copy of the letter to his business associate, the American impresario James Pond. A few weeks later, Pond wrote to Stanley in turn, outlining his plan to secure an American publisher for Ithobal and praising Stanley’s letter as ‘one of the most touching experiences of sympathy & friendship I ever read. It brought me tears’.66 Arnold’s Ithobal and Stanley’s epistolary tribute thus complete an affective cycle that had begun with Arnold’s Tennysonian gloss on Stanley’s travel narrative. If Arnold encouraged Stanley to see himself in Ulysses, Stanley now returned the favour by casting Arnold as an ageing and ailing Homer. In an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886, Stanley offered some revealing insights into his mobile reading practices. In order to lighten the loads of his carriers, he regularly jettisoned items from his library over the course of an expedition (always saving the Bible and Shakespeare). Demoted in status from literature to litter, these discarded commodities suggested an amusing scenario to Stanley: Many of these books are still in Africa, along the line of march, and will be kept as fetishes until some African antiquarian will pick some of them up a century hence, and wonder how on earth ‘Jane Eyre’ printed in 1870, came to be in Ituru, or Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’, Dickens and Scott, came to be preserved among the Lubari of Gambaragara.67 By tracking the journey of the book from simple reading text (the cheap reprint) to venerated ‘fetish’ and object of ‘antiquarian’ appreciation, Stanley demonstrates a keen awareness of the dynamic nature of the mobile literary commodity. His ‘local’ reading of Tennyson in an African context courted anachronism by rehabilitating the classical hero as an explorer and colonizer. But the journey of the textual commodity in space always necessitates a rupture in time: modern print culture becomes the domain of the antiquary, and the popular novel takes the place of the primitive fetish.

196

Brian H. Murray

In these samples of exploratory verse, we have the paradox of the nineteenth-century explorer: and ceaselessly modern in his desire to remake the wilderness in the image of the metropole. Through the efforts of nineteenth-century explorers and their African collaborators, Central Africa, like Timbuktu, had emerged from the realm of myth into what Tennyson describes as the light of ‘keen Discovery’. But if ‘Discovery’ had demolished the gleaming spires of Timbuktu, it was with an eye to rebuilding new myths and new monuments. This chapter has benefited from the generous comments of Josephine McDonagh, Clare Pettitt, Rosanna Da Costa and Owen Boynton. The research for this chapter was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ ERC grant agreement no 295463.

Notes 1 H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (London: George Newnes, 1899), 2: 151. Stanley’s record of the precise numbers is inconsistent. For a detailed discussion see Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber, 2008), 163–165, 192, 196. 2 Stanley, Dark Continent, 2: 148–9. 3 Stanley, Dark Continent, 2: 149. 4 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, Poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), 2: 88–91. 5 The traffic in both directions is explored by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr eds, Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). For an exemplary case study see Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 6 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 8. 7 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2008), 6. 8 H. M. Stanley, ‘Mr. Stanley’s mission’, Daily Telegraph, 22 November 1877, 2. 9 H. M. Stanley, Field Journal (21 August 1876–3 March 1877). Stanley Archives, Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren. MS 18. 10 Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, 88–89. 11 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 115. 12 [Goldwin Smith], ‘The war passages in “Maud”’, Saturday Review, 3 November 1855, 14–15 (15). 13 Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, 91. 14 Matthew Rowlinson, ‘The ideological moment of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”’, Victorian Poetry, 1992, 30: 265–276 (267). 15 Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, 89–90. 16 Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60. 17 Matthew Rowlinson, Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 44. 18 René Caillié, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830). 19 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Timbuctoo’ [1829], Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1830–1862, ed. J.C. Thomson (Warwick: J. Thomson, 1904), 1–12 (11).

Ulysses in ‘darkest Africa’

197

20 Erika Behrisch, ‘“Far as the eye can reach”: Scientific exploration and explorers poetry in the arctic, 1832–1852’, Victorian Poetry, 2003, 41: 73–91 (78, 86). 21 Tennyson, ‘Sir John Franklin’ [1877], Poems and Plays, 498. 22 Alfred Tennyson to Emily Sellwood Tennyson, 21 March 1874. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (eds), The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 3: 76; Frank McLynn, Stanley: Dark Genius of African Exploration (London: Pimlico, 2004), 1: 220. 23 A Foreign Office diplomat, Arabic scholar and former Jesuit priest, W.G. Palgrave was the brother of Golden Treasury anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave. Tennyson, ‘To Ulysses’, Poems and Plays, 802–3. W. Gifford Palgrave, Ulysses, or Scenes and Studies in Many Lands (London: Macmillan, 1887). 24 Arthur H. Montefiore, Henry M. Stanley: The African Explorer (London: S. W. Partridge, 1889). 25 M. B. Synge, The Struggle for Sea Power (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1903), 94; Arthur Montefiore Brice, David Livingstone: His Labours and Legacy (London: Partridge & Co., 1889), 7; Edward J. Larson, An Empire on Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 249. 26 Robert Falcon Scott, Journals: Scott’s Last Expedition, ed. Max Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 456. 27 Stephen Bates, ‘Tennyson verse chosen to inspire Olympic athletes’, Guardian, 4 March 2011, 11. 28 H.M. Stanley, In Darkest Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1890), 2: 431. 29 ‘Mr. Stanley’s travelling library’, Critic, 13 February 1886, 85. 30 H.M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1872), 103, 161–2. 31 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 40–42. 32 Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10. 33 Stanley, Dark Continent, 2: 353–54. 34 H.M. Stanley, ‘Speech or preface concerning the rear column’ (undated, c. 1891), 28. RMCA 4710. Also cited by Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 181. 35 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 91. On the European myth of Africa as an unhistorical ‘dark continent’ see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 173–98. I explore these issues at greater length in Murray, ‘Primitive man and media time in H. M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent’, Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, ed. Trish Ferguson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 112–31. 36 George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, from 1819–1880 (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1882), 74–75. On visiting the Congo Free State for himself in 1890, Williams became disillusioned with Leopold’s scheme and even wrote a pamphlet denouncing Stanley’s treatment of the local Congolese. See Murray, ‘Primitive man’, 127; John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 37 Williams, Negro Race, 75–76. 38 Williams, Negro Race, 79. 39 Stanley, Dark Continent, 1: 112–13. 40 Williams, Negro Race, 79. 41 Tennyson, ‘The May Queen’ [1833], Poems, 159–174 (162). 42 Stanley, Journal. RMCA 18.

198

Brian H. Murray

43 James Sligo Jameson, The Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, ed. by Edith Jameson (New York: John W. Lovell, 1890), 6. 44 Stanley, Darkest Africa, 1: 126. Tennyson’s original reads: ‘Not once or twice in our rough island-story, / The path of duty was the way to glory’. ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ [1852], Poems and Plays, 202–5 (204). 45 Tennyson, ‘The Princess’ [1847], Poems and Plays, 154–202 (179). 46 Stanley, Darkest Africa, 1: 179. 47 W. G. Stairs, ‘Shut up in the African forest’, Nineteenth Century, 1891, 29 (167): 45–62 (60–61); Tennyson, ‘Amphion’ [1842], Poems and Plays, 101–2 (102). 48 Rowlinson, Tennyson’s Fixations, 142. 49 Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 211. 50 Edwin S. Arnold (ed.), The Arnold Poetry Reader (London: Kegan Paul, 1920), 5–10. 51 Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation (Boston: Roberts, 1879), xi. 52 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: or the Story of my Experiments with Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1927), 57, 50. On Gandhi’s London networks and the overlap between fin-de-siècle vegetarianism, radical politics and ‘anticolonial polemic’ see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 67–114. 53 Jameson, Rear Column, 6. 54 Brooks Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West: Sir Edwin Arnold (New York: Bookman, 1957), 152. 55 Edwin Arnold, The Light of the World, or the Great Consummation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1891); Stanley, Journal (15 February 1891). RMCA 81. Michael Ledger-Lomas persuasively suggests the Anglican clergyman and author Frederic Farrar as a more likely and immediate influence on Arnold’s poem. See Ledger-Lomas, ‘The Great Consummation: Christ and epic in the later nineteenth century’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2009, 14 (2): 173–189. 56 Edwin Arnold, The Voyage of Ithobal (London: John Murray, 1901), 78, 114. 57 ‘Some notable books of the month’, Review of Reviews, 1 November 1901, 537. 58 William Canton, ‘Sir Edwin Arnold’s New Poem’, Bookman, 1901, 21: 24. 59 Arnold, Ithobal, 160–61. 60 John 1:23; Isaiah 40:3 (KJV). 61 Dentith, Epic and Empire, 1. For more on the relevance of epic poetry to nineteenth-century literature and modernity see Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–8. 62 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 36. 63 I have discussed these ideas at greater length in Brian Murray, ‘Building Congo, writing empire: The literary labours of Henry Morton Stanley’, English Studies in Africa, 2016, 59 (1): 6–17. 64 Wright, Edwin Arnold, 177. 65 H.M. Stanley to Edwin Arnold, London, 27 February 1901. RMCA 2550. 66 James B. Pond to H.M. Stanley, New York, 12 April 1901. RMCA 1833. 67 ‘Stanley’s travelling library’, 85.

14 The traffic in representations The case of Kipling’s Kim Isobel Armstrong

In October 1851, George Eliot wrote to a friend that she had been taken by Dr Brabant to visit the Great Exhibition and then to the panorama of the ‘Overland Route’.1 So familiar was the feat of the ‘Overland Route’ that she did not even need to say that this was the ‘Overland Route to India’, showing at the Gallery of Illustration, 14 Regent Street, and seen by a quarter of a million people before it closed, crowds who had also listened to the eloquent commentary of Joachim Stocqueler.2 Thus in a single day she twice experienced the uni-directional traffic in representations of India. In the terms of Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, she would have been introduced to the cultural economy of distance, the long-distance flows of trade and the passage of mercantile commodities. In addition, she would have been introduced simultaneously to representations precipitated by that trade, and to the simulacra of time and space in the panorama. Not only things but images, ideas and representations, and language, as in Stocqueler’s commentary, constituted the traffic between England and India.3 In a later work Appadurai writes that ‘Culturally constructed stories and ideologies about commodity flows are commonplace in all societies’ and particularly in a global economy. Eliot would have necessarily entered such narratives.4 The Indian exhibits at the Crystal Palace, by a freak of taxonomy, since India was not under direct British rule as a colony, were placed more or less at the centre of the Exhibition, between the space devoted to Britain and its colonies and the ‘rest of the world’.5 For India was not technically a colony, but too intimately bound up with British interests through the East India Company (Indian territories were thought of as British ‘possessions’) to count as the rest of the world. Thus India had a central but ambiguous place in the Exhibition.6 At the Crystal Palace Eliot could not have avoided the fetishized Koh-i-Noor diamond,7 and in the Indian section she would have been introduced to exotic oriental modes of locomotion via that icon, the elephant,8 just as she would have been introduced to western modes of traffic via shipping and train at the panorama (actually a hybrid of both diorama and panorama, consisting of stationary and moving panels), a celebration of Thomas Waghorn’s achievement in cutting the route to India from three months to virtually one (from Southampton to Calcutta, via the Mediterranean,

