Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement 0824834836, 9780824834838

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Colonial Space, Anglo-Indian Perspectives
Chapter 1 “I Want to Send India to England”The Aesthetics of Landscape and the Colonial Home
Chapter 2 Hills Kinder Than Plains? Kipling’s Monstrous Hill Station
Chapter 3 “Out of Bounds” Clubs, Cantonments, Plains
Chapter 4 Savage City Locating Colonial Modernity
Chapter 5 Medical Topography in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters
Chapter 6 The Engineers’ Revenge, the Age of Kali Kipling’s Bridges and the End of Jungles
Chapter 7 Man-Eaters of Kumaon and Jim Corbett’s Jungle Idiom
Afterword
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

out of bounds anglo-indian literature and the geography of displacement

Alan Johnson

writing past colonialism

out of bounds

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature book series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with and contest the legacy and continuing mindset and practices of colonialism, and inform debate about the processes of globalization. This manifests itself in a concern with difference from the Euro-American, the global, and the norm. The series is also committed to publishing works that seek “to make a difference,” both in the academy and outside it. OUR HOPE IS THAT BOOKS IN THE SERIES WILL

• engage with contemporary issues and problems relating to colonialism and postcolonialism • attempt to reach a broad constituency of readers • address the relation between theory and practice • be interdisciplinary in approach as well as subject matter • experiment with new modes of writing and methodology

INSTITUTE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES | WRITING PAST COLONIALISM

Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography Edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia Edited by Lynette Russell Postcolonizing the International: Working to Change the Way We Are Edited by Phillip Darby Dark Writing: geography, performance, design Paul Carter Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society Anoma Pieris Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 Lanny Thompson Mediating Across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution Edited by Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement Alan Johnson

out of bounds ANGLO-INDIAN LITERATURE AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DISPLACEMENT

Alan Johnson

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu

© 2011 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Alan G. (Alan Gerhard) Out of bounds : Anglo-Indian literature and the geography of displacement / Alan Johnson. p. cm.—(Writing past colonialism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3483-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8248-3521-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Anglo-Indian literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Anglo-Indian literature—20th century— History and criticism. 3. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936— Criticism and interpretation. 4. Steel, Flora Annie Webster, 1847–1929—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Corbett, Jim, 1875–1955—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Space in literature. 7. Imperialism in literature. 8. Colonies in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Writing past colonialism series. PR9484.3.J64 2011 820.9'954—dc22 2010050466

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Series design by Leslie Fitch Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.

For Margaret, Nishant, Shirin, and Roshin

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

Colonial Space, Anglo-Indian Perspectives 1

Chapter 1.

“I Want to Send India to England”: The Aesthetics of Landscape and the Colonial Home 46

Chapter 2.

Hills Kinder Than Plains?: Kipling’s Monstrous Hill Station 81

Chapter 3.

“Out of Bounds”: Clubs, Cantonments, Plains 112

Chapter 4.

Savage City: Locating Colonial Modernity 138

Chapter 5.

Medical Topography in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters 163

Chapter 6.

The Engineers’ Revenge, the Age of Kali: Kipling’s Bridges and the End of Jungles 206

Chapter 7.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon and Jim Corbett’s Jungle Idiom 232

Afterword 282 Bibliography Index 303

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to many colleagues, friends, and institutions, and to the patience of my family. I want to begin by thanking Parama Roy who, while at the University of California, Riverside, responded to the first ideas for this project and has since inspired me to apply rigor to the argument. I also thank, for feedback and/or encouragement at various stages, Sukanya Banerjee and Thomas Klein. Colleagues here at Idaho State University have provided a welcoming intellectual environment, and I thank them all. In addition, I thank my ISU students, graduate and undergraduate, who have responded to some of the ideas presented here and have kept me on my toes. I have also benefited from presentations of parts of this project at the following venues: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, London; Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Rocky Mountain MLA Convention, Scotsdale; USACLALS Conference, Santa Clara University; Empire and Imperial Cultures Conference, California State University, Stanislaus; Utah State University, Logan; and Idaho State University’s Department of English and Philosophy Works-in-Progress series. Crucial to an interdisciplinary study of this kind was the professional attentiveness of librarians at the following institutions: University of California, Riverside, especially the Inter-Library Loan office; India Office Library and Records, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library; Royal Geographical Society Archives; National Archives of India; and Idaho State University, including its indispensable ILL staff. I am indebted to William Hamilton, director of the University of Hawai‘i Press, for his close attention to this project, and particularly to the two anonymous reviewers whose detailed and judicious comments improved the draft immensely (though they cannot, of course, be responsible for any remaining shortcomings). I am also grateful to Managing Editor Ann Ludeman, and to copy editor Terre Fisher for her thoroughness. I am thankful to Phillip Darby at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, for approving the first version of the manuscript subsequent to the two original reviewers’ remarks, and for his kind attention throughout. I received funding for research from my home institution, Idaho State University, whose Humanities and Social Sciences Research Committee and Faculty Research Committee provided resources for further research and writing. I am especially grateful for this indispensable support. An earlier version of Chapter Four appeared as “The Savage City: Locating Colonial Modernity” in Nineteenthix

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Century Studies 25.4 (2003). A much shorter version of Chapter Six appeared as “ ‘Sanitary Duties’ and Registered Women: A Reading of On the Face of the Waters” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 1998. Finally, friends and family members made much of this possible in the way of encouragement and sanctuary. Particular thanks first of all to my parents, Gay and Ginny Johnson, for their immeasurable support along the years; my in-laws, Newton (who did not live to see this) and Sumitra Prasangi; and most importantly, Margaret, Nishant, Shirin, and Roshin, who can finally stop asking “When?”

Introduction Colonial Space, Anglo-Indian Perspectives

Space is fundamental in any exercise of power. — Michel Foucault

British-Indian Geographies, Anglo-Indian Attitudes

In the 1880s, during his wanderings in the north of British India, the young Rudyard Kipling visited the sixteenth-century fort of Amber, in what was then called Rajputana (now Rajasthan), just outside Jaipur. Reporting for the Pioneer newspaper based in Allahabad, Kipling drew intriguing conclusions based on his observations there: If . . . a building reflects the character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or—but here the annals of Rajputana contradict the theory—to act openly. The crampt and darkened rooms, the narrow, smooth-walled passages with recesses where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and descending stairs leading nowhither, the ever-present screens of marble tracery that may hide or reveal so much,—all these things breathe of plot and counterplot, league and intrigue.1

At first glance, this seems an embarrassingly bald Orientalist impression. The bewildering “maze” of unlit hallways is worthy of the subterranean gothicism of Poe, one of Kipling’s literary forebears,2 but with a colonialist twist that conjures a host of stereotypes concerning “Eastern” mystery and magic. Nor is this surprising: Kipling was certainly interested in magic, as his many stories of 1

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supernaturalism attest. Lewis D. Wurgaft has helpfully observed that the AngloIndian preoccupation with magic was partly a means of distinguishing British order and reason from India’s supposed irrationality.3 But Kipling’s discussion of the correspondence between Indian architecture—more broadly, to use a shorthand I will be returning to, India’s spatiality—and Indian society is much too complex to be reduced to a two-dimensional outlook such as this. In fact, as I will be arguing in this book, the larger British-Indian attitude toward both the natural and built environments of the subcontinent is, in its literary expression, profoundly conflicted and therefore deeply revealing of colonial fixations and uncertainties. On a broad level, perhaps this is to be expected in a time of rapid industrial and societal changes, which resulted in an unprecedented transformation of physical and social spaces as well as a profound mix of self-doubt and self-certainty. The ambivalence resulting from all of this change is particularly noticeable in the period’s literary expressiveness: Think of Baudelaire’s Paris, Dickens’ London or Hardy’s Salisbury Plain. By the same token, writers were able not only to reflect this turbulence, but also to shape the public perception, and even the broad physical retransformation, of particular environments. One assumption behind this study, then, is that writing is not distinct from its surroundings, but rather a powerful means of re-imagining and reconfiguring those surroundings, ideologically as well as materially. If this was true for a changing Europe, what can we say about writers’ selfperceptions in the context of colonialism? This was a period, as Stephen Kern has described it, that witnessed the compression of space and acceleration of time, and nowhere more so than in the colonial theater.4 Railways, cityscapes, and infrastructural projects transformed the appearance of the Indian subcontinent, a transformation that simultaneously facilitated imperial reach and Indian nationalism.5 Europe, as both idea and place, was never a region separable from its colonies, particularly so in the case of British India. Britain, as numerous critics have shown, is impossible to define in its modern imperial sense without including in this definition its crown jewel, India.6 Britain inserted its own perturbations and ideals into these “Eastern” representations, infusing them, as we will see, with corresponding degrees of derangement (such as the proverbial “decay” of ancient Indian traditions) and idealized sentiment (devolving usually into notions of the “picturesque”). These mixed ideas of India owed much to Britain’s own anxieties concerning its demographic transformation and its geopolitical position in the world, especially as East India Company interests evolved into those of the Crown. As the historian Francis Hutchins puts it, the “certainty of a permanent Empire” in the later 1800s “seemed to increase in proportion to its fragility, and to serve for many people as a defense and retreat from

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reason long after the course of events had proved its impossibility.” The situation was, as Hutchins titles his book, an “illusion of permanence.”7 Prominent writers and intellectuals tended to fall into the habit of endorsing this illusion, none more so than Kipling, at least in his public persona. This attitude was a notable change from the 1700s and early 1800s, when British administrators like Warren Hastings and William Bentick, for all their blind spots, encouraged cultural and conjugal interaction between Indians and Europeans.8 In the context of the anglicized world I will be examining, which deeply informs our understandings of English literature and culture, Britishness was, to adapt Linda Colley’s perception and Benedict Anderson’s catchphrase, an imagined community conceived in contradistinction to other regions and cultures.9 Although Britain held sway over much of this dynamic, the relationship between the “sceptered isle” and its Indian jewel was transactional. That is to say, India was a physical and imaginative presence in the imperial epicenter: on the level of writing, as in the “discovery” of ancient India by the French philosophes and German Romantics, and in Wilkie Collins’ moonstone curse; as objects to be exhibited, as at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851; in the form of spices and textiles; and in the rarer but no less important guise of sketches and paintings of flora and fauna, palaces and ruins. This book argues specifically that Anglo-Indian writers, by which I mean nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British writers who viewed India as “home,” were acutely conscious of the relatively new topographies they inhabited and which largely defined their social purchase in imperial society.10 This Anglo-Indian sensitivity to the representation of geographical as well as man-made spaces—for the two were, as I will explain, interwoven—resulted in narratives that are intriguingly doubleedged, simultaneously supporting and subverting colonialist ideologies. Despite their obvious differences from one another, the writers I examine—chiefly Kipling, Flora Annie Steel, and the tiger-hunter Jim Corbett—all reflect this Anglo-Indian outlook, each one offering a window onto a permanently fractured sensibility. The years leading up to and including those in which these writers wrote, between the 1880s and 1940s, have attracted much scholarly attention, and for good reason. Besides coinciding with the rise of modern industry, this period followed the so-called Mutiny of 1857–1858, which led to more conservative colonial policies. The Mutiny, or “Great Rebellion,” was so named to underscore the British perception of betrayal by Indian soldiers (sepoys) enlisted by the East India Company, who rose up against their European masters. The immediate causes of the rebellion were clearly the ill treatment of the sepoys, the annexation of key principalities, and, more importantly, the alienation of Indians as a result

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of misguided policies. The anglicized urban Indian elite inevitably reacted to these policies, so that even as British imperialism became more robust, Indian nationalism rapidly gained ground. The naming of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1876 consolidated the juridical as well as symbolic shifts in colonial administrative tactics. Most notably, past practices, such as Britain’s interference in local religious customs and the toleration of British and Indian intermarriage, which had held for over a century, were now deemed imprudent. After the rebellion (which Indians call the First War of Independence), the British, so one story goes, having tasted the fruits of their greed for property and control, sought to defuse further disaffection by officially refraining from criticism of Native beliefs and customs. At the same time, as Veena Talwar Oldenberg observes in her history of colonial Lucknow, a culturally rich city at the epicenter of the rebellious storm, the British administration—now referred to by the suitably Indian word for rule, Raj—insinuated itself into Indian society far more effectively by means of social policies and bureaucratic regimes. Indeed, the cultural legacies of Delhi and Lucknow point to what is arguably a more important result of the Mutiny, namely, the number of colonialist tropes it generated for the consumption of English readers. The imagined rape of Englishwomen by Native men, for example, became a recurring image that structured the increasingly racist attitudes of British administrators.11 Even on the cusp of the twentieth century, when Steel wrote, or in the 1930s and 1940s, during which Corbett published his tiger tales, the fear among British-Indians of more mutinies infused the manly images of hunting, espionage, and chivalric rescue in the popular press. These transformations of British-Indian society were especially marked by the physical segregation of Europeans and Indians, a policy shift that required a re-ordering of colonial topographies. British military stations, called cantonments, were established on prime real estate far from the bazaars of the Indian city, commonly referred to as the “Native town.” As more and more Englishwomen arrived in the subcontinent to wed British officials, who now could no longer cohabit with Indian women, officers began building homes for their families in India’s hills to escape the heat of the plains.12 These hill stations, partly patterned on English towns, generated their own mystique in this period of high imperialism.13 At the same time, the railway station, the plains bungalow and garden, the Civil Station, and the English Club all became the defining attributes of British-Indian society in these years. To speak of the Hill Station or a Club was, therefore, to speak of a distinct colonial sensibility that could not be divorced from its environs. Kipling is especially famous for satirizing his compatriots’ attachment to these spaces, which reinforced British-Indians’ sense of self-importance. Indians likewise viewed the British through a topo-

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graphical lens, rightly seeing their enclaves as smug redoubts: Compound walls, checkpoints, imposing monuments, and intimidating boulevards made clear to the Raj’s subjects the intrinsic separation of Indian and European societies, what Frantz Fanon calls, in the context of French Algeria, a “compartmentalized world.”14 I have been speaking thus far of “British India” as if this were a self-evident monolith. Although British imperialism in its broad features was, and is, represented as a homogenous whole, recent studies have revealed its subterranean heterogeneity via its liminal and marginal actors and social relations.15 This study maintains that certain writers of the Anglo-Indian community in particular expressed the disjunctions and contradictions of colonial identity formation in productively intriguing ways. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, “Anglo-Indian” originally meant any European inhabitant of colonial India. The label became especially contested during the period under consideration, with “country-born” Britishers such as Kipling, who was born in Bombay, feuding for cultural turf with visiting Europeans whom they viewed as interlopers. “The country-born,” Kipling states in Kim, have their “own manners and customs, which do not resemble those of any other land,” least of all those of the “dirty [Englishman].”16 For a colonial culture that demanded authentic racial and social allegiances in the climate of Europe’s civilizing missions, to be simultaneously Indian and English demanded delicate social negotiation, producing a persona that was at once skeptical of and loyal to the “mother country.” No wonder, then, that Kipling’s eponymous hero Kim must establish his Irish-Indian-Imperial identity “through an elaborate relay of identifications, desires, and impersonations.”17 The term “Anglo-Indian,” moreover, operated as both noun and adjective, so that Kipling, for instance, was immediately characterized as an AngloIndian writer, at once a spokesman for the community and an idiosyncratic voice. This designation was part of a larger, evolving discourse of colonialist identity, with various players positioning themselves as experts—experts on economic policy, cultural authenticity, Indian architecture, Indian languages, and so on. Although, as Bart Moore-Gilbert observes, Anglo-Indians had for decades been crafting a seemingly distinct voice through publications targeting their growing community and through a dialect that incorporated countless words from Indian vernaculars, Anglo-Indians quarreled among themselves about the degree to which they were culturally closer to or further away from “Home.” Their stake in colonial India’s geographical imaginary was constantly at war with their equal stake in England, a country that was, as Raymond Williams has demonstrated, itself fractured along the lines of metropolitan and rural societies.18 George Otto Trevelyan, writing of his visit to India in the 1860s, famously

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patronized his Anglo-Indian hosts in words that catch his metropolitan English attitude. Anglo-Indians, he concluded, “looked upon India as their birthright, and failed to acquire the larger views and wider interests of a general English education.”19 Indians, by contrast, were termed “Natives” by the Europeans, who variously called members of the mixed-race population “half-castes” and “Eurasians.” By the early 1900s, as the nationalist movement in India quickened, persons of mixed-race, sensing their increasingly indistinct status—that is, neither properly British nor Indian—began to call themselves Anglo-Indian to safeguard their social perch, much to the displeasure of British inhabitants.20 The combination of Britain’s and India’s cultural and racial caste systems in these years led inevitably to name-calling and the micro-management of group labels. Thus, Britishers back Home, infected with late nineteenth-century racial fears about Europeans who “go native,” commonly used “domiciled” and “country-born” to refer condescendingly to their India-settled brethren. The latter, in turn, safeguarded their perch by using racial and cultural epithets like “wog” and “native” for Indians. Indians of course chafed at this discrimination, but so did British-Indian writers like Kipling, Flora Annie Steel, and Jim Corbett, who, despite their differences, played a strategic hand, by alternately insisting on their Anglo and their Indian allegiances. I focus on these and a few other writers precisely because I see in their partial selves (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s term) a particularly acute sensitivity to the predicament of modern consciousness.21 It is not coincidental in this regard that the writers I examine pay so much attention to location— imagined location, to be sure, but also, and importantly, geographical as well. Too often, space is conceived of as either entirely bounded or entirely porous, leaving no room for the range of (dis)locations between these poles.22 The in-between status that Kipling, for example, describes so effectively was a lived experience for the inhabitants of colonial India, Eurasians, Anglo-Indians and Indians alike. To be sure, modern communities all shape their identities through a complex mix of spatial and social, concrete and imaginative correspondences. The colonial Indian experience, however, was particularly marked by such complexities. It is no accident, therefore, that a modern writer like Rushdie should find in Kipling a resonance with his own migrant experience. More to my point in this study is that Kipling and other Anglo-Indian writers felt a particular kinship with Eurasians. This accounts for their attention to the plight of hybrid characters, such as the sympathetic Hurree Babu in Kipling’s Kim, whose presence reflects what Rushdie has described, in one of his own fictions about mixed-blood characters, as the near “schizophreni[a] . . . of the Indiannesses and Englishnesses that struggled within [Kipling].”23 There is thus a revealing slippage in the very

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definition and application of the term “Anglo-Indian,” a slippage that befits this study’s investigation of a sensibility whose liminality derives as much from its conflicted environment as from its psychological underpinnings. It should not be so surprising, therefore, that a writer like Steel, in her short stories and her most famous work, On the Face of the Waters, should feel compelled to uphold imperial interests even as her characters, whether they are domiciled Englishmen and -women or Indian women, exemplify contrary interests. Steel’s adoptive Anglo-Indian identity—although not country-born like Kipling or Corbett, she had come to view herself as part of this company—is especially split along such lines.24 More significantly, as we will see, her characters are impossible to comprehend fully without an appreciation of the different social and physical spaces they inhabit—cityscapes, bungalow verandas, upper rooms. This point thus presupposes that we cannot understand the literary play of “Anglo-Indian” without an equal attention to the term’s geographical contexts. Indeed, the very term “domiciled European” is itself a spatial term, as Peter Scriver points out.25 It is precisely this interplay among self-perception, cultural entitlement, and imperial dictates that characterizes this study’s attention to the geography of displacement in late colonial India. Kipling’s ambivalent description of Amber Fort illustrates these disjunctions well. If we limit our reading to this passage, which seems to feed the stereotype of gothic space and its ominous effect upon its inhabitants, we miss the tone of irony, even outright sarcasm, which leads to entirely opposite conclusions than the one famously espoused by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835, that non-European minds are benighted by their environment and birthright. Kipling’s intent in this travel passage (and the entire piece) becomes clear once we register the final, deflationary line: “In a dead palace [i.e., like this one]—a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with hundreds of years ago, and of plotting that had for their end . . . the coming of the British tourist with guidebook and sun-hat—oppression gives place to simply impertinent curiosity.” The passage caricatures not the Rajput past, but instead the quintessential English globe-trotter who darts from one tourist sight to another, ticking them off one by one.26 There is perhaps no more telling indication of Kipling’s disdain for the shallow tourist than the distance he—that is, the journalist narrator—places between himself and this representative interloper by his use of the third-person pronoun. There is, indeed, an odd slippage between the Englishman who bullies his way onto each new scene and the Anglo-Indian whose commerce lies with a side of Rajputana society that is “outside, and unconnected with, that of the [British-controlled] Station.” If it is the persona of the diurnal Englishman who surveys Jeypore from “the top of the palace,” it is the Anglo-Indian who bal-

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ances this perspective by viewing it from below, emphasizing thereby not only a seldom seen Jeypore, but also the tenuousness of perspective itself.27 This backand-forth between first- and third-person voices that are sometimes one and the same, sometimes distinct, betrays the Anglo-Indian narrator’s recognition of his divided self. This split voice also speaks directly to my interest in this book, which is to explore the Anglo-Indian’s preoccupation with his or her physical as well as imaginative place in the subcontinent. The Anglo-Indian place of dwelling, to borrow from Gaston Bachelard’s study The Poetics of Space, possesses an element of unreality whose resonance, at once physical and imagined, is necessarily vulnerable to a variety of meanings and interpretations.28 The ways in which the British conceived of their place in colonial India had much to do with how they conceived of the region’s natural and built environments—hills and plains, jungles and bridges—as well as its more socially determined constructs, such as bungalows, gardens, and bazaars. By “colonial spatiality,” therefore, I mean the collectivity of conceptual and material outlooks at particular historical junctures. This spatial orientation is therefore contingent and frequently performative, infused as it is with ideological, individual and contextual idiosyncrasies. But can one speak of “space” without immediately inviting such a multiplicity of definitions as to render the term ineffectual? Even if one accepts the term, don’t its inherent contradictions make speaking to a particular spatial outlook impossible? My answer to these questions is in turn “yes” and “no,” even as I note the importance of keeping these points in mind. Equally important for the present project is the effect of narrative. Michel de Certeau’s distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) is useful in this regard. “A place is . . . an instantaneous configuration of positions,” each of which is unique. Space is the web of relations amongst these positions and is constituted through “the actions of historical subjects.” “Stories,” de Certeau observes, “ . . . constantly transform places into spaces and spaces into places. They organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces.”29 It is narratives, in other words, that mediate this ceaseless, uneven dialectic, whose particular operation I aim to investigate in the chapters that follow. In the vein of Paul Carter’s archaeology of landscape and history,30 I am interested in describing the ambivalent intersection between language, historical place, and ideology so as to account for the overlap of representation and materiality. Thus, the instant one speaks of “colonial space”—of an orientation that is political and a prime constituent of modernity, as in the instantaneous telegraph communicating imperial triumphs across India—one is obliged to speak also of local and contingent place. Critical to my investigation of the literary depiction of these spaces, there-

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fore, is the style and structure Anglo-Indian writers use to express their relationship to the subcontinent. Inevitably, these representations differ from writer to writer, and from era to era. What connects them to one another is a shared, deeply ambivalent sense of geographical and imagined homeliness whose negotiation has much to tell us not only about British Indian literature, but also about the ever-present contestation over authentic selfhood in all narratives that wish to be taken seriously. For all their differences, Kipling’s comic treatment of his compeers, Steel’s self-serious romance set against the Mutiny, and Corbett’s tiger-hunting memoir are equally reflective of a deeply felt ambivalence regarding geographical and societal location. One has only to compare their works to a non-resident English writer, such as Trevelyan, to see the distinction between English and Anglo-Indian. For all Trevelyan’s wit in deflating European pomposity in the tropics, he clings to long-standing assumptions about the distinction between English and Indian cultures. India’s “strange luxuriant vegetation” presents merely “the wild romantic charm” of the tiger hunt, which contrasts with the reassuring familiarity of “home-made bread” and “the Haymarket Theatre.”31 (“Strange” is a word that comes up again and again, especially in the travelogues of visiting Europeans.) Kipling and Steel, as well as Corbett, share no such assurance. In their imaginings, England and India are not distinct entities, but instead culturally entwined, casting a doubtful shadow across Europe’s official self-certainties. As inhabitants of an indentured culture, always second to Mother England (if above the even lower rung assigned to Indians), AngloIndian writers exemplify a fitful and often contradictory relationship to their cultural location that is remarkably similar to that of postcolonial writers. More to the point, as the term “location” indicates, Anglo-Indian and postcolonial writers, for all their differences, share a like mix of wonder and distaste regarding their inheritance of European spatial paradigms. For instance, there is no mistaking Kipling’s ironical yet admiring treatment of the “bridge-builders” of the Raj, Corbett’s preference for “forest roads” over European clubbishness, or Steel’s enchantment with, but condescension toward, the “upper rooms” of Delhi’s Hindu and Muslim inhabitants during the Mutiny. This mixed attitude emerged, I argue, when Europe’s long-standing presumptions about geographical exploration and conquest, including Romantic notions of arcadia and empirical quantifications of space, became entwined with an Anglo-Indian poetics of habitation. This study therefore describes how geographical presumptions, which began with Europeans’ self-confident and decidedly non-ironic estimations of South Asian geography, informed Anglo-Indians’ keen self-awareness of their bicultural location. For all their variance, the resulting narratives are Anglo-Indian inasmuch as their ambivalent relationship to India makes them

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as likely to impugn their European precursors as to praise them. Thus, while Kipling adopts the well-tried British idiom of distanced irony, he characteristically personalizes it in his contradictory urge to simultaneously satirize and applaud the anchoring realities of his colonial world. This mixed outlook—perhaps best exemplified in Kipling’s tales of hill stations and cantonments and in the cacophonous Grand Trunk Road in Kim, as well as in Corbett’s jungle stories—inflects the works of Indian writers like Nirad Chaudhuri, Raja Rao, and Arundhati Roy; this is an important development that the scope of my study does not allow me to delineate in the way it deserves.32 By paying closer attention to the intersection of spatiality and identity in the context of Anglo-Indian writers’ common desire to advertise their English as well as Indian roots, this study addresses a number of interrelated questions that have as much to say about the relationship between words and spaces as about the authors in question. For instance, given the Raj’s obsessive construction of bungalows and bridges, cantonments and clubs, gardens and hill stations, and the large body of literature that is consequently filled with this iconography, what can we say about the effects of this physical reconfiguration upon the subjects who inhabit this landscape and this literature? What are some of the antecedent tropes that infuse the nineteenth-century spatial imperium? Specifically, how does this ethos of colonial iconography and its ostensibly moral implications resonate with those subjects whose outlook refuses, to various degrees, to be spatially bound, and who instead look into the alleyways behind the colonial Club? How are Anglo-Indian women and Indian women figured in this spatial arrangement? In pursuing such questions, I will attempt fresh considerations of Kipling, Steel, and Corbett. These writers are, as I have said, quite different from one another: Kipling, in his autobiographical and fictional output alike, is the wry observer of his compatriots’ earnest desire to be at once supremely English and indignantly expatriate—that is, Anglo-Indian. Steel, viewed for a brief time as Kipling’s literary equal, places women at the heart of her imagined India, and the tales of famed tiger hunter and conservationist Corbett provide rare evocations of a largely solitary appreciation of northern India’s jungles. Given Europeans’ romanticized treatment of non-European territories in the centuries leading up to the Raj, it is no accident that these writers devote a significant portion of their texts to Britain’s enchantment with the subcontinent’s geographical and urban features. But this romanticized view depends, as we will see, on an equal supply of disenchantment with—even outright condemnation of—those same territories. It is this contradictory view that Anglo-Indian writers simultaneously share and subvert.

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Letters of Marque and the Globe-trotter Kipling’s case is particularly illustrative of Anglo-Indian identity for a number of reasons, and therefore it is an apt starting point for my study. From his first works, published while he was still in his teens in the 1880s, Kipling was seen as the voice of colonial Britons. In later years, he was also viewed, with some justification, as the champion of British imperialism and its ideology of the “civilizing mission.”33 He was placed in a global pantheon by his literary mentor, Mark Twain, who said in his autobiography that Kipling’s “voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark.”34 Several critics, with whom I clearly share points of agreement, have found Kipling’s prose and poetry to be expressive of the writer’s “partitioned” self, citing his ambivalence with regard to his twin ties to Anglo-India and Britain.35 He has also been regarded as both a proponent and a satirist of Victorian middle-class aspirations, specifically as these were embodied in the inimitable professionalism of the duty-bound colonial officer.36 These various treatments have made it difficult to disentangle Kipling the modern prose stylist from Kipling the imperialist (as evoked by the still-common adjective “Kiplingesque”). The prevalence of such evaluations begs the question of why Kipling is viewed as an emblematic figure in the first place. I contend that the spatial cast of Kipling’s oeuvre is part of the numerous, often contradictory registers that draw readers to Kipling’s work. We thus see in Kipling’s description of Amber Fort a narrator who mostly espouses the globe-trekking that Kipling scorns, but who makes a direct connection between the maze of “crampt” spaces and the character of its inhabitants. The text makes clear that Kipling the reporter sees himself reflected in both the globe-trekker and the erstwhile Rajput residents, whose identification with their palace parallels Kipling’s own identification with India’s geographical and built environments. More pointedly, Kipling’s well-known interest in characters able to transgress social boundaries to better understand, to “know,” previously secret truths indicates an authorial fascination not simply with the ability to inhabit different personae, but also with the ability to transgress physical and social space. This is why Kimball O’Hara’s skill with impersonation cannot be dissociated from his ability to traverse both narrow and open spaces, such as the dark gullies and the Grand Trunk Road that figure prominently in Kim.37 Kim’s youth—we literally witness his growth from boyhood to adolescence—is especially consequential since it is emblematic of Anglo-India’s obsession with youthful, malleable personalities. By the same token, youth is always susceptible to the circumscription of adult boundaries, aging, and the constant threat of death, mostly in the form of disease. These poles of vitality

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and mortality structured most European perceptions of the tropics, producing in India what David Arnold has called “deathscapes,” or the documentation of a “morbid geography”—graveyards, monuments, disease-ridden jungles—that characterized Europeans’ susceptibility to the dangers of their adoptive land.38 No wonder a crucial factor in accounts of the British-Indian character’s ability to transgress colonial space is his or her relatively unconditioned and still vital youth. As Arnold observes, a European’s death in India “was never far from the ‘picturesque,’ ” with writers evoking the romanticized image of a selfless and adventurous spirit struck down amidst (and by) lushly dangerous geographies.39 The preference for the picturesque has had the paradoxical effect of transforming the image of a wandering spirit into a colonial still-life. Broadly speaking, colonial India expressed its desires ambivalently, juxtaposing the militarily and politically violent stress on social and spatial boundaries with an equal stress on mobility. Long before Kim’s peregrinations, Sir Richard Burton won fame for his descriptions of impersonating “Orientals” to gain access to areas normally off-limits to a European.40 Burton’s narratives resonated with his European audience, for in them he acts on not only a latent, mostly male, desire for nomadism, but also a desire for adolescent adventurism.41 These representations of boyish adventure are part of a familiar pattern of child-centered tropes in colonial discourse that are important to consider in light of Anglo-Indian literature. A key feature of an Anglo-Indian upbringing was the role of the Indian nursemaid, or ayah, who often became a surrogate mother for the European child. Anglo-Indian children were sent to Britain at the age of about eight for their education, which meant a sudden separation from their two “mothers” and the country of their birth—a rite of passage that was usually painful and occasionally traumatic.42 The adult Kipling, for example, seeks out his Eurasian ayah’s blessing just before his marriage in 1892 and in his autobiography remembers her fondly. His ayah was, as for most Anglo-Indian children, clearly a childhood confidante and, perhaps most importantly, a font of gossipy, sometimes macabre, and always entertaining stories.43 There is thus an unmistakable interplay in the literary tropes of Anglo-Indian childhood between idealized innocence and the corrupting influence of worldly experience. John McBratney discusses how Kipling reacts to this, in part by constructing “liminal enclaves,” representative of childhood playfulness (such as Mowgli’s jungle realm or Kim’s bazaar), as a means of enacting his dreams for “white creole” agency that is uncorrupted by the larger imperial and metropolitan cultures.44 Whereas the convention of English boy heroes coming to India to prepare for active participation in the work of Empire was well established,45 McBratney rightly highlights Kipling’s unique attention to the domiciled (country-born)

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individual, who introduces a fresh take on cultural transactions. McBratney thus argues for a more generous reading of Kipling’s works than, for example, Sara Suleri is willing to grant. Like McBratney, Suleri speaks of the inevitability of the youthful, relatively innocent Kim’s displacement by an adult and imperially tainted Kim. Suleri’s conclusion, however, is more pessimistic, for Kim’s ultimate colonial education disallows an indictment of Empire. Such education has, in short, “silenced his voice, and demonstrated that in its adolescence is its end.”46 I want to follow Suleri’s conclusions a bit further, to contextualize Kipling by examining how the views expressed through his work compare to some of the prevailing ideologies of his day. To begin with, tropes of unfettered youthfulness, as Suleri observes, posit the Europeans’ youthful energy against an aged, decrepit India. Thus, Edmund Burke indicts Governor Hastings’ administration for giving free rein to young East India Company men, allowing them to engage in “boyish gambols” and “desperate boldness.” The contrast is all the more piquant since India is the very image of vulnerable decrepitude. Suleri points out that Burke’s disgust will give way, in the nineteenth century (and in Kipling), to an imperial ethos that encourages and extols the bold energy of youth. Burke’s wariness of the tendency to treat the vast subcontinent as a European playground (echoed later in the term for Russian-British tensions in northwestern India, the “Great Game”), as opposed to a realm of imperial duty and consequent order, is of a piece with his ideas about the sublime. India’s dense tropicality, great age, and seemingly unfathomable religions and cultures are emblematic of terrifying obscurity and depthless immensity—physical as well as temporal—that inform Burke’s characterization of the sublime. It is therefore critical to Burke that a rule of law be exercised that acknowledges a graduated scale of power culminating in the responsible discretion of traditional (i.e., English) authority. Without this, despots like Hastings, with his self-interested immaturity, will fill the vacuum, and, more terrifying still, return this unfettered power to its sender, Britain. Ironically, Hastings, for all his acquisitiveness, respected the civilization he had been tendered. In this regard, he was not unlike leading Orientalists such as the linguist William Jones, who detected continuity between India and Europe not only in their languages, but historically as well. This did not sit well with the Burkeans, who mixed their romanticism with a hearty dash of English traditionalism. Not surprisingly, therefore, Burke’s influential concepts of beauty and the sublime depended, as scholars have shown, on the distinction between ontological whiteness and its negation, the “vacant spaces” of “black bodies.”47 This premise became a point of comparison for many travelers in India, such as Bishop Heber, whose well-known 1826 Narrative of a Journey

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through the Upper Provinces of India presents the author’s first impressions of Bengalis, whose “darkest shade of antique bronze” he compares with that of the Negro, who possesses “something . . . which requires long habit to reconcile the eye to him.” Heber, like other Europeans—including the novelist and poet Robert Southey, whose work influenced Heber’s picturesque treatments of India—finds the “great difference in colour between different natives” unsettling, for some even resemble Europeans.48 This consternating mix scrambles the European’s standards of aesthetic and moral sensibility. In a telling aside, Southey, while writing his popular “Oriental romance,” The Curse of Kehama (1810), noted: “There is no mapping out the country (i.e., India), no reducing to shape the chaotic mass.”49 In Burkean terms, despotism, whether the Hastings or the French Jacobin brand, is a corruption of judgment, whose sensory apparatus collapses under the weight of unremitting darkness and fraudulence, chaos and superstition.50 These are the material and aesthetic reference points with which AngloIndian writers like Kipling had to contend. Although Kipling, for one, did not consciously imbibe this Burkean perspective, and although his writings clearly reveal an author who exults in his close proximity to byways and bazaars, there is nonetheless an equally powerful urge to paint a picture of subcontinental darkness and mystery, which critics have taken to calling colonial (or imperial) gothic.51 Metaphors of vertiginous depths and dizzying heights, as for instance in his nocturnal Dantesque descent into Calcutta’s seedy depths in City of Dreadful Night, bestir, as we will see, an almost suffocating prolixity of spatial and corporeal images, so that what promises to be straightforward reportage in many of Kipling’s works quickly devolves into occult language worthy of Ann Radcliffe. Bishop Heber anticipates Kipling when he visits the same Jaipur palace Kipling will describe later in the century. “The passages,” writes Heber, “are all narrow and mean, and the object in the whole building seems more to surprise by the number, the intricacy, and detail of the rooms and courts, than by any apartments of large size and magnificent proportions.” Heber similarly precedes Kipling’s Dantesque imagery in remarking that the Ganga (Ganges) River puts him in mind of the “monstrous dark-coloured water” described in the Inferno (adjectives that also animate John Ruskin’s criticism of Indian art in the wake of 1857).52 In contrast to these precedents, Kipling’s prose is characteristically ironic, this irony being a key feature of his spatially inflected ambivalence as a domiciled “native.” In both his fiction and his journalism, Kipling’s iconoclastic eye undercuts the standard colonial declamations concerning India. He does so by first giving free rein to familiar colonial tropes. For example, his descriptions of

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the subcontinent frequently begin by indulging in his fascination with gothicism. He infuses the Amber Fort description, like all his journalistic pieces collected in Letters of Marque, with words like “dead” and “desolate,” “terrible” and “appalling.” At one point, he speaks of “a strange, uncanny wind, sprung from nowhere,” and of the “confusing intricacy” of bas-relief work, describing how a narrow passage led him “deeper and deeper in the tangle of a mighty maze,” all of which “worked toward the instilment of fear and aversion.”53 Kipling fills his impressionistic visits to Princely cities of old with parallel images of lightness and darkness, with maze-like hallways and avenues offering a “view . . . as unobstructed as that of the Champs Elysees.” On the evidence of Kipling’s description of Amber Fort quoted above, one might conclude that his reportage is of a piece with the period’s Orientalist outlook. But he goes even further. Having passed beyond the “civil lines” of cities and cantonments—traveling, in effect, “out of bounds”—Kipling soon enters gothic tomb-like spaces. Like Thomas de Quincey’s renditions of London’s “enigmatical entries,” “sphynx’s riddles of streets,” and shadowy districts that function as a correlative to the early nineteenth-century author’s opiate vision, Kipling’s crumbling Rajput palaces figuratively entomb relics and memories of once-grand fiefdoms—memories that seem almost as hallucinatory and haunting as de Quincey’s inscrutable London.54 But for all their implications of death and derogation, and in consequence their implicit threat to British-Indian order, Kipling’s palaces, “built of [nothing but stone],” abruptly lose their frightening potency upon the intrusion of a comically inquisitive and bumbling British tourist.55 The author’s skepticism about the gothic effects of the site is confirmed when we learn that the palace described lacks any of the ghostliness normally associated with it, and is therefore unable to exert the kind of haunting that critics have cited as evidence of its resistance to British rule.56 It is at such points that Kipling begins to unveil his narrative strategy, for by first indulging in what were at the time familiar tropes of darkness and intrigue, the author pretends to lay out colonial credentials, pinning images of Eastern grief to the page. He then ushers in the Anglo-Indian version of the trickster, who is unimpressed by the piling up of dependent clauses stuffed with metonyms for cultural degeneration: unlit rooms, mazelike passageways, marble screens. The Chaplinesque tourist, book in hand and speeding past the sights, is as unanticipated in this paragraph as the solitary sentence that describes his appearance and abruptly deflates the previous lines’ pretensions to factual reportage. The tension between Kipling’s urge to factually report and to engage in sensationalized storytelling, between his respect for histories of place and his

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penchant for irony, betrays a characteristically Anglo-Indian ambivalence with regard to India’s iconography. The history Kipling alludes to in this case is that compiled by Colonel James Tod, who earlier in the century, in his capacity as political representative, had conventionalized the romantic image of the Rajputs. In Tod’s hands, the Rajputs’ chivalry, courage, and their immense fortifications epitomize Eastern grandeur.57 Kipling filters many of his seemingly straightforward impressions of Rajputana through what “Tod had written.”58 In Rajputana, Tod viewed Rajput palaces and tales as a potent antidote to the ostensibly marauding tendencies of the more southern Marathas, who had successfully resisted both British and Mughal rule; they were also a counterpoint to the Mughals, in whom the British saw an uncomfortable, because potentially adversarial, reflection of their own religious and governmental attitudes. Kipling accordingly sprinkles his text with references to a legendary Rajput princess, “fair Pudmini,” and transforms her into a veritable Helen, who kills herself along with her handmaids. Similarly, the demise of a Rajput redoubt is favorably likened to the sacking of Troy.59 Tod, like his official successors, exhibits a common colonial contradiction in wishing to preserve and extol the virtues of once-great Indian kingdoms even as he unfavorably compares their ruins to the machinery of modern Europe. This comparison reflected, at root, the kind of utilitarianism that had become the guiding ethos of colonial governance. Its implications were at once cautionary and confirming: Ruins of epic scale showed that every empire, Britain’s included, would fall. At the same time, the knowledge that Britain held sway over these vast lands and their histories ennobled, in colonial eyes, its mission. Above all, Tod was, like his successors, enthralled by the feudal attributes of these Native Princely States, whose culture and architecture had attracted the “aristocratic sympathies” of earlier British colonial officers. This infatuation with Rajput aristocracy would become increasingly unpalatable to those officials, including many in key positions, who advocated a utilitarian approach to Indian governance.60 Kipling’s Anglo-Indian eye, like Tod’s, also focuses on the historical evidence that gave rise to this divided utilitarian-aristocratic outlook. But Kipling’s real object is his negotiation of a distinctly middle-class, country-born regard for places that are at once dauntingly monumental (as in Tod’s text) and trivially touristic (as in the eyes of the globe-trotter). Somewhere between these poles, Kipling’s narrator implies, lies an ostensibly “real” India that resists cooptation. It is important to locate this implication within an Anglo-Indian idiom of geographical displacement. Rather than view Kipling’s description of Rajputana as simply an extension of Tod’s colonialist rhetoric, we must be alert to Kipling’s narratorial sleight of hand, which militates against such conclusions.

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It is not the subject of Kipling’s account that demands our attention so much as the account of his subject, the multiplex images and tonal shifts that make it impossible to pin him (or his narrator) to an ideology. Kipling’s third-person account is presented in the guise of an “Englishman” whose outlook is distinct from that of the “Anglo-Indian point of view.” The implied author, in turn, adjudicates these points of view and tones, so that the single text alternately presents three voices, the resident Englishman, the globe-trotting tourist, and the Anglo-Indian. Whereas the insolent globe-trotter can return to his “cheery British household” and the resident Englishman can make a “home for the time” in “a dâk-bungaloathsome hotel,” the implied Anglo-Indian author must be ever on the move among landscapes that are as discursive as they are material.61 “Jey Singh [ founder of Jeypore],” declares the exasperated narrator, “would have hanged these Globe-trotters in their trunk-straps.”62 In sum, Kipling’s travelogue is polysemous in characteristically AngloIndian ways. At times, the narrator distances himself from official British descriptions of the region, such as those by one of Tod’s successors, the archaeologist H. B. W. Garrick, whose impulsively citational account calls as much attention to itself as to the medieval crenellations he describes.63 Garrick’s prose aims at modesty with the contrary result of tacit self-regard. He thus enacts the familiar colonialist dramatization of one’s own engagement with the colonial landscape, of playing a singular role on a large stage.64 Kipling’s very words echo Garrick: “desolation,” a word Kipling endlessly repeats, is how Garrick describes India’s ruins; and both draw on Tod’s biblically imbued personification of archaic Rajputana as “having become a widow” who laments her abandonment. Yet at the same time, Kipling’s text turns this dramatic presentation on its head by comically undercutting the expected official tone. The reader is kept off-balance by the range of tonal shifts: self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing, inquisitive, historically officious, and straightforwardly observational. The clear call of “the Road,” the traveling narrator’s domain and the space that enables his physical as well as narrative wandering, is another important element in Anglo-Indian literary expression, Kipling’s in particular. It will figure especially powerfully in Kipling’s later novel Kim, where the character Mahbub Ali believes that only the “Road” can be his friend Kim’s true teacher, echoing the narrator of Letters of Marque, who “would send [each boy, that is, apprentice officer] out for a twelvemonth on the Road.”65 The road, indeed, becomes a leitmotif in the collection, for it forces the visitor to “ ‘pass the time o’ day’ to fellowwanderers. Failure to comply with this law implies that the offender is ‘too good for his company; and this, on the Road, is an unpardonable sin.’ ”66 Besides looking forward to the vital presence of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim, Kipling’s

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impulse here to empty governmental offices and pack the clerks off on a road trip signifies the kind of power he wishes he had. For the road suggests the admixture of commerce, class, and custom that colonial administrators rarely encountered or comprehended—and their incomprehension, in the author’s Anglo-Indian view, accounted for the kind of bureaucratic morass he vilifies in other writings. “It is good to be free, a wanderer upon the highways,” Kipling declares in Letters of Marque, “knowing not what to-morrow will bring forth . . . Verily, there is no life like life on the Road—when the skies are cool and all men are kind.”67 It is no wonder, then, that all the authors I consider in this study express some longing for itinerancy, whether it takes the form of Kipling’s road, Steel’s bazaar lanes, or Corbett’s jungle trails. Anglo-Indian Mimicry

It is at this point, however, that Kipling’s Anglo-Indian dream confronts reality, for even an Anglo-Indian’s knowing commerce with the subcontinent is limited by his or her race, especially in the aftermath of 1857. While linguistic fluency and the ability to adopt different costumes might equip the AngloIndian with a fair degree of social mobility, there was always a limit imposed by one’s skin. The British, of course, distinguished Indians by religion, caste, and tribal groupings, creating notions of racial identity that persist to this day.68 What better way to circumvent these limitations than by creating, as Kipling does, a “white” (Irish) protagonist, Kim, who “was burned black as any native” and can ventriloquize a range of voices. But how does Kim’s whiteness manifest? On one level, as other scholars have pointed out, Kim’s whiteness is unattainable for any Indian. In this world, only whites can trade in identities; “natives” are relegated to fixed roles.69 Kim’s racial identity thus seems to operate as an immutable central command, the essential referent for all of his signifying activities, including his mimicry of Indians and his game of “prowl[ing] through the dark ghullies and lanes” of Lahore in his “costume of a low-caste street boy.”70 Kipling thus follows his contemporaries’ common practice of making race a powerful catchall for the many layers of physical, cultural, and intellectual identification that abound in Kim’s Indian pageantry. On another level, the novel refuses to assign Kim any easily identifiable race: His very whiteness, as Parama Roy reminds us, “is never something that can be taken as given; it must also be learned, demonstrated, and defended.” Kim’s Irishness, after all, aligns him more, in Victorian thinking, with Indians than with Englishmen.71 What is most noteworthy about Kim’s transactional identity, in my view, is his spatial sensibility, his interaction with the various topographies he encounters. As Homi Bhabha and others have observed, colonial whiteness was itself a

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bluff. By adapting Jacques Lacan’s insights about the mechanisms that produce an individual’s sense of colonial identity, and by drawing on Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic excavations of racial self-consciousness, Bhabha has been able to expose the instabilities and anxieties at the heart of colonial discourse. Rather than a world of discrete, separable subjectivities and objects and their forthright representations, Bhabha perceives that the colonialist fetish for categorization in fact reveals a terrifying, though suppressed, recognition of its fictionality. What is more, colonialism is inherently unstable, for in seeking to establish a racially superior wholeness distinct from the colonized subject (who is purely Other), colonial ideology is forced to acknowledge an Other subjectivity that has no less claim to wholeness. This contradiction stems from what Lacan calls the “mirror stage” of psychological development, the point at which a child imagines that he or she possesses a unitary self, just as his or her reflection appears in a mirror. This impulse arises principally because the ego is inherently fragmented and alienated. The projection of an “imaginary anatomy,” as Lacan terms it, thus functions in some ways like a map that gives cohesion to a vast and uneven terrain—here, the individual’s lived experiences—that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. The fantasy of wholeness thus depends upon the particular cultural and environmental conditions that nurture the child. This imagined, idealized self becomes for the child a reference point for self-identity—an identity that is, however, rent by the “distress” that inevitably results from a failure of that self to meet the similarly narcissistic demands of “others,” including its own mirrored image. For this reason, the self, in Lacanian terms, is alienated from its idealized, if continuously recalibrated, projection at the very instant this projection first becomes a means of psychological—that is, perceived—wholeness.72 How, then, do individuals fare in the racially charged colonial environment? More to the point, if one’s “imaginary anatomy” is, as Lacan posits, constituted through its social transactions, what happens to individuals in the particularly alienating context of colonial space? How, finally, do these contexts and individuals account for the Anglo-Indian sensibility I am concerned with here? Staying with Kipling’s writings as particularly clear illustrations of my theme, I want to suggest some possible answers in light of both his aforementioned travel sketches and The Jungle Book, which depict, as McBratney has argued, seemingly distinct but actually reciprocal spatial realms. If we accept Lacan’s premises about the imagined integrity of the persona in contrast to a fragmented world, it follows that Kipling’s representations of Indian spaces, constituted as they are “by complex and interconnecting modes of production” (as Kavita Philip puts it in her discussion of colonial science), help form important components

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of the Anglo-Indian imaginary.73 We have seen the tonal shifts registered in Kipling’s Rajputana travelogue. In the same way, in other narratives he turns to different topographies, including the jungle, the cantonment, and the hill station, to register his multifarious and often contradictory outlook. It is not too much to say, for this reason, that the symbolic dialectic of hills and plains in the post-1857 landscape, one that generated acute literary expressions of home and homelessness, reflected the Anglo-Indian’s own similarly dialectical persona.74 “Home” became a resonant issue that dominated country-born conversations until Indian independence. This situation was not, of course, limited to AngloIndians. Peoples across the subcontinent bore the brunt of the British Crown’s post-1857 “reterritorialization,” the appropriation of property and widespread displacement that went hand in hand with industrial expansion.75 The predicament facing Eurasians and other minority groups was especially traumatic. Yet the juridical and essentially racist discourse the British used to identify specific groups with specific regions, and thereby to justify the colonial “rule of property,” could not similarly account for emotional ties that cut across groups and spaces.76 In this sense, an examination of Anglo-Indian sensibility sheds light on what Manu Goswani observes to be true of all social groups, namely, that “social spaces—colonial and national, political and economic, material and imagined—do not emerge from self-evident geographies, nor do they exist in mutual isolation.”77 Fanon’s perception that colonial space is entwined with colonial race is instructive in this regard. Drawing on his own experiences as an Afro-Caribbean individual framed by colonial stratifications, Fanon sets up the black man’s iconic moment of confrontation with the white child’s gaze: “Mama,” exclaims the child, “see the Negro! I’m frightened.”78 It is significant that a child identifies the black man, for not only does it amplify the dominant white culture’s infantalized fear of the Other, it also indicates the effect of the black body on the white child’s psyche. For the latter, the black man is at once a man of parts (with recognizably human attributes) and a purely objectified corporeality that is, as Fanon puts it, “unassimilable.”79 The white child is thus able to re-assert the boundary between him (or her) and the negation of whiteness by simultaneously acknowledging and disavowing the black man. The latter, on the other hand, is forced by this encounter to regard himself as representative of all that is non-white. He thus functions as the white child’s projection of an image whose very negation helps to constitute and to safeguard its imaginary anatomy, its individual integrity. Noting that this transaction is always dynamic, never static, and that, as Lacan asserts, the presumed integrity of the projecting ego is eternally transformed through this dialectic, Bhabha adds to this equation by pointing out

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the profound paradox at the heart of this process, a paradox that is particularly noticeable under the stresses of colonialism: Even as the British residents of India proclaim their interest in raising “a class” of Europeanized men among the Indians, the British bar this anglicized class from ever becoming culturally and morally “white” enough.80 Like Fanon’s iconic moment of racial differentiation, the British sought to establish their psychic wholeness by projecting onto the Indian “babu” figure a mirror image of themselves, “English” in all ways but coloring. At the same time, the British distinguish themselves from the Indian, whose essentialized non-English body corroborates the fantasy of white superiority and egoistic unity. Bhabha thus reminds us of the fracturing of the ego—the white colonizing ego—at its point of origin, though that fracturing is not surprisingly unacknowledged or “disavowed.” The effect is an ambivalent hybridized identity, eternally unstable and therefore always anxious.81 This anxiety is inescapable, for despite wanting to completely know India (as I discuss in the context of City of Dreadful Night), the British insistence on India’s obdurate mystery results in a conundrum, which in psychological terms means an intrinsically fragmented psyche. For their part, the Indians who must endure the colonizing gaze frequently learn to practice a “sly civility” that pretends to ape their masters’ idiom but in fact mocks it. It is this almost parodic version of the official idiom of rule that Bhabha mines to arrive at his insights into the elusive, inherently unstable dialectic of power and resistance. Yet precisely because Bhabha continues to frame this transaction as a dialectic, he preserves the dualism at the heart of colonial discourse, namely, the dichotomy between white and brown, ruler and ruled. Similarly, McBratney’s postulation of a “felicitous space”—an imagined realm like Mowgli’s jungle “that resides uneasily on the cusp between the two paradigms of cultural selfhood: a Victorian racial typology . . . and a modernist” view of “identity as slippery and self-fashioned”—largely maintains a binary schema that reflects the dialectic that grounds imperial myth-making.82 More notably, Bhabha’s theorization, like Lacan’s, suggests an ahistorical reading of psychosocial transaction, one that downplays cultural and material variations. Perhaps this is unavoidable when characterizing in broad terms a dynamic that clearly expresses itself in multitudinous ways. My interest here, however, lies in pondering the implications of this concept of mimicry for Kipling’s already ambivalent Anglo-Indian sensibility as he comes to terms with the subcontinent’s complex and contrasting spatial characteristics. To fruitfully address mimicry in the context of Anglo-India, it is crucial, first of all, to note that there are no discrete, irreducible modules of self-understanding. What might constitute a psychic mirror for an English country-born child

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like Kipling, whose principal relationship in his first five or six years is with his ayah (Indian nursemaid)? What is the context for the Irish orphan Kimball O’Hara’s psychological self-reflection? And if Mowgli’s life in the jungle represents an idealized version of the domiciled English child’s engagement with his natural environment prior to his adolescent entrance into a human-centered sphere, what are the indices or, to use Lacan’s phrase, “symbolic matrix,” for Mowgli’s self-understanding? Conversely, how do Anglo-India’s inassimilable fragments, such as the ruins of Jaipur or the nocturnal underworld of Calcutta, shape the ego of the Lacanian “fragmented body”?83 I would argue that all of these spheres—the fictitious space of the Jungle Book, the much-documented (if variously represented) ruins of India’s past, the infelicitous grunge of urbanism—together must contribute to the constant re-fracturing and re-alignment of the Anglo-Indian ego. As opposed to the European romanticization of India that empties the land of historical specificity and denies its contemporary viability, the Anglo-Indian sensibility perceives and represents India, including its ruins, as simultaneously alive and dead. Light and darkness, as well as the chiaroscuro of shifting in-between shades animate Kipling’s, Steel’s, and Corbett’s tales, whose leitmotifs are verandas and jungle glades, highways and magical events, espionage and gossip. These Anglo-Indian writers see in these images a refraction of their own oscillating allegiances and conflicted desires. The choice of genre was one means of negotiating these conflicts. In Kipling’s case, the narrative form in Letters of Marque, the feuilleton, helps work through and constitute his conscious effort to incorporate the ruins of Rajputana into the fabric of an India that, in Anglo-Indian eyes, eternally resisted any such incorporation. Chief among the attributes of this form, one common to nineteenth-century newspaper reporting, is its allowance for spontaneous and digressive commentary, which suits the wandering feet of its author in his “Pleasures of Loaferdom.”84 This is much the same approach we find in Kipling’s flanerie in the alleyways of Calcutta, in Corbett’s forest treks, and, to a lesser extent, in Steel’s domestic spaces. In the peregrinations of a self-styled “savage” outsider, whose birthright as a domiciled European compels his movement to and from the omphalos of empire, we find that the fringes of empire are crucial constituents of the center—in British India’s case, Calcutta is one such key constituent. Kipling locates himself somewhere amidst these spaces, and somewhere in between his simultaneous reflection and mockery of the empirical language of exploration. Kipling’s ironic depictions of colonial India’s proverbially perplexing topography are the spatial correlatives of a mimicking stance that slides from the subaltern agency of an Indian interlocutor to the counterinsurgent authority of the Euro-

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pean colonial and points between. Given this in-between condition of the bicultural Anglo-Indian, we should not be surprised to find an iconography expressive of this liminal outlook and indeed such an iconography emerges. To return to the ego’s mirror stage in the context of Anglo-Indian identity, I would argue for as much emphasis on Lacan’s brief discussion of the symbolic, especially material, correlatives of the “fragmented body,” as on his discussion of language and temporality, which Bhabha has elucidated. If mimicry, as Lacan generally conceives it (following sociologist Roger Callois), is principally the way in which a person perceives his or her objective surroundings, so that the mirror-image is effectively a combination of psychic and material space—“the threshold of the visible world”—what are we to make of mimicry in the context of colonial space? If colonial mimicry indeed cuts two ways, it follows that spatial perceptions, whether on the part of the colonizer or the colonized (a binary I hope to complicate), likewise represent the observer’s internal processes of acknowledgment and disavowal. Gothic literature is thus read as a particularly spatial expression of the ways Europeans have worked to constitute their own shifting identities by recourse to images, frequently erotic, of primitivism, ghostliness, interiority, and surreal enlargement. In colonial works, such representations help to differentiate the western “Europe” from anything remotely “Eastern” and ancient, even as the same images, examined psychoanalytically, reveal a latent recognition of identity with these same “outside” images.85 In colonial gothicism, one can thus be confident of finding an even more acute differentiation between “us” and “them.” Anglo-Indian prose, however, pulls the rug out from under these finely balanced analyses, for the Anglo-Indian is the “colonizer” under erasure or, conversely, the trace “Indian.” (The quotation marks indicate my own inevitable erasure, for I must use “colonizer” and “Indian” even as I acknowledge these terms’ fluidity.) If indeed the figure of the Anglo-Indian is filtered through layers of representation that include attributes of “Englishman” as well as middle-class Indian, and if this Indian is typified, as historians and literary critics alike have shown, as the effeminate Bengali babu, then it is equally important to recognize the ways in which Anglo-Indian sahibs were compelled to assert their “English” masculinity in the face of detested pious condescension of the arrivants from “back Home.” If India’s Kiplings and Corbetts were viewed as country bumpkins, this is the very persona author Kipling mockingly adopts in his guise as a “savage” interpreter of the Indian scene. Anglo-Indians like Kipling and Corbett structured their self-perceptions according to an ensemble of prescribed roles while working to subvert those prescriptions. If anything, Anglo-Indians were sometimes viewed by India’s Home-based administrators as dangerously (because femininely) close to Eur-

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asians. To rely, then, on a Fanonian triangulation of psychological nodes—the white child, the “Negro” mirror, the colonial superego—to explain Anglo-Indian attitudes toward race and place is to ignore an equally potent constellation of perceived attributes that included effeminacy, class, education, maternity, and moral inheritance. A thorough analysis of the Anglo-Indian mirror stage would, for example, have to pay attention to the functions of the ayah and the babu as well as to their implied correctives, the martial English father and his handmaid, the imperial memsahib. I hope to show that the liminal outlook I have been describing does not result in predictable outcomes. Corbett’s comparatively matter-of-fact, nonurban representations of Indian geography, for instance, differ considerably from Kipling’s ironic, cosmopolitan predilections. Nor do the spatial correlates of this in-between perspective emerge full-formed in every case. It is better to characterize Kipling’s, Corbett’s, and Steel’s liminality as necessarily performative (again, the theatrical dimension is hard to ignore) and inherently unstable. It is not coincidental that Kipling relishes journalistic meandering and Corbett his peripatetic hunts. With each trek into the jungle or around the Princely State, the Terai (low-lying lands, including Kumaon, in the Himalayan foothills) or the city, these writers imaginatively re-shape their relations to the environment and so re-work the psychological mirrors that constitute their respective AngloIndian identities and personae. I do not mean to suggest, in consequence, that the ruins Kipling encounters in Rajputana, for instance, metonymically represent, in a one-to-one correspondence, the author’s haunted psyche, or that Corbett’s man-eating tigers signify the hunter’s own repressed instincts to roam and lay siege to an otherwise ordered colonial world.86 The relationship between the writer and his spatial configurations is always in flux and always prone to the destabilizing network of sensorial associations. Where in Fanon the black man suffers under the gaze of the white boy in a relatively predictable dialectic, in the Anglo-Indian work the dialectic itself disintegrates under multiple ideological gazes—visiting English tourist, colonial functionary, Oxbridge administrator, Indian babu, Indian villager, and so on. Clearly, Kipling and Corbett were not compelled to endure the kind of prejudice that Fanon analyzes; indeed, their own domiciled gaze frequently meshes with colonial hierarchies. My point is that in failing to discern these writers’ partiality for exchangeable voices, disguises, and Indian vernaculars, all of which equip the author to transgress preordained boundaries, we overlook the way their works unbalance the very psychological concepts that critics conventionally rely upon to describe modern coloniality, that is, the mind-set of everyone in this milieu, whether British, Indian, or Anglo-Indian. A passage from The Jungle Book tale “The King’s Ankus,” describ-

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ing Kaa, the big rock python, also describes these authorial impersonations: Kaa “had changed his skin for perhaps the two-hundredth time since his birth. . . . Skin-changing always makes a snake moody and depressed till the new skin begins to shine and look beautiful.”87 Scope of the Book As the preceding discussion indicates, this study is not concerned with how Indian authors have responded to British and Anglo-Indian evocations of the subcontinent, a discussion that demands more space than I have here.88 My selection of materials has been guided by my interest in how colonial spatiality has been inhabited and expressed by hyphenated characters, especially those characters that have conventionally been treated in fixed ways. This focus has led me to writers whose works are in many ways emblematic of the contradictions at the heart of the colonial mind-set. My choices are thus intended to be representative of various notable strands of such expression, rather than a catalog of every possible articulation of the in-between existence that I believe has a lot to tell us about not only colonial, but, by implication, also postcolonial spatiality. I have mentioned the principal authors whose works I will be examining. Such an examination cannot, however, leave out the archival and historical texts that informed the imaginative contours of colonial representation. This study is neither an attempt at a social history of Anglo-India, nor a psychoanalytic investigation of colonial repression or of gender or of race, nor yet is it a reading of the boundaries of statecraft. There are many noteworthy studies of these dynamics and if I draw on them at various points, it is to substantiate my aim of probing the ways in which colonial expressions of space and place, those particular ideological relationships to physical spaces, both condition and are conditioned by the self-perceptions of the various subjects who inhabit the pages of colonial-era texts. To that end, I have turned to narratives that resonate with the intimacies and consternations associated with spatial inhabitance. Edward Said effectively demonstrated the links between power and space that Foucault had long noted. His Culture and Imperialism (1993) begins with a chapter titled “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in which Said stakes his claim for a reading of literature contrapuntally in terms of cultural formations and the world. His book’s title underscores the mutual constitution of European ideas of culture and the history of Western imperialism. As he states in his introduction: “The great cultural archive . . . is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made.”89 Thus, the manorial parlor world of Jane Austen can no longer, he argues, be read independently of the Jamaican plantations and slavery that financed those manors. To be

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sure, Said has been critiqued for overstating his case, particularly in his earlier Orientalism (1978), as when he distributes the triumphant Western discourse of Orientalism (which produces a certain “Orient” in order to better manage it) equally among the ancient Greeks and nineteenth-century European colonizers.90 But the force of his argument is clear. Pertinent to my discussion is Said’s focus on the politics of location, both his own as a Palestinian-American and the subjects of his analysis. Hence such phrases as “the voyage in” to characterize the “conscious effort to enter the discourse of Europe . . . , to mix with it, transform it,” and “the sense of what it means to be at home” come into play in reference to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said’s point is to highlight “the importance of empire to the situation at home.”91 Clearly, Said’s own sense of home and homelessness invigorates his readings with an ambivalence that marks most diasporic writing. In the context of colonial literature, it is important to explore how a similar (un)homely sense, of both belonging and not, profoundly structures imperious European interactions with colonial spaces. This ambivalence is all the more pronounced in writings by Anglo-Indians—those “countryborn” Europeans whose sensitivity to the notion of home finds some resonance in even the most outwardly “colonialist” of texts. A deep sense of fracture in Anglo-Indian descriptions of familiar sites of social exchange—bazaars and hill stations and military settlements—manifests itself variously as irony, injury, and loss. To excavate these undercurrents of Anglo-Indian sensibility, I have necessarily drawn upon scholarship from a range of disciplines. For example, in addition to Bachelard’s philosophical poesis, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points us to the ways in which “[e]very established order,” particularly the spatial, produces an ethos that the individual and the group imbibes, and is thus defined by its sense of limits and sense of reality—a spatial, temporal, and affective context that he calls “habitus.” Derek Gregory and Ross King have written about space from the perspectives of, respectively, geography and architecture, as has Anthony Vidler on the uncanny, Narayani Gupta on colonial urbanism, and Gillian Rose on the gendering of space. Tony Bennett probes similar questions in his examination of the nineteenth century’s “exhibitionary complex,” and the pioneering subaltern studies theorist Ranajit Guha highlights the role of “territoriality” in India’s history of insurgencies. Stephen Kern draws on a range of disciplines to consider how the modern “culture of time and space” distorts all previous conceptions of proximity. Kathleen Kirby analyzes “spatial concepts of human subjectivity,” Timothy Mitchell has mapped the politics of colonial rule in Egypt,92 and Partha Chatterjee succinctly reminds us of the interdisciplinary nature of colonial power dynamics.93

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The point of departure for many current theorizations of space, however, is Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 Marxist analysis, The Production of Space, which continues to generate healthy responses, such as in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies.94 Lefebvre’s analysis is provocative in that it links capitalist modes of production to the late-modern production of self-constituting space, that is, to the individual psyche. Echoing Walter Benjamin, Lefebvre argues that capitalist production saturates the world in the form of commodities, which are “exposed to the gaze of the passers-by, in a setting more or less alluring, more or less exhibitionistic.” “Self-exhibition is [the commodity’s] forte,” residing as it does in the social arena of the marketplace. This “chain of commodities,” moreover, is interlinked with all the other “circuits and networks of exchange,” including— perhaps especially—the recognition of others.95 Hence the vital need, claims Lefebvre, for a materialist account of spatial production, one he believes has been ignored by the overly epistemological interpretations of such scholars as Foucault and Derrida. “We may be sure,” he states, “that representations of space have a practical impact, that they intervene in and modify spatial textures which are informed by effective knowledge and ideology.” Consequently, these representations of space must have a direct “influence in the production of space.”96 By “spatial textures,” I take Lefebvre to mean the cultural and individual sensibilities shaped by the production of space, a dynamic process that is never settled but derives its energies from the contests between different power interests, from the state and its military to educational institutions and the market. Lost in most analyses of these abstract, ideologically charged transactions are the particular historical processes that Lefebvre takes pains to point out. He is, he maintains, more interested in the “affective kernal[s]” of the everyday—“ego” and “house,” “church” and “graveyard”—that inhabit “the interstices between” spatial abstractions.97 This is my interest as well—that is, to tease out the affective kernels of in-between lives, or, to adapt Soja’s words, to reveal how colonial “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life.”98 Examining the ways the writers I have selected respond to this dynamic of spatiality and power seems to me to be especially revelatory of the geographical dimension of human histories. A critical reading of these writers, in other words, can re-direct our attention to how the specificities of everyday life are conditioned by geographical sensibilities. Read any novel set in colonial India and you will notice an apparent paradox: the cohabitation of words describing an exhilarating but vertiginous immensity of geographical space with those describing the ceaseless crowding of human spaces—city bazaars, social clubs, verandas, alleyways. I say “apparent paradox” because in the pages that follow I