200

Isobel Armstrong

Alexandria and Suez). ‘Things-in-motion’, as Appadurai terms the social life of things, are the essence of both spectacles.9 John Plunkett has written about the Overland Route in more detail in Chapter 3 of this volume.10 My point in mentioning it here is to show how George Eliot’s experience demonstrates the traffic in representations, the absolute saturation of popular visual culture in images of India, resulting in an iconography that became completely familiar. I want to place Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in this context.11 The traffic in representations is itself represented as traffic, a global movement of images to and from India. But in fact, as images became quasi-things, mediated by technology, whether in print or through the telegraph or the photograph, it is the case that India and its objects are always out of place, always displaced by being mediated through western eyes. The global is thoroughly localized in British territory and cultural experience. I am not suggesting that there was an authentic India that might be uncovered if we strip away occidental vision; rather India and its objects are a fiction of orientalism, and in so far as I say this I am voicing a familiar account of imperial discourse known to us through the work of Edward Said and the rich scholarship that followed his inaugural work.12 I want to suggest that part of the work of Kim, published fifty years after Eliot’s visit and forty-four years after the 1857 uprising, in 1901, is to question the model of a uni-directional movement of representation and its monological binary, occidental/oriental. Appadurai points to the complexity of ‘the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time’, and ‘as they circulate in specific cultural and historical milieus’: ‘[T]he concrete historical circulation of images’ and ‘the meanings inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’ are subject to ‘different regimes of value’ in Kim.13 Kim, the novel, is itself part of the flow of representations of India, and cannot stand outside this as metacommentary. Kipling’s solution to this, to avoid the infinite regression of representation, was to pose the dilemma of being part of an ideological narrative in the novel itself. Kim, the character, is at the junction of a number of representations: he is himself, like a commodity, a part of the flow of images and subject to the traffic of representation. Patrick Brantlinger has noted the novel’s ‘openness to cultural difference and lack of teleological structure’.14 Kipling’s openness extends to an interest in the way teleological binaries and representations organize lived experience. The monological master binary in particular of the power of occidental abstraction and science against oriental hybridity is not a workable account of Anglo-Indian experience in this novel.15 Technology, the railway system and the telegraph, became increasingly part of the literal traffic that established the pacification of India – and for this reason Gandhi constantly protested about their presence.16 (Kim travels constantly by train from Lahore, to Lucknow, to Simla, his mentor, the Lama, from Lucknow to Benares and back, encountering a range of the population, from prostitutes to soldiers to shop owners.) Another optical technology

The traffic in representations

201

participated in this pacification, the camera. As Christopher Pinney has demonstrated in his Camera Indica. The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), after 1857, the photograph became an important part of the imperial project.17 Sometimes through private photo albums collected by bureaucrats and soldiers, but just as often mediated through army projects, the photograph was the tool of military reconnaissance, and of territorial investigation. Among other photographers Pinney cites Nottingham born Samuel Bourne, whose image of the Manirang Pass is typical of the topographical photography of exploration and surveillance. It was Bourne who said that the camera of the ‘conquerors’ taught the ‘natives’ that the calotype was as ‘formidable’ as the conquerors’ guns.18 Even when an image had no ostensible surveillance purpose, it was often taken by army or ex-army personnel. Edmund David Lyon’s ‘Tanjore Pagoda’ (1867) is typical of such images, one of a massive documentation of Indian monuments and antiquities stored by the India Office.19 The photograph was ‘formidable’ above all because it was used by the police and medical personnel for identifying criminals and bodies, and subsequently, after 1861 when Indian local governments were ordered to collect photographic likenesses representing classes and races in India, for both ethnographic and surveillance purposes by the secret police. An ideology of the photograph as that which would typify and generalize racial characteristics grew apace – although one should note the contradiction between the assumption of the photograph’s absolute specificity and its abstracting possibilities, to which I shall return. Pinney lists many collections of such photographs, the outstanding collection being the 8-volume The People of India (1868–75), collected by Charles John Canning, who became the first Viceroy of India. Rather strangely, the photograph is not a strong presence in Kim, though when it appears it is significant. It is mentioned twice, at the start of the novel, and when Kim and a Hindoo child play what is now known as ‘Kim’s game’, a memory test guessing game when objects once shown have to be remembered in their absence. They play this game at one time with ‘photographs of natives’, an ostensive definition of things out of place. But before I turn to Kim I want to suggest that the uni-directional drive and monologic binary that I have described was sometimes de-mystified. I will look briefly at two episodes from another novelist, Thackeray (his childhood was spent in India), who understood the lethal work of images. In Vanity Fair, when the Sedley household possessions are auctioned off (the Napoleonic war has precipitated a financial crash), there is a portrait of Josh Sedley, an Anglo-Indian tax collector for the East India Company, that recalcitrantly resists being sold. Portrait of a gentleman on an elephant … let the company examine it as a work of art – the attitude of the gallant animal quite according to natur’; the gentleman in a nankeen jacket, his gun in his hand, is going to the chase; in the distance a banyhann tree, and a pagody, most likely

202

Isobel Armstrong resemblances of some interesting spot in our famous eastern possessions … [my emphasis]20

The auctioneer has never seen an elephant, has no idea where ‘this interesting spot’ is, has no grasp of Indian topography (may not even know this is India), only of conventional orientalized images of India, a casual iconography without an original. These are re-mediated in the portrait. The infinite regression of the colonial image is here, being literally sold on. What the auctioneer does know is that this is an image of one of ‘our famous eastern possessions’. As has been said, India was not strictly a colony, simply a commercial ‘possession’. Thackeray’s deconstructive mockery is fully aware of this. On another occasion in The Newcomes, the second anniversary of Clive’s marriage to Rosie brings with it a gift, a table centre piece which might have come out of the Exhibition. There was a superb silver cocoa-nut tree, whereof the leaves were dextrously arranged for holding candles and pickles; under the cocoa-nut was an Indian prince on a camel giving his hand to a cavalry officer on horseback; a howitzer, a plough, a loom, a bale of cotton on which were the East India Company’s arms; a Brahmin, Britannia, and Commerce with a cornucopia, were grouped round the principal figures.21 A supreme piece of colonial hubris, offering ownership of India to the privileged British subject. Bodies are mounted on bodies on bodies: the unequal proportion of horse and camel and the impossible physical strain of such a handshake itself deconstruct the false accord of Indian prince and military officer. Thackeray loves to produce metonymic lists with one discrepant item. Western technology, the gun, prosthetic aid of the cavalry, keeps the primitive labour-intensive means of production in its place – plough, loom and cotton – as literally the East India Company’s ‘arms’. Britannia and Commerce, actually abstractions, become figured as persons, whereas the Brahmin, a cultural reality, is derealized as symbol. (Note the contradiction between abstraction and specificity.) The cornucopia naturalizes economic products. This piece of embodied ideology asks at what point the body of domination passes into its guns, how abstractions are distorted into things, how things themselves, exposed by their very distortions, rebel against the ‘will’ that has configured them. Ownership of the image is clearly the prerogative of British power here: the representation of the Indian subject is its property. As Thackeray critiques this travesty, such satire may not solve power relations but certainly it exposes them. Things out of place depicted by an object out of place. To turn to Kim, and the very first sentence of the novel: Kim is defiantly out of place. ‘He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun ZamZammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the wonder house, as the natives call the Lahore Museum’ (3). Kim, an orphan who looks, behaves and speaks like an indigenous native street child, is, we soon

The traffic in representations

203

learn, a white boy of Irish origin, Kimball O’Hara, the son of a deceased colour-sergeant in an Irish regiment who had married a colonel’s nurse-maid and remained in India as a railway worker. In the very first sentence of the novel, right at the start, Kim is placed between two symbolic forms of colonial power. He is astride the gun (its Persian name means ‘capturer of strongholds’) and opposite the museum, the place of the cultural trophies of victory, as Benjamin called it. The space of war and the space of the exhibition are across the street from one another. That first sentence is extraordinarily artful. It produces two languages and a translation within itself – gun/Zam Zammah (a heroic nick name); museum/Ajaib-Gher – and a further redaction of the museum as the ‘wonder house’ in ‘native’ terminology, though we have to remember that this designation is also an English translation of the vernacular. To translate we have to substitute one word for another. It is to some extent an act of erasure. But there is an alternative way of thinking about this sentence. The English and ‘native’ or vernacular words co-exist in this sentence, as we move from one to the other. So the sentence can be experienced as a multiple signifier in which meanings exist concurrently, an amplification rather than an erasure. We can move from one term to another without displacing either. That first sentence epitomizes the questions of the novel, though the novel complicates these questions as it evolves. Is Kim astride two cultures or is he between them? Does he have to be ‘de-Englished’ as it is said later in the novel, to remain an ‘Asiatic’ (180)? Does he have to erase his Indian identity in order to accept his role as a ‘Sahib’ and member of the secret service? (The period at school educated him as a Sahib.) What languages are his? What things belong to him? Indeed Kipling complicates affairs in this first sentence by offering not only a ‘straight’ translation of the Lahore museum but the intimately local native image for it, the wonder house – but in English. By the end of the novel Kim begins to ask who he is – what sort of interiority is available to him. Or has his interiority been destroyed? Furthermore, Kim’s instinctive loner’s mentality makes him an alien in his community. In the novel’s first sentence he is not only between cultures but sitting astride the gun ‘in defiance of municipal orders’. His mixed affiliations never resolve themselves into an ‘either/or’ binary. Rather they make him a complex of identities: it is only those around him who draw him into racial and cultural oppositions. He is in some senses what John McBratney terms a ‘white creole’, a figure attempting what he terms, borrowing from James Clifford, ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’.22 But his self-making is constantly challenged and mediated by figures across the racial divide, from the lama, to Mahbub, to Creighton. He is claimed, for instance, by Methodists, Catholics, and the Buddhist lama. Charles Allen has noted the way Kim can ‘slip effortlessly from one guise to another’.23 Patrick Brantlinger notes Kim’s ‘parallel worlds’, and comments that his nature as an ‘incomplete Sahib’ is actually useful to his masters because his habit of ‘behaving like an Indian’ can be exploited in the ‘Great Game’ of spying.24 Kim’s multiple identity is

204

Isobel Armstrong

precisely not a hybridity, which suggests the unproblematic fusion of disparate and mixed elements, but a more uncomfortable multiform identity, a slippage from exuberant shape-changing to coercively formed persona and back: he is uncomfortably at the junction of many identities. That is why we think of him as out of place. In a brilliant reading of Kim Margery Sabin has pointed out that as the tool of the British Secret Service Kim will be known by a code, as all the other members are.25 C25, R17, E23 are the examples. He will transport coded messages – the ‘pedigree of a white stallion’ denoting troop movements – as he has done for Colonel Creighton in his days of innocence, at the end of the novel participating in the defeat of French/Russian spies, an alliance formed by the Russo-French entente of 1894 which threatened Britain’s territorial power in India. A code, originally in Roman times a systematized record of statutes, is a system of signals (as used by the telegraph system for instance) in which words are arbitrarily used for other words or phrases ‘to secure brevity or secrecy’, as the Oxford Dictionary puts it. The arbitrariness of the signifier drives the code. But in this novel words themselves have disappeared in the substitutive process to be replaced by the pure abstractions of letters and numbers, letters and numbers that do not translate but simply stand for a single individual. This code goes as far as possible in performing the work of de-semanticizing and de-personalizing, we have a person and a pure sign. A geometrical sign. Such codes appear to be a western practice. But there are other quite different moments in the novel where representation, not as sign but as specificity and indexical relation with concrete things and people, is at stake. Pinney reminds us of Pierce’s tri-partite category of symbol (signifier), icon (visible mimesis) and index (material linkage as in the light of the photograph); it is a tripartite taxonomy that presupposes a link between signification and its object as a code does not.26 There is a drama in the novel between reductive impersonal sign (occidental) and a plenitude of the index (oriental). The question, the inquiry of the novel, is not so much whether one can straddle or be between these but what are the lived material consequences of an ideological distinction between occidental and oriental consciousness. Kipling makes this struggle increasingly complex, as recent criticism recognizes.27 Kipling’s exploration of the traffic in representations and its formative effect on identity uncovers a number of cultural imaginaries. I will look at two episodes where the exchange of images, its possibilities and perils, is explicit. The first is an encounter between the Tibetan lama (Buddhism) and European Curator of the Museum at the very start of the novel. ‘Now lend me thy spectacles’, says the Curator, after taking the lama through a tour of the museum. The Curator looked through them. They were heavily scratched, but the power was almost exactly that of his own pair, which he slid into the lama’s hand, saying: ‘Try these.’ ‘A feather! A very feather upon the face!’

The traffic in representations

205

The old man turned his head delightedly and wrinkled up his nose. ‘How scarcely do I feel them! How clearly do I see!’ ‘They be bilaur – crystal – and will never scratch. May they help thee to thy River, for they are thine.’ (15) Note the recurrence of the doubling of English and native vernacular. We can read this moment in a number of ways. As an exchange of vision or as things out of place. In the first mode, this is a ritual moment, an almost sacramental exchange. A contract to exchange one another’s ways of seeing, a reciprocal exchange of eyesight or at least mutual recognition. I think the lens of the spectacles is a place holder for the camera. The Curator has already opened a book of photos to show the lama an image of his monastery in response to his description of it. His lens gives transparency, clarity, to the lama’s search for his sacred river. It endows him with the pure transparency, the potential insight, that will eventually mean that the lama interprets the river symbolically rather than literally, interprets the river as a kind of vision, a representation. The lens enables him to distinguish between the literal and the symbolic in a way that western thought recognizes, as in the categories of Pierce. (By contrast Kim is an inexperienced symbolist: he fetishizes the regimental symbol, the red bull, endowing it with misplaced mystical meaning.) The lama on the other hand endows the scholar with the history of his seeing. The material marks and scratches of his lenses record a lifetime of physical and mental effort. It is effort that implicitly justifies the images of the museum, which the lama recognizes as an interpretation of his own Buddhist culture and religion by European scholars as much as by Tibetan thinkers and artists – ancient Greco-Indian sculpture, maps of the Buddhist Holy Places, interpreted by European scholar/translators. The museum for him is a place where occidental and oriental knowledges come together. A place of ‘images’, the lama calls it. Interred in museal space though they are, things have not reached the end of the re-signifying process that keeps them alive. Significantly, the lama pays for Kim’s western schooling. The exchange is a mutual giving of one form of vision for another, visions that can come together. What emerges is a creative hybridity where the exchange of images is not uni-directional, a genuine modifying of each other’s imagined worlds. On the other hand, a quite different binary is possible. The optical technology of the west, monovisual, lens-centred, abstracting, committed to a transparency that does not seem aware of its own mediation, can also be seen as the dubious inheritance of the lama when he accepts the spectacles. It is the technologist’s ideal of undistorted vision. The spectacles in this context create the visual extremes of literalism on the one hand and abstraction on the other, as the camera’s specificity and generalizing power is handed to him, and

206

Isobel Armstrong

commit him to swing between concrete particularity and abstraction without resolution. His Buddhist quietism spurns the plenitude and multivalence that Kim accepts. His ‘river of life’ is qualitatively different from the ever-changing life of the Road, the ancient silk road, that Kim relishes and that is also twice described as a ‘river’ of life – ‘Brahmins and Chumars [leatherworkers], bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias [Hindu traders] … India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles’ (58), the incessant flow of people and goods. In this reading the mythologizing of the sacred river revealed to the lama at the end of the novel is a form of mystification, a form of mistaken purism endowed by the false clarity of the spectacles. On the other hand, the scratched, marked lenses of the lama’s spectacles represent the lama’s restricted, obfuscated vision, the subaltern experience, that cannot fully interpret a complex world shaped by the traffic in representations. The ‘spectacles’ episode (the exchange is referred to several times by the lama) sets up a number of binaries: first, the European vision of the Curatorscholar, the Buddhist mysticism of the lama; second, the transcendental vision of the lama and the multivalent plenitude to which Kim is committed. The third binary incipient in this episode, that perhaps subsumes the others, is the western technology of abstraction against the knowledge based on concrete particularities. Essentially science and hybridity are the ideological alternatives played out between Kim and Colonel Creighton, his minder. Creighton, a man yearning to be among the pure scientific experiments of the Royal Society in England (171) assures Kim that his schooling is not only training him into being a Sahib but also into being a ‘chain man’, a surveyor, essentially a worker mapping and measuring (another geometric system) in the territorial project of colonial possession: ‘thou must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains and rivers – to carry these pictures in thine eye till a suitable time comes to set them down on paper’ (116). It is a surrogate for intelligence gathering by camera. The ‘chain man’ is the polar opposite of the lama’s integrated ‘chain of being’. The practice of making the same metaphor accrue different meanings – river, chain – is fundamental to this text and expresses the contradictions it encounters. Essentially Kim is to be an imperial camera for reconnaissance into the interior. Here his expertise as an indigenous reader, an intuitive and buoyant ethnology of the Indian Road is to be abandoned or instrumentalized. It is instrumentalized. The two knowledges are theorized as antipathetic but are effectively complementary, two sides of the same ideological figuring. The two seemingly antipathetic knowledges generate two forms of representation or figuring. One depends on the code, the other on an indexical or natural relationship of contiguity. But apparently the same thing can be interpreted as one or the other. The picture in the photographic image can be abstracted for the purposes of power or it can be offered in its specificity. Just as Kipling allows the paradigm of photographic vision to appear as a reference, so he allows that other form of image making to be present by inference – finger printing or dactylography, developed in India by Sir William

The traffic in representations

207

Herschel – which in fact, as Carlo Ginzburg showed so perceptively, displaced photographic representation as a mode of surveillance, beginning in Bengal from the 1890s.28 Kipling could not have been unaware of this, or that fingerprinting was subsequently exported to England. Fingerprinting, like the photograph, can take two antipathetic representational forms. If Kim is to be trusted, the fingerprint was already an indigenous practice in India as a substitute for the signature, a unique mark of the self. ‘From Balkh [Afghanistan] to Bombay men know that rough-ridged print with the old scar running diagonally across it’ (34). This is the print of authorization produced by the horse dealer and spy, Mahbub, one of Kim’s mentors. He ‘wetted his thumb on a cake of Chinese ink, and dabbed the impression on a piece of soft native paper’ (134). The signature migrates as a proxy, along with commodities, takes part in the traffic in representation, but it is not a thing out of place as its unique character is recognized as an authentic representation of the trader. It is closer to the indexical representation (to use Pierce’s term as described by Pinney (69)), an image, than to a code. It is part of the lifeworld and cultural practice of India. The systematic fingerprinting used for wide scale surveillance, on the other hand, regards the fingerprint as a code, a primitive bar code, for a person. It is a thing. It abstracts and turns the person it figures into a thing, a thing out of place. In England in 1888 Francis Galton tried and failed to abstract from Indian fingerprints typical racial characteristics, using these in the same way that photography had been used. The same metaphor (river, chain), a different reference: the same object (a fingerprint), different forms of figuring it. Through these strategies Kipling explores the heterogeneous knowledges of India and the west and suggests that they are so bound up with one another that a uni-directional flow of images or things has no meaning. They expose the abstraction/hybridity opposition as artificially constructed. One more example suggests the contradictions of the double account of knowledge into which Kim is forced. This is the episode of ‘Kim’s game’ in Lurgen’s shop, where Kim is temporarily lodged. The shop is explicitly compared to the western ‘wonder house’, the museum (149), but its miscellaneous hybridized contents from all over the world – Japan, China, Russia, Persia – from samovars to crucifixes, Lurgen thinks of as junk, as things without meaning. (He is trafficking in precious stones, the only things that have meaning for him, reducing exchange to ‘pure’ commodity.) The contents of the shop do take on meaning, however, when they become objects that mark different ways of knowing exemplified by Kim and the Hindoo boy who lives there. In the intense competition between Kim and the Hindoo boy (who is Lurgen’s lover, another exploited persona), over remembering and identifying objects, the Hindoo always wins. Where Kim can only remember five blue stones, the boy remembers the weight and appearance of two flawed sapphires, one ‘chipped at the edge’, a Turkestan Turquoise, one inscribed with a ‘Name of God’, another stone cracked across, ‘for it came out of an old ring’ (153). The boy’s depth and understanding can recontextualize these objects

208

Isobel Armstrong

and place them in a history, put them in their place. Kim cannot. We are clearly intended to understand an opposition between abstracting and specifying knowledges here. Kim, for all his indigenous identity, lacks training in specificity, just as he is a bad reader of symbols. We might think of the Koh-i-Noor here, abstracted as the triumph of imperial trophy in England, endowed with a highly specific history of bloodshed in India. But it is more complex than this, for Lurgen attempts to mystify and confuse Kim by manipulating both forms of knowledge, two orders of things. A phonograph (western technology) keeps Kim awake all night as if he is haunted by magic voices until he destroys it. By a form of conjuring whose mechanism is not revealed, a pitcher of water arrives at Kim’s side. He is told to throw it back: it breaks; he is told that the broken pieces are becoming whole. ‘The shadowy outline of the entire vase’ (150) appears to Kim. In a highly sexual attempt at mesmerizing him (and presumably by manipulating a projected optical image) Lurgen insists on the reintegration of the vase, but Kim resists this magic. It is magic of a kind, but it is also magic that depends on western optics and the technology of optical illusion, just as the panorama/diorama seen by George Eliot depended on the same image-making techniques. Kim resists by departing from thinking in Hindi and repeating the multiplication table in English and finally exorcizes the deceptive image: ‘But it is smashed’ (151). The jug is a collection of dripping shards, on the floor, in the sunlight. The shards are in a manner in place, in English. But at a cost. Though the reality of the Anglo-Indian exchange is of constant interpenetration, Kim is always forced into extremes. This episode contrasts with a later moment when he ‘dreamed in Hindustani, with never an English word’ (189). The Lurgen illusion is an extraordinary episode. Kim arrives at the empirical truth but he has wrested this understanding from coercions in which knowledge has been perverted – technology used as magic, vision mystified. And the empirical understanding has been achieved through loss, through the casting off of his Indian language and the loss of a multiform identity. And one might say that he loses vernacular English also in favour of the abstractions of number as he repeats the multiplication tables as a mantra. Throughout the novel Kim is at the junction of different knowledges and different forms of representation that are continually artificially separated. At its end, after a long illness following upon a mission to defeat Franco Russian spies, Kim’s survival, at the junction of separate and alienated cultures rather than in the matrix of multiple knowledges, is an open question. Kipling’s exploration in this novel is complex. The interpenetration of cultures is everywhere apparent, and yet Kim is constantly enjoined to keep them apart or to belong duplicitously to one or the other. He is the subject of a unidirectional ideology and an ideology of uni-direction.

Notes 1 Eliot, letter of 4 October 1851. Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1: 364.