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show how Anglo-Indians’ depictions of the colonial subcontinent conjoin infinitude and confinement, each a necessary counterpart of the other. The result is usually messy, often uncomfortable, and always fascinating. More importantly, we cannot adequately understand either colonial British or postcolonial Indian fictions—or, for that matter, modern British fiction about colonialism—without looking closely at why and how writers depicted the subcontinent in the way that they did. Why, then, the focus on space and not also on time? Kern rightly links these concepts together in his study of the profound cultural changes that arose alongside nineteenth-century developments in mobility, cartography, and timekeeping.99 Europe’s geographical and architectural conquest, as well as its temporal classifications and controls, fed the notion that non-European peoples who lacked similar modes of measurement were inferior both racially and culturally.100 Revealingly, Kipling frames the stories of past life in a narrative of the present, a mechanism that, as McBratney observes, enables the author to allegorize the Then as a lesson for the Now.101 In a sense, the temporality of the text—the time of reading—parallels the sequential rediscovery of lost time, as when artifacts are unearthed in a meadow. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “chronotope” calls attention precisely to the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” He notes how time in literature seems to become “visible,” just as the literary expression of space is susceptible “to the movements of time, plot and history.”102 Like Walter Benjamin’s Marxist contention that “homogenous, empty time” must give way to “materialist historiography,” Bakhtin alerts us to the need to “assimilat[e] historical reality into the poetic image” in order to account for the pressures of a modern historicized world no longer enchanted with “empty time.”103 Bakhtin’s intervention is an important one in the struggle to simultaneously hold in our minds two seemingly opposed dimensions, time and space. This is especially useful given the interrelatedness of individual spatial-temporal perception and one’s environment (as opposed to Kant’s a priori definition of these purely cognitive dimensions). Part of the difficulty of conceiving of literary space, as Michel Foucault and W. J. T. Mitchell remind us, has to do with the history of spatial and temporal concepts and the privileging of the visual over the literary arts. Foucault calls attention to the industrial revolution’s transformation of our understandings of time and space, with space becoming “fundamental in any exercise of [modern] power.” Foucault understands this to be a naturalized and therefore almost invisible distribution of power. Partly for this reason, literary space has become, as Mitchell argues, “a synonym for the denial of history and the escape into

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irrational reverence for mythic images”—what Benjamin calls the “aura” of pre-industrial, pre-literate iconography. While Mitchell identifies “a dialectical struggle” that distinguishes the supposed split between time and space in the arts, my focus on the spatial dimensions of colonial experience will target more particularly the Anglo-Indian preoccupation with dwelling.104 It is nonetheless important to keep Mitchell’s and Bakhtin’s observations on the interconnection of time and space in mind as we probe the ways in which Anglo-Indians conceived of the powerfully spatial features of their particular milieu. Colonialism is predicated most obviously on the notion of physical boundaries that are at the same time social boundaries. C. L. R. James underscores this reality in the title of his pioneering work on colonialism and cricket, Beyond a Boundary. Like Bakhtin and other theorists, James recognizes the reciprocal relationship between space and its inhabitants: each shapes the other, so that it is very hard at times to separate, for example, individual motivation from the pressures of the social-spatial milieu that colonialism so strenuously seeks to control.105 This does not mean that individual agency is moot, but we must apply a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives to our readings of colonial spatiality to expose the subtleties that may distinguish individual motivation. The “contact zone” between cultural forces identified by scholars of colonial India signals a critical awareness of the liminal world so often enacted—and, I would add, embodied—in the heteroglossic and heterotopic dynamics of colonial rule.106 As all the theorists and critics make clear, such boundaries inevitably lead individuals as well as groups to transgress the borders of their world. This is so precisely because boundaries are usually invented in an effort to preserve some particular balance of power. Boundaries and the possibilities of boundary-crossing kindle the fears and desires of this dynamic. Thus, to the degree that race, class, gender, and sexuality were obsessively categorized in the nineteenth century, their supposed antitheses—the European “gone native,” “half-caste” offspring, eunuchs—alarmed colonial officials, who at once perceived and disavowed the instability of their rubric.107 The interest in spatiality was especially powerful under colonialism because the tools behind Europe’s global conquest beginning in the eighteenth century were precisely those geared to geographical acquisition and control—surveying, map-making, military ventures, division-and-rule policies and, perhaps most effectively, the invention of the “civilizing mission.” Backed by an ideology that justified violent occupation as the necessary means to secure the ultimately beneficial inculcation of so-called civilized practices in “native” cultures, this mission and the evangelical fervor associated with it point to the transference of a religious idiom to an imperial one. This emerged, not accidentally, at a

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time when Britain in particular was struggling to come to terms with a loss of faith in the certainties of Christian teleology, in the wake of idol-smashing scientific discoveries. In much the way that many evangelicals turned to printed tracts to promulgate their message, imperialists depended on the potency of language to disseminate their beliefs. Writers of fiction and autobiography, of poems and news reports, all produced mountains of prose that took for granted imperialism’s stated aim of reconfiguring geographical and built colonial spaces to promote the “moral good.” For example, the term “time-line,” while attesting to the linkage of temporal and spatial interests, took visible form in telegraph and railway networks introduced to India in the course of its colonial development; these relied upon a coordinated matrix of timetables and rail junctions that, as Kern points out, conditioned, among other things, the conception of the future as well as the structure of narrative.108 Similarly, that most influential venue for imperial and national self-advertisement, the museum, effectively universalized Europe’s perception of society, even non-European society, as a temporal and spatial arrangement of reality that is best articulated through catalogues and exhibits. Much of the so-called romance of empire depended upon a belief in timeless European values that are asserted over the ruin of indigenous non-European societies. To imagine oneself as holding the reins of the future required a contrasting passivity on the part of one’s subjects, and that passivity was never more clearly on display (according to the colonial script) than in the exhausted history of ancient India. Romance, however, is only one element of the colonialist equation. Of equal interest are the historical contexts of romance and the shift from a comparative certainty about Europe’s place in the known world to the increasingly ambivalent Anglo-Indian idioms that so largely defined late colonial modernity—a period in which, paradoxically, Europe was assumed to have reached its colonial zenith. Timothy Mitchell points to this paradox in his study of French colonial Egypt when he argues that Europe’s colonially ordered world was naturalized as one in which the European and usually male “observing subject” is conditioned by a “metaphysics of capitalist modernity” in which lived space lacks meaning until it is framed by this observer as if it were an exhibition. For Europeans, writes Mitchell, “reality meant that which presents itself in terms of a distinction between representation and original.”109 The observing subject is, moreover, one who internalizes this Cartesian division between the world-as-stage and the ostensibly separate gaze. The European eye, according to Mitchell, represents the colonial world “as though it were a picture of something,” waiting to be arranged in such a way as to be interpretable.110 As a result, “the boundary of the outside” world of the “colonial order” is seen to be all that there is.111 Gillian

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Rose’s discussion of European perspectives of non-European spaces correlates with Mitchell’s points, although she refocuses our attention to the masculine properties of this gaze.112 Mitchell’s study of colonial Egypt has been useful for identifying what is indisputably a key feature of colonialist representations of the East, that is, the European tendency to frame India and elsewhere as if the landscape and peoples were a picturesque object for aesthetic or scientific scrutiny. This perspective certainly informs the paintings, photographs, and writings about British India. Mitchell’s emphasis on this representational split does not, however, leave much room for the kind of in-between outlook I am probing here. To make his point about a “modern [European] subjectivity” that carefully constructs “the effect of having a position,” Mitchell must subscribe in some degree to the very categorization he wants to complicate.113 He appears, for example, to envisage subjectivity as at once individuated and unitary, as when he refers to “European” and “Egyptian” standpoints without addressing the complexities of these positions and names. The breadth of Mitchell’s study no doubt necessitates a measure of generality. But the exclusive focus on the difference between an overdetermined Europe and its other, in this case Egypt, overlooks the split within the individuals who variously subscribe to one worldview or another—or, indeed, to both worldviews at once, as Anglo-Indians often did. If Mitchell rightly calls out Europe’s naturalized conception of the “neutrality of [non-European] space” as a crucial presupposition for colonial discipline, he neglects to explore how this conception is so often split at the moment of enunciation, as Bhabha observes.114 The “deliberate disguise” of colonialist operators that Mitchell highlights assumes an essential European-ness distinct from the disguise and from the indigenous population, as opposed to an identity that, as Bhabha has demonstrated, is always already conflicted. My own conclusion is that this inherent ambivalence is itself variable, so that one is hard put to speak, for example, of a singular Anglo-Indian (or Egyptian) mentality. The writers I examine here indeed exemplify quite different attitudes and motivations. What links them together is a general spatial sensibility conditioned by their Anglo-Indian experiences. It is important to keep this in mind as we proceed. Despite the broad brush of some of Mitchell’s arguments, his concentration on colonial spatiality returns us to the particularities of the lived environment in such a world, as opposed to studies that alternately over-emphasize the psychological, class-based, and political effects of coloniality. The different analyses of colonial power dynamics on which I have drawn offer partial approaches to a study of Anglo-Indian spatial sensibilities. But taken together they, have provided me with many of the necessary analytic tools.115 If no one of these

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approaches is sufficient unto itself, each is a catalyst that may bring forth various nuances of bicultural existence in a world—British India—overcharged with the politics of space.116 A group of historians of India identified as the Subaltern Studies Collective has significantly added to our understanding of these colonial interstices. Chief among them is Ranajit Guha, whose work significantly informs this study. Guha’s seminal essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” for example, shows that colonial texts are as revealing for what they do not say as for what they superficially tell us.117 He shows how colonial forms of knowledge, to which we are still beholden, have largely determined the way in which we view history, so that those lives and events that do not fit presupposed categories have been ignored. As with most of the works I have drawn upon, Guha’s is acutely aware of its own entanglement in paradigms that occlude “subaltern” agency. Such self-critique is not really new, of course. Indeed, my aim is to show how the bifurcated sensibilities in the writers I examine lead them to challenge the status quo. This is, I suggest, the way to read Kipling’s ambivalent record of his visit to Amber Fort, as a constellation of tones and strategies that reflect partial selves. *** The subsequent chapters of this book take up, in turn, hill stations, cantonments, city streets and bazaars, engineered structures, and the jungle hunt. Chapter One draws on archival materials and historical studies to contextualize the ways Europeans looked upon Indian landscapes, and how these landscapes befuddled European presuppositions about the subcontinent, including the aesthetic concepts of the sublime and the picturesque. Drawing on nineteenth-century British representations of India by John Ruskin, G. A. Henty, and Harriet Tytler, this chapter discusses the ways in which imperial iconographies of British India—the concept of the picturesque and the treatment of land as “virgin soil” ready for development—compare with Anglo-Indian depictions of the same. Kipling’s short story “Rikki-tikki-tavi” is especially noteworthy for its articulation of a sensibility that is at once at home in India and estranged from it, refracting this ambivalence through the motif of the bungalow garden. The chapter as a whole illustrates how the British tended to represent India’s natural environment in terms of order and disorder: managed Garden and untamable Jungle, bordered stations and disordered bazaars. Anglo-Indians’ bicultural outlook, by contrast, presents a world in which the garden and the jungle are never separable but instead always overlapping. Chapter Two turns to a discussion of the hill station and the plains, including the latter’s “cantonment culture.” Focusing especially on Kipling’s short

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story “Lispeth,” I illustrate how the hill station and cantonment helped to define one another in both conventional and Anglo-Indian ways. The chapter also illustrates how impersonation, at which Kipling’s country-born character Strickland is notably adept, reveals a typically Anglo-Indian skepticism about the separation of English and Indian spaces. Kipling’s iconic Plain Tales from the Hills, whose title puns on this, effectively satirizes British-Indian culture precisely because Kipling’s hyphenated voice is able to discern both the inner and outer workings of these paradigmatic social spaces. Kipling’s self-perceived insider/outsider status enables him to parody the hill station’s culture of colonial politesse. Chapter Three explores the literal and symbolic roles of the colonial Club and the cantonment, both of which stressed exclusionary practices. An English resident was prohibited, either juridically (in the case of soldiers, especially) or socially from crossing cantonment borders—from being “out of bounds”—in defiance of the sanctified rituals of club life. This is why Kipling focuses on characters whose borderline existence threatens this sense of order. Like the physically divided Club he depicts in “The Bisara of Pooree,” characters who thrive on border-crossing express latent Anglo-Indian desires. Similarly, the Grand Trunk Road, which in fact anchored Indian traffic for centuries, figures prominently in Kim precisely because it is a space whose kaleidoscopic variety mirrors the persona of Kimball O’Hara. Chapter Four focuses on Kipling’s travelogue of Calcutta, City of Dreadful Night, to demonstrate how Europe’s experience of late nineteenth-century urbanism, particularly in regard to spectacle and to the figure of the flaneur, the strolling spectator, is echoed but also subverted in the colonial city. At once a copy and a betrayal of the quintessence of European urbanism, Kipling’s uncanny versions of Calcutta expose fault lines that colonialism does not want to acknowledge. Drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin, Kipling’s version of Calcutta proves to be a copy of the imperial epicenter, London, but one that calls its very centrality into question. The chapter rounds out this discussion with a reading of Kipling’s story “The Madness of Private Ortheris” to show how the author’s fictional and non-fictional interests cohere around concerns with liminality. Chapter Five turns to Flora Annie Steel’s revealingly flawed Mutiny novel, On the Face of the Waters, to show how the Indian bazaar and bungalow, and especially the veranda, were crucial tropes in British-India’s domestic geography. How Steel employs these tropes counters the conventionally masculinist images of the Mutiny. In Steel’s otherwise conventional imperial novel, the watershed event of the 1857 rebellion, intensely charged as it is with preconceived notions of Indian spatiality, simultaneously endorses imperial narrative and calls atten-

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tion to the occlusion of women in this narrative. The British-Indian invention of the field of “medical topography,” I argue, is a particularly revealing motif that informs Steel’s novel in fascinating ways. Chapter Six reads Kipling’s story “The Bridge-Builders” to show how the author’s Anglo-Indian perspective inclines him to empathize with the natural environments—represented by talking animals—even as he celebrates the quintessential duty-bound imperial worker. This perspective alternately endorses pastoralism and industrialism, and not surprisingly the story concludes on a note that accentuates this split outlook. A key articulation of this split is the character Peroo, an experienced Indian sailor whose polyglot abilities, not unlike those of Kim and Mowgli, save the bridge. The final chapter, Chapter Seven, locates the place of hunting in the colonial imaginary and explores how Jim Corbett’s popular tiger-hunting tales, especially the best-selling collection Man-Eaters of Kumaon, complicate conventional colonialist representations of predation and confineable spaces. The tropical hunt, described in innumerable memoirs, became emblematic of exotic colonial life, so much so that ordinary Britons thronged to an exhibition of stuffed tigers at the 1851 Crystal Palace. I show how Corbett’s narratives, by contrast, imbue this seemingly familiar iconography with an ambivalent sensibility that resists the self-avowed authority of conventional British representations of India. Typically “fiendish” tigers prove, in Corbett’s hands, to be discursive versions of his own ambivalent identity. For all his differences from Kipling, Corbett’s tales record a similarly empathetic connection to India’s environment, which they discursively shaped into a homely, if conflicted, space. This study focuses on the Anglo-Indian sensibility, but its thematic concerns intersect with similarly conflicted idioms that have informed postcolonial works like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, whose switched-at-birth narrator, Saleem, proves to be Eurasian, a blend of European departure and Indian arrival at the nation’s midnight birth. Rushdie’s novel shows that the question of belonging always turns on societal claims of provenance and ownership, a theme that not surprisingly recurs in postcolonial narratives. As I have tried to show, such claims, whether they are based on colonial, national, class, religious, or gender categories, are suspect not simply because they are rooted in a politics of exclusion, but more importantly because the supposedly stable spatial idioms they employ are, in fact, built on contradictions. This is why we need, as Gaston Bachelard has said, a poetics, rather than a politics, of space.118 Thus, the question I have tried in different ways to address is simply: What happens when the exclusionary symbolism that attaches to the colonial hill station or the cantonment or (negatively) the bazaar proves to be shot through with spaces

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and actors that transgress? The answer, as I trust the following chapters will show, is not a more complete consideration of coloniality, but rather a more accurate representation of what Gyanendra Pandey has called the “fragmentary” perspective,119 what Kipling termed the “savage” point of view.120 As such, this study does not follow a strict chronology of events or publications, but instead thematizes British-Indian iconographies in such as way as to illuminate their inherent ambiguities. Notes Epigraph. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 252. 1. Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (New York: H. M. Caldwell Co., 1899), 29. 2. Kipling’s contemporaries immediately discerned the resemblance between Kipling’s tales of the supernatural and Poe’s. Bonamy Dobrée, for instance, observed in 1927 that Kipling’s “stories of horror” were “unequalled outside Poe.” Dixon Scott similarly invoked Poe in his 1912 discussion of Kipling, as had Andrew Lang before him, in 1891. See Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 75, 312, 361, respectively. 3. Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 58. 4. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 5. For more on Europe’s industrial-colonial nexus in the nineteenth century, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), especially chapter 4, “Attributes of the Dominant: Scientific and Technological Foundations of the Civilizing Mission,” 199–270. 6. Innumerable works exist, of course, on both the general level of European “encounters” with the “East” and on the narrower (though still immense) level of modern European interaction with the subcontinent. Examples include, in the areas of history, geography, anthropology, and Indology, Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men; Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay on Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Kew, England: Royal Botanic Gardens, 1992); and, in literary criticism, most notably Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) as well as Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial

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India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7. Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), xi–xii. 8. As Wilhelm Halbfass observes, the Enlightenment mood in eighteenth-century Europe took root in India in the form of William Jones and the Asiatic Society, which had Hastings’ blessing. Certainly this was a practical part of Britain’s ambition to more effectively control the subcontinent in the interest of trade. Nonetheless, it is a fact that the level of interaction between Europeans and Indians, in marriage as well as scholarship, increased in the decades after 1757, when Britain consolidated its grasp of India. See Halbfass, India and Europe, 62–64. 9. Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (Oct. 1992): 309–329; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 10. The term “Anglo-Indian,” originally used by “native-born” Britishers to distinguish themselves from those Europeans who had come to India as adults, began to be adopted by the mixed-race, or Eurasian, community early in the twentieth century. For most of the book I retain the original sense of the term in order to maintain historical and semantic consistency. 11. On this trope, see for example Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), passim; and Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency & India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 36–39, 207. 12. On Englishwomen arriving in India [post-1857] strictly in order to become wives. See Margaret Macmillan, Women of the Raj (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), xii–xx. 13. Judith T. Kenny, “Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: the Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.4 (1995): 695. 14. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 3. 15. Homi Bhabha’s essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” is the locus classicus of current postcolonial theorizations of hybridity. See his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993). For productively applied discussions of this theory, see for example Roy, Indian Traffic. 16. Kim: A Critical Edition, ed. Zohreh T. Sullivan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 105. 17. Roy, Indian Traffic, 9. Roy shows how the late-colonial Anglo-Indian commu-

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nity attempted to co-opt Indian nationalism as “its own,” thereby threatening to scuttle Indians’ own nationalist moves. My study endeavors to identify and understand how the contradictions and ambivalences within this community are expressed in similarly ambivalent works of literature, whose stated aims are usually at odds with their narrative forms and effects. 18. See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and “Orientalism” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Bose, Organizing Empire, 184. Also see Roy, Indian Traffic, chapter 3: “Anglo/Indians and Others: The Ins and Outs of the Nation,” 71–91. 19. George Otto Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London; Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1866), 13. 20. As a result of successful lobbying by the Eurasian community, they were legally termed “Anglo-Indian” by the new state of India at the time of its independence in 1947. 21. See Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books/Penguin, 1991), 15. 22. Doreen B. Massey is therefore right to counter such a binary in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001). Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 174–175. 23. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Vintage, 1995), 15. 24. Margaret Macmillan describes Steel’s comparatively unorthodox resolve to roam about India, forsaking her prescribed role as the dutiful wife of a colonial Civil Servant. See her Women of the Raj, 238, 246. 25. Peter Scriver, “Placing In-Between: Thinking through Architecture in the Construction of Colonial-Modern Identities,” National Identities 8.3 (Sept. 2006): 210. 26. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 29. 27. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 35. 28. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 59. 29. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117–118. 30. See Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 31. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 99, 84. 32. Chaudhuri describes in his 1951 work Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) his youthful awe of colonial Calcutta’s boulevards; Rao, in Kanthapura (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), paints a portrait of a southern Indian village buffeted by the clash of colonialist policies and the nationalist movement; and Roy, in The God of Small Things (New York: Random

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House, 1997) gives life to the natural environment of a Kerala town in the 1960s and 1990s. 33. See Edward Said, “Introduction,” Kim (London: Penguin, 1987), 7–46; Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 200; and Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India. 34. Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), 287; quoted in John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15. 35. See for example Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 1–26; and Roy, Indian Traffic, 71–91. 36. See Bose, Organizing Empire, 173–179; and Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 136–195. 37. See for example Kim: A Critical Edition, 5, 107: Dreaming of returning to “the Road,” Kim “yearned for the caress of soft mud squashing up between the toes” (107). 38. David Arnold, “Deathscapes: India in an Age of Romanticism and Empire, 1800–1856,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26.4 (Dec. 2004): 339–353. 39. Arnold, “Deathscapes,” 345. 40. Parama Roy discusses Burton’s, and his contemporary audience’s, penchant for spectacle, observing that whereas the “civilizing mission demands the careful maintenance of nonpermeable boundaries,” Burton’s permuations simultaneously question and uphold colonialist attitudes. Burton’s preference for playing mixed characters (e.g., “half-Arab, half-Persian”) corresponds in several ways to the dynamic favored by the Anglo-Indian writers I focus on here. See Roy, Indian Traffic, 34, and 17–40 passim. 41. For more on Kim’s “nomadic” proclivity, see Ian Baucom, Out of Place, 95; for more on Kim’s adolescent signification, see Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 128–131; and see below. 42. Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 58, 84–85, 99. 43. Kipling. Something of Myself for My Friends, Known and Unknown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–3, 105. 44. John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), xxvi and passim. 45. G. A. Henty’s best-selling “boys’ adventure” tales of the time are particularly noteworthy for their favorable depiction of imperialists-in-the-making. See for example Henty’s In Times of Peril: A Tale of India (London: Griffith & Farran; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1881), about the Indian Mutiny; and Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 221 and passim.

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46. See Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 128–131. 47. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757, 1759), quoted in Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 200. 48. Bishop Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–1825, 3 vols. (Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corp., 1985), vol. I, 4, 9–10. 49. Robert Southey, Commonplace Book, quoted in Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: From an Antique Land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 190. 50. As Nigel Leask notes, “Romantic Hellenism,” beginning with the eighteenthcentury German art historian J. J. Winckelmann, was long the standard according to which other cultures were measured (and usually found wanting). Moreover, Europeans read the demise of Greek civilization as a cautionary tale of the intermixing of politics and aesthetics. See Leask, Curiosity, 48–50. 51. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), chapter 8 (227–254); Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, chapter 2 (24–48); Low, White Skins, Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 148–149; and Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, chapter 5 (180–229). 52. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, vol. II, 403, 7. The extent to which Heber’s visit to Rajputana clashed with his Romantic vision of the tropics is reflected in Heber’s contrasting description of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, with its myriad of plants offering “a picturesque and most beautiful scene” that “more perfectly answers Milton’s idea of Paradise except it is on a dead flat instead of a hill, than anything which I ever saw.” Narrative of a Journey, vol. I, 52. 53. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 124, 126. 54. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), quoted in Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35. 55. Kipling, Letters of Marque, Letter 3, 20. 56. Thomas Metcalf, in his illuminating study An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, remarks on Kipling’s “skepticism,” but then cites the same lines, in which Kipling speaks of a the sensation of being “followed by scores of unseen eyes,” as evidence of the author’s anxiety. But Kipling, as I have noted, makes clear that these palaces are not living, hence do not elicit any such haunted feeling. Otherwise insightful readings by Gail Ching-Liang Low and Lewis Wurgaft similarly underplay the thread of self-deprecation so noticeable in Letters of Marque. See Metcalf, 109; Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 143–155; and Wurgaft, Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India, 133–134.

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57. James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India (Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2001), 36, 94. 58. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 129. 59. Ibid. 60. For more on the contemporary debate over how to view feudal Rajputana, see Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 138. The classic exploration of this topic remains Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 61. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 14. This is not to say that Kipling did not relish the dramatic tales that fed the very tropes he mocks. These tales in one sense replay the childhood excitement of listening to an ayah’s tales. No wonder that an older Kipling’s recollection of “evening walks . . . by the sea” with his ayah in Bombay still elicited in the author a surprisingly gothic sentiment, at once “menacing and attractive.” He had “always loved the voices of night winds through palm . . . trees” as much as he has feared the same trees bathed in “tropical [darkness]” (Something of Myself, 2). 62. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 54. 63. H. B. W. Garrick, Report of a Tour in the Panjab and Rajputana in 1883–84. Archaeological Survey of India (1884) (Delhi: Indological Book House, 1975). 64. For more on the imperial I/Eye, or “the-monarch-of-all-I-survey,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially chapter 9, 201–228. 65. Kipling, Kim: A Critical Edition, 82; Letters of Marque, 153. 66. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 144. 67. Ibid., 105. 68. See Gyandera Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 69. See Roy, Indian Traffic, 78; and Satya Mohanty, “Kipling’s Children and the Colour Line,” Race and Class 31.1 (1989): 21–40. 70. Kipling, Kim: A Critical Edition, 3, 5. 71. Roy, Indian Traffic, 87. 72. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 1–7. Also see Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 85–87; and Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 191–237. 73. Kavita Philip, “English Mud: Towards a Critical Cultural Studies of Colonial Science,” Cultural Studies 12.3 (1998): 309. 74. It is worth noting, in this regard, Manu Goswami’s observation in her broader discussion of Indian history that this period saw the rise of “a global space-time” that

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“was a dialectical, contradictory, and doubled process.” Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 39. 75. For a full discussion of colonial “territorialization,” see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Also see Goswami, Producing India, 39 and passim. 76. See Goswami, Producing India, 57. 77. Ibid., 5. 78. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 112. 79. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161. 80. This is the term, and the argument, Thomas Babington Macaulay used in his influential 1835 “Minute” on Indian education. 81. See Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” Both in Critical Inquiry 12 (Fall 1985): 144–165. 82. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, xix. 83. Lacan, Écrits, 4. 84. For more on the narrative form of the feuilleton, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 43, 146–147. 85. See for example H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–8, 172–173; and Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, xi–xxv. 86. Brian Luke makes such an assertion, albeit in a non-colonized context (North America and the North American hunter), in his essay “Violent Love: Hunting, Heterosexuality, and the Erotics of Men’s Predation,” Feminist Studies 24.3 (Fall 1998): 627–655. 87. “The King’s Ankus,” in The Jungle Book (New York: Book League of America, 1948), 125. 88. There are a number of studies about the engagement of Indian literature and film with colonialism, such as Parama Roy’s Indian Traffic (1998) and Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

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89. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxi, 12. 90. Said, Orientalism, 3. 91. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216, 88–89. 92. Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,” in Nicholas B. Dirks et al., eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 155–199; Ross King, Emancipating Space: Geography, Architecture, and Urban Design (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996); Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Narayani Gupta, “The Useful and the Ornamental: Architecture in India in the Last Two Centuries,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 25:1 (1988): 61–77; Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography; Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Culture/Power/History, 123–154; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 61–77; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; Kathleen M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. 93. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Chatterjee observes how “technologies of disciplinary power . . . put in place by the colonial state . . . create[d] the institutional procedures for systematically objectifying and normalizing the colonized terrain, that is, the land and the people of India. Not only was the law codified and the bureaucracy rationalized, but a whole apparatus of specialized technical services was instituted in order to scientifically survey, classify, and enumerate the geographical, geological, [and] botanical . . . properties of the natural environment and the archaeological, historian, [and] anthropological . . . characteristics of the people” (19–20). 94. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1993). Also see Derek Gregory’s reading of Soja in Gregory’s Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 257–266. 95. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 342. 96. Ibid., 3–5, 41–42, 44. 97. Ibid., 42–43. 98. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 6. 99. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. 100. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 242–246. 101. John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 143. 102. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.

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103. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 262; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 91. 104. Mitchell, Iconology, 98; Benjamin, Illuminations, 98. 105. Shirley Ardener makes precisely this point in “Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women: An Introduction,” with which she opens her edited volume of essays, Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993), 2 and passim, 1–30. 106. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space. Bakhtin develops his influential concept of “heteroglossia” in “Discourse on the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 259–422. For Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia,” see his “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, 252, as well as Edward Soja’s discussion of the concept in Postmodern Geographies. The term “liminal,” now so much in use, is Victor Turner’s, from his influential works in symbolic anthropology, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967) and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969). See Sherry B. Ortner’s useful review of the latter in “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” in Culture/Power/History, 372–411. 107. James Fitzjames Stephen at the London offices of Britain’s colonial Home Department for India wrote that eunuchs were “wretches” in charge of “an organized system of sodomitical prostitution,” seconding John Strachey’s earlier memo calling for the enforced end to a common practice that “is highly discreditable to our Government.” See National Archives of India [NAI] Home Department, Judicial, file no. 55, 30 July 1870. For more on the colonial policing of sexuality, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), and Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.4 (1994): 579–602. Such rhetoric exemplifies Britain’s masculinist regard toward a supposedly emasculated culture. For more on this, see Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, passim. 108. See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 92, 148. 109. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xv. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 167. 112. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 7–8. 113. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 59. 114. See Bhabha’s “In a Spirit of Calm Violence,” in After Colonialism: Imperial

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Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 335, 337. 115. For example, Said’s pathbreaking if totalizing historical view of Orientalist tendencies, the despatialized, dehistoricized insights of Bhabha’s psychoanalytic approach, Ashis Nandy’s perspicacious but overindulgent meditation on Gandhi’s anti-modern mythos, Rose’s greater attention to gender differences than to their overlap, Sara Suleri’s spotlight on colonial rhetoric at the expense of politics, and Gail Ching-Liang Low’s discussion of colonial psychic liminality rather than spatial liminality. 116. Suleri highlights Europe’s tendency to read India, Britain’s “jewel in the crown,” as a powerful Western metaphor that “suggests spatial intransigence” in order to disavow the “fluidity of culture” (Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 6, 5). As Bhabha observes, a fuller understanding of how the combustible mix of colonialist and nationalist tendencies shaped, and is shaped by, narration requires us to do our best to avoid precisely the either/or thinking that guides conventional ideas about borders and subjectivity (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 125–133). Gauri Viswanathan echoes this point in her demonstration of how Indian women converts to Christianity under colonialism were stripped of real choice in the visible effects of their decision, governed as they were by the Manichean ethos of a colonial order that demanded legal fixity (Gauri Viswanathan, “Coping with (Civil) Death: The Christian Convert’s Rights of Passage in Colonial India,” in After Colonialism, 183–210). Also see Peter Hulme’s similarly effective discussion, in the context of the Caribbean, of how, despite the binarist thinking that pervades colonialism, its effects are various and contradictory (Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 [London: Methuen, 1986], 21 and passim). Nandy’s study of Kipling and Gandhi seeks, with partial success, to avoid precisely such binarist thinking by underscoring the “androgynous” basis for Gandhian politics. But this otherwise insightful study cannot resist conceiving of Gandhian tactics as inherently different from other forms of resistance, implying once again the very otherness that such tactics are presumed to subvert (Nandy, The Intimate Enemy). Rose, like Mary Louise Pratt, has reminded us of how the representation of colonial landscape as feminized and in need of cultivation owes much to male-ordered European perspectives, but that we must read such representations against the grain, alert to both their explicit and oblique commentaries (Rose, Feminism and Geography; Pratt, Imperial Eyes). Low’s discussion of Rider Haggard and Kipling in White Skins, Black Masks succeeds on many levels in pointing us to the interstices of colonial discourse so as to detect the contradictions and permutations that course through all relationships of power and resistance. 117. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Stud-

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ies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–86. 118. I refer to Gaston Bachelard’s aforementioned 1958 book The Poetics of Space. 119. Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About HinduMuslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 27–55. 120. Kipling, City of Dreadful Night (New York: H. M. Caldwell Co., 1899).

Chapter 1

“I Want to Send India to England” The Aesthetics of Landscape and the Colonial Home

“Home!”—ah! how much the past and the future is enshrined in that peace-breathing, that ecstatic syllable! —English visitor to India, 1852

[W]heresoever in Hindostan Englishmen make their homes, no regard is had to economy of space. —G. O. Trevelyan, 1866

As the above epigraphs from the best-selling nineteenth-century writer G. O. Trevelyan and an anonymous 1852 traveler suggest, “home” was a constant companion of the English in India. They were variously homesick and homeward bound, and took pains to appoint their bungalows with Manchester cotton and London journals. Yet the associational power—indeed, the very meaning—of these items varied significantly depending on how long the traveler had been in India, and on whether he or she had determined to settle there. Interlopers in the nineteenth century, for instance, were never in doubt that England was home and India an alien space, whereas those who came for a career (civilian or military) in the subcontinent arrived with a veritable library of anecdotal and official accounts, gleaned from Britain’s long affair with India, of what lay ahead for anyone who chose to stay. For the latter, India, like it or not, was to be their new home. Trevelyan’s generally jaundiced view of the living conditions of Anglo-Indians led him to declare that “Every article in an AngloIndian household bears witness to the fact that the Englishmen regard themselves but as sojourners in the locality where fate and the quartermaster-general may have placed them.”1 But many of these resident Europeans quickly accepted 46

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and even delighted in their newfound colonial expertise and in the trappings of indigenous pomp, which, for all its real and imagined dangers (such as disease and “degeneresence”) afforded the luxury of commodious—and, as Trevelyan emphasizes, spacious—habitation. These colonial personnel, many of them from the lower and middle classes, soon grew fond of their “Anglo-Indian” tag. On their own turf they were able to lord it over the Indians and rather proudly introduce their own version of India to curious European visitors; but back in England they were never openly accepted into the genteel society they had emulated, despite their ability to buy real estate. They formed their own clubs in London and, with varying success, found audiences for tales of their overseas adventures. These Anglo-Indians were thus compelled to negotiate Britain’s fickle public consciousness concerning class and upward mobility, non-Western lands, and the changing sense of what it meant to be English. These troubles over identity explain why, in their speech, social habits, and writings, Anglo-Indians of the nineteenth century exhibited a deep ambivalence about the idea of “home,” for home was both England (in which case it was capitalized as Home) and the soil of their colonial home.2 Anglo-Indians took pride in their relatively authoritative positions in the subcontinent, where they lived far better than they could have back Home. Frequently, they even adopted some Indian living habits, though this would become less common by the mid1800s. The English therefore looked upon India with a combination of smug detachment and proprietary interest, a combination that varied from individual to individual, but which resulted in a patchwork sensibility, that is, a cultural outlook produced from the jumbled mix of two hitherto distinct and historically complex cultures. This is why colonial conceptions of home were couched in words and objects that memorialized Britain even as Anglo-Indians established elaborate codes of conduct that, across various incarnations, fused European and Indian symbolic idioms of public display.3 They developed, in other words, a kind of double-consciousness, so that even the most imperious of their community came to see certain features of India—especially geographical features—as ineluctable parts of their individual as well as collective identities. I will further argue that by the mid-nineteenth century—especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1857–1858 war—Anglo-Indians expressed this identification with India’s geography through a mixture of scientific, aesthetic, and gothic tropes, and that this mixture is most noticeable in some of the most popular literary genres of the day. To complement the arid prose of limitless bureaucratic ledgers, for instance, Anglo-Indians popularly showcased their talent for tiger hunting in memoirs and romantic novels, and spiced their tales with images of mango sherbet sipped on

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an airy veranda. Such domestic asides resonated powerfully with readers back in England, who were variously entranced, reassured, and alarmed by the writings of their compatriots. The famous example is Kipling, who mingled satire of the Anglo-Indian and “babu” classes, imperial hauteur, and cultural (and sometimes racial) hybridity all at once, as we will see. (Many Anglo-Indians were stung, believing that his early fame had been earned at their expense. His “Plain Tales from the Hills caused the utmost irritant by its hints . . . of loose living among the highest circles of Simla.” He was no more than “a subversive pamphleteer.”4) More common were thousands of now-forgotten works with titles like Sword and Surplice; or, Thirty Years’ Reminiscences of the Army and the Church that fed an increasingly global-minded imperial ego, one that boasted of its willingness to brave the dangers and hardships of colonial life—jungles, disease, boredom, and Native whimsy.5 There were also numerous manuals for the late-Victorian tourist of Empire, the newly arrived English soldier (known as a “griffin”), and the colonial housewife. Examples include Memoirs of a Griffin, or A Cadet’s First Year in India, by Captain Bellew (1880); and Indian Jottings: From Ten Years’ Experience in and Around Poona City (1907), by Edward F. Elwin.6 Thus, in addition to fiction, the travelogue (particularly about scientific endeavors), hunting memoir, guidebook, conduct book, and military memoir all reflected as well as shaped the mix of perplexity, scorn, and pride that Anglo-India instilled in English readers; these works also presented similarly ambivalent attitudes toward the concept of home through which Anglo-Indians continually had to sift. These narratives record, with varying combinations of nostalgia, jingoism, and criticism, Britain’s drastic and ceaseless reconfiguration of the Indian landscape. Not surprisingly, then, the continuous construction of cantonments, canals, bridges, monuments, plantations, and railway lines, all in sight of baroque establishments thrown up by merchants (European as well as Indian) who became wealthy facilitators of these enterprises, powerfully shaped the aesthetic sensibilities of Anglo-Indians. The railway station in particular became an important conduit for the stream of English-language publications aimed at a steadily increasing pool of European and some Indian readers. Large numbers of British residents of India responded to the rapid changes on the subcontinent, and to an expanding public appetite, by jotting down their own experiences in memoirs that simultaneously claim to be unique and representative of “old India.”7 In short, the discursive conceptualization of home, both by Indians and Anglo-Indians, could not be divorced from a discourse of spatiality that was always in flux, nor from the marketing of home as a recurring theme of the modern colonial experience. The intermingling of racial, social, and colonial boundaries thus proves to be a crucial factor in the formation of European identity in the colony. As Fou-

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cault observes, “The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices—establish for every man . . . the empirical orders . . . within which he will be at home.”8 Ann Laura Stoler makes clear that bourgeois colonial sensibilities relied upon a politics of exclusion that publicly insisted upon the “evidence” of discrete identities, but in reality depended upon the transgression of racial and cultural boundaries to reconfirm those fictive identities. A particularly powerful trope in this regard is the “Native” woman, whose various roles as servant, ayah, and prostitute both defined and threatened bourgeois domesticity.9 But this imagined taxonomy of cultural and racial contamination is not simply allegorical, as some have argued.10 While notions of purity and danger (as anthropologist Mary Douglas has phrased this binary) are clearly at the heart of all cultural outlooks in one form or another, to leave our interpretation of colonial attitudes at the level of metaphor is to overlook what I take to be a vital component of colonial culture, namely, its spatial materiality. To return to the particularities of Anglo-Indian society, “home” therefore proves to be as much about South Asia’s built environment as about the region’s imagined extensions. Home, in the case of British India, was thus as much about bungalow space as about imperial ideologies. The British-Indian bungalow was usually “a low, one-storey, spacious building, internally divided into separate living, dining and bedrooms,” with a broad veranda. The house was “invariably situated in a large walled or otherwise demarcated ‘compound’ with generally one main exit to the road on which it [was] situated.” Servants’ quarters were “separate from and placed at the rear of the bungalow.”11 This spatial domestic arrangement profoundly affected the self-perceptions of the British in India, the physical demarcations confirming, in typically circular logic, the Europeans’ separateness and cultural superiority. Not surprisingly, there arose what I call an Anglo-Indian aesthetic of space that plays a prominent role in colonial discourse, and is intimately tied to Europeans’ depictions of Indian topographies. This aesthetic, as we will see, is a prime constituent of the AngloIndian conceptualization of home, perhaps naturally so given the romanticized nineteenth-century perception that English rural domesticity and scenery are humane reflections of one another. It is tempting to read the European desire for the so-called virgin soils of colonial rusticity as simply a projection of pastoral idealism onto a non-European landscape, much as English poets idealized their rustic heritage. But though this holds true in a broad sense, such a reading hinges on at least two broad assumptions that I want to challenge here. The first is that these landscapes are conceptualized and described by Europeans according to uniform prescrip-

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tions for beauty, which project onto the land an entirely pre-ordained iconicity. A second assumption is that tropological spaces commonly associated with the colonial imaginary, especially the jungle and the garden, were peripheral to the ostensibly more-real social, political, and military drama of colonialism. Close attention to some classic British-Indian tales shows, to the contrary, that the jungle and the garden (to cite only the two most familiar tropes) are powerfully entwined in colonialism’s political, military, and domestic vicissitudes, and that encounters with Indian topography, as described in both published and unpublished records, prompted Europeans to re-evaluate their original aesthetic conventions. Indeed, modern European encounters with the tropics forced continuous re-examinations of their aesthetic tastes back in Europe, so that by the late 1800s it was possible, for example, for imperial Gothic architecture in India to set the fashion for buildings back in England.12 Each of these assumptions has a lengthy history, and it is crucial to summarize that history before moving on to discuss the ways colonial-era aestheticism (dating principally from Edmund Burke’s 1757 essay on the sublime and the eighteenth-century landscape movement to at least the inter-war years of the last century) continues to shape discussions of literary treatments of India. The Sublime, the Picturesque, and the Beautiful

Partha Mitter, in Much Maligned Monsters, his pathbreaking exposition of the “history of European reactions to Indian art,” has demonstrated the influence of eighteenth-century ideas of beauty, the sublime, and the picturesque on European enthusiasts who rediscovered and described both Indian art and its cultural contexts. In particular, Mitter shows how the classic European mix of romanticism and empiricism was happily met in India, with its “colossal” carvings and “great symmetry in . . . form.”13 The notion of the sublime, especially, found its apotheosis in the “gloomy” and “gigantic” interior of such caves as Elephanta and Ajanta, together with the “strange uncertainty that hangs over” their origins.14 That is to say, these European ideas of beauty’s classical, instructive symmetry and the sublime’s natural infinitude seemed to be corroborated by encounters with Indian statuary, as well as by its remote settings (such as the island of Elephanta and the overgrown, “forgotten” Ajanta caves). But it was not simply a matter of fitting Indian vistas into a preconceived schema. However powerful were the aesthetic concepts Europeans brought to bear on the geographies they “found,” it was also true that non-European spaces helped shape the development of these concepts. Edmund Burke’s meditation on the sublime appeared, notably, in the same year (1757) that Clive conquered Bengal and thereby began Britain’s occupation of India. As Srinivas Aravamu-

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dan observes, Burke’s linkage of irrepressible “feeling” and of “obscurity” with non-European lands and peoples signals not only the prevailing trust in rationalism at the time, but also the anxiety surrounding anything—including sublime vistas—that threatened the promise of an orderly, and therefore beautiful, arrangement of (European) society.15 More important for my argument here is the fact that Burke’s treatment of the “oriental” as a cornerstone of the sublime depended on his rather typical contemporary view of Indian iconography as fascinating but “monstrous,” a view that, despite some changes over the succeeding century, seemed to be reconfirmed in many Victorians’ minds—notably Ruskin’s—following the 1857 rebellion.16 (As Bishop Atterbury said to Alexander Pope earlier in that century, in reference to Galland’s edition of Arabian Nights: “They are to me like odd paintings on Indian Screens, which at first glance may surprise and please a little; when you fix your eyes intently upon them, they appear so extravagant, disproportionate, and monstrous, that they give a judicious pain to the eye.”17) This concept of the sublime, in turn, significantly informed the tenets of the popular Picturesque movement, as evinced by numerous publications, from William Hodges’ early sketches of temples and mosques in the 1780s to the many nineteenth-century “picturesque” travel narratives of India by Englishwomen. Mitter notes, for instance, that while Hodges was greatly impressed by the sophistication of Indian sculpture, “he felt compelled to criticize” it for its absence of verisimilitude resulting from a “lack of concern with nature,” and hence morality.18 This perennial European complaint links Hodges, as we will see, to Ruskin’s mixed response to Indian craftsmanship. But how exactly does this relate to the views of Anglo-Indians, and, consequently, Anglo-Indian literature? Untangling the latter’s ambivalent representation of home is central to a fuller understanding of the literature’s governing aesthetic and the power of this aesthetic in the story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and Indian literatures. In the first place, that ambivalence stemmed from the clash of Romantic notions of nature, such as Hodges held, with the subcontinent’s own consternating mix of landscapes, artwork, and peoples. In one attempt to shape this mix, official colonial ethnographies enumerated and “fixed” various groups according to their perceived natural environments, all with an eye to facilitating governance.19 The impulse to reshape tropical wildness into a semblance of Europe also stemmed from a European medieval tradition that, in turn drawing on the classical heritage, identified courtship and maidenly romance with enclosed gardens, which, as Martin Kemp observes, had made a “regular association of the cult of plants with the role of women.” According to Kemp, this in fact provided a “more accessible outlet for women’s creativity than most other outdoor pursuits.”20 Subtending

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this classical image was the Renaissance vision of the garden as a prelapsarian space in which pure Christian women could freely mingle with their suitors, untroubled by the world beyond.21 Even as modern science came to the fore during the eighteenth century, it was beholden to the high symbolism of medieval iconography. Such symbolism informed the ideal of the feminized garden, whose Anglo-Indian version became, as we will see, a powerful imperial trope. In the context of British India, moreover, classical and medieval iconographies commingled uneasily with Romanticism’s more scientific and “natural” embrace of the subcontinent’s topography beginning in the early 1800s. David Arnold notes that “the language of tropicality”—the repertoire of fixed ideas associated with natural history, landscape painting, and travelogues concerning the Caribbean and the islands of the Pacific—did not have much to do with India until the 1830s, for up to this point India had been represented as an antiquated, artisanal realm of monuments, temples, and forts, and of dusty “picturesque” towns.22 The very sentiments that had fueled the picturesque movement and ideas of sublimity fed an array of preconceptions about India as a culturally generative but crumbling society, suitable mostly for framing. That changed as Britain’s purchase upon the country increased, and with it the need for a commensurate degree of cultural and biological knowledge. Added to these developments was the nascent idea of a liberating and distinctly BritishIndian culture, in which a middle-class Briton could play aristocrat—or, at the very least, meet an aristocrat, something that was impossible in the British Isles. The irony, therefore, was that even as urban-dwelling Romantics in England were ensuring the preservation of flora and fauna by establishing associations like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (in 1824) and the Humanitarian League, Anglo-Indians—British residents of colonial India who came to regard it as home—exulted in the same sorts of aristocratic sporting habits their betters prized back Home, namely, the “spirit of the chase,” as one imperial hunter put it. Indeed, big game hunting in the relatively untrammeled forests of India was seen by this same hunter as catalyst for “the exploration and settlement of unknown and pagan lands.”23 To a large degree, European accounts of India in the later 1800s and early 1900s reflect these inherited strands of medieval, Romantic, and scientific perspectives. Numerous scholars have pointed to the remarkable recycling—the intertextuality—of Orientalist images, which influenced a range of colonial writers. As Elleke Boehmer points out, Stanley made sure he read Burton and Speke’s accounts of their African adventures before setting off to find Livingstone; Stanley, in turn, fired Conrad’s fancy.24 It is not surprising, therefore, to hear that the botanist Joseph Banks, who sailed with Captain Cook, felt that

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Tahitians resembled the nature-loving Greeks of antiquity, or that biblical images informed many early travelers’ tales.25 These preconceptions were dependent not just on literary antecedents, but equally on grand topological comparisons made possible by European travels across vast distances and diverse geographies. Increasing numbers of traveling artists contributed to this intertextual concordance, so much so that by the mid-nineteenth century, Englishwomen visiting India, such as Emily Eden and Fanny Parks, began to publish illustrated diaries that echoed one another both verbally and visually, thereby establishing an iconographic lexicon that, in turn, would shape the views of other European visitors for years to come. These developments do not, however, mean that Europeans produced a static view of colonial landscapes and peoples. The Indian subcontinent, with its long history and rich cultural and geographical diversity, as well as its vital place in the history of modern Britain, was especially resistant to such homogenization. Despite the British Empire’s efforts to systematize the governance of judicial, military, and health establishments, Anglo-Indian men and perhaps especially women thwarted these systematizing efforts. What was India’s role in the complex story of the aesthetics of modern iconography? As my readings of latecolonial Anglo-Indian texts show, India held a special place in the refinement and production of some of the most influential textual images of the colonial era, an iconography that continued (and frequently continues) into the nationalist phases of British and Indian history alike. This variety of imperial tale-telling is distinguished by numerous—and, as we will see, inevitable—contradictions. One leitmotif of this tale is the resentment that grew within the Anglo-Indian community over what it perceived to be the Home government’s increasingly dictatorial policies in the nineteenth century. The irony is that British culture itself was powerfully shaped by the customs of its colonial cousins, and that Anglo-Indians were at once proud and ashamed of their colonial culture. There was, in fact, no way to define precisely what “British” and “Anglo-Indian” meant, any more than one could define “Indian.” The ambivalence on all sides toward the ideas of India and of home was not helped by archeological and linguistic investigations beginning in the late eighteenth century, studies that purported long-forgotten atavistic connections between India and Europe. Scholars like Sir William Jones, working in Calcutta, found in Sanskrit the natural home of European languages, a link that he termed “Indo-European.” Similarly, the discovery of Greek and Roman coins in the Deccan and the reexamination of accounts of Greek emissaries to Indian kings made it suddenly clear to European Romantics that the classical world had, as they put it, “drawn directly from the original well of India,” and that it

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was, in fact, on the “banks of the Ganges and the Indus [where infant mankind lived its happy childhood years].”26 Meanwhile, the development of the Picturesque movement stimulated travelers to turn their eyes to the subcontinent, where they predictably found “a rural sweetness” that resembled “antient [sic] Arcadia,” as one influential British engineer put it in 1799.27 Inevitably, this was contrasted with the “monstrous” Indian habits and tastes I mentioned earlier. Outwardly, then, there seemed to be little ground between the images of India as at once Edenic and demonic. Nor did this ambivalent Orientalist construction much concern readers in the eighteenth century, a time that was, after all, accustomed to tensions between the advocates of scientific inquiry and individual feeling. The Orient was the stage for what were, after all, principally European activities, as Edward Said has shown.28 On a practical level, moreover, it seemed to the British that they had succeeded in disciplining the subcontinent to a great extent. In 1800 the signs all pointed to this, for it was a year that marked the beginning of the East India Company’s first survey of Indian lands, enabled partly by the previous year’s defeat of the mighty Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam in Mysore, in the recalcitrant south.29 With the death of this iconic king, the acquisition of his fabled treasures (proclaimed by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone to be symbolic of colonial perfidy and power), the commencement of mapping, and the artistic representations of India as picturesque, the subcontinent seemed to be securely fastened to the British crown. But to leave the matter here would be what philosophers call a category mistake. To say that Britain had entirely subsumed India is to subscribe to the very Orientalism that first arrived at this claim. In many ways, it was the other way around: India ingested Europe. More significantly, if not commonly, as is most evident in the literature and paintings of the period, Indians and Europeans mingled their customs and tastes to such a degree as to create new cultural idioms, which, even as they continued to change, quarreled with the fixity of cultural differences that colonialism necessarily encourages.30 Given this complexity, it is not surprising that individual travelers continually threw up more informed counterexamples to the conventionalized commentaries of the British-Indian bureaucracy. Thus, as late as 1901 the section on health in the Imperial Gazetteer declared that the low rate of insanity among the Indians, as compared with Britons, was due to their “possess[ing] less brain energy” and being “less highly strung” [than the inhabitants of modern Europe] (465). On the other hand, the architecture critic F. S. Growse, though no liberal, groused in 1886 that the government’s heavy-handedness in “art-manufacture” dictated “the clumsiest travesty of a foreign [i.e., European] model to the most graceful conception of home [that is, Indian] growth” (ii–iii). Contemporary readers were

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thus presented with an impression of administrative meddling in aesthetic areas better left to locally conditioned experts—an impression that the Anglo-Indian community tried to exploit in its unceasing efforts to establish its own distinct identity. The difficulty, of course, was that this identity was constantly changing. Another reason for Anglo-Indians’ contradictory views of their adoptive home was their inability to control, whether materially or rhetorically, its mysteries and perceived terrors—jungles, diseases, their own “degeneration,” and even “going native.” Degeneration meant not simply the physical and psychological slippage into indigeneity, but also religious conversion. Such changes were, therefore, commonly represented through moral attributes. Whereas “roses, balsams, and the Lilly of the Valley excite a pleasing resemblance of home,” as a military officer remarked of his 1831 travels in northern India,31 a great variety of “plague-spot[s],” from the practice of Thuggee—the much-publicized cult that offered its strangled victims to goddess Kali—to the ill health of troops and the “immensity” of the plains, worried both the military and civilian communities.32 “[N]o part of England,” declared Edwin Arnold in 1881, “bears any resemblance to these jungle clearings” (313). And there is yet another layer of contradiction: the jungle itself, that most iconic of Indian spaces, was both terrifying and “soul-stirring,” baleful and bountiful. The jungle, in short, is interpreted as a vertiginously complex iconography that once more exemplifies for Britons India’s sublimity. In its depths lurked both disease and herbal antidote—a perception underscored by the noted nineteenth-century botanist Joseph Hooker, who called the tropics “nice places to see, but not to dwell in.”33 Those Europeans who did dwell in them were determined to domesticate their profuse vegetation. The colonial bungalow garden became, as a result, a vital counterpart to the wild jungle, for it both kept out the jungle and cultivated the jungle’s flora. It was a redemptive space of Edenic succor.34 Both these spaces, moreover, were clearly gendered, as I have already noted: Memsahib safely pruned her garden whilst Sahib went on shikar or hunt, enlisting an army of locals to corral and kill wild pig and tiger. The garden was carved out of the jungle yet held untamed parts at bay. As such, the garden forever fended off the threat of jungli (wild) encroachment, just as the jungle itself could, with enough fortitude and men, be tamed. The redoubtable botanist and sketch artist C. R. Markham exemplifies this view when, as he traveled throughout India in the 1860s, he admires how English settlers “have converted a jungle which filled a ravine below their house into a wilderness, very tastefully, by judicious cutting, and opening, of views through the trees; and have planted quantities of [eucalyptus] trees.”35 Sara Suleri has described how painters and writers sought to frame such

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sights in picturesque terms to freeze their disconcerting dynamism for later viewing, no longer troubled by elements that escape the notice of the surveilling eye.36 It is English visitors to the subcontinent rather than residents who favor this technique. By contrast, those who came for military or civilian postings often sought to carve a place for themselves in the new physical and social environments. As a result, they equivocate constantly between uncanny (because alien) and homely (Europe-like) representations of their surroundings, as we can see in a letter from one W. C. Fox to his parents in the early 1900s: “Tonight there has been a beautiful thunder-storm . . . It is quite like home to hear the rain hollering down, but before the storm began it was quite like another place.”37 Extraordinarily alert to the topography around him, he observes of his army posting: “There are scattered trees, but in the main it is a huge barren, grassgrown plain, with huge hills all round [sic],” and in dozens of letters he alternates between exhilaration—“All most gloriously wonderful” he gushes after viewing a sunset—and melancholy—“Deolali . . . is a rotten place to be kept in for weeks on end, without holiday and every place outside it ‘Out of Bounds.’ ”38 By 1916 it was possible to send photographs to England, as Fox did to his parents, fulfilling his urge to “send India to England.” This phrase captures a sentiment that Europeans expressed in varying ways throughout the colonial period as they came upon non-European sights. Yet the desire to share these views with the home country, in photographs, sketches, or magic lantern shows, was not the same as that of a casual tourist. Rather, these colonial representations, by being transferred from their original settings to the walls of the English home, were powerfully symbolic of, and instrumental to, the fabrication of a geographical aesthetic that lay at the heart of “Englishness,” an aesthetic composed of a tangle of reputedly distinct Indian and English motifs. The result was an assemblage of contradictory images. Fox’s unselfconsciously dissonant focus on what he takes to be India’s beauty as well as ugliness tells us less about India than about Fox, who perceives India through the lens of his own homesickness. Soon after Fox’s arrival in a land he had glimpsed through a thick archive of representation, an archive that was itself premised on both alienation and familiarity, we see his desire to make sense of his displacement by means of the homely epistle. Although in some cases homesickness did not disappear in the British resident of India, it often led to a reconfiguration of the “home sense” that the sahib or memsahib had originally packed into their P & O baggage. Items of Highland wool, in this sense, must accede to the protective demands of the “solar topee,” the ubiquitous colonial pith helmet. The sense of “sending” India to England, then, strikes a number of registers all at once. It signals, most obviously, a proprietary interest, wherein the words

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or images being mailed are metonyms for India as a whole. The phrase also reflects longing on the part of the sender to connect to home, and more precisely to ensure that the recipient understands, and has in hand, the evidence of India’s inclusion in a global Britain. A certain patriotic pride in this enterprise can be seen in all of these missives, of course. But as time passed, the BritishIndian resident acquired a certain pride in inhabiting, and being the ostensible custodian to, the vast and diverse geography of India itself, so that he (and sometimes she) came to see Britain’s comparative puniness in less majestic, more mundane terms. Thus, Indian terrain is almost invariably described by Fox as “huge,” echoing the impression recorded by numerous memoirists that India offers an immensity of size and a comparative diminution of personhood, as Francis Yeats-Brown noted in a popular account, to which I will return.39 A key element of the impulse to “send India to England” is precisely its reverse: The British resident lets it be known to his Home-side interlocutors that England can and must be sent to and swallowed by India, that unimaginably huge extension of Britain’s imagined kingdom. This posed a perplexing problem, however, for the very infinitude of Indian geography meant that it could never fully be kept within the bounds of British propriety and governmental administration. British India’s near obsession with boundaries of space as well as behavior, especially after 1858, together with its conflicted attitudes toward open plains and thick forests (each in their own way emblematic of freedom and confinement), resulted in a medley of metaphors battling for space on the writer’s page. Take, for instance, the Coorg forests highlighted in an 1871 memorandum that represents them as pristine, atavistic spaces threatened by local villagers: “In Coorg there are forests called Devarookadoo, or sacred woods, which, until late years, have never been touched by man; but now . . . these forests have been invaded [by villagers].” Such woods, the Public Works Department memorandum goes on to say, were in one instance suggestively named the “Black Forest” by English residents to invoke “their density and awe-inspiring stillness.”40 The explicit comparison of Indian woods to Germany’s legendary primeval forest may seem odd here.41 But it makes sense inasmuch as British writers frequently depicted Indian woods as, like the Black Forest, being filled with superstitious inhabitants whose beliefs in ghosts and magic spooked the otherwise staid Europeans. This primitivism invited cautious oversight rather than interference. A second memorandum by another Home Office official concerning the same space thus claims that the dense forests attract “the primitive races who first roamed these hills,” who “must have . . . set apart [the woods] by general acclamation as the residence of demons and other Sylvan deities.” He laments the present decay of “fine old trees” as a result

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of more recent intrusions, both Indian and British. He therefore advocates, in a remarkably Romantic vein, that the colonial government endorse the land rights of the Coorg tribals to safeguard both the coffee crop (from which nearby villages were profiting) and, more suggestively, the tribals’ sacred “virgin soil.” The official adds somewhat self-righteously: “I would hold that the forest, set apart from time immemorial, and not by the grant of any known government, . . . should be allowed by a government like ours to be so utilized as the advanced religious feelings and tendencies of the votaries may point out.” Curiously, he sees this proposal for noninterference in indigenous affairs to be the best means of achieving the British Government’s aim, the demise of “the superstition of the dark ages.” He concludes by acknowledging that he “feel[s] deeply that the future of Coorg and of the Coorg people is, under Providence, entirely in our hands,” and begs the government’s pardon for “thus writing at length on the subject.” And well he might: His recommendation to cease coffee cultivation to save the “sacred forests” would, if implemented, have meant a significant loss of government income from these well-planted, “virgin” hills.42 Far more commonly, as Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha observe in their ecological history of India, “The goal of immediate profit from the most valuable resource of the moment was far more attractive” to the colonial government “than the goal of long-term conservation of a diversity of resources.”43 The official’s defense of local religious customs and sacred spaces in the above memorandum thus seems to be uncharacteristically charitable for its time, a throwback to the more pluralistic European mind-set of the late 1700s and early 1800s. On the face of it, then, these colonial memorandums exhibit an admirable degree of sympathy for local topography and beliefs and a corresponding critique of contemporary governmental policy. This is not what one might expect from the kind of investment in control of the natural environment that Michael Adas has characterized as the core of European colonial dominance.44 What is important to note in these records, however, is the rhetorical habit of naturalizing the tribals by defining their existence according to a vaguely defined closeness to nature. The treatment of rustic Europeans that had typified earlier Romantic literature continues to influence Victorian and Edwardian accounts of indigenous Indians. This colonial romanticism further mixes racial and topographical typologies to produce a rhetoric that often idealizes jungle- and hill-dwelling peoples and their habitation and demonizes village- and plains-dwelling Indians. My point here is to illustrate how this geographical aestheticism pervaded writings at this time and to maintain that this aestheticism, as the above Public Works memorandum reveals, frequently led local officials to plead for the preservation of those areas and peoples that corresponded to their split view of the

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colonial world. This split view unwittingly encompassed both prelapsarian and postlapsarian images of the subcontinent, images whose arbored antiquity constantly sought to displace the dusty bazaars associated with spatial and moral decay. This ceaseless effort to place and displace competing versions of colonial reality reflects the sense of ambivalence about home that forever addled AngloIndian sensibilities. The rhetorical dialectic that distinguishes this sensibility became a mainstay of nineteenth-century European colonial prose, so that it shaped the topographical depiction of even those who made no claim to a home in the tropics. For example, C. R. Markham, a formidable figure in the history of the Royal Geographical Society who traveled around the globe, made several visits to India. He, too, falls into the patterns favored by his colonial compatriots, describing Coorgs as “a fine good-looking race” who are “bold, independent and hard working” and possess “comparatively fair skins.” Similarly, he describes the aboriginal Todas, who inhabit the forests surrounding coffee plantations near the Coorg hills, with phrases that can be interchanged with those describing the wooded hills: “All the Todas . . . are tall well-made men, with . . . immensely thick clusters of glossy black hair.” Markham then goes into raptures about the local hills, which, like the Todas and Coorgs, are “exceedingly beautiful” and overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, “rich herbage and fine trees.” The hills, like the well-made tribals, afford pleasingly “slender and curved” slopes with “glorious view[s]” that enoble the soul. Markham also fits the Todas and Coorgs into a Darwinian hierarchy of race and character. The Todas are noble and handsome, with “Jewish features” and “white heads and beards,” the very picture of the Old Testament patriarchs. By contrast, Markham views the neighboring Badaga tribals as “smaller and uglier than the Todahs [sic]”; they are “poor, lazy, and indolent.” Yet another nearby tribe, the Kotas, are “disgusting beasts, eat carrion, and are worse than crows.” These less-admirable peoples occupy correspondingly unlovely lands— they cultivate “the lower slopes” and reside in dingy, haphazard villages.45 Like the government official’s plea for the preservation of unspoiled lands and peoples, Markham’s descriptions reveal less interest in indigenous rights than in the supposed necessity of maintaining a space that, like the imagined sanctuary (and sanctification) of the Black Forest during the Renaissance, can transfer the charge of bestiality and animalism normally associated with jungle life to village and urban life. Indian towns and cities thus came to assume, particularly in the wake of the supposedly villainous uprising of 1857, the attributes of conspiratorial incivility by proving (retrospectively) to be the perfect spaces for treachery and rumor. The usually threatening occult associations of jungles and hills are viewed by British naturalists as tolerable in the government’s moral calculus

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since, as the PWD official observes, these spaces owe their preservation to the tribals’ religious beliefs.46 Perhaps more troubling to government officials than any perceived threats, animal or human, was the lack of definable boundaries: Some of these woods have never had recognizable boundaries, and that the Coorgs have, in some cases, for their own benefit, or for that of the European settlers, voluntarily circumscribed the limits of such woods to such an extent . . . that the natural actions of the wind and atmosphere has led to the decay of the trees and the virtual extinction of the sacred wood.

This lack of definable borders and boundaries defies the kind of spatial orchestration that signifies management and order from a British viewpoint. Indeed, it is possible to view Britain’s governance of India as a gigantic experiment in the hierarchical redistribution of peoples and lands, a redistribution that, though also visible in England’s class-ridden society, could be more willfully implemented across India’s non-European and comparatively unfettered landscapes. This meant that Europeans themselves also had to contend with boundary rules and territorial mandates. The letter-writer Fox, for example, complains of the confinement: “Hav[ing] been in India 8 or 9 weeks, . . . I have seen as much of it as I could walk around in an afternoon.”47 Fox’s juxtaposition of a huge barren and confined compounds precisely captures the competing representations of India in British-Indian writings. Fox’s descriptions, especially his frequent references to home, are characteristic British-Indian reflections of estrangement and homeliness. India’s boundaries both alarm and reassure him, even as he is “disturbed, unsettled and miserable” to hear that his parents have changed houses in England. “It won’t be like coming home to find you in a strange house.” A similar dialectic frames the depictions of forest and plain, bounded cantonment and out-of-bounds bazaar. The irony, of course, is that the longing to leave the cantonment coexisted with fear of the subcontinent’s seeming infinitude. This infinitude was often linked, moreover, to India’s proverbial mystery, which combined architectural as well as natural recesses with religious obscurantism. In British eyes, India’s immense temples and monuments matched the country’s geographical immensity. The representation of these naturalized human structures, however, proves difficult. How is one to render with any accuracy a scene of estrangement and mystery? For many the task proved impossible, words failed them. Here, for example, is botanist Joseph Hooker, writing in 1849: “The Mountain Scenery is grand beyond all description—so

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magnificent an amphitheatre of rocks and snow . . . that no one can properly describe it,” and “the mountains are beyond all description beautiful.”48 Three decades later, the much-published Orientalist Edwin Arnold continues to echo this idea of representational impossibility: “It is difficult to describe a coffee estate so that it may be clear to the imagination of one who has never seen that plant growing under cultivation, since it is little like any home production, and no part of England bears any resemblance to these jungle clearings.” He cites the same obstacle in representing more urban milieus: “It is difficult to describe a Native street to those who have never seen one.”49 These increasingly obligatory, even hackneyed characterizations are presented as pronouncements of the cultural interpreter, whose observational and scientific skills cannot match the sensory impact of the scenes at hand. What these spatial representations do, of course, is preserve the aura of mystery that European readers came to expect of such “Eastern” fare. But if the chaos and “mass of life” of the Native street defy description, one can always label the scene picturesque, featuring people “in their gay turbans and flowing sarees.” “Picturesque,” in other words, becomes the default term for the crowded confinement of Native towns, which induced a combination of unease and fascination in the European viewer: Men with burdens of all sorts and shapes . . . monopolize much of the narrow space, and trot along with strange cries . . . the Native shops are curious, and quite unlike European ones. They are nothing but dark little dens facing the street, where the merchant sits, surrounded by his goods, crosslegged on his own counter.50

Here, infinitude meets its limit, but a limit whose unfamiliarity breeds precisely the sensation of unknowable depths—dark dens, maze-like alleyways, the infinite regress of mass crowds—that one encounters on journeys across the subcontinent. That is to say, the claim that India forestalls accurate representation becomes, ironically, a springboard for endless, often ostentatious representations of European fantasies that belie the Englishman’s linguistic and social incapacity. The conventional view of India’s untranslatability parallels the colonial reconfiguration of space. A picturesque India turns unfamiliarity into a framable object, emptied of history and agency alike. Conversely, the familiar spaces of British-India—cantonments, monuments, hill stations, as well as ceremonial hybrids like the durbar—are not picturesque, but symmetrical, regular, and perhaps most importantly, visible. For to a great extent, colonial governance depended on the visible signs—and aesthetic designs—of the layered trappings

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of power. These designs depended, in turn, on their contextual rendering. For example, the festoons and medals that an Indian prince boasted in a colonial British durbar were the visual signature of orderly rule, they invested him with a measure of power that depended on his perch on the titular ladder, a perch that had to be periodically re-calibrated and re-celebrated. Once returned to his fiefdom, however, a rajah reinhabited, in British eyes, his picturesque, purely Indian person. In this conventionally exotic setting, the European visitor’s words flowed, as Harriet Tytler’s did in her 1847 account of a royal dinner in the province of Awadh, whose accession by Britain would play a pivotal role in the events leading up to 1857: There were two long tables with chairs on one side of each. The King [of Oude] sat in the centre of one of these, with Lord Hardinge on his right, Colonel Richmond the Resident on his left, and the two little princes, his sons, close by on the right also, after which came all the Native noblemen. The highest European officials and their families sat at the table opposite that of the King, whilst the others took whatever seats they could find at the second table. As I went with the family of the Assistant Resident, I had a very good seat indeed, opposite the King’s table, from whence I could observe all the proceedings. The King and his family were gorgeously attired in kincob (cloth of gold) and jewels. Such strings of pearls, emeralds and diamonds we had never before seen. Some of the emeralds were the size of large marbles, but so badly cut that they only looked like bits of glass. The diamonds too, though immense, were cut into thin, flat ones and made no more show than pieces of crystal would have done. Nevertheless, these jewels were very costly and gorgeous. The pearls were simply splendid, both in size and colour. The King had strings and strings of these from the neck to below the waist.51

Tytler, the wife of a colonial official, goes on to describe the entertainment provided by the King, particularly the great animal fights, in which caged tigers attack live buffaloes. Though Tytler includes the obligatory phrase “I cannot describe the scene properly,” she provides precisely the rich details that had become a staple of the exotic colonial tour. As with all such conventional accounts, she concludes the episode by confirming her unique perspective: “The spectacle we witnessed that day will never be again seen in India.”52 She can say this with confidence because, writing in the wake of the Mutiny that is her memoir’s core, she knows that the King of Oude’s rule and extravagance will shortly be curtailed. Tytler’s picturesque sketch of his kingdom will help to perpetuate the aura of this avowedly unique but in truth standardized Indian scene.