The traffic in representations

209

2 For an account of the Overland Route and the didactic panorama see Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 207–9; 460. Visitors to the Overland Route during the months of the Great Exhibition (May–October 1851) numbered 200,000. 3 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4–6. 4 Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact. Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 51. 5 For maps of the Crystal Palace exhibition spaces see the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry (London: W. Clowes, 1851). 6 After the East India Company Act 1784 (Pitt’s India Act), the administration of the company passed to a Board of Control appointed by Parliament. For an account of the East India Company see Antony Wild, The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from 1600 (London: Harper Collins, 1999). 7 I describe contemporary discussion of the Koh-i-Noor and its history of violence in my Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 229–31. 8 There was considerable public interest in the elephant: the original howdah, or seating arrangement for elephant travel, lacked an elephant. A stuffed elephant was eventually loaned by the Saffron Walden museum after the Exhibition had opened. 9 Appadurai, Social Life of Things, 5. 10 Thanks to John Plunkett for allowing me to read an earlier draft of his research. 11 Rudyard Kipling, Kim [1901], ed. Jeffrey Meyers, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003). All subsequent references to this text in parentheses. 12 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1979). 13 Appadurai, Social Life of Things, 4–5. 14 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Kim’, The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. Howard J. Booth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 138. 15 I mean by hybridity the fusion of different, heterogeneous elements; Homi Bhabha’s valuable more complex sense of hybridity, as the moment of discourse that actually leads to a breakdown of western oppositions such as occidental/ oriental, is not uppermost in my formulation, though it is certain that Kipling’s novel could be read in this way. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, second edition (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–19. 16 See Laura Bear on the centrality of the railway to Indian nationhood. Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 17 Christopher Pinney,Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 18 Pinney,Camera Indica, 21. 19 British Library, India Office Records, 212/4 (26). 20 William Makepiece Thackeray, Vanity Fair [1848], ed. John Carey (London: Penguin, 2001), 187. 21 William Makepiece Thackeray, The Newcomes [1855] (London: Random House, 1994), 633. 22 John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), xxxvi–xxxviii, 30. 23 Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865–1900 (London: Abacus, 2008), 353. 24 Brantlinger, ‘Kim’, 128, 132. 25 Margery Sabin, ‘Colonial India and Victorian storytelling’, The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 248–74.

210

Isobel Armstrong

26 Pinney, Camera Indica, 20. 27 Over the last decade critics have become unwilling to see Kipling as the ventriloquist of western imperial values, leading to some innovative work. See Janet Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling. Writers and their Work (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007); Mary Hamer, Kipling and Trix (London: Aurora Metro Publishers, 2012). 28 Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 120–3. Ginzburg discusses the merits, for surveillance, of the photographic archive and the fingerprint and argues for reading the fingerprint not only as a form of control but also as a source of indigenous knowledge.

Selected Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. Ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Banerjee, Prathama. Politics of Time: ‘Primitives’ and History-Writing in a Colonial Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Baikin, Jordanna. The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Bayly, C.A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Burton, Antoinette and Isabel Hofmeyr, eds. Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Classen, Constance and David Howes. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge, 2013. Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge, 2006. Coe, Sophie D. and Michael D. Coe. The True History of Chocolate. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and their Possessions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

212

Selected Bibliography

Cooke, S. B. Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland. New Delhi: Sage, 1993. Curry-Machado, Jonathan, ed. Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Dean, Warren. Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Drollas, Leo and Jon Greenman. Oil: The Devil’s Gold. London: Duckworth, 1989. Flood, Finbarr B. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “HinduMuslim” Encounter. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Freese, Barbara. Coal: A Human History. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2003. Gately, Iain. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2016. Ghosh, Devleena and Stephen Muecke, eds. Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Hoffenberg, Peter. An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Huggans, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Jones, Robin D. Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent c. 1800–1947. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. London: Penguin, 1997. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mathur, Saloni. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Myers, Janet C. Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Ong, Aihwa and Stephen J. Collier, eds. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Selected Bibliography

213

Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008. Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Rappaport, Erika. ‘Packaging China: Foreign articles and dangerous tastes in the mid Victorian tea party’. In Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 125–146. Revel, Jacques. Ed. Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Robbins, Bruce. ‘Commodity Histories’. PMLA, 120 (2005), 454–463. Roseberry, William, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach. Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Saffron, Inga. Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Simpson, Mark. Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Striffler, Steve and Mark Moberg, eds. Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Warman, Arturo. Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, trans. Nancy L. Westrate. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Waters, Catherine. Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Young, Paul. Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold type refer to figures Page numbers in italic type refer to tables Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes Abdul Karim Khan 34, 40 Abdullah (Dulhe) Khan of Agra 36 Abha Collection 37 Absolon, J. 49 acculturation 174–5 adaptation 5–6, 146 Addis, T.W. 33, 41n28 Adsett, T. 140 advertising 3, 6, 60, 121 Africa 3, 7, 10, 26, 77, 166; exhibitions 59, 154–5; exploration 184–96; ivory trade 80–5; poetry 184–96 Agamben, G. 8, 92–5, 98n22&25 agriculture 7, 64, 65, 70, 97n9, 106, 116 agricultural implements 66; and science 8 Ailsa (coolie ship) 124 Akbar II (Moghul emperor 1806–37) 18–21, 29n13&17; elephant procession watercolour 18–19, 19; titular invocation 18; writing cabinet and brooch images 20–21, 21, 29n28 Akbar Khan (Mughal prince) 24 Akbar Shah (Mughal emperor 1556–1605) 15 Alexandria 49–50, 200 Algebra for Beginners (Hall) 181 Algebra (Hall and Knight) 178–80 Algiers 44, 50 Alladiya Khan 36–7 Allan, J. (coolie transporter) 117–18 Allen, C. 203 Alley, K. 88 America, see Canada, United States American West 44; British growth 45

Amphion (Tennyson) 191 Amundsen, R. 188 Anand, M.R. 155 Ancient Law (Maine) 149–51 Anderson, B. 44 Angel, Capt W.H. 124–5, 128n52 Angenot, M. 109 Anglo-Afghan War (1839) 23 Anglo-American Expedition (1876) 184, 191–2, see also Stanley, H.M. Anglo-Sikh War (1845–6) 23 anthropocentrism 5, 90 anthropology 1, 5–6, 36, 59, 75, 99, 88, 104, 150–1 anthropomorphization 4 anti-Enlightenment 91 Appadurai, A. 1, 5–6, 92, 98n19, 199–200 archaeology 151 Archaeological Society of Delhi 30n44 Arithmetic for Beginners (Lock) 179 Arjuman Banu Begum (Mumtaz Mahal) 15, 16, 24 Armstrong, I. 10, 199–210 Arnold Bake collection 36 Arnold, E. 10, 184–5; poetry 192–6; struggle with illness 194–5 Art-Manufacturers of India (Mukharji) 67–8 artisan 7, 26, 62–72 Arts and Crafts movement (England) 61, 152 arzee (petition to address the emperor) 18, 29n19 Asadullah Khan Kaukuv 34

Index Asolando (Browning) 189 Assembly Rooms (Plymouth) 53 At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers (Rushdie) 98n23 Atkinson, E. 188 Attali, J. 37 Austen, J. 101–102 Australia 9, 44, 53, 63–4, 78, 118, 176; Melbourne 63–4; migration 132, 134, 140, 148; panorama 52–3; Report of the Royal Commission for Victoria at the Calcutta International Exhibition 64–5; Sydney 53; Tasmania 53 Avoca (coolie ship) 118 Azizuddin Khan 36, 41n20 B. Banerjee & Co. 181 Baden Powell, B.H. 25–7, 30n49 Bahadur Shah Zafar (Mughal emperor 1836–57) 15, 23–4 Bakshiram (potter) 67–8, 68 Bande Mataram (Tagore) 36 Bandopadhyay, G. 178 Banerjee, G. 179 Banvard, J. 53 Barkatullah Khan 34 Barker, F. 184 Barker, R. 44 Barnes, J., et al. 130, 142n10 Barsetshire novels (Trollope) 148 Barstow, A. 147–8 Barthes, R. 140–1; ‘reality effect’ 141 Basu, K.P. 181 Basu, S.C. 181 Baviskar, A. 90 Bay of Bengal 50 Bayly, C.A. 11n3, 158n25 Beecher Stowe, H. 171 Belgium 187 Belich, J. 11n3, 44, 130 Bell, A.G. 58 Bengal 62–4; Bay of Bengal 50; clay figures (castes and occupations) 69, 73n36; Economic and Art Museum 63; Education Department 179; indigo and disturbances 163–73; intelligentsia 164, 172; partition 62; Resistance 171; Service 178 Bengal Hurkaru 166, 170–2 Benjamin, W. 4, 27, 59–61, 93 Bennett, J. 81, 87n1 Bennett, J.G. 192 Bentinck, Lord W. 29n14

215

Bernstein, J.M. 105 Bhabha, H. 209n15 Bhagavad Gita 192 Bhaskarbua Bakhale 36–7 Bhaurau Kolhatkar 37 Bhurji Khan 36 Bible 3, 4, 82, 101, 107, 185, 194, 195 bidri work 66 billiards 82, 84 Birdwood, G. 61, 64, 71n15, 153–4 Bisnauth, D. 124 Bivona, D. 187 Blanchard, P., et al. 159n37–8 body histories 2; ‘body at work’ 70 Bombay (Mumbai) 7, 33–4, 37, 48, 117, 150, 153, 179, 192, 207, 48 Bomwetsch, Rev 166 Boral, Lalchand 33, 42 Book History 172 Bose, A.M. 179 Bose, H. 34–7; music cylinders 36, 41n19; record label 36 Botanist, The (coolie ship) 118 bottles, plastic 85, 96 Bourne, S. 201 Brahmagupta 175 Brantlinger, P. 200, 203 Breckenridge, C. 60, 65 Brett, W. 163, 170 Briefel, A. 66 Briggs of Sunderland (ship-builders) 117 Brighton Herald 130 Bristol Mercury 46 British and Foreign Bible Society 3 British Library 36 British Quarterly Review 172 Brooklyn (Tóibín) 156 Browne, Dr J.C. 123 Browning, R. 189 Brunel, I.K. 45–6 Buck, E.C. 64, 70n22 Buddhism 174, 204–6; founder 192 Bunyan, J. 185 Burke, W.S. 33 Burnett, Sir W. 121 Byerley, A. 42–4 Byron, Lord, G.G. 189 Caillié, R. 187 Calcutta (Kolkata) 3, 32–4, 49; Botanical Gardens 65; coolie trade 9, 115–28; Garden Reach depot 119; intelligentsia 34, 164; Missionary Conference (1855) 165; music business

216

Index

32–5; panorama and romantic Orientalism 46; Printing and Publishing Press 169; Provincial Economic Museum 64; ship building 116, 126n2; Supreme Court 170; textbook printing and piracy 180–1; Union Bank failure 164–5; University 35, 179 Cambridge University 176; Press 181 Camera Indica (Pinney) 201 Cameron, W., Haines, S. and Maude, M.M. 131, 142n2 Camoes, L. Vaz de 111n14; and the Fury of Adamastor 103 Campbell, G. 152, 171 Canada 44, 56, 129–32, 136 Canning, C.J. 201 Canton, W. 193 Cape of Good Hope 47, 117 Capital, 4, 75, 76, 100, 101, 105, 106, 109, 111n11, 126n2, 156; cultural 3, 9 Capital (Marx) 4 capitalism 4, 89, 92–96; accumulation 95; agrarian 145 Carey, W. 176 Caribbean 9, 115–120, 124–5 carpet-weavers 66, 67 case oil 118 Casey, J. 179 caste system 8, 66–7, 69, 89, 92, 93–4, 95, 101, 102–4, 106, 107, 121, 124, 125, 158n23, 182 Certeau, M. de 43 Chandra, H. 163 Chandvankar, S. 36–7 charkha (spinning wheel) 61 Chatterjee, P. 89 Chatterjee, R.B. 10, 174–83 Chatterjee, S. 73n36 Chattopadhyay, B.C. 61 Chaudhuri, A. 173 Chaudhuri, S. 7, 58–73; et al. 1–12 Cherry-Garrard, A. 188 Childe Harold (Byron) 189 China 63, 86, 115, 175, 207 Chisholm, C. 140–2, 144n54 chloride of lime 121 Chlorodyne 123 Chokhi Dani hotel (Rajasthani) 156, 159n40 cholera 91, 119–20; epidemic medicines 120–1 Christianity 3, 90, 93, 168, 175, 192; arrival through colonialism 100–3,

111n15; Catholicism 102–105, 112n33–4, 203; symbols 102; and water 90 Church Missionary Society 166 Civil Rights Protection Act 95 Clarendon (coolie ship) 122 Clarendon Press 177 Clifford, J. 203 coal 1, 4, 7–8, 77–80, 86, 118; costs 78–9 Cobbett, W. 132, 137 coconut oil 118 colonialism 1–6, 49, 88–89, 97n7; Belgian 187; British 2, 145–59, 175–6; communication 2, 11n3, 78; French 115; Portuguese 100-1; resistance 3; see also East India Company colony 6, 8, 62, 89, 120, 129, 144n56, 145, 155, 187, 199, 202; and metropolis 2, 196n6; settler 8 Comfort for the Poor! (Chisholm) 140 commodities 1–12, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98n23, 106, 111n11, 141, 146, 147, 154, 155, 164, 195, 199, 200; composition and decomposition (coal and ivory) 8, 77–87; cultural significance 1–2, 6–10; exchange and exhibition 58–60, 71; place and form 2–4; print 163–86 commodification 5, 8, 74, 77, 79, 85, 103, 106; de-commodification 84, 85 Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Richards) 6 communidade 8, 102; gaunkaria 102, 104–6, 108, 110 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 5, 12n13, 89 Condy’s fluid 121 Congo Free State 187, 197n36 Congo River 184–5 Connell, C. (ship designer) 117, 126n11 Conrad, J. 82 consecration 93 consumption 1, 5–6, 27, 46, 59, 65 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) 84–5 coolie trade 8–9, 138; Blackwall frigates 116, 126n4; Chinese from Macao 115; cleanliness and bilge purification 121; and the dark waters 119, 124; deculturalization process 119; food and stores 9, 120–1, 124; from Calcutta 115–28, 126n2; heat and damp 118; illnesses and water impurity 118–21; inflammable cargo

Index prohibition 118; items held and traded (power) 112, 120–22; and the kalapani (returnee emigrants/Queen of Sheba) 124; medical comforts and health treatments 9, 120–3; milk provision for children and infants 121; mortality rates 121, 127 n26; musical instruments 117; on-board surgeons 113–16; resistance and mutiny 117, 121n48; rice and salt cargoes 111, 120n16; safety and ventilation 111–13; shipping contracts 110–11, 119n12; ships and welfare 9, 108–18; to be kept khush (happy) 109, 119n3; ventilation 9, 112–14 Coromandel (ship) 32 cottage industry 3 Cottagers of Glenburnie, The (Hamilton) 146 cotton 1–3, 63, 68, 202; Manchester 4, 62, see also swadeshi, textiles Counsel for Emigrants (1834) 127 Country and the City, The (Williams) 145, 149 Coutts and Parkinson (ship builders) 109 Cowper, W. 189 Cranford (Gaskell) 148 Crary, J. 43 Cresswell, T. 43 Croker, T.C. 141 Crystal Palace 60, 154, 199, see also Great Exhibition Cuban Counterparts (Ortiz) 5 Cunard, N. 80 curry spices (powders) 118 Dadasaheb Phalke 37 Daily Telegraph 174–6, 182 dal 118 Dante, Alighieri 176–7, 183 Darnton, R. 172 Das Gupta, A. 7, 30–40 Day, L.B. 166 Deb, N. 9, 108–21, 138 Deccan Sanskrit College (Poona) 192 Deendayal, Lala 37, 41n27 Defoe, D. 53 degradation 86, 92 Delharee (coolie ship) 120–5; and Dr Wiley’s diary 120–5 Delhi 13–24; Shahjahanabad citadel 13; Durbars 58; Red Fort complex 13–15, 24; St James’ Church 26; Siege of 24

217

Demerara 108–9, 125; Damraila 116, 126n3 see also Guyana Dentith, S. 179, 184 Descola, P. 82 Deserted Village, The (Goldsmith) 145 Deshpande, M.M. 114n33 Deveria, J. 66 Dewey, J. 158n28 dhadka wild grass 66 Dias, L. 8, 100, 110n3, see also Os Maharatas diaspora 11n3 Dickens, C. 44–5; and The Noble Savage 58; visiting panoramas (Mr Dooley) 45, 54 Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (Watt) 62, 72n15 dioramas 43, 45–9, 199, 208; Boardgame of the Overland Route to India (Sallis) 50; imitation 49–50; Ocean Mail to India and Australia via the Cape (Greive and Telbin) 50; Overland Mail 48–9; Overland Route (Hamilton) 49–51; The Route of the Overland Mail to India from Southampton to Calcutta 49–50, see also panoramas discrimination 87 disinfectant 121 Dow Chemicals 90–1, 94n33–5; contaminated bottled water 91, 94n34 Dravida movement 93n28 Drury Lane Theatre (London) 45 Durkheim, E. 81 Dutt, M.M. 159 Dutt, R.C. 59 Dwarkin and Company 34 Dyer, Dr J.E. 124 East India Company (EIC) 18, 63, 199–202; Act (1784) 189, 199n6; bribery and corruption 15, 26n9–10; India Museum 64, 146; and the Moghul court 14–15; Protector of Emigrants appointment 119, 122–3; see also colonialism East India Dock (London) 117 East India Office 45 East, West (Rushdie) 98n23 eBay 84 Eck, D. 87 Economic History of India (Dutt) 61 ecosystems 2 Eden, A. 153

218

Index

Eden, E. 18–19; family portrait (miniatures) 18, 28n30 Eden, G., Lord Auckland 29n14 Egyptian Hall (London) 53 Elder of Glasgow (ship-builders) 117 Elementary Algebra (Hall and Knight) 166–71 Elementary Algebra Part 1 (Basu/Basu/ Ghosh) 171 Elements of Geometry (Hall and Stevens) 180 elephants 189–91, 199n8; and ivory 75, 77–9; procession watercolour 17–19, 19; travel 46 Eliot, G. 148–50, 199–200, 208 Emancipation 88, 108 Emigrant’s Guide, The (Cobbett) 125, 130, 136n21 Emigration: Letters from Sussex Emigrants (Hasted) 123, 130–3, 131–2 emigration 122–3; distorted picture 124; literature 123–35; schemes 123, see also letters Emigration to Suriname (IOR) 120n26 Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered (Chisholm) 133 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887–9) 181 engagement 2 Engels, F., and Marx, K. 5, 12n13, 84 English Immigrant Voices (Cameron, Haines and Maude) 135n2&6 English Post Office 46 Englishman 170 environment 7–8, 76, 96n7, 145, 153 environmentalism 2, 83; activists 85–6; changes 2–3; damage 85, 92n7 Era, The 54 Erikson, C. 124 Espinet, R. 116 espionage 203–4, 207 ethnicity 5, 174, see also race Euclid (Casey) 169 Euclid (Ghosh) 170 Euclid Parts I–IV (Hall and Stevens) 165, 168–71 evolution 90, 152 exchange process and value 1, 4 exclusivity 87–8 exhibitions 6–7, 58–73; Amsterdam (1883) 62–6; Artist and Empire (Tate Gallery 2015–16) 67; Battersea Park, London (1885) 61; Calcutta

(1883–4) 62–6, 69; catalogues 7, 52, 61–4, 69–70n15; Colonial and Indian (1886) 59–61, 64–7, 67; Columbian (Chicago 1893) 59; dioramas and panoramas 44–56; display circulation 63; Franco-British (Shepherd’s Bush) 59; Glasgow (1888) 61, 67–9; Great London (1851) 1–3, 60–1, 65, 157, 199, 209n6–8; human zoos 58–9, 65, 155, 159n37–8; Indian art (1903) 65, 72n15; London (1886/1862) 63–4, 71n15; Lyon (1914) 159n37; Melbourne (1879–80) 63–4, 67; Pan-American (1901) 59; Paris (1878/ 1889–1900) 58–60, 62–4, 70, 71n15, 157; primitive craft villages and workers 59–61, 66–7; Punjab (1864) 26; revenue and customs earnings 58; value 92; Vienna International (1873) 65, 72n15; village cultures (black/ Indian/English) 58–60, 157–8, 159n37; Zulu Kaffirs 58, see also Crystal Palace, museums exile 11n3, 24 exploitation 2, 107, 124 explorers 3, 10, 154, 184–6 extortion 164 Famine 61–2, 64, 90 Far Eastern Recording Expedition 36 Farrell, G. 30 Feaver, G. 151n18 Ferguson, W.F. 160 ferrograph 34 fetishism 4, 57, 88, 189; of labour 58 feudalism 101, 149, 153 Fiji 115, 118–19 finger-printing (dactylography) 196–7, 200n28 fire 86, 148 Fiske, J. 151n18 Flood, F. 71 Forbes Watson, J. 59–63, 69–70n15 Forget-Me-Not 147 Fox Strangways collection 36 Francis Xavier, St 107 Franklin, Sir J. 178 Fraser, J.B. 20–1 Fraser, W. 20–1 free trade 3–4, 45, 150 Freedgood, E. 6, 11n3 Friendships Offerings 147 From Status to Contract: Biography of Sir Henry Maine (Feaver) 151n18

Index Gafoor, A. 123 Gaisberg, F. 30–1 Gaisberg, W. 33–2, 37 Galton, F. 207 Gandhi, M.K. 7, 61, 155, 158n25, 159n32, 192, 198n52, 200 and Indian village economy 72n17; spinning cotton 70 Ganges (Ganga) 8, 88–9, 91, 92, 93, see also water Gaskell, E. 148 Gauhar Jan 31–2, 35–8 Gaunkari history (Pereira) 107n40 Gautama, Siddhartha 192, see also Buddhism G.D. Tyser (coolie transportation) 119n12 Geddes, P. 60 Gerber, D. 131 ghee 117 Ghosh, A. 40n1, 115, 123, 156 Ghosh, P. 180–1 Ghulam Ali Khan 16, 26, 29n21 Ghulam Hussain Khan 23–4 Gibralter 50 Gillard, H. 52–4, 53, 55n43 Ginzburg, C. 207, 210n28 Glasgow 63, 65, 67–80, 116, 117 Glass 85 Gleaner, The (Kingston newspaper) 121 global warming 76 globalization 2–3, 43 Goa 100; Portuguese colonial rule 95–6, see also Os Maharatas Gobind Das (holy man) 68 Gold, A.G. 149 Goldsmith, O. 138 Gomes, F.L. 96 gouache 18 grain 111, 134, 190 Gramophone Company, The 32–4, 38–9; Bengali record sales 37, 39–42n28; celebrities 38, 39–42n28; discs and equipment 38 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler) 35 Gramophone and Typewriter Company Ltd 32, 39 Grant, Lt Gov J.P. 163–72 Grant, M. 59 Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti) 146, 156n4 Gray, T. 189 Great Exhibition (London) 1, 3, 4, 65, 154, 199, see also Crystal Palace, exhibitions, museums