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The King of Oude, or Awadh, is at once an historical participant (whenever he is an instrument of colonial rule) and a suitably splendid subject for Anglo-Indian narration. His fabulous if rough-cut gems stand in for his similarly “gorgeous” but unrestrained person and for his court’s ornamentation and extravagant entertainments. In Tytler’s handling, the king personifies the colonial picturesque, a convention whose original eighteenth-century “re-enchantment” of domestic rusticity had in India subsumed “alternative fantasies of ruggedness, turbulence, and the primeval powers of nature.”53 This convention changed once again with the Mutiny, for although features of the colonial picturesque continued to exert a powerful influence on the imperial vision, the elemental “powers of nature” that had before registered as an exotic, wild, but ultimately tamable part of Indian naturalism became, in British accounts, evidence of the “madness” that had swept the subcontinent. This shift is due, I suggest, to a critical change in British-Indian iconography after 1857. Whereas previously the colonial claim to scientific objectivity, which rested on the presumed invisibility of the observer in any form of representation (as in the work of popular eighteenth-century artists Thomas and William Daniell), had carried the day, by the time Tytler publishes her memoir (the mid-1800s), the direct participation of the observer in the scenes she or he documents has become what European audiences relish. In one sense, Tytler’s narrative, with its matter-of-fact tone and frequent anecdotes, clearly follows the pattern of previous memoirs by English women, such as Fanny Parks’s well-known 1850 work Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque. Such memoirs are, as Sara Suleri points out, replete with conventions of picturesque description, and more specifically, a “plotless” feminine digressiveness whose “equanimity is antithetical to the excessive catalog of deaths that her memoir transcribes.” Suleri further observes that these narratives “embalm the violence of Anglo-India,”54 a violence that in fact preceded 1857 (as Tytler’s record of British deaths throughout the pre-1857 portion of her narrative clearly indicates). The body count of the Mutiny thus serves, in Tytler’s tale of survival, as an apotheosis of an always-present truth about AngloIndian life. Even the division of Tytler’s memoir into two parts, pre- and postMutiny, cannot conceal the continuity of colonial violence. What are we to make of the equally powerful pretense of accuracy in Tytler’s otherwise picturesque account? As we can see in the above excerpt, taken from the first part of her book, Tytler echoes a conceit common to nineteenth-century depictions of India, namely, her disinterested attention to detail—emeralds “the size of marbles,” gold-embroidered kincob cloth, and so on. Tytler’s prose clearly combines the picturesque and the scientific gazes. If Tytler the English wife and mother can lament the frequent tragedies of British-Indian life, especially death

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to disease, and insert intermittent wishes such as sighing over the imminent demolition of a Mughal home, “How I would like to paint it!”,55 Tytler the historian records an ostensibly factual view of that same colonial space. In this she exemplifies what Matthew Edney, in his study of British-Indian geography, identifies as a merging of the “realist and Picturesque views.”56 In Tytler’s hands, the King of Oude combines in his person the historical individual and the picturesque caricature, a figure who, after 1857, was a metonym for betrayal in the English imagination. This aestheticization of the historical distinguishes spatial representations of colonial India after 1857, when mythic sites of recent colonial conquest were photographed and described alongside the sites of ancient India, as if all contributed equally to the telos of Britain’s imperial destiny. In this context, Suleri’s conclusion that “Tytler’s account of the Siege of Delhi is paradigmatic of a colonial will to remain immune to historical action even while it is immersed in history” misses the point, as does the remark that “Tytler evinces a perfunctory understanding of the historical inevitability of the 1857 war.”57 The war, as well as colonialism’s mortuary history, is precisely the reason for Tytler’s bloodless prose. Her narrative, seeking as it does to comport the mythic with the historical, the personal with the general, is in fact symptomatic of colonialism’s ambivalent attitude toward history, as indeed Suleri’s use of “paradigmatic” suggests. Tytler’s personal distinction of being the only known Englishwoman to give birth during the Mutiny—and the “only lady” to have survived the Siege of Delhi—certainly singles her out as a rare maternal presence in a sea of militarism. By my reading, however, her account is more characteristic of British India’s impulse to aestheticize colonialism’s inherent violence. The particular logic of this impulse, more significantly, is premised upon the location, or if need be, construction, of virtuous space, the kind of space that was assumed to be a corrective to the inherent contradictions of the Anglo-Indian habitus. To cite one more prominent example of the tendency to aestheticize colonial history, take the botanist Markham’s lyrical 1860 description of the tomb of the great Tipu Sultan, in the southern Indian state of Mysore: “The effect of the snow white tomb, richly adorned with arabesque work, the cloudless sky behind, and the feathery palm trees rearing their graceful heads all round, is exceedingly pretty.” These are strange words to apply to a monument that signifies the end of a formidable obstacle to British conquest, namely, the death of the “Tiger of Mysore” in the 1798 battle of Seringaptam.58 Within a year of his death, European visitors began to include the tomb on their itinerary around a rapidly anglicizing India. One would expect, therefore, a scientist’s verbal reprise of the famous 1798 assault on Tipu’s fortress in a period when Britishers were prone to sentimentalizing their so-called imperial mission. Should we not expect

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Markham to extol the tomb’s status as an iconic signpost in British-Indian history rather than as an artifact of a vanquished kingdom? To begin to answer this, one must note that Markham’s distinctly European indicators of exotic beauty— the “snow white tomb” set against tropical “feathery palm trees,” the “arabesque work”—follow a long tradition of picturesque vocabulary and artwork. Even in the influential work of the scientifically minded eighteenth-century painter of Indian scenes, William Hodges, one sees the impress of picturesque convention, as when he provides the symmetrical Mughal king Sher Shah’s tomb with irregular borders to better fit with his idea of India’s rough-edged landscape.59 Like Hodges, Markham exhibits “a residual aesthetic, mediating the parallel drive for order and history” as well as a propensity for the picturesque melancholia of ruins that at once stand apart from and, like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, recede into the surrounding vegetation.60 Most such ruins, dating to the Mughal heyday or to ancient times, were viewed as distinct from the ruins of recent British history, such as those of the Mutiny. Tipu’s tomb, whose relatively recent date of 1798 inaugurates the period of Britain’s imperial reach even more than does Robert Clive’s 1757 conquest of Bengal, effectively signifies the cusp of the pre- and post-British era. It is a tomb, in other words, whose story simultaneously precedes and participates in Britain’s colonial history. The particular power of such stories on the imagined history of Britain depends greatly on the places in which the stories are set. In attempting to incorporate Tipu’s tomb into the history of British India while also keeping it at arm’s length, Markham typically strives to resolve the split in Europe’s attitudes to its Indian possessions by domesticating them. As such, Markham’s description of Tipu’s tomb encapsulates the mix of observational detail and aesthetic analogy that characterizes Europeans’ spatial logic, and which to some degree informs the Anglo-Indian sense of “homeliness.” If the wildness of India and its rebellious kings are a necessary foil for Britain’s orderly conquest and rule—a wildness that is kept alive by the legend of Tipu’s and Nana Sahib’s personifications of tiger-like ferocity—it is the underlying aesthetic dimension of this outlook that, in manifesting a latent unease with the impulse for orderliness, exposes colonialism’s fissures and ambivalences. Somewhere in between the scientific and the picturesque, between the cantonment and the bazaar, is the ragged mélange of the Anglo-Indian sensibility. Arboreal Gothic

We have seen how profoundly familiar as well as alienating India was to the European eye, its “virgin soil”61 untamable and ancient, yet at the same time amenable to the sort of cultivation “chiefly effected by the importation of plants

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from foreign sources,” as one official put it.62 Such views stemmed from a mixture of awe toward these uncharted woods and a wish to re-fashion them in the image of Europe. Tellingly, this perspective on landscape corresponds to the nineteenth-century’s neoclassical fondness for social dualities, especially purity/ impurity, virgin/harlot.63 This meant that any virgin land had to be maintained scrupulously lest it fall into unscrupulous hands or desires. In this masculinist framework, India’s so-called virgin soil demanded proper stewardship by educated Englishmen whose task was to revivify the land. This led to the schizophrenic activity of tearing up certain “decaying”64 trees and replanting with French pine, Australian eucalyptus, and Japanese conifer, “giving the landscape a much more densely wooded appearance,” in the words of historian Dane Kennedy.65 Significantly, then, this ambivalent colonial view—that is, the land as promise and lie, garden as well as jungle—is articulated through what I will call the geography of dislocation, which is an aesthetics of geography whose rhetoric is heavily laden with organic metaphors.66 Colonial nature narratives thus performed two functions, acting on the one hand as surrogate collections of natural desiderata for Home (i.e., properly English) readers, in words as well as images, and, on the other hand, enacting and mythologizing moments of sublime, and often uncanny, discovery. Even as home becomes, as I have said, a slippery concept for Europeans by the end of the nineteenth century, an arcadian mythopoesis, with its iconography of mysterious jungles and exotic menageries, infuses British-Indian narratives. But it was also true that the lushness of the tropics, which many interpreted as the re-creations of Eden, influenced the development and perpetuation of Gothic and Romantic tastes—notable, for example, in the subcontinent’s Indo-Saracenic architectural style. Indian forests, with their unfamiliar (to European scientists’ eyes) banyan and gulmohar trees, were frequently compared to the curves and buttresses of European cathedrals and palaces. Simon Schama, who traces the genealogy of such architectural styles, describes how Renaissance architecture increasingly took on an “arboreal Gothic” look, and how, conversely, landscapes—particularly mountains—were favorably seen to resemble, in the words of eighteenthcentury mountaineer William Windham, “ ‘old Gothic Buildings or Ruines.’ ”67 John Ruskin famously took these sentiments to extremes, fetishizing the irregularity that he found most pronounced in Gothic architecture (especially cathedrals) and in alpine vistas.68 Significantly, as Richard Grove tell us, Ruskin was also profoundly influenced by the early nineteenth-century ecological writings of Alexander von Humboldt, who had focused much of his attention on India and had himself been influenced by “British colonial naturalists” and “colonial English painting.”69 Much earlier, however, the seventeenth-century Dutch bota-

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nist Hendrik van Reede, in his travels in southern India, had described one particularly large tree “as a magnificent, elegant and delightful palace, whose vaults were supported by as many columns as one could discern branches . . . thus these forests were like a house of very elegant structure rather than virgin forests.”70 Van Reede’s conjunction of house and virgin forest is not incidental to the iconology of spatial identity in colonial India. Rather, van Reede instinctively projects onto the Malabar forest comforting attributes of home. Of course, the very extravagance of this bower and of the surrounding landscape threatens to overtake its homely shape, for its status as a refuge from the “inclemency of the climate” with its “excessive showers and the heat of the sun” is never assured, at least not without the proper stewardship that van Reede envisions. Despite their claims to empiricism, then, Enlightenment-era botanists relied on many of the same aesthetic tropes that would become a mainstay of the Anglo-Indian aesthetic sensibility. Thus, Robert Hobbes, visiting in the year 1852, quite comfortably naturalizes villages and their inhabitants by means of Wordsworthian tropes, as when he describes “picturesque cottages . . . surrounded by arborescent grasses.”71 Far from reflecting any sympathy on the part of the writer with the villagers, which such characterizations were often designed to suggest, in keeping with Romantic pastoralism, this naturalization merely accentuates the distance between the author and his or her subject. The Aesthetic of Home: Masculine, Clubbish, Fuzzy

By the time Ruskin turned his eye from English landscapes to India, in the wake of the 1857 war and in conjunction with an 1858 exhibit at the Kensington Museum, he found what had previously seemed to him a “love of subtle design . . . universal in the [Indian] race” betrayed, in fact, a “distorted and monstrous” abomination. Indian art, he concluded, could not “draw a flower, but only . . . a zig-zag.”72 Mysteriously, the very land that had formerly impressed Europe with its arboreal splendor had become disconnected from that splendor. No wonder, then, that India’s vast plains and dusty roadways dotted with villages should have come to represent for Europeans a travesty of the Edenic visions so tantalizingly close at hand. William Shenstone, a contemporary of William Gilpin, the progenitor of the picturesque movement, and a leading proponent of eighteenth-century landscape gardening, advocated a natural meandering form for gardens, rather than the “strait-line.” Where his German contemporary, von Humboldt, had seen in southern Indian flora the apotheosis of the picturesque, Shenstone tellingly cites the endless highway “from Agra to Lahore” as an example of the kind of famous but painfully unchanging vista he condemns.73 This sort of disagreement suggests that whereas Europeans’ relationship with India

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was crucial to the development of the concept of the picturesque, any feature seen as discordant to this view was censured.74 As Ruskin’s comments indicate, such censure became commonplace following the 1857 war, which the British viewed as a betrayal of trust on the part of their Indian soldiers (sepoys) and, by extension, Indians in general. Ruskin’s stress on the “zig-zag” imputes a crooked, deceitful Indian approach not only to their British patrons, but also to a properly aesthetic, and therefore moral, understanding. By 1858 the picturesque was no longer a mainstay. Images of murdered English women and children, of mass executions, and of famineravaged villages contrasted with earlier romantic conceptions of India, particularly as photography began to assert itself. That is to say, along with their masters’ trust, Indians had also betrayed the natural aesthetic arrangement of life. Subsequently, stock pronouncements that there was “nothing of interest” in India began to appear alongside a delight in “perfect English shrubbery lining the road.”75 The vague dismissal of Indian plains became a foil for certain cherished reminders of Home. We can see the influence of such ideas even in the work of those real heroes of British India, the civil engineers. As one of them put it, in the midst of an 1869 study called “Roads, Railways, and Canals for India,” “Nothing is more monotonous than to have to march along a straight road . . . Curves, however, are unsightly in an open plain, . . . as one often meets with in India.” It was therefore up to the engineer to aesthetically vary curves and “tedious” lines by hiding their “mistake” with clumps of trees.76 Scenic India, in other words, had either to be transformed to suit English eyes, or swept clean. Any place or person seen to fall between these poles was suspect. Given this colonialist perspective, it is not surprising that a common explanation for Britishers’ ambivalent late nineteenth-century depictions of the Rani of Jhansi, an Indian heroine of the 1857 conflict, and for the ubiquity of colonial adolescence as a literary motif, is that imperial masculinity acted out a repressed sexual drive in the colonial theater, and that the “revenge of the repressed” was usually expressed in policies, especially concerning inter-racial intimacy, and in fictions like those of G. A. Henty that simultaneously acknowledged young European males’ desires and sublimated them through the only means available in this circumscribed environment: violence. In his history of sexual behavior and legislation in British India, for instance, Ronald Hyam claims that the colonies allowed young European males to enact sexual fantasies unavailable to them in Europe (an argument that echoes Edward Said’s more nuanced reading of Flaubert’s erotic visits to Egypt). In her otherwise cogent analysis of the many representations of the Rani of Jhansi, Nancy Paxton similarly concludes that

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when the surrender of sexual delight was redefined as a renegade pleasure and the color bar was raised so high that even Indian princesses were redefined as “abject,” romance writers found themselves in an imaginary cul-de-sac where violence became the measure of male enjoyment. Under these circumstances, the revenge of the repressed finds inevitable expression in the parallel fantasies about the abduction and rape of Englishwomen by Indian men.77

Although such arguments are no doubt accurate to the extent that postMutiny fiction and legislation are commonly concerned with the supposed violence perpetrated against Englishwomen, they overlook, as Ann Stoler points out, the complex range of longings that animated these representations. Rather than simply documenting an outlet for libidinous frustrations—what Victorian scholar Martha Vicinus has termed the “hydraulic model of sexuality”78—the iconography of licentious Native women and of rapable European women obscures colonialism’s greater interest in the management of race and class, and more crucially, as we will see, of colonial spaces.79 For example, in Henty’s novel In Times of Peril the Rani of Jhansi’s aristocratic bearing, together with her exotic beauty—qualities that tacitly supersede those associated with her maternity—make her an appropriate savior of English boys. The adolescent protagonists Ned and Dick, it is important to note, are far from aristocratic; their heritage and social habits would, in England, distinguish them as bourgeois middle-class. In colonial India, their race (as this and other such novels presume) warrants the kind of habits and respect normally associated with well-heeled country gentlemen. In other words, class and race consciousness are, as Stoler has observed, dependent on one another, so that it is impossible to talk about the one without the other. The boys’ adventures on the plains and in the jungles of India collectively function as a rite of social passage, not unlike that of Kipling’s Kim, who learns to acknowledge and embrace his English heritage amidst the crowds and bazaars of India (a process made ironic by Kim’s Irish blood). Some colonialists went so far as to exclude from this social clubbishness any European born in the colony, since that was thought to be a moral contaminant for white children.80 The widespread colonial fear of “going native” thus derives as much from a fear of social regression as from the fear of racial contamination. To “go native” meant to forsake the only avenue open to lower-class Europeans for gaining a higher perch on the ladder of societal prestige. Anyone eccentric enough to adopt indigenous practices was perceived to have betrayed the rules of membership in the expatriate community. As Stoler points out, “what sustained racial membership” in the colony “was a middle-class morality, nationalist

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sentiments, bourgeois sensibilities, normalized sexuality, and a carefully circumscribed ‘milieu’ in school and home.”81 So long as one’s (male) identity was safeguarded by this group membership, one could undertake a measure of transgression in the service of the group without impugning one’s imperial masculinity. Many of these features, particularly the notion of membership, that clubs touted as notice of inclusion and exclusion, are on display in Anglo-Indian literature. However, at least as far as colonial India is concerned, Anglo-Indians like Kipling and Corbett, who were country-born and so viewed with a measure of suspicion by their fellow Europeans, or who dared to cross boundaries, as did Steel, produced a distinctly different kind of narrative than what Henty had to offer. Their “range of longings” had less to do with European bourgeois attitudes than with the urge to traverse a landscape that, in their eyes, was every bit as various as their itinerant self-identifications. This is why it is impossible to pin down their allegiances, either biographically or discursively. This is why their narratives favor bifurcated characters and fractured landscapes. In a sense, their writings functioned as a discursive “fuzzy” space,82 in which Anglo-Indian affect could mediate not “the contradictory logic of Eurocentrism,” as Mrinalini Sinha has argued for the conventional British colonial club,83 but rather the logic of a comparatively centerless world. The Jungle in the Garden: Kipling’s Animal Biography

Kipling’s fiction is, like that of many of his British colonial peers, animated by a backdrop of aestheticism, exhibition, and the Mutiny, but in notably distinct ways. Perhaps the clearest example of this is “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” from The Jungle Book, a story that seems to enact the European re-inscription of the Indian landscape. The story focuses on familiar tropes of inclusion and exclusion, but does so in a way that complicates both contemporary and modern readers’ assumptions about home. In “Rikki-tikki-tavi” (hereafter RTT), the mongoose saves an English family from cobras in their seemingly safe bungalow. While in other tales Kipling celebrates the ways in which English ingenuity and know-how tame a wild landscape, at the cost of a fixed concept of “home,” RTT proffers what appears to be a home-space whose civilized stability is never in doubt. But this is precisely what the story’s tension relies upon, since the arrival of the cobras menaces that security, and, more significantly, since it is animal instinct rather than the exercise of reason that saves the day. While many of Kipling’s stories rely on the classic reason-madness binary of the colonial psyche, his abiding concern is for neither a defense nor a critique of that binary; rather, he pushes for recognition that the centrality of home in British India is composed

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of equal parts emotion and intention, and that spatial tropes are therein similarly entwined. In her ethnology of tea plantation labor in India, Piya Chatterjee observes that the garden is both a “material and moral trope,” one that draws on the preand post-lapsarian images of the protestant ethic that undergirded the manufacture of tea.84 Hence the titles of books like Assam Planter: Tea Planting and Hunting in the Assam Jungle and The Amateur Gardener in the Hills, which mediate between a manageable and a wild paradise. In fact, the Assam Tea Company set up a diorama of idyllic British plantations in the 1851 Crystal Palace to advertise the “tea gardens” of Assam hills—gardens that bespoke a genteel, upwardly mobile middle class. As Chatterjee notes, this was part of a conscious construction of feminine domesticity in the service of colonial trade.85 The English planter with his gun became a crucial part of this domestic myth, as did the motif of the walled bungalow compound and its network of allied spaces: the garden, certainly, but also the polo ground, racetrack, and Club. In RTT, the English family occupies a “big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment,” whose sprawling grounds boast “a large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes as big as summer-houses of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass” (286). Although the mongoosehero’s small size amplifies the compound’s comparative largeness, the narrator clearly intends us to see the young mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi as a variety of colonial adventurer: inquisitive to the point of foolishness, brave, innocent, and selfless. “This is the story,” we are told, “of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed” (284). Soon after he is nursed back to health by the human family after being found near death in their compound, Rikki-tikki “went out into the garden to see what he could see” (286). He is, significantly, a naif, unused to the treacheries of natural predation. “What is the matter?” asks Rikki-tikki of the grieving tailor-bird, Darzee. “One of our babies fell out of the nest yesterday and Nag ate him,” says the bird. Rikki-tikki commiserates, but can only say, “I am a stranger here. Who is Nag?” And immediately he is answered with “a low hiss—a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet.” The enormous cobra spreads its hood and attempts to cow the mongoose. But, incredibly, Rikki-tikki is afraid only “for a minute,” for “it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, . . . he knew that all a grown mongoose’s business in life was to fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too, and at the bottom of his cold heart he was afraid” (287). What is worth noting here is that we are never in doubt as to the snakes’ (there are two) ultimate demise. Nag “knew that mongooses in the garden

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meant death sooner or later for him and his family” (287–288). It is Rikki-tikki’s fate that involves our sympathies. Indeed, although he eventually fights and kills both cobras, the mongoose very nearly succumbs to his wounds in the process. The tale ends thus: “Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head inside the walls” (299). Given our reading of Rikki-tikki as a colonial adventurer, it is tempting to see these words as an allegory of Empire. But it is important to remember that Kipling’s Anglo-Indian pedigree obligated a more authoritative description of the nuances of natural life: “When the cobra runs for her life, she goes like a whiplash flicked across a horse’s neck” (297); and “the old books of natural history are full of myths about animals and plants” (288). This is the tone of the eyewitness, one whose claim to truth depends on a native-born, child’s-eye view of the garden, whether that child is a mongoose or a human. The garden in this case is neither Edenic nor some despoiled place, but rather a timeless realm of quiet governance in which we presume Rikki-tikki will live out his days. The walls are, after all, a constant reminder of the non-Edenic, and there is some question as to whether they are truly keeping out the jungle’s threat or simply maintaining that illusion. By one reading, nature’s wildness is tamed here not by an English race, nor simply by an animal likeness of that race, but by the exercise of reason. Rikkitikki’s instinctual innocence, for example, quickly moves into a more knowing evaluation of the dangers around him: “Now, if I kill [Nag] here, Nagaina [his mate] will know; and if I fight him on the open floor, the odds are in his favour. What am I to do?” (292). We cannot, however, attribute Rikki-tikki’s actions wholly to either pure instinct or cultivated reason. Both Rikki-tikki and the garden exist on the cusp of these oppositions, defying, on one hand, the emotive correspondence to the sublime and, on the other, the rational order of beauty. If Rikki-tikki is the savvy adventurer in parts, the story carefully reminds us that he owes his life to the nurturer of this domain, the boy Teddy’s mother, who is present at the beginning as well as the end. The bungalow’s domestic concerns, in other words, bracket the violence of the garden’s subterranean life. Indeed, life and death are closely aligned, with Rikki-tikki half-dead at both the beginning and the end of the story, moments when the mother is needed most. The family’s rehabilitation of the mongoose and his conquest of the cobras reflect the proper equilibrium of an Anglo-Indian home. There is yet another important dimension to the anthropomorphism of Kipling’s mongoose. When Kipling published the story in 1894, in The Second Jungle Book, a subgenre that Peter Broks terms “animal biographies” had grown

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popular. Its Bambi-like personified animals were the protagonists in stories that sentimentalized nature and often demonized man, the invader. The vast popularity of this subgenre rode on the back of an “explosion in pet ownership in the second half of the nineteenth century,” which seems to have corresponded to an increasingly interior-focused middle-class world that was ornamented with exotic souvenirs.86 The incipient globalization of imperial commodities combined Benjamin’s notion of arcades and flanerie with the public display of zoo life and world expositions. Indian royals like the King of Awadh, as Harriet Tytler observed, had enjoyed keeping menageries, and beginning in the 1860s public zoological gardens appeared in cities throughout the subcontinent, from Bombay (1862) to Calcutta (1875).87 Zoos became popular during the colonial period in large part because the collection and taming of wild animals—often the very ones that hunters continued to risk their lives to kill—demonstrated the imperial ethos of domesticated wildness. Indeed, European hunters and zoos joined forces in the adventure of collecting and exhibiting specimens of animals, alive as well as dead, as a way to trumpet their global reach. Wild animals could now be viewed by the average person, whose particular fascination with safely caged predators transformed fear into affection. This affection, even romanticization, became an essential ingredient of every hunting tale. Hunting also happened to be a lucrative pursuit since trophies and memoirs were certain to find a buyer, especially if the trophies were of tigers and lions.88 These grim testaments to the manly toil of the hunt had become the necessary accouterments for any proper colonial home. Though it was always preferable to have killed the animal oneself, purchased trophies and skins were acceptable. Hunting thus became a practically indispensable activity for military stations like Kipling’s Segowlee cantonment. As the well-known officer-hunter Gordon Cumming wrote in his 1871 book Wild Men and Wild Beasts: Scenes in Camp & Jungle, The only parts of the country which are much shot over are those in the immediate proximity of cantonments, say within fifty or sixty miles. Beyond this radius, game may be found in sufficient quantities to satisfy the most greedy sportsman; and in the pursuit of some species he will find no lack of the danger which gives zest to the chase.89

Cumming’s words present a typically colonial image of India—a sea of wildness interspersed with garrisoned islands of Europeans—an image whose pedigree includes the stranded Robinson Crusoe. Yet Kipling’s RTT, as we have seen, gives voice to the unsettling colonial awareness of a conjuncture, indeed

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an overlap, of wildness and domesticity. The mongoose, for this reason, is petlike as well as feral, “like a little cat . . . [and yet] a wild creature,” resembling the half cultivated garden (284–286). Kipling’s story, in other words, rounds out Cumming’s romantic picture by showing that cantonments included within them a largely unobserved natural world of dramatic, violent struggle even as the narrative endears to the reader creatures like Rikki-tikki-tavi. This violent side of cantonment life afflicts human as well as animal motivations, as we will see. The very theme of predation that runs through colonial adventure narratives demands the foil of a heroic, shrewd, and sympathetic warrior, one who combines the instincts of a jungle “denizen” (as hunters were wont to call them) with the affection of a pet. Kipling’s Anglo-Indian mongoose exhibits all these characteristics in that most hybrid of imagined spaces, the Anglo-Indian bungalow garden. Notes Epigraph. Robert G. Hobbes, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan, Two Volumes,” 1852. India Office Library and Records [IOLR] MSS.EUR. B260, London. Epigraph. G. O. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1866), 4. 1. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, 5. 2. Unlike the Portuguese of the sixteenth century, who settled in Goa permanently, the English usually intended to, and except for disease or accident often did, return to England. See William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Flamingo, 2003), 17. Also see Roy, Indian Traffic, 85–86. 3. See for example Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel; Rosemary George,The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fiction; and Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. 4. Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 248, 251. 5. There were also a sizeable number of memoirs and travelogues by European visitors who alternately mocked and exoticized their Anglo-Indian hosts; of these, George Otto Trevelyan’s The Competition Wallah, first published in 1864, is probably the most famous. 6. Captain Bellew, Memoirs of a Griffin (London: William H. Allen & Co., 1880); Edward F. Elwin, Indian Jottings (London: John Murray, 1907). 7. See C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 429; and Priya

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Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 39. 8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), xx. 9. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 111, and chapter 4 passim (95–136). Stoler paraphrases Foucault’s central thesis in the History of Sexuality, that the middle-class family, far from being a sanctuary from “the sexualities of a dangerous world,” is in fact a “site of their production” (112). 10. See Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 126–128. 11. Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 124–125. 12. See Metcalf, An Imperial Vision. 13. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 133, 150. 14. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 158. 15. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 199. 16. There was, in fact, a long history of European representations of India as inhabited by monsters. See Rudolf Wittkower “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): passim. 17. Quoted in Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 200–201. 18. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 123–126. See also Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 75–110. 19. For more on the specific ways in which British colonialism used language and numbers to catalog the subcontinent’s peoples and cultures, see for example Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” Orientalism and the PostColonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314–340; and Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–56. 20. Martin Kemp, “ ‘Implanted In Our Natures’: Humans, Plants, and the Stories of Art,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and the Representations of Nature, ed. David P. Miller and Peter H. Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 212. 21. Kemp, “Implanted,” 214; and see Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 52–53. 22. For more on such typological representations, see Arnold, “Deathscapes,” 339–354. 23. Hugh Gunn, “The Sportsman as an Empire Builder” (1925), quoted in John

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M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 37 and passim, 26–53. 24. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46, 48. 25. See Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 47. 26. F. Majer (1771–1818) and J. Görres (1776–1848), respectively; quoted in Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe, 73. 27. William Lambton, head of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, in his diary; quoted in Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 60. 28. Said, Orientalism. The Orientalist, observes Said, “is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says.” He “makes the Orient speak” (20–21). 29. Maya Jasanoff, “Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests and Imperial SelfFashioning.” Past & Present 184 (August 2004): 129 and passim, 109–136. 30. For more on the intermixing of Indian and European cultural forms, see for example Dalrymple, White Mughals, and Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Vintage, 2006). 31. Lieut. A. Burnes, Assistant Resident in Cutch, “A Geographical & Military Memoir on the Indus and its Tributary Rivers from the Sea to Lahore,” 1831. National Archives of India [NAI]/ Foreign Dept/Misc./S. No. 269, New Delhi. 32. “Plague-spot” was a common label for anything that vexed colonial rule and was adopted by Indian officials as well, as in a report on the “abominable practice” of castration among certain criminal classes. (Syed Ahmed letter of 14 April to John Strachey, National Archives of India [NAI]/ Home/Judicial/file no. 55, 30 July 1870, New Delhi). Similarly, “immensity” was a favorite term for areas beyond direct supervision, particularly the central plains, as in Francis Yeats-Brown’s opening to his bestselling Lives of a Bengal Lancer (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1933). 33. Quoted in David Arnold, “Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850,” in Felix Driver and Luciana Martin, eds., Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 143. 34. See Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 52. 35. C. R. Markham, “India Journal,” 30 October 1860. Royal Geographical Society [RGS]/ CRM 67, London. 36. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 76. 37. W. C. Fox, Letters to parents, 20–26 May 1916. Royal Geographical Society [RGS]/ LBR.MSS.AR 177, London. 38. RGS/ LBR.MSS.AR 177, W. C. Fox letters to parents, from Bombay, July and 22 August 1916, respectively.

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39. Yeats-Brown, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 5 and see 56. 40. Anonymous memorandum from the Officiating Superintendent of Coorg, to Public Works Department, 23 January 1871. National Archives of India [NAI]/ Home/ Public/98A, 8 July 1871, No. 78, New Delhi. 41. The Black Forest was represented by Renaissance German writers and artists not as a bestial place (as the Romans had stigmatized it), but as a space of healthy domesticity. See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), 96. 42. Kavita Philip suggests that although the British “could never claim” that India was, like Australia, a blank slate (terra nullius), the subcontinent’s forested areas, commonly inhabited by tribal peoples, were seen to be inefficiently used, and so in need of European management. Philip, “English Mud,” 309–310. 43. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 208. 44. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 5, and passim. 45. RGS/ CRM 67, “India Journal,” 18 October–25 November 1860 (vol. 4). 46. See Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, chapter 5: “The Fight for the Forest,” 146–180. 47. RGS/ LBR.MSS. AR 177, Letter from W. C. Fox, 22 August 1916. 48. Ironically, it was tribal peoples who most frequently rose up against state hegemony, usually as a result of the government’s effort to take control of ancestral tribal forests. Joseph D. Hooker, “Fourth Excursion into Tibet,” 10 December 1849. Royal Geographical Society [RGS]/ JMS 11/28, 1850, London. 49. Edwin L. Arnold, On the Indian Hills, or Coffee Planting in Southern India, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 313, 171. 50. Arnold, On the Indian Hills, 171–172. 51. Harriet Tytler, An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler, 1828– 1858, ed. Anthony Sattin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 65. Tytler’s memoir became perhaps the most famous of Mutiny-survivor accounts, as I note in my later discussion of Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters. 52. Tytler, An Englishwoman in India, 66, 68. 53. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8. 54. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 98–99. 55. Tytler, An Englishwoman in India, 167. 56. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 60. 57. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 102, 101. 58. Which, coincidentally brought an end to French designs on the region. 59. This is Matthew Edney’s observation in Mapping an Empire, 62. For more on the scientific and picturesque features of Hodges’ work and that of his equally influ-

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ential successors, the painters Thomas and William Daniell, see chapter 1 of GuhaThakurta’s Monuments, Objects, Histories. 60. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, 13. The author is commenting on the pioneering Scottish surveyer of ancient Indian architecture, James Ferguson (1808–1886). 61. NAI/ Home/Public/98A, 8 July 1871, Memorandum to Public Works Department, 23 January 1871. 62. Landolicus, The Indian Amateur Gardener (Calcutta: W. Newman & Co., 1888), in India Office Library and Records, London. Similarly, an early-nineteenthcentury memoirist notes how “the lilly of the Valley excite[s] a pleasing resemblance of home, & there are many plants foreign to India.” NAI/ Foreign Dept./Misc./S. No. 269, “A Geographical & Military Memoir on the Indus and its Tributary Rivers,” 1831. 63. See Grewal, Home and Harem, 109. 64. Capt. R. Cole, Officiating Inam Commissioner, Coorg. Memo of 28 March 1871, National Archives of India [NAI]/ Home/Public/98A, New Delhi. 65. Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58. 66. It was, in fact, the collecting and cataloging of tropical plants that had helped fan interest in travelogues, beginning most notably with the narratives of the Comte de Buffon and Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his 1768 Pacific venture. See Martin Kemp, 197. 67. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 229, 465. 68. Ibid., 512. 69. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 372–373. Nora Scott similarly writes in her journal of the 1880s: “Here [in India] we seem wholly dependent on nature, like the peasants in Millet’s pictures” (8). Nora Scott, An Indian Journal, ed. John Radford (London: The Radcliffe Press, 1994). 70. Van Reede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678–1693); quoted in Richard Grove, Green Imperialism, 85. 71. IOLR/ MSS.EUR. B260, Hobbes, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan,” 1. 72. Ruskin, The Two Paths (1859), quoted in Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 141–142. 73. William Shenstone, “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening” (1764), quoted in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul J. Wood, and Jason Gaiger (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 819. 74. Art historians Pratapaditya Pal and Vidya Dehejia note how “India [ . . . ] unfolded before the artist’s eye all of the elements that he formerly had to conjure up

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from imagination at home.” Pal and Dehejia, From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India, 1757–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 97. 75. J. L. Sleeman, “A Reconnaissance through the Jind District . . . ,” 1907. Royal Geographical Society [RGS], London; and RGS/ CRM 67, C. R. Markham, Letter of 3 November 1860. 76. T. Login, “Roads, Railways, and Canals in India,” India Office Library and Records [IOLR]/ 8775.dd.31/1–7, London. In Tracts Relating to Civil and Sanitary Engineering, Etc. 1839–72 (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1869), 5. 77. Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, 164. 78. Quoted in Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 173. 79. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, chapter 6: “The Education of Desire and the Repressive Hypothesis,” 165–195. 80. For this reason, it is hard to find accounts, fictional or otherwise, of European children between the ages of about eight and eighteen since most were packed off to boarding schools in Europe. Kipling himself was sent to England at the age of six, ostensibly, as Angus Wilson notes in his biography of the writer, for health reasons, but really for “social and racial reasons. Anyone who was anyone would send his children home.” Indian nursemaids, or ayahs, might be helpful until about this age, but after this they were seen to be dangerously influential on the white child’s psyche. See Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (New York: Viking, 1979), 21. Also see Stoler’s discussion of this in chapter 4 of her Race and the Education of Desire, 95–136. 81. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 105. 82. I borrow the concept of a “fuzzy” outlook from Sudipta Kaviraj to describe the collective, nonterritorial sense of “Indianness” that preceded a more modern, selfaware notion of nationhood. See Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1–39, and especially 20. 83. Mrinalini Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,” Journal of British Studies 40 (Oct. 2001): 493. 84. Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 52. 85. Ibid., 43. 86. Peter Broks, “Science, the Press and Empire: ‘Pearson’s’ Publications, 1890– 1914,” in MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World, 155, 158. Also see Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 34, who discusses how pet-loving in Europe expanded along with the slave trade, which saw Africans bought and sold in the manner of “exotic possessions,” their docile bodies lending both economic and cultural status to white owners.

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87. Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West, trans. Oliver Welse (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 125. 88. Curiously, hunters visited zoos both to reassure themselves that “there is still something left to kill in this world” and to spur themselves on to further conquests. 89. Lt. Col. Gordon Cumming, Wild Men and Wild Beasts: Scenes in Camp & Jungle (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1871), 2. Also see Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 113, where Cumming is cited as a quintessential “empire-builder.”

Chapter 2

Hills Kinder Than Plains? Kipling’s Monstrous Hill Station

Those who live in the plains in India naturally look to the hills. —Francis Younghusband, 1924

If down here I chance to die,/Solemnly I beg you take/ all that is left of “I”/To the Hills for old sake’s sake. —Rudyard Kipling, 1886

The Road that is so alluring to Mowgli and Kim, like the road in Corbett’s world that “runs for several miles due west through very beautiful forests,”1 may induce in its travelers a sense of infinite possibility, but owes its existence to cities and military outposts and railway stations. The Road in this sense is not a winding and sometimes overgrown jungle pathway; it is, rather, a mythic stage for Homeric journeying, always with an eye toward home, whatever that might be. If in Kim’s eyes it is “a river of life” akin to the Buddhist Way, and therefore filled with the potentiality for renewal, it is also, as in Jim Corbett’s later tales, framed by commerce. More significantly, as this chapter argues, the road in British India always leads to the hills. Kim follows his beloved Lama into the foothills of the Himalayas, precisely the locale in which Corbett performs his feats, and in which Forster’s Mrs. Moore, through her train window, contrasts “the hopeless melancholy of the plain” to the Vindhya hills (A Passage to India).2 This favorable view of hills is partly due to their treatment as spiritual abodes in both European and Indian traditions. Even today, Hindu holy men retreat to mountain caves in much the way Christian monks live in monasteries that cling to precipitous slopes. Mountains are also the source of rivers like the Ganges, and in eighteenth-century Europe, the source of much ardor, both Christian and 81

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Romantic. From Dante’s contrast of hellish depths with divine promontories, through the eighteenth century’s association of aesthetic refinement with “glorious desolate” Alps (as Thomas Gray called them), and on to Ruskin’s biblical nineteenth-century paean to the “sublimity” of alpine heights,3 Europeans long associated mountains with profound moral sensibility. Francis Younghusband, a late-colonial adventurer, administrator, and popular author (and president of the Royal Geographical Society), who self-consciously espoused Imperial masculinity, opens his book Wonders of the Himalaya with a characteristic craving for natural conquest: “In the distance we see a range of hazy hills. We do not doubt their real existence. But they are shrouded in a bluey mystery. And we long to penetrate their secret.” He yearns to see the “glorious woods” and “magnificent views” in the “wonderful country ahead. We cannot be content until we have stood upon those hills and seen the other side.”4 Younghusband fills his book with similarly superlative expressions of admiration. There is, of course, another side to these splendorous hills. As Younghusband himself hints in his reference to “mystery,” and as his book makes clear despite his claim to “have seen what real loftiness and purity is” in the “inmost core of the Himalayas,”5 the hills are magnificent but dangerous. They are dangerous, first of all, because of the possibility of natural disaster and physical hardship. Avalanches narrowly miss Younghusband’s party, glacial crevasses repeatedly pose risks, and fatigue stalks the climbers. In its conjoining danger and beauty, Younghusband’s Victorian outlook owes much to his eighteenth-century predecessors, for whom mountains were the original source of the idea of the sublime. In the eyes of Burke and his contemporaries, as for their Romantic progeny, the Alps were at once glorious and horrific, their abyssal valleys reminders of primordial geologic calamity and human insignificance. This Romantic obsession with the unnerving, and therefore potentially liberating, irregularity of high mountain crags—their resemblance to Gothic architecture, particularly in a ruined state—captivated observers well into the twentieth century. Mountains, especially those on the scale of the Alps and Himalayas, dwarfed any human construction and so recalled humans to a proper respect for nature; snowy summits put any kind of Napoleonic hubris in its place. Others in the 1700s saw mountains quite differently. In their eyes, mountain climbing offered the perfect opportunity to “conquer” nature and prove their manhood, and thereby exemplify a nationalistic élan. They took to placing tokens of conquest, notably flags, atop these summits, much as compatriots like Captain Cook were planting their colors in faraway lands. Both perspectives continued to hold sway into the nineteenth century. Begin-

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ning in the 1850s, John Ruskin’s analyses of painting and architecture powerfully shaped their development. As we might expect, Ruskin took a rather different view from his Romantic forebears, but neither did he agree with aspirants to the conqueror role. In his homage to gothicism, as Ian Baucom has argued, Ruskin combined the progressive and traditionalist perspectives that animated debates over architecture and the role of nature in the national consciousness.6 He wanted a changeless, timeless architectural presence that simultaneously registered the changes necessary to mankind’s striving toward moral perfection. The influence of his ambivalence on the fashioning of imperial architecture is perhaps most evident in Bombay’s supremely gothic 1880 Victoria Terminus, which exhibits a classic Anglo-Indian amalgam of Gothic and Indo-Saracenic styles. Ruskin was not solidly enamored of indigenous Indian architecture. As I noted earlier, in his fury over the 1857–1858 Mutiny, he turned against what he admitted was the Indian craftsman’s “almost inimitable” skill with the “fine arrangement of fantastic line” and subtle design. In his post-Mutiny mood, this artistic subtlety became merged with what he saw as the cunning deceit of the sepoys who had dared to make such a drastic break with their British masters. What made Indians an “uncivilised” race was the absence of an appropriate appreciation for natural, as opposed to a denaturalized, undisciplined, and “bestial” beauty. This fusion of race, morality, and aestheticism—so favorably combined in the English people, so “abominabl[y]” composed in the Indians (as Ruskin thought)7—came to dominate the British imperial view of India, and of Indians, in the late colonial period. I want to stress two observations about Ruskin’s stance that inform this chapter’s discussion of hill stations in the literature of colonial India. First, I agree with Simon Schama that Ruskin’s rather strained arguments for the preservation of natural, especially mountainlike, irregularity in architecture undercut both the vainglorious martial aspect of hill-climbing and the Romantic treatment of mountains as “beauties so savage and horrid.”8 Second, Ruskin and his patriotic England-bound peers actually knew very little about India, and so the Anglo-Indian representation of hill stations was effectively a riposte to the attitudes such important cultural critics propagated. More specifically, Ruskin’s rejection of two of the prevailing treatments of hills informs the kind of subversive parody of this space that Kipling’s tales would eventually model. Yet in their parody, Kipling’s tales celebrate in both their content and style precisely the tendency in Indian art that Ruskin disparagingly likened to a zig-zag. That is, Kipling mocks England’s stereotyping of Anglo-India to undercut both stereotype and its ideological underpinnings. The tensions thus generated are ineluctably tied to Kipling’s spatial poetics. The unevenness of that poetics mirrors his

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narratives’ topographical settings as well as their sometimes competing stylistic, generic, and ideological motivations. Kipling, in part due to his father’s involvement in the Indian crafts movement,9 was cognizant of the arguments about ways a culture aestheticizes its morality. As an Anglo-Indian, Kipling bristled, as did his father, at Ruskin’s denigrations of expressive forms originating in India. Yet in his tales of hill stations, especially in his first book, Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling’s split self (unlike his England-born father’s) produces narratives whose irony matches their multiform settings—in this case, the hill station and its twin, the station on the plains. By multiform I mean spaces that, like the other Anglo-Indian spheres I have been examining, throw up not a pat conventional representation of imperial society but instead an ever-changing multifarious iconography of Kipling’s cultural moment. Kipling’s Simla tableaux, like the characters and scenes of “monstrous hybridism” in Kim,10 combine characters and scenes that alternate between—and hover between—the transgressive and the disciplinary, the licit and the illicit. This border-crossing is not the kind of knowing disguise that G. A. Henty’s characters, for example, engage in without in any way affecting their core Englishness. Rather, Kipling’s topographical tales reveal the extent to which the spatial dislocations so characteristic of life in colonial India prove to be versions of the author’s divided self. This is largely because Kipling, like Corbett (and like Kim), continuously tries to make sense of his unbridgeable loyalties in relation to the different spaces—physical as well as cultural—that he variously occupies. This is why Kipling’s Anglo-Indian prose thrills to the uncertainties and subterranean promise of each of his narrative settings, such that his characters’ absorption with their surroundings overshadows their ideological obligations. The ambivalence we detect in Kipling’s writings is therefore not a reflection of what postcolonial critics have rightly called “nervousness” that was woven into the very fabric of Empire.11 Whereas imperial overseers were eternally anxious about the threat of insurgency and disease—the very threats the hill station was built to escape—Kipling frequently returns to these sources of anxiety for his fund of satire. This does not, of course, mean that Kipling manages to avoid all of the pitfalls of his compatriots; he often uses the foil of proverbial native mismanagement, for instance, to hit his intended mark. But he characteristically alternates, as Andrew Rutherford observes, between admiration for the Raj and a profound irreverence.12 Kipling’s Anglo-Indian spatial sensibility plays both consciously and unconsciously with this imperial anxiety by mocking its earnestness, its adherence to spectacle, and its geographical arrogance. In doing so, he touches inevitably on those concerns uppermost in colonial minds:

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good health, cures for illness, and death; martial exhibition and the exhibition of curios, as in Lurgan Sahib’s shop in Kim; bathos and sincerity; loyalty and betrayal; disguise and detection; knowledge and ignorance; and isolation versus the gossip of crowds in a land where, as the military officer and hunting enthusiast Gordon Cumming declared in 1871 (and Kipling repeats in a Plain Tales story), “every one [i.e., every European] knows every one else.”13 These concerns spawn their own idiosyncratic worries in the context of the hill station, where, for example, scandal commands a disproportionately large narrative focus, and where the cause of “madness,” unlike the Plains variety—which in BritishIndian lore is variously induced by heat, boredom, and disease—is usually misplaced romance. Stories of misjudged affection, which is usually heterosexual, occasionally homosexual, frequently homosocial, like the trope of impersonation that is so central to colonialist texts, present another version of the supposed dividing line between civility and animal instinct, namely, fraudulence. A dominant ideology that obsesses over loyalty and disloyalty is obliged, if it is to continue its “illusion of permanence,” as Francis Hutchens famously called it,14 to revisit again and again its own valuations regarding this division. In performing this rite, and in order to shore up its aura of confidence, the Raj piled up a store of stereotypes that hinge on deception, detection, and the restoration of social order—an order built principally on the pretense of loyalty and discipline. “I Am in England”: The Scandalous Asylum of the Hills

Just as cantonments were established throughout India to safeguard the health of British soldiers and thereby ensure the continuance of British rule, so did the British go up into the hills to escape the heat and diseases of their settlements in lowland locales, which they habitually referred to as the plains. While intense heat could certainly result in sunstroke and dehydration, giving rise to the fashion of wearing a “a good sunhat” or pith helmet,15 it was life-threatening illnesses—chiefly cholera, typhoid, malaria, and dysentery—that chased Europeans into higher elevations. Although it would be a long time before the specific causes of such diseases were discovered, the British quickly learned the advantages of hills. In 1883 the medical researcher August Hirsch described this early insight: At the very first general diffusion of cholera in India in 1817–1819, medical observers had their attention directed to the fact that the hill-forts remained exempt in a remarkable way, while the disease was prevalent in the plains round about, and that the removal of troops from an infected district to an elevated station, without any separation of the sick from the healthy, was followed by a speedy disappearance of the disease from among them.16

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Hill stations were thus established principally as sanitaria, a fact that must enter into any cultural discussion of fiction set in these communities. For although it is true that disease was less liable to afflict European residents of hill stations, by no means could one presume to avoid all illnesses there. For instance, a variety of dysentery called “white flux” was familiar to those who lived in the Himalayan foothill stations, in parts of the Deccan, and in the Western Ghats.17 This indicates that the annual summer flight to hill stations was as much a psychological as a physical comfort. The politics governing public space was a notable feature of colonial Simla, and tended to inform colonial accounts. Emily Eden, for instance, recalled that during her visit to the hill station in the 1830s, “nautch girls” (literally “dancers,” a euphemism for prostitutes) in the Simla bazaar “are very pretty, and wear beautiful ornaments but it is not lawful to look at them even for sketching purposes. Mr N—, one of the magistrates has removed them all from the main street, so the bazaar is highly correct.”18 Pamela Kanwar, who records this observation in her history of Simla, describes the continuous quarrel between the Simla Municipality with support of the respectable public (Indians as well as Europeans) and the prostitutes who sought to establish their business in various locations around the township. In the same way, Europeans constantly invoked respectability to justify restrictions on where Natives could build new residences.19 Not coincidentally, social hierarchy matched topographical location, with Europeans occupying the higher reaches of the hillside to avoid rain run-off and the ever-encroaching bazaar. After 1875 Simla was effectively divided into an upper level for mostly European inhabitance, including a Mall road worthy of any in Europe, and lower levels, including the Lower Bazaar, where Indian professionals and laborers (many of them Muslim) resided, and where shops and other essential services were located. Further below lived the untouchables, who did the unsightly work of cleaning latrines and disposing of litter.20 Somewhere in between the Europeans and professional Indians dwelled Eurasians and poor whites. These communities “were usually grouped together, for the white were also suspected to have traces of brown.” The implication was that a loss of class could be equivalent to a loss of race. Many members of these communities resided “in the smaller cottages scattered across Simla,” as if unsure where to place themselves. Simla was thus, as Kanwar puts it, “the spatial embodiment of a social system,” one that reflected “the colonial dynamic at the level of space.”21 The British fetish for cleanliness to ward off disease and the constant worry about overcrowding translated into an ideological distribution of space.22 Municipalities thus allotted residences to hill station inhabitants according to their social status, with Europeans and wealthy Indians occupying prime real

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estate higher up the hill and poorer Indians relegated to lower, crowded, and unsanitary bazaar areas. In many ways, hill station society was an intensification of colonial life across the subcontinent. India was a country whose vast landscape,23 as British writers habitually described it, made the European observer feel small. Although rare individuals, such as Jim Corbett, embraced this sense of insignificance, most turned impulsively to the replication of European urbanism, with all its social trappings, to offset feelings of estrangement or isolation. And it was in the hill station, built to replicate England in miniature, that the Raj most enthusiastically mimicked the domestic attitudes of the Homeland. The idea of being in a verdant English enclave atop the hot plains prompted a great deal of navel-gazing prose and flights of fevered verse, such as that of one Anglo-Indian “chaplain,” whose impressions of a hill station in western India occasioned his 1876 poem “Hymn to the Omnipresent Deity.” The hills, which he contrasts with Hinduism’s “mis-shaped forms” and “horrid idols,” are “Where the fragrant almond’s shade/ Or cool bananas bless the glade;/ Where Albion’s exiled children view/ The shadow of the cloudless blue.”24 In contrast to the airy avenues of cantonments on the plains,25 Europeans lived in close quarters in the colonial hill station, a topographical fact that facilitated their reputation for gossip and scandalous tales. The physical arrangement of British hill communities, as Dane Kennedy has noted, followed “the sinuous contours of the rugged landscape,” with English-style cottages hugging crest lines and the shores of, in some cases, artificial lakes.26 Churches were often built of stone in the style of their Norman and Gothic cousins back Home. No wonder Nora Scott noted in her diary entry of 1884, “I can almost fancy, if I shut my eyes and listen just to the sounds of bird and insect life, that I am in England.”27 Hill stations were in many ways functional contradictions, for although they cultivated a social and spatial refuge from the hurly-burly of governance on the plains, they were in fact an essential component of that governance. Boarding schools soon proliferated on the slopes, for their educational purpose agreed with the rationale for the construction of hill stations. Besides providing some measure of safety from tropical heat and disease, hill station schools also removed English children from the presumed moral contamination of their ayahs and other Native servants. The famed administrator Sir Henry Lawrence’s hill school was thus declared, soon after its 1847 completion, to be “[an asylum] for the orphans and children of [European] soldiers serving or having served in India . . . from the debilitating effects of a tropical climate and the demoralizing influence of barrack-life; wherein they may obtain the benefits of a bracing

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climate, a healthy moral atmosphere and a plain, useful and above all religious education.”28 The hill station at Simla, in northern India, was especially popular. It was viewed with such favor that it eventually become the “summer capital” of the Raj, which spared no expense in transporting cartloads of documents each year to and from the station.29 Simla, which Kipling’s lampooning made famous, may have been unique in this governmental role, but not in its evocation of middle-class, small-town England, complete with its juicy innuendo and ballroom gossip. The hill station’s legendary proclivity for gossip was even worked into its geographical features with the naming of Scandal Point, an area that is still so named, and which is said to have earned that name from an event early in Raj rule when an Indian royal eloped from this point with the daughter of a British Viceroy.30 Rumors seemed to follow and take sustenance from the station’s meandering roads, as each morning and evening brought new travelers and new tales. In this dimension, hill stations aped the often stereotyped domestic sphere of imperial town life: The gossipy bungalow memsahib of the cantonment in her hilly habitude suddenly felt free to converse with a large variety of sahibs at the Club, in the intimate post office, and upon the Mall, that long thoroughfare of daytime commerce and evening strolls. Englishwomen flocked to the hills; when they were not there, they dreamed of them. This at least is what writers of the era tell us. Given the mythos of the hill station and of its opposite number, the plains cantonment, in contemporary sources, it seems useful to keep in mind the colonial tendency to exaggerate the distinctions between these two spaces, just as we must read against the grain of British accounts of the 1857 uprising. This is, however, precisely the point of discourse analysis, which probes the degree to which a particular rhetorical representation becomes the conventional lens through which a culture views its (preferred) sense of reality. Thus, Kipling’s tales of hill station, cantonment, and city life at once echoed and subverted prevailing notions of these cultures, and his accounts became in turn potent points of reference for subsequent representations of Anglo-India. In Kipling’s hands, the hill station variously connotes and inhabits the intersection of civility and scandal, the earthly and the spectral, hill and vale. In the representational dialectic that prevailed in Kipling’s day, whose conventions included the feminization of non-European geography, the hill station not surprisingly became a stage for romance and the exercise of feminine wiles. One chronicler, writing just two years before Kipling began publishing his short stories, goes so far as to use identical phrases to describe and objectify both the Englishwoman and the verdant hills as compared to the bleakness of the plains. “Nature,” he

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writes on the opening page of his 1884 guidebook to northern hill stations, “has not been bountiful in her gifts to the plains.” He goes on to declare a few pages later that nature similarly deprives the Englishwoman on the plains of her need for variety, as opposed to the duty-bound life of her bureaucratic husband. No wonder that the liveliness of hill station life beckons her with its promise of a more natural society.31 The guidebook’s author establishes both a semantic and a material contiguity between the monotonous and extensive plain and the woman who lacks the varying delights of social ties. He implies that once the Englishwoman reaches the hills, her involvement in society will be transformed from the tedium of uniformity into the excitement of diversity—much as the hills were seen to relieve the otherwise unrelenting tracts of flat countryside. In a paean to colonialism’s built environment, the guidebook writer additionally speaks to “the wonderful works of man” that “correct the niggardliness of nature.” His point that European engineering has improved the natural world exemplifies the period’s belief in the morality of environment. The author thus implies that by moving to the hills, the lonely Englishwoman, a product of natural beauty, will become a part of the hill station’s adornments.32 The hill station, in other words, promises salvation from the tropical strain on the European’s physical and moral vitality. How, then, does the promise of the hills fit with the hill station’s reputation for gossip and scandal? The paradox of the hill station—a paradisiacal space of indigenous natural virtues coupled with English craft and stewardship that at the same time stimulated a degree of social invective that threatened its collapse—partly explains the tendency to feminize it. The ills of the hill station, much like the cantonment’s ills, were frequently blamed on either Indian or European women (a problem that I will presently discuss in detail). But Englishmen encouraged and often reciprocated the feelings attributed to the seasonally “lonesome” Englishwoman, and men became similarly intoxicated by the hill station’s comparative, if often illusory, relaxation of social boundaries. The public extension of “bungalow privacy” and the loosening of social boundaries, which Kennedy rightly describes as the hill station’s “intersection of [the] dialectical forces” of “the public and the private,”33 may have suited the holiday mood, but it did not sit well with the government’s presiding administrators—no doubt because they had more to lose by this than did the community’s subcastes. There was thus, despite the potent “air of gaiety” generated by innumerable balls, fêtes, and especially amateur theatricals, the constant reminder of work to be done and roles to be filled.34 One official labeled Simla “A watering place gone mad.” A bemused visitor wryly observed: “Work and play were inextricably mixed up . . . one was expected to go everywhere and do everything . . . One had to call on

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everyone in the station; to ride and play tennis; to dance, to picnic and generally to have a thoroughly good time—all, as part of one’s job.”35 A recent history of Ooty, a hill station in southern India, picks up this note in describing such settlements as “the little patch of England that each exile discovered it to be. Or, rather, it was an English dream made a shade delirious . . . by the thin, high air, combined with . . . the outdoor life.”36 For early British visitors the “climate had a touch of savagery about it . . . that did not fit in altogether with any homesick recollection of the mountains of Cumberland or of Malvern.”37 But this impression would change with the planting of eucalyptus trees and the construction of gabled cottages. Clubs, racetracks (“an institution without which our countrymen seem unable to support existence in India,” in G. O. Trevelyan’s wry words), libraries, and a medley of residences with names ending in “Hall” rounded out the transformation of the colonial hill town from a sketchy and somewhat wild retreat to a central barometer of English propriety.38 The Indian hill station consciously cultivated a level of social sophistication that was seen to be comparable to that of Home, in particular London. At the same time, the hint of scandal, or to use Kipling’s preferred word, “crash,” was a constant if vaguely felt worry. It also made for good stories. Lispeth’s Scandal, or The Tragic Hills

Why linger on the plains, my friend, Why linger on the plains? Your feathers frizzling at the end, Your body sore with blains [ . . . ] Come to the hills, Bulbul, Come to the hills, Our cup of joy is full, We have no ills [ . . . ]. 39 To say that Kipling’s texts explore an Anglo-Indian divided self is not the same as claiming that his fellow Anglo-Indians followed suit, or that they were pleased with his productions. The image of ordered contentment that Anglo-India nurtured for itself and broadcast to an amused world was one that Kipling would spin to his own ends, much to the annoyance of his cultural peers. Plain Tales for the Hills, says Dennis Kincaid in his social history of British India, “caused the utmost irritation by its hints . . . of loose living among the highest circles in Simla.”40 Kipling was, of course, also a believer in Europe’s

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genetic idea of a “white man’s burden,” to use the phrase he made (in)famous in his poem 1899 of that name (a poem that was in fact written as a cautionary address to the United States in the wake of new colonial enterprises it established in the Caribbean and the Philippines). Notwithstanding Kipling’s official, unabashed imperialism, his fiction, as recent critics have pointed out, is a rich fund of hybridity and metaphor that sheds light on what I identify as the spatial disjunctions of Anglo-Indian culture. Kipling was never wholly imperialist, nor entirely a celebrant of the native-born worldview. Indeed, it was precisely because Kipling’s tales exposed these fault lines that his Anglo-Indian contemporaries grew uneasy. Nor were readers in Europe exempt from this unease, for it is his country-born sensitivity to Indian topography that, in my view, most clearly exposes colonialism’s intrinsic moral contradiction. In its habit of oscillation between mocking and celebrating imperial ambitions, Plain Tales from the Hills, the book that made the young Kipling famous, lays bare the contradictory notions of space at the heart of Anglo-Indian identity—and, I would add, the heart of any dominant creole culture. The story “Lispeth,” for instance, counters the simplistic European elision of lower-class Indian women with nature. The first line of this story, which opens Plain Tales from the Hills and has received much recent critical attention, informs the reader that the protagonist is a “Hill-girl.”41 This fact is important not simply as a plot mechanism. Although she was brought to a nearby mission as an infant and baptized a Christian, it becomes clear in the course of the tale that Lispeth’s heart is drawn to the hills. This fact augments the tale’s celebration of indigenous independence (political as well as religious) and—in an example of Kipling’s Dickensian inheritance— its tragicomic indictment of Christian piety. It is important to note here what Kipling, and many of his contemporaries, meant by “Hills.” First of all, he refers to the ruggedness of the Himalayan foothills. These, like their alpine cousins, offer spectacular views of the higher peaks. This topography, in turn, frames its original inhabitants, the various tribal groups who thinly populate the stark altitudes and sloped forests, and who survive by farming on terraces or by hunting game. This Romantic image of the hill people was not, certainly, limited to colonial India; in eighteenth-century Scotland, for example, so long as local Highlanders did not threaten British dominance, their evident connectedness to their locale came to be seen as picturesquely rustic.42 In India, the Todas of the southern Nilgiris, before attracting serious scholarly study, were viewed in similarly picturesque ways. Depictions of tribal groups in the Himalayan foothills, the setting for Kipling’s stories, follow this pattern. As a consequence of the area’s harsh winters, searing sun, and sheer ascents, the indigenous peoples who thrive in the hills are represented as self-reliant and ruggedly beautiful.