219

Great Northern Railway 151 Great Western Railway 46 Grieve, T. 47, 52 Grigg, H.B. 179 Grimwade’s milk powder 121 Guha, R. 167 Gulab Singh 23 Gupta, A. 9–10, 163–73 Gupta, I. 167 Guyana 116, see also Demerara Habermas, J. 105 Haidar Khan 36 Haidari Jan 34 Hall, H.S. 174–82; and Knight, S.R. 176, 182; and Stevens, F.H. 180–2 Hamilton, E. 146 Hamilton, W. 43, 51–3; Diorama of the Overland Route 51–53; Excursions Around the World 43; new route 53 Handbook of Indian Products, A (Mukharji) 66 Handbook for Surgeons Superintendent of the Coolie Emigration Service (Laing) 120, 126n15 Harcourt, F. 47 Hardt, M. 95, 99n31 Harraden, S. 34 Hasted, F. 129, 132, 142n2–6; letters Adelaide (Upper Canada) 129–130; parish emigration scheme (Petworth) 129–30 Hastings, Gov W. 17 Hawd, J.W. 32–3 Haythornthwaite, J.T. 179 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 82 Heber, Bishop R. 29n17 Hegel, G.W.F. 190, 197n35 Helsinger, E. 157n3 Henkin, D. 135 Henn, A. 111n15 Herodotus 193 Herschel, Sir W. 24, 206–7 hierarchies 1; Mughal imperial rule 16–20 Hindoo Patriot 166, 172 Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa (Henn) 111n15 Hinduism 8, 65, 66, 69, 70, 83, 104, 106, 166, 182; Brahminical 83, 89, 98; legends 106, 108; mathematics and zero discovery 174–5; migration narratives 106–7; outcastes and untouchables 88–90, 93n28; pollution

220

Index

and touch 88–9; religion and water 8, 89–95; sacred and profane 8, 94–98, 97–8n17; sanction and entitlement rituals 104 History of the Negro Race (Williams) 190 Hoffenberg, P. 69 Hofmeyr, I. 131 Home, R. 29n20 Homer 186–9, 193–5 Hooker, J.D. 65 Household Words 45, 49, 56, 58, 172 human zoos 58–9, 65, 148, 159n37–8 hybridity 5, 200, 204, 209n15 hybrid markets 79–80 Ibis trilogy (Ghosh) 156, see also Sea of Poppies iconoclasm 94 Ideas in Things (Freedgood) 6 ideologies 4–5, 140–1, 201, 202, 208, see also settlerism Iliad (Homer) 189, 193 Illustrated London News 66 Imdad Khan 34 imperial shows 59–60, 157–8; Delhi Durbars (1903, 1911) 60, see also panoramas, dioramas In Darkest Africa (Stanley) 189 Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism (Northrup) 124 India 7, 58–71, 115–16, 174–5; Agra Central Jail 63; Agricultural Department Exhibition Branch 64; carrot cultivation 64; craft, textile and agriculture economic revival 7, 60–71; Delhi, ivory and Mughal age 15–31; education and textbooks 174–82; foodstuff exports 118; Ganges sacred river (pollution/degradation) 8, 88–96; Hindustani music recordings 32–42; Mughal ideas, sites and themes 7, 15–31; pacification 200; Partition of Bengal (1905) 70; Rebellion (1857) 26, 145; sale of Kashmir region 23; sound recording history 7; swadeshi (home manufacture movement) 62, 70, 162n32, 182; Taj Mahal 15; technological development 63; village communities (crafts/economy) 61–71, 72n17, 149–52, 159n39, see also Bengal; Calcutta; Overland Mail to India India Office Records (IOR) 126n26 Indian artist working methods, ivory 26–7

Indian Institute (Oxford) 64 Indian Journal of the History of Science 40n1 Indian Ocean 6–8, 10, 50, 78, 79 indigo 63, 117; and Act XI (1860) 155, 171; brutal commerce 164; Commission (1860) 165–9 Indigo disturbances 9–10, 163–73; oppression and cruelty 9–10, 154; press and print power 10, 163–6; songs 163–4 Industrial Arts of India (Birdwood) 61, 63, 71n15, 153 Industrial Revolution 5, 8 industrialization 145, 153 Inferno (Dante) 186–7 Instructions to Surgeons of Vessels conveying coolies from the West Indies to India 120 Ireland 9, 149, 154, 155, 156, 203 Irish Land, The (Campbell) 152 iron rails 117 Irving, W. 147 Islam 18, 66, 103, 124, 166, 182; Mahomedan Literary Society 34 ivory 3, 4, 7–8, 15–31, 77–84; and art creation 13, 28n2; aura 78; ban 78, 84–5; billiard balls and carved items 82; miniatures 7, 15–31; distribution and dealers 25, 31n52; employment 84–5; hunting and primitive resource 81–3, 86, 87n10; Indian artist working methods 24–5; Lord Amherst collection 17–18, 19; in the marketplace 23–7, 24–5; moralistic arguments 91; mounts recast as medals 23; Mughal subversion 15–19; Mughalerie and native themes 22–4, 25, 30n35; natural to cultural substance 80–85; painted and portable 20–2; paper to ivory transpositions 20–2, 21; personal souvenirs and gift-giving 15–22; politics and cruelty 80–3; Warner’s (Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal) 15, 16 Al jabr w’al muqabila (Khwarismi) 175 Jackson, C.R. 163 Jacob e Dulce (satire) 101, 110–1n5 Jahangir (Mughal emperor 1605–27) 16, 28n2&7–8 Jaipur-Atrauli school of music 36 James, J.G., and Whitehead, A.N. 85 Jameson, J.S. 191

Index Jamkhandi princes 36 Janaki Bai 34, 39–40 Jesuits 14, 34, see also missionaries Johnny Ludlow series (Wood) 151 Jones, W. 143n5 Journal of Indian Art and Industry 61 Judaism 103 jute 117 Kabul expedition (1842) 23 Kali Jan 34 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (Glasgow) 68 khadi (spun cloth) 61; Gandhi’s campaign 62, 70 Khan, I. 25 khilat (honorary robe bestowal) 15–16, 28n3, 29n13 Khwarismi, Muhammad ibn Musa 175, 182 Killick, T. 147 Kim (Kipling) 10, 199–208; as British Secret Service tool and code 204, 208; and colonial power symbolism 203–4; imaginaries and cultural identity 204–5; loner mentality but multiple identity 203–4; spectacles episode 204–5 Kinnear, M. 32–4, 40n1 Kipling, J.L. 61 Kipling, R. 10, 199–208, 210n27 Kirkland, C. 148 Kittler, F. 35 Kling, B. 164–5 Knight, S.R., and Hall, H.S. 176, 182 Koch, E. 30n35 Koh-i-Noor diamond 60, 199, 208 Kolkata, see Calcutta Kopytoff, I. 92, 98n19 labour 4, 8; demographic shifts 8 labourers 4; coolie 8–9, 115–25; migrant 145 Ladoo, H.S. 123 Lady’s Magazine 149 Lafont, Father 34 Lahore 15, 23, 179, 200; Lahore Chronicle 170; museum 202–3 Laidlaw, J.B. 45–6, 54; Panorama of New York 46 Laing, A.G. 187 Laing, J. 118, 122, 126n4, n15 Lal, B. 126n4 Lalchand Boral (singer) 33, 39, 42n28

221

lammas lands 154 land 8, 61, 63, 88, 90, 91, 97n7, 97n9, 110, 101–8, 111n11, 112n34, 129, 145, 149, 150, 151, 190, 191; enclosure 145; landscape 60, 89, 107, 147, 151, 189 Landholders’ Association of British India 171 Landholders and Commercial Association 170 Lang, A. 154 language 3, 32, 39–40, 168, 176, 190, 199, 203, 208; code 137; diversity 42; Hindustani 208 lantern slide suppliers 53, 57n38 Latour, B. 2, 8, 81, 85, 87n21; Actor Network Theory 2, 59, 85 laudanum 123–5 Law, J. 84 Lawrence, Honoria 23, 26, 30n41 Lawrence, Sir Henry 23, 26 Le Noir, E. 149 Ledger-Lomas, M. 198n55 Leopold II of Belgium 187, 197n36 letters 9, 129–44, 145; authentication 9, 137, 140–2, 144n54&65; Cornelius Cosins 136; encouragement to follow 134–4; Isabella Wyly 134; John H. 140; John Watson 136; Joseph Silcox 134; Mary Holden 136–7; material success and quality of life 134, 143n31; 19th century emigrants’ market 129–42; personal stories 134–5; printed vs. manuscript 130–5, 143n15; scholarly editions 131, 143n12; tokens and mail tampering 135–42, 138–9; Watson family collection 133; William Corlett 133–4; William Voice 134 Levi, P. 79 Light of Asia, The (Arnold) 191–2 Light of the World, The (Arnold) 192, 198n55 Linnaean Society 64 Livingstone, D. 188 Lock, Rev J.B. 179 London 3, 32, 41, 45–6, 58, 95–6, 154, 159, 166, 184, 188, 192; exhibitions 4, 58, 60–67, 199; panoramas 44, 51; port 118, 125; publishing 165, 130, 132, 165, 172, 176 Long, Rev J. 163, 166–72; as clearing house for Indian language publications 168–9; libel action 170–2 Longden, Sir J. 131n48 Longfellow, H. 189

222

Index

Lubbock, B. 126n4 Lukács, G. 105 Lushington, E.H. 170 Lyon, E.D. 201 Macau (Macao) 115 Macaulay, T.B. 174; Minute on Indian Education (1835) 174–5 McBratney, J. 203 McClintock, A. 189 McDonagh, J. 9, 145–60 Machado, E.V. 111–6n5–7 Macmillan, D., and Macmillan, A. 176–7 Macmillan, G., and Macmillan, F. 176 Macmillan, M. 176–70 Macmillan (publishers) 154, 174–81, 183n3–5; author royalties 177–8; (BLMA) archives 175, 183n3–36; family-run company 176–70 Madras 117 Magalhaes, M. 104, 111n16–17, 112n27 Mahanjanbandhu 35–7, 41n15 Maharaja Ranjit Singh 24 Mahomedan Literary Society 34 Maine, H.S. 9, 61, 106, 154, 158–9n23&28–32; on Indian native society 150–3; labour and craft preservation 152–4; on law, property and feudalism 149–54, 158n28; as Professor of Jurisprudence (Oxford) 150–1; village communities 153, 149–57, 157–8n14–16 Malka Jan 34 Mallikarjun Mansur 36 Malta 49, 50 Man Ray 83 Manchester 3, 156; cloth 4, 62 Manser, W.P.B. 53 Mantena, K. 150, 158n21, 29 Manuel, C.H. 169–70 Marathi theatre 37 Marchant, W. 130 market 10, 25, 26, 27, 31n52, 32, 34, 35, 38, 59, 60, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87n8, 150, 152, 153, 154, 178, 181, 182; logic of 86; marketplace 15, 24, 147 Marx, K. 3–5, 59–61, 78, 93–4, 97n9, 158n16; and Engels, F. 5, 12n13, 89; and Indian village economy 72n17; and primitive accumulation 82 Marxism 59, 106 mathematics 174–81; and al-gebra (Arab/ Hindu synthesis) 175–6; applied geometry 175

masculinity 130 Mathur, S. 61–63, 162n32 Mathura City 35 Maujuddin Khan 34, 39–40 Maurice, K. 86 Mauritius 9, 115–6 Mauss, M. 78 medicines 120–1; South American herbal 122; Victorian home remedies 122 Melba, Nellie 33 Melbourne 63–4; Industrial and Technological Museum 64 Melo e Castro, P. 110n7 Melville, W. 26 Mesopotamia 175 Messrs Carter and Co. 52 Metcalfe, C. 61, 106 Middlemarch (Eliot) 148–50 migration 2, 8, 9, 11n3, 43, 45, 119, 129–42, 145, 147–8; coolies 8–9, 115–25; global depictions 44, see also emigration, letters, panoramas Mill, J.S. 152, 158–9n30 Milton, J. 189, 195 Mintz, S. 5 Mirza Abu Zafar (son of Akbar II) 17–19; EIC’s preferred successor 19 Mirza Salim (son of Akbar II) 15–17; and his father 18–19, 19 missionaries 3, 164–70, 172, 176, 185, 189 Mitford, M.R. 9, 145, 153–85, 157n3&7; commercial success 147; dispersal threat 148; and village tales 146–8 Mitra, D. 10, 164, 167–72 Mitra, N. 70 mobility 2, 11n3, 43, 135, 148, see also migration modernity 1, 3, 5, 8–9, 43, 45, 52, 61, 77–8, 90, 100, 105, 108, 151–2, 189; capitalist 5; colonial 70–1; hypermodernity 158; impacts 145–9; industrial 89; tradition v. modernity 54, 194 Mombassa 82 Money and Fiction (Vernon) 101–2 Monier-Williams, Sir M. 64 Monkland, C. 148 Montefiore, A.H. 185, 188 morality 84, 85, 101, 105 Moretti, F. 146–7, 157n4 Morris, W. 152–3, 159n32 Mr Bucktone’s Voyage around the Globe (Planché) 52–3

Index Muecke, S. 8, 77–87 Mughal era 15–31; art and painting traditions 15–16, 16, 19–21, 23–5, 28n2; and British diplomatic equality 15–19; courtly rituals 16–20, 28n3–9; and faux traditional subjects 26–7; furniture and jewellery 20, 29n28; genealogical portraits 23–4, 30n39–40; ivory, artisans and image-gifts 15–31; manuscript paintings 23; and Mughalerie 22–4, 27; portable miniatures 20–2; right to assert status 18–20; subversion and power debasement 15–19, 29n20 Mukharji, B.P. 66 Mukharji, T.N. 7, 63–70; botany collection 64–5; caste taboos 66; exhibition preparation and catalogue collections 7, 63–70; Index Collection 64; interpreter and documenter 69; and monographs 64; savage Naga warrior and civilised European comparison 69–70 Mukherjee, A. 179–80 Mukherjee, H.C. 166 Mukherjee, S.P. 174, 180 Müller, M. 153–4 Mumbai (Bombay) 7, 33–4, 37, 48, 117, 150, 153, 179, 192, 207 Murdoch, A. 130 Murray, B.H. 10, 159n36, 184–98 Murthy, A. 98n29 museums 59–60, 62–5, 68–9, 92, 153, 202–3, 205, 207 music: churis bangras and thalas 35–6; Classic and Corinthian Theatres 33; cylinders (wax/iron/diamond) 33–7, 41n21; discs 34, 37–9; ferrograph and spool recorder advent 36; and Hanover factory 33; Hindustani early recordings (India) 7, 32–42; khayal singer 36; performers 33, 39–40; production and effects 33, 38; repetition and representation 37; songs and ballads 32–40, 51, 52, 109–10, 123, 163–5, 172, 190; Tefiband (sound on film) 36, see also phonographs My Village versus Our Village (Croker) 151 Nabokov, V. 83, 87n18 Nanda, M. 91, 97n13, 16 Narayan, R.K. 155 Nash, A.M. 178 Nasse of Bonn 158n16

223

nature 74, 78, 82, 85, 87n10, 88, 89, 89; human 66; domination of 79, 86, 90, 92, 95, 97n7, 102 Nawab Ghalib Jung 39 Nawab of Jhajir 25–6 Nawab Wazir Ghazi ud-din Haider (King of Avadh) 29n20 nazr (tribute/diplomatic gift) 15–19, 28n7,11&16–17; presentation abolition 18, 29n17 Negri, A. 99n31 Nehru, J. 61–2, 72n17 Nelson, T. 175; Royal Readers 175, 182–3n2 neo-paganism 91 Neophone 38 New Home: Who’ll Follow? A (Kirkland) 148 New York 43, 45, 46, 47, 53–6, 59, 131, 148, 159 New York Herald 192 New York Zoological Society 59 New Zealand 44–5 Newcomes, The (Thackeray) 202 Newton, W. 121 Nicole Record Company 33, 38 Nil-Darpan (The Indigo-Planting Mirror) (Mitra) 10, 164, 167–72; book recipients and circulation 169–70; popular feeling and curiosity 168–9; translation and libel 169–72 Northrup, D. 124 Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (Thackeray) 50–1 Nourse, Capt J. (coolie transporter) 117–18, 126n12 novels 6–8, 101–12; and capital threat in Goa 101–12; land understanding (communidade) 8, 103–12; narrative structure 102, 111n7; Victorian 6, see also Kim, Middlemarch, Os Maharatas Nur Jahan (wife of Jahangir) 24 Nur ud-Din (Light of Faith) 28n7 Occupy movement 156 Ochterlony, D. 20 Oddie, G. 166 Ode on the Death of Wellington (Tennyson) 191, 198n44 Odyssey (Homer) 166–7, 168, 193 Oliver, I. 28n8 Open Letter to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India (Dutt) 61

224

Index

opium 4, 63, 115; addiction withdrawal 122–3; trade with China 115, see also laudanum orientalism 46, 97n9, 192, 200 Orientalism 97n9, 200 Ortiz, F. 5 Os Brâmanes (Gomes) 101 Os Lusiadas (Camoes) 111n14 Os Maharatas (Dias) 8, 100–12; Betalbatim village 100, 108; caste 102–6; character (landlord) and plot (land privatization) 102, 108–9; and communidade (governance/hierarchy) system 8, 100–10, 112n27; Cortalim village and Manguexi 104, 111n20; and Foral (land administration document) 104, 105; Gandaulim village 108, 112n40; gaunkars (lineage) 106, 110, 112n40; gauponn (village council) 108; gram-devta (village deity) 104–5; gram-purusha (village founder) 104–7; incompleteness 100–1, 111n8; land and money 100–2, 105–7; Marathas 100, 110n4; as narrative of decline 100; origin stories and history 102–107, 111n17, 112n32–3; pre-lapsarian economies 100–1, 105–6; realism and ethnography 108–9; and sea (geological time) 107–8; vangods (lineage) 106, 112n40; village deity and Catholicism conflict 103–6, 112n33–4 Our Village (Mitford) 146–7, 154, 157n7 Overland Mail exhibition 47 Overland Mail, The (Smith’s panorama) 49–50 Overland Mail to India 7, 47–54, 200; safe and fast 48; touring panoramas 47–54, 48–51, 55; trade and communications networks 47–56 Overland Route Entertainment (Manser) 53 Overland Route, The (Taylor) 52, 199, 209n2 Oxford University Press (OUP) 174–6, 177 Pacific Railway 43 Pal, J. 69 Palgrave, W.G. 188, 197n23 Pall Mall Gazette 195 Pandora (coolie ship) 117 Panikkar K.M. 29n13–19 Paris 53; exhibitions 58–64, 65, 70, 71n15, 16

paganism 91, 104, 189 panoramas 43–57, 208; and Anglo-world expansionism 43–4; audiences (Bristol/ Calcutta) 46; Banvard’s and souvenir programme 54; Bay and City of New York 45; early subjects (maritime/ military) 44; emigration 43; exhibitions (tickets/prices) 44–56; Hardy Gillard’s Pacific Railroad 54–6, 55; Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers 52–3; Overland Mail to India 47–54; Overland Route to Calcutta 50–2; Overland Route to Sydney 53; patented 44; touring 43–57; trade and communication networks 43–57, see also dioramas Park, M. 187 Pathé records 34–7 Peacock, B. 163 Pearson, M. 79 Peasantry of Bengal, The (Dutt) 61 Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company (P&O) 49–53; free passage for artists 49–50; route to Calcutta and diorama 49–51 Peninsular Steam Navigation Company 49 People of India (1868–75), The (Forbes Watson Canning) 72n15, 201 Pereira, R.G. 112n40 Peter the Great (Tzar of Russia) 85–6 Pfeiffer, I. 78 Phenol 121 phenomenology 2, 11n3, 94 Philosophy of History, The (Hegel) 190 Philosophy of the Novel, The (Bernstein) 105 phonographs 34–7, 41n15, 208 photography 27, 39, 41n27, 200–1; Manirang Pass (Bourne) 201; for surveillance 201 Pierce, C.S. 204–5; Sign Theory 204–5 Pignarre, P., and Stengers, I. 78 Pinney, C. 201, 204 Pinto, R. 8, 100–12 Pitt Press 181 Pitt, W., Lord Amherst 17–18, 29n19 Planché, J.R. 52–4 plantations 8, 9, 54, 115–16, 123, 124; indigo 164; rice 118 Pliny the Elder 80 Plunkett, J. 7, 43–57, 200 Pocock, E. 184 pollution 8; and Ganges 8, 88–95

Index Pompey the Great 80; elephants and ivory 80–1 Pond, J. 195 Portugal 47 Pope, A. 189 Portuguese Goa 8 postage system (international) 132; and mail tampering 132–8 Postal Age, The (Henkin) 135 postcolonial studies 2, 10, 84, 159 poverty 61, 109, 129 Prasad, R.S. 158n25 Pratt, M.L. 185 Price, B. 176 Princess, The (Tennyson) 191 print 2, 3, 9–10, 185; and cultural portability 147, 157n10; emigration literature 9, 130–42; Indian language publications and translations 168–72; mobile (travelling) texts 9–10; piracy 147, 180–1; presses 3, 175–81; school textbooks 10, 174–83; used by European travellers and missionaries 185, 196n5; and village lives 146–57 Prior, M. 189 profanation 8, 88–93, 98n22–5 Profanations (Agamben) 92–3, 98n22 Punch 46–8; Putting a Panorama Around the Earth 47, 48 race 5, 54, 60, 62, 65, 69, 163, 187, 190, 201, see also ethnicity racism 58–9, 162n38 railways 43, 45–7, 88, 100, 116, 149, 200, 203 Rainford, E 132 Raja Jivan Ram 20–2 Rajan, R.S. 8, 88–99 Rajasthan 159, 159n40 Ram, T. 63 Ramasamy, E.V. 98n28 Ramchand, K., and Samaroo, B. 128n51 Rao, R. 155 Reality Effect (Barthes) 140–1 reflexive game 86 representations 2, 37, 59–61, 64, 69–70, 86, 90, 199–202, 105, 110, 115, 169, 185; of India 200–2; traffic in 199–208 Review of Reviews 193 rice 9, 56, 116–18, 165 Richards, T. 6 Ricks, C. 186 Ridgway, J. 143n31 Ridsdale, Rev R. 140