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Thus, Lispeth “grew very lovely. When a Hill-girl grows lovely, she is worth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon” (7). An Englishwoman visiting Simla two decades after Kipling published his story falls back on similar descriptive packaging: A hill woman is “as a rule, extremely good-looking, and a born flirt.” Her hardiness enables her, moreover, to deftly engage in repartee with any who “wish to chaff her.”43 Together with this image of the indigenous, no-nonsense beauty, Kipling and his peers kept in their minds that other comforting image of the English hill station I have described. The colonial hill station certainly coexisted with surrounding villages, and in many ways relied on villagers to service its basic needs, from the collection of firewood to the building of roads.44 Still, the English community viewed itself as a small somewhat antiquated English town might have done, with its close-quartered citizenry ever alert to the social and physical boundaries separating them from anything that threatened their civic arrangement, whether this be dishonorable behavior for a European or the occasional run-in with dacoits (bandits) in the countryside. “Hills” also, if less commonly, called forth for Victorian and Edwardian English readers the contemplative spiritual life I alluded to earlier. The Lama in Kim is the most well-known example of such a character in colonial literature, who “sigh[s]” over the sight of his beloved hills, whence cometh his strength.45 We will see, in my later discussion of the novel, how this complicates the British view of inhabitance. Kipling’s earlier writings already demonstrated his awareness that a full representation of the colonial arrangement of space in the hills must include the colonial peripheries—common soldiers, Native servants, and that borderline community, the Eurasians. When, therefore, Kipling refers to “Hills” in these stories, he calls forth a host of associations. Lispeth clearly belongs to the periphery of hill life, English and indigenous Indian alike. For if, along with her embrace of Christianity, her “pale, ivory colour,” her “Greek face,” and her unusual height make her partially acceptable to the Kotgarh town chaplain and his wife, these very facts place her outside the sphere of her own people, who “hated her because she had . . . become a white woman who washed herself daily” (7–8).46 Yet despite differences from “her race” because of her growing resemblance to white womanhood, “the Chaplain’s wife did not know what to do with her” (8). Although Lispeth felt “very happy where she was,” the missionaries are perplexed by their own righteous creation. For Lispeth was too imitative and enamored of English society to suit the missionaries’ proper ethnographic placement of her among the few heathen hill people who have been saved. The chaplain and his wife (particularly the latter) are threatened by this presence of brown whiteness. Their frustrated inability

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to ascribe either race or class to Lispeth reflects their own anxieties about class and social standing, which were vitally important to Europeans who viewed the colony as a means of moving above their middle-class origins.47 Even more disturbing is Lispeth’s decidedly un-ladylike strength and gait. “She did not walk in the manner of English ladies—a mile and a half out, with a carriage-ride back again. She covered between twenty and thirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, between [the towns of ] Kotgarh and Narkunda” (8). Here Kipling betrays two prejudices common to Victorian treatments of India’s northern hill people and to non-Europeans in general. On the one hand, the mention of classical traces in Lispeth—her Hellenic beauty— places her firmly within the romanticized representation of Himalayan tribal peoples who were thought by some Europeans to be either the lost tribe of Israel or the still-refined remnants of Alexander’s conquest. Martial “races” like the Pathans and the Rajputs were now and again identified as members of these supposedly European settler groups. At root, the noble savage idealism of the eighteenth century, which rhapsodized over the “natural,” intrinsically non-European innocence of Tahitians and North American Indians, had given way, in the nineteenth century, to a belief in racial typology that justified Britain’s expansionism. For if the martial prowess of “noble” northern Indians (as opposed to the presumed effeminacy of most other Indians) could be explained by their European-ness, then all was well in the racialized universe. It was this very idée fixe that points to Kipling’s other related prejudice, which is the desire to pigeonhole different peoples according to their genetic affinities. This enumerative typology of race and culture, which had begun earlier in the nineteenth century, took hold of the Empire’s public imagination during and after the 1857 war, and especially following the shrewd misuse, beginning two years later, of Darwin’s evolutionary theories.48 In this light, Lispeth’s return to the ways of her “own people,” although shown to be a clear result of missionary bias, confirms what her hill-born physique and stamina should presumably have made plain: that she can never be English, and that even to dream of this is to injure both her true identity and that of the Englishwoman she aspires to be. Yet this evidence of authorial preconception does not account for the tale’s sympathetic treatment of Lispeth and its indictment of English behavior—a treatment that, as Bart Moore-Gilbert has observed, critics have tended to dismiss as patronizing at best, conventionally pietistic at worst.49 Contrary to expectation, Lispeth does not fit the prevailing colonialist construct of the “Indian woman,” which Lata Mani has shown to be integral to male-ordered conversations about colonial-era law between British officials and the Brahminical establishment.50 The story, I maintain, is for many reasons an important introduction not only

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to the collection of tales that follow, but also to the tensions built into—indeed, integral to—Kipling’s narration. Andrew Hagiioannu has argued that Plain Tales points to “the essentially textual character of colonial authority,” and that the “rhetorical strategy of ‘plainness’ was the means by which Kipling evoked the non-regulation system of the pre-Mutiny Punjab, opposing the influence of utilitarianism.” The stories thus counter the trust in “scientific language” that was used to justify colonial rule and racism.51 Kim, too, argues Hagiioannu, celebrates the kind of non-regulatory indirect rule exemplified most famously in the Punjab by zealous colonial administrators Henry and John Lawrence, whose hallmark was resourceful action, not bureaucratic top-down administration.52 This Punjab style of governance was admired for its plainness, to distinguish it from the arcane “nonsense of rules and formalities,” as Henry Lawrence described conventional colonial management.53 This paternalistic active style of governance helped shape the mythos that developed around hunting, where a man could, as in the Punjab of the Lawrences’ day (the 1840s onward), “[get] away from the artificialities and conventions of civilization” and enjoy “a plain dinner” away from Station etiquette.54 The Punjab style therefore espoused a dream of benevolent fraternity composed (illogically) of English governors and Indian subjects. Kipling was enthused about this vision, as his Jungle Book stories clearly indicate, with the central character Mowgli gradually realizing the country-born instincts that allow him to tame the animal world while fostering its familial communitas. That Mowgli is a child for much of the narrative sojourn is, as critics have been quick to remark, equally important. For in Kipling’s worldview, and as many of the Plain Tales make clear, childhood possesses a Blakean innocence that adult dishonesty extinguishes. Above all, children are direct and “plain”; the enactment of Kipling’s version of the Punjab style therefore depends as much on wide-eyed directness as on the adult world’s dictatorial whip. Yet there is, as always in Kipling’s oeuvre, a notable absence haunting these tales, an absence identified as an “emptiness” in Kim’s protagonist, and variously described by critics as “loss and alienation” (Behdad), “silenced [voice]” (Suleri), “mourning” (Baucom), “freedom” from authority (McBratney), and internalized “violence” (Nandy).55 The theme of loss balances the Anglo-Indian longing for familial comfort. The crux of Lispeth’s story is her re-conversion to the ways of her own people. What sets up this reversion to her ostensibly true habitude is a fateful encounter during one of her “little constitutionals” (in American parlance, a hike) with an injured and unconscious Englishman. Once again disrupting

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the imperial masculinist code of behavior, Lispeth carries the man “down the breakneck descent into Kotgarh . . . in her arms.” With an inborn determination, she “simply” pronounces: “ ‘This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself. We will nurse him, and when he is well your husband shall marry him to me” (8). The chaplain and his wife, we are told, “lectured [Lispeth] severely on the impropriety of her conduct. Lispeth listened quietly, and repeated her first proposition. It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.” She is intent on carrying out “her programme” (8–9). Kipling’s comment about “Eastern instincts” is of course a facetious jab at the Western ethos of “love at first sight.” Yet while the narrative comically punctures the veneer of colonial Christian charity and civilization, it also makes the prospect of such a marriage—and therefore Lispeth herself—sound ridiculous. Upon recovering his health and that most essential of colonialist attributes, “coherence,” the Englishman, who was visiting the “Simla hills . . . to hunt for plants and butterflies,” is amused to learn from the chaplain’s wife of Lispeth’s attachment to him. “He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and romantic, but, as he was engaged to a girl at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen.” Yet despite this fact, the man, a “traveller in the East,” and therefore a forerunner of the “globe-trotters” Kipling disparaged in his non-fiction, “talk[s] to Lispeth, walk[s] with Lispeth, says nice things to her, and call[s] her pet names . . . It meant nothing at all to him, and everything in the world to Lispeth.” When the man finally departs, “Lispeth walked with him up the Hill as far as Narkunda, very troubled and miserable,” and, “[b]eing a savage by birth,” takes “no trouble to hide her feelings” (9). Prior to this leave-taking, the chaplain’s wife, “being a good Christian and disliking anything in the shape of fuss or scandal—Lispeth was beyond her management entirely—had told the Englishman to tell Lispeth that he was coming back to marry her. ‘She is but a child, you know, and, I fear, at heart a heathen,’ ” she tells the man. “So all the twelve miles up the Hill the Englishman . . . was assuring the girl that he would come back and marry her; and Lispeth made him promise over and over again. She wept on the Narkunda Ridge till he had passed out of sight along the Muttiani path” (10). The innocent Lispeth waits months for the man’s return and grows impatient. Finding once again “an old puzzle-map of the World in the [missionaries’] house” that she “had played with . . . when she was a child,” Lispeth “put it together of evenings, and cried to herself, and tried to imagine where her Englishman was. As she had no ideas of distance or steamboats her notions were somewhat wild.” The man, for his part, “forgot all about her by the time he was butterfly-hunting in Assam. He wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth’s name did not appear there”

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(10). Finally, the chaplain’s wife, thinking that Lispeth’s “indelicate folly” has subsided, reveals the truth to her. Unable to comprehend this deceit, Lispeth, in the story’s climax, enacts the kind of spectacular transformation that is at the heart of many subsequent stories in Plain Tales, one that is at the very heart of Kim. Going “out down the valley” to where her own people reside, Lispeth “returned in the dress of a Hill-girl” and with “her hair braided into the long pigtail . . . that Hill-women wear.” “ ‘You have killed Lispeth,’ ” she spits at the missionary couple. “ ‘You are all liars, you English’ ” (11). We are told that Lispeth “took to her own unclean people savagely,” and that “she married a woodcutter who beat her after the manner of paharis (hill people) and her beauty faded soon.” The chaplain’s wife unrepentantly dismisses this reversion by stating, “ ‘Lispeth was always at heart an infidel.’ ” To which the narrator replies, “Seeing she had been taken into the Church of England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not do credit to the chaplain’s wife.” The story ends by telling us that Lispeth lived to an old age and “had always a perfect command of English.” “It was hard then,” when she would tell “the story of her first love-affair . . . to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, exactly like a wisp of charred rag, could ever have been ‘Lispeth of the Kotgarh Mission’ ” (11). If, as noted earlier, Lispeth’s return to her people is a version of the “return to paradise” ideal cultivated by colonial-era Europeans, who naturalized indigenous peoples as vestiges of noble savagery and sought their preservation in the manner of museum displays,56 it is an odd version of this ideal. For Lispeth does not, after all, revert to paradisiacal existence; instead, her woodcutter husband beats her and her readiness to recount her earlier life betrays present disappointment. While the English missionaries’ efforts were, according to Dane Kennedy, part of the “corrupting influences . . . of the outside world,”57 the alternative was not necessarily better. The tale’s conclusion, indeed, borders on regression rather than regeneration. Where, then, are we to place Kipling’s tragic tale of convalescence and betrayal, fractured identity and “faded” beauty, in the context of colonial beliefs? This is an important consideration, for these themes will course through most of Kipling’s succeeding tales, which hinge on impersonation and misrecognition; illness, including madness; scandal as a type of betrayal; hybridity (racial, linguistic, cultural); and disorientation. Above all, they work from the precariousness of self-identity. The story of Lispeth, I contend, refutes the very notion of racial purity that propped up the Victorians’ ethnographic hierarchies and imperial self-justification. To begin with, Lispeth is not simply a go-between for two distinct cultures, for an intermediary must have the trust of both parties. Lispeth clearly does not. Even before her conscious embrace of Christianity, we are told, she had

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earned her own people’s mistrust because she does not physically resemble them. Like Mowgli, Lispeth is conversant in two languages and two cultures, yet ultimately she is unable to exist peacefully in either, in large part because she embodies no easily identifiable mark of racial difference. This makes her a curiosity, a face to paint, rather than a true Hill-girl or conventional mission resident. She is, in effect, an innately syncretic figure whose presence disturbs the putatively discrete worlds of the European and the indigenous Indian. This, as the story makes clear, is less a virtue than a burden given European (and, we are made to suppose, Indian) attitudes about ethnic identity. The narrative itself wavers on this ideological demarcation, at once critiquing and supporting it. Indeed, the representation of Lispeth resembles that of the surrounding landscape, threatening to objectify her beauty in familiar colonialist fashion. (In the collection’s penultimate story, “By Word of Mouth,” Kipling does describe the terrain in explicitly erotic terms, with “big, still grass-downs swelling like a woman’s breasts” [230].) Yet Kipling rarely leaves his characters to a fate of facile comparisons. In a characteristic twist of Kiplingesque irony, it is this woman of classic, non-English beauty who rescues the Englishman. Lispeth’s notion of romance is, significantly, shown to spring from her love of the hills. All along, her imagined love is couched in topographical images and verbs of mobility: She has found him on the road, walks with him daily, and, when he departs, accompanies him until, as she “wept on the Narkunda Ridge,” he is “out of sight along the Muttiani path” (10). Until the revelation of the missionary woman’s deception, Lispeth has identified herself with the mission’s work and its geographical surroundings, so what proves to be predictable in the tale is not Lispeth’s simplicity and ignorance of the wider and ostensibly more sophisticated world, rather it is the Englishman’s—and the chaplain’s wife’s—callousness and manipulation. For this reason, her later discovery of English lies compels her not only to forsake her adoptive religion, but also to remove herself from its spatial associations. The intertwining of Lispeth’s imagined peripatetic courtship with topographical features is not incidental to the story’s thematic thrust. The narrative clearly connects truth-telling to location, and this is a correspondence that we also find in the subsequent tales as well as in Kim. In this context, images and terms of perspective and distance resonate with the Anglo-Indian interest in geographical displacement. A key image in this regard is the “old puzzle-map of the World” that the grown Lispeth retrieves and cries over just prior to learning the truth. Where her perspective is flawed by ignorance of the larger world, the Englishman, too, fails to possess a proper perspective, in this case an ethical one. Lispeth’s ability to see into the physical distance (as distinct from a map), as

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when she bids farewell to the traveler, bespeaks a moral perspicacity that exposes the Europeans’ amoral logic. Whereas Lispeth cannot “see why she should keep silent” about her desire (9; emphasis added), it is the traveler’s figurative myopia that causes him to physically fall from a cliff “while reaching out for a fern on a rotten tree-trunk” (9). For her part, Lispeth’s in-between status as, in effect, a whitened Indian displaces her from the signifying context of her birth culture as well as of that of an unseen Europe. This causes her to trust naively in the referents at hand, to the extent that her “wonderful eyes” cannot separate her object of desire from geographical circumstance: she has “found” her “husband” both literally—on the road—and romantically. The narrative subtly underscores her newfound love’s metaphorical blindness by having him “fancy” that he had fallen (for he cannot recall the incident) as well as, after his recovery, he “fancies that nothing would happen” as a result of his dalliance with a naïve “savage”—a term Kipling uses to great ironical effect (9). The tale ends with a final iteration of Lispeth’s geographical and perplexed identity. In its final sentence, the narrator repeats that the Kotgarh settlement was known as the “Mistress of the Northern Hills,” a point mentioned early in the story (7). This settlement, an emblem of anglicization as well as indigeneity, parallels Lispeth’s development. Like the Europeanized Kotgarh, Lispeth never loses her “command of English.” At the same time, neither the town, with its mix of European and Indian cultures, nor Lispeth, with her combination of mission education and indigenous habit, can balance their motivational contradictions. This is not to claim, however, that the narrative merely reconfirms the colonialist tendency to identify geography with womanhood. Lispeth possesses too much agency to support such an easy conclusion. Here, it is useful to reconsider the motif of the puzzle-map that Lispeth puts together night after night as she pines for the absent Englishman. The map is certainly, on one level, a metonym for the puzzling world beyond the mission and the hills, a world that Lispeth has read about but cannot truly comprehend. This is so, however, not because she is a simple Hill-girl; Lispeth’s incomprehension is due, rather, to the inherent mutability of a world—geographical as well as political—undergoing constant reconfiguration. She knows perfectly well where England is, and her daily exercise of reconstructing the puzzle-map adds nothing to her knowledge. Her effort therefore borders on fetishism, as if her constant activity will make the puzzle pieces reveal, individually and then collectively, some significance relating to her Englishman’s whereabouts that transcends the artifact itself. But her temporary fetishism is nothing compared to Britain’s fetish for map-making, including the kind of child’s puzzle-map offered to Lispeth. Her repeated construction and break-up of the puzzle emblematizes the much larger geopolitical

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realities of a period that saw constant wars, as well as the deadly backdrop of the Great Game between Russia and Britain, which figures so richly in Kim. On a discursive level, Lispeth’s puzzle-map is a microcosm of Kipling’s own collection of stories, each of which turns on moments of misrecognition and irony, as well as the narrator’s self-reflexive comments on the very nature of storytelling. The protagonist of another Plain Tales story, “On the Strength of a Likeness,” we are told, “wanted to be deceived,” and “meant to be deceived,” and even “deceived himself very thoroughly,” a summing-up not simply of the character’s neurotic wish to believe a visiting stranger is the absent woman he loves, but also the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. The imaginative possibilities provide the promise of a borderless world. The bitter truth, of course, is that Lispeth’s action goes practically unnoticed by everyone but herself and the missionary couple, precisely because the Empire’s constant enforcement of its extensive borders—the very borders outlined in toy puzzles—far outweighs individual motivation. Yet even the missionaries’ avowed interest in Lispeth’s particular soul underscores their hypocrisy, for Lispeth’s baptism merely enables the chaplain’s wife to mimic the imperious conduct of her governmental contemporaries, which Kipling so frequently and fluently satirizes. Thus, in terms of individual fate, Kipling’s tale appears to imply that it matters little whether Hill folk like Lispeth align themselves with missionaries, British governance, or indeed (as other Kipling works indicate) one of the local Indian kings.58 The outcome always favors those in power. The fact remains, however, that despite Britain’s declared aim of establishing and maintaining boundaries in the interest of the “body politic,” it is, as Kipling’s stories themselves demonstrate, the individual body that interests the state. As I note in my later discussion of Steel, the obsessively documented investigations of Indian prostitutes’ perceived threat to the health of British soldiers, especially after 1857, demonstrate that, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown in the context of medieval Europe, those individuals or habits or spaces that have been deemed to be “socially peripheral” are “often symbolically central.”59 The Indian prostitute’s body, like the bazaar, symbolized the corrupting forces that were believed to bedevil the male English body. By bringing into focus peripheral lives like Lispeth’s—lives that include opium users, Indian conjurers, prostitutes, army privates, and so on—Kipling gives poetic expression to this insight into the obsession with peripheries and borders. These lives clearly matter a great deal to the self-identity of the British in India, and especially to Anglo-Indians like Kipling, whose divided sensibility sees a reflection of itself in outsiders like Lispeth. Like Kipling (and like Kim), Lispeth remains a puzzle to herself and others. To possess, as Lispeth does, “a perfect

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command of English” and yet to test the full racial, cultural, and geographical implications of this statement—this is the chief conundrum so many of Kipling’s characters face. Testing Boundaries: Matrimony, Detection, and the Hunt

Equally revealing of Kipling’s characteristic hybrid style—now poignant, now serious, and often both at once—is the topographical detail he devotes to the scene-settings in the hills. The hill station itself is, as noted above, a relatively small feature of the subcontinent, whose plains metonymically represent the real work and real life of the British Empire. As Governor-General Dalhousie said in the mid-1800s, Simla, like other stations, was a veritable “eyrie from which to watch the newly-annexed plains that stretch below.” It was the plains that mattered. The hill station was helpful to health and relaxation, but not indispensable, Simla’s later role as “summer capital” notwithstanding. Yet the large literary space devoted to the hill station would seem to belie this reality. Indeed, Kipling’s aforementioned interest in positing a “plain” style as a counterweight to the arcane bureaucratic machine of the Raj can be cited as crucial evidence of the claim that, in the words of one recent Kipling critic, “colonial authority” is “essentially textual.”60 Critics rightly point out that the proliferation of record keeping affected all facets of colonial rule and became the engine of state power. While there is no denying this Foucauldian insight into the operations of an eminently modern state apparatus (an insight that Kipling’s frequent references to rhetorical skill and documentation make clear), this conclusion tends to discount the material authority of the British Raj, which was expressed just as effectively through architecture as through record keeping.61 But what constitutes authority in Kipling’s version of the hill station? How does he represent it spatially, and do his iconographic representations in fact end up contributing to what is, after all, a predominantly discursive form of power? I believe that the connection between topography and discourse I have identified in “Lispeth” directly challenges the claim that textuality supersedes spatiality. Much of the strength of Plain Tales stems from not only the tonal shifts I have mentioned, but also from the syncopation of hill tales and plains tales, with their alternating send-ups of an obfuscating bureaucracy and the self-satisfied British-built hill settlements. Kipling’s native-born European eye for this textual-spatial nexus thus gives us narratives whose satirical frisson derives from an eclecticism that relies as much on topographical as rhetorical devices and mixes gravity with levity. To further illustrate my points about the connection between topography and Anglo-Indian social custom, including marriage, in the hill station, I turn to

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the Plain Tales story “Cupid’s Arrows,” where we find the setting of an archery competition described thus: There were beautifully arranged tea-tables under the deodars at Annandale, where the Grand Stand is now; and, alone in its glory, winking in the sun, sat the diamond bracelet [i.e., the winner’s prize] in a blue velvet case . . . On the appointed afternoon all Simla rode down to Annandale, to witness the Judgment of Paris turned upside down. Kitty rode with young Cubbon, and it was easy to see that the boy was troubled in his mind . . . Barr-Saggott was gorgeously dressed, even more nervous than Kitty, and more hideous than ever. . . . and the shooting began; all the world standing in a semicircle as the ladies came out one after the other. (50)

Such passages reemphasize Anglo India’s careful orchestration of space, a habit that reflects the orderliness of the bureaucratic minds behind the event. Simla society literally descends onto Annandale, the town’s famed tree-fringed race-course area that, as Pamela Kanwar notes, was the site for “countless balls, dinners, picnics, fêtes, flower shows, dog shows, archery competitions, hack races and even rickshaw races.” By Kipling’s time, though after the era described in the story, Annandale was also beginning to host cricket, football, and polo matches.62 Each event was an occasion for both entertainment and social snobbery, and therefore was undertaken with a mixture of earnestness and lightheartedness. The story recounts the strategy of Kitty Beighton, an unmarried young woman, to avoid falling into the hands of a prominent resident, the older and “ugly” Commissioner Barr-Saggott. The commissioner connives to win Kitty’s hand by organizing an archery competition. Knowing that she is the best lady shooter, he offers as a prize a diamond-studded bracelet. Kitty, who has her eye on the young cavalry officer Cubbon, intentionally misses the bull’s eye, thus ceding her place to another woman and leaving Barr-Saggott feeling crushed. Kipling’s scene presents a common spectacle: a carefully planned public event in which each of the actors is supremely self-conscious about his or her place in the social hierarchy. All of Simla society gathers at the site and arranges itself in a semicircle round the archers to show off and be seen. There then follows an impropriety, in this case Kitty’s deliberate, skillful misfiring of her arrows. “I wish I could describe the scene that followed,” declares the narrator—who then goes on and describes it: “It was out of the ordinary and most improper,” for her visibly intentional misses caused “a chilly hush [to fall] over the company” (51). Kitty’s action smacks of the “scandalous” behavior hill station society relishes.

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Kitty is thus doubly audacious in having scorned a local worthy and in having done so before the entire European population of Simla. Yet for all her unconventionality, Kitty must act within the confines of what were perhaps the most powerful social conventions of British hill station life, those attached to courtship and hunting. Archery was a popular sport and commonly connected to hunting not because arrows were actually used to kill game but because they represented for British Indians a connection to the mythic grandeur of the hunt. The title of Kipling’s story coyly invokes Cupid to signal both romance and the British Empire’s self-styled affinity with Rome. References to archery in particular signal the British-Indian obsession with sport as well as hunting.63 This explains the reference in the tale “Lispeth” to the virgin hunting goddess Diana, whom the protagonist is said to resemble, at least in European eyes. Kipling’s frequent references to classical archers thus spotlights British imperial hubris—that is, the self-conscious comparison to Rome—while simultaneously championing the likes of Lispeth and Kitty, women who dare to challenge colonial custom. I will have more to say about the colonial hunt in my later discussion of Jim Corbett (Chapter Seven), but it is important to note the link between these two masculine varieties of Victorian predation and their topographical context. Colonial Victorian courtship as depicted in most fiction was conducted in cottage parlors and on genteel carriage rides. But just as the Simla Mall, or main road, was conducive to such activities, so was it occasionally possible, as Kipling’s narrator coyly tells us, to hear of “shooting tigers on the Station Mall” (195). At the same time, pig-sticking and the tracking down of bandits, which figure prominently in colonial literature, are practices that took place in far larger, more remote, and less controllable spaces on the fringes of the hill town than were required for balls and archery meets. Despite obvious differences between an area like Annandale and a hill station’s forest or bazaar, the common subtext of this world, at least outwardly, was predation. Much colonial Indian literature claimed that to spot a tiger in high grass, follow a thief in the bazaar, or land a suitable spouse required much the same set of skills, and these pursuits were considered equally vital to the maintenance of colonial propriety. Strickland, a police detective who appears in two of the Plain Tales and fourteen years later in Kim, perfectly exemplifies the interest in hunting, impersonation, and hybridization that mark many of Kipling’s narratives. The story “Miss Youghal’s Sais,” in Plain Tales, simultaneously validates the great lengths to which Strickland goes to win Miss Youghal’s hand (thereby endorsing the social connection between matrimony and shikar) and satirizes the stuffiness of Simla society, which cannot tolerate the transgressive likes of Strickland. The implied

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narrator, who hints at his own reporting skills and includes himself in the Simla community, clearly relishes Strickland’s amazing facility, born of “seven years [of study] among the native riff-raff,” for “perpetually ‘going Fantee’ ” that is, going native, violating that iconic colonial taboo (24). Although most Europeans do not understand him, says the narrator, his story’s focus on Strickland’s activities, together with the use of superlatives and the narrator’s friendship with the detective, show the narrator to be one of the few persons who understands this “doubtful sort of man” whom others avoid (24). Indeed, the Anglo-Indian narrator is a kind of outsider in his own right and therefore identifies with the eccentric Strickland. The strong implication is that writing outside the bounds of officialdom is itself a form of impersonation that also requires wanderings and discoveries among alleyways and bazaars (29). That Kipling should choose to introduce Strickland for the first time in the context of the detective’s hard-won betrothal helps Kipling touch on many themes at once—matrimony, hunting, and impersonation, as well as on intimations of racial hybridity, the endorsement of an outsider’s point of view, and the questioning of narratorial credibility. The story’s tone, as in “Cupid’s Arrow,” is light-hearted, which allows Kipling to sneak in, as it were, topics that will seriously concern all his work, especially Kim. The story, in brief, has the seemingly eccentric, dangerously nativelike detective impersonate a sais, or horse groom, belonging to the staid Youghal parents in order to find a way to win the hand of their young daughter. The Youghals have spurned Strickland’s initial offer because “Mrs. Youghal said she was not going to throw her daughter into the worst paid Department in the Empire, and old Youghal said, in so many words, that he mistrusted Strickland’s ways and works” (25). After the Youghals “went up to Simla in April,” Strickland, whom they presumed to have “dropped the business entirely,” asks for “three months’ leave on ‘urgent private affairs,’ ” and “all trace of him was lost” (25–26). But then the narrator is met by “a sais . . . on the Simla Mall” and given a note, signed by Strickland, that asks for “a box of cheroots.” Only when he procures the cheroots and delivers them to the apparently Indian groom does the narrator discover that the “sais was Strickland, and he was in old Youghal’s employ, attached to Miss Youghal’s Arab” (26). Only Miss Youghal knows of his disguise, which allows her to spend time daily with her disguised lover. After two months of acting the part of a hard-working groom, Strickland is angered by the flirtatious attention of a “distinguished General” toward Miss Youghal in his (Strickland’s) virtually invisible presence, and he launches into “most fluent English” and threatens the general’s life. After recovering from his shock and hearing the full story, the General “nearly rolled off with laughing.” He compliments Strickland for his amazing performance, and

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agrees to Strickland’s request for help in settling the matriomonial business. The Youghals grudgingly comply, and when Strickland and Miss Youghal marry, the detective agrees to “drop his old ways” and mingling with every sort of person, in every sort of place (29). The narrator adds, however, that he will “[s]ome day” relate the tale of “how [Strickland] broke his promise to help a friend” (29). Meanwhile, the couple lives happily ever after—an ending that matches the story’s opening statement that “Our lives [in India] hold quite as much romance as is good for us. Sometimes more” (24). The story is, however, less about romance than about Britishers’ longstanding yet uneasy fascination with encountering Indian persons and spaces that are usually off-limits. The narrator’s opening declaration seems to suggest a cautionary tale, in which any would-be adventurer, such as Strickland, must resist becoming overly conversant in non-European affairs. Strickland asserts that were he “to write all he saw his head would be broken.” His promised autobiography “will,” states the narrator, “be worth buying,” but “even more worth suppressing” (27). Both Europeans and Indians fear such knowledge, whose uncanny reach threatens to expose the illicit dealings being conducted on the unacknowledged fringes of Empire, fringes that include opium dens, brothels, and smugglers’ rooms. The ostensible reasons for these fears are, for the Indians, that Strickland’s knowledge may lead to arrests, whereas for Europeans this same knowledge verges on scandalous indignity, even—and one can practically hear the hill station community’s collective gasp—cultural conversion. In effect, like Lispeth, Strickland breaks caste on both counts. He is thus a figure who is at home only between, never within, established social spheres. Significantly, the narrator is the only person Strickland trusts enough to approach on the Mall while still disguised as a sais. The narrator finds this “quiet, dark [and black-eyed] young fellow” to be an amiable companion, one whose features and interests (I would argue) resemble the narrator’s own. The narrator’s description of Strickland as dark-skinned in fact anticipates similar descriptions of “ ‘Spanish’ complexion[ed]” characters, such as the lovely Eurasian Miss Castries in the story “Kidnapped” (98). What exactly, one wonders, intrigues the Anglo-Indian narrator about such Eurasian Britishers? To answer this, it is important to listen closely in these tales to the narrator’s tone as he seems to call Strickland’s immoderate, socially unacceptable performances to account. For in such declarations as the story’s closing line, “But he [Strickland] fills in his Departmental returns beautifully,” the facetious tone is clear: Strickland would be the last person to enjoy bureaucratic “Departmental routine” of the sort that Kipling lampoons in several Plain Tales, notably “Pig.” Strickland’s relegation to such duties is, for both the narrator

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and the reader, tragic, for without his constant visitations to places that “no Englishman must . . . look upon” (25), the detective’s youthful energy is stifled, his hard-won knowledge nearly undone. “[H]e has, by this time,” the narrator tells us, “been nearly spoilt for what he would call shikar. He is forgetting the slang, and the beggar’s cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the undercurrents, which, if a man would master, he must always continue to learn” (29). Like Kimball O’Hara’s obligation to leave behind his wayfaring, hybrid childhood to serve the Raj, and Mowgli’s painful abandonment of his jungle freedom as he returns to humanity, Strickland’s marriage requires him to relinquish his unacceptable vocation and cross over into a life of social, dull propriety. The Eurasian Strickland is doubly fraught with racial and cultural consequence. He must deny the part of his self that had relished one form of hunting to win the fruits of another, matrimonial conquest. This dilemma is central to the narrative, for the narrator sees in Strickland a version of his own cultural ambivalence. The enumeration of all that Strickland is forced to abandon—“slang,” “beggar’s cant,” “signs,” “marks,” etc.—alerts us to the narrator’s own zest for the very same “under-currents.” Like Strickland, the country-born storyteller can perform his art only by embracing the subterranean societies that help constitute and sustain above-ground politics. Paradoxically, Strickland’s embrace of conventional marriage gives him the license for transgressive practices by providing him with a cover for these activities. Unable or unwilling to entirely give up the anglicized part of his life, namely matrimony, the detective compromises by deciding to continue his non-European activities, at night or in disguise. Kipling’s narrative, like Strickland’s tactics, tests the limits of hill station society in Simla, that bustling, changeable town so emblematic of the colonial arrangement of space, bursting with rumor and journalistic opportunity. The fact of the hill station’s changeable and therefore always uncertain nature is crucial to the theme of individual hybridity, for Strickland feels secure only in the interstices of Simla’s cultures and of its built environment, that is, in the town’s hidden lanes and in multilingual conversation. There is thus some poignancy in the detective’s emergence from this world into the matrimonial one, and not only because he must relinquish his Indian amusements. For when in anger he gives himself away to the general who is flirting with Miss Youghal, he does so in full knowledge of the social environment built upon racial and cultural inequity. The true scandal of the colonial hill station is therefore not at all the potential for misalliance or Strickland’s proclivity for going native. As Strickland discovers, the scandal is that a dominant culture should rank individuals according to the hue of their skin, a practice that in the detective’s case makes him “a doubtful sort.” The revelation of his Englishness is therefore acutely ironic, for

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he is culturally as much Indian as English. In the general’s kind of world, Strickland can locate himself only in that moment of transition between Indian and English, when he feels his emotion most intensely and speaks English words despite wearing the garb of an illiterate sais. The moment of high drama suits his inclination for theatricality. To the general, once his own angry “fit” has subsided, Strickland’s liminal moment plays “rather like a 40-minute farce” (28). It is, perhaps, the only way the general can describe a condition that he cannot explain. Conclusion

In rounding out my discussion of the hill station and Kipling’s distinctively duplex outlook, it is fitting to turn to his poem “A Tale of Two Cities,” whose title and opening lines suggest a dialectical opposition between two evenly weighted sites, the city (Calcutta) and the hill station (Simla). In the main, Kipling’s Calcutta combines all the ills that are missing in the hills. If Calcutta is a “pestilential town” that constantly flirts with death, Simla—or more generally, the Hills—is the best place “for rule, administration, and the rest.” Kipling consigns the city on the plain to the lower depths of human existence less for its unwholesome climate than for its avaricious trade, where “the Merchant risk[s] the perils” of sickness, corrupt politics, and chaotic sprawl for the sake of profit. By contrast, Simla provides all that is missing in the metropolis on the plains. Interestingly, despite its title, the poem devotes virtually all its space to descriptions of a choleric Calcutta rather than to the implied merits of Simla. This is no doubt because Simla was well known to Kipling’s contemporary readers and needed no further elucidation; Kipling makes his point simply by invoking the name. The same, however, could be said about Calcutta, whose long history of representation, both verbal and visual, had made its contradictions even more familiar to colonial-era readers than Simla’s. Why, then, an apparent mismatch between title and content? The answer is that the “two cities” here are not simply Simla and Calcutta. Rather, each of these settlements figures multiple communities, since, as I have argued about Simla here and will similarly argue about Calcutta in a later chapter, each is composed of a variety of spatial realities that intersect with and give shape to equally various cultures. In other words, each city in this poem symbolizes the attributes of all other hill stations and towns. The relative absence of Simla is thus entirely in tune with the author’s Anglo-Indian outlook, for if one eye glares at the city Charnock founded in Bengal, the other eye is shortsighted, unable or unwilling to bring into focus the distant (from Calcutta’s perspective) and idyllic enclave of imperial society. This 20/60 vision reveals Kipling’s Anglo-

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Indian sensibility insofar as it details the immediacy of its surroundings while trying to sustain a softened rose-tinted idea of an absent community. Yet once the Anglo-Indian physically travels to and enters that absent space, he or she is again forced to train a knowing eye on its variegated and mundane habitat. This does not mean that Calcutta and Simla simply switch places in the observer’s mind such that each representation stands in for the other. To the contrary, their differences are readily acknowledged, even celebrated. But owing to this inherently bifurcated outlook, Anglo-India’s geographical displacement does mean that no colonial locale is typologically fixed in its imagination. The uneven dialectic between immediacy and distance, much like that between childhood and adulthood, points to the precarious sense of being “unhomed.” In the case of Anglo-Indians, who as children were abruptly shipped Home by around age six, childhood simultaneously represented place and absence, home and homesickness. To speak, therefore, of the colonial Indian “hill station” or “city” is to call forth a host of contradictory emotions and memories, for these are places at once idyllic and mundane, transgressive and civilized. Space is radically split, and split again in the Anglo-Indian’s remembrance of these places as well as in day-to-day interactions within them. Notes The chapter title comes from Kipling’s Kim (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 220, where Kim, glad to see a dooli (palanquin) that will bear the ailing lama on their mountain journey, cries, “Oh, Holy One, thy Hills are kinder than our Plains!” Epigraph. Francis Younghusband, Wonders of the Himalaya (1924) (New Delhi: Srishti Publishers & Distributors, 2000), 2. Epigraph. Kipling, “A Ballad of Burial” (stanza 1), in The Works of Rudyard Kipling: One Volume Edition (New York: Black’s Readers Service Co., [1930]), 21. 1. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (New York: Bantom Books, 1966), 75. 2. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1984), 232. 3. Horace Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae (1743); and John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1875); both quoted in Schama, Landscape and Memory, 453, 513. 4. Younghusband, Wonders of the Himalaya, 1. 5. Younghusband, Wonders of the Himalaya, 67, 61. 6. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 69. 7. John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 16, 262–263. Ruskin rages about the unsurpassed, “[abominable] brutality” of the Indian soldiers’ uprising, which he believes derives inevitably from an “undisciplined,” “degraded” race.

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8. Thomas Gray, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray (1739), quoted in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 450. 9. See Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 154–162. 10. Kipling, Kim, 199. Page references to Kim in this chapter will hereafter appear in parentheses in the body of my text. 11. See for example Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, chapter 6 (200–277); Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 5, 16, 26, 115, 156; Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 113 and passim; and Baucom, Out of Place, 45, 114. 12. Andrew Rutherford, “Introduction,” in Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxi. 13. Cumming, Wild Men and Wild Beasts, 2. Kipling’s narrator in “Wressley of the Foreign Office” repeats this in Plain Tales from the Hills (227), suggesting either that Kipling was familiar with Cumming, or that Cumming’s phrase was in currency in the 1870s and 1880s. 14. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence. 15. See G. M. Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology (London: John Bale, Sons, and Danielsson, Ltd., 1904): “For India . . . a good sunhat is indispensable” (29). The term “sola topee,” a combination of the corruption of “solar” and the Hindi for “hat,” was used for over a century, although it later overlapped with the term “pith helmet.” For Kipling’s use of the term, see for example the story “The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly,” in Plain Tales from the Hills. 16. From August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, I (1883), quoted in Nora Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal (Chicago: University of Chicago Geography Department Research Paper No. 141, 1972), 12. Mitchell’s work provides a good history of the British rationale for and development of hill stations by using as a case study Kodaikanal, in southern India. She notes that besides the vested interest of the British in establishing these settlements, American missionaries (as well as those from other European countries) followed suit. 17. Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical pathology, III (1883), quoted in Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, 47. 18. Emily Eden, Up the Country, 1837–1840 (1866), quoted in Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 136. 19. Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 137 and passim. 20. Ibid., 59, 180–181. 21. Ibid., 86, 250. 22. Ibid., 250–251. 23. For example, Francis Yeats-Brown in his best-selling Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930), describes his general experience of India by using phrases like the “immensities and secrecies of India.” Also see Chapter Five, below.

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24. An Indian Chaplain, “Hymn to the Omnipresent Deity” (beginning with stanza 4), in The Mahableshwar Hills and Other Poems (London: Provost and Co., 1876), 10. 25. Although a few hill stations, such as low-lying Dehra Dun, also functioned as cantonments, these exceptions retained the social atmosphere of their more numerous, and geographically higher, cousins. For more on the definition of “hill station” and their establishment, see Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, chapter 3; Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, chapter 1; and Kanwar, Imperial Simla, chapter 2. 26. Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 3. 27. Scott, An Indian Journal, 8. 28. Some Account of the Lawrence Military Asylum (1850), quoted in Sanjay Srivastava, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 99. 29. Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 41. The government’s actual stay in Simla lengthened over the years, until, by Kipling’s time in the 1880s, it was lasting “seven months and more,” as Kanwar points out. 30. Ibid., 4–5. 31. Life on the plains—by which most Britishers meant life in the cantonment— was almost invariably described in these ways. This quote comes from a mid-century travelogue by Robert G. Hobbes in an unpublished 1852 manuscript, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan” (IOLR/ MSS.EUR. B260). 32. John Northam, Guide to Masuri, Landour, Dehra Dun, and the Hills North of Dehra (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1884), 4–5. 33. Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 6. 34. Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 78. 35. Quoted in ibid., 79. 36. Mollie Panter-Downes, Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill Station in India (London: Pimlico, 1985), 7–8. 37. Ibid., 8. Panter-Downes is perhaps thinking of G. O. Trevelyan’s remark, in his popular 1864 account of a visit to India, The Competition Wallah, that the hill air is “as pure and fresh as the air of Malvern” (96). 38. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 23. 39. Geofry (pseudonym), Ooty and Her Sisters, or Our Hill Stations in South India, with Sketches of Hill Tribes (Madras: Higginbotham and Co., 1881), 9. 40. Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 248. 41. See for example McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 64–65; Peter Havholm, Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction (Aldershot, ENG: Ashgate, 2008), 103–109; Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 80; and Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, 89. 42. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 466–467.

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43. Alice Elizabeth Dracott, Simla Village Tales (1906), quoted in Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 9. 44. See Kanwar, Imperial Simla, chapters 1 and 2. 45. See Kipling, Kim, 63. 46. All page references henceforth appear parenthetically in the body of my text, and are cited from the following edition: Plain Tales from the Hills, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 47. On the connection between empire and class, including concepts of motherhood, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 48. For a good summary of this development, and of its influence on Kipling, see McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, chapter 2. As recently as 1967, Mollie Panter-Downes, in her otherwise engaging Ooty Preserved (cited above), echoes colonial attitudes toward indigenous hill people. For example, she describes Toda men as having “strong features that would look well on a coin.” The Todas are, she determines, “much as they were in the attractive old coloured prints of the hill station” (22). 49. Moore-Gilbert rightly takes critics to task for decontextualized readings of the story in the introduction to his edited anthology Writing India: The Literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 13. See also, in the same volume, Moore-Gilbert’s “ ‘The Bhabhal of Tongues’: Reading Kipling, Reading Bhabha,” 111–138. 50. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women, ed. KumKum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88–126. 51. Andrew Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile (London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 29–30. 52. See Wurgaft’s discussion of this in The Imperial Imagination, 35. 53. Quoted in Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, 35. 54. Malcolm Darling, Apprentice to Power: India 1904–1908; quoted in Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, 38. 55. See Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers, 77; Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 131; Ian Baucom, Out of Place, 95; McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 93, 102; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 69. 56. See Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 70–80. 57. Ibid., 80. 58. To be sure, Kipling, like other colonial writers, tends to group together and typify the behavior of India’s numerous royals, seeing them as generally hedonistic or reckless. In reality, of course, the actions of rajas (and, in a few cases, ranis) differed from one to the other, with some siding with the British, others feuding with one

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another, and yet others investing themselves in the growing nationalist movement. For more on this in the context of northern hill stations, see Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 98–101 and passim. 59. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 20. The authors cite this summation from the 1978 work of anthropologist Barbara Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. 60. Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would be Kipling, 29. 61. Historians like Thomas Metcalf and Bernard Cohn, for example, have (respectively) detailed the relationship between power and architecture and power and regal ceremony. See Metcalf, An Imperial Vision; and Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 165–209. 62. Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 19–20. 63. See John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation,and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 13, 168.

Chapter 3

“Out of Bounds” Clubs, Cantonments, Plains

PLACES TO AVOID.—Vicinity of large cities, especially to leeward of them, also the proximity of cantonments occupied by the native black troops of India, whose habits put all sanitary rules at defiance. —Charles A. Gordon, M.D., 1866

The Colonial Club, Inside and Out

If the hill station as a whole served as a site for transgressive behavior among Anglo-Indians, it was the station Club more specifically where the community most visibly acted out its ambivalent attitudes and aspirations. The Club was an intermediary space that figures prominently in colonial literature, including Kipling’s works. The words of George Orwell, who served as a policeman in colonial Burma, capture this well: “In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the seat of British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain” (because the British denied them entry).1 This was so because the Club functioned as a venue for stories—by Kipling as well as other writers—about that other pole of British colonial life, the plains. It was in the comfort of the Club that civilian and military men could embellish stories about their adventures on the plains. The accent on masculine plains exploits shared in a spirit of badinage throws into relief the fact of the hill station’s large European female population in the late nineteenth century, who figured principally as objects of romance. The Club’s male members clearly exaggerate or invent their adventures to remind themselves and the station’s female audience of the supposed dangers that 112

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surround British enclaves on the subcontinental plains, dangers that demand a muscular response. But depictions of the plains, as we have seen, are as liable as any other spatial trope to be unstable signifiers of colonial attitudes. As if to represent this ambivalence physically, the British built a few of their 114 cantonments (military stations) not on the plains, where most were located, but in low-lying hills. As with the (usually) higher hill stations, the lofty cantonments were intended to provide respite from the heat, diseases, and generally “bad air” (the literal definition of “malaria”) that besieged Europeans in the lower regions.2 In practice, men stationed at the higher-elevation cantonments often proved to be just as susceptible to the “degenerating” conditions their colonial officials incessantly worried about, such as venereal diseases and soldierly misconduct. In colonial literature, therefore, the loftier cantonments frequently functioned in much the same way as those on the plains, with the difference that the hill environment fostered a greater sense of “English” social life. In Kipling we find noteworthy differences from more conventional British representations of the military station, and these shed particular light on the Anglo-Indian outlook. The Club is a quiet but magnetic presence in colonial Indian writings. Particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Club—a term whose habitual capitalization signifies its important presence—was the focal point of the British-Indian community, most commonly as an after-work gathering site for men, where one could sink into an armchair, whisky-soda in hand, to read the latest newspapers, exchange gossip, and retain the European community’s “illusion of permanence.”3 Though usually off-limits to women, the Club occasionally staged community theater productions and seasonal balls. More significantly, membership in the Club—every station had one, and cities and larger towns boasted several different, sometimes competing, clubs—was a coveted symbol of societal status that depended on one’s social rank.4 With entry into clubs based on social status (one for officers, another for enlisted men; one for Europeans, separate ones for Eurasians and Indians), the Club would seem to be self-selective and therefore not at all the hybrid space that I argue it in fact was. Indeed, as Frantz Fanon has written, “The colonial world is a world cut in two,” a world that physically and psychologically separates colonizer from colonized. This Manichean distinction, where belonging and not belonging are key determinants, often threatens, as Fanon observes, to characterize the national world as well.5 The Club makes socially concrete these boundaries and the dynamics across them in ways that lay bare the dilemma of nation-making, where those categorized “in-between” are alternately barred and allowed entrance, depending on what is expedient to the door-keepers. Let

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us recall the touchstones of the imperial and the national state, the contradictory visions of an expansive and yet contractive dream. The dream is expansive insofar as it aims to encompass distant territories and cultures; it is contractive in that, in the most differential terms, it may exclude from the precincts of the imperial “home” (and full citizenship) those who presume to possess equal membership. Thus, the Indian was called a “citizen” of the colonial British Empire, but clearly not entitled to the same privileges or member services as the English citizen. Relatedly, there is a discordant note of alternating claustrophobia and spaciousness in Indo-Anglian literary representations of colonial India, where imperialism’s expansive-contractive rhythm finds its spatial correlative in, for example, the longing recorded in the autobiography of the popular 1950s novelist and one-time colonial army officer John Masters for the subcontinent’s open spaces such as the Himalayas on the one hand, and its confinements—the bungalow and the Club—on the other.6 We find a similar theme in a book to whose influential depiction of BritishIndian army life Masters consciously responds, Francis Yeats-Brown’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which appeared during the colonial era (1930): Riding through the densely packed bazaars of Bareilly City, . . . cantering across the magical plains that stretched away to the Himalayas, I shivered at the millions and immensities and secrecies of India. I liked to finish my day at the club, in a world whose limits were known and where people answered my beck . . . [where] exiled heads were bent over English newspapers, their thoughts far away, but close to mine.7

As in so many British accounts of the subcontinent, the plains acquire their sinister allure inside the contemplative world of the Club, each space acting as a foil for the other. Additionally, the Raj Club was a colonial version of the coffee-house establishments that had sprung up in Europe in the seventeenth century, which according to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White were spaces that “provided a mediation between domestic privacy and the grand public institutions of business and the state.”8 Like the coffeehouse, the colonial Club was largely a male sphere of middle-class sensibility, a physical as well as imaginative place where government functionaries could mingle over a game of billiards and, emboldened with gin and tonic, vent their frustrations and superstitions regarding the regimentation of their lives outside the Club’s walls. But far from being a venue for radical speech or democratic license, the Club, like the coffeehouse in Europe, effectively buttressed the state interest in “the regulation of the body, manners and morals of its clientele.”9 It was principally the middle-class

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male whose “body,” thanks to venues like the Club, was thus shielded from the grotesque, corruptible physicality of those lower-class “colonials and provincials” who favored the unruly tavern.10 No wonder, then, that Kipling’s Strickland races to the Simla Club after his adventure as Miss Youghal’s sais to procure some “decent clothes” and scrub from his body the vestiges of lowly sais-ness with the aid of “a hot bath, with soda in it” (28). The Club was also a prime locale in which to find out the supposed truth behind station gossip (as we are told in the story “The Other Man”) (72). In colonial literature such truth is rarely a real threat to the state, and the facts behind a given romance or mystery prove to be incidental to the operation of colonial governance. So, for example, E. P. Stebbing, in one of his popular books about jungle hunting, declares revealingly that although the Club was one of “the delights of the Station,” it had “but a subordinate place in the scheme of life in the East” for “the Ruling Race.”11 The typical hill station Club had evolved from its East India Company days of military “revelry, drunkenness, [and] gambling” to become, in Pamela Kanwar’s apt words, “the picture of ritual” by Kipling’s time.12 There thus seems little doubt that the historical Club of colonial India was, like its models in Europe, instrumental in supporting and furthering the social and administrative interests of the state. The Club Divided

If, as I have been arguing, Kipling’s self-styled “outsider” outlook is characteristically ambivalent in its regard for the competing interests of European administrators, Anglo-Indians, Indians, and Eurasians, how exactly does the stratified space of the Club figure in his (Kipling’s) Anglo-Indian narratives? To be more specific, is Strickland’s compulsion to scour his body also a symbolic need to distinguish his physicality (and by extension, morality) from the unholy dirt that clings to all grooms? If this were indeed the case, Strickland’s action, to follow Stallybrass and White’s observation, would merely endorse a European colonialist attitude that underpins the Raj overseers’ middle-class mind-set. This is not, however, how Kipling references the Club. To the contrary, the Simla Club to which Strickland races for a bath proves to be a locale that exposes, and effectively undercuts, the conventional operation of social space in the colonial hill station. Because the Club insists on being a racially and socially hermetic space, it actually accentuates the borderline that Kipling shows to be ever-present in everyone’s minds, and which Strickland habitually crosses.13 In other words, Kipling’s tales show that the club’s very exclusivity relies upon a contradictory desire to both maintain and cross boundaries of class and race. Historically such boundaries are maintained not simply by physical barriers, such as walls, screens, and clothing, but equally by conversational rules. Indeed,

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the physical and social boundaries were intended to reinforce each other. Who could address whom in this hierarchical public sphere was as important as who could enter. An enlisted Englishman could not strike up a casual conversation with an officer, just as a civilian clerk could not impulsively hail an administrator. Honorific titles were expected to be used by juniors, and all Indians were expected to call Europeans “sir” or “madam.” Clubs, especially those in smaller towns, were also frequently sectioned off according to gender: Englishwomen eventually gained entrée to clubs but were banned from their bars. As with the bungalow, the club veranda became a space in which women could gather to talk.14 The social and physical spaces of the Club therefore maintain codes of conduct in the service of imperial order. Kipling’s stories subvert this “production of space,” in Lefebvre’s sense— that is, the combination of social and material milieus—by showing it to be, in fact, far more porous than colonial culture believed it to be.15 He does so by fusing narrator and key characters, by situating stories in iconic British-Indian spaces, and by mocking the colonial obsession with certainty and fact. In “The Bisara of Pooree,” in Plain Tales from the Hills, the narrator, Churton, and a mysterious friend, “the Man who Knew,” share a compulsion to tell others (including the reader) what they know about a bejeweled “box of silver” containing a fish-shaped ornament—the “Bisara” of the story’s title (190)—perhaps to unburden themselves. The space where they divulge this secret is, fittingly, at a dining table in the Simla Club. Unbeknownst to them, a certain Army officer named Pack has overheard their conversation as the Man who Knew bent Churton’s ear, “Half in fun, and half hoping to be believed” (192). We learn that the Man who Knew is subsequently eager to report potentially scandalous news to Churton: The Bisara, a priceless antique and legendary magical charm that has since been stolen from Churton’s curiosity shop, is likely in the hands of Pack, “a nasty little man who must have crawled into the Army by mistake.” Intent on winning the hand of Miss Hollis, Pack, so the Man who Knew guesses, has stolen the Bisara as an enticement. The dining room, reports the narrator, “is built, as all the world knows, in two sections, with an arch-arrangement dividing them” so that, seated a certain way, “you cannot see any one who has come in.” Moreover, “every word that you say can be heard” by all other diners and “by the servants behind the screen.” “This,” the narrator remarks pointedly, “is worth knowing; an echoing-room is a trap to be forewarned against” (192). Pack, dining alone near the “arch-arrangement” just out of sight of Churton and his friend, is one such eavesdropper, and apparently the only one to overhear the secret. From this elaborate setup we can see that the place of the telling is clearly as important as what is told. Here the story proffers another contradiction: The room’s divided

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layout and potential for entrapment via gossip and scandal is commonly known, yet Churton and the Englishman appear to be oblivious to this danger. There is no indication in the story that they are alone in the Club, and clearly they have made a mistake in conversing about the Bisara in a much-frequented place. They have forgotten what is most “worth knowing” in this instance, namely, the porosity of their surroundings. The reader too, of course, eavesdrops on their conversation thanks to the narrator’s summary of the Bisara’s background and magical power. Importantly, Churton’s “ordinary English ears” treat the mysterious Englishman’s tale as a “bit of folklore” (192), whereas the narrator—and the eavesdropping Pack—is a believer. Churton, in other words, proves to be a typically skeptical government official, and one who has yet to learn the truth about Club gossip and Indian magic. He is up to this point a mere collector, rather than interpreter, of Indian “curiosities” in his home. The narrator and The Man who Knew, by contrast, can read the collection with equal acuity. Indeed, the voices of the narrator and the mysterious, savvy Englishman are, I contend, one and the same. The exposition on the Bisara’s birth in “Pooree ages since” with which the tale opens (190), the narrator’s sympathy for the unknowing “ponydriver” whose pony carries off the tiny Bisara hidden inside its thick necklace (sympathy because the pony-driver hasn’t a clue about the magical potency of the box, which the Man who Knew is glad to be “rid of”). The narrative’s marked insistence on “knowing” and “believing” all point to the narrator’s uncanny intimacy with the extraordinarily observant Englishman. To say, in this context, that the Englishman is the narrator is also to say that his voice, and that of the Plain Tales collection as a whole, is Anglo-Indian inasmuch as the bifurcated and permeable setting mirrors his own bi-cultural identity as well as his narratorial elasticity. This explains the narrative’s current of credulity that opposes Churton’s initial wall of skepticism, and also the ambivalent characterization of India as a place where, although “nothing changes” beneath its bright surfaces, there is always change—alterations of the heart as well as Churton’s altered views of magic. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the narrator’s (and Englishman’s) AngloIndian perspective is his characteristically absorbed attention to features of northern India’s geography and to the dynamism of spaces seemingly “fixed,” according to colonial expectations. Just as in the story “Lispeth,” where the protagonist’s cultural hybridity and mobility cross the imperious British insistence on maintaining borders in the Himalayan foothills, “The Bisara of Pooree” spotlights the ease with which a tiny box traverses the subcontinent’s vastness. The box’s origin in “Pooree” (Puri) points to forces in India that elude imperial control, for Puri was (and is) a vital Hindu pilgrimage center that, like other

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places of pilgrimage such as Varanasi and Hardwar, is far from being a “timeless” or “changeless” holy city. Pilgrims in colonial India contributed to a robust economy that operated beyond British reach. Markets, bazaars, and fairs that arose in conjunction with pilgrimages, and which generated the kinds of caravanseries Kipling vibrantly describes as proceeding along the Grand Trunk Road in Kim, belie the desire of Europeans to see India and its peoples in stasis.16 Such spaces recur in Anglo-Indian narration precisely because they mirror the AngloIndian’s restless subjectivity. Clearly then the Club, despite its apparent stolidity and many boundaries, is not immune to leakage. The Simla Club dining hall’s division into two sections and further partitioning by the servants’ screen is described in a paragraph that is framed, as I have noted, by an insistence on “knowing.” There are, it would seem, two kinds of knowledge, the useless and the useful (what is “worth knowing”), which roughly correspond to the Club’s physical separations. The dining room’s “arch-arrangement” is simply ornamental rather than practical, yet it enables Pack to remain hidden as he hears a truly useful piece of information. The servants’ screen likewise hides the kitchen from diners, and yet proves equally conducive to spying on private conversations. Just as there is a disuniting impulse at the heart of the Club, so (the story suggests) is there inherent disunion at the core of colonialism’s will to know. For even as colonial authorities sought to know every facet of India that concerned their rule, they cultivated the idea of tropical mystery that whetted their curiosity and provided a justification for extrajudicial investigation. As Lewis Wurgaft puts it, “The British fascination with magic—and the identification of India with illusion supported by it— existed in contrapuntal relationship to the supposedly demystified doctrine of administrative order, the pillar of imperial policy.”17 In this sense, the constant references in colonial-era writing to Indians’ fear of the “evil eye” reflect less a sociological interest than the Europeans’ anxious realization that the government’s desire to “see” and control India with the same degree of omnipresence would never be fulfilled. To Kipling’s Anglo-Indian eye, however, the inherent futility of attempting such surveillance was cause for celebration because the spaces he envisions in Plain Tales and in The Jungle Book have more to do with the preservation of mystery and mobility (the Bisara, the jungle) as with the need for authoritative order. The Bisara’s migration from Puri to northern India gives heart to the narrator’s faith in Indian systems of pilgrim commerce, for Puri is the authoritative epicenter of this traffic and yet never forcefully seeks to retrieve the tiny box-charm. The eyeless fish inside the box, which the story’s epigraphic rhyme informs us is the real wish-granter (“Bring me a lover, thou little Blind Fish” [190]),

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underscores the story’s concern with insight. The Bisara’s unplotted, mysterious journey is distinguished from the colonial fetish for facts, for fixed routes and explicable narratives. It is therefore fitting that in this instance, the Bisara is stolen “from its place under the clock on the mantelpiece” in Churton’s chamber. This, the narrator wryly notes, is one of the “facts of the case” (191). Such facts are, of course, incidental to the larger claims about the box’s magic; they do not lead us any nearer the sort of truth required of Simla society. The mantelpiece clock that keeps regular time on its perch above the Bisara’s “place” is, in contrast to the box-charm, a meaningless distraction from the object (the Bisara) that can boast of being “the only regularly working, trustworthy love-charm in the country” (190). In keeping with the aura of secrecy that surrounds mysteries, the entire incident—Pack’s initial attempt to cross the marriage “code” by winning the hand of a higher-status woman and the revelation of his thieving strategy—in the hill station ends with “no public scandal” (194). But the text itself reminds us of the gossipy narrator who crafts it, much the way some hand in Puri crafted the Bisara “ages since” (190). The small box containing an eyeless wishing fish in many respects matches the narrative frame, which encloses a tale whose teller purports to know more than he will say. Like the box, the story crosses the topographical and social boundaries separating hill from plain.18 Cantonments: The European Station in Context

The 1897 version of the Cantonments Act defines a cantonment thus: “[A] locality . . . which is set apart primarily for military and medical officers, chaplains, soldiers, European and East Indian subordinates and their families; for whom houses situated within such limits are by priority of right available.”19 These limits were governed principally by health concerns, as the epigraph that opens this chapter makes clear. Once in place, the cantonment’s spatial obsessions inevitably became, in the words of sociologist Anthony King, “a total culture area [sic] . . . where the environment was modified not only according to culture-specific theories of ‘medicine’ but also, to accord with equally culturespecific olfactory, aural and visual preferences.”20 The cultural dimension of the cantonment and its surroundings cannot be understated. The functional motivations for establishing cantonments early in the nineteenth century were always, as I have said, entwined in aesthetic considerations stemming from both a general European sensibility and a specifically English one. Health, beauty, and military demands thus merged in continuously changing ways. We can see this mingling of style and function, and of the sentiments that drive them, in an essay on architecture by John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, who was an influential Raj artist. “It is on the architecture of to-day,” he

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insists, “that the preservation of Indian art in any healthy semblance of healthy life now hinges.”21 By “architecture of to-day,” Kipling meant the building sense that subscribed to his own preference, which was to encourage the use of India’s “village” craftsmanship in public buildings, though always guided by British expertise. By comparison, British architects and artists who preferred a grander “Indo-Saracenic” style, dominated by Byzantine and Mughal arches and domes, viewed this particular mix as demonstrating Britain’s supposedly enlightened rule. Kipling the elder, a crafts enthusiast, despaired at the many Indo-Saracenic projects of his day; in his eyes they were a corruption of indigenous arts and, by consequence, diminished Indian faith in the Raj. The sentence above, in which Kipling repeats the word “healthy,” raises the political stakes by concluding with the verb “hinges.” For Kipling, public spaces in India were morally and aesthetically healthy only if they reflected local craftwork. Only in this way, Kipling believed, could such spaces serve the superior goals of an enlightened Europe.22 Kipling’s choice of terms is important, for it evokes a then-prevalent entwining of ideologies of space and health that, in aesthetic terms, took for granted the transparent representation of cultural and imperial values. It is no accident, therefore, that the elder Kipling, as chief designer for the deliberately ornate Imperial Assemblage of 1877, when Queen Victoria was formally proclaimed Empress of India, took active part in what Bernard Cohn has called the “idiom” of ritualized ceremony through which Britain sought to consolidate its rule.23 A crucial component of this was a re-orchestration of space, which took on added urgency for the British following the events of 1857. Besides architecture, the Raj was notable for its establishment of railways, roads, telegraph lines, and military cantonments, all of which enabled the government to control its interests. On the face of its successful hold on the subcontinent, the Raj government’s assumption that this reconstitution of space would elicit public awe was justified. This Victorian version of shock and awe, performed on the backs of Indian laborers, did not translate into appreciation on the part of Indians for the cultural value of European material achievements, as John Lockwood Kipling and his contemporaries, for all their disagreements, had assumed. At stake was the British aim of soliciting Indians’ trust in a putatively benign (because aesthetically concerned) institution of power, and, conversely, European trust in Indian labor. Not surprisingly, the “hinge” that John Lockwood Kipling speaks of has as much to do with the trust and betrayal as with physical and moral health. Of all the public spaces in British India, it is the cantonment that most obviously (indeed, obsessively) exemplified the fault lines of health/ illness and trust/betrayal, a fact that explains its recurrence as a setting in colonial literature.

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At about the same time the elder Kipling was entering the fray over imperial aesthetic values, George Otto Trevelyan, scion of two famous families with links to India (his uncle was Thomas Babington Macaulay), sums up the cantonment station this way: An Indian station consists of two parts: the cantonments of the Europeans and the native city and bazaar. The west and east are far apart, separated by a waste common, fields or garden . . . The west rules, collects taxes, gives balls, . . . builds its theatres . . . The east pays, . . . haunts its rotting shrines, washes in failing tanks, and drinks its semi-putrid water. Between the two is a great gulf: to bridge it over is the work reserved for him who shall come to stabilitate [sic] our empire in the East. . . . The European station is laid out in large rectangles formed by wide roads. The native city is an aggregate of houses perforated by tortuous paths . . . The Europeans live in detached houses, each surrounded by walls enclosing large gardens, lawns, out-offices. The natives live packed up in squeezed-up tenements, kept from falling to pieces by mutual pressure. The handful of Europeans occupy four times the space of the city which contains tens of thousands of Hindoos and Mussulmen.24

The European cantonment, with its wide, guarded spaces and neatly ordered roads, was the extreme expression of colonial preoccupations with health and public order. Bholanauth Chunder, writing in 1869, similarly contrasts the congestion and dust of the town with the cantonment’s “long avenues.” “In no Indian town are the roads so broad, and so well ventilated. The open maidans [ fields] very well answer the purpose of these squares which preserve the health of our metropolis.” Chunder’s identification with British propriety—“our metropolis”—illustrates the degree to which he, an anglicized Bengali, feels pressed into colonial service; the book was, after all, published in London.25 Chunder’s praise of the cantonment’s “bungalows, barracks, bazars, and gardens” anchors his impression of the European station’s service to health.26 In this connection, the historical context of the establishment of cantonments merits attention. A rapidly industrializing England was increasingly concerned with matters of public health and hygiene, which incurred the need for infrastructural changes to suit prevailing attitudes. One influential theory held that sickness was conveyed primarily through the bad air that clogged the crowded, windowless dwellings in major cities, including London. (Only late in the nineteenth century did the germ theory of disease assert itself over other arguments.27) In England first, then in India, the importance of high ceilings and

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proper ventilation was a key element in the budding public health awareness.28 There was also a vital mercantile interest: Broad lamplit streets would bring greater commerce and easier policing.29 These early nineteenth-century Chadwickian and commercial concerns directly shaped the design of military stations in the colonies. In India, worries over the health of the British soldiery intensified after the Mutiny. Existing cantonments were enlarged and refurbished, and new ones proliferated. In this post-1857 period, as for example Veena Talwar Oldenberg observes in her discussion of Lucknow, the cantonment “spread out its outposts into the center of the old city when its prominent buildings, which had once been palaces, harems, or religious edifices, were recaptured, vacated, and converted into a string of armed camps.”30 Throughout the subcontinent, the cantonment’s expansive but linear “Military Board” style of architecture31 sought to establish “a small European cosmos at the edge of the city” largely to provide recreational diversions for a soldiery easily tempted by the city’s pleasures.32 As an 1862 military report put it, “Amongst the many Indian questions that occupied the attention of the Local and Home Governments . . . , none excited more interest than that which treated of the sanitary tracts of country in each Presidency, their undoubted utility, and the state of their communications.” The report goes on to declare that sanitary concerns are “not by any means a purely medical question . . . there are many circumstances, such as character of scenery, and the means of obtaining occupation and amusement which . . . may materially affect the health of the [European soldiers].”33 Clearly, the authorities had far-reaching implications in mind for their reconfiguration of the colonial built environment. Clearly, then, governmental concerns for European health and hygiene in the tropics, and the establishment of habitats expected to meet these concerns, were crucial factors in the shaping of colonial attitudes and of Indian responses to these attitudes. European constitutions were believed to be more refined (physically as well as morally), and therefore susceptible to degeneration in India’s “unsuitable” climate. By contrast, the Native body’s wilder, less refined constitution (so the logic went) inured it to the harsh tropical climes. This perception reinforced British suspicions about Indian reliability after 1857, for as an English surgeon in Bengal wrote: “A Native’s estimate of heat and cold is so different from ours that we are not likely to obtain, unless by direct observation, any reliable information regarding the meteorology of an unknown District.”34 It is significant that this remark was made a few months after the uprising began. The 1857 war provided a ready answer, in British minds, to the long-sought reasons for European susceptibility to disease in India. In a word, it was the inherent untrustworthiness of Indians that was now said to have fed the

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conflict and necessitated the segregation of the two communities. But this attitude was accompanied by greater efforts to placate Indians’ religious and social sentiments, since British insensitivity to these had been a significant impetus for the uprising of the sepoys against their East India Company masters. The British could not, moreover, do without the cheap labor, food, and merchandise procured via Indian cities and towns. Colonial authorities thus moved to assert greater control over the actions of both British and Indian soldiers in and around the cantonment by ratcheting up the rules and construction projects that seemed most likely to ensure the separation of the races and, consequently, secure their health. Regulations laid out in succeeding versions of the Cantonments Act were conceived with these aims in mind. As one such publication put it, “Wherever it shall appear necessary for the protection of troops . . . it shall be lawful . . . to extend the limits of any military cantonment . . . and to define the limits around such cantonment within which such rules . . . shall be in force.”35 Any soldier, British or Indian, trying to conduct trade in illicit liquor or prostitution faced stiff penalties, including imprisonment. Punishment depended, of course, on who crossed which lines: A European venturing “out of bounds”— that is, outside the cantonment—without authorization was governed by one set of rules, whereas an Indian daring to enter Crown property without invitation faced other, often harsher disciplinary actions. Indian soldiers lived on lands and in conditions far inferior to those of the white cantonment. These soldiers’ dwellings in so-called “Native lines” often consisted of little more than a hut made of “straw or bamboo matting” and “measuring some 10 by 7 ½ by 7 feet high.” Each hut was crowded with family members, constructed close to other huts, and lacked the proper drainage and ventilation enjoyed by even the simplest British barracks.36 Although the mortality rate for Indian soldiers was much below that of European soldiers, the glaring differences between the European cantonment and the Native lines was apparent to the Indian soldiery. As the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand recalls of his service in the colonial army, Somehow, the White Sahibs . . . always saw to it that the best landscape in the town was reserved for the army. And, within the cantonment, . . . roads were repaired as soon as they were torn up by the rains or too much traffic and watered, morning and afternoon, to keep the dust at bay, hedges trimmed, so as to set off the bungalows to effect; and there they lived . . . in a seemingly grim, awe-inspiring silence.37

Such perceptions bear out Anthony King’s observation that the development of the cantonment was not only a spatial phenomenon, but also a cultural one.

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Kim’s Road: Knowledge Beyond the Boundary

Cantonment culture provided a potent setting for colonial fiction, much of it predictably romanticized and tendentious. The comparative exceptions, to which I now turn, provide a sidewise take on colonial life that presages narratives that are more forthrightly critical of British-Indian attitudes, including E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Just as we saw Kipling take hill station and Club societies to task for their superciliousness and, at the same time, probe the ambivalences beneath their surfaces, so do Kipling’s tales set in the cantonment expose ambiguities that creep into this otherwise rigidly-defined space. These cantonment tales, like those of the hills, thrive on the intersections and overlaps of class, race, and language. The conjunction of habits, prejudices, and misapprehensions supplies Kipling with his opening for the kind of comic frisson that invariably animates tales of cockney and Irish soldiers upending the dignity of their superiors. In the larger, structural arc of the Plain Tales from the Hills collection, the cantonment episodes, as I noted in the previous chapter, alternate in syncopation with the hill, Club, and city stories to evoke the spatially attuned rhythm of Anglo-India, a rhythm that requires but also counters the clamor of the Raj. Kipling’s stories sustain the impression that the cantonment culture’s insistent physicality, and all that is associated with it, is actually as tentative and mutable as that of any hill station. It is in this light that we must read these “plain tales from the hills,” interpreting each spatial representation not as one fixed space defining another, but as an intrinsically messy mix of spatially conditioned cultures and motivations.38 In Kim, India’s hills assume almost mythic proportions, and fittingly so, for it is the Himalayas to which the lama, with Kim in tow, travels in a spiritual search for the River of the Arrow. Kim’s enlistment as a spy and the lama’s otherworldly quest come together in unexpected ways. As Zohreh Sullivan succinctly puts it, Kim is “At once a spy thriller, a picaresque adventure story, a maturation story, and a quest romance.”39 Briefly, the novel follows the orphaned eight-yearold Irish boy, Kimball O’Hara, who can pass for Indian, as he searches out his late father’s identity. With his eyes to the ground, Kim is enlisted by a horse trader named Mahbub Ali, who is in the service of British intelligence, to provide information about people he daily encounters. Kim meets the old Tibetan lama and joins him on his spiritual quest, which eventually takes them to the Himalayas. Along the way, and mostly on the immensely long Grand Trunk Road that becomes a central motif in the novel, Kim meets a colorful range of characters. These include Lurgan Sahib, a British spymaster whose cover is a Simla jewelry store, and who immediately recognizes Kim’s skill at entering all

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manner of social groups; the Sahiba, a strong-minded hill woman who proves invaluable to both Kim and the lama; Hurree Babu, an anglicized Bengali and shrewd British operative; and Lispeth, who reappears here long after Kipling published her eponymous story. Eventually, Kim is educated for three years at an English school to ensure that he learns European ways, which enables him to more effectively participate in the “Great Game,” the term Kipling made famous to refer to the battle between Russia and Britain for control of Afghanistan. When Kim and the lama reach the heights upon which the lama will breathe his last, in the novel’s final chapter, the reader is presented with a duplex image of journeying that sustains the entire narrative: There is, on the one hand, the Grand Trunk Road that, as we are told early in the book by an old Mutiny veteran, “is the backbone of all Hind” and hosts “[a]ll castes and kinds of men.”40 On the other hand, Kim and his ailing but relieved master are confronted on their journey up the mountainside by “the hideous curves of the Cut Road” and “roaring gusts off Kedarnath” (224). That is to say, the hurly-burly of the Grand Trunk that beckons Kim with its memory of “the caress of soft mud squashing up between the toes” and “the forbidden greasy sweetmeats of the bazars” on the wayside (107) is at odds with the horrifyingly perched ghat (hillside) road he and the lama, prostrate on a dooli (palanquin) encounter toward journey’s end. The novel would thus appear to present two clearly contrasting images of colonial India’s spatial impress, one humanly ordered, populous and clamorous, the other natural, silent, stark. Connected to, and apparently transcending, these competing commercial and geographical representations is the depiction of a vast imperial system of fact-gathering and map-making that, as Ian Baucom observes, resists the nomadic and “trespassive” in its relentless desire for control.41 I say that the novel appears to present these images straightforwardly because this is not the case. Kim in fact never settles upon a singular ideological or representational imperative, as a strictly imperialist reading of the novel would encourage one to believe. To the contrary, the novel celebrates, as Baucom and others have shown, the “borderlines” of Kim’s world, a world that includes, as we have seen, Hurree Babu the culturally hybrid agent; Kim himself, the Irish boy bred on “bazar-rumour” and tutored by a “half-caste woman”; shrewd courtesans; and Lurgan Sahib, the hybrid, “black-bearded” man with “white hands” in Simla who trains Kim in the art of perception.42 Yet this celebration of hybridism is balanced with the recurring motif of map-making, a skill critical to imperial logistics and one for which Kim exhibits a natural talent, as the spymaster Colonel Creighton soon notices. How, then, are we to read the novel—as a text that ultimately endorses the imperial mandate, or one that resists it? There are compelling arguments for

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both interpretations, including Baucom’s case for a view of it as schizophrenic in that it holds up a belief in inimitable, active Englishness even as it constantly undercuts this construct. Englishness in the imperial moment indeed proves to be necessarily predicated on its own un-doing, its “tropicalization.”43 Thus, Anglo-Indians like Kim who are radically “tropicalized” embody the kind of inbetween existence on which English identity must be sustained, notwithstanding strident claims to the contrary. Here we come to a vital reason for the novel’s fascination with roads, for Kipling’s interest, as virtually all his works set in India clearly show, is in the virtues of mobility as opposed to stasis. In many ways, Kipling’s works consistently re-enact his meanderings as a young reporter, when, as he tells us in his autobiography, “Having no position to consider, and my trade enforcing it, I could move at will in the fourth dimension.” He means by this last phrase the “bare horrors of the private’s life,” but he clearly also has in mind “all manner of odd places,” including “liquor-shops . . . and opium dens.” Nor is this purely for journalistic purposes. Kipling acknowledges, in words that anticipate the colonial flanerie I discuss in relation to his Calcutta travelogue, that he wanders nocturnal city streets “for the sheer sake of looking.”44 It is this craving for mobility and looking, and for the activity’s inherent rewards and dangers, that Kim embraces in journeying from plains to hills, from the “Sahib”-training school of St Xavier’s in Lucknow to Lurgan Sahib’s curiosity shop in Simla. Yet Kim’s Anglo-Indian perspective and street-level upbringing equip him with an inestimable advantage over his European and Indian peers, for like Strickland and Lispeth and the narrators of so many of the Plain Tales, Kim can negotiate the borders between the Raj’s spatial and ideological regions. True, his Irish, Indian, and English selves are continually at war with one another, so that he can never be entirely at peace in the hills, as the lama can, nor passively remain on the plains, in cantonments, or among the Trunk Road caravans. Mobility, moreover, would appear to favor imperial motivations for surveillance, enabling spies and colonial agents to traverse the land with various degrees of impunity. Yet for these very reasons Kim’s borderline outlook and his restlessness enable him (to borrow from Hurree Babu’s words) to “occupy two places in space simultaneously” (209). This is why Kim is compelled to a life of journeys, to longing for and moving between India’s aesthetically pleasing northern mountains and its “flat North-Western landscape,” which he “look[s] out upon” from the window of the “te-rain” (166). This also explains Kim’s predilection for inhabiting the gaps between oppositions. The Cut Road with its “hideous curves” that he and the lama encounter midway in their trek up the mountains is thus emblematic of Kim’s own existential dilemma. Like Kim, and like Lispeth, the Cut Road clings precariously to the hillside, simultaneously

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providing a view of “the Plains spread out in golden dust” and the twin Raieng peaks of the Himalayan range that bespeak the healing end of the lama’s quest. In this light, the wish to support either a disciplinary or a subversive interpretation of the text misses the point, for a narrative structured upon an AngloIndian adolescent’s ceaseless movement between and within physical and psychological spaces destabilizes the very basis of such an interpretation. This is because contradictory outlooks drive the novel’s representations of natural as well as synthetic objects. For instance, it is significant that Kim, who throughout his figurative and physical journeys asks himself, “ ‘Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?’ ” (156), cryptically declares to himself, by book’s end, “ ‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ ” (234). However we interpret this combination of statement and question, the moment clearly brings an epiphany, for having traversed the rugged beauty of the Himalayas and having been nurtured by the “lower Sewalik” hills, that the lama and Kim reach the end of their journeying. Kim’s declaration, which his “soul repeated . . . again and again” in this cathartic moment of selfawareness, is fittingly precipitated by his conversation with Hurree Babu, that hybrid of East and West, whose pragmatism contrasts with the lama’s spirituality and which, more importantly, recalls Kim to the worldliness he loves and has been missing. Unlike the lama, who could not see with “even [the] spectacles” of “the Keeper of the Images” in Lahore’s museum (225), Kim is keenly observant of his physical surroundings. The text’s running emphasis on ocular perception as a metaphor for spiritual insight is nowhere more evident than at this climactic point, for Kim’s return to the bustle and solidity of the plains, as opposed to the hills’ otherworldly beauty, is presented unambiguously: He tried to think of the lama . . . but the bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought aside. Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with the thatched huts hidden among crops—looked with strange eyes unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things— stared for a still half-hour. (234; emphasis added)

Then, having uttered his resonant “I am Kim. And what is Kim?” the world comes back into focus: [O]f a sudden, easy stupid tears trickled down his nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were

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all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible. . . . (234)

I highlight the word “between” to underscore the novel’s preoccupation with Kim’s ability to perceive several worlds simultaneously—English, Indian, AngloIndian, half-caste. His apparent recognition at this moment of the world’s “bigness” is, after all, a partial one, glimpsed from between the gates of the Sahiba’s (that is, the “woman of Kulu”’s) “disorderly order[ed], . . . long white rambling house” (226) in which he and the lama convalesce. It is not so much the physical immensity of India for which Kim yearns, but rather “the changing mob” of its trains and roads. By contrast, the lama longs for the healing “snow of the Hills” (166). Yet the Sahiba’s residence at the foot of the hills is just as heterodox, if not as populous, as the mob beyond its gates. Like that hill-bound station of Simla, with its bazaar a “crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five” and boasting nearly everything—“ladies’ rickshaws by night, . . . grocers, oil-sellers, curio-vendors, firewood-dealers, priests, pickpockets,” and, not least, the likes of Lurgan Sahib (124)—one finds on the plains, the Sahiba’s heterodox home, which provides an apt context for Kim’s climactic moment of self-awareness. For his self-divisions discover in the Sahiba’s many and various friends and in-between setting the perfect dialogic counterparts to his hybrid—or, to borrow Kim’s own word, “kichree” (155)—existence. Such a reading may seem to run counter to the fact that the text resorts, in fairly predictable colonial fashion, to women characters who are alternately sexualized and maternalized, and are thus never (it appears) agential subjects. As readers have long observed, for a protagonist who is surrounded by women—the halfcaste woman who initially looked after him on the streets, the same Lispeth, and the Sahiba—Kim, despite his natural attraction to them, is extraordinarily celibate.45 There is no doubt that Indian women in the novel (there are no Englishwomen) function principally to tutor, test, and nurse Kim. In many ways, the lama stands in for the mothering for which Kim yearns. It is nonetheless important to recall Lispeth’s earlier appearance in Plain Tales from the Hills, where, her very persona, ill at ease either in the Kotgarh Mission or among her own people and consequently embittered by her life experience, brings into focus the Raj’s frustrated fetish for the establishment of geographical and cultural borders. Lispeth’s earlier incarnation, together with her attempt to seduce Kim in the later text, conveys a sense of female agency that at once supports and subverts the male-ordered universe she (and the novel) inhabit. Lispeth proudly declares, “I

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am the Woman of Shamlegh” and orders “her two husbands and three others” to bear the lama’s dooli down the mountain (220). Besides her strong spirit, Lispeth’s ability to traverse the hilly paths between points of communal contact sets her apart from others and bestows her with uncanny power, borne of unusual determination. When she takes Kim’s note to the Babu, we are told: “She turned resolutely uphill” (214). More revealing, perhaps, is her unwittingly ironic echo of Kim’s earlier (and, in my view, halfhearted) complaint about being “so-always pestered by women” (214): “Do not pester me,” she commands her whining husbands (220). Just as the lama frequently signifies maternity, so here does Lispeth momentarily enact what is usually viewed as a colonialist, male prerogative. The reiteration of the words on Lispeth’s lips resonates ironically with Kim’s original “I am Kim”; for now, rather than impede his passage toward worldly re-integration, Lispeth chooses to aid Kim’s ostensibly masculine sojourn on her own terms. “Ostensibly” because Kim’s and the lama’s journey in fact reorders the predictably male-centered depiction of colonialist space, a reconfiguration whose success depends upon the critical acts of female characters. This may seem an untenable argument given the novel’s preoccupation with imperial map-making, surveys, and frontier arithmetic. Yet Kim’s dumping of survey data and instruments over the hillside radically disturbs the image of rational cartography and imperial modernity. A process of information-gathering that had seemed, until this moment, to be a fait accompli proves to be no match for Kim’s—and Lispeth’s—geographically attuned but decidedly non-technological worldviews. The instruments they wield (or, in Kim’s case, learn to wield) are not the “brass idols” (206), like the theodolite, which Creighton and the other arbiters of colonial reason applied to India’s geography with clinical perseverance. Instead, Kim and his Indian cohorts’ back-alley commerce, their familiarity with India’s multifaceted social spaces, provide them with a ground-level acumen that the Raj functionaries can never acquire with their instruments. Kim’s tossing of the brass idols at once returns us to the moment of his initiation into Creighton’s spy network and anticipates the novel’s closing scene. In Chapter 7, Creighton tells Kim that he “must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains and rivers” and “some day” go “across those hills and [to] see” and report on “what lies beyond” (101). By book’s end, Kim has indeed gone beyond the hills. Instead of espionage, however, his mind—and the reader’s attention—is focused on his beloved lama’s exultation at having freed himself, however briefly, from the Wheel of Life. The lama “crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved” (240). In closing his novel with this scene, Kipling cedes Creighton’s dream of a panoptic perspective to the lama’s encompassing, spatially levitated vision of

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“all Hind” (239), which complements Kim’s earthy knowingness.46 The “salvation” the lama has “won for himself and his beloved” chela, Kim, can be read on a number of levels, but not the least of these is the lama’s saving Kim from the machinations of imperial statecraft. The novel’s iconic opening image, of a young Kim sitting “astride the gun Zam-Zammah” outside the Lahore Museum (3), is fittingly counterpoised by the lama’s non-violent posture, and by Kim’s own final words: “What said the Sahiba?” Kim looks to the woman from Kulu for the reassurance about this world, and to the lama for otherworldly sustenance, just as he finds in Lispeth an invaluable ally whose skill at boundary-crossing complements his own. Kimball O’Hara resides comfortably among these individuals and between these worlds, just as he will, the narrative implies, be at ease only in the spatial and cultural dialogism of hills and plains. Unsung Heroes of the Road

The complementarity of hills and plains continued, implicitly or explicitly, to frame the geographical assumptions of colonial fiction and autobiography many years after Kipling’s popular treatment of this motif. Like the twinned motifs of jungle and garden that permeate colonial writing, the salutary hills are invariably a counterpart to representations of harsh living on the plains. Yet despite the plains’ reputation for “dull monotony” that “soon dissipate[s] the romantic ideas” brought by young British recruits into “the land of their adaptation,”47 it is upon this picturesque and vast flatness that the real work of Empire occurs. In 1945, for example, the well-known British-Indian novelist Maud Diver extoled the fraternity of “unsung heroes,” those British engineers whose projects were critical to the sustenance of imperial rule.48 Like Kipling, she singled out the Grand Trunk Road for particular praise; unlike Kipling, however, she did so purely to champion English fortitude and know-how. This was a particularly pressing concern for an author whose many books on India had, over several decades, taken for granted the solidity of the Raj, only to find that by 1945 the regime “looks like nearing an end” (9). Diver bemoans this fact, for, in her words, “England’s work for India . . . may be nearing its finest phase” (9). She tolls the bell that initiates a long period of mourning over the end of Empire, a nostalgic sensibility that, as late as the 1980s, when conservatism shaped England’s self-expression, praised the kind of colonial derring-do Diver marketed so successfully. More to the point here is Diver’s explicit connection of imperial grit to the geographical imperative. She authorizes her own subject, by quoting Kipling’s famous description of this “huge artery” that imperial engineers have maintained for well over a century, with (she repeats) uncomplaining self-sacrifice (9, 22). Similarly, she lauds the engineers who undertook the

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“incredible transformation” of the Punjab’s “immense desert area [into one of the great granaries of the world]” (11). To be clear, these engineering feats do not in themselves interest Diver. Grand geographical transformations function instead as illustrations of the fundament of integrity that Diver believes individual Britons bring to their tasks, creating thereby “a living Indian Empire” (10). Yet Diver’s praise of personal gumption cannot, as she herself acknowledges, do without the exaltation of the built environment. More importantly, as we saw with the construction of hill stations and cantonments, the Indian environment is a test case for European science. Diver’s contradictory claim is that the previously unmanaged, “unromantic” landscape has been made worthy of conquest by the likes of Alexander Taylor, the chief construction engineer for the Grand Trunk Road, whose person has borne “witness to the indisputable truth that character . . . has been the foundation-stone of British power in the East” (10, 22, 280). Such reasoning ignores the motivations for the original conquest of a supposedly unmanaged tropical environment, but was nonetheless taken to be self-evident in the late imperial period. It is a logic that binds together geography, construction, and “character,” so that the figure of the dutiful, intrepid engineer-adventurer leads necessarily to the celebration of loyalty to the State, and to the corollary condemnation of anyone or anything that questions such fealty. For to stand in the way of professedly essential bridge-building, as Kipling’s talking animals attempt to do in “The Bridge-Builders,” is to challenge the Empire’s good work. Conclusion

It will be useful to conclude this chapter by comparing Diver’s and Kipling’s perceptions of the colonial geography to that of a later text, the novelist John Masters’ once-popular (in the 1950s) autobiography, Bugles and the Tiger. Masters casts a lovelorn gaze upon the country he has left for good following India’s independence in 1947. I describe this gaze as “lovelorn” to underscore the sexually charged undercurrent that sustains all Masters’ works, including his autobiographies. In this Masters is not unique: Colonial discourse tends very much toward a libidinal, masculine, and homosocial representation of European proclivities within the colonial milieu. Conversely, non-Europeans, along with their dwelling places, are feminized. Usually, this opposition of masculinity and femininity fails to relieve the anxieties at the heart of this opposition, as Bhabha’s Lacanian interpretation of colonial space has shown. The over-insistence on European masculinity tries to deny colonialism’s intrinsically unstable desires. Masters exhibits much the same anxiety in his two autobiographies as well

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as in his fiction, where he refracts his competing desires through ambivalent references to Indian spaces. Thus, for Masters, India is a “lusty, disinterested mistress” who taught him to appreciate “peace, love, friendship, and space.”49 Masters’ description of his military career, with its numerous references to geographical, sexual, and social pleasures, leads him to identify libidinal India with both tropical and sexually transmitted diseases. During his service (in which, incidentally, he follows his colonial ancestors), Masters repeats the hills-plains conceit and states that he “had caught two germs—in the low country, a . . . dose of malaria, and in the Himalaya, a passionate love of mountains.”50 Tropical sickness and desire merge in his recollection of imperial duty, combining as they do a predictably romanticized image of the subcontinent with a vision of its ostensibly harsher realities, such as the malaria he mentions. As if to advertise the grittiness of this experience, Masters does not shy from describing a colonial-military life of old-fashioned barracks and that ever-present condition of cantonment life, boredom, a life inhabited by “sand-harlots, riddled with every type of venereal disease” (155). Here Masters perhaps knowingly echoes such memoirists as Private Frank Richards, who graphically portrayed army life earlier that century by describing local prostitutes as “sand-rats . . . who being in the last stages of the dreaded disease and rotten inside and out, only appeared after dark.”51 Like Richards, Masters uses “germ” to mean both virus and the suggestively illicit passion that frames his mostly fond remembrance of his former home. This trope points to his ambivalent treatment of a superficially fond remembrance of the colonial past that also frames Masters’ novels. In his autobiography, the stability of mountain love contrasts with and negatively defines the threatening instability of disease, whose location—whether it is the body of the prostitute or the allegedly sulfurous milieu of Native towns—colonial officials obsessively attempt to name, categorize, and contain. Masters, in short, defines his professed love for pure mountainous landscapes by distinguishing them from spaces that appear to him, and to most of his European peers, to embody anarchic and potentially treacherous energies. His frequent references to the hills on one level at least, mediate the conjunctions of cantonment and bazaar, city and village that perpetually troubled the Raj. To remember beloved mountains is to hold up a promise of salubrious, uncongested distances. Notes Epigraph. Charles A. Gordon, Army Hygiene (London: John Churchill and Son; Calcutta: R. C. Lepage and Co., 1866), 131. 1. George Orwell, Burmese Days (New York: Time Inc. Book Division, 1962), 13.

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2. Anthony King notes this in his social-historical discussion of cantonments, upon which I draw: see Colonial Urban Development, 108. 3. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence. 4. The club, as Anthony King notes, was for Europeans the “main focus of social interaction and the principal centre of information exchange.” King, Colonial Urban Development, 87. Mrinalini Sinha observes that the role of this colonial sphere, or “clubland,” was central to the “imperial institution in colonial India.” See her “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere,” 490, 493, and 489–521 passim. 5. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 38, 40. 6. Nirad Chaudhuri, for instance, speaks of the “ ‘claustrophobia’ of colonial Calcutta” and of being consequently “driven to assert [the independence of environment].” See The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, 267. Claustrophobia thus characterizes not simply national imprisonment and the comparative space of freedom, but also psychological, geographic and domestic claustrophobia and spaciousness. If Nehru’s Discovery of India begins and ends in Ahmadnagar Fort, where he was imprisoned by the British in the 1940s, the book’s own discovery is that “[w]e in India do not have to go abroad in search of the Past and the Distant,” but only “in search of the Present.” The latter he claims to be necessary since “isolation . . . means backwardness and decay.” The Discovery of India (1946), ed. Robert Crane (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 416, 412. 7. Yeats-Brown, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 5. In another volume of the autobiography, Masters claims that “the world was hungry for a new Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” a book he “did not particularly like.” See John Masters, Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (1954) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 105–106. 8. Stallybrass and White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression, 95. 9. Ibid., 96. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. E. P. Stebbing, The Diary of a Sportsman Naturalist in India (London; New York: John Lane, 1920), ix. 12. Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 81. 13. “Borderline” is a term that recurs in Kipling’s work, most prominently in his Plain Tales story of a Eurasian clerk, “His Chance in Life,” whose mixed race marks him as an inhabitant of this luminal space. Plain Tales from the Hills, 59–60. 14. Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere,” 501. 15. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 16. I quote here from C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 127. See 125–139 for a description of how religious practices contributed to economic activity. 17. Wurgaft, Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India, 58.

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18. “Beyond the Pale,” a story in Plain Tales from the Hills that has attracted some discussion, is set in town on the plains, and is similarly preoccupied with physical and social boundaries. It describes a country-born Englishman, Trejago, whose “aimless wandering” leads him to the Indian part of town, into Amir Nath’s Gully, where he falls in love with a young, cloistered Indian woman named Bisesa. Their affair is discovered by an angry relative, who cuts off Bisesa’s hands and beats up Trejago. Here, I wish only to note how the oppositional categories with which the story begins and purports to endorse—White/Black, English/Indian—are in fact blunted by the two protagonists’ many edges, and by the rough edges of the spaces they occupy. The story, like others by Kipling, counters the colonialist gaze that takes for granted the racial separation of peoples. We might say that in Trejago’s purview, the Symbolic level of British-Indian conformity, to use Lacan’s terms, switches places with the Imaginary level of Indian society, so that colonialist logic is temporarily inverted—largely as a result of Trejago’s Anglo-Indian intimacy with Indian social spaces. This means that for Trejago, Bisesa’s room momentarily becomes the Symbolic, and his Station life the Imaginary. The bordered spaces prove to be physical correlatives of an inherently alienating, because racially and sexually distorted, world, with no room for the integral egos that Trejago and Bisesa momentarily enjoy. By contrast, colonialist texts like Nora Scott’s An Indian Journal (1880s), Fanny Parks’ popular Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850), and George Aberigh-Mackay’s Twenty-One Days in India (1882) resort to a dehistoricized language that, as Suleri has shown in her discussion of the picturesque, objectifies landscapes and peoples. See Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, during Four-andTwenty Years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana (1850), quoted in Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 102. Also see George Aberigh-Mackay, Twenty-One Days in India, or The Tour of Sir Ali Baba, K.C.B. (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1882) and Nora Scott, An Indian Journal, 35. For a critique of “Beyond the Pale,” see for example Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 134; on Kipling’s gothic inclinations, of which this story is often said to be an example; see for instance Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, passim and Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, chapter 8 (227–254). 19. Copy of Cantonments Act 1897, and of the Cantonment Regulations, published 15th October, 1897 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1989), India Office Library and Records [IOLR]/ MSS EUR. B.378, London. 20. King, Colonial Urban Development, 120. 21. John Lockwood Kipling, “Indian Architecture To-day,” first appeared in The Journal of Indian Art 1.3 (1886). It is quoted in Gavin Stamp, “British Architecture in India 1857–1947,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 129.5298 (May 1981): 368. An indication of the cross-pollination of ideas between England and its colonies can be seen in a key architecture journal of 1865, which stated: “The revival of architectural

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taste which has sprung up in England with the last twenty years is slowly but gradually spreading to India; and within the last few years . . . public buildings [have] been erected which could be no discredit to any European capital.” Quoted in Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of Global Culture (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45. 22. For a thorough discussion of the debates between Indo-Saracenic endorsers and Indian crafts enthusiasts, see Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, chapter 5 (154–175). 23. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” 165–210. 24. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, 2–11. A twentieth-century colonial British Army officer describes the cantonment thus: “Cantonment (kan-toon-ment) (1) A group of buildings for housing troops (2) A military station. (3) The act of cantoning troops. (my definition—also “billeting” or “quartering”) from the French cantonner—to quarter . . . The use of the word in India was often part of a place name eg Agra Cantt., Delhi Cantt., Meerut, . . . Sialkot are a few of the best known. They often had a separate railway station . . . Britain neither ‘occupied’ or ‘colonised’—we ruled and our sovereign was the Empress (Victoria) or Emperor (Edward & Georges).” Personal communication from a retired major in the Indian, British, and Canadian Armies, 23 August 1994. 25. This did not, however, prevent him from imagining a twentieth-century visitor being able to gaze upon similarly arranged Indian towns, which a “Young Bengal anticipates.” See Bholanauth Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, 2 vols. (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1869), 180, 321–322. 26. Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo, 337. It is worth noting the Chunder’s 1869 text records travels made between 1845 and 1866, affording him a relatively rare Indian perspective on British India’s changing fortunes and construction projects, including the aftermath of the 1857–1858 war, which he is obliged to recall in typically colonialist fashion as a moral travesty committed by Indian rebels (339–341). 27. See Radhika Ramasubban, Public Health and Medical Research in India: Their Origins Under the Impact of British Colonial Policy (Stockholm: Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries, 1982); and David Arnold, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 28. “[F]air climate” and “roomy barracks,” for example, were often believed to be basic requirements “to ensure the health and life of European soldiers in India.” See “Military Hygiene in India,” Calcutta Review (1859), 375. It is important to note that the focus on ventilation and climate in terms of health as a European, not simply British, concern, as Paul Rabinow, for example, discusses in French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), especially 32–39. 29. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 67. 30. Veena Talwar Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 49.

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31. “With the establishment of the Public Works Department (PWD) in 1854,” writes Anthony King, “an ‘engineering vernacular’, known more widely as the ‘Military Board’ style, became the standard form for official Government of India buildings.” The Bungalow: The Production of Global Culture, 38. 32. Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 53. Faisal Fatehali Devji elaborates succinctly on this process: “colonialism had crippled the [Indian] moral city . . . not only by destroying or ignoring traditional structures of spatial authority . . . , not only by attempting to insert a ‘neutral’ space (such as the market, for instance) into the Indian landscape, but also by locating institutions of public power outside the ‘native’ city either in the ‘civil’ or ‘military’ lines, or in a parallel city such as New Delhi.” See his “Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900,” South Asia 15.1 (1991): 148. 33. “Report on the Road to Mahableshwar via Ambur Khind and Mundur Dew by Lieut. Col. R. Phayre, Quartermaster General [Poona].” Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government No. LXV—New Series (Bombay: Printed for the Government at the Education Society’s Press, 1862), 3. 34. T. E. Dempster, late Superintending Surgeon, Bengal Establishment, report of 26 January 1858. In Papers Regarding the Extent and Nature of the Sanitary Establishments for European Troops in the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Presidencies. (N.p.: Military Department Press, 1860). Held in the India Office Library and Records [IOLR], London. 35. Quoted in Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development, 119. 36. King, Colonial Urban Development, 121. 37. Mulk Raj Anand, Morning Face: An Autobiographical Novel (1968), quoted in King, Colonial Urban Development, 120. The protagonist of Anand’s novel Untouchable similarly observes the more comfortable environment of “the British regimental barracks” that so captivates his imagination, the “oddments of Anglo-Indian life”—“pith solar topees, peak caps, knives, forks, buttons, old books”—adding to his dream of a better life. Untouchable (London: Penguin, 1940), 11. 38. To assert this broadly is not, however, to endorse unconditionally every feature of this syncretic Anglo-Indian outlook. For instance, the colonial form of “Hinglish” spoken by Kipling’s ubiquitous cockney soldiers offends our ear: “I purshured a ekka, an’ I sez to the dhriver-divil, I sez, ‘Ye black limb, there’s a Sahib comin’ for this ekka. He wants to go jildi to the Padsahi Jhil . . . to shoot snipe—chirria” (Plain Tales, 55). The butt, in this case—the story “The Three Musketeers”—is one Lord Trig, “a Peer” whose priggishness runs aground on the wrathful soldiers’ prank. The reporter-narrator here, as in many other Kipling stories, professes merely to record others’ accounts and thereby sustains the fiction of allowing the reader to judge for him- or herself. If the layers of social strata once again offset one another to great comic effect and

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the narrator disavows the soldiers’ diction, the text’s ethical blindness remains. Other chapters in this book consider the case of colonialist attitudes, even in contemporary writers who are comparatively less conservative than their peers. 39. See Zohreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 148. 40. Kipling, Kim: A Critical Edition, 51. Page references that hereafter appear in brackets in this section refer to this edition. 41. Baucom, Out of Place, 93. 42. See Kim, 3, 53, 124, 126, 222. Kipling seems to have based the character of Lurgan Sahib on a well-known polyglot antique dealer, A. M. Jacob, who may have been “a Polish or Armenian Jew,” was raised in non-European countries, and was believed to be a conjurer and mesmerist. His home in Simla, Pamela Kanwar reports, “was furnished in the most lavish ‘Oriental’ style, and filled with priceless ornaments.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was also “said to be an invaluable aide to the political secret service.” Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 83. 43. Baucom, Out of Place, 99. 44. Kipling, Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown; quoted in Andrew Rutherford, “Introduction,” in Plain Tales from the Hills, xx. 45. See for example Patrick Williams’ discussion of this in “Kim and Orientalism,” in Kim (2002 critical edition), 417–421. 46. Edwin Arnold expresses something akin to Creighton’s sentiment when he remarks, in his 1881 book On the Indian Hills that when he ascends into the hills of southern India, he can’t help “feeling an eagle myself and seeing the world as they see it!” (303). The famed geographer C. R. Markham similarly describes his glee in attaining “the bird’s eye views I got” among the Pulney hills. RGS/ CRM 67, “India Journal,” 18 October–25 November 1860 (vol. 4). 47. IOLR/ MSS.EUR B260, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan,” vol. 1. 48. Maud Diver, The Unsung: A Record of British Services in India (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1945). Subsequent page references are to this edition, and are incorporated parenthetically in the body of my text. 49. John Masters, Bugles and the Tiger: A Volume of Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1956), 301. 50. Masters, Bugles and the Tiger, 243. All subsequent references to this book refer to this edition and appear in parentheses following quotations. 51. [Private] Frank Richards, Old-Soldier Sahib (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 199.

Chapter 4

Savage City Locating Colonial Modernity

In 1869, the well-known English journalist Walter Bagehot stated, “Savages copy quicker, and they copy better,” a comment that underscores the colonialist view that non-Europeans were masters of mimicry but not much else.1 Homi Bhabha turns this on its head to show that Indians, for example, were able to exert a measure of control over the interplay between themselves and the British. In the preceding chapters, I have discussed how Anglo-Indians’ discursive negotiation of the apparent opposition between European and nonEuropean outlooks adds another layer of complexity to an already complex web of relationships under colonialism. In this chapter, I explore how the space of the colonial city (in this case Calcutta) functions in colonialist discourse and, more importantly, how Kipling’s Anglo-Indian rendering of Calcutta, in City of Dreadful Night, simultaneously echoes and mocks this colonialist perspective. My argument here works from Walter Benjamin’s notion of iconic “aura” and his discussion of the urban flaneur (strolling spectator) to shed light on two points: first, that Calcutta’s mimicry of European urbanism, in Kipling’s hands, is at once an original and a copy, which questions the very concept of “aura,” and second, that the Anglo-Indian flaneur—in Kipling’s terms, the “savage” onlooker—both copies and mocks the idea of homelessness epitomized in the activity of “flanerie,” that is, the urban strolling and store-gazing that became an obsession of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. The result is a text that accurately, if sometimes awkwardly, represents the fractured world of colonial modernity, the Anglo-Indian urban world whose inhabitants are ceaselessly in search of home yet paradoxically relish their chance to be on the threshold.

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The Colonial City

“India,” wrote Hegel, “has always been” for Europeans an unknowable “Fairy region, an enchanted world.”2 Hegel believed that his generation’s rational enlightenment had finally called India’s bluff: the fabled land was a Xanadu of purely rhetorical proportions, its supposed wisdom a castle of air in Europe’s solid shadow. This early nineteenth-century view further implied that Europe would now, at last, know India empirically and philosophically in its true essence, an essence long since forgotten by Indians themselves. In so doing, Europe would dialectically supersede India—and by extension the East—in every way. Europe, or “the West,” would represent India with mimetic accuracy. But Hegel’s fellow Europeans generally did not share his assurance. They were unnerved by the chimera they had fashioned over the centuries—India of the unicorn and the manticore.3 On the one hand, India was to be mapped with the most up-to-date instruments and thus rendered eminently visible and changeable. On the other hand, the region would, in most Europeans’ eyes, retain a dimension frustratingly and even threateningly hidden from modernity’s customary glosses. The story of this uneasy regard for the subcontinent is, in fact, the story of modern (predominantly British) colonial culture, whose narrative strands are entwined in the region’s postcolonial state and status. Like all modern nations, the Indian nation-state mines its past for precisely the kind of visible, empirical assurances that Hegel invoked, even as it mystifies that past in the service of a forward-looking present. India’s cultural tense, like that of all nation-states, is thus future-perfect, the axes of its imagined location impossibly sustained by simultaneous glances ahead and behind. But how can a nation be at once young and old, as Gandhi envisioned India to be? Part of the answer lies in the story of colonial modernity, particularly as this modernity was articulated spatially in the colonial imagination. Besides using the term “modernity” to signal the shift from a preindustrial to an industrial state beginning in the nineteenth century and to highlight the latter’s compulsion to organize space to facilitate its needs, I also mean to call attention to what Timothy Mitchell, in his discussion of colonial Egypt, calls “the metaphysics of capitalist modernity,” whereby the physical world is seen to be entirely separate from its representations.4 A significant figure in the expression of this new metaphysics is the Baudelairean flaneur, the wandering urban spectator whose middle-class bourgeois outlook struggles to come to terms with the increasingly entwined spheres of the private and the public—a simultaneously desirable and frightening condition that Poe caught in his phrase “the man of the crowd.”5

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More specifically, by focusing on the figure of the flaneur, taking into account Benjamin’s appraisal of this figure in the context of urban spectacle, and by drawing on Freud’s concept of the uncanny, with its nuanced engagement of homeliness and unhomeliness, I will explore the quintessentially “colonial modern” cityscape of Calcutta as Rudyard Kipling rendered it for his multiple audiences (particularly his readers in England and Britishers in India) in his 1888 travelogue City of Dreadful Night.6 While the colonialist mythos was constituted largely in terms of nonurban spaces—the frontier, the jungle—it was the colonial city that consolidated this imaginary for its metropolitan readership. Kipling’s sardonic in-between perspectives on Calcutta’s spaces provide insight into the motors of colonial psyches and their necessarily ambivalent perceptions of “home,” an ambivalence that was, and still is, built into a blurring of the very concepts of a colonial and a national home. But it is Kipling’s parodic self-deprecating mode of narration, more than his considerations of genre or audience, that bespeaks a consciousness laden with the uncanniness of cultural migration, a consciousness that anticipates later, postcolonial expressions of exile as well as certain strategies of colonial mimicry and postmodern ambivalence. More importantly, Kipling presents Calcutta as at once a faithful and counterfeit reflection of Victorian London, a space visibly European and civil on its surface but jarringly un-European and uncivil at its depths. This brings to light the inherently destabilizing effect of spectacular representation by which the modern nation identifies itself. Kipling’s depiction of colonial cosmopolitanism may seem at first glance to be a predictably colonialist construct, and his mode of address is admittedly quite different from later modes of narration that voice anxieties of location. However, his perspective actually resembles that of later urban chroniclers and more crucially differs from that of his contemporaries, notably Charles Baudelaire, by attempting to narrate a homeland within the conceptual and inescapably ironic space between India and Britain. As we will see, Kipling was struggling to come to terms with a self-consciously spectating presentation of a landscape that already by the 1880s—its grand boulevards a visible correlate of the spatial flows of global commerce—confirmed for British readers not only Britain’s ascendancy in world affairs, but also India’s commendable apprenticeship in those affairs. Kipling is able to see and explore the alleyways that lie beyond the boulevards, alleyways that alternately beguile and imperil an AngloIndian sensibility haunted by the discourse of its own rule. He therefore deliberately invokes the role of the “savage wanderer” who stalked nineteenth-century urban reformist literature in Britain and India, where bourgeois onlookers accused the lower classes of trespassing on established residential boundaries.

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Kipling’s double coding, whereby he is at once a cultural insider and outsider, seems a conscious effort to represent, through a generically transgressive idiom I will call (purposely stressing its architectural correlate) “colonial modern,” a physical and psychic world already coded in multiply mixed ways. A key feature of this idiom is Kipling’s fondness for describing the “unholy” (as he frequently terms it) conjunction of European and Indian spaces in the colonial city. But his trademark mixing of high and low cultural forms, which is expressed most often as motifs of confinement and nomadic movement, can never be couched in the language of Hegelian certainty. Instead, Kipling’s code-switching, his uneven mix of disdain and admiration for the sights at hand, produces the same sense of bewilderment in his reader that Kipling experiences in Calcutta. On one level, this mode of narration mimics the Parisian penchant for strolling and spectating that arose in the context of nineteenth-century world exhibitions. For Kipling, as for the contemporary European flaneur, “the city splits . . . into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room.”7 But I want to stress here the ways in which Kipling’s “savage” wanderings beneath the colonial city’s refined exterior send up the very premise of territorial demarcation. Unlike Baudelaire’s flaneur, who can merge with the crowd whenever he chooses, Kipling’s stroller, with his ever-homeless eye and in-between status, is obliged to remain always aloof. Kipling’s flaneur is therefore able to look askance, and often mock, spatial limitations. Knowing India “One of the few advantages that India has over England,” a narrator says admiringly in Kipling’s short story “The Phantom Rickshaw,” “is a great Knowability.”8 The speaker of these words has recently seen a ghost, and appears determined to test the limits of his sensory world. Kipling’s neologism, “knowability,” is characteristically double-edged, as the tale’s narrator discovers: colonial India is both knowable and knowing. Curiously, both renderings of the term are viewed as advantageous to India and consequently detrimental to India’s European beholder. On the one hand, India has lost its fig leaf: it is eminently mappable, its peoples and lands quantifiable. On the other hand, India possesses occult extrasensory knowledge that no European can understand—a knowledge of darkened byways alive with unimaginable, mysterious, and therefore seemingly irrational apparitions and ideas that besiege European civility. If one can conceive of India’s brand of knowledge as an advantage, it is hard to see why the first point—India’s mappability—should also be so conceived. The benefits of having mapped a region would seem to be self-evidently in Europe’s favor, but

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the crucial advantage lies with the ambiguity of Kipling’s term, “knowability,” which undercuts Hegelian certainty. Urban India’s Janus-faced capability to be at once knower and known, but never clearly the one or the other, is precisely the story of colonial modernity. As a nineteenth-century metropolis, Calcutta was both London and not-London, at once uncannily imitative of European space and a cunning forgery of it. Kipling’s diatribe on the “Big Calcutta Stink” in City of Dreadful Night, which I take to be a prime example of the colonial modern idiom, is essentially an allegorical critique of the colonialist need to fix in place the purportedly separate spheres of India and Europe. The “stink” of Calcutta, like the fog in Dickens’ Bleak House or the mist in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (texts that helped condition nineteenth-century Europe’s urban sensibility), suffuses everything, from the city’s inhabitants to Kipling’s own narrative voice. The olfactory metaphor thus cues us to Calcutta’s cultural and physical antinomies, which had become familiar to British and Anglo-Indian readers alike through literary types like the obsequious, deceitful Bengali babu and the dangerously unruly Indian bazaar, which we have met in earlier chapters. Although Calcutta was for many years the hub of British governance in India (until Delhi assumed that role in 1911), and although it was critically important to European mercantilism, it came to be cast as a locus of negative comparison. It became a non-city, an enchanting but essentially hollow space that counterbalanced the solidity of a London or a Paris. Calcutta became, in short, a bad copy. Travelogues, guidebooks, and memoirs painted an image of a cityscape clownishly aping its European siblings.9 On one level, then, the title of Kipling’s book merely echoes the conventional view of colonial Calcutta as “the city of dreadful night.” But implicit in Kipling’s representation is the recognition that the very standards by which Calcutta was measured (London, Paris) are themselves irresolvably conflicted. Kipling detects parodic possibilities in a space that accentuates self-conscious imitation and its resulting distancing effect—psychologically, the distance between model and mimic, between homelessness and home—materially, the distance between alleyway and boulevard, backwoods and city. Whereas the Parisian boulevard was in Kipling’s day presumed to be a high point of nineteenth-century urbanism, the comparatively less familiar (to middle-class residents) bylanes were viewed with suspicion. By comparison, Europeans both admired the Calcutta boulevard for its close resemblance to Paris boulevards and disdained its obvious differences. As an example of the “critical distance” from a normative model that Linda Hutcheon shows to be integral to parody,10 Kipling’s text plays on the powerful distancing effects colonial spaces could have on an individual’s perspective. Kipling’s work reads as a record of what it means

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to be a wayfarer in an increasingly disjunctive and self-referential world— “with the difference that colonial Calcutta, like the young Kipling himself, can never really merge with either the European or the Indian crowd. Playing the role of the “savage” stroller, the colonial flaneur, Kipling’s narrator, part-European and part-Indian in outlook, is able to mock the conventions of European cityscapes. Kipling sets up this disjunction at his very entrance to the city, remarking in his opening pages on the uncanny presence of English hats as a sign of longing: There was a man up-country [i.e., in the hinterland] once who owned a top-hat . . . Then he threw it into a tree and wild bees hived in it. Men were wont to come and look at the hat . . . for the sake of feeling homesick . . . But top-hats are not intended to be worn in India. They are as sacred as home letters and old rosebuds. [My] friend . . . cannot see why a barbarian [i.e., Kipling] is moved to inextinguishable laughter at the sight. (City, 18)

The author frames his first adult foray into the world of the colonial urbanite as a rite of passage. To his untutored, “savage” eye, top-hats serve no purpose in a non-European milieu and are meant only to preserve a semblance of home. But as he begins to look around the urban landscape, his scoffing quickly turns into a tribute to Anglo-Indian audacity: “Let us take off our hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent . . .” (7). Where he had expected rude vehicles and unruly traffic, he finds himself instead scurrying before “a rush of broughams,” whose top-hatted passengers all exhibit “the best turn-out in the Empire” as they “go to office.” The London-like avenues even boast that “touchstone of civilization”: lamps . . . fitted into sockets (22–23; original emphasis). The awed reporter from the backwoods can only tip his hat once more “to Calcutta, the well-appointed, the luxurious” (23). His later visits to the crowded, more unsavory parts of the city, such as Chouringhi [sic] Road’s cramped compounds with their “seethment of human life,” merely increase his original wonder since they make Calcutta’s modern life seem all the more unlikely and out of place. But so out of place does the city appear to Kipling, so uncanny its resemblance to London, that his amazed rhetoric frequently turns on self-doubt. The very first paragraph of City heralds his entry into a world unlike anything he’s yet known: “We have left India behind us at [Calcutta’s] Howrah Station, and now we enter foreign parts. No, not wholly foreign. Say rather too familiar” (7). The familiar and the strange merge as “we”—Kipling speaks for his reader throughout—find ourselves in a strange time-space. “Why, this is London!” exclaims the narrator when he sees Calcutta’s harbor. “This is the docks. This is

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Imperial” (9).11 And yet it is a place in which Anglo-India’s sometimes excruciatingly in-grown imitation of English social life causes “the eye [to lose] its sense of proportion” (9), exaggerating the ameliorative effect of such accouterments as the top-hat and the brougham. Even a “bar of music . . . from home” can spark “the feeling of caged irritation . . . that comes from the knowledge of our lost heritage of London” (7). Whereas Londoners can enjoy the familiar “roar of the streets, the lights, the music, the pleasant places,” “we have nothing except the few amusements we painfully build up for ourselves” (7–8). Kipling’s solemn intercession on behalf of his compatriots is, however, less concerned with the forfeiture of an essential European politesse than with the unpleasant “knowledge” that the entire enterprise—including European civility and colonial mimicry—is hollow. To better understand the differences between Calcutta and London, we need to ask precisely what accounts for the fascination of the former in the eyes of Anglo-Indian writers. Weren’t its esplanades and edifices built up, after all, to be representative of European cultural dominance? On what grounds does it fail in this endeavor? Why should the city be thus viewed as a false copy of European modernity? It is not Calcutta or colonial capital formation per se, that demands scrutiny, but this (predominantly male) spectatorship, a gaze fascinated by a looking-glass world where an Irishman is often (but not always) an English representative, and a Bengali male often (but not always) effeminate. Such slippery signifiers inevitably accompany the British-Indian attempt to be at once British and colonial by crafting a bourgeois self in its duplex home-space, a self that would always be frayed internally by the incessant longing for a true home. Hence the paradoxical feature of colonial narrative: a nostalgia for home accentuated by the condition—the willed condition—of homelessness. For Kipling, colonial Calcutta percolates with all these dislocations and attractions. Calcutta’s falseness depended, too, on the European interpretation of Indian history. In effect, India was construed as Europe’s uncanny double, with an imagined past that nicely corroborated European designs. These designs, according to Foucault’s familiar proposition, depended on ideologies of “degenerescence” and the “administration of bodies.”12 The development of the modern bourgeois individual, according to this formulation, meant that he or she was socialized to think of personal motivations only in accordance with statelevel administration. Despite seeming to be free, the modern citizen in fact closely resembles someone who is physically incarcerated. But such a reading, though accurate on a broad scale, leaves little room for maneuver by individuals. More significantly, Foucault fails to note the colonial pedigree of these ministrations and their effects.13 We must ask how exactly the self-censoring apparatus of

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observation, which so conditions flanerie, shapes the Anglo-Indian imaginary, and how Kipling maneuvers within this imaginary. The British Indian saw in Calcutta, and more broadly in India, a corruption of civic discourse. Arthur J. Payne, the Calcutta Municipality Health Officer in 1872, typically described Indian parts of the city as “abodes of misery, vice, and filth.”14 This is a view Kipling seems initially to echo. The corruption was simultaneously bureaucratic, as in Kipling’s description, and physical, as when the foremost medical office in 1836 lamented the city’s “slothful” and disease-prone inhabitants.15 Yet there is something deeply conflicted about a worldview that wants to duplicate the solidity of Europe on foreign soil and, at the same time, question the very possibility of duplication (on the part of Indians). Duplication is a cornerstone of the colonial style of governance, for it relies on the replication and dissemination of discursive and spatial codes—laws, buildings, uniforms, memoirs, tourism—that protect its interests. This contradictory stance is partly due to a confusion of the relationship between space and time in the establishment of cultural identity. The nineteenth century’s trust in civilizing progress created through the motif of the time line (the traditional means of expressing time spatially) the illusion of cultural coherence and inevitability. Thus, Walter Bagehot, the influential economist and writer whose words I quote in the epigraph above, toed the British line in asserting that non-Europeans were consummate but mindless mimics, lacking any original thought. For him, the test of a civilization was its originality and autogeny. The “savage propensity to mimicry” is thus a mark of belatedness that results in “monotonous [sameness]” and ultimately “degradation.”16 Bagehot’s bald phrasing of then-common social-Darwinian views opens a window onto the rhetorical engine of Victorian cultural transaction. For Bagehot exposes Victorian preoccupation with imitation and a corresponding urge to constantly fix extra-national boundaries that will safeguard its own nervous mobility, its own discursive license to stroll, flaneurlike, on the “rude” (Bagehot’s term) edges of its empire. This peripatetic inclination—that is, the conceptual frame of flanerie—is thus an alienated product not only of modernity, as Benjamin shows,17 but also of colonialist culture, so much so that the flaneur, as a socialized urbanite and thus a practitioner of watchfulness, is as much a “savage copier” as the non-European whom Bagehot accuses of dull simulation. Bagehot, in other words, unknowingly sees himself reflected in the object of his scorn. In Kipling we witness an inner struggle among three competing tendencies: his impulse toward flanerie, which is distinguished by an uncanny sense of perpetual displacement in the heart of a familiar city; his countervailing desire for the stasis of home; and his celebration of “savage” observation. Unlike Ben-

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jamin’s concept of the urbane flaneur, Kipling’s version is conditioned both by the city and by the country. We should recall that the 1857–1858 war, when Indian soldiers hired by the East India Company were provoked into attacking their British superior officers, generated a steady supply of maudlin epics about martial adventure and English heroics. India’s geography began to play a bigger and bigger role in feeding this mythopoetic appetite. In remote frontier provinces like the Punjab, men like Henry Lawrence could prove their English mettle by risking death on foreign soil to subdue unruly elements in the Great Game. As Lewis Wurgaft puts it, literary accounts of these endeavors “presented a dimension of human experience felt to be missing or diminished at home [i.e., England]—the daily encounter with death that fosters self-mastery and personal insight.”18 The firebrand administrator Herbert Edwardes thus deferred to divine will to “make many barbarous wills give way to one that was civilised,” even if this meant that God “must . . . wish us to remain unhomed.”19 But home is not exactly England, either. Edwardes’ lament is a characteristically Anglo-Indian expression of both homesickness and homesteading: to be “unhomed” was in some sense to live in the remembered spaces of Europe as well as in the current space of one’s newly imagined home. The latter is to be distinguished (as colonial literature usually intends it to be) from one’s “real” home. Kipling, recognizing how the savage country had become a symbolic staple of the urban “home” readership, plays these powerful images off each other to question the very principles governing Britain’s sense of global residence. His juxtaposition of past and present home spaces calls into question the very notion of original homeland. But what exactly do we mean by the word “home” in this context? If it is not surprising that the nineteenth century’s fascination with India’s supposed ruin and decay (the “degradation” cited by Bagehot) should serve as an iconic foil for Europe’s robust modernity, why was that modernity so unsure of itself as to require a defensive posture? Why was home allegorized on so many fronts? The very assertion of colonial boundaries, both spatial and temporal, speaks of estrangement, of what Freud calls an uncanny—at once familiar and strange—“homelessness” resonant with loss, distance, and remembrance. Freud uses the German for (un)homely, unheimlich, to mean uncanny, as it has been rendered in English. Tracing the term’s etymology, Freud provides examples of home’s propertied domestic connotations, and its latent connection to the comfort of the womb.20 But this space can also be claustrophobic, Freud argues, so that home can just as easily be a burden or trap, not to mention castrating.21 It is thus at once a conceptual and a physical space, and perhaps this is its double edge—its dangers as well as comforts—that find expression

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in the uncanny. The precise provenance of home therefore proves impossible to locate. The theorization of uncanniness is not based on colonial literature per se, so its relevance here needs some explanation. Freud’s essay describes the classic sense of alienation that Marx and others have identified as a by-product of modernity, and which Charles Baudelaire memorably expressed in his starkly urban verse. It is important to note further that this experience of homelessness parallels Europe’s developing emporium culture, in which colonies and their products are treated with a mix of condescension, fear, and fascination. A chief participant in this conspicuous consumption is the Baudelairean stroller, whose bourgeois-male identity allows him to stare at and imaginatively possess the novelties of his turf: shop windows, crowds, panoramas. Benjamin famously wrote: “The flaneur is still on the threshold of the city as of the bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he yet at home.”22 These words suggest that the flaneur’s gaze is sovereign and imperious, but surreptitiously so. The roaming voyeur is unhomed until he identifies himself with the modern tableaux of crowded shops, amidst people he does not know, participating in the reproduction of the businesslike anonymity that is a new and distinct feature of the modern city. But this positioning cannot last and depends on further movement, on the perpetuation of displacement. So the flaneur wanders around a city whose spaces and ambitions become increasingly disconnected from places and memories formerly associated with home. He is both watcher and watched. This partly explains the uncanniness of the stroller’s recognition of himself as merely one among many: the fear and shock that the spectacle of the big-city crowd aroused in the observer are mingled with the crowd’s “attraction and allure.”23 In literary expression, therefore, the detached subjectivity experiences the city as strangeness, as in Baudelaire’s signature poem “Les Sept Vieillards” (The seven old men), where the poet/flaneur views nineteenth-century Paris much like “a drunk who sees double.”24 Like Dickens’ London fog, Baudelaire’s sullied mist is a “dirty yellow fog that inundates every place.”25 The stroller’s dreamlike perception of the city is thus due to a disorienting mix of desires: for penetratingly aloof observation, and to be Poe’s “man of the crowd.”26 For Baudelaire, the flaneur is one who seeks through his writings to make sense of a modernity that seems terrifyingly unstable and effectively unreal. But it is unreal precisely because its apparent “newness,” a characteristic the flaneur forever pursues, in fact camouflages modernity’s standardizing effects.27 The individual in a crowd is, after all, as duplicable as the clothes he wears. Bagehot’s civilizational “degradation” is thus reversed in a Benjaminian reading, becoming the degradation of “the commodity fetish,” where sameness presides.28

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Savage Cities, Painted Women

Like Baudelaire, Kipling began his career as a journalist who presented a personal view of a particular place in a brisk and arresting format, the feuilleton.29 The teenage Kipling regularly composed what he called “twelve-hundred [word] Plain Tales jammed into rigid frames.”30 These hallmarks of nineteenth-century urban expression afforded a quick read, thus replicating in prose the performance of the flaneur. But the city, whether Paris or Calcutta, demanded ever more “copy”—both the mechanical reproduction of newsprint and the duplication of objects, spaces, and cultures. So even as Kipling acknowledged the value of his rigid frames, he exulted, like the flaneur who cherishes ever-enlarging avenues, in his release from their confinement; he enjoyed a rush of productivity in being allowed to expand to “three- or five-thousand word cartoons once a week.”31 Baudelaire’s startling invocation of “pleasure that kills” and his ironic pairing of flowers and evil32 resemble Kipling’s “terrible and enchanting peepshow,” as his admiring contemporary Edmund Gosse labeled his stories.33 Both writers’ transgressive texts call attention to urban injustices even as they toast the city’s constant ability to surprise. For Kipling, however, any such celebration is short-lived, for unlike Baudelaire, there could be no hope of his merging with the crowd. Whether among fellow Anglo-Indians, Londoners, or Indians, Kipling’s skeptical eye, chronic homesickness, and white skin prompt him to instead produce a prose made dyspeptic by imperial boundaries. His tales grow increasingly double-sighted and disturbed by the sights at hand; their tragicomic vision is more and more drawn to night shadows, graveyards, and “dead” cities, suggesting to me that this culturally uprooted young author could locate himself only in spaces expressive of the thin line between life and death. Other writers, including Baudelaire and Joseph Conrad, certainly described such spaces, but they did so from the belief in a homelike space within Europe. Not so Kipling, who had to contend with the potent mythologizing of the colonial frontier in popular narratives, including those by his friend Rider Haggard. Such works construed the non-European hinterland as a school for heroic achievement, one where a salubrious Home is favorably contrasted with the East’s harsh “plague-spots,” a typical phrase of the era.34 Going a step further, some colonials saw these same far-off spaces as the atavistic abode of Europe. The redoubtable Herbert Edwardes happily discovers that the Pathans of Punjab, unbeknownst to themselves, are in fact one of the lost tribes of Israel.35 Edwardes, it is implied, will return them to their real identity, and at the same time stake a British claim to their mountainous, truly European land. For him, there is never a problem of separating the true from the false.

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Kipling brings an equal zeal to his parody of such popular myths. In particular, he upends the well-worn tropes of disease, pastoralism, and the questing romance in such tales as “The Man Who Would Be King,” where the framed narration of the adventure’s chief participant, Carnehan, thus distanced from the author, casts a sardonic eye on imperial vanity to reveal the ugly underbelly of enchantment. And Kipling was well aware of his public, who, as his biographer Gosse put it, “crowd around him begging for ‘just one more look.’ ”36 The look that Kipling knowingly invites is less a peep into the exotic East than a peep into its fictionality. His “word cartoons” are shadow plays that question representation in its political, iconographic, and ideological senses. No wonder he is drawn to the unrepresented—prostitutes, foot soldiers, orphans. Representation is thus intimately tied to the power to observe. Benjamin, for instance, remarks on the “uncanny elements that other students of the physiognomy of city have felt” in reading nineteenth-century fantasy stories.37 By this he means the characteristic, incipiently modern sense of “something menacing in the spectacle” of big-city crowds, to which the flaneur, as we’ve noted, was attracted like a moth to a lamp. The ambivalence of loathing and desire, which Freud was to theorize in psychoanalysis, is caught in the flaneur/poet’s “glance,” which wants both to control and to hide.38 In an age rapidly becoming attuned to the synchronicity of photographic images and of communication, which collapse earlier notions of time and space, the flaneur’s glance seeks a stabilizing version of itself in the blank look of the crowd. Baudelaire compares the flaneur’s discomfiting yet captivating experience to prostitution, which, as the most intimate meeting of strangers, represents for him the quintessential coupling of beauty and evil. Baudelaire’s poems about bohemian Paris turn the tables on the flaneur by having him lose a measure of his observational power, and thus his power to subdue whatever seems threatening and unfamiliar. It is significant that the idea of uncanniness often arises in relation to “painted women” (Freud’s phrase),39 who are themselves to the male eye a strangely familiar sight. For Baudelaire, the prostitute symbolizes modernity’s ambivalent urban vision: though “contaminated,” there is “no exalted pleasure which cannot be related to” her.40 Perhaps this is because prostitution epitomizes for Baudelaire the unexpected, uncanny shifts in reference that emerge amidst the city’s increasingly porous “boundaries between high and low.”41 If the prostitute was, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White rightly remark, one link in the nineteenth-century city’s “metonymic chain of contagion which led back to the culture of the working classes,” for Baudelaire her role was a structuring, rather than incidental, component of what it means to be a “modern” bourgeois male—a point revealed in his obsession with the physical delimitation of

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space and with bodily hygiene vis-à-vis the “harlot.”42 In other words, Baudelaire detects in the streetwalking prostitute a semblance of his own, and other men’s, activity, a comparison decidedly distasteful to the bourgeois flaneur. The male writer/flaneur, intent on discovering meaning amidst alienation, shares something of the experience of the nightwalking woman, whose own transactions force her to cross the threshold between house and street. The key difference, of course, is volition: the nineteenth-century male flaneur might invite the prostitute’s presence, but not the other way around. Flanerie, expressive of male-ordered scopophilia (the concept of the female observer, or flaneuse, would come later), figures woman, and specifically her lack of a phallus and its associative power, as a device by which to calibrate its reference points.43 We might say that the flaneur’s gaze, attenuated by an increasingly fragmented world, “demands,” as Laura Mulvey puts it in describing film’s male-centered logic, “a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of mirror recognition” so that the flaneur may see himself represented whole.44 The figure of the prostitute is uncanny because, in Benjamin’s words, her “eye scrutinizing the passers-by is at the same time on its guard against the police.”45 That is to say, her eye, which offers an invitation laden with “tense vigilance,”46 resembles the internalized surveillance of the crowd, a look that the flaneur must acknowledge but disavow since it recalls his liminal status. To admit the prostitute into a normative field of vision—to meet her returned gaze—would be to disturb the dynamics of this privileged field and its requisite spaces; but to dismiss her would be to ignore the reality of this space. Hence Baudelaire’s ambivalence toward the figures of home and prostitute alike: his “hate of home” impossibly leads him, as a “passionate observer,” “to establish his dwelling in the throng,” just as it leads him to at once condemn and extol prostitution.47 As we will see, Kipling expresses a similar ambivalence when he encounters a prostitute in the depths of Calcutta. The difference, of course, is that the colonial city throws up starker differences between male European observer and nonEuropean people and places. City of Dreadful Night How, in Kipling’s hands, are the counterfeited “depths” of colonial Calcutta accounted for? Kipling sardonically patterns his entry into the city after Dante being led by Virgil. As he heads into the non-European zones, “[The Police guides] lead and they lead and they lead, and they cease not from leading till they come to the last circle of the Inferno—a long, long, winding, quiet road. ‘There you are; you can see for yourself,’ ” say the Police. To which Kipling responds by addressing his reader:

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But there is nothing to be seen. On one side are houses—gaunt and dark, naked and devoid of furniture; on the other, low, mean stalls, lighted and with shamelessly open doors, wherein women stand and lounge, and . . . whisper one to another . . . One look down the street is sufficient. Lead on, gentlemen of the Calcutta Police. Let us escape from the lines of open doors, the flaring lamps within, the glimpses of the tawdry toilet-tables adorned with little plaster dogs, glass balls from Christmas-trees, and—for religions must not be despised though women be fallen—pictures of the saints and statuettes of the Virgin. The street is a long one, and other streets, full of the same pitiful wares, branch off of it. (71–72)

Traditional European culture is scandalously torn from its proper place: The honorable Virgin amidst colonial dishonor! Christmas in the Inferno! Such allusions to European home culture abound in City, so much so that the poet James Thomson’s well-known 1874 poem of the same name gives Kipling his own title and theme. Thomson’s nocturn about an alienating (because no longer God-fearing) London echoes Baudelaire’s proverbially damned (maudit), though without a trace of the French writer’s somber, ironic tone. We will see that Kipling juggles various levels of irony, occasionally verging on the burlesque (as in the example just cited) and mockery, but without ever hiding his identification with these scenes of Anglo-Indian life. His parody, as truly a “counter-song” (as the root meanings of para and odos indicate), at once playfully respects and belittles its object.48 Kipling’s parodic texts thus exhibit “repetition with distance,” but with one important qualification: the spaces in which Kipling’s scenes unfold sometimes are similar to those found in Europe, but are often unique to the colonial city, as in the case of an opium factory or a bungalow. Thus composed of many cultural layers that greatly increase the attributes of repetition and distance, these objects of parody in fact require a multi-pronged tone like Kipling’s, who can deftly keep his tongue in cheek even as he maintains a certain colonialist propriety. The propriety in this case is the indignation Kipling professes to feel as he looks into houses that try to assume an Anglo-Indian poise, but achieve only a sad caricature of it. But this very sight—with its “tawdry toilet-tables,” “glass balls,” “statuettes”—belies his earlier declaration that there is “nothing to be seen.” On one level, this declaration echoes the policemen’s implication that there is nothing worth seeing, and that this hick reporter can bear only a glimpse of the vast and shocking world beneath imperialism’s gentrified surface. (“How long does it take to know [Calcutta] then?” Kipling elsewhere asks his guides. The reply: “About a lifetime . . .” [67]. Hence their promise to lead him to “the

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lowest sink of all” since without them he, like other Englishmen, would lose his way [71].) But then Kipling, the supposedly savage and naive backwoodsman, of course goes on to tell us precisely what he sees. The large portion of the city that Europeans take to be unknown (14) and indescribable (10) is precisely the area that Kipling turns into a blinding revelation by listing each street’s “pitiful wares” and their spatial disjunction, which acutely remind him of his own—and his readers’—dislocation. Indeed, this is part of Kipling’s narrative strategy: to shake his reader from the complacency of customary sight. In thus pretending to eavesdrop on the true work of empire, Kipling adopts the role of his reader who must piece together, and somehow make whole, the fragmented space and speech before him. Moreover, his “reflections of a savage,” as he titles the second chapter of City, are really those of a savvy watcher who can demonstrate his knowledge by (re)constructing it on paper. What he sees will be a disquietingly uncanny reflection of himself. The city’s fragmentation, in other words, reflects his own cultural bifurcation and his journalistic outsider perspective, a fragmentation visible in his literary reconstruction of the city. For more evidence of this let us, as Kipling would say, “look further.” Here, Kipling and his guides are discussing another street scene: “How can you . . . have faith in humanity?” “That’s because you’re seeing it all in a lump for the first time, and it’s not nice that way . . . But recollect, you’ve asked for the worst places, and you can’t complain.” “Who’s complaining? Bring on the atrocities. Isn’t that a European woman at that door?” “Yes. Mrs. D—, widow of a soldier, mother of seven children.” “Nine, if you please, and good-evening to you,” shrills Mrs. D—, leaning against the door-post, her arms folded on her bosom. She is a rather pretty, slightly-made Eurasian, and whatever shame she may have owned she has long since cast behind her. A shapeless Burmo-native trot, with high cheek-bones and mouth like a shark calls Mrs. D— “Mem-Sahib.” The word jars unspeakably. Her life is a matter between herself and her Maker, but in that she—the widow of a soldier of the Queen—has stooped to this common foulness in the face of the city, she has offended against the white race. The Police fail to fall in with this righteous indignation. More. They laugh at it out of the wealth of their unholy knowledge. “You’re from up-country, and of course you don’t understand. There are any amount of that lot in the city.” Then the secret of the insolence of Calcutta is made plain. Small wonder the natives fail to respect Sahib, seeing what they see and knowing what they know. . . . All this time Mrs. D— stands on the threshold of her room and looks upon the men with unabashed eyes. Mrs. D— is a lady with a story. She is not

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averse to telling it . . . “They said I’d poisoned my husband . . .” “And—ah—did you?” “ ’Twasn’t proved,” says Mrs. D— with . . . a pleasant, lady-like laugh that does infinite credit to her education and up-bringing. Worthy Mrs. D—! It would pay a novelist—a French one let us say—to pick you out of the stews and make you talk. The Police move forward, into a region of Mrs. D—s. This is horrible; but they are used to it, and evidently consider indignation affectation. Everywhere are empty houses, and the babbling women in print gowns. The Police . . . lunge hither and thither, . . . and each plunge brings up a sample of misery, filth and woe. (67–73)

Before commenting directly on this excerpt, it is important to note that amidst Calcutta’s “great wilderness of packed houses—just such mysterious, conspiring tenements as Dickens would have loved” (59), Kipling encounters many other nocturnals besides Mrs. D—: another Eurasian woman, drunk; “John Chinaman” addicted to gambling and opium; sailors, also drunk; a bejeweled courtesan he names Dainty Iniquity, and another more prosaically labeled Fat Vice; the obligatory babus; English Tommies; and so on. He likewise delves into Calcutta’s mighty railway shops, a Eurasian community, a cemetery, the depths of a coal pit mine, and an opium factory. These crowded sites and their jumble of inhabitants appear to conspire not simply against the legitimacy of the empire and of race, but against the properly urbane spectacle of expansive, orderly spaces. Once again we see the surface appeal of Paris’ grand boulevards, home to the flaneur and the feuilletonnier, and brainchild of Georges Haussmann, “the Prefect of Paris and its environs,” who in the 1850s forged “a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city.”49 Subsequently, Kipling flippantly calls for “turn[ing] several Hausmanns [sic] loose into the city, with instructions to make barracks for the population that cannot find room in the huts” and which hide vice “in its unwashed bosom” (64). For “why should Englishmen be forced to wander through these mazes of unprofitable argument against men”—by which he means the voluble but vapid Calcutta Municipal Council—“who cannot understand the iniquity of dirt?” (32). The apparent conspiracy against English order dissolves in Kipling’s acid tone and exaggerated indignation: clearly, he himself is not “forced to wander” the city’s alleyways. His reference to the iniquity of these spaces and their occupants mocks a mainstay of colonialist rhetoric, and shows such rhetoric to be a web of false typologies. Returning to the scene with Mrs. D— cited above, we can now connect Kipling’s ambivalent view of the imperial city to his similarly ambivalent but narrower focus on Mrs. D— as an important feature of this landscape. While

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her prostitution is impertinent enough, much more impertinent is the contrast between her coarse behavior and what she presumably aspires to be, namely, a memsahib—a European lady. At stake is a language of imperial coherence: as the widow of a Crown solder, Mrs. D— is semantically contiguous with the Queen, but this is equally the case for Kipling’s implied reader, who, like Kipling, is represented as an ingenuous outsider, someone whose writing disrupts the symbols of imperial and racial superiority. When this capital proves to be as insubstantial as Mrs. D—’s presumption, the knowing police laugh at what they take to be the false indignation of their high-minded charge. The real threat proves to be India’s “knowability,” its access to truths normally kept offlimits. And what is off-limits is the central lie of empire, namely, that Calcutta’s disappointment, its “false” promise of evoking the “lost heritage of London” (7–8), results not from the city’s inherent lie, but rather from its being lied to—just as Kipling feels himself to be. The lies are manifold, but chief among them is that India, by mimicking an essential Europe and entering its imperial fold, forfeits its right to any form of non-European existence. Mrs. D—, whose English blood makes her “not quite not European,” signals by her Eurasian presence “the secret insolence of Calcutta,” whose citizens now “fail to respect the Sahib, seeing what they see and knowing what they know” (72–73). The text thereby transposes the knower and the known. It is precisely by adopting the shocked reaction of his reader, to whom he speaks conspiringly (“We are all . . . barbarians”), that Kipling can shuttle between mockery and gravity, discursively enacting a version of the duplex mimicry that was distinctive of the colonial transaction. What the newcomer lacks he makes up for by shape shifting, behaving now like the scandalized gentleman, now the imperial cheerleader, now again the irreverent prose cartoonist. With its allegiances divided between India, English India, and England, Kipling’s text ironically sets the up-country frontiersmen “dwelling beyond the Ditch” (7) against the city’s “heads of departments,” whose politicking produces a “hopeless fog” of verbal contention (34). By thus switching around the constitutive axes of colonial “knowledge,” Mrs. D—reflects Anglo-Indians’ own tacit skepticism about the existence of the kind of pure, dignified, and commanding English persona the empire demanded. It is possible, of course, to read the portrait of Mrs. D— as racist polemic. The conditions which encumber the Eurasian prostitute, according to Gail Ching-Liang Low in her discussion of the text, are meant to show that “[n]ative blood must be differentiated from white blood in order that the hierarchy of power and privilege may remain intact.”50 The concept of whiteness no doubt informs Kipling’s texts; it is, as I have noted, one of the features that pre-

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vents his merging into the crowd—along with his general sense of not belonging. But given Kipling’s numerous references to the city’s spatial orientation and corresponding access to, or denial of, spectacle—City of Dreadful Night, for instance, teems with the word “see”51 and is at pains to present Calcutta as a metropolis with its own steady roar of traffic and “crowded and hurrying life” (16–17)—his text does more than simply turn English-style order “on its head,” as Low argues.52 Far from being a mere obverse of a metropolitan Home, Kipling’s Calcutta looms more importantly as a question mark over the very belief in such a provenance by revealing London itself to be a fictive premise. Kipling can only yearn for what he knows to be a textualized London, an image of Home that hovers with false allure—a “proper Museum smell,” as he puts it elsewhere— above the pages of old books and half-remembered sights.53 The conflicting loyalties demanded by the cultural and spatial overlay of these cities require this kind of constant and precarious negotiation. The result, for someone like Kipling equally familiar with the streets of Bombay, London, and Paris, is a particularly acute wish, expressed in constant shifts of tone, to locate his personal identity in the fog of colonial space—the space of the city, certainly, but also of the text.54 Consider Kipling’s double-edged description in his autobiography of his arrival in the port of Bombay at age seventeen, having been away to school in England for nearly a decade: “I found myself at Bombay where I was born.”55 This sense of astonished self-discovery is never far below the surface of any of his texts.56 In a few short days after his arrival, Kipling declares with evident pleasure, “My English years fell away, nor ever . . . came back in full strength.”57 Later, in Lahore, a city that “Doré might have drawn,” with its gothic “spectacle of sleeping thousands,” the author discovers a memory-encrusted city of dreadful but revealing night, if one only cared to look further, beyond its first “false impression.”58 For this city was, after all, “the only real home” he had ever known.59 What Kipling finds strange there is not the “odd places” (such as opium dens) he describes for his readers, but the conflicted figures of English authority: “a Captain just cashiered for horrible drunkenness” and “a man . . . on the edge of tears because he had been overpassed for Honours.”60 Kipling thus conveys secret, insolent, and unholy knowledge of the colonial mind-set, the self-doubt that inevitably visits the colonial project. The authority that ought to provide irreproachable supervision fails, as the premise of the model city proves in revealing moments to be a house of cards.61 But the imagined Home of England in Kipling’s India is no less problematic than the alienated, godless England described in Thomson’s poem from which Kipling launched his narrative. In another short story “The Madness of

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Private Ortheris,” Kipling portrays a homesick Tommy ready to go “ ’Ome.” In a fit induced partly by the narrator’s abundant supply of Bass beer, the cockney Ortheris laments this “ ’ome-sickness”: I’m sick for London again; sick for the sounds of ’er, an’ the sights of ’er, and the stinks of ’er; orange-peel and hasphalte an’ gas comin’ in over Vaux’all Bridge. Sick for the rail goin’ down to Box’ill, with your gal on your knee an’ a new clay pipe in your face. That, an’ the Stran’ lights where you knows ev’ry one, an’ the Copper that takes you up is a old friend that tuk you up before, when you was a little, snitchy boy lying loose . . . An’ I lef’ all that for to serve the Widder beyond the seas, where there ain’t no women and there ain’t no liquor worth ’avin’, and there ain’t nothin’ to see, nor do, nor say, nor feel, nor think . . . There’s the Widder sittin’ at ’Ome with a gold crownd on ’er ’ead; and

’ere am Hi, Stanley Orth’ris, the Widder’s property, a rottin’ FOOL!62 Ortheris’s words, framed by the civilian reporter-narrator, parody the contradictions at the heart of Anglo-Indian nostalgia. To begin with, Ortheris’ name, a compound of the prefix “ortho” (upright and correct) and Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, is itself oxymoronic. It is unlikely, moreover, that Ortheris would know “ev’ry one” on the Strand (just as Kipling knew hardly anyone when he came to live off the Strand after this story’s publication).63 More importantly, the narrative belies Ortheris’ disgruntled claim that “there ain’t nothing to see, nor do” in India: Ortheris is eminently at ease shooting parrots, kites, dogs, snakes, turtles, and crows. Similarly, his tearful chatter undermines his grumbling that there is nothing to say or feel. The civilian narrator, aware (with the reader) of Ortheris’ absurd complaints, offers to help him desert in the hope of returning him to his senses. They exchange clothes and within hours, sure enough, the hapless private is discovered “calling for us like a madman,” only too glad to repossess his uniform, which “seemed to bring him to himself.” He ultimately yearns more for his army life (“want[ing] to tear my clothes off his body,” says the narrator) than for the Home of the Widowed Queen and offers a suitably penitent face to his mentor and fellow soldier, Mulvaney.64 The narrator, as he departs for home, can come to no “conclusion of any kind whatever” concerning Ortheris’ behavior.65 But the story’s conclusion is implied: the narrator and Ortheris share a real sense of loss regarding their imagined homes. The Bass beer, in its reminder of Home, like Ortheris’ dream of setting up a taxidermy shop in England, gives way finally to the fear of what awaits them in England, whose strangeness could very well swamp the spaces through which they define themselves. “Hi swum

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the Irriwaddy in the night, you know,” he proclaims proudly, if anxiously, to the narrator, accenting the “I” in order that his interlocutor will not doubt the identity of the frontier hero standing before him.66 The profession of taxidermy itself points to Ortheris’ urge to preserve England as he imagines it, far from the Irrawaddy River—though he fails to realize how the Irrawaddy itself is an extension of English space. Like the “stuff’ fox” of Ortheris’ dreams, both men risk being stuffed and displayed in writing. On the one hand, the soldier’s cockney words seem jarringly, if comically, at odds with the narrator’s proper English, which bookends the tale. On the other hand, the fact that Ortheris’ antics are deemed worthy of such bookending casts into question the very notion of propriety, just as their doubling showcases the homesickness shared by the lower and middle classes alike. For Ortheris’ uncanny double is the narrator, whose words effectively clothe Ortheris’ story, only to be torn off by the soldier in a panicked plea for some semblance of his own self. Parody yields to poignancy when both men finally come to recognize themselves in each other. The effect here is close to the young Kipling’s uneasy experience of returning to London in 1889 with newfound fame (due, ironically, to his tales of Ortheris and Mulvaney). He feels put on display in a city whose shifting and shouting inhabitants, who having just “bored their way back from the theatres,” nonetheless keep their “eyes-front and fixed, as though not seeing.”67 London’s surreal, distorting effect on individual identity is best conveyed in Kipling’s remembrance of “fac[ing] the reflection of my own face in the jet-black [i.e., coal-dusted] mirror of the window-panes for five days. When the fog thinned, I looked out and saw a man standing opposite [a] pub . . . Of a sudden his breast turned a dull red like a robin’s, and he crumpled, having cut his throat.”68 In seeing the image of the dead man through his own reflection, Kipling’s sense of lifeless alienation dissolves into that of the victim, much as he writes his own displacement into his reflections on the strange sights of Calcutta and Ortheris’ plight. Conclusion

It ought not be surprising by now to note how the empty theatricality of London, the imperial center, is echoed in Kipling’s prose by the corresponding theatricality of the colonial modern. It is fitting, then, that the narrator of “The Phantom Rickshaw,” who questions India’s “knowability,” should be surrounded by an unseeing, theater-going crowd in Simla in the same moment that he sees ghostly images. So great is his astonishment at the discovery “that the Seen and the Unseen should mingle so strangely” that he finds he cannot recognize himself.69 It is this very strangeness that most appeals to Kipling. His narrators perpetually balance on the cusp of plural identities, trying desperately

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to avoid the thin line separating sanity from insanity, the seen from the unseen. Yet even as they yearn for subjective wholeness and perspective, these same individuals compulsively wander the fringes of their accustomed world. This is why they must continually ask the reader’s indulgence, pleading the credibility—the knowability—of their incredible tales. It also explains Kipling’s preference for framed narration (more so in his stories than his travel sketches). Positioning the reader as a flaneur, Kipling’s boxed narratives simulate, through the narrator’s seemingly straightforward reporting, the distancing effect of the peepshow, whose otherwise unspeakable sights become palatable. In particular, it is the narrator as feuilletonist, master of the intricate spacing of words, who can best survey and mediate the layered truths of the landscape before him. The knowability of Kipling’s India is its knowing ability to stage modern colonialism’s self-invention, much as Kipling’s multiply layered, ever-shifting tones throw into question the loci of meaning even as the text professes its wholeness. We are not far here from the position of the flaneur, whose disinclination to join the crowd—the very group whose alienation he mercilessly expresses—is at constant war with his desire to merge, recognizing as he does their shared and mutually constituting origins. Though Kipling’s stories generally share with later narratives the “implication that all stories are in a state of being retold,”70 he goes further, directly implicating his narrators as actors in the geographically and psychologically split landscapes they explore. In Kipling’s hands, the colonial city is not simply a backdrop for bourgeois angst, but rather a space that, though tantalizingly homelike, is a mystifying mix of surface and depth, past and present, confinement and mobility. Kipling’s text throws into relief the contradictory urges of the modern state. By deploying a colonial modern idiom that mixes word, tone, and place, he reveals the unsettling knowledge that there will always be spaces that exceed the state’s consuming reach. Notes 1. Walter Bagehot, “Nation-Making,” Imperialism & Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, ed. Barbarar Harlow and Mia Carter (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 267. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, “India,” The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 139. 3. See Wittkower, “Marvels of the East,” 152–197. 4. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, xiii. 5. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. and ed. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 416–420.

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6. Kipling, [The] City of Dreadful Night [and] American Notes (New York: H. M. Caldwell Co., 1899). (Note: The title for City variously appears with and without the definite article.) All subsequent page references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the body of this chapter. 7. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 417. 8. Kipling, “The Phantom Rickshaw,” The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales (Chicago: Donohoe & Henneberry, n.d.), 5. 9. For discussions of the influential role of colonial travelogues and guidebooks, see, for instance, Grewal’s Home and Harem and Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 10. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 6. 11. Swati Chattopadhyay similarly notes this uncanniness, which distressed Europeans precisely because the resemblance between European and colonial metropoles scuttled the supposed need for a “civilising” European presence. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 23–24. 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 118, 140–143. 13. For more on the colonial origins of modern institutions, see Timothy Mitchell and Paul Rabinow. 14. Quoted in Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 72. 15. James Ranald Martin, Notes on Medical Topograph; Report of the Committee Appointed by the Right Honorable the Governor of Bengal for the Establishment of a Fever Hospital and for Inquiry into Local Management and Taxation in Calcutta (Calcutta: Bishop College Press, 1840), 14. 16. Bagehot, “Nation-Making,” 267–270. 17. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 21. 18. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, xi. 19. Edwardes, quoted in Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, 36. 20. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 222. 21. “The Uncanny,” 243–244. 22. Benjamin, Illuminations, 156. 23. Ibid., 163–174. 24. Baudelaire, “Les Sept Vieillards,” in The Flowers of Evil/ Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. and ed. M. and J. Matheus (revised ed.) (New York: New Directions, 1983), 331.

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25. Baudelaire, “Les Sept Vieillards,” 331; my translation. 26. See Benjamin’s Illuminations, 170, for an important gloss on Poe’s influence on Baudelaire, who translated Poe. 27. See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 22. 28. Ibid., 22, 18. 29. For more on the feuilleton and its role in modern forms of narrative, see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 147–148; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 146–148; and Bruce Mazlish, “The Flaneur: From Spectator to Representation,” The Flaneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 50. Also see Benjamin, Arcades Project, 21. 30. Kipling, Something of Myself, 75. 31. Ibid., 75. 32. Baudelaire, quoted in Benjamin, Illuminations, 168. 33. Edmund Gosse, “Rudyard Kipling,” Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 108. 34. Letter [unsigned] to India Office, London, 14 April 1870. National Archives of India [NAI]/ Home/Judicial/No. 55, 30 July 1870, New Delhi. 35. See Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, 36. 36. Gosse, “Rudyard Kipling,” 117. 37. Benjamin, Illuminations, 187. 38. Ibid., 167. 39. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 237. 40. Baudelaire, quoted in Stallybrass and White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression, 137. 41. Stallybrass & White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression, 126. 42. Ibid., 138, 136. 43. See Priscilla Parkhust Ferguson, “The Flaneur On and Off the Streets of Paris,” in Tester, The Flaneur, 22–42; and Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 234. 44. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 310. In this sense, Freud’s self-described alarm at abruptly and repeatedly turning onto a “narrow street” of “painted women” seems less a matter of surprise than of inclination, given the context of his ordering criteria: wandering about without asking (or wanting to ask) directions, he returns to a site whose type he knows although its specific topography is new. But even this newness soon dissolves (not least in its retelling, which reconfigures the event as anecdote, one flaneur to another), and he finds himself, literally and figuratively, within the liminal context of the defamiliarized, the illicit (Freud, “The Uncanny”).

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45. Benjamin, Illuminations, 191. 46. Ibid., 191. 47. Baudelaire, quoted in Keith Tester, “Introduction,” The Flaneur, ed. Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 2. 48. See Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 32. 49. Berman, All That is Solid, 150. These broad avenues “opened up new social, cultural and economic sites to which people were drawn” and where “shops of all kinds” aligned themselves in a spectacle of middle-class Parisian life (Smart, 161), a development that by the 1880s, the time of Kipling’s Calcutta excursion, was “acclaimed as the very model of modern urbanism.” See Barry Smart, “Digesting the Modern Diet: Gastro-Porn, Fast Food and Panic Eating,” The Flaneur, 161; and Berman, All That is Solid, 151–152. Compare the pioneering journalist William Howard Russell’s journal on India’s 1857 uprising. To him, Calcutta’s “open spaces” immediately “suggest Moscow,” and its lighted lamps call forth “the Champs Elysses avenue.” Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, ed. Michael Edwardes (London: Cassell & Co., 1957), 9–10. 50. Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 186. 51. A single page of City’s text illustrates this: “ ‘I’d like to see where this alley is going to end’ . . . ‘Whot’s that?’ ‘Sergeant of Police just to see where we’re going . . . ’ ‘Whot’s that?’ . . . ‘I couldn’t quite see’ ” (68). 52. Low, White Skins, Black Masks, 189. 53. Kipling, Something of Myself, 44. 54. In his autobiography, Kipling tells of accompanying his father, Lockwood, to the Paris Exhibition of 1877 (where Lockwood was in charge of Indian Exhibits) and being overcome by the “full freedom of that spacious and friendly city,” which was “an education in itself.” Something of Myself, 47. 55. Kipling, Something of Myself, 56. 56. In his autobiography, Kipling tells of accompanying his father, Lockwood, to the 1877 Paris Exhibition (where the elder Kipling was “in charge of Indian Exhibits”) and being overcome by the “full freedom of that spacious and friendly city,” which was “an education in itself.” See Something of Myself, 47. 57. Ibid. 58. Kipling, “The City of Dreadful Night,” Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People, ed. P. N. Furbank (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 283–284, 286. 59. Kipling, Something of Myself, 95. 60. Ibid., 72. 61. Ibid. 62. Kipling, “The Madness of Private Ortheris,” A Kipling Pageant (New York: Literary Guild, 1935), 26–27.

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Something of Myself, 84–86. “The Madness of Private Ortheris,” 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., quoted bit on 26. Something of Myself, 85. Ibid., 84–85. Kipling, “Phantom Rickshaw,” 55. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 261.

Chapter 5

Medical Topography in Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters

Medical Topography and Colonial Distress

A key feature of imperial Britain’s efforts to manage the topography of the Indian subcontinent was the focus on health and hygiene. If Edwin Chadwick’s and Henry Mayhew’s best-selling Victorian-era studies of London’s sanitary conditions and laboring population indicate the degree to which a growing English middle class was as concerned about moral decay as about disease, the small number of Britishers in the tropics was all the more obsessed with fear of contagion and “degenerescence.”1 As much as nineteenth-century London’s sewers and slums made the city’s genteel communities anxious, India’s bazaars and “native towns” and jungles terrified British colonials. In typical fashion, an 1859 Calcutta Review article by Dr. Norman Chevers urges that British soldiers must not be “exposed . . . to all the destructive effects of unrestrained and reckless debauchery in the Bazars [sic].”2 Bazaars were, in the typical view of a mid-nineteenth-century traveler, marked by “meanness and shabbiness” that contrasted with Britain’s imagined cleanliness.3 Friedrich Engels, and even Chadwick, would have begged to differ. The point, however, is that in nineteenth-century India, Europeans beset by cholera and other vectors of death, and increasingly challenged to explain their colonial mission, turned to contemplating ways the colonial topography could be better managed. A first step was the appointment of a military officer to take charge of “medical topography.” In a 12 August 1857 memorandum, James Ranald Martin, a medical doctor and prominent shaper of health legislation in British India, advised, in the interest of “the sanitary duties of the Army,” the naming of “an official of scientific attainments . . . who shall . . . add to the Department of Military Topography that of Medical Topography.” Such an official would over163

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see the proper construction of barracks and hospitals to safeguard the health of the British soldier in India.4 The term “medical topography” ingeniously conjoins the increasingly prominent role of medical science in the nineteenth century and the colonial army’s ceaseless concern with the manipulation of both public and private spaces. It is significant that Martin recommends the combining of medical, military, and sanitary offices throughout British India only three months after the uprising had been instigated on 10 May 1857 by Indian sepoys in the employ of the East India Company. The so-called Great Mutiny was a momentous event, as we have seen, for it resulted in a reconfiguration of Britain’s relationship to India, one that ushered in a new phase of colonial governance. The East India Company was forced to hand control of India over to the British government (nominally the Crown), which immediately brought its considerable monetary and military resources to bear on the subcontinent. The medical-spatial policy changes suggested by Martin were instrumental to this governmental reconfiguration, for his insistence on the gathering of medical statistics, appointment of far-reaching Sanitary Commissions, and study of deforestation all led to more effective health programs in India. This also meant that British administrators became all the more intent on managing the lives of Indians. The “civilizing mission” claim, in other words, could now be extended to geographical, not just social, spheres. As the historian David Arnold notes, medical topography, which textually combined landscape and death to produce what he called “deathscapes,” was a conceptual term that helped shape the discourse concerning this “morbid geography.”5 For example, the British study and management of swaths of land devastated by disease, for example, identified the Indian inhabitants to be victims of their own mismanaged environment. Medical topography was thus emblematic of the colonial take on the then-newly discovered relationship between natural and human environments. The Mutiny, which generated textual, pictorial, and photographic images of death in the British media, further promoted the notion that India, and the tropics in general, were incubators of natural as well as social dangers. A new subgenre of fiction quickly developed that came to be called the Mutiny novel.6 It was styled as a morality play whose English actors bore the standard of Good and the traitorous Indians the sign of Evil. (Although the form did not always overtly Christianize the event, the English heroes exhibited a Christian ethos that opposed the Hindu and Muslim rebels. Additionally, most post-Mutiny accounts, as I will show, conflated religion and politics in their characterization of Hindu and Muslim intentions.) The genre was practically obliged to include such staple dualities as betrayal/loyalty and madness/reason; tropes like the “dark mutinous alleyways” and the circulation of chappatis (unleavened bread),

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which was widely believed to have signaled the start of the uprising; and conventional characters that included the plucky Englishwoman, the unflappable English gentleman-spy, and the crazed Muslim zealot. Most of these post-Mutiny motifs were really extensions of European preconceptions of the tropics and its inhabitants that had been accumulating since the days of Columbus and Vasco Da Gama.7 But after the events of 1857, the colonial sensibility turned what had been a distanced and picturesque idiom into a lexicon of epic and self-righteous struggle, with the result that this idiom became entangled with the juridical, geographical, and medical languages of state. Not surprisingly, imperial-minded novelists continued to find in the 1857– 1858 uprising a perfect setting for the repetition of the loyalty/betrayal opposition, which hinged on an infantalized image of Indians who are forever in debt to British paternalism. The ma-baap (mother-father, parental) relationship between ruler and ruled that British authorities crafted and actively endorsed must never again be tested. The almost instant mythologizing of the Mutiny allowed later imperial writers, such as Maud Diver, to fuse the trope of loyalty to Britain’s geographical imperative by drawing on a long-standing staple of topographic detail: the heroic iconography of the built environment stood proudly above societal tensions, so that, in Diver’s reasoning, “the men who have built India up and held it together . . . see to it that, in spite of official vagaries above and seditious propaganda below, the dams hold, the canals irrigate, the grass grows and the British Raj endures.”8 Although the last words in this statement fly in the face of the historical fact of India’s imminent freedom, their repetition insists that, whatever the political fate of the Raj, its works—bridges and railways—will continue to signify the integrity of their builders. Another work, the Grand Trunk Road, which features prominently in both Kipling’s Kim and in Diver’s celebrations of Empire, was critical to the British Army’s logistical supply lines during the Mutiny.9 The Indian sepoys understood this colonial iconography well, which is why, to announce the start of their insurgency in the most potent way possible, they burned the most “visible symbols of [British] authority”—cantonment bungalows, office buildings, and police stations.10 The British moral reaction to such acts was predictable: The Indian rebel instantly became a synonym for treachery, and the Mutiny myth provided handy references for writers whose ostensible aim was simply to instruct and enlighten. Samuel Smiles, a best-selling essayist who in the late 1800s popularized such middle-class Victorian ideals as obedience and duty, praised the selfless British soldiers, who during the Mutiny “died to a man” rather than renounce their Christian religion, thereby adhering to a “simple manliness” that he asks his readers to emulate. The soldiers’ trust and obedience withstood the onslaught,

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says Smiles, of an inherently undisciplined rebellion. Like the cantonment, the soldier represented civilized order, the rebel anarchy. G. A. Henty, the popular young-adult writer who churned out episodic tales filled with imperialist clichés, produced his own version of the Mutiny subgenre, In Times of Peril (1881), a useful point of comparison for Steel’s novel.11 Passages in chapter 1, “Life in Cantonments,” are worth quoting since they contain a typically aestheticized iconography that filled the British imagination: Very bright and pretty, in the early springtime of the year 1857, were the British cantonments of Sandynugghur. As in all other British garrisons in India they stood quite apart from the town, forming a suburb of their own. They consisted of the barracks and of a maiden [ field], or, as in English it would be called, “a common,” on which the troops drilled and exercised, and round which stood the bungalows of the military and civil officers of the station, of the chaplain, and of the one or two merchants who completed the white population of the place. Very pretty were these bungalows, built entirely upon the ground floor, in rustic fashion, wood entering largely into their composition. Some were thatched; others covered with slabs of wood or stone. All had wide verandas running round them, with tatties, or blinds, made of reeds or strips of wood to let down, and give shade and coolness to the rooms therein. In some of them the visitor walked from the compound, or garden, directly into the diningroom, large, airy, with neither curtains nor carpeting nor matting, but with polished boards as flooring. The furniture here was generally plain and almost scanty, for except at meal times, the rooms were but little used. Outside, in the veranda, is the real sitting-room of the bungalow. Here are placed a number of easy-chairs of all shapes, constructed of cane or bamboo—light, cool, and comfortable; these are moved, as the sun advances, to the shady side of the veranda, and in them the ladies read and work, the gentlemen smoke. In all bungalows built for the use of English families, there is . . . a drawing-room as well as a dining-room and this, being the ladies’ especial domain, is generally furnished in European style, with a piano, light chintz chair-covers, and muslin curtains. (5–6)

All these domestic features of the British-Indian cantonment—bungalow, shaded veranda, and chintz-covered furniture—also appear in Flora Annie Steel’s best-selling novel of 1896, On the Face of the Waters. But I will argue that although Steel’s predictable characters met the expectations of patriotic lateVictorian readers, who enjoyed her tale in prodigious numbers, by providing

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them with similarly detailed descriptions, her narrative, quite unlike Henty’s, ultimately weaves an ambivalent representation of “India,” one whose various strands focus on liminal spaces, such as the bazaar and the bungalow veranda, and on figures who transgress these spaces—an Englishwoman disguised as a Hindu widow, an Englishman who alternately dresses as an Indian soldier and an Afghan, an Indian magician who impersonates a woman, and others. This historical romance thus justifies imperial governance12 even as it teases out the unstable signifiers of that governance. I do not mean that Britain’s hold over much of the subcontinent had at the time of the novel’s publication weakened in any substantive way,13 but Steel, writing in a moment of increasing Indian nationalism and other challenges to Britain’s global reach, threads into her narrative a semiotics of colonial distress. By distress I mean a latent consciousness among colonial rulers and late-century readers that rule would henceforth mean juggling many new balls at once: education, jurisprudence, religious policy, statecraft, the policing of borders, medicine, and so on. To drop any one of these would spell trouble. To keep them all in the air would prove to be, as many colonial administrators began to realize, practically impossible. Hence Martin’s strenuous effort to fuse topographic, military, and medical concerns. In the pages that follow, I show how Steel’s novel responds to these concerns by portraying women, both English and Indian, in terms of colonial regimes of space and health. In doing so, the novel lays bare the contradictions, and sometimes self-criticisms, at the heart of an essentially masculine and quasi-religious imperial rule. But before turning to the novel, I will consider how ideas of territoriality and space play out in the context of some familiar colonial typologies of space and society, and highlight how changing health regimes reinforced these typologies. Bazaars and Corrupting Prostitutes

Ann Laura Stoler has illustrated “the extent to which control over sexuality and reproduction were at the core of defining colonial privilege and its boundaries.”14 To facilitate this development, colonial rulers positioned European women as the embodiment of Victorian middle-class respectability and imperial domesticity. Unsurprisingly, this ideal was largely constituted in opposition to the Native—the Native man, certainly, but also, and crucially, the Native woman. Colonial administrators acted on these distinctions by literally segregating Europeans from local Indians in the townships, building walls between European and Indian areas of cities.15 (Hence the spatial configurations discussed in earlier chapters, such as cantonment, Native town, and civil lines [the civilian officials’ area of town]). In addition, administrators in the mid-1860s implemented

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the Contagious Diseases and Cantonments Acts to control Indian prostitutes by cordoning off their workplaces and requiring them to register with British military authorities and submit to frequent medical inspections.16 A significant motivation for this legislation was the fear among administrators, doctors, and military officers that Englishmen might “go native,” a transformation that could, in their minds, debilitate whole European settlements, much in the manner of a virus. For Stoler, the threat of disease and segregating walls are emblematic of the hysteria surrounding cultural contagion that characterized post-Mutiny British rule.17 Medical topographers therefore sought to safeguard European identities by fixing spatial boundaries, whether this was the cantonment limit, the barracks, or the lock hospital (a hospital reserved for cases of venereal disease). As the 1866 Army Hygiene handbook pronounces, “marriage with natives is [not] desirable on social grounds . . . , the issue of such marriages being deficient in all that constitutes manliness.”18 Cantonment boundaries were thus determined mostly by contemporary scientific notions of the miasmatic (airborne) spread of disease, as the 1863 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India explicitly states.19 So, for instance, British Indian Army authorities mandated that the residences of Indian workers in the cantonment be placed far from those of British residents. Inevitably, the more favorably situated areas—those on higher ground and away from flood-prone rivers and lower-elevation Native towns—were cleared for Anglo-Indian bungalows and other European constructions. As the Manual of Family Medicine for India states, “The first thing to look for is good drainage, and therefore a slight elevation of the ground will be the preferable locality.”20 Paradoxically, as the anxiety surrounding the corporeal and spatial disciplining of Indian habitations increased after 1857, it was accompanied by what S. P. Mohanty has called an “imperial subjectivity” that wished to avoid easy definition.21 This was a subjectivity that could, like Kipling’s hero Kim, deftly adapt to non-European circumstances without losing his (but never her) intrinsic European-ness. (Ironically, for Kim it is his Irishness that suffices to counteract that contagion.) A subjectivity like Kim’s could not simply imitate but actually become Other by means of some indefinable transaction. Kim, who is reared in a Lahore bazaar by a “half-caste woman,” can “lie like an Oriental,” still possesses an inborn capacity to distinguish between truth and lie, original and counterfeit. This makes him extremely valuable in the Great Game because he is an eminently disguisable spy.22 By helping to guarantee Britain’s imperial borders, Kim secures his own essential European and imperial selfhood. The British state, as Kim learns, fights on his behalf to establish boundaries that can withstand the threat of spatial and cultural diffusion.

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Such thinking is in full view in Edward J. Tilt’s widely read 1875 book, Health in India for British Women and on the Prevention of Disease in Tropical Climates: The only way we have of estimating the relative healthiness of different parts of India for Europeans, is the variable mortality of the British soldier in the different regions, because, wherever stationed, he continues to be the same specimen of British humanity, his clothing, diet, vices, mode of life are everywhere the same, so it is supposed that if he dies too frequently in any given spot, it is bad for Europeans to reside there.23

Tilt uses as an index of imperial health the ostensibly changeless livelihood of the British soldier. In Tilt’s view (and that of most authorities), the particular habits of the soldiery were less important than their predictability—a predictability that depends on trust in the seemingly impermeable, visible boundaries the British had carefully constructed to ensure their dominance—boundaries of race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality as well as of cartography, architecture, and hygiene—and various combinations of these. As Narayani Gupta notes, the British delineated their own architectural space with “straight lines of identical houses, totally different from the eclectic architecture and irregular roads of the Indian towns which were adjacent to them.”24 In other words, a particular sense of changeless modularity underlay these constructions (of habit, of architecture) on both sides. In stereotypes of the Native these modules included, most notably, the corrupting Indian woman, the effeminate babu, and the anglicized Bengali parvenu, whose verbosity and transparent mimicry bespoke unrestrained excess and the duplicity that suffused Anglo-Indian literature following the Mutiny.25 These poor imitations of English civility were presented by the ruling Europeans in contrast to their own standard of civilized deportment, a standard that was as visible in the built environment as in the persons who inhabited these spaces. But it was precisely this assurance of modularity that the Mutiny called into question. The insurgency was everything that British rule was not: unpredictable, not confined to any single area; it was a “madness” every bit as miasmic, in British eyes, as the most insidious disease. Indeed, post-Mutiny British historians, journalists, and memoirists alike commonly naturalized the uprising by describing it in medical terms, as if this eruption had been latent all along and simply found the right victims (the uncomprehending and innocent Europeans) among whom they could metastasize. The confusion of medical metaphors is beside the point: The sepoys become at once agents of insurrection and vectors of a vaguely conceived force that the subcontinent exerted upon all its inhabit-

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ants. The tropical disposition to the spread of disease was read, in a time of poorly understood pathological and entomological conditions, as a predisposition for societal calamity. Of course, India had always been read by Europeans through a veil of mysticism, its occult faculties a long-standing impediment to rational knowledge, yet a vital ingredient in the country’s fictional depiction. But until the Mutiny, colonial authorities liked to believe that anything they did not know was not worth knowing, and consequently characterized their Indian soldiers much as they did their hunting dogs—loyal, brave, and even friendly. After the insurrection, these same soldiers were seen as treacherous, cowardly, and mad, their previous reputation became inverted in the face of their sudden “rabidity.”26 Clearly, the British confidence in a semiotics of orderliness had been shattered, to be supplanted by one of distress. British post-Mutiny rhetoric and public behavior unexpectedly displayed a curious combination of nativization and segregation, given the prevalent colonial fear of “going native.” After the East India Company was compelled to cede control to the British government, administrators sought to simultaneously cajole Indian rajas, mollify various religious sensitivities, and militarize the landscape in an effort to consolidate British power. By “militarize the landscape” I mean the coordinated efforts to segregate army stations by increased demarcation and enforcement of cantonment boundaries, to implement draconian sanitary rules, and to ensure strategic interests by, for instance, laying railway tracks and blasting roads across the Northwest Frontier. Perhaps the most effective of these strategies was the exhibition of imperial pomp through public rituals, in their way a new expression of the old Mughal durbars. It is important to note, moreover, the tendency of the British to romanticize Mughal rule while denigrating Hinduism, as Forster tends to do in A Passage to India.27 Just as the Mughals had held public audiences to placate as well as awe their largely Hindu subjects, beginning in the 1860s, the British went to great lengths to organize immense tented gatherings of maharajas in all their finery.28 Even Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s artist father, was enjoined by the viceroy, Lord Lytton, to design the ornamentation of the imperial banners for the most famous of these durbars, the Delhi Imperial Assemblage of 1877, when Viceroy Lytton’s proclamation of Queen Victoria to be India’s “Empress” was announced to the subcontinent and suitably celebrated, just as had recently been done in England. Harriet Tytler, the famous Mutiny survivor and memoirist, invoked Lockwood’s son in describing the event: I believe it was the grandest sight ever seen in India since the start of our Rule. I wish I had Kipling’s pen to draw the scenes as I saw them. The Proclamation

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was indeed a wonderful sight, a sort of Arabian night and fairy scene. All the rajas were seated in a segment of a circle, each maharaja or raja or nawab vying with the others in grandeur of dress and jewels.29

She concludes by remarking, “It was both a lovely and a ludicrous sight,” a combination of magnificently festooned elephants and a contingent of riffraff. She “wonder[s] what the effect was on the minds of those royalty to see the Viceroy’s camp pitched on the very spot where the Delhi princes had been conquered by our army.”30 Tytler explicitly connects the two events, the failed Mutiny and the Imperial Assemblage, that came to define the Raj, and notes the stark symbolism of the Viceroy Lord Lytton’s decision to choose the very space where the insurgents had been defeated for the ceremonial proclamation. Its success clearly relied on aesthetic judgments (the ornamentation) as well as historical evocation. Equally important was the role of media—telegraph, newspaper, and magazine—in broadcasting the event. One contemporary Anglo-Indian newspaper in the important, far-off cantonment city of Poona reported that even the Indian community had, on the night of the durbar, spontaneously caught the celebratory mood: “the best proof of an innate, sincere, and respectful loyalty to their beloved Empress . . . lies [in] . . . the illuminations in the City . . . Bazaar . . . given spontaneously . . . [by] the poorer classes.”31 The language here reveals that the durbar’s success was measured, in large part, by its resonance in farflung bazaars, and this for two reasons: First, the language of class massages the egos of Indian as well as British rulers and assures an English and elite Indian readership of the Raj’s epic, timeless features. Second, such language reintegrates the bazaar, the nefarious site of insurrection in Mutiny literature, into the compass of a benign parental (ma-baap) authority. The cause of Europeans’ deep anxiety over the bazaar during and following the events of 1857–1858 is not hard to pinpoint. As the historian Ranajit Guha observes, “A rebellion—any rebellion—is, in the eyes of its adversaries, a disease”32—especially so given the long-standing European characterization of the tropics as pathologically and morally insidious. “Revolt,” remarks a contemporary administrator quoted by Guha, “is contagious & it is impossible to foresee the extent to which the evil might spread.” More specifically, Guha cites an official saying that the rebellion “spread through the Bengal Army . . . like any infectious disease in a vitiated atmosphere.”33 To be sure, the alarm expressed by colonial authorities is not unique to the Indian context. Just as upper classes in Europe had sometimes been shocked from their reverie of rule by lower class rebellions (such as that of Wat Tyler or Ned Lud), so did the colonialists register the uprising as abrupt and, therefore, irrational. How else to explain a crazed jolt

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to the body of state? Guha shows otherwise: The mutineers were often peasants who were reacting to decades of abuse at the hands of their British masters as well as Indian landowners. The rebellion, though sparked by the sepoy Mangal Pandey’s shooting of a British officer in Meerut, turned into a coordinated effort that was made possible, ironically, by the very rule that the British had established over the past century. Britain’s highly centralized bureaucracy on the subcontinent “had unified and brought into focus the refracted moments of semifeudalism in the countryside in a manner unprecedented in Indian history.”34 Yet the British could not conceive of such coordination from a diverse and, in their eyes, undisciplined society. British accounts of the rebels’ incredibly rapid transmission of signals from village to village, over vast distances, without the aid of telegraph or railway, took on mystical overtones.35 There was no individual Paul Revere here to light a lantern, but instead two decidedly collective, nonbureaucratic means of communication: the bazaar “gup” (rumor) and the circulating chappati.36 Both were read after the fact as an inevitable, uncontrollable, and unpredictably straying from rational semantics, their instrumentality a complement to the idiopathic contagion across the countryside. This retrospective conclusion serves paradoxically to ascribe logic to inexplicable (because inconceivable) events. It is this larger British effort to make sense of Indian betrayal to which Flora Annie Steel’s novel, and all Mutiny fiction, belongs. Not surprisingly, therefore, both bazaar rumor and chappatis feature prominently in Steel’s narrative. The bazaar’s reputation as a space for illicit behavior, and for physical and psychological pollution, meshes easily with the worries about rumor. Rumor is vagrant, traceless, and not reproducible. It “flies,” as the Romans liked to say. It appears to transcend time and place. Add to this the physical space of the Indian bazaar, and you have everything a colonial power fears: a corruption at the very heart of the empire, whose marketplaces, however unseemly, are the arteries of both trade and raw intelligence. The satirist of Anglo-India, G. O. Trevelyan, describes the Indian bazaar in characteristically derogatory terms: Do not let the name “bazaar” conjure up reminiscences of the Pantheon, or of . . . Soho Square . . . An Indian bazaar is a narrow street of one-storied hovels, each with a small verandah, of which the floor is raised about two feet above the level of the road. The fronts are generally of wood, carved in tawdry patterns, dirty beyond anything that cold western imaginations can conceive. Into the filth and darkness of the inner room behind the shop no European, save a police-officer, or a sanitary commissioner, would dare to penetrate. The proprietor sits in the verandah surrounded by his stock-in-trade . . . There is

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. . . an utter absence of the picturesque costumes which, in the markets of Cairo and Alexandria, almost realize our ideas of the Bagdad of Haroun Alraschid.37

Not coincidentally, Trevelyan, who visited India in 1864, places his description of this insidious space, together with his recollection of the Anglo-Indian bungalow (see below), shortly before his chapter on the Great Mutiny. The corrupting miasma of the bazaar percolates in the vicinity, both geographical and lexical, of English residences. The ominous implications of this spatial contrast are clear: The bazaar continues to breed the germ of disorder that may once again threaten the orderly bungalow (although Trevelyan elsewhere in his book almost too vigorously assuages such fears, judging that the network of telegraph wires, roads and railways built up after the Mutiny have made British power now “absolutely secure from an internal shock”).38 In many ways, his book is a tracing of routes that intersect the India he has thus far only imagined. At virtually every step Trevelyan is forced to confront a “strange” country, whose physical presence he must view through his screen of preconceived notions. Consequently, his sense of direction and proportion suffers, much as his impression of an Indian bazaar suffers when he contrasts it with the exoticized image he had sustained in his mind. At another instance of disappointment Trevelyan, after emerging from a bungalow, faces a “smaller open space” near which he discovers the remnants of a “rude fortification” of earth, “the first evidence I had met with of the great mutiny.”39 “The country being strange,” he remarks of his tiger-hunting expedition, “there continually occurred some misunderstanding about the name and direction of places.”40 The bazaar, with its impenetrable inner rooms and narrow streets, is emblematic for this sense of European disorientation and perplexity in the face of an uncanny (that is, strangely familiar) country. The chappati, that other symbol of the dastardly native conspiracy in 1857, occupies a similar place in the colonial British iconography of treachery. Like the bazaar, it stands for coded messages and mysterious activity. The circulating chappati was in fact used, historians tell us, as a signal of such fastspreading diseases as cholera. A runner from one village would pass a chappati to the next, thereby warning neighbors of the contagion. No doubt just such a warning had been recognized, in hindsight, as a signal for the start of war. For the British, the circulation of chappatis mirrored the circulation of rumor. Both these media were renegade, uncontrollable, and seen as occult. As interpreted retrospectively by both baffled Britishers and exultant sepoys, the rebellion had acquired a near-mystical cast, with Hindu and Muslim holy men standing in for prophets of the imminent end of Britain’s rule. The country’s traditional reverence for holy figures meant that they frequently helped circulate rumors

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of impending change and rebellion. Thus, even before the Mutiny’s outbreak Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Fyzabad had, in February 1857, called for “holy war . . . against the English.”41 No wonder “crazed” holy men are a mainstay of the Mutiny novel, as we will see. Colonial anxiety surrounding the space of the bazaar is hard to overstate. Five years before the Mutiny, Robert Hobbes had extolled India’s “wondrous” natural bounty but exclaims upon seeing a Calcutta bazaar: What a din! What a bustle! . . . there is a meanness and a shabbiness about the markets, so different to the neatness and even elegance of taste in Britain, such an utter want of taste in laying out the goods, as renders all unsightly to the European observer.42

The comparative turmoil of the “unwholesome” Indian marketplace offends his aesthetic, moral, and bodily values, prompting his quick retreat to the reassuringly European face of the city, which outshines that of Home and recalls “the fairy tales of our childhood.”43 It was this bewilderment by the Indian marketplace that drove the belief that “the whole country had risen almost instantaneously” in the hot summer of 1857, propelled by rumor spread from the bazaars.44 As Sumit Guha reports, a “great burst of barracks building began during the 1860s” to “dissipate the miasmata that current medical theories blamed for most diseases.” These were also intended to distance soldiers from bazaars and brothels.45 The convergence of strategic and health concerns associated with bazaars thus resulted in a spatial relocation of colonial power to cantonments and civil lines—a move that in northern cities eviscerated a courtly Mughal aesthetic that Britishers had earlier admired.46 Even as late as 1944 the military went so far as to recommend that “[t]he boundaries of all bazaars . . . should be marked by pillars,” and ordered that “whenever the limits so marked have been exceeded, . . . the officer commanding the station will direct all houses, walls or enclosures so improperly built . . . beyond the authorized boundaries of the bazaar to be thrown down. . . .”47 Of central concern in the government’s health regime was the figure of the Native prostitute. Debates surrounding the practice of prostitution fill both European and Native newspapers of the era. Most British administrators feared the degeneration of the army by Indian prostitutes, as well as the sullying of imperial respectability by the presence of European prostitutes. British and American evangelicals warned of moral catastrophe. And Indian (mostly male) reformers lamented the plight of “our” women.48 Among colonial authorities,

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the perils of venereal disease in particular became an obsession after 1857 and overrode other moral and political considerations. The British soldier was an expensive commodity, and his health a veritable index of the Empire’s. This was not so easily accomplished, however, because the British Army traditionally allowed and at times even encouraged the admittance of so-called regimental prostitutes to placate the unmarried troops. As a result, a series of Cantonments Acts in the 1860s authorized the registration and examination of cantonment prostitutes in an effort to contain venereal diseases. A paradox inevitably arose: If prostitutes ensured the mental health of the army, they also, according to one Inspector-General, “aid[ed] in reducing the strength of empire.”49 Tables and charts recording incidents of venereal disease proliferated in every cantonment in India beginning in the 1860s. Like the constant fear of “going native” and of subversive communications, syphilis was read as the visible sign of moral contamination and illicit commingling of Indian and British bodies and spaces. Hence, a diseased British soldier was typically ordered to identify a prostitute, who, as the alleged contaminant, was then examined and removed from cantonments.50 For instance, a cantonment medical officer’s 1885 report relates that one registered cantonment prostitute named Rahdya was arrested and “confessed” to being “diseased since she left . . . with the regiment . . . After her arrest the number of cases of syphilis amongst the cavalry . . . immediately decreased by 75 per cent.” The doctor’s report ends in anxious hyperbole: “There can be no doubt that the increase in venereal during the year was in great measure due to this girl.”51 Such lock hospital reports invariably reprise an identical story: diagnosing a British soldier’s infection, discovering the alleged vector, and immediately expelling her. One can almost hear in these reports the medical officer’s sigh of satisfaction at having dispatched yet another uncomfortable statistic. But the relentless logic of this equation only guarantees its perpetuation since the army both condoned and censured the illicit coupling of racialized bodies. The detection of disease does not so much brand the transgression, as identify a vector who presents multiple corruptions—physical and psychological, administrative and moral. The prostitute Rahdya was thus the referent for a host of ready-made problems and solutions; her continued presence guaranteed the medical topographer his own existence.

On the Face of the Waters: Domesticity and the Semiotics of Space Nowhere is the post-Mutiny zeal for virtuous space more evident than in the Mutiny novel subgenre, which was immensely popular from the late 1850s right up until India’s independence in 1947. The tale follows a familiar plot: a young hero finds himself embroiled in sudden insurrection; he fights valiantly,

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saves Englishwoman (sometimes with help from loyal natives), and finally wins the hand of a long-suffering but happily resilient loved one. The distinguishing traits of this hero are his proclivity for disguise and resulting mobility, his enduring sense of fair play, and his almost medieval chivalry. G. A. Henty, the successful “boys’ adventure” novelist, used this formula to frame his story of teenage derring-do set at the time of the Mutiny. Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell and many other Victorians recommended Henty’s books as part of the enculturation of proper male citizenship, whose key features were selfless duty, bravery, and self-possession. The 1857 war, the backdrop for Henty’s In Times of Peril, which made room for the full play of all these imperial virtues, would seem to be the perfect setting for an adolescent tale combining the dangers of nature and the “natural” deceit of non-Europeans. My interest here is to illustrate how Henty, like most enthusiasts of the imperial tradition, resorts in this novel to the sorts of predictable but fascinatingly (and, as far as I can tell, unconsciously) split depictions of India that I have been analyzing—specifically, the representation of the Indian jungle as nature’s beautiful bounty as well as a dangerous, tiger-infested realm. Whereas superficially Henty conjoins India’s geographical and animal threats with its peoples’ supposedly disordered, inscrutable, and therefore dangerous motivations, a closer reading of the novel exposes contradictions at the core of Anglo-India’s domestic sensibility, with its competing claims of tropical belonging and exile. Nor could the result be otherwise, for in using a forest adventure as a crucial plot mechanism, Henty’s novel activates all of the jungle trope’s associational power. Much of this power was already close at hand, so that Henty, who never actually visited India, could draw upon a ready supply of popular romantic motifs to shore up his novels’ putative authenticity—novels whose enlargement of the romantic theme of colonial conquest influenced generations of English readers. For his material, the author had only to visit any number of colonial-themed exhibits, choose from a burgeoning literary fund produced under the perceived utility of literature in the service of Empire, or listen to one of the thousands of repatriated “old India hands” for his homework. As Nancy Paxton has observed, the boys’ colonial adventure genre sought to reconcile the contemporary penchant for historical fact with the equal appetite for formulaic romance, a strategy that Flora Annie Steel’s 1897 Mutiny romance also used, but with very different results.52 Historical events thus took on a romantic life of their own, as did the 1885 death of General Gordon at the hands of Sudanese warriors in the imperial outpost of Khartoum. Jan Morris has nicely summarized the “instant folklore” that grew up around that death as “part morality play, part Golden Bough.”53 Indeed, one of the paintings Henty would have seen within a year of Gordon’s

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“martyrdom” was G. W. Joy’s deeply romantic representation of the General practically welcoming his assassination atop a dais-like flight of steps.54 That Gordon was equally well known for his quest after the “historical” sites of the Bible—the Garden Tomb, the Garden of Eden—testifies to the Victorian mix of post-Darwinian scientism and muscular evangelicalism, a mixture that works its way into the most secularized and romantic of imperial narratives. Indeed, a convoluted theme of revenge styled as redemption sanitized many imperial debacles like the one surrounding Gordon’s death. This development is largely attributable, surely, to late imperialism’s increasingly anxious complaints about the steady rise of anti-imperial resistance, at whose hands Gordon sacrificed himself. The gospel of imperial redemption thus proved to be extremely effective counterinsurgent propaganda. Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) went to India during the heyday of imperialism, as the twenty-year-old wife of a British civil servant posted to the Punjab. In her twenty-two years in northern India, she learned to speak local languages and, amid such activities as establishing and inspecting schools for Indian girls, became a proponent of women’s rights in England. In the years after returning to England in 1889, she wrote over twenty popular works of fiction as well as an autobiography, In the Garden of Fidelity; she also co-authored a perennial favorite of Anglo-Indian women, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. It was after the publication of On the Face of the Waters in 1896 that some began to speak of her in the same breath as Kipling: the novel ran through many printings and was hailed as the definitive Mutiny novel, particularly noted for its attention to historical detail.55 It is in the ostensible spirit of this detail that Steel announces in her preface, “I have not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the slightest degree.” She assures her Victorian reader of her “scrupulously exact” attention to detail, “even to the date, the hour, the scene, the very weather.”56 Her own narrative additions, she concludes, are provided merely “to give a photograph— that is, a picture in which the differentiation caused by colour is left out—of a time which neither the fair race nor the dark one is ever likely quite to forget or to forgive” (i). Apart from credentialing the novel’s historicity, such statements explain the ostensibly even-handed treatment of British as well as Indian characters. While readers today find the novel nakedly partial to imperial interests,57 I suggest that there is nonetheless a subtext that points, however unwittingly, to a logical impasse in the conventional British interpretation of these events. More importantly, the novel articulates this impasse in its representation of colonial spaces as much as in its dialogue and characters. Like all Britishers, Steel viewed the events of 1857–1858 as a watershed in British-Indian relations and a testament to British discipline; hence her eager-

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ness to flash her credentials, as it were, and to earn the public’s (and publisher’s) approval. Historians like Bernard Cohn have long described how “the Mutiny was seen by the British as a heroic myth [of superiority] embodying . . . their central values . . . [of ] sacrifice, duty, fortitude, [order and discipline],” a myth “which explained their rule in India to themselves.”58 Cohn’s use of “embodying” is apt in this regard since, as Jenny Sharpe has demonstrated, the British counterinsurgency greatly relied on a discourse of rape whose defining trope was the chaste and always-threatened “English lady.”59 Not surprisingly, the metonymical logic that Cohn says partly underwrote Britain’s rule over India led to a solemn pilgrimage to hallowed Mutiny sites like Cawnpore (Kanpur), whose symbolic capital made it the choice location for a viceregal durbar in 1860, and which quickly became a more popular travel destination than the Taj Mahal. Other sites, all of which figure in Steel’s novel, are the Lucknow Residency, where British men, women, and children, along with a number of Indian servants, withstood a three-month siege, and whose very name invokes the importance of imperial domesticity; the Delhi Ridge, the scene of bloody fighting; and the Red Fort itself, erstwhile residence of the rebellious and subsequently exiled last Mughal, Bahadur Shah.60 The Ridge in particular (where one Steel character meets his redemptive end) signaled in the colonial mind a characteristically English male fortitude in the defense of English women. Briefly, Steel’s story follows the adventures of Kate Erlton, of classic memsahib mold, whose overriding desire, as we learn early on, is to protect the order of her home. She has, however, fallen out of love with her husband, the gambler Major Erlton, her son is off to school in England, and she begins to sense the injustice of the situation. Presently, Jim Douglas, a key character in the novel, appears as “James Greyman,” a gallant former army officer and horse trader whom Kate, despite her conscience, finds attractive—“here was a man who could put romance into a woman’s life” (22). Like innumerable previous romances set against the Mutiny, Steel’s tale tests and thereby establishes the limits of imperial womanhood through her characters’ various reactions to both military and domestic disturbances. A key difference here is that Kate’s eventual romance with Jim is less male-driven, more woman-centered than those depicted by Steel’s mostly male predecessors in the genre. Kate keeps her sharp wits about her regardless of ever-present danger, engineering her own abduction and pretending hysterics as she is carried off by an Afghani trader—who is none other than Jim Douglas in disguise. Conventionally, however, the romance between Kate and Jim can occur only after the tidy deaths of Major Erlton and his lover, Alice Gissing, and at the cost of Indian lives: Tara Devi, who immolates herself rather than face Jim’s love for Kate and thus accomplishes the very act

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of sati (immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre) from which Jim had earlier saved her, and Zora, Jim’s young mistress, whom he has rescued from a “dancing” profession (an euphemism for prostitution) but who, as the novel begins, is dying as a result of her pregnancy with their child. Clearly, desire and domesticity frame the familiar military triumphs Steel reprises. Of particular interest to me is the spatial iconography of the illicit relationships and acts, which the novel details and which contrast with the domestic iconicity of the Anglo-Indian home. The rebellion begins, for example, by having a registered prostitute signal its outbreak in the cantonment bazaar in the city of Meerut. Steel’s narrative thus draws directly upon—and adds to— key features of the colonial archive that I have been describing. From her upper room in a “lane of lust,” Steel’s prostitute signals a soldier, a “dissolutefaced trooper,” by calling out a code phrase of the rebellion: “We of the bazaar kiss no cowards.” The soldier must then relay to others the signal to start the revolt in the city. “The speech which brings more than speech,” writes Steel mysteriously, “had come from the painted lips of a harlot” (173). Significantly, it is the prostitute who plays upon the trooper’s mix of sexual desire and simmering resentment to so effectively spark the rebellion, which the novel suggests is equivalent to the woman’s illicit trade. The motive behind the Mutiny, the text implies, is thus not “caste or religion, patriotism or ambition,” as some have suggested, but simply from an uncontrolled passion, or madness, that is appropriately expressed by a prostitute (173). The cause of the rebellion is, in other words, illicit speech uttered within an illicit environment. Typical of novelists of the Mutiny, Steel wishes to pinpoint the origin of the Mutiny’s signal, to put a name to an otherwise amorphous source and its effects. Steel attempts to prove her account (which historians have never, in fact, corroborated) by having Jim Douglas himself overhear the prostitute’s pronouncement. In his Afghani disguise, Jim roams the bazaar lanes and brothels of Delhi just days preceding the outbreak to ascertain the people’s mood; then, switching to the persona of a beggar, he disappears. Besides isolating in this way the source of the viral “madness,” the harlot scene also, as Jenny Sharpe observes, “delegitimate[s] the religious discourse of prophecy that was so crucial for spreading the revolt,” though, as we will see, the role of prophecy is itself largely a construct of counterinsurgent discourse.61 More tellingly, Steel employs a narrative logic identical to that of the medical official who read the prostitute Rahdya as the cause of disease: She identifies the sign of transgression and isolates the contaminant, thereby explaining the cause (either physically, as in Rahdya’s case, or discursively, as here) by framing it as a medical diagnosis that can now be treated. That is to say, the illicit conditions that gave

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rise to the Mutiny are akin to the germ of venereal disease that has debilitated British troops. The narrative’s logic at this early juncture does not seem to trouble the British characters or their motivations when, on every other occasion in the novel, the Mutiny’s cause is described in mysterious terms, as emanating from an unknowable source in the form of rumor or the circulation of chappatis (119–123, 413). Indeed, Steel grants an entire chapter to the phenomenon of the chappatis, but in the end can only inquire rhetorically, “Sent by whom? And wherefore?” (116). Moreover, once started, the British (male) authorities themselves add to the rebellion’s momentum by precipitating a series of “fatal mistakes” that would sound “improbable in any other history” (413), and by failing to act until much later. Steel follows the canonical history of the Mutiny here, for British authorities were in fact blamed for ignoring seemingly obvious signs of impending trouble.62 Thus in Steel’s account the Mutiny begins with a signal from prostitute to sepoy, builds through rumor and other transmissions, and reaches its crescendo on the back of British inexperience and inaction. The syntactic pattern here precisely matches the medical diagnosis of imperial troubles, as we can see in the conclusion of a typical contemporary critique of the British Army shortly after the rebellion: “Illness engenders vice, and vice brings . . . disease” and “debility.”63 We see this in the novel when the key male character, Jim Douglas, chivalrously chooses to remain with the protagonist, Kate Erlton, in his quarters in a safer, non-European section of the city where he has secretively kept his Indian family. Meanwhile, however, the battle for Delhi rages, and his inability to join it, “the general strain of inaction,” induces a fever (273). The only answer to this equation, the narrative makes clear, is to reverse the series of events: inaction must become action, rumor must stop (in this case through the use of disguise and espionage), and prostitutes must be silenced. Inasmuch as Kate Erlton is, narrowly speaking, a catalyst for this reversal, and inasmuch as she will, by novel’s end, have learned to free herself from the clutches of imperial domesticity, Steel’s text is a relatively radical rendering of an iconic moment in British history. Such a reversal, however, proves difficult, for at the heart of the novel lies the ambiguous charlatan Tiddu, the Indian banjara (traveling performer), who helps Jim refine the art of disguise. As with Kipling’s Kim, Jim’s ability to imitate non-Europeans is premised on his self-evident (because English) pure identity. His quintessential Englishness, in other words, enables him to effortlessly impersonate its opposite, namely a typical Indian inhabitant of the city, who can participate in and even produce “bazaar gup.” Indeed, one could even claim that it is this chameleonlike talent, and the crises that warrant it, that make him

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English—though the crucial help of a typically ambiguous Indian (Tiddu) skews this equation. Even Kate participates in this transaction, disguising herself as an Indian woman, a sati to escape murderous rebels. Where Jim learns his disguise from Tiddu, Kate learns hers from Tara Devi, whose indebtedness to Jim for once saving her is a predictable component of Jim’s imperial English identity. Once again, whereas Jim and Kate can learn from their Indian aides to pass as Indians, the latter can in no way imitate their English masters. I want to focus on each of these Indian characters in turn since they present a way of reading Steel’s text against the grain to illuminate the trope of medical topography that, as I have been arguing, structure much of the period’s prose. It is important to keep in mind the conjuncture of ambiguity and specificity (or knowability) that this trope suggests, for Steel’s text can explain the Mutiny only by juxtaposing these two axes of the Europe’s understanding of India. To begin with, Tiddu pushes the notion of disguise to its limit, for his perfect imitation of a veiled woman enables him to enter the otherwise all-female space of the zenana (harem) in the Mughal palace, ostensible site of the rebellion’s architects. By disguising himself thus and entering such an iconic space with impunity, Tiddu acts out the male colonial desire to expose the kind of “eastern” mystery emblematized in Victorian texts by the zenana.64 (Steel has already described how Jim characteristically follows his “almost unbearable curiosity as to what [has] really happened” amongst the Indians, which leads him to adopt his disguise [254].) But as an Indian man impersonating an Indian woman on behalf of the British, Tiddu’s action cannot sustain the classic colonialist dream of perfect imitation in the pursuit of knowledge. Any knowledge gained by this subterfuge must, after all, be contingent on Tiddu’s own mystery as an Indian (not to mention trustworthiness). Tiddu’s actions, in other words, produce the familiar conundrum of colonialist mimicry, which is the double desire to remove all doubt but to cultivate mystery. By contrast, in In Times of Peril, G. A. Henty has his teenaged protagonists, Dick and Ned, disguise themselves as Indian women to take refuge in a zenana, offering a classic example of the supposedly innate English capability for impersonation, a talent that is born of a self-certain, integral, and active Englishness. In this post-Mutiny schema, an Indian is, by contradistinction, an inherently untrustworthy, because readily changeable and amoral, persona. Surely, Tiddu’s oscillating allegiances and identities unnerve Jim. As Tiddu puts it, “To be many-faced ma[kes] all faces more secure by taking from any the right of that permanence” (102–103). In my reading, Tiddu’s role is two-fold: In the sense of plot development, he exposes the beginning of the Mutiny, but he also points to the ways in which the British construct events as an idiopathic

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contagion, a madness. On the eve of the revolt, Tiddu and Jim (in chapter 6) pause at a crossroads outside the rebellion’s flashpoint, the town of Meerut, and must decide which road to take, the one leading to the city, or the one to the cantonments, which, as the quarters of Britain’s military, the rebels first targeted.65 Yet the city with its bazaar, as we have seen, is just as ominous a space. Jim senses, as other characters have early on in the novel, that something is amiss, and he keeps his eyes wide open (149). In their moment of indecision, Tiddu points out to Jim an apparently well-known “Yellow Fakeer,” who sits motionless in the median of the crossroads. When a young Indian trooper passes by “on his way evidently to riotous living in the bazaar,” he pauses to place a coin in the fakir’s bowl, prompting Tiddu to remark, “The fakeer wanted him. To give the word, mayhap.” Jim does not doubt that Tiddu means by this the signal to rise against the British. Suddenly, however, the fakir disappears, and Jim, annoyed at this, exclaims, “I certainly saw him!” But Tiddu simply claims to have willed Jim to see him (158). The ostensible signal, or “word” for uprising proves, in effect, to be none other than Tiddu’s. It is, in other words, the mysterious, mesmeric power of a lone fakir rather than coordinated Indian planning that the novel adduces as the Mutiny’s spark. More potent still than the illicit power of the prostitute, Tiddu’s indeterminate identity is capable of shape-shifting between not just male and female, but, more crucially, English and Indian. But why should Tiddu present his warning to Jim in this magical way, anticipating the actual signal that the aforementioned bazaar prostitute will shortly relay to a trooper? It is at once a clear and a vague warning, depending on how Jim interprets it. He cannot, in any case, prevent the historical events from occurring. This portrayal of the rising cloud of revolt that was beginning to move across “the face of the waters” demonstrates Jim’s sensitivity to his troops’ sentiments: he senses in the air the “clang” of injustice and its resentment. But it is noteworthy that his sensibility must be aided by a changeable Indian whose loyalty, however demonstrable, is forever suspect. Tiddu is, in short, the narrative’s hinge for the contradictions inherent to imperial logic; he signifies, as does the archival case of Rahdya, the circular reasoning that recasts the Mutiny as inevitable as well as preventable. Such reasoning determines that if Indians’ transgressive acts precipitated mutinous events, more boundaries are the only answer. Yet, in a tautology that every form of imperialism must produce, one can guarantee the strength and efficacy of such boundaries only by testing them. The very limits imposed by the Raj, in other words, require that they be breached. Without this dynamic of limit and transgression, the Raj would lose its reason for being. The frequent examples of this circular reasoning in Anglo-Indian fiction manifest in the familiar spaces I have been describing: the bazaar, the city, the

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cantonment, and, perhaps most commonly, the bungalow veranda, a favorite emblem of imperial domesticity. Nineteenth-century works with titles like Told in the Verandah that exhibit a preoccupation with the conjuncture of bungalow, garden, and jungle, filled the shelves of British readers in India as well as in the larger Empire.66 The jungle and garden, as I noted in my discussion of Kipling’s “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” continually besiege one another in Anglo-Indian literature. The veranda, that indispensable feature of bungalow life, similarly resonates on several levels: as a space of European leisure in a hot climate; as a threshold where goods from the bazaar are brought to be sold to the English memsahib so she can be safe from marketplace pollution; and as a zone situated between English and Indian spheres of life—in short, a liminal space that combines, but never completely adulterates, the two spheres (a combination that approximates the Anglo-Indian’s liminal identity).67 Trevelyan describes the typical bungalow of a British official as “surrounded on all sides by a broad verandah,” as opposed to the generally small verandas of Indian homes. The bungalow itself, writes Trevelyan, sat “in its own enclosure of from three to ten acres of lawn and garden,” and possessed “[t]wo lofty spacious sitting-rooms, with so wide an opening between that they almost form one hall,” as well as “bedrooms at either end” and an attached bath. Inside, “The Sahib . . . has a sanctum of his own where a confusion reigns which surpasses anything which could be found in . . . the chamber in an English country-house.” For the “walls are ornamented with mouldering antlers and dusty skulls of boar and tiger, the trophies of unmarried days, . . . a map of the district, a ground-plan of the station, . . . and a print of Lord Canning, cut out from the Illustrated London News.” Trevelyan describes in further detail an eclectic display of guns and Great Exhibition souvenirs, or “tokens,” piles of paperwork, and more maps, pictures of England, and portraits.68 It is just this kind of bungalow that Kate Erlton lived in. Steel measures the contrast between this homey setting and the mutinous chaos of the moment by having Kate, toward the end of the novel, sit on her “ruined verandah” following the recapture of Delhi by the British. Only from this vantage and at this time is Kate able to comprehend the reality of the wrecked city, even though it “seemed unchanged . . . [s]een from afar.” “Rebellion,” she reflects, “would linger long, but its stronghold, its very raison d’étre, was gone” (417). But gone, too, is the naïve tranquility of Kate’s house: formerly “home-like” and “peaceful” (20) in its typical Anglo-Indian eclecticism, it is now shattered. Her “flowerful garden” (20), whose “clumps of English annuals” had earlier helped create for Kate a “cult of home” (21) is now a fitting catalyst for, and reflection of, her changed perspective, its carefully pruned sanctum can no longer pretend to be a corner of Europe.69 It is significant, as I have said, that Kate ponders all this in the space of

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her veranda, that essential colonial construct fronting a bungalow and set above the pathway leading up to the house. The veranda, far more often than the ceremonial durbar, enforced the domestic social code that dictated how and where visitors could be received. To greet a member of Indian royalty, for instance, the bungalow’s English occupants would have to descend the veranda steps to greet him or her, whereas others would be forced to ascend, as if to a dais.70 Indian salespeople were permitted to spread their wares on the veranda, but only under strict supervision. Now, however, Kate’s world has been turned upside down. Her thoughts are significantly sited in the veranda, a physical and social threshold of the AngloIndian world, and are not unlike the bazaar prostitute’s “speech which brings more than speech.” After the Mutiny, both speech and space have assumed for the British in India a less easily controlled, more ambiguous cast. Just as the minor character Captain Morecombe says to Kate early in the novel as disturbances cloud the horizon, “In India . . . [y]ou can’t differentiate cause and effect when both are incomprehensible” (134), so now the in-between veranda space underscores the circularity of imperial logic—a circularity that had always shaped European discourse, but which had only now, after a systemic shakeup, become obvious to everyone. “Causeless terror” proves to be indistinguishable from its effect—much as Tiddu’s changeable identity is for Europeans ultimately unintelligible. Along with profound political consequences, the 1857–1858 war augurs for Anglo-Indians a dramatic shift in their sense of identity and in their alliances with Indians. The results, however, are surprising. One would expect the Raj’s greater obsession with spatial and social boundaries following the war to result in a more self-confident, because self-justifying and self-important, Anglo-Indian identity, but the opposite was generally the case. The literature of the post-Mutiny period exhibits a curious ambivalence regarding the future of Britain’s presence in India. It is this ambivalence that Steel’s popular narrative cannot help but display, whatever lip service it pays to the imperial norm. The reconstruction of post-1857 India into a more segregated, more disciplined society, moreover, attests to the colonial administration’s new feeling of edginess—including, significantly for this study, a pervasive perplexity about what it meant to be Anglo-Indian.71 Part of this edginess stems from the tendency of the East India Company (and later the Raj) to identify itself with the glory of the Mughals—a late-lamented glory whose evident decay portends a similar fate for the British. Another reason for British anxiety, as Steel makes clear, is the new issue of changing women’s roles in society as much as the threat of militant insurrec-

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tion. Steel’s women characters, Indian as well as English, are a constant source of consternation for the male characters. More significant, in the context of my emphasis on spatiality, is the novel’s deliberate inversion of the conventional associations of domestic space. I have noted how the view from the veranda of Kate’s home jogs her from her habitual perspective on Indian colonial life. The theme of perspective is replayed time and again through metaphors of sight and vision to emphasize a world turned upside down. It is the women in Steel’s novel who see things afresh and act as catalysts for similar changes of attitude among the men. Steel’s insistence on “speaking against a masculine discourse of revenge,” as Jenny Sharpe puts it,72 accomplishes its aim, but at the expense of Indian women. By introducing scenes of changed gender roles in terms of changed physical perspectives and settings, Steel thus compels her Victorian readers to reexamine their assumptions about societal codes of conduct. She does so especially by inserting seemingly insignificant but in fact telling details in her descriptions of domestic spaces. For instance, in an important scene in which Jim Douglas returns to his Indian sector home on “a Delhi roof” to ensure that Kate is safe and to check that his obligee, Tara Devi, has kept an eye on her, he is met with a surprise: And yet Jim Douglas felt a keen pang of regret when, for the first time, he gave the familiar knock of those old Lucknow days . . . , and Tara opened it to him dressed in the old crimson drapery, the gold bangles restored to her beautiful brown arms. He had brought Kate round during the previous night to the lodging he had managed to secure in the Mufti’s quarter, and leaving her there alone, had taken the key to Tara; this being the safest plan, since everything could then be arranged in discreet woman’s fashion before he put in an appearance. And the task had been done well. The outside square or yard of parapeted roof which he entered lay conventional to the uppermost. A spinning-wheel here, a row of waterpots there, a mat, a reed stool or two, a cooking place in one corner, a ragged canvas screen at the inner doors. There was nothing to prepare him for finding an Englishwoman within; an Englishwoman with a faint colour in her wan cheeks, a new peace in her grey eyes, busy—Heaven save the mark!—in sticking some disjointed jasmine buds into the shallow saucer of a water-pot. . . . He sat down on the edge of the string bed feeling a little dazed, and looked at her and her surroundings critically. It was a pleasant sunshiny bit of roof, vaulted by the still-cool morning sky. There was a little arcaded room at one

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end, and the topmost branches of a neem tree showed over one side. On the other, the swelling dome of the big mosque looked like a great white cloud, and in one corner was a sort of square turret, from the roof of which, gained by a narrow brick ladder, the whole city was visible; for it was the highest house in the quarter, higher even than the roof beside it, over which the same neem tree cast a shadow. (256–257)

This rooftop room in Delhi, it is important to note, is almost identical to the Lucknow room in which he and his late mistress, Zora, had lived, and where she died (as we are told early in the novel). There is, however, a notable difference in the perspective they afford. Whereas his grief-imbued rumination outside the Lucknow room had caused his “keen eyes” to gaze upon “the half-seen city spreading below him,” with its “wreaths of smoke from thousands of hearths rising to obscure it from his view” (35), now, on the Delhi rooftop, “the whole city was visible.” This bird’s-eye view of an otherwise shadowy city—an elevated perspective that would become one of the favorite topoi in Mutiny novels—actually promotes the purposes of that other preoccupation of the novel, Jim’s misapprehension of women. Jim’s literal overview of the city is a metaphor for his rapidly changing view of women (albeit Englishwomen). Far from limiting his perspective, the act of sitting on the edge of a cot feeling dazed accompanies his newfound appreciation of the city and of Kate. Importantly, this appreciation comes only when Kate more fully inhabits an Indian home and when he can more clearly see distinctly Indian details, like the neem tree. Jim finds that he has misjudged the women in his life. This newfound appreciation of women causes him to reconsider his previous assumptions about their roles in the rebellion. Thus, as he re-enters the town immediately after the scene quoted above, Jim grumbles to himself that “resistance [to the British] would collapse but for one woman’s ambition.” He is speaking of the Mughal queen, who, rumor has it, plays a shrewd Lady Macbeth to the doddering Mughal monarch Bahadur Shah, whom the Indian soldiers have turned into a figurehead for their campaign. But this thought jogs another: Jim “thought bitterly that a woman had stood in [his] way; since but for Kate, he could surely have forced Meerut into making reprisals by reporting the true state of affairs” (259). Kate, in other words, has scuttled Jim’s desire, borne of fresh anger and grief, for revenge. More tellingly, she has taken to heart the need for disguise, ornamenting herself with jasmine, “[billowy] Delhi dress,” and “filmy veil” (257). Kate threatens to become Indian, and in this Tara conspires with her, shifting the boundaries of Jim’s known world. No wonder he feels dazed. Yet it is pre-

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cisely this disjunctive space that, as we have seen, affords a view of “the whole city.” Equally disconcerting to Jim is his sense of powerlessness, signaled by the transition from action on his part to unaccustomed receptivity. “He had brought Kate round” and “taken the key to Tara,” only to find that both women have taken it upon themselves to escape the stifling inaction that Kate had earlier sensed (228). The women’s readiness to adopt disguises in order to move around the city show that they are capable of stealing a page from his book of male mobility and stealthiness. Hence Jim’s “pang of regret” for having Tara, in her crimson drapery and gold bangles, recall a time in the recent past when the commingling of Indian and English women in such a fashion would have been unthinkable. He laments the sudden loss of conventions that had enabled men to roam and speak far more freely than women. The irony, of course, is that the Mutiny will now make such mixing and reversing of roles even more taboo. Not only does the narrative invent this reversal, that is, the switching of gender roles, it does so at Jim Douglas’ expense: Prevented from taking heroic action, his frustration mounts. More tellingly, the open view of the city afforded by this upper room of Indian-European domesticity—a view, to be sure, that we see from Jim’s perspective—suggests that the women are able to improvise in ways that even Jim’s talent for disguise cannot match. The decisiveness with which Kate and Tara play their parts is matched in the same chapter by intrigue at the Mughal court. Even as Jim complains to himself about the women who stand in his way, “Something was going on in the palace which ended indecision for many a man.” Jim’s military instincts have enabled him to read the portents of the country’s crisis, but we are also told that “Zeenut Maihl [the queen] saw facts as clearly as Jim Douglas” (259). She sees, for instance, that within her own palace Princess Farkhoonda, whom she hates for carrying on a romance with Prince Abool-Bukr, is a threat to her (Zeenut’s) control (260). If earlier in the novel “the Queen [had] played her game unmolested” (83), she continues to weave her stratagems right to the rebellion’s conclusion, leaving Jim to grind his teeth and bemoan his inability “to leave all womanhood behind and fall to fighting manfully” (267). Thus, although the description of a conspiratorial, feminized Mughal court immediately follows that of Jim’s upper-room apartment to confirm, on one level, the verisimilitude promised in the preface, on another level the shift underscores the problem of women’s agency in the imperial epic. As Nancy Paxton puts it, Steel’s virtual sequestration of Kate and Jim in the latter’s apartment in the Native section of Delhi is very like “imprisonment in the harem,” albeit “with a difference.” “Steel thus turns [Orientalist conventions] inside out”

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inasmuch as her “morally rebellious hero, Jim Douglas,” learns “to appreciate a chaste and companionate English marriage,” though at the cost of the two Indian women in his life.73 Steel’s frequent placement of terms like “certainty,” “very real,” and “fact” alongside words that indicate ambiguity—“dim,” “vaguely,” and “shifting” (259–260, 263)—confirms this problematizing thrust of the narrative.74 Thus, Jim grudgingly agrees to have Tiddu instruct him in the true art of impersonation since “if there was anything certain in this world it was the wisdom of forgetting Western prejudices occasionally in dealing with the East” (66). Steel compounds this familiar colonial-Indian opposition of ambiguity and certainty by juxtaposing seemingly discordant scenes, as those above, to reveal their shared investment in gendered spaces. In each scene, women manipulate conventional femininity to achieve a certain agency in traditionally male domains—even as some women must play to the book’s ideological constraints by remaining in their places. Inevitably, the two roles overlap. This is why, in the palace, Princess Newasi, despite being labeled “a born coward” (260), is the one to spirit away her frantic lover, Abool, after he has killed imprisoned English women and children. Forcing herself to overlook “his blood-stained hands,” Newasi blames the queen for the Britishers’ deaths. She then “snatched an old white veil from its peg and wrapped it around her, as she passed rapidly to the door; but he did not move. So she passed back again as swiftly to take his hand, stained as it was, and lay her cheek to it caressingly” (262). Not unlike Tara’s and Kate’s actions, Newasi orchestrates an escape from the palace (and the queen’s murderous intent) by hiding in a curtained palanquin that passes “the Great Hall of Audience with its toothed red arches, looking as if they yawned for victims” (262). When, “fearful of what she might see,” she “peeped through the dhoolie curtains, there was nothing to be seen save the shifting curious crowd” (263). Like Jim’s belief, engineered by Tiddu, that he has seen a “yellow fakeer,” Newasi’s eyes can perceive only what the curtain gap allows: there is “nothing to be seen,” not even Abool’s bloody hands. This is akin to the narrative’s sleight of hand in presenting fiction as fact, set up in a sense by Steel’s pronouncement in the preface that “even the story of AboolBukr and Newasi is true,” and that “an Englishwoman was concealed in Delhi, in the house of an Afghan, and succeeded in escaping to the Ridge just before the siege.” “I have,” says Steel, “imagined another; that is all. I mention this because it may possibly be said that the incident is incredible” (i). Steel no doubt convinced her nineteenth-century readers of this, but in my reading, the tale’s historical truth is less significant than its partially successful strategy of revising the masculine spatiality of Empire. Steel backs her claim for verity, after all, by citing the crucial acts of women. Such scenes illustrate how narrative struc-

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ture and diction alike complement spatiality so as to underscore the agency, as opposed to the more conventional passivity, of women in the colonies. This is why the narrator can announce expansively by chapter’s end that though some women in the palace “had lost Delhi,” others “had regained it” (263). Steel’s strategy is limited, however, by her ultimate deference to imperial sanctity, which posits sacred English values against those of a profane India. An inevitable part of this is the representation of Hindus and Muslims, whose respective actions in the war are read by the British in quite different ways. Muslims appear as “fanatic” and irredeemable murderers, whereas Hindus are generally depicted as less vengeful than renegade, motivated less by religious fervor than by opportunistic greed. Hindus, in short, are wayward children; Muslims are committed adults. In his recent study of colonial representations of Indian Muslims, Alex Padamsee notes that Britain’s pre-Mutiny obsession with Islamic iconography and a glorious Mughal past had led the British to identify with many features of Muslim India’s symbolic language. Muslim “treachery” during the Mutiny, especially the Mughal king Bahadur Shah’s token role as rebel leader, turned the colonialists’ former attraction into loathing. In Padamsee’s reading, this “reversal of the symbolic function of the Mughal emperor” is a devastatingly uncanny one, for the earlier British self-identity with Mughal rule must now undergo an “exorcism.”75 In other words, British obsession with Muslim treachery in the Mutiny stems from the Britishers’ disavowal of a self-image intricately, if confusedly, tied to Mughal iconography. Interestingly, Padamsee mines Steel’s popular 1905 non-fiction guidebook to India, titled simply India, for many of his examples of this role-reversal. Although the guidebook celebrates Islamic tombs and palaces, the living Delhi is said to be notable only for its hallowed Mutiny sites, corrupted as it is by the Mughals’ poor remnants, an apathetic Muslim community.76 What is notable in Steel’s fictional representation of the Mughal court is its principal function as a foil for the ostensibly self-sacrificing actions of Hindu women, notably Tara Devi.77 The narrative continues to intertwine the adventures of Kate, Tara, and Newasi, so that by the conclusion of the novel we hear clear echoes of earlier references to these characters’ premonitions and perspicacity. In the final chapter, “Rewards and Punishments,” we are told that “Newasi’s eyes had seen something day and night, night and day, ever since they had strained into the darkness after Prince Abool-Bukr when he broke from her kind detaining hand and disappeared” (415).78 Just as Newasi had spied sepoys mingling with others in the palace on the day of her escape with Abool, so now, in her people’s defeat, she sees “a crowd.” This time, however, the crowd includes vanquishing British soldiers brandishing “a cluster of spearpoints”; they are gazing at three prison-

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ers held within “an open space” (415). Desperate to find her imprisoned lover, Newasi beholds “The vision! The vision!” of Abool, who is one of three prisoners (all Mughal princes), “dodging like a hare, begging for bare life—seeking it, at last, out of the sunshine, under the shadow of the ruth [carriage] wheels.” We last see her in a faint, and read that Abool is dragged off to be shot for his part in the deaths of Britishers. The narrative’s by-now familiar symbols of shadow and light, and confinement and release, are meant to underscore the manner in which Abool’s actions are finally revealed in the light of apparent British justice. Newasi has always embraced daylight; she has simply been fooled by a shadowy lover. The truth of her vision is realized too late. The “open space” that no longer allows Abool to hide his perverse actions from the world also becomes the focus of a truth that was muted in contemporary news reports, one that was uncomfortable for Steel’s contemporary readers. Moments after Newasi faints, Abool and the two other imprisoned princes were executed on the spot by a Major Hodson. Conventional histories had, until Steel’s novel, described Hodson’s action approvingly: He merely exercised a stern and necessary rebuke to the defeated rebels in the name of “outraged and murdered” Englishwomen. In Steel’s account, by contrast, Hodson rides “at ease behind the dead princes” and “gloried in the deed, telling himself . . . that in shooting down with his own hand, men who had surrendered without stipulations to his generosity and clemency . . . he ‘had rid the earth of ruffians.’ ” Steel bravely calls this “a strange perversion of the truth, responsible, perhaps, not only for the praise, but for the very deed itself” (416). Hodson’s and others’ vengeful violence, in other words, stemmed from a disinclination among Victorians to face the truth of these excessive, unwarranted acts. More crucially, Steel affirms what all Indians knew, that the victorious British indiscriminately held Indian men accountable for the supposed rape and slaughter of Englishwomen. In the masculine ethos of the empire, rumors of rebel outrage thus excused, indeed cried out for, summary justice. Steel thereby counters the much-cited Victorian belief that the increased presence of Englishwomen starting in mid-century unbalanced a carefully constructed homosocial equilibrium, one in which Native soldiers seldom deviated from their assigned roles.79 Englishwomen were thus in a double-bind during the Raj: Whereas they safeguarded the sphere of imperial domesticity, their proximity to ordinary Indian life (the liminal veranda space is an obvious example) threatened to unravel the domain of Anglo-Indian masculinity. After the chaotic events of 1857, therefore, Englishwomen, like Indian prostitutes, retrospectively stood accused of stepping over their civil lines. Critics seeking to explain Britain’s military inaction and disorder frequently blamed it on a vaguely defined degen-

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eracy of masculine prowess at the hands of women, as we saw with the case of Rahdya. Fearful of this and other perceived threats, British India pathologized the female body and demanded immobility of women, relegating English memsahibs to the bungalow and Indian women to the bazaar. This makes Kate’s and Tara’s and Newasi’s transgressions in Steel’s novel all the more radical, given the context of British and Anglo-Indian cultures of the 1890s. However, we have seen that despite Newasi’s essential faithfulness (as opposed to the note of disloyalty that all Mutiny novels of the period invoked), and despite her feminine perspicacity, it is evident that she, like virtually all the other Indian women in the story, must finally relinquish her narrative and moral place to an Englishwoman. Tara Devi, eternally obliged to Jim Douglas for saving her and critical to Kate’s safety, fares no better. It is significant that the denouement of these three women’s adventures should occur within the space of a few pages, and that each one’s fate is tied to her own particular spatial sensibility. These narrative splices emphasize the disjunction that Steel’s Anglo-Indian sensibility incurred in the wake of the war’s historical rupture. One notable splicing of spatial imagery occurs when Kate, taking in the deceptively tranquil sight of Delhi from the liminal space of her veranda, is startled by “a brown hand on her wrist . . . with a circlet of dead gold above it.” “Tara!” she gasps, and instinctively heeds Tara’s injunction to follow her to an ill Jim Douglas (417). Even as Tara feels compelled to save Jim and (following his charge) Kate, she displays lingering jealousy over Jim’s interest in the Englishwoman. Lurching toward the Delhi bazaar area “in a curtained dhooli which Tara had left waiting on the road below” the bungalow, “and trying to piece out a consecutive story from the odd jumble of facts, and fancies, and explanations which Tara poured into her ear,” Kate at last comes to a house in the labyrinthine heart of the city (419). Here, she experiences an uncanny moment: “It seemed to [her] as if her heart stopped also. She could not think of what might lie before her as she followed Tara up the dark, strangely-familiar stair. Surely, she thought, she would have known it [the room] among a thousand (419).” It feels familiar because it was in this very room that, just weeks ago, she and Jim and her late friend’s young son, Sonny (disguised as a street urchin), had with Tara’s help impersonated an Afghan Muslim family (316–317). It is clear that Kate would never have found this room a second time without Tara’s guidance. Like Tiddu who both concealed and revealed India’s mystery to Jim earlier in the book, Tara’s hand now has “set the door wide.” Tara has tried to displace the Afghan touches with English ones. Hence the sense of uncanniness that re-asserts itself when “Kate paused on the threshold, feeling . . . dazed once more at the strange familiarity of all things. It seemed to her as if she had

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but just left that strip of roof a-glow with the setting sun, the bubble dome of the Mosque beginning to flush like a cloud upon the sky” (419). Kate’s pause on the threshold is again emblematic of her sense of standing between two existences and two realities. More importantly, the room’s ambience makes Kate’s task of “trying to piece out a consecutive story from the odd jumble of facts” impossible. The English/Indian room bespeaks the same task Steel seems to have felt she faced in attempting to produce a work that is, as she states in the book’s preface, “at once a story and a history,” but which “probably fails in either aim” (v). Whether or not Steel was consciously negotiating either this generic flux or the sense of vertigo experienced by these three women is beside the point. More noteworthy is the juxtaposition of scenes that are meant to be climactic. Although individually each scene serves, rather conventionally, to define each woman’s motivation and existential decision, taken together the three resolutions betray the narrative’s investment in the imperial project and indict the imperial masculinity that was at its height when Steel wrote her tale. Such a contradiction seems to lie at the heart of Anglo-Indian culture and it is strikingly laid out by Steel’s text. The novel’s conclusion reinforces these contradictions. As Kate enters the room where Jim lies ill, Tara, “still beyond the threshold, watched her disappear, then stood listening for a minute, with a face tragic in its intensity. Suddenly a faint voice broke the silence, and her hands, which had been tightly clenched, relaxed. She closed the door silently, and went downstairs.” Seeking Tara’s help, Kate “stole back to the outer roof, expecting to find Tara there . . . But the roof lay empty” (420). It is then that Kate, “with a flash,” recognizes “poor Tara’s” desperate need for Jim’s love. As Jim regains consciousness and asks about the battle’s outcome, Kate is filled with pity both for Tara and for Jim’s missed opportunity to participate in the fight. She seeks to compensate for this by assuring him that “you had your chance of saving a woman . . . and you saved her” (422). In applauding Jim’s decision to save Kate in lieu of joining the battle, the narrative displaces conventionally brash heroism with Jim’s quieter, more studied act of rescue—a displacement figured as well in Jim’s recumbent passivity and the women’s ministrations. Several points in the narrative belie Steel’s otherwise bold revision of the imperial plot, however. First, even as the reader encounters an Indian room with English touches, a room where “[e]verything was in its place” (421), British India’s clarity and mystery are once again invoked. Thus, although the room’s “strange sights” such as Tara’s poor imitation of English chicken broth— “chicken-brât”—incite pity in Kate for Tara’s plight, and although Jim jokes that he thought Kate was a ghost, Kate, who clearly wishes to reassure herself of sta-

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bility amidst the surrounding disorder, focuses on the one “certain [thing]” that Jim requires (food) and summarizes the British victory as “beyond the possibility of doubt” (420–421). Second, Tara haunts Kate’s conscience; she “seemed to Kate [to ask] every question that could be asked about the mystery of womanhood and manhood” (423). In an eerie reprise of Bertha Mason’s actions in Jane Eyre, Tara steals back at night to gaze upon the sleeping Kate and Jim, jealously removes an image of Zora from Jim’s locket, then, in “mad exultation,” returns to her own roof-top room across the city. There, she ignites a fire, slips on “her scarlet tinsel-set wedding-dress,” and waits for flames to consume her, intoning, “Day, Night, and Twilight say I am suttee.” “My God!” exclaims an English soldier who arrives on the scene, “I thought you said it was empty—and that’s a woman!” (424). Tara’s function in the novel is, of course, to unite Jim and Kate and then conveniently fulfill her original intention to become a sati. Yet the English soldier’s choice of words is telling, for the conjunction of emptiness and Indian woman aligns Tara, an Indian widow, with the same lack of agency that Kate had felt when she saw her familiar world falling down around her. But Tara is more than a foil for Kate; her status as signifier in the construction “empty = woman” amounts to a productive hollowness, a lack that substantiates Kate’s newly active womanliness.80 Paradoxically, then, Kate’s capability is predicated on a void. When Kate disguises herself under Tara’s tutelage as a sati, she successfully “occup[ies] the space of the Hindu woman,” as Jenny Sharpe has observed.81 But Tara’s attempt to mimic an English home is no match for Kate’s effortless mimicry of Hindu widowhood, and Tara’s failed attempt to mimic is necessary to the narrative’s strategy of negotiating the many contradictions that beset the Raj. Thus, despite providing us with a progressive woman-centered narrative filled with innovative depictions of domestic space, Steel is ultimately unable to restrain from justifying the aims of empire. Mughal Decline and Imperial Commerce

There is another, less individuated void against which British India sought to define itself, and that is the Mughal court at the time of the Mutiny. It is this entity, which Steel re-imagines to suit her plot, that perhaps more than anything else warranted the implementation of a medical topography. While Sharpe is right to focus on the complex literary representation of sati (as have a number of other critics, including Lata Mani and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan), the construction of Muslim women in the context of the Mutiny, though far less scrutinized, is no less important.82 I have described Newasi’s active attempt to account for, and thereby limit the effect of, Abool’s sinister actions. Yet despite Steel’s gesture toward female moral complexity in the person of Newasi, it is hard to overesti-

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mate the degree to which Steel was conditioned by the British identification with Mughal India. In the Mughals, as Alex Padamsee points out, British rulers felt they had a kindred spirit: they shared, it seemed, a compulsion to govern forcefully and to symbolize that governance ostentatiously (especially through architecture, but also through royal ornamentation).83 Moreover, the British interpreted Mughal history as a cautionary tale for similarly minded enterprises, for although the Mughals had, like the British, brought order to Indian chaos and magnificent transparency to a dusty and inscrutable Hindu country, they had, after all, fallen into ruin. It is precisely because of this identification with the Mughals that the British find the court’s participation in the rebellion particularly deceitful and upsetting. Rebellion among Hindus, the colonial writers reasoned in hindsight, was terrible but not really surprising; what could one expect from a “mysterious race”? Muslims, on the other hand, had reneged not simply on a contract with their European masters, but on the promise of their own better selves. The romance of the Taj Mahal, Lucknow’s baroque architecture, filigreed Urdu couplets—all had turned bittersweet for the British following the rebellion. How else to account for the change but by a viral madness? Steel’s focus on connivance and betrayal in the court of Bahadur Shah and her detailed description of the court’s rich décor are clearly central to her imperial plot. The effete, emasculated, and hermetic Mughal world is described, for example, in an early chapter “In the City,” which begins with the verses of a song: Come, beauty, rare, divine, Thy lover like a vine With tendril arms entwine; Lay rose red lips to mine, bewildering as wine. The song came in little insistent trills and quaverings, and quaint recurring cadences, which matched the insistency of the rhymes. The singer was a younger man of about three and twenty, and as he sang, seated on a Persian rug on the top of a roof, he played an elaborate symphony of trills and cadences to match, upon a tinkling saringi. He was small, slight, with a bright vivacious face smooth shaven, save for a thin moustache trimmed into a faint fine fringe. His costume marked him as a dandy of the first water, and he smelt horribly of musk. The roof on which he sate was a secluded roof, protected from view, even from other roofs, by the high latticed walls, its only connection with the world

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below it being a dizzy brick ladder of a stair climbing down fearlessly from one corner. Across the further end stretched a sort of verandah, enclosed by lattice and screens. . . . (90)

The singer is none other than Abool, Newasi’s lover, come to entice his mistress with wine-drenched poetry. His reverie beside Newasi’s secluded room is matched by that of the palace-fort, where we are introduced to a life “shut in from all outside influence, . . . like some tepid, teeming breeding-place for strange forms of life unknown to purer, clearer atmospheres” (76). Steel’s indictment of Mughal misrule (contrasted with Britain’s “purer” governance) is caught in the “faint fine fringe” of Abool’s moustache, the alliteration and archaisms (like “sate”) mocking the scene’s vainglory. The song’s “little insistent trills” and “quaint recurring cadences” are more suitable to the Victorian convention of womanly wiles than to a man who will soon cut down English women at the insistence of a murderous queen. By contrast, Newasi “wore no jewels” and has “fled from court-life and its many intrigues” (91). A scene that British writers would previously have called picturesque is, as Gautam Chakravarty says, more generally about the representation of Mughal iconography in Mutiny fiction, transformed by a few choice phrases into a representation of decadence and betrayal foreshadowed.84 Like the previously bustling and economically crucial bazaar85 that is, in retrospect, shown to harbor rebellion, to have always been in rebellion, Mughal culture in extremis exposes what it has hitherto managed to keep hidden. The rebellion, declares the novel, has called the court’s bluff. Thanks to those savvy few, like Jim, who detect the early warning signs, this does not come as a total logistical surprise, however. Jim is intent on visiting the Mughal palace the day the rebellion begins, since, as he intones, “information’s everything” (214). Much of this information, however, comes in conspiratorial offstage whispers at the court, which neither Tiddu nor Jim can hear, and which must be left to the novelist’s invention. The resulting image of Mughal enfeeblement in Mutiny novels serves as a crucial foil for Britain’s healthy male rule. This fictional theme derives from numerous contemporary descriptions by various British journalists, military officers, and women who, soon after the city’s capture by British forces, entered the Red Fort to gaze at the defeated Mughal king. Even the less jingoistic reporting of William Howard Russell finds “a diminutive attenuated old man, dressed in an ordinary and rather dirty muslin tunic.” This “dim-wandering-eyed, dreamy old man” seemed a ridiculous emblem for “the most gigantic mutiny in the history of the world,” a man who had somehow “hurled defiance and shot ridicule upon the race that held every throne in India in the hollow of their palms.”86

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Another visitor, Ruth Coopland, adds that Zeenat Mahal, whom she found sitting defiantly next to the king, possessed an expression that “seemed capable of inciting the king to deeds of blood, which she was accused of having done.”87 As Steel puts it, “the old King, . . . listening to brocaded bags” and “making couplets,” had been “cozened by the Queen” (368). These images, which circulated for decades in the colonial imagination, and indeed have only recently been revisited, indicate the great disappointment felt by vanquishing Britishers at discovering a less-than-heroic enemy chief.88 The European nostalgia for the kind of enlightened Mughal power found in Akbar, the contemporary of Elizabeth I, or in the ruthless but decisive Aurangzeb, had been besmirched by their unworthy descendent, Zafar.89 Even more unseemly to British eyes was the manner in which a cuckolding queen, Zeenat Mahal, had usurped the spirit of Mughal authority. As Steel puts it midway through the novel, Zeenat, exasperated by the palace’s inert men, at one point “tore off her hampering veil and rolling it into a ball flung it at the head of a drowsy eunuch in the outside arcade—the nearest thing to a man within her reach” (217). Though her energy is admirable, she personifies the corrupting poison of an overweening mind that spreads like a pox from the Red Fort palace to infect an illiterate and impressionable soldiery. In Steel’s novel, there is a direct link between this sickness in the heart of the palace and Jim Douglas’ “autumnal fever” on the Delhi Ridge, which “though it killed few, sapped steadily at the vigour of the garrison” (367). The description of the scene at the Ridge in fact abuts that of the cozened king. Major Erlton, Kate’s adulterous husband, is the single soldier resistant to the two types of contagion, physical and moral. “I don’t know what it is,” he tells Jim cheerily, “but though I’m a lot thinner, this life seems to suit me. I haven’t felt so fit in ages” (367). In contrast to Kate’s propensity for thoughtful reflection, her husband “never sate and watched the rose-red walls [of the city]” (368). Erlton epitomizes the dutiful imperial officer whose very zeal nourishes his body and whose death in battle redeems past sins. The message is, however, that such an unreflective, spontaneous temperament cannot abide any sustained discipline; Erlton is made for war, not peace. The irony is that Jim’s illness saves him for a longer and more properly residential life with Kate in a colonial culture that will now tend to accentuate the hyphen in Anglo-India both physically and imaginatively. Steel’s text is thus unconventional not only in domesticating Jim, but in finding illness to be an ally in Kate’s quest to reformulate her sense of the “perfect home” from the one she had naively cherished before the rebellion. The victory cuts two ways, for Steel’s narrative is at once a story of emasculation and imperial reassertion. Major Erlton and Jim Douglas are therefore emblematic of a colonial world

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turned upside down by insurgency, the one signifying death in the name of the empire’s life, and the other figuring a life that must henceforth exist in a state of anxious counterinsurgency. Triangulating their meaning is Kate, a woman who has by turns impersonated a Hindu sati, a Muslim wife, and, self-deceptively, a Company wife in service to the English “cult of home.” Britain’s feminization of the subcontinent, begun earlier in the nineteenth century through the use of such tropes as “virgin soil” and effete babus, finds its quintessence in the body of the last Mughal. Indeed, feminization is frequently elided with emasculation in late-colonial texts, so that the Shah’s decrepit presence in the palace following the Mutiny (and just prior to his exile to Burma) matches the condition of his prostrate homeland. The country must now, reasoned the British government, be rehabilitated, its topography radically altered and quantified so as to excise the mystery at its heart—a mystery that continued, in various ways, to be identified with feminine desire. The medical topographer’s duties, in other words, must include a clinical investigation of all possible causes of illness together with a reordering of space. If Indian women cannot generally be coerced into the benevolent self-sacrifice of a Tara, at least some, like Rahdya, can be registered and confined. Such a policy follows on the shift in attitude from the eighteenth-century English nabobs with their Indian wives, to a post-Mutiny urge to bring single Englishwomen to cantonments and civil lines so as to form proper Anglo-Indian families that are separated from “native” India. The Anglo-Indian habit of having their children nursed by Indian ayahs and then packing them off to England flew in the face of their claims to value maternity. For Jim and Kate, their supposed union in the face of calamity would have led Steel’s contemporary readers to expect of them a childless future. Yet the narrative refuses to go there, choosing instead, like a proper Anglo-Indian wife, to coddle the moment of victory and of union, as a space of textual promise. In this sense, the narrative forestalls an inevitable future even as it yearns for it. The predicament in which English colonial women found themselves after 1858 resulted, as Sara Suleri has observed, in their production of discursive spaces that “record with ambivalence the familial decentering of Anglo-Indian domesticity, in which maternity must lease out its progeny to either one culture or the other.”90 The requisite colonial corollary of this domestic space, the mysterious Indian zenana, remains a site of erotic temptation for English men (and so an ever-present, if imagined, threat to the English wife) as well as a reminder of the Indian mothering to which the Englishwoman ceded her child. As such, colonial domesticity becomes refigured as simultaneously nurturing and threatening, Indian and English. Although Steel’s novel thus befits its imperial imprimatur by showing ill-

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ness to be an idiopathic threat to English rule, it also unsettles the equation by having illness preserve this rule, as with Jim’s convalescence. More importantly, the role-switching of women and men revolves around a nexus of spatial, medicinal, and reproductive interests that at once subverts and upholds a conventional image of women and men in the colony. There is, however, one crucial interest that governs the whole enterprise of colonialism, but which, because it is encrusted with other motivations, is often muted in the Mutiny novel, and that is commercialism. This interest ties together not just the raison d’être of both the East India Company and the Raj, it also encompasses in various ways the livelihoods and actions of Rahdya, Kate, and Tara. The choices available to women at the time, both English and Indian, and of various classes, cannot be separated from their perceived transactional value as Anglo-Indian wives, Indian nursemaids, and military prostitutes. Marriage was a means of upward mobility for Englishwomen even as ayahs and “registered women” earned what they could. As Philippa Levine has observed in reference to the latter, although venereal disease was much more prevalent among British soldiers than among Indian sepoys, the disease nevertheless became a sign of Indian turpitude and the moral laxity of Indian women. Thus, “India was the disease; Indian women the carriers.”91 Hence the medical topographer’s appointment to administer this elision of geography, women, and disease. It is therefore fitting that this book should begin with the words “Going! Going! Gone!” and end with the voice of the Mutiny’s lamented hero John Nicholson lingering over “the dark faces and the light alike—‘Come on, men! Come on!’ ” (1, 425). The dead Nicholson beckons Britain back to its imperial duty in India, belying the double-meaning of “Going! Gone!” Yet these first words, like the pages that follow, immediately register the text’s ambivalent attitude toward India, and Britain’s place in it, for they signal the auction of the “King of Oude’s menagerie,” a public auction that accompanies the annexation of the huge province (and which recalls Harriet Tytler’s description of the menagerie). In Steel’s words, this action is a “just and unjust retribution” for the Nawab’s (the king’s) “unmentionable atrocities” (2). On the one hand, Steel rightly records the Indians’ feeling of resentment that “sharpened the [inevitable] antagonism of race.” On the other hand, the annexation, in the narrator’s view, is a necessary corrective to the excesses of the most profligate place in the subcontinent (3). The whole transaction is a distillation of the centuries-old meeting of two very different cultures, although on this day “the commercial instincts of the West” meet “the uncommercial ones of the East in open market for the first time.” The narrator thus admits to a confusing scene (2). One final irony: in this scene we are introduced to Major Erlton, who, as Kate looks on, bids exorbitantly for

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one of the Nawab’s parrots to please his love interest, Mrs. Gissing. If the public auction demonstrates a properly commercial, propertied rationale for British rule, the impetuous Major Erlton suggests how tenuous this rationale is when women intrude on its idealized operation. Still, as Steel’s novel plays out, we see that this auction could not function without British India’s culturally coded, spatially conditioned images of women. Notes 1. Edwin Chadwick, Report . . . on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: W. Clowes, 1842); Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), 4 vols. (London: Frank Cass, 1967). 2. Review of Indian Annals of Medical Science. Article on the Means of Preserving the Health of the European Soldiers in India, by Dr. Norman Chevers, M.D. Calcutta Review (1859), 368. 3. IOLR/ MSS.EUR B260, Hobbes, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan,” vol. 1. 4. J. R. Martin to Home Govt., 12 August 1857. India Office Library and Records [IOLR]/ L.MIL.7, London. I should note that the field of medical topography derived from the increasing attention given by Europeans to the study of medical geography and climatology, the conclusions of which greatly determined colonial policies throughout the nineteenth century. Martin himself was president of the India Office Medical Board and a member of the influential Royal Commissions, in 1859 and 1863, that investigated “the Sanitary State of the Army in India”—commissions which, in the wake of the 1857 uprising, shaped military and medical practices in the subcontinent for years to come. In these reports, as in the above memorandum, Martin attributes the high mortality rate of the British-Indian soldiery to ill-chosen camp locations and poorly ventilated dwellings. Considerations of the distribution of diseases and climates extend from James Lind’s Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London: J. Murray, 1768) to G. M. Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1904). 5. Arnold, “Deathscapes,” 341. 6. Since I am discussing colonial attitudes and Steel’s fictional responses to these attitudes, I defer to colonial usage of the term “Mutiny” (with capitalization) to convey its contemporary charge. Indians have always viewed the 1857–1858 war as the “first war of independence.” 7. The famed Victorian naturalist Joseph Hooker during his voyage to India in 1847 matter-of-factly labeled the Singhalese as “happy, cheerful and contented,” yet “untrustworthy” and “treacherous.” Quoted in David Arnold, “Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850,” in Felix Driver and

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Luciana Martins, eds., Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 143. 8. Maud Diver, The Unsung, 9. 9. See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 359. 10. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 308–309. 11. Henty, In Times of Peril: A Tale of India (London: Griffith and Farran; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1881). Page references hereafter appear parenthetically after quotations from this edition of the novel. 12. Although the term “imperial” technically refers to Queen Victoria’s 1877 acquisition of the title “Empress of India” (which Benjamin Disraeli had urged), the ethos of empire began to pervade the subcontinent after 1757, when Robert Clive’s victory in Bengal signaled the inauguration of English authority. I thus use the term less as a temporal than as a cultural signifier. 13. Veena Talwar Oldenberg argues, to the contrary, that British rule grew stronger through its efforts at surveillance. See her The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877. It is also worth noting that certain northern cities, such as Kanpur, became more industrialized as a result of new railway lines and its advantageous geographical position, according to C. A. Bayly in his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 440–441. 14. Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13.1 (January 1989): 154. 15. See Judy Whitehead, “Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation, and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India,” Gender and History 7.1 (April 1995): 54–55. 16. For more on these Acts, see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980); and Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 17. Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 72. 18. Charles Alexander Gordon, Army Hygiene (London: John Churchill and Son; Calcutta: R. C. Lepage And Co., 1866), 23. 19. 1863 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India; with Précis of Evidence (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1863). 20. See Anthony King’s pioneering study Colonial Urban Development, which provides a detailed overview of many such books. Also see William J. Moore’s 1874 manual (cited above), A Manual of Family Medicine (London: J. & A. Churchill); updated 1883. 21. Mohanty, “Kipling’s Children and the Colour Line,” 36.

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22. Kipling, Kim: A Critical Edition, 3, 13. 23. Edward J. Tilt, Health in India for British Women and on the Prevention of Disease in Tropical Climates, 4th ed. (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1875), 3, 14. 24. Gupta, “The Useful and the Ornamental,” 66. Also see Sara Suleri on the broad and perplexed British view of India’s “amorphousness” in “Amorphous India: Questions of Geography,” Southwest Review 71.3 (Summer 1986). 25. The racial differentiation of Europeans and non-Europeans that had become commonplace during several centuries of enforced trade and exploration was, as Betty Joseph argues, recycled in India in the late 1700s during the trial of Warren Hastings, who in the process of defending his enrichment as a governor-general stated, “The native Indian is weak in body and timid in spirit,” and “the Englishman is quite a different character in India,” possessed as he is of a natural superiority. Yet this early cultural egotism does not match its material articulation after 1858. See Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 158–159. 26. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, for example, who had not paid particular attention to India prior to the Mutiny, writes in his 1879 poem “The Defence of Lucknow” a mutinous, generalized foe that attacks the Lucknow Residency “thro’ the smoke and the sulphur like so many fiends in their hell.” The predictable foils to this onslaught are brave Englishmen and the “valor of delicate women.” 27. Pre-Mutiny, the British had looked to the Mughals as their subcontinental precursors, whose monuments and ceremonies the British prized. Post-Mutiny, this very idea of that closeness, now seen to have been betrayed, suggested disgust. Thus, the once-lauded Mughal artistry of Delhi becomes, after 1857–1858, a focal point of revenge. “Raize her [Delhi] to the ground—palace and tower,” cries Mary A. Leslie’s 1858 sonnet “Delhi.” The poem wants the city to become a “gorgeous sepulcher” so that dead Britishers might be suitably remembered. Quoted in Gautam Chakrabarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105. 28. On the importance of the durbar as public ritual, see Cohn, “Representing Authority in Colonial India,” 178–180. 29. Harriet Tytler, quoted in Anthony Sattin’s afterword to his edition of An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of Harriet Tytler, 1828–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 30. Tytler, quoted in Sattin, “Afterword,” An Englishwoman in India, 181. 31. Poona Observer 28.1 (2 January 1877), 3; emphasis in original. Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai. 32. Ranjit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 221. Indeed, a modern British historian of India, C. A. Bayly, continues to insist that “the bazaars were full of

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ominous rumors” and “played an . . . important part in the calculations of the rebels.” See Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 359–360. 33. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Guha’s emphasis. 34. Ibid., 226. 35. Ibid, 223–226. 36. Guha acknowledges that rumor by itself was not “uniquely Indian” (251). As I have stressed, however, the coupling of rumor with the Indian bazaar, a space already viewed with anxiety and suspicion by Europeans, makes this motif extraordinarily powerful. 37. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 23. 38. Ibid., 123. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 101. 41. Quoted in Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 274. 42. IOLR/ MSS.EUR. B260, Hobbes, “Scenes in the Cities and Wilds of Hindostan.” 43. Ibid. 44. Gautam Bhadra, “Four Rebels of Eighteen-Fifty-Seven,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri C. Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 151. 45. Sumit Guha, “Nutrition, Sanitation, Hygiene, and the Likelihood of Death: The British Army in India c.1870–1920,” Population Studies 47 (1993): 389, 397. 46. See Faisal Devji, “Gender and the Politics of Space,” 148. 47. Military Lands Manual (As Modified up to 31st December, 1944) (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), 245–246. Poona Cantonment Board Office collection, Pune. 48. See Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of the Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993), 37. 49. G. Farrell, Inspector General of Civil Hospitals, Punjab. Lock Hospital Reports, 1891. India Office Library and Records [IOLR]/ L.MIL. 7/315C, London. 50. Surgeon-General Bratly, Bhagrao Cantonment Hospital, Lock Hospital Reports, 1891. IOLR/ L.MIL. 7/315C. 51. Major J. A. L. Montgomery, Deputy Commissioner, Sialkot, Lock Hospital Reports, 1889. IOLR/ L.MIL. 7/315C. 52. Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 140. 53. Jan Morris, The Spectacle of Empire: Style, Effect and the Pax Britannica (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982), 73. 54. This painting now hangs in the Gordon’s Boys School in England.

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55. Gautam Chakravarty lists other examples of the popular genre from just the 1890s: G. A. Henty’s Rujjub the Juggler (1893), H. C. Irwin’s A Man of Honour (1896), and A. F. P. Harcourt’s Jenetha’s Venture (1899). See Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, 6. As Chakravarty notes, there were many reasons why this decade was particularly expressive of jingoism and imperialist sentiment; notable causes for the popularity of this sentiment in literature were the century’s European expansionism, the spread of literacy, and enfranchisement of the lower classes, who could now feel, by the 1890s, that they were acknowledged members of the empire (3). 56. Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters (Delhi: William Heinemann, 1897), i. Page references to this edition will hereafter appear in parentheses. 57. Violet Powell, in her 1985 introduction to a reissue of the novel, praises it as “a book in which the faults of both sides in the Mutiny were so uncompromisingly set out.” Introduction (Delhi: Arnold-Henemann, 1985), 8. Compare, however, Jenny Sharpe’s critique of the novel in Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 87. 58. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” 179. 59. Jenny Sharpe, “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency.” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 29–30. 60. See James Routledge, English Rule and Native Opinion in India, from Notes Taken 1870–74 (London: Trubner & Co., 1878), 241; Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” 176–179; and Andrew Ward, Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacre and the Indian Army in 1857 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996), 547, 551. 61. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 88. 62. See for example George Bruce Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, 1857– 1858, vol. 1 (London: n.p., 1879), 1. 63. Unsigned editorial, Calcutta Review (1859), 394. 64. The zenana was a common focus of European women’s narratives about India, such as Helen Mackenzie’s Life in the Mission, the Camp and the Zenana; or, Six Years in India (London: Richard Bentley, 1853). The space has therefore attracted much scholarly attention: see for example Janaki Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1813–1940,” in Cultures of Empire: A Reader, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 224–245; and Grewal, Home and Harem, 200–202, 208. 65. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 140–141. 66. Told in the Verandah: Passages in the Life of Colonel Bowlong, Set Down by His Adjutant (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1895). 67. For more on the space of the veranda in the social history of colonial India, see Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development, 150–153. 68. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 23–25.

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69. For the history of European gardens in colonial contexts, see, for example, Mary Condé, “Reading Romance, Reading Landscape: Empires of Fiction,” in Glenn Hooper, ed., Landscape and Empire, 1770–2000 (Aldershot, ENG: Ashgate, 2005), 127– 140; and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), especially chapter 3. As Condé observes, citing as an example Steel’s own general interest in Mughal gardens, “English gardens in India and Africa, with their mixture of exotic blooms and suburban order, are, as a metaphor for harmonious imperial rule, often meticulously described” (137). 70. See King, Colonial Urban Development, 141. 71. Historians of the Mutiny have, in fact, debated this topic. In her 1984 book The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877, Veena Talwar Oldenberg, for instance, refutes the contention of such influential historians as Thomas Metcalf, S. Gopal, and Francis Hutchins that Britain’s ability to hold on to India for another 90 years was due to the Raj’s decision to exercise a hand’s-off approach to Indian social practices. Oldenberg argues, instead, that the “direct outcome of the revolt was the systematic elaboration of a more penetrating and effective means of controlling Indian society” (xviii). 72. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 101. 73. Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, 132. 74. The words “real” and “reality,” for instance, are strung together in the space of two sentences (260), just as, two pages later, “shifting” is used three times within a few lines (262). Other words in this chapter include “melted” to describe a crowd, and numerous references to vision and sight (255–263 passim). 75. Alex Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 68. 76. See Flora Annie Steel (text) and Mortimer Menpes (paintings), India (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1905), 75, 136. 77. See note 23 above. 78. Indeed, many of the novel’s chapter titles in Book II point up the events’ spatial iconicity—for example, “In the Palace,” “In the City,” “On the Ridge,” “In the Village,” and “In the Residency”—just as in Book III the titles metaphorically signal varying degrees of colonial comprehension and incomprehension, as well as an epic denouement: thus, “Night,” “Dawn,” “Daylight,” “Noon,” “Sunset,” and “Dusk.” 79. See, for instance, Margaret Strobel’s Introduction to her European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 80. The resemblance here to the caves in {E. M.} Forster’s A Passage to India is inescapable. 81. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 108. 82. See Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions,” 27–34; and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan,

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Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993). 83. Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims, 1–4 and passim. 84. Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, 175–179. 85. C. A. Bayly notes that the first half of the nineteenth century the number and importance of bazaars increased across much of India. Ironically, it was precisely the success of entrepreneurial forces that resisted the East India Company’s increasing desire to centralize its control by, in part, styling itself as a new version of Mughal authority. The resentment of vested Indian merchants and local kings eventually burst forth under the mantle of religious protest when a sepoy shot his British commanding officer in 1857 and so triggered the rebellion. On the economic and political variables of this period, see Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 292–302. 86. William Howard Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 170–171. 87. Ruth Coopland, A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior and Life in the Fort during the Mutinies of 1857 (1859), quoted in Gautam Charkavarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, 213. 88. See, for example, Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (New York: Vintage, 2008). 89. As G. O. Trevelyan observed in a rare instance of objectivity a few years after the war, vengeful British soldiers “barbarously” targeted “the unfortunate Muslim,” hanging hundreds of innocents simply because of their faith. Trevelyan, Cawnpore, 47–48. Such attempts to inject a modicum of reason into conventional representations of the rebellion were, however, shouted down by jingoistic popular accounts. 90. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 98. Also see, in this regard, the entire chapter, “The Feminine Picturesque,” 75–110. 91. Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,” 599.

Chapter 6

The Engineers’ Revenge, the Age of Kali Kipling’s Bridges and the End of Jungles

“The Bridge-Builders”: Taming the River

Far from the cantonment garden was an India that was just as important to the construction of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian homeliness: the India of immense engineering feats, particularly railway bridges and dams. These edifices were necessarily large in order to span rivers that dwarfed anything in Europe, and they seemed to require a new vocabulary of awe. As we will see in Kipling’s “The Bridge-Builders,” colonial reason holds sway in the form of engineering that principally intrudes upon the lair of that sleeping giant of a river, the Ganges. This story, which has attracted scholarly attention from various disciplines and is often judged to be one of his best, was originally published in 1893 and included in Kipling’s 1898 collection The Day’s Work.1 It recounts the Public Works Department’s completion of a great bridge in northern India that would soon bear “the first train-load of soldiers.” Part of the story is based on Kipling’s 1887 article for the Civil and Military Gazette on a new Sutlej River bridge. James Richard Bell, the living model for Findlayson, the story’s chief engineer, later said that the tale was “a farrago of bridge-building stories told to R. K. at various times.”2 In “The Bridge-Builders” (hereafter BB), Kipling itemizes the bridge’s epic proportions in celebration of the genius of its two long-suffering engineers and their trusty Indian assistant. But magnificent and sturdy as this engineering wonder is, it barely survives the sudden onslaught of a rain-gorged river in full flood. Kipling devotes a significant portion of the story—fifteen of forty pages—to Chief Engineer Findlayson’s opiate dream, in which Hindu gods and river creatures debate the dangers and virtues of the bridge.3 The extra-human council shows, on one level, that this engineering marvel of the British Raj com206

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mands the attention of even natural and spiritual elements that normally elude European perception. As Michael Adas puts it, “The railway bridge itself, spanning the mighty Ganges, which for millennia had been one of the main sources of Indian civilization, symbolizes the British capacity to reshape the Indian environment in order to increase its productivity.”4 This is certainly one irrefutable reading of the tale. On another level, however, the dream, by deferring to certain features of the romanticism and jungle imagery I have been examining, presents a view of industry as out of sync with the land. Whereas the bridge will surely “facilitate the movement of travelers and products for market,” the narrative suggests that it will also destroy the elemental world of which Kipling wrote so lovingly in other short stories and in Kim—a world of magic and nature.5 The tale is thus yet another example of Anglo-Indian ambivalence, the bridge itself a symbol of connection as well as transgression. For reshaping the Indian environment necessarily means destroying something in the process. Kipling immediately introduces us to Chief Engineer Findlayson, whose “years of disappointment and danger” are seemingly behind him. Enticed by the possibility of further rewards (he expected the title of Commander of the Indian Empire), and relying on his quintessential English resourcefulness and determination, Findlayson heroically tries to tame the Ganges River’s awful force by bridging it. Crucially, Findlayson’s idea of home, an issue typically built into colonial narratives tied to innate Englishness, proves to also be invested in the Indian landscape he loves. Home, for Findlayson, thus proves to be simultaneously “out there” and “here,” generating a cognitive split that is realized in his hallucinogenic dream that Peroo, the culturally hybrid (and equally intrepid) Indian assistant, facilitates and that forms the heart of the tale. Kipling also introduces us to the bridge itself, and to its work crew, a description worth quoting at length since it is a good example of Kipling’s wonderfully detailed prose as well as an important contrast to later parts of the story: Findlayson, C.E. [Chief Engineer], sat in his trolley on a construction-line that ran along one of the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either side of the river—and permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges’ bed. Above them ran the railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rose towers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and

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pierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise of hooves, the rattle of drivers’ sticks, and the swish and roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of railway-sleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support the last of the girders as those were riveted up. In the little deep water left by the draught, an overhead-crane traveled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron into place, snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber-yard. Riveters by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of the railway-line, hung from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale yellow in the sun’s glare. East and west and north and south the construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments, the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the sideboards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand tons more material were thrown out to hold the river in place. Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of the country that he had changed for seven miles around. . . . —and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work was good. (3–5)

The robust technological features of the bridge—immense piers, footpathstanchions, iron girders riveted up—are alive, with cranes snorting and grunting like elephants and trains shrieking. The piers have throats, and brick towers haunches. Findlayson’s Godlike gaze thus takes in not an inanimate landscape, but a new life-form satisfyingly fashioned from northern India’s red earth. Held together by his own special invention, the “splendid Findlayson truss,” this great Kashi Bridge has taken shape over three years’ time under his tireless supervision through “heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease,” its originally raw and ugly construction rising to span “Mother Gunga.” So much has he invested in the project that, although he is “sick for home . . . his shed of a bungalow . . . had become home to him” (10). His dedication to the profession that defines him is further underscored by Kipling’s trademark repetition of titular abbreviations (here, C. E.) for builders of the Raj, where professional titles were the cherished evidence of one’s imperial work and duty. They spoke for themselves. Together with his able assistants Hitchcock and

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especially the sailor-foreman Peroo, Findlayson has dealt with storm and “awful rage against red tape,” as well as “drought, sanitation, finance; birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring castes.” He had faced down the “blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case” (7). By all accounts, he has earned his right to declare victory over the river and collect his reward. The organic metaphors that characterize the bridge’s construction are crucial to the range of possible readings the story invites. For one thing, the narrative redirects a natural vocabulary most often associated with wildlife to technology: the “haunches” do not belong to a tiger, as one might expect, but rather to towers; the crane “grunts” like an elephant; and girders boast awesome “bellies.” Mother Gunga herself “roar[s]” back at the engineers’ audacity (18). The bridge work, in other words, is brought to life by borrowing from the vocabulary of jungle lore, a colonial genre that, as in the memoir of one hunting engineer, is replete with the “deep growl[s]” and “furious yellow orbs” of tigers and other creatures. It is one that Kipling extols in his Jungle Book tales.6 The implication is that Findlayson and his engineering assistant, Hitchcock, are not unlike intrepid big game hunters who challenge and finally (if barely) conquer their prey. This naturalized engineering feat has, however, progressed at the cost of cholera and smallpox epidemics (7), “heart-breaking” bureaucratic recalcitrance (6), violent weather (7), and aesthetic insensitivity: the bridge is “raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka—permanent” (5). The engineers’ persistence has also eaten up an often dreary three years of their lives—a testament to the kind of dutiful resolution that Kipling celebrates in other tales, but which here sounds like bitter lament. The almost sublime presence of the bridge, in other words, competes with the coin of loss. This loss, however, is ultimately redeemable for a simple reason: The bridge is worth it. But Kipling hews to the imperial-work story by barely mentioning the thousands of Indian construction laborers and few hundred European riveters whose work is at once vital and at the margins of the story of the two commanding engineers. The workers merely “swarm” around the stone-and-iron leviathan. It is the bridge, by contrast, that seems eerily sentient. Again and again, we are told, “the bridge was two men’s work,” that of Findlayson and Hitchcock—“unless one counted Peroo” (7). In the context of imperial prose, Kipling’s homage to imperial engineers is a hybrid, for it combines a predictable colonial lexicon of English duty and unreliable Indian labor (Hitchcock has had to keep them in line) with the language of the sublime. The awe-inspiring, sentient grandness of the bridge resembles the “amazement and excitement” elicited by the great Bengal tiger in the eyes of colonial hunters. Their most adulatory adjectives were

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reserved for this “Lord of the Jungle” whose movements are, like the eloquent design of the bridge, “the very poetry of motion.”7 The bridge, however, is threatened not by a human hunter, but by natural calamity. Just as the scaffolding is being removed, the rains hit and the flood rages, threatening to destroy “his” (Findlayson’s) bridge. The proprietary pronoun is important since Findlayson sees himself, his wholeness, entwined in the bridge. Caliban-like, he declares, in the face of the flood, “The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it” (21). Like his bridge, Findlayson seems a captive of the great river—a suggestion that comes to life when he and Peroo become stranded on a sliver of land when the floodwaters hit. It is Peroo who saves Findlayson. Seeing his master’s reckless attempt to stand by his bridge as he stubbornly tries to oppose nature, the lascar persuades the Englishman to take opium. But as the waters rise, and hawsers snap, a drugged Findlayson feels his soul separating from his body, and presently as he and Peroo are stranded on the newly created island, he dreams he is present at a convocation of animals and Hindu gods, including Gunga herself (in the form of Mugger the crocodile), who bemoan the strength of the still-standing bridge, for it is a sign of their imminent obsolescence. The god who speaks with the most circumspection and the least emotion is Hanuman, the monkey god, who also built a bridge to Lanka (as described in the Ramayana), and who observes that the “new worshippers from beyond the Black Water” are “men who believe that their God is toil” (33). He finds in the English engineers a kindred spirit. Krishna, for his part, warns the other gods that if the British succeed in drawing people away from traditional worship, they (the gods) will “become little Gods again—Gods of the jungle” (38). Mugger likewise groans, “They have changed the face of the land—which is my land. They have killed and made new towns on my banks” (30). He asks for “the Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!” (29). The crocodile and tiger are the most fiercely opposed to what they see as the defilement of sacred waters and lands. Here, the tiger is all menace (as if Kipling cannot allow its usual grandness to compete with that of the bridge). “Snarl[ing] wickedly,” the tiger declares: “In the end, . . . we are left with naked altars” (28, 31). Krishna scolds them for counting on the worship of ordinary villagers, for not recognizing that their days are coming to an end. “Me alone they cannot kill,” Krishna concludes dramatically, “so long as maiden and man meet together or the spring follows the winter rains . . . My people know not now what they know; but I, who live with them, I read their hearts. Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods.” (39)

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The story ends, predictably, with the bridge withstanding the flood. Hitchcock has meanwhile called upon the local fief-holder, the Rao of Baraon, nattily dressed “in tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued turban” (43) to bring his personal steam-launch to find a stranded Findlayson and Peroo. Findlayson remembers nothing of the opium dream; Peroo, recognizing the inevitability of modern change, pilots “the launch craftily up-stream” (44). Although this tale is usually read as a paean to colonial science and enterprise (a conclusion echoed by historians Gyan Prakash and Michael Adas), there are some noteworthy omissions in this interpretation. For all its clichés of imperial virtue, BB suggests that the worlds of magic and science are not so easily labeled Indian or European. The presence of the resourceful and in the end redemptive lascar Peroo, whose ten years of worldwide travels have instilled in him an unusual combination of technological skill and mystical faith, undercuts Findlayson’s and Hitchcock’s self-congratulation at the start of the story. Hitchcock, for instance, echoes Findlayson’s Olympian satisfaction in his work when he says, “Isn’t it damned good?” The Englishmen’s pride is all the greater for having (as they see it) accomplished their three-years’ mission: “Not half a bad job for two men, is it?” declares Findlayson (5). What they discount, as I have noted, is the work of hundreds of Indian laborers, but most significantly they have, until the flood, also downplayed Peroo’s role. It is only later that we are told of Peroo’s indispensable help: So the bridge was two men’s work—unless one counted Peroo, as Peroo certainly counted himself . . . There was no one like Peroo . . . to lash and guy and hold, to control the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the borrow-pit . . . ; to strip and dive, if need be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure up-stream on a monsoon night and report on the state of the embankmentfacings. He would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson and Hitchcock without fear, till his wonderful English . . . ran out and he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would recommend. (7–8)

There is a telling shift in the point of view here, for it is the omniscient narrator who tells us that Peroo clearly understands his value to the construction of the bridge; he does not need the Englishmen to tell him this. Findlayson and Hitchcock, moreover, cannot know of yet another dimension to Peroo’s knowledge: the realm of gods and animals. Peroo’s understanding of the languages of reason as well as unreason (besides a mixture of foreign tongues, “his wonderful English” and “his still more wonderful lingua-franca, half Portuguese and

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half Malay” [8]) establishes his vital role as a mediator between worlds. “[O]n land we worship Shiva, we Kharvas [Peroo’s caste group]; but at sea on the Kumpani’s boats we attend strictly to the orders of the Burra Malum (the first mate), and on this bridge we observe what Finlinson Sahib says” (9). Peroo’s ability to “craftily” steer the local Raja’s steam-launch with the two engineers back to civilization, just as he steers his way through foreign tongues, underscores his leadership skills. Peroo says early in the story, “My honour is the honour of this bridge” (9), and indeed, his “possess[ion] [ . . . ] of the wheel” figures his usurpation of Findlayson’s proprietary claim to the bridge (44). Peroo’s knowledge of boats comes from his long experience of working on “Kumpani”—that is, East India Company—boats. His lascar status makes it understood that his work on Company ships took him to ports in many lands: “He was a Lascar, . . . familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who had risen to the rank of serang on the British India boats, but wearying of routing musters and clean clothes had thrown up the service and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment. For his knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy weights, Peroo was worth almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services . . . Neither running water nor extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an ex-serang, he knew how to hold authority”(7–8). His intimate knowledge of European ways thus positions him as the ideal (and necessary) interlineal actor in the drama of empire. The steamboat, moreover, had long been viewed by the British as the “great engine of moral improvement,” second only to the railroad.8 The story’s stress on his piloting, in addition to managerial, skills indicates a degree of respect that clearly places him second only to Findlayson and Hitchcock in the narrative’s hierarchy of intrepid characters. More than this, Peroo’s rare knowledge of the culture and industry of both land and sea makes him an indispensable agent in Britain’s “technological transformation of colonized societies.”9 In this regard, Peroo is a rare example in colonial fiction of a Native who masters the supposed mysteries of the West’s “engineering genius”—precisely the mysteries that Europeans pretended were ultimately incommunicable to their non-European employees, and which figured as a counterweight to indigenous forms of knowledge—particularly “magical” forms.10 It’s no surprise, then, when he tells Hitchcock of the time he “prayed to the low-press cylinder in the engine-room of a steamer” (12). Like Kim and Mowgli, Peroo crosses worlds. Kipling’s story itself demonstrates a version of Peroo’s biculturalism, which proves so integral to the English engineers’ success. The seemingly digressive supernatural debate among gods and creatures is similarly integral to the tale’s narrative success. If the story as a whole sensitizes the Victorian reader to the

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stakes of colonial industry’s reordering of cultural spaces, the drug-induced tale-within-a-tale reminds the contemporary reader of India’s resistance to such changes. As John McBratney points out, Kipling commonly used the framing device to contrast past and present, as in the story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill. These very English tales enabled Kipling to convey “an awareness of the past living in the present,” and of history’s lessons for the present.11 In BB, however, the narrative contrast between the opiate dream and the engineers’ workaday world functions less as an illuminating allegorical conjunction of past and present than as an uncanny hybrid of two kinds of dreamscapes, the technological and the immaterial. One hint of this hybrid, indivisible world is the gods’ appearance as sensate animals. Their corporeal, breathing presence forestalls the reading of the divine council as simply a figment of Findlayson’s and Peroo’s drug-induced dream. Indeed, this nocturnal dreamscape counterpoints the engineers’ sentiment, expressed earlier, that their three-years’ work has been “a long, long reverie” (7). Peroo also initially believes he has dreamed the conference of gods. “I have seen Sydney, I have seen London, and twenty great ports, but . . . never man has seen what we saw here,” he murmurs the next morning to a still-dazed Findlayson. Peroo’s supernatural yet earthly vision links together the worlds of measurable and unquantifiable perception; indeed, the latter is but a more refined version of the former. In a sense, the story reenchants what Weber called a “disenchanted” world that, with the advent of modern science, had enthroned technological advancement in the place of divine worship.12 For his part, Findlayson, presumably still pleased at having “changed [the face of the country] for seven miles around,” responds to Peroo’s gibe “Has the sahib forgotten; or do we black men only see the Gods?” with the complaint that “there was a fever upon me . . . It seemed that the island was full of beasts and men talking, but I do not remember” (41). Peroo finds in this reply an answer to the gods’ and animals’ final words: “Brahm dreams—and till He wakes the Gods die not” (40). Peroo interprets this riddle in light of Findlayson’s forgetfulness, identifying the chief engineer with the chief god Brahm. To Peroo’s mind, so long as Findlayson/Brahm continues to conjure his form of reality—bridges, railroads, canals—the indigenous gods can continue their hold over the villagers. The gods, concludes Peroo, “are good for live men, but [not] for the dead” (42). Peroo’s recollection of the extra-human council he and Findlayson witnessed appears to conflate the two worlds with which he is most familiar. This reconciles their differences through a version of syncretism common to India, where not only can history (itihasa, a measurable diachrony) coexist with the far more expansive and immeasurable concept of divine presence (darshan), but perhaps more significantly, where the bridge representing modernity breaks with tra-

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ditional gods even as it courts their blessing. As Hanuman says of the Europeans during the council, “Their Gods came, and we changed them. I took the Woman [i.e., Mary] and made her twelve-armed” (38). Although Krishna counters this with the warning that henceforth the Europeans “will change more than the names,” and that “the beginning of the end is born already” (39), there is equally the suggestion that the bridge, being the creation of Peroo as much as the Englishmen, will always have to contend with the fury of the river god. It is a structure whose material and historical immutability paradoxically relies on the very premise of geographical mutability under-girding the engineers’ creed. The story in the end suggests that nothing can outlast the gods, not even the finest of modern bridges. This equation of gods with timelessness would seem to reassert the predictable colonial identification of indigenous Indian practices with ahistorical myth, and of modern technology with history, on which fanciful gods can have no influence. There is certainly a hint of this inasmuch as the Englishmen’s work obeys the rule of the clock and the calculus, in contrast to the surreal continuity of the gods. Such a conclusion, however, overlooks the story’s indulgence in hybridity—on many levels. To begin with, the narrative implies that once the English engineer and Brahm, both effectively the gods of their creations, cease to believe in their dreams, everything—bridge, gods, villages—will cease to exist. Like the engineers’ “reverie” of three years’ work, “Brahm dreams still” (40). Only so long as these creators gaze upon the particular reality of their worlds will those worlds continue. This is one reason for the many references to sight in the story, particularly in its final pages. Hanuman, the great monkey god, admits that “ ‘it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also builded no small bridge in the world’s youth’ ” (29). He refers, of course, to the fabled bridge to the island of Lanka that he and his ape race constructed with their own bodies, thereby enabling Ram to cross over into the demon god Ravana’s lair and rescue his wife Sita (recounted in the Ramayana). Shiva, too, placates the anxiety of the animals—especially the furious crocodile and fearsome tigress—by exclaiming, “ ‘Ho! Ho! I am the builder of bridges indeed— bridges between this and that, and each bridge leads surely to Us in the end. Be content, Gunga. Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at all’ ” (33). When Findlayson comes to his senses following the opiate dream, he too trains his sight upon the river “till his eyes ached” (41). When Peroo asks Findlayson in surprise if it is “only we black men” who “see the Gods,” Findlayson’s response, in which he describes his dream then claims to “not remember,” is a curious contradiction. This points to Findlayson’s fractured consciousness. Then his mind immediately turns to the bridge and the river: “ ‘A boat could live

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in this water now, I think’ ” (41). The moment he recalls the talking beasts, he expels them from his conscious thoughts. Findlayson’s denial is perfectly consonant with the narrative’s framed structure, which, in revealing the night dream to have been as real as the day’s, points to the muddled heart of Anglo-India. The story’s examples of syncretism do not, however, mean that nothing will change, or that the gods will be able to assimilate to these changes. Many in the god-and-animal council, amazed that the human-made “bridge still stands” after the flood (27), warn of the threat to their existence. Like the animals in the Jungle Book tales, the gods here fear a new kind of law. Villagers, they reason, will now start to relinquish their belief in the gods and become entranced with the bridge-builders’ power. The gods, however, do not die; they simply relinquish their control over the land. They must, it seems, “become little Gods again” and return to the jungle, as Krishna said (38). This, of course, would be no refuge, for the jungle, as we have seen, was no less within the purview of the scientific gaze than were other spaces. More importantly, the Kashi Bridge, chastened by the river and a multitude of near-catastrophes, has merged, the narrative suggests, with the sublime power of nature it has sought to shackle. The bridge is alive, and represents less inanimate violence in the face of nature than a persistent will to insert itself peacefully into India’s life-blood. It is “serene” at the end (189). The bridge’s “invisible staging” also hints at the sort of theatricality that was evident in the 1851 London Exhibition displays of Assamese tea plantations and jungles. If London visitors could participate in the work of empire, so too, it appears, could English readers and Indian spectators cast an admiring eye on Public Works Projects—with Anglo-Indians and translated Indians, like Peroo, as go-betweens. Indeed, by having the railroad bridge merge with its natural surroundings and thereby appease the spiritual violence of its intrusion into the landscape, Kipling’s story engages a similar sense of outrage that had riled Europe’s first railway travelers. As Wolfgang Shivelbusch points out, the inauguration of rail travel in Europe initially elicited in travelers a “loss of the sense of space and motion” and of the “natural irregularities of the terrain” that horse-drawn locomotion had always governed. Along with other industrial changes, the railroad’s disregard for the curves of hills and the elbows of rivers, its sharp linearity, seemed to early European train passengers to herald the death of rustic beauty and of some essential strand of the human spirit.13 This diminution of the experience of geographical space was felt less acutely in India, as the conventional figure of the imperial hero-engineer makes clear. Still, Kipling’s story is intentionally ambivalent, its supernatural dreamscape a necessary and respectful comple-

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ment to the engineers’ quotidian topography. This split in the narrative upends in characteristically Anglo-Indian fashion a clichéd aesthetic proportionality that had commonly been ascribed to India’s geographical spaces. Taking their cues from Kant and Burke, generations of European commentators had come to see non-European lands as spaces of sublime excess, of vistas and ruins of awesome and terrifying magnitude. For this very reason, such sights could not possess the attributes of beauty that pertained in Europe—order and symmetry, delicacy and gentle variation, and, above all, clarity and a corresponding morality. It is important to note that by the mid-Victorian period the stereotypes of Eastern awe and terror began to change, not because India was viewed with any greater understanding (sentiments were quite hostile following the 1857 uprising), but because the British Crown, having taken direct possession of the subcontinent from the East India Company, felt the need to assert its rightful place in the pantheon of natural Indian rulers. This meant, as Thomas Metcalf observes, that in searching for ways to “define their empire in Indian terms, [the British] sought to incorporate Indian styles into their building activities.”14 Although the Sutlej River bridge Kipling describes is a product of modern utilitarian engineering and therefore not at all a hybrid form like the Gothic and Indo-Saracenic architecture of the period, the bridge’s construction, as Kipling takes pains to tell us, requires a characteristically Indian method of labor. It also requires, a foreman, Peroo, whose hybrid knowledge can best facilitate that construction during the near-catastrophe of the early flood. It is therefore fitting that Kipling’s tale should conclude with Peroo admitting to an intermingling of Hindu folk mythography and ostensibly non-religious modern technology. This, however, comes at a price: The accusatory “they” spoken by the gods against the English who have re-shaped the land, must also be directed to some degree at their former worshipper, Peroo. For all its playful hybridity, the story is not uncritical in splicing together the images of Western science and India’s proverbial mystery. Kipling cannot help mocking, for instance, the Rao Sahib’s fusion of England and India: Dressed “in tweed shooting-suit and a seven-hued turban,” and admitting to an ignorance of his own steam engine, he typifies the anglicized babu figure that had become a fixture in Anglo-Indian writings long before Kipling. He tells Findlayson that Hitchcock “ ‘woke me in the arms of Morphus,’ ” and that he must return to “ ‘[the state temple] at twelve forty-five’ ” to “ ‘sanctify a new idol . . . They are dambore, these religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?’ ” (44) Although this comic interlude does not offset the story’s celebration of imperial engineers, the Rao’s presence reminds us in a typically colonial fashion of what was seen as an absurdly baroque meshing of East and West in many Indians. The Rao’s

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brand of cultural fusion shares little with that of Peroo or the syncretic folk adoption of Christian saints. Quite the contrary, and it is the engineers themselves who have helped steer the Rao’s attention to frivolity by “playing billiards and shooting blackbuck with the young man,” who “had been bear-led by an English tutor of sporting tastes . . . and was now royally wasting the [Government’s] revenues” (43). There is no little irony in having Hitchcock use the Rao’s “operaglasses” to try to spy the missing Findlayson and Peroo. Not only do the field glasses prove ineffectual (it is Peroo who first sees and then hails the launch), the contrast between the wish for rugged utility here and the glasses’ delicate design seems a parodic thrust into the inflationary theme of unrelieved imperial toil, the “day’s work,” that the collection is usually said to be celebrating, and that the engineers epitomize.15 The wry conclusion to three years’ work in “The Bridge-Builders” implied to Kipling’s contemporary reader that it is not stark utility or mechanical eloquence one must squeeze from the toil, but recognition of the compromises necessary for the conclusion of a spatially and culturally intrusive project. These compromises include a renewed appreciation for non-European expertise, and the awareness of a metaphysical realm that exists beyond Britain’s ken. In leading his British audience into an unfamiliar territory where crocodile talk mixes with the speech of Shiva, Kipling exposes the thin line between epic and prosaic, comic and tragic versions of the same Anglo-Indian tale. Two Mowglis and a Tiger

The animal actors in Kipling’s tales are vital to his multifarious worldview.16 Perhaps none of his fiction has attracted as much popular and critical attention as the stories that make up The Jungle Book. Taken as a whole, the stories seem at first glance to be not at all a record of hybridity, but rather of the war between natural and civil boundaries and the inevitable conquest of the jungle by man (particularly the English Raj). After all, for all their demonstration of human flaws, the tales recount Mowgli’s dawning recognition of his superior human qualities and of his eventual duty to the Raj. Nor was Kipling the only one to spotlight the apparent division between natural and civil lines. As a British retiree from the Indian Forestry Service put it, the jungle is a “lovely place . . . if you know the rules.” Though he means by this the habits of forest animals and the common sense required of humans who inhabit the jungle, his words imply the proud knowledge of the expert who must protect his territory—in this case, a remembered territory—from the ignorant, usually urban, and therefore dangerous trespasser. In this way he preserves British-India’s conventional boundaries, social as well as physical.17

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As a number of critics have pointed out, Kipling’s Jungle stories hinge on the territorial and cultural transgressions of Mowgli, whose figurative métissage— his “dual human and jungle affiliations,” as John McBratney puts it18—echo a number of other Kipling characters. Mowgli’s two warring selves never result in the final victory of one over the other, but instead resemble the bifurcated persona of Kim and Peroo, and indeed of Kipling himself, as Ashis Nandy reminds us.19 Mowgli’s ambivalent self, moreover, appears to be based principally on his unique intimacy with the jungle, a space of darkness and danger that contrasts with the walled village whence he toddled into the company of wolves and panthers and bears. He likewise conjoins the worlds of childhood innocence and adult experience. Indeed, his ability to translate human speech for his beast-friends makes him an arbitrator of cultural spaces, a kind of imperial “translated man,” to borrow Salman Rushdie’s expression for his own modern-day relocations.20 McBratney is right, therefore, to emphasize the resulting “tension” in these stories “between, on the one hand, a desire to create felicitous arenas of communitas and, on the other, the need to bring these arenas into a practical working relationship with the social structure of empire.”21 Most such interpretations of Kiplingesque hybridity presume that the human and natural worlds, and their allegorical correspondences, are ultimately separable. Mowgli, after all, returns to the human fold, and Kim leaves behind the unbridled ways of his youth. Although the boys may take with them useful elements of an unbounded youth, their initiation into adulthood corresponds to their introduction into English civility and imperial society. There is certainly no question that the Raj exerts a powerful disciplinary force upon these characters, or that the narratives ultimately endorse the presumptions of liberal progressivism. The spaces from which Mowgli and Kim wean themselves— the jungle, the bazaar—are gloriously described, but always as an exercise in anticipation and loss. For the jungle and the bazaar episodes mark time as nice dreams that must lamentably admit the reality of a modern geopolitical enterprise. This familiar conclusion overlooks the vital fact that these iconic spaces of commerce and of wildness interpenetrate one another in so many ways as to make it impossible to separate them geographically or imaginatively. Similarly, to speak of the Raj is to presuppose an essential integrity for what is a changeable, often Janus-faced cultural and ideological administrative apparatus. The Jungle Book tales, as we have seen in “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” exemplify the necessary mutual dependence of all of these superficially oppositional spaces. Even that most noticeable of partitions, between youth and adulthood, is not so easily differentiated. If Mowgli and Kim must enter the less innocent, more

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internecine world of grown-ups, their narratives still stand as a record of youthful zest that permeates their adult remembrances, just as in Kipling’s autobiographical writings. More significantly, Mowgli’s and Kim’s youthful, exuberant escapades in the jungle and the bazaar are marked by dangers every bit as lethal as the violence of the colonial adult world that haunts the narratives’ outcomes. No wonder these juvenile tales are distinguished by intimations of predation, liminality, and the determination to craft a story in order to forestall death. No wonder, too, that The Jungle Book is threaded with “songs” that either commemorate or excoriate the jungle community’s members and experiences: These rhymes establish spatial and social parameters by remembering and thus reasserting “the Law,” particularly the taboo against the kind of needless killing that man (as Mowgli discovers) seems to enjoy. The injunction in “The Law of the Jungle”—“kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man” (with original emphasis on the latter phrase) (92)—cannot be divorced from Mowgli’s poignant first return to the village, when he cries to Mother Wolf: “Do not forget me! Tell them in the jungle never to forget me!” (28).22 To remember is to live on in the space of narrative. This is also why Kipling’s characters indulge in acts of personal storytelling. “If I made a beginning,” says Baloo to Mowgli about the jungle’s countless stories, “there would never be an end to them” (90). This tale-telling impulse cannot separate the beginning of a narrative from its conclusion, nor one tale from another. There is, in other words, no definitive resolution to the tales, whether they are treated singly or as a whole. Kipling’s narrative liminality becomes especially noticeable when we compare his fiction with the conventions of the post-1857 colonial hunting memoir, which enlisted the middle-class reader in a vicarious hunt by emphasizing its aesthetic and iconographic familiarity even as it exoticized the expert’s special knowledge and fearlessness. Like Harriet Tytler’s domestic-historical Mutiny memoir, which aesheticizes the historical event even as it historicizes the aesthetic (as when Tytler describes the King of Oude’s glittering and implicitly decadent pre-1857 court), the conventional hunting memoir is presented as romantic theater. It dramatizes the intrepid hunter’s skills by silhouetting them against a wild yet knowable backdrop of game-filled jungles. Kipling’s jungle tales are comparatively free of this distinction. Instead, each of the anthropomorphized animals in the stories combines a mix of instinct and reason that the generic hunting narratives imagine to be separate. That quintessential wild boy, Mowgli, articulates this best when, dancing “on Shere Khan’s hide,” he sings of his recent, painful recognition of his partitioned self in “Mowgli’s Song”:

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The jungle is shut to me and the village gates are shut. Why? . . . /I am two Mowglis . . . /Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.” (120–121)

It is particularly fitting that Mowgli is able to recognize this duality while celebrating the feared tiger’s death. For Shere Khan’s demise signals the end of an unnatural fact that disturbs the Jungle Law, namely, the tiger’s man-eating behavior. As we will see in the discussion of Jim Corbett’s hunting tales, a maneater is not born but made at the moment its “large-hearted gentleman” persona (to use Corbett’s phrase) suffers from the unlucky handicap of lameness or old age.23 As Kipling’s Mother Wolf observes in “Mowgli’s Brothers,” the first of the Jungle Book tales, in which Mowgli first makes his appearance: “[Shere Khan] has been lame in one foot from birth. That is why he has only killed cattle” (5). Within a few years, Shere Khan has committed the unpardonable sin of killing a human. For as the Law states, “never kill Man.” As the animals congregate one summer night at a watering hole, the tiger makes his appearance. Resentful of Mowgli the “Man-cub’s” presence in the assembly, the Lame Tiger boasts of his recent meal: “ ‘Man!’ said Shere Khan coolly, ‘I killed an hour since.’ He went on purring and growling to himself” (78). At this the “line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper went up that grew to a cry: ‘Man! Man! He has killed Man!’ ” The reaction of horror prompts the tiger to rub it in: “ ‘I killed for choice—not for food.’ ” “ ‘It was,’ he concludes, ‘my right and my Night’ ” (79). Hathi, the Master of the Jungle, must concede this “right,” but berates the tiger for his selfish act and orders him off to his lair. Mowgli’s puzzled questions then prompt Hathi to recount a story of the jungle world’s fall from grace, of its transition from an Edenic union of immortal animals, who “knew nothing of Man” (81), to a life marked by fear and death. It is the First of the Tigers who “forgot” his juridical duty in the communal jungle and killed a buck in anger (82), thereby unleashing death and precipitating a breakdown of order. But the Law that develops as a result of the dissolution of innocence and fearless amity is not divine. Instead, as John McBratney points out, the Law is a “fabric of practical moral understandings woven into the total way of jungle life,”24 and a negotiated settlement spearheaded by wise Tha, the First of the Elephants, is worked out. “Fear” proves to be none other than Man, the Hairless One, who learns to kill by following the First Tiger’s example. “Thou hast taught Man to kill!” Tha exclaims (87), lecturing Tiger in near-biblical language. “[Fear] shall make the ground to open under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about thy neck, and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than thou canst leap” (87). Although he keeps mostly to himself in villages just beyond the Jungle’s

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boundary, Man’s presence alone is enough to frighten the animals into an awareness of their lost innocence. It is precisely this recognition of loss—principally the loss of innocent companionship—that marks all the Jungle Book tales. These stories are usually interpreted as allegories of Kipling’s tragicomic worldview that is exhibited in his satires of Anglo-Indian, Indian, and English societies, though always with that distinctive brand of empathetic humor. The emphasis on loss, confusion, and duplicity that we saw at the heart of Kipling’s spatial account of colonial modernity recurs in his Jungle Book tales (which he published a few years after City of Dreadful Night), but with different implications. Whereas the sense of lost morality that suffuses Kipling’s vision of Victorian Calcutta clearly implies the existence of a contrastively moral, uncorrupt, and chiefly European model of civil order (albeit one that Kipling fails to find even in Europe, as his criticism of London shows), Mowgli’s jungle world has no such external register with which to be contrasted. Whereas colonial literature usually compared the instinctual life of the jungle with urban rationalism, The Jungle Book proffers merely the crumbling remains of ancient Indian glory inhabited by the Monkey People, and the caged menageries of local kingdoms, such as the “King’s cages at Oodeypore” from which Bagheera escaped. Even the English “justice” that Mowgli’s biological parents have heard about is nebulous and distant. The animals’ use of the nominative “Man,” therefore, collectively refers to the threatening actions of villagers, local kings, and the Raj. Only Mowgli can hope to translate his animal family’s jungle “talk” into the language of Man and thereby avoid a deadly clash. He does this literally when the villager Buldeo, with his “old Tower musket,” enters the jungle to search for and kill the Jungle Boy, the Wolf-child who has bewitched the village. Invisible to Buldeo behind their leafy concealment, the eavesdropping Mowgli and his animal brethren listen as the old hunter “began to tell the story of Mowgli, the Devil-child,” to a rapt and admiring bevy of fellow villagers. Although Buldeo is a braggart, his additions and inventions in describing his hunting skills—for example, “how he himself had really killed Shere Khan; and how Mowgli had turned himself into a wolf”—are a grudging narratorial acknowledgment of his storytelling skills (159). Buldeo the hunter enlarges the imaginative plane of his otherwise circumscribed world by a skillful exaggeration worthy of any author.25 Buldeo intuitively understands that the power of legend is as vital to his interests as the power of the gun. More to the point is Mowgli’s patient role as an interpreter of this Man-talk for his bestial coterie, and so, in effect, for the reader. Mowgli’s patience ends, however, with Buldeo’s talk of the impending execution of Mowgli’s parents for witchcraft. That is to say, Mowgli the “translated man” is not a neutral designation but rather an ethical assignation. Significantly,

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the seed of Mowgli’s moral compass is intimately connected to maternity: Mowgli’s preconscious natal bond to his mother, Messua, and to the beloved Mother Wolf. This mother-son bond limns much of Kipling’s work, often in the vein of mournful absence, as in the orphaned Kim’s projection of motherhood onto the Lama or the figuratively orphaned colonial soldiers of his popular ballads. Here, the juxtaposition of Mowgli’s rescue of Messua and the unexpected arrival of Mother Wolf conjoins the twinned halves of Mowgli’s self, suggesting that those who first gave him milk simultaneously bred him to discern truth from lie. There is, indeed, a remarkable competition between his two mothers for their son’s acknowledgment of maternal debt: “I gave thee milk, Nathoo,” exclaims Messua after Mowgli has cut the thongs that bound his parents. “Dost thou remember? . . . Because thou wast my son, whom the tiger took, and because I loved thee very dearly” (165). Moments later, after Mowgli has leapt back through the window to eavesdrop on the congregating villagers, Mother Wolf surprises him with her touch: “Little Frog,” she murmurs lovingly, “I have a desire to see that woman who gave thee milk.” And later, “I gave thee thy first milk; but Bagheera speaks truth: Man goes to Man at the last” (167). Mother Wolf’s sense of impending loss matches Messua’s recognition of her biological son’s inevitable transformation into manhood, echoing a theme in the Anglo-Indian sensibility that associates the transition to adulthood with a territorial movement—in this case, from jungle to human settlement. In Kipling’s own life, that shift went from India to England and back again. The echo of William Blake’s contrast between innocence and experience is unmistakable: Mowgli’s animal brother confidently proclaims, “I am Bagheera—in the Jungle—in the night” (171), whereas the village “Man-pack” can do no more than slink through the jungle, ever-mindful of hidden beasts (and of a vague English polity), before returning to a village rent by an irrational fear of witchcraft. Superficially, Kipling appears to set this Blakean opposition in the traditionally gendered, romanticized terms of British India, with maternity’s naturalized, trustful, and emotive innocence contrasting maturity’s sober, denaturalized code of stoic duty (in the case of the English) or of mob rule (in the villagers’ case). But Kipling unsettles this clichéd shift from the uncivil love of Indian mothering to England’s necessarily earnest paternalism. Mowgli’s maturity, like Kim’s, marks a rare alloy of wild jungle (or in Kim’s case, bazaar) knowledge and worldly civility that will prove an invaluable bridge in the governance of jungle and garden, bazaar and cantonment. It is this tamed wildness—what Kipling elsewhere calls (with the irony that marks his journalism) his “savage” outlook—that the stories constantly exalt. As with Kim’s intercessionary skills, Mowgli’s mixed allegiances—he is, as Bagheera reminds him, “of the Jungle and not of the Jungle” (171)—make him

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an object of respect as well as suspicion. The absence of a definitive moral counterpoint to Jungle Law, particularly in the richly suggestive story “Letting in the Jungle,” plays havoc with the opposition of domesticated probity to untamed nature that conventionally structures tales of the colonial frontier. The story’s title thus cuts two ways: Whereas Mowgli leads the animals in an attack on the village that has imprisoned his parents for perceived witchcraft, thereby “letting” the jungle into the village, Mowgli’s very entry into jungle life as a mancub has upset an age-old balance in much the way that the First Tiger’s killing allowed death—and humans—to infiltrate the ways of the wild.26 The village, in other words, has already been “let into” the jungle. The panther Bagheera’s experience with human cages further attests to the conjunction of human and animal lives long before Mowgli’s birth. Bagheera’s remembrance of hearing “men talk round the King’s cages at Oodeypore” explains his defense of Mowgli’s plan to attack the village without shedding blood: “There speaks Man!” he exclaims to the other animals. “The Man-cub is right in this. Men hunt in packs. To kill one . . . is bad hunting.” But even Bagheera’s respect for Mowgli’s inborn confidence cannot prevent him from murmuring to his bear-friend, “There is more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law, Baloo” (157–158). These words, which McBratney calls “enigmatic,”27 must be interpreted in light of Bagheera’s prior familiarity with human speech. When, later in the story, Bagheera’s growing excitement over the imminent attack slides into boastful hankering after human blood (“Is it killing at last? . . . Who is Man that we should care for him” [170]), Mowgli angrily dares him to “ ‘Strike, then!’ ” Using “the dialect of the village, not the talk of the Jungle,” Mowgli’s “human words brought Bagheera to a full stop” (171). Bagheera is cowed as much by his recollection of human authority as by Mowgli’s ability to invoke authority in two tongues. The panther’s perception of something “more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law” refers both to Mowgli’s astonishing capability and to Bagheera’s own dark knowledge. The jungle world prior to Mowgli’s presence was not, in other words, as untouched by human interference as the animals liked to believe. Mowgli is not, however, the only jungle dweller in these tales of Edenic pleasure and plunder. In “Letting In the Jungle,” Kipling takes pains to introduce the Gonds, “the aboriginal owners of the land,” “living in the deep Jungles,” who appear only rarely, and always as a prophetic presence before those relative arrivistes, the village folk. In their ecological study of India, Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha point out that the Gonds were, in fact, noted for their ageold intimacy with northern India’s ancient forests, so that with the intrusion, first of other Indians then the British and their industrial technologies, these “aboriginal plough cultivators” succumbed to a deep “melancholia.”28 Indeed,

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Kipling’s narrative of a vengeful Mowgli and his animal brethren trampling Buldeo’s village to dust and thereby enabling the jungle to repossess the land concludes on a note of stark human catastrophe that diminishes an otherwise verdant rejuvenation: The four [i.e., three elephants and Mowgli] pushed side by side; the outer all bulged, split, and fell, and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them. A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.

The crescendo of plosives (“bulged, split, and fell”) and participles (“roaring,” “houseless and foodless”), and perhaps most significantly, the absence of any human gaze, including Mowgli’s, together underscore the utter finality of the wreckers’ act. In this light, “Edenic” is a mischaracterization, for in the scene described here nature displaces human existence utterly. There is no hint of the eventual return of humans, without whom the jungle’s “full blast” is annihilating rather than life-giving. There is, in other words, no one to name the jungle— not even the forest-dwelling Gonds. The appearance of the Gonds in the story subverts the narrative on a number of levels, formal as well as substantive. For one thing, the village-dwelling Hindus regard the Gonds as inferior beings, their nomadic, atavistic habits threaten the hierarchical stasis of Brahminical society. Here, Kipling’s story corresponds to lived reality, for as Ranajit Guha notes, the Hindu elite viewed the “ ‘unclean’ tribal peasantry” as deeply subversive—a classic example of the feudal power struggle between a landed mercantile class and its rural debtors.29 In India, wandering tribal groups like the Gonds further complicated matters, since they resisted appropriation and manipulation by non-tribal, and therefore higherstatus, religious and landowning Indians. Gonds, being outside the Hindu caste system, were deemed to be the lowest members of society. Yet precisely for this reason, these “little, wise, and very black hunters, living in the deep Jungles,” to use Kipling’s words, possess an intimacy with the jungle that takes on the aura of mysterious, half-devilish knowledge, much in the way the British regarded Indians as a whole. Met with a portent of catastrophe for which their gods have no answer, the villagers in Kipling’s story seek the Gonds’ advice as a last resort, only to discover whether they (the villagers) have offended the “Old Gods” of

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the forest and of the Gonds. The villagers desperately hope the Gond headman, outcaste though he is, can help them redeem an otherwise hopeless landscape. By way of response, the headman silently picked up a trail of the Karela, the vine that bears the bitter wild gourd, and laced it to and fro across the temple door in the face of the staring red Hindu image. Then he pushed with his hand in the open air along the road to Khanhiwara, and went back to his Jungle, and watched the Jungle People drifting through it. He knew that when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside. There was no need to ask his meaning. The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their God, and the sooner they saved themselves, the better. (183–184)

The Gond headman’s warning proves true, and after some delay (for “it is hard to tear a village from its moorings”), the villagers reluctantly retreat to Khanhiwara, the town where the English live. The story’s denouement might suggest an authorial endorsement of tribalism and indigeneity. The Gonds’ fleeting appearance does not, however, justify such a reading. Whenever Mowgli and his animal brethren speak of “Man,” they clearly mean villagers: Buldeo is “a man with a gun,” “men hunt in packs,” and men live in “cramped” dwellings (155, 157, 164). Most importantly, “man” is a compulsive storyteller. Buldeo always has “a tale to tell” (166), usually with himself as the hero. The Gonds, by contrast, are notably silent, their passing presence as indistinct as the village’s cropland in the aftermath of the animals’ flood-like destruction, when the “fields were already losing their shape” (185). The tribal people seem, in effect, to be not so much “of” the jungle (as Mowgli is) as constitutive of it. If they displace the Brahminical practices that colonial discourse generally treats with a mix of contempt and anxiety—just as the Gond headman himself regards the villagers, “looking half afraid and half contemptuously” at them through his outcaste eyes (183)—it does not follow that the Gonds signal a romanticized throwback to an Adamic noble savage. The long-running antagonism between nomadic tribes and settled villagers is demonstrated by the death of one of the villagers, who is discovered by Mowgli and his crew with “a long, small-feather Gond arrow through his back and breast” (143). This incident is yet another example of the narrative’s ironic commentary on the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted. Furthermore, in their contrast with Mowgli’s childlike innocence, the forest nomads register a version of the raw atavistic potentiality that Kipling viewed as

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latent in all adults. He personified that potential in such archetypal characters as the woodland-dwelling Puck, the “oldest Old Thing” in the later story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill, who, true to his name, puckishly mediates between natural and modern worlds, and between core story and narrative frame.30 Like the Gond headman, Puck arrives when summoned (albeit unknowingly, in this case). But the Gond headman does not conjoin past, present, and future the way that Puck does in the context of England; nor does he bridge distinct narrative streams. Instead, the headman mutely reminds the villagers of a forest whose secrets transcend even the “goblin army” of Mowgli’s animal friends (184). The Gonds appear less a human presence than signifiers of the jungle’s inherent paradox, for in its efflorescence (“all life came on with a rush”) it is also lifetaking (the rush of life requiring a “flood” [185]). Kipling’s story may have been an anachronism even as he wrote it. Just as Mowgli’s ability to mediate between natural and modern worlds leads to his eventual return to human society and enrollment in colonial service, so were the Gonds and other tribal groups forced to yield to the greater power of an increasingly technocratic world. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha describe how, much as we saw the animal gods despair over the intrusion of the railroad bridge in “The Bridge-Builders,” the Gonds were convinced that the loss of their forests signaled the coming of Kaliyug, an Age of Darkness, in which their extensive medical tradition was rendered completely ineffective . . . Unable to resist the changes wrought by that ubiquitous feature of industrial society, the railway, “all gods took the train, and left the forest for the big cities.”31

Mowgli’s ability to survive is due, once again, to his facility with the idioms of very different but increasingly interpenetrative spaces—a facility the Gonds do not yet possess. Like other Kipling characters, notably Kim, Mowgli’s skill is in a sense authorial: He learns to mimic the voices of a variegated world, links together its multi-layered spheres, and traverses a number of plot lines. In this light, the Gond headman is merely a distant reader of a set of characters, the villagers, whose misguided actions he judges—rightly—to be doomed. His forecast is, for this reason, no surprise; we are never in doubt as to the animals’ imminent triumph. The unpredictability, rather, lies in the “author” Mowgli’s interaction with the medley of characters whose motivations reflect a mix of self-interest and selflessness. On another level, Kipling’s silent but perspicacious Gond character occupies much the same space as the author’s own Anglo-Indian community, whose

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bicultural sensibility is attuned to the “magical” contours of Indian society in a way that the self-styled rationalism of the Home country could never understand. No wonder so many of Kipling’s tales—“In the House of Sudhoo,” “The Mark of the Beast”—concern themselves straightforwardly with the operation and effects of magic and ritual, just as a number of stories, such as the satirical “Pig,” ironically use the abstract prose of an arcane, bureaucratized colonial governance. Indeed, Kipling privileges this straightforward quality, or plainness, in the punning title of the collection that made him famous, Plain Tales from the Hills, which includes the story “Pig.” As Andrew Hagiioannu observes, this was one strategy by which Kipling critiqued an invidious abstraction that he believed the post-Mutiny utilitarian style of governance had foisted upon an inherently non-utilitarian country.32 Like the Gond headman’s use of the bitter gourd, Kipling’s quintessentially Anglo-Indian ambivalence that lauds epistemic sophistication and an Indian mythos he identified with the very natural world threatened by such an episteme leads him to warn his colonialist compatriots against an over-reliance on ratiocination and technocracy. When, for instance, Colonel Creighton in Kim tosses that essential tool of colonial cartography, the theodolite, off a Himalayan mountainside to its ignominious end, he acknowledges the often-mystic power of the subcontinent’s vast landscape over instruments that would seek its subjection.33 This does not mean Kipling discounts technological innovation—his admiring portraits of engineers like Findlayson are a case in point. Yet such characters always learn to acknowledge other, and sometimes otherworldly, forces that defy their European calculus.34 At the root of this European nod toward India’s less constrained forms of knowledge is Kipling’s own cognizance of the ethical conundrum at the heart of the colonial project. The bicultural Kipling observed and often criticized, but could not resolve, the moral implications of Britain’s territorial imperative. Kipling therefore, to adapt Ashis Nandy’s perceptive psychosocial analysis, “lived and died fighting” not only two, but a multiplicity of selves—colonialist and AngloIndian, mystic and empirical.35 Colonial instruments of cartography are of limited interest to Kipling’s best-known characters, who, as we have seen, must rely on other powers of discrimination to find their bearings. The Jungle Book tales spell out this ethical morass by pointing alternately to the dangers as well as benefits of a communitarian and a more individualized social contract. Critics have noted Kipling’s intellectual fondness, on one hand, for the post-1857 “Punjab style” of frontier rule, one that depends upon a legislator whose no-nonsense directness, knowledge of India, and trust in English law reflected a blend of paternalistic, evangelical, and utilitarian ideologies that had taken hold of England, and that could be implemented with relative impunity

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in what British administrators believed to be an incorrigibly anarchic land.36 On the other hand, Kipling’s sympathies clearly lie with the likes of adolescent hybrid figures like Kim and Mowgli who, in some measure at least, can resist— or hope to resist, since they are still young—the state’s authoritarian tendencies. A later Jungle Book story, “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” is emblematic of the twin desires that beset such hybrid characters, for although the character of the story’s title dies a revered Hindu ascetic (hence the honorific, Bhagat), he draws upon both this reverence and his worldly, pre-ascetic existence as “Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command” to raise the alarm among nearby villagers of the landslide he has seen approaching.37 He demonstrates the Punjab Style of utilitarian command as well as an inward calm that together enable him to be of use to the local hill people. This dual inclination toward outward action and inward contemplation, moreover, directly corresponds to the spatial features that character inhabits. Thus, we are told that Purun Dass’s mother’s “hill blood draws [him] in the end back to where he belongs”; he retreats to an ancient deserted Hindu shrine built “under the shadow of the deodar” forest. Amidst this Himalayan beauty, from which he can survey the vastness of a lordly world, he finds “the silence and the space” to which his wanderings have led him.38 Like an Indian St. Francis of Assisi, Dass befriends the mountain animals—monkeys, large deer (barasingh), the Himalayan black bear. They resemble children in being “alive with curiosity” (the monkeys), always seeking treats (the barasingh share Dass’ fresh walnuts), and exhibiting impatience (the bear). Echoing Mowgli, Dass takes to “call[ing] them all ‘my brothers,’ ” and, like the older Mowgli, he becomes the epicenter of their comparatively innocent world. There is symmetry to Dass’ and Mowgli’s opposite journeys, for whereas Mowgli must learn to leave the world of childhood innocence, an aged Dass learns (or relearns) how to be sensitive to childish ways. Significantly, we find that it is not Dass’ worldly training that detects the imminent landslide; rather, it is the instinctive nervousness of his child-animal “brothers,” who sense the minutest earthly changes, that alerts him to it. The story’s refrain of fraternalism and the villagers’ consequent salvation recall the help Mowgli receives from his jungle brethren, and provides a fitting coda to the animal tales. Notes 1. I cite some of these critics below. In his literary biography of Kipling, the writer Angus Wilson calls “The Bridge-Builders” one of his “two [best stories].” See Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, 2. 2. James R. Bell, quoted in Daniel Karlin’s notes to his edition of The Oxford

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Authors: Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 576. Kipling’s original article is “The Sutlej Bridge,” Civil and Military Gazette, 2 March 1887, 2–3. The bridge he viewed was the Kaiser-I-Hind bridge, though Angus Wilson claims that it was the Dufferin Bridge, which allowed the Grand Trunk Road to span the Ganga River. Regardless of the factual details, it seems most likely that Kipling had at least two, and possibly more, bridges in mind when he wrote “The Bridge-Builders.” The bridge in the story is, after all, a representative example of Raj engineering. See Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, 93. 3. I refer here to the 1925 Doubleday, Page & Company “Mandalay Edition” of all of Kipling’s works. “The Bridge-Builders” appears as the first story in the combined one-volume edition The Day’s Work/Many Inventions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925), 3–44. All subsequent parenthetical page references will be to this edition. 4. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 235. 5. Ibid. 6. W. Hogarth Todd, Tiger, Tiger! (London: Heath Cranton Ltd., 1927), 63–64. 7. E. P. Stebbing, Jungle By-Ways in India: Leaves from the Note-Book of a Sportsman and a Naturalist (Plymouth, ENG: W. Brendon and Son, Ltd., 1910), 246, 248. 8. These words were written in the 1830s by Governor-General William Bentick, quoted in Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 224. 9. Ibid., 234. 10. Ibid., 235. 11. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 143. 12. I refer, of course, to Max Weber’s thesis in his The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (1905). 13. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Space and Time in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 23. 14. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, 56. 15. The high-brow glasses may contrast with a different kind of elegance, Findlayson’s utilitarian truss, but they are no less a product of the same cultural impulse. Kipling treats that impulse, namely, the urge to domesticate space, ambivalently and his best-known example, Grand Trunk Road in Kim, is a route that at once demarcates the surrounding geography and expands the possibilities for self-perception. 16. Kipling’s fascination with animals continues in “The Undertakers,” essentially a sequel to “The Bridge-Builders.” In this tale an older Findlayson re-encounters an old crocodile he had known while, as a younger man, he built the great bridge. The crocodile’s anger at its changed world mirrors the perplexed outlook in many other Kipling characters who have witnessed industry’s transformation of natural space—a mixed outcome, in Kipling’s narrative. The crocodile is eventually shot dead, providing a

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mournful coda to the Ganga River’s recent history. The tale contains a rare (for Kipling) reference to the Mutiny, which adumbrates the theme of radical change in interesting ways. The story is also included in the Second Jungle Book, which appeared in 1895. 17. Recording from the 1970s of Mr. F. C. Ford-Robertson, Indian Forestry Service (retired). IOLR/MSS.EUR. R190/1, 3 cassettes. Ford-Robertson remarked on his experiences from the 1920s through the 1940s. 18. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 98. Also see Andrew Hagiioannu’s discussion of cultural “translation and adaptation” in chapter 4 of his The Man Who Would Be Kipling, 96–114. Also see Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India. 19. See Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, passim. 20. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 9–21. 21. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 87. 22. Page references to these and all subsequent pages refer to The Jungle Book (New York: The Book League of America, 1948), and appear parenthetically throughout my discussion. 23. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, xviii. 24. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 91. 25. The statement that his “fame as a hunter reached for at least twenty miles round” reminded Kipling’s contemporary reader of this world’s limits (159). 26. The orphan-protagonist is not new in literature, of course. However, Kipling’s placement of him in an Indian forest that is far removed from Raj intrusion enables the author the freedom, as John McBratney observes, “to explore his fascination with border-crossing” (Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 85). My own reading, as this chapter indicates, includes other characters in this liminal enterprise. A more recent avatar of the orphaned Mowgli is Harry Potter, whose use of magical powers in a Muggle world, and its repercussions, at times echoes Mowgli’s suspect powers of animal speech. Mowgli’s parents, too, are accused of wizardry, and both Harry and Mowgli sense acutely their solitary sojourn through a pernicious adult world. See J. K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series. 27. McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 96. 28. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 176. 29. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 72. 30. See Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, in Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems, ed. John Beecroft (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), 407 and passim, 403–531. See also John McBratney’s discussion of the tales in Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, chapter 7 (133–163). 31. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 176. The authors quote from British anthropologist Verrier Elwin’s pioneering mid-twentieth-century studies of tribal communities.

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32. See Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would be Kipling, 29–30. 33. As John Keay explains, a theodolite is a precision instrument that “is basically a very superior telescope mounted in an elaborate structure,” enabling accurate measurements of vast geographical spaces. The theodolite allowed British surveyors, beginning in 1800, to map the entire subcontinent in an act that is still regarded as a great historical feat of science. See Keay, The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 29. 34. There are accounts, as well, of European technology attaining an aura of ritualistic iconicity, as in an account of a traveler to Tibet in the early nineteenth century, who finds a head Lama in possession of “an old telescope, made by Pyefinch, London,” that “had belonged to the great Lama, by whom it was given to one of his predecessors.” William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, Travels in India: [In the] Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Punjab, in Ladakh and Kashmir, in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz and Bokhara, from 1819–1825, ed. Horace Hayman Wilson (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989), vol. 1, 239. 35. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 69. 36. See Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination, 17–53; Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would Be Kipling, 3–33; and McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space, 41, 100. 37. Kipling, “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” in The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Randall Jarrell (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1961), 285 and 277–286 passim. 38. Kipling, “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” 280–281.

Chapter 7

Man-Eaters of Kumaon and Jim Corbett’s Jungle Idiom

The present volume . . . [aims] . . . to present an old though still engrossing subject in what is perhaps a novel manner; to carry the reader into more direct contact with the surroundings of the Indian sportsman and naturalist, and . . . to lead him into the jungle with all its fascinating variety of scene and season, hill and plain. . . . —A. I. R. Glasfurd, Rifle and Romance, 1906

Back to Nature and Shikar

As powerful as they were, the tropes of the jungle and the garden could exert power only through British India’s idealization of individual labor, whether that labor was the Englishwoman in her bungalow or the Englishman on the hunt. The clearing of trees and animals, the management of domestic space, the mapping of a continent—all required work. Into the twentieth century, popular writers like Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel published, respectively, The Unsung: A Record of British Services in India and the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, serious-sounding titles that sought at once to mythologize and demystify colonial life. These texts were, in effect, paeans to middle-class virtues and aspirations, the kind of celebratory accounts that some historians argue are symptoms of the gentrification of values.1 As such idealizations of material and social engineering took root in the later 1800s, there evolved, as a counterpart to bridge-building and imperial motherhood, that logical extension of virile work, the sporting life, the most popular expressions of which in India were polo, cricket, and hunting. These activities, especially the latter, inevitably fostered an interest in the preservation of the spaces required for their proper pursuit. 232

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The imperial preservation of such spaces was thus a forerunner of the modern conservation movement. There was, of course, an intricate web of motivations behind these developments. As I noted earlier, the European desire to find new Edens was an old one. In India, the tendency to look upon forests as pristine reminders of an earlier, simpler, and ultimately more humane time than the present era of urban blight coexisted with the colonial appetite for natural resources such as timber and gemstones and Europeanized spaces, the hill stations and cantonments. By the mid-Victorian age, this contradictory impulse, encouraged by the increasing disciplinary interests of the modern Raj, had resulted in the enumeration and denigration (though not always subjugation) of forest tribes, who were viewed by the imperial state less as stewards of their ancestral lands than careless squatters. In the nineteenth century, young unmarried Englishmen gazed upon their vast Indian dominions as an arena in which to pursue adventure after administrative duties were done. As a certain Major General Rice trilled in recollection, “Never was there such a paradise for the hunter . . . the whole country then being like an undiscovered land.” Ordinary Europeans learned to mimic the hunting practices of Mughal kings, using scores, sometimes hundreds, of Indian men to corral a tiger before their gun sights. The jungle and the hunt became one; jungle villagers, in choosing to live foolishly and fatalistically close to the dangerous, magnificent tiger, were generally deemed to be no more than careless primitive stewards of a veritable paradise.2 The idealization of the jungle, therefore, went hand in hand with the usurpation of indigenous rights.3 More and more, in this age of stress and artificiality, we feel the need of going back to Nature, back to the good land, back to simple pleasures and homely country delights. (Pearson’s Magazine, 1907)4

The “back to nature” movement at this time, which invested itself in the enterprise of natural conservation, thus associated the return to natural living with homecoming. The “homely country delights” invoked by the anonymous writer mediates that curious Anglo-Indian sensibility of being simultaneously at home and in exile, for it meshes the imperial work ethic with the belief in revisiting comparatively untouched lands. This was coterminous with the late nineteenth-century cult of imperial domesticity, for with the arrival of the English memsahib and her bungalow domain after the Mutiny came the perceived need for compensatory masculine sport. And it was yet another means for AngloIndians to go one up on their compatriots back in England, for bungalow life required its definitional negative, the jungle; and in what better place could a

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proper man, especially a nonaristocrat, play emperor? More significantly, as my reading of Kipling’s “Rikki-tikki-tavi” shows, the bungalow garden was essential to the homeliness of the country bungalow, its aura of refuge enhanced by the jungle it keeps at bay. Just as hill stations threw in relief the hot work of the plains, so did the garden accentuate the jungle—and the taming of that jungle with the rifle. The hunter thus mediated the worlds of wildness and refinement.5 But the hunt was not an exclusively male province. In much the way British India provided room for European women—including Irishwomen like Annie Besant—to exercise a measure of independence in a man-centered world,6 European women during the Raj were often encouraged to demonstrate sporting skills, particularly those linked to hunting. We saw, for instance, Kipling’s heroine Kitty in the Plain Tales story “Cupid’s Arrows” playing down her skill at archery. Memsahibs bagging large game therefore figure frequently in colonial memoirs.7 The extent to which hunting (shikar) was woven into Raj culture is made clear by Kipling’s own frequent use of it as a metaphor, such as when, in the later story “Pig,” a colonial official embarks on a calculated pattern of revenge that is “a new and fascinating form of shikar” (162). Once again, the public display and announcement of hunting successes were more important to one’s individual prestige and, by extension, to the reputation of the Raj than was the experience of the hunt itself. Thus, it was enough for an Englishman or -woman to shoot baited game from atop an elephant or a raised and screened wooden platform (machan) and then to pose for a newspaper photograph. The symbolic testament was vital. The staged hunt also meant that the higher the individual hunter’s rank, the more animals he or she was sure to bag. This did not mean that hunting was easy. Mary Procida describes, for example, how the occasional obligation to negotiate forest paths on horse or on foot required women to adapt their clothing to suit the rough conditions.8 The imperial aim, above all, was for memsahibs to display to the public, both Indian and European, their ability to wield a weapon. Such a demonstration was deemed necessary primarily to impress upon Indians that Englishwomen were not to be taken advantage of, especially as nationalist sentiment rose during the early 1900s. But this was not always so. Harriet Tytler, who survived and wrote about the 1857 rebellion, describes how she, “delighted with [the] freedom” of being “left entirely to my own devices” during a solo journey (with twelve Indian bearers) to the Hills in 1840, came upon a tiger. “ ‘Have you a gun, Memsahib?’ ” asked one of the men. “ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Had you been a sahib you would shoot the tiger,’ ” the man answered. To take up arms, which Englishwomen were more entitled to do after 1857, especially as more of them “came out” to India from Britain, was thus to enter a sphere of male action.9 However, this was

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not all, for the ritual of shooting also ensured one’s place in the European social hierarchy, just as it ensured one’s capability to deal with Indian hardships. This social aspect of hunting was a singularly noteworthy part of the fox hunt back in England, one in which a broad spectrum of classes—rural laborers who helped with the hunt, aristocratic equestrians, and urban bourgeois spectators—could temporarily mix together, and in which women often predominated. But the fox hunt proved to be the exception for women participants in England; other shooting sports, such as bird and deer hunting continued to be markedly masculine endeavors.10 In India, the cultivation of manly pursuits such as big game hunting that matched the outwardly masculine ethos of empire would, one presumes, have precluded women from hunting parties. That this was not the case underscores the extent to which male colonial authorities were willing to bend social rules in order to ensure that the “work of Empire” progressed. The increased license for Englishwomen to enter the normally male preserve of sports must, however, be set against the larger backdrop of the longstanding feminization of the subcontinent under European patriarchy, an ideological construct that classified the region’s diverse peoples in terms of a martial theory of race. Thus, while the Bengali babu was deemed to embody all that was weak and effeminate, the northwestern Pathans and Sikhs earned British respect for their manly tradition of soldiery.11 Add to this the entirely imagined threat of Indian assault upon Englishwomen following the events of 1857–1858 and one can see the motivation for, as it were, arming white women. Thus, Indian men, Hindu as well as Muslim (though not Sikh), were in a no-win situation, for they were at once viewed as a sexual threat to Englishwomen and emasculated representatives of a similarly effeminate land. Within the public sphere, the colonialist ethos, in the name of safeguarding (European) feminine purity and matrimony, paradoxically encouraged Englishwomen to adopt certain roles normally associated with Englishmen while relegating Indian men to positions of relative powerlessness. The preservation of femininity was presumed, by extension, to safeguard imperial interests. But sporting women were also expected to conform to ladylike decorum, which in turn placed them in a contradictory role that was rarely acknowledged. The “domesticity” of hunting, that is, the license for women to take up the gun in the interests of colonial rule makes sense according to British-Indian values. Like the naturalist movement, the jungle hunt or shikar was seen as a rationalized means of reconnecting with an essential homeliness of the human spirit that was endangered by rapidly spreading urbanism.12 Anglo-Indians in particular viewed India’s open spaces as an opportunity to fuse the hunting habits of Europeans and Indians to create a distinctly homegrown version, signaled

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by the Hindi borrowing, shikar.13 The new experience of home was thus possible through the act of hunting across India’s wilds. While this movement was championed in England as well as in the colonies, it was Anglo-Indians who, with all their insecurities over identity, promoted hunting as a quintessential idiom of imperial life. Not surprisingly, the cult of shikar, combining Romantic longing and imperial enterprise, also spawned a cottage industry of taxidermy, so that no bungalow could be proper or whole without mounted antelopes and tiger skins. Ironically, this middle-class imperial idiom borrowed many of its rites and aesthetic ideals from the long-standing shikari practices of India’s kings, who regularly fêted European dignitaries with choreographed hunts, complete with mounted elephants and hundreds of drumbeaters to corral a hapless tiger or leopard. The Europeans learned from their host rajas, too, the merits of the Indian hound, who became indispensable to every hunt. A number of rajas proudly displayed their dozens of trained dogs, who lived in fine style. In his Illustrated Guide to the Jungle, written to accompany the 1895 Indian Exhibit in London, Rowland Ward tells us, As the visitor passes through the entrance, . . . he finds himself in a jungle glade, with opening vistas through foliage; each one of these openings, and numerous little peeps of smaller dimensions, bring fresh combinations of the fauna of the country, so realistic that the veteran shikari looks and longs, and turns away with a sigh for the old days and the trusty rifle.14

Nostalgia is triggered here by the simulation of jungle life, a virtual representation that literature—and, by the late Victorian period, accompanying photographs—could readily reproduce for the eager crowd. The wistful sigh incited in a passerby relies on the artifice and repetition of colonial nostalgia, which effectively tames the tropical wilds. But the visitor need not have visited India or any other colonial space to feel this nostalgia. Indeed, just as important as skill in hunting was a knowledge of landscape, such as we find in G. A. Henty’s young-adult Mutiny novel In Times of Peril, where his two adolescent heroes observe how the jungle in which they are stalking wild pig occasionally gives way to a “plain . . . intersected by several nullahs [ravines].” Appropriately, Henty has the country-born cousin instruct his visiting cousin in the art of topographic interpretation, an art the novel’s readers would presumably learn to appreciate.15 Further, any representation, whether text or exhibit, would elicit a nostalgic reaction only to the extent that it engaged the vast economy of similar texts and images, as Thomas Richards has shown in the context of Victorian commodity culture.16

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One such text, the Rev. Jacob Chamberlain’s 1897 memoir In the Tiger Jungle, and Other Stories of Missionary Work, presents itself as a “thrilling narrative” of India, “the fairy-land of romance” and “at the same time the purest and most invigorating fountain at which our youth can drink.”17 That both India and the book at hand are so bundled is a characteristic slippage of rhetoric and space. Chamberlain’s chapter titles, too, are a litany of contemporary set-pieces: “Encounter with a Ten-Foot Serpent,” “Struggle with a Tiger,” “The Stick-to-it Missionary,” and so on. G. A. Henty’s In Times of Peril, similarly supplies the obligatory jungle struggle—his two adolescent English protagonists wait for hours one night on “the edge of a thick jungle.” Suddenly, there is “a mighty roar—a rush of some great body passing over them—a scream of one of the natives—a yell of terror from the rest. The tiger stood with one of the [Indian] guards in his mouth, growling fiercely . . . ‘To the jungle!’ Ned exclaimed, and in an instant they had plunged into the undergrowth, and were forcing their way at full speed through it. Man-eating tigers are rarely found in pairs, . . . and even had such been the case, they would have preferred death in that form to being murdered in cold blood by the enemy.” Needless to say, the dashing young men live to fight another day.18 The appetite for such accounts continued unabated well into the twentieth century. Toward the end of British rule in India (the 1930s and 1940s), Jim Corbett published hugely popular accounts of his already locally famous exploits as a tracker of man-eating Bengal tigers. When Oxford University Press published his first and best-known book, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, in August 1944 (the editor having changed the title from Corbett’s original Jungle Stories), its sales astonished both the publisher and Corbett. It rapidly sold out, and by the following year Oxford published a second edition. By 1946 commercial publishers in Britain and the United States, capitalizing on its popularity, bought the publication rights and enthusiastically marketed the book. Within a few months, as Corbett’s biographer Martin Booth notes, “over half a million copies were in print and the book was to sell more than four million copies world-wide by 1980.”19 In the ensuing years, the book was translated into nine European languages and six of India’s languages. By 1948, Hollywood had released a B-movie loosely based on the book and shot on a California film lot. Booth wryly records that “Jim saw it once. He said the best actor was the tiger.”20 The film, which changed the hunter from British to American, did nothing to diminish Corbett’s fame. But what exactly caught the public’s imagination, particularly on the cusp of India’s independence and imperial Britain’s demise? What did Corbett’s prose offer that earlier and sometimes relatively popular hunting tales did not? A key factor is Corbett’s modesty in describing his adventures and, more crucially, his

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evident sympathy for both the man-killing predators and the villagers who were the main victims. When grateful villagers praise his name for removing this terror from their midst, Corbett’s satisfaction is evident. At the same time, the tales’ patient buildup of suspense as the intrepid author-hunter tracks his quarry and the satisfying climax at the tiger’s death reveals Corbett’s noticeable thrill in single-handedly facing, often within a few feet, a creature he alternately admires for its beauty and condemns for its indiscriminate violence. Indeed, the conflicted tone of Corbett’s texts seems to arise from the classic Anglo-Indian (and perhaps Eurasian) conflict concerning his identity as both Anglo and Indian. Corbett’s mixed attitude toward the hunt and his empathy for the tiger owed much to his bicultural upbringing, with his allegiance to the British-Indian government competing with his inbred love of the Himalayan foothills (terai) and its inhabitants. Martin Booth accurately describes how the Corbett family’s life as “domiciled English civilian[s]” inevitably led to their identification with the land in which they lived. “In all but blood, they were Indians,” Booth writes, “white Indians.”21 Booth’s point is right even if he misses a key fact: The Corbett children were likely to have shared Indian heritage as well.22 The family did, however, try to inculcate a typically country-born, as opposed to Eurasian, outlook. The result is that Corbett’s writing exhibits the kind of paradox of identity we see in Kipling’s prose, only more so. For despite British-India’s well-defined stratification of class and race and Corbett’s own sahiblike labeling of characters (such as “my servant”), and despite his colonial anxiety over India’s impending independence (for he feared a reenactment of the 1857 turmoil targeting the British), it is equally evident that he is most at home in his Indian environment, and that he identified himself in terms of his beloved Kumaon hills. For an Anglo-American and European readership at war or recovering from its devastation, and for a world set to begin a period of decolonization, Man-Eaters of Kumaon spoke to a new sense of what home might be. Mowgli’s Home, Corbett’s House

In Kipling’s first Jungle Book, the old village hunter Buldeo represents a threat to the preservation of jungle society. Mowgli admonishes the old man for being ignorant of “the jungle, which is at his very doors” (104). The result, as we know, is the dissolution of Buldeo’s village, whose contours “los[e] their shape” when Mowgli “call[s] in the Jungle to swamp out [the village’s] lines” (187). “I will never again bring into the Jungle strange things,” Mowgli decides (147). But the reader knows very well that Mowgli’s hope cannot last, for the jungle ultimately cedes much of its independence to man. The lone rifle-wielding villager Buldeo is chased out, only to be replaced by other “strange things”—Euro-

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pean hunters seeking sport as well as Indian Forestry Service workers, such as F. C. Ford-Robinson, who said that “if you know the rules,” the jungle is “a lovely place.”23 Interestingly, Ford-Robinson echoes both Kipling’s and Corbett’s references to jungle “law” as a crucial corollary to the pleasures of jungle living: It is a “lovely” (Ford-Robinson), a “beautiful” (Corbett), or a “wonderful” space (Kipling), so long as one respects its creatures and minds its threats. This law is emphatically not of human origin; unlike the fixations of human rules, jungle law is improvisational, open to new circumstance—including the entry of a human child. It is this very difference that splits Mowgli’s psyche, for his fear of humans stems, above all, from his realization that he is one of them. Just as the jungle (or at least a part of it) is closed to Buldeo and his village, so is jungle life at times closed to the human Mowgli since some of the animals harbor lingering suspicions (26). And Mowgli fears his own estrangement from his two selves—“I am two Mowglis” (121). It is the same sort of estrangement the cageborn Bagheera has experienced and must always try to live down. Their shared experience makes them natural companions. Paradoxically, only their minding of the law—and Bagheera’s minding of Mowgli—can allow them to enjoy the insouciant pleasures of their wonderful world. For his part, Corbett continually distinguishes himself from his Englandborn administrative colleagues. He writes, for instance, of being surprised when three Englishmen accompanying him in pursuit of an Indian bandit succumb to violent cases of hay fever. “Indians do not get hay fever and I myself have never had it. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone suffering from it, and what I saw alarmed me.” Corbett clearly groups himself with the Indian members of the party and like them is mystified by this non-indigenous reaction to the elephant grass that covers parts of his beloved northern-Indian countryside. Just how closely he identifies with the land is made clear soon after, when he relishes his return to “the beauty of the jungle” in which he feels at home. As we approached . . . , two leopards stepped out on the track, saw us, and gracefully bounded away and faded out of the sight in the shadows. I had been out of my element during the long passage down the side channel, but now, what with the elephant . . . and then the peacock warning the jungle folk [i.e., the animals] of the presence of danger, and finally the leopards merging into the shadows, I was back on familiar ground, ground that I loved and understood.24

Yet this very identification, combined with Corbett’s colonial sensitivity to boundaries, frequently results in a characteristically ambivalent treatment of the

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“jungle folk” that make him feel most at home. Corbett follows the tendency of colonial writers to aestheticize the leopard, that “most beautiful” of India’s animals,25 even as they demonize its behavior—a “detested [pest]” is how one conservationist describes it.26 In many ways, Corbett’s tiger-hunting memoirs, set in the same terrain (the Himalayan foothills) Kipling had in mind, are a later Anglo-Indian generation’s response to the wild luxuriance of Mowgli’s domain. Even The Jungle Book, however, reminds us of tensions brewing on the jungle’s edge, such as the hostility between the villagers and tribal Gonds and the conflict within Mowgli as he tries to sort out his emotions.27

Man-Eaters of Kumaon in Context The 1966 Bantam paperback copy of Man-Eaters of Kumaon carries blurbs trumpeting the “hair-raising, true story of Jim Corbett’s personal war against the man-killing tigers of India,” in which “[a] man alone follow[s] a blood-spattered trail, pitting his cunning and courage against the most perfect killers nature ever invented.” The tigers are described as “slashing, tearing, man-eating furies” who had consumed hundreds of villagers, as indeed they had. Corbett, we are told, “was the only man who had the daring and skill to hunt these man-eaters. He tracked them into their strongholds, in the hot, fetid jungles, the grassy plains, and the rock-sloped gorges to fight grim duels that could end in death!” Presented this way, Corbett inhabits a familiar role in the repertoire of plucky characters that had long been a staple of imperial prose. If we hear in such rhetoric the echo of “the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed” against cobras, we are not far wrong. We can also detect Chief Engineer Findlayson’s pluck amidst the perils of the land. Indeed, the postwar introduction to the book by Sir Maurice Hallett, Governor of the United Provinces in which Corbett hunted, declares, “These jungle stories by Jim Corbett merit as much popularity and as wide a circulation as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books.” If Kipling’s books “were fiction, based on great knowledge of jungle life; Corbett’s stories are fact, and fact is often stranger than fiction.” Corbett’s work follows a long tradition of real-life hunting accounts, including those of Rowland Ward, who had wowed London’s exhibition crowds. The foreword to another popular memoir, Tiger, Tiger! by W. Hogarth Todd, similarly compares Todd’s narrative to “Kipling’s story of The Bridge Builders,” which displays that characteristically English “capacity for self-effacing devotion to duty and the unfailing performance of The Day’s Work, unsupervised, unencouraged and usually unthanked.” The unremarked linkage of “strenuous sport” and imperial duty was a commonplace from the mid-Victorian era to the end of the Raj in 1947. The soldier-ants of the imperial hive are those unsung P.W.D. (Public

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Works Department) and Forest Service men “who preserve forests, build dams, and carry the burden of Empire in India.” In short, hunting was empire by other means.28 Speaking in the same vein, Hallett praises Corbett’s stories for exemplifying the courage necessary to defeat enemies—whether that enemy is a tiger or “the human enemy of Tokio who possessed in many respects the skill and power of the man-eater” (ix–x).29 Indeed, it was Corbett’s publisher’s theory that the international attention the tales attracted was due to their publication near the end of a long, bloody world war. “Years of massive, indiscriminate slaughter and regimentation,” wrote R. E. Hawkins of Oxford University Press, “had eroded faith in the significance of the individual. It was immensely refreshing to read of this contemporary dragon-killer, who in perfect freedom roamed the countryside cheerfully facing danger and hardship to rid the world of tigers and leopards convicted of man-eating. Sir Galahad rode again. Truth and justice had returned.”30 Hawkins’ words characteristically personify the cats for their taste in human flesh, “convicting” them of a kind of cannibalism. Corbett’s own words, however, frequently belie these claims. “[I]t is not fair,” he pleads in the “Author’s Note” that prefaces Man-Eaters of Kumaon, “that for these acts [of killing cattle or people] a whole species should be branded as being cruel and bloodthirsty” (xvii). It turns out that the man-eater, as Corbett takes pains to explain, is a product of environmental stress, “compelled . . . to adopt a diet alien to it.” Such a tiger is “driven by necessity to killing human beings.”31 Had the natural order not been upset, these magnificent “large-hearted gentle[men] with boundless courage” would have sustained their normal diet and “help[ed] maintain the balance in nature.”32 These sentiments explain why Corbett always harbored guilt for killing even the most notorious man-eaters, as is clear from his frequent pauses in the action to explain to readers the firm reasons for hunting down a tiger. When, for instance, he finally encounters the “Mohan man-eater” asleep and fires into its head from five feet away, he stops to admit, “It occurs to me that possibly you also might think it was not cricket,” then goes on to list three arguments for his action. “All good and sound arguments, you will admit,” he concludes, “but the regret remains that . . . I did not awaken the sleeping animal and give him a sporting chance.”33 There is an uneasy tension, then, between Corbett’s own descriptions of his exploits and the selling of these exploits. Corbett’s (and the blurbs’) claim that his stories are a different, even unique record of true adventure, quite distinct from traditional adventure tales such as Henty’s, does not move us very far from the conventional tropes of garden and jungle. In fact, Corbett’s tales complement

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rather than supersede the popular gardening and housekeeping guides. They do so, however, with a key qualification: namely, an implicit distrust of imperial—and at times human—aims and actions. Such skepticism about human motivations is at the heart of Corbett’s eventual conversion to the conservationism espoused by earlier proponents such as John Muir and, as we will see, the pioneering wildlife photographer and Corbett acquaintance, F. W. Champion. My argument here is that despite their generic typecasting, Corbett’s tales create, through their jungle setting and conversational tone—what I am tempted to call a jungle idiom—yet another expression of Anglo-India’s restless desire for bicultural authenticity. These tiger-hunting tales do so not with the tone of storybook romance Kipling was so fond of, but instead with a matter-of-factness that throws into high relief the tales’ obvious drama. Thus, whereas in Kipling the tiger symbolizes delinquent transgression, Corbett’s man-eaters, being alternately antagonists and (more frequently) protagonists, signify precisely the opposite: Their habits are shown to follow the natural laws of their habitat. It is the human who trespasses upon this territory. Corbett’s Anglo-Indian sensibility cannot help but admire this law-abiding yet dangerous animal, for he detects in its behavior, and particularly in the threat to its survival, a version of his own betwixt-and-between identity in the twilight of British India. Thus, the Romantic but genuine conservationist longing in Kipling’s Jungle Book becomes in Corbett’s late-colonial hunting tales an explicitly non-romantic reflection on the conjunction of historical contingency, chance encounter, and the consequences of human action. The determinations of imperial progress begin to give way to post-imperial indeterminacy. Beautiful, Devilish Tigers

Superficially, as the cover advertisements on Man-Eaters of Kumaon indicate, Corbett’s tales meet the conventions of the imperial hunting tale. Early in the book, for example, Corbett is careful to note that although he must spend a lot of time on the veranda of his bungalow, he has a job to do, both in tracking the man-eating tiger and in telling the tale. “I have a tale to tell of that bungalow but I will not tell it here, for this is a book of jungle stories, and tales ‘beyond the laws of nature’ do not consort well with such stories” (13). Like Findlayson’s almost maddening determination to stick to his work, Corbett’s tone is authoritative and self-effacing, as if he is resigned to shoulder the burden of setting the record straight about jungle lore. He likewise sprinkles his tales with the European sportsman’s obligatory admiration for his feline foe, consistently calling them “the finest” of wild creatures and extolling their “boundless courage.”34 Decades earlier, when a young Corbett would have just begun serious hunting,

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the self-styled sportsman and naturalist E. P. Stebbing, in his 1910 book Jungle By-Ways in India, similarly described a bull bison he had just shot: “I put a bullet into the body with no visible result, and we then slowly advanced . . . He was a fine bull, the head not as big as I had hoped. But what a gallant spirit! Unvanquished to the end. ‘And of the two of us,’ I thought to myself, ‘I think you have come out of it in the best light.’ ” He concludes, “So ended the grandest fight and the most exciting hour I have passed in India. For . . . stubborn to the last the bull’s gallant spirit winged its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.”35 It is hard, of course, to see how the dead bull has “come out of” this favorably. Yet Stebbing’s respect for the bull and for animals in general informed his parallel role as a facilitator of wildlife sanctuaries in the subcontinent and, later, as the first Imperial Zoologist. As a senior forestry officer in British India, where the forestry department managed all matters relating to wildlife and shikar, he recommended a ban on the hunting of certain endangered species.36 Thus Stebbing’s words, for all their clichéd excess, hint at the tone of conservation that begins to appear in early twentieth-century colonial hunting memoirs. Following accounts like Stebbing’s, Corbett likewise views his quarry as worthy warriors whose luck had simply run out. Corbett’s prose includes the essential ingredients of a hairraising and exotic hunting adventure: daring, resourcefulness, experience, modesty, and a healthy respect for the land and its creatures. In this sense, Corbett’s twentieth-century adventures hark back to the era immediately following the 1857–1858 uprising, when the sporting life became synonymous with physical and moral strength. An 1864 Calcutta Review article declares hunting to be a crucial means of “support[ing] our national prestige, and impress[ing] on the native mind a belief in our skill, energy and resources, and physical strength.”37 No surprise, therefore, that the then-viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, should write in his foreword (following Hallet’s introduction): If every beginner would study [Corbett’s book] before tackling his first tiger, fewer persons would be killed . . . For something more is required than courage and good marksmanship for the successful pursuit of dangerous game. Forethought, preparation, and persistence are indispensable to success. (xi)

Corbett echoes this when he tells us: “From early boyhood I have made a hobby of reading and interpreting jungle signs” (8). Such declarations convey an inevitability about his career as well as his ultimate success and tell us that he has chosen to leave the sanctuary of the bungalow for the isolating, unpredictable wilds. Like the memsahib who rules her home while her family is away— husband at work, children shipped to boarding school in England or the hills—

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Corbett sees his task as an isolated one, but a task whose telling allows jungle law to assume some semblance of reason. Like the hunting raconteurs who possess “an inexhaustible fund of shikar yarns,” Corbett feels compelled to give his experiences narrative shape by allegorizing the natural world in terms of the colonial. By this I mean that Corbett’s solitary sojourns into man-eating territory function, on one level, like the idealized penetration—and it is hard to avoid the masculine, erotic charge to these arcadian triumphs—of the imperial frontiersman into exotic wilds. One justification for this conclusion is that despite his claims to be tracking tigers entirely alone, Corbett is almost always accompanied by between one and three Indian helpers. In typical colonialist fashion, the heronarrator displaces any non-European personalities from his center of consciousness. Corbett’s contemporary British readers would have taken this as a matter of course, for why on earth should a villager get credit for the European’s obvious courage and skill? For this readership, Corbett, like other European hunters, was effectively alone in the jungle. It would be a mistake, however, to group Corbett in with colonialists who viewed India merely as an extension of British game parks. Corbett, as I have said, was Anglo-Indian to the core, in ways that E. P. Stebbing’s England-centered outlook could not comprehend. The contours of Corbett’s particular worldview encompassed, but were not bound by, the spatial dictates of the British imperial outlook. As I have been arguing in this chapter, the “law of the jungle” actually depends on the fusion of garden and jungle tropes, each of which requires the other. In Corbett’s case, features of middle-class domestic life surreptitiously enter into and help constitute his jungle lore. This is partly due to Corbett’s own background as a “domiciled” (Corbett’s preferred term)—or more disparagingly “country-bottled”—Englishman, which placed him below upperclass Britons and civil servants and above Indians, resulting in a classic British sensitivity to social inclusion and exclusion.38 For example, Corbett accepted as a natural fact the master-servant hierarchy. His bungalow, like that of Kipling’s Gisborne, was far from being an outpost that matched his reclusive persona. The house and compound, after all, which he shared with his beloved sister, needed tending by a team of Indian servants whose tasks preserved the aura of beneficent domesticity that was so important to British-Indian self-image. By the same token, Corbett, like most Anglo-Indians, viewed themselves as servants of the larger order. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find in Corbett’s writing evidence of the then-common European middle-class mix of faith in scientific knowledge, the idealization of the countryside, and condescension toward country folk. (The latter tendency was fed by the social-Darwinian notion of racial typology, with late nineteenth-century Europeans trumpeting their racial supe-

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riority.) A further complication in Corbett’s work is the odd coupling of historical, modern progress and natural, mythic transcendence. Within the British imperial purview, this characteristic meshing of historical and mythic time and space—a portrait of the empire as simultaneously mundane and epic, romantic and rational—perfectly suited Anglo-India’s competing allegiances to both the colonial metropolis and to tropical nature. As Peter Broks remarks of middleclass English culture, “The wilderness was an aesthetic and ethical resource of beauty and spiritual truth, an escape from the artificialities of the cities”; and it was the comparative vastness of colonial space that provided this outlet.39 At the same time, however, Corbett’s hybrid Anglo-Indian sensibility, dependent though it was on the feminized space of the bungalow and on a larger middle-class ethos, quietly subverted these stock underpinnings of empire. He was, as I have noted, unusual among his compatriots in being most at home in jungles and among jungle folk rather than in clubs and bungalows. If in England fashionable hunters could pretend to mediate wildness and civil life by ritually staging fox hunts, in India Corbett’s narratives of hunting tigers solo and on foot did not so much recall Fennimore Cooper’s romanticized frontiersman as call into question the very assumptions behind hunting as sport. He would come to see big game hunting as “simply unrestrained slaughter for the crude pleasure of it,” in the words of a friend.40 Corbett, as I have noted, takes pains to justify his killing of man-eaters and ultimately chooses to put away his gun. This choice seems to be a virtually inevitable conclusion to the lifelong conflict between his role as a white hunting sahib to whom villagers accede (as they do in a young Eric Blair’s account about shooting an elephant in 1920s Burma) and his identification with jungles and hillside villages.41 Though he often follows the well-marked path of other genre writers like Todd and Chamberlain, who extol the wilds of India as Edenic spaces in need of individualized (European male) adventure, Corbett enlivens his prose with a Kiplingesque ear for digression and colloquial conversation together with a naturalist’s eye for physical detail. In the midst of one tale, for instance, he takes time to boast of his almost Mowgli-like knowledge of the forest: If I were asked what had contributed most to my pleasure during all the years that I have spent in Indian jungles, I would unhesitatingly say that I had derived most pleasure from a knowledge of the language, and the habits, of the jungle-folk. There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk . . . The ability to speak the language of the jungle-folk, apart

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from adding an hundredfold to one’s pleasure . . . , can, if so desired, be put to great use.

Corbett makes it clear, in all his narratives, that this knowledge is rare, and that the reader should be suitably awed. He called this knowledge “jungle sensitiveness,” “