225

Rivers of Empire (Worster) 90 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 53 Roe, Sir T. 28n8 Rouse Ball, W.W. 181 Rowlinson, M. 187 Roy, T. 26 Royal Gallery of Illustration (Regent Street) 47, 50–2, 199 Royal Victoria Theatre (Sydney) 53 Runchhordas, V. 34 Rural Life in Bengal 165–6 Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain (Helsinger) 157n3 Rushdie, S. 98n23&29 Ruskin, J. 152–3, 157n32 Russia 85, 158n16, 207; spies 204, 208 Sabin, M. 204 Said, E. 200 St George’s Gallery (Hyde Park Corner, London) 58 Sallis, W. 52 Salsette (coolie ship) 121, 124 salt 115, 118–19 Samaroo, B., and Ramchand, K. 128n51 Sambad Pravakar 167 Samya (Chattopadhya) 61 Sandbach, Tinne & Co (slave/coolie ships) 117, 126n12 Saraswati, D. 158n25 Saturday Review 186 scale questions 2, 11n3 Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot) 148 Schivelbusch, W. 43 schoolbooks 10, 174–83 Scott, Capt R. 188 Scott, W. 189 Scrope, G.P. 143n31 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh) 115, 125 Seeton-Karr, W.S. 168–70 segregation 94 self-reflexivity 7 sensory studies 11n3 Serampore Press 176 settlerism 130–1, 142 Shah Alam (Moghul emperor 1759–1806) 15 Shah Allum (coolie ship) 118 Shah Haji 29n13 Shah Jahan (Mughal emperor) 15, 16 Shaikh, F. 9, 129–44, 145 Sharma, A.N., and Sharma, A. 37 Sharma, Y. 7, 15–31

226

Index

shast wa shabah (devotional sun allegiance ritual) 16, 28n6 Shaw, M.L. 34 Sheila (coolie ship) 120, 124–5, 127n26 Shelton, A. 75 ships 50, 78, 83, 116, 195, 199; British 116; builders 116–17; clippers 117; combustible cargoes 118; and coolie trade 115–28; iron 116; safety measures 118; sailing 117, see also steamships Shiva, V. 91 silver 4 Simpkin, Marshall & Co. (publishers) 172 Singha, K.P. 163, 171 Sircar, P.C. 176 Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (Irving) 147 Skinner, Lt Col J. 26 slavery 82, 83, 115, 126n4; abolition 115; slave trade 9, 117 Smith, A. 47, 50–1, 56; dioramas and sketches 51 Smith, B. 132–4 Smith, C. 179 Smith, G. 186 social changes 2, 135 Social Life of Things (Appadurai) 1, 5–6, 92, 199–200 Sockett, Rev T. 129–130, 136–7, 138–40, 142n6 Somprakash 163 Song Celestial, The (Arnold) 192 Song of Solomon 83 Southampton 47, 49, 50, 52, 117, 199 Souza, R. de 97n7 sovereignty 90, 104 Spain 47 spool recorders 36 SS Great Western 45–6 Stagg, J.A. 181 Stairs, W.G. 191 Stanley, H.M. 10, 184–95, 197n34; blank spaces (wilderness) 194; Bula Matari (Swahili nickname) 194; expedition to the Congo 184–92; letter to Arnold 194–5; poets and classical comparisons 189–92; self-image 186–7; Swahili oral poetry translations 10, 189–91; and Tanganyika 191; use of Tennyson’s poetry (Ulysees) and speech coincidence 10, 184–92, 198n44; Wanyamwezi song 190–1 Statue of Liberty 58

steamships 46–9, 54, 75–7, 116–17 Stengers, I., and Pignarre, P. 75 Stevens, C.C. 179 Stevens, F.H. 178–81; and Hall, H.S. 180–2 Stocqueler, J. 199 Stoker, B. 194 Strike, but hear! (Long) 172 Stuart, G.H. 179 Stubbs, W. 151 Suez 47–51; Canal opening (1869) 53 sugar 4–5, 9, 66, 115, 118, 125; traders 35 Sukhasancharak Company 35–7 swadeshi 62, 70, 162n32, 182 Swahili 10, 189–90, 194 Sweetness and Power (Mintz) 5–6 Swing Riots 147 Swinging Bridge, The (Espinet) 123 Swoboda, R. 67; Portrait of Bakshiram 67–8, 68 Sydenham (coolie ship) 124 Sydney 53 symbolism 203–4; Christian 104; colonial power 203–4; tri-partite category 204–5 Tagore, Rabindranath 7, 36, 58, 70 Taine, H. 59 talking machines 34, see also phonographs Talmeyr, M. 61–2, 72n16 Tasmania 53 taste 6, 23, 26, 32, 59, 68, 71, 156 Taussig, M. 79 Tawney, C.H. 179 Taylor, E.B. 152 Taylor, T. 52 tea 1, 4, 65 technology 1–5, 27, 35, 47, 64, 116, 119, 175, 200, 202, 205–6, 208; development 32, 38–40, 63, 76, 74, 91, 100; and obsolescence 7, 37; transport 47, 119, 147; weapons 194 Telbin, W. 49, 52 telecommunications 3, 58, 148, 200, 204 telegraphy, 3, 200, 204 telephone 58 television 148 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 10, 184–96; explorers 186–8; Sir J. Franklin’s tomb epitaph 188; Ulysses 185–8, 191–2 Textiles 62–3, 65, 164, 174; Textile Manufacturers and Costumes of the

Index People of India (Forbes Watson) 62, 72n18, see also cotton, swadeshi Texts of Power (Chatterjee) 89 Thackeray, W. 46–7, 201–2 Theatre 33, 37, 44, 52, 80; London 47, 58; Australia 53 Theatre Royal, Haymarket (London) 52 thing theory 2, 6, 11n3 Thomas Hamlin (coolie ship) 116 Thomas, T.N. 126n16 Thompson, H. 154 Through the Dark Continent (Stanley) 184–90 Timbuctoo (Tennyson) 187, 194–6; and El Dorado 187–8 Times, The 192 Tinker, H. 124 tobacco 4–5, 6 Tóibín, C. 156 tourism 3, 7, 20, 22, 24, 29n29, 56, 156, 159n36, see also transport, travel trade 26, 49, 56, 62, 65, 74–86, 145, 154, 164–6, 174, 176, 184, 199, 206, 207; and communication networks 48–57, 76; coolies 9, 115–25; deficit 63; depicted in panoramas 43–9, 53–4; and transmission of ideas 174–5 transculturation 6, 196n7, see also acculturation transport 3; costs 154; technology 47, 119, 147; trade and communications networks 47–56, 184, see also Overland Mail to India, railways, ships, steamships, tourism, travel travel 3, 43–57; Bristol–London Paddington railway 46; elephants 46; London–Bristol–New York 45–6; networks 3, 47–54; physical and social experience 51; shorter route Calcutta to Britain (via Suez) 47–9; texts 10; virtual and touring 43–57, see also tourism, transport travelogues 48, 63, 184–5, 188 tree sap (guttapercha) 3 Trigonometry for Beginners (Lock) 179 Trinidad 115–27, 123; Chinitat 116, 126n3, see also Caribbean, West Indies Trollope, A. 148 Tucker, H. 191 Tucker, M.E. 97 Twenty-Four Letters from Labourers in America to Their Friends in England (Smith) 132–5, 143n39

227

Ulysses or Scenes and Studies in May Lands (Palgrave) 188 Ulysses (Tennyson) 185–8, 191–2, 198n44; association with Stanley’s expedition 188; London Olympic Village (2012) motto 188 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Beecher Stowe) 171 Union Bank of Calcutta 164–5; failure 164 Union Carbide pesticide plant (Bhopal) 95–6, 99n33; gas leak and Yes Men 95–6, 99n35; trial by ordeal 95, 99n34 United States 44, 59, 118, 130, 132–3, 136, 147, 156, 171, 184, 195; AfricanAmericans 190; native Americans 145; New York 42, 44, 46, 47, 52–6, 59, 133, 148, 156; panoramas 52–6; the West 45, see also Anglo-American Expedition, World Fairs urbanization 145 utilitarianism 8, 150 values 4, 90–1; models 101–2; regimes 200; use 4 Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 201–2 ventilators 9, 120–2; Boag’s 120; Perkin’s automatic 120 Vernon, J. 101–2 Vibrant Matter: Political Ecology of Things (Bennett) 78 Victoria and Albert Museum (London) 24–5, 146 Victoria, Queen of England 67, 163–4 Village Anecdotes (Le Noir) 146 Village Communities (Maine) 146–9; land and trade 151–3; and outcasts 152 Village Incidents (Anon) 147 Village Reminiscences by an Old Maid (Monkland) 148 Village Walks (Barstow) 147–8 villages 9, 100; communities 150–9; conceptions 146; depopulation and modernity effects 146–49; exhibition (black/Indian) 58–61; genealogy (19th century colonial) 146–59; rights and land 149; rural character and scenery 146–8; spectacles 154–7; and television adaptations 148 Virgil 189 Vishnu 8 Vishnu Digambar Paluskar 37 Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande 35 Visit to Europe, A (Mukharji) 63, 73n31, 73n39

228

Index

Viswanathan, G. 182–3n2 Vivekananda 158n25 Von Maurer, G.L. 158n16 Voyage of Ithobal, The (Arnold) 10, 193–4 W. Thacker of Newgate (publisher) 165, 176 Waghorn, T. 47–9, 199; debt and death 49 Walker, J.F. 83–5 Wallich, N. 65 Warner, H.J. 15, 24; ivory collection 16 water 7, 80, 88–99; access prohibition and punishment 94–5, 98n29; Ganga Action Plan 88, 96n4; Ganges sacred river 88–95; hydraulic society 90, 97n9; management systems 90; privatization 95; purity and pollution 88–96; satyagraha 94; secular 89; transformation into commodity 90; value 8, 89; worship 90, 94, see also pollution Water Wars (Shiva) 91 Watt, G. 61, 64, 71–72n15 Wazir Jan 34 Wells, Sir M. 163, 170–2 West India Dock (London) 118 West Indies 116–120, 124–5, see also Caribbean

West London Food Reform Society 192 Westminster Review 132 Whitby (coolie ship) 126n16 White, L.G.W. 126n4 Whitehead, A.N., and James, J.G. 85 Whittaker, G. 146 Williams, G.W. 190, 197n36 Williams, R. 145, 149, 156, 157n1 Willis’s Public Rooms (St James’s Square, London) 47 Wilson, J.M. 176 Wintle, C. 69–70 Wittfogel, K. 97n9 Wonder that was the Cylinder, The (Sharma and Sharma) 37 Wood, E. 148 Woolston of Southampton (ship-builders) 117 World Fairs 58–60; Saint Louis (1904) 59, see also exhibitions Worster, D. 90 Xavier, St Francis 107 Yes Men, 95–96, 99n35, see also Union Carbide Zanzibar 79, 184, 193 Zohra bai 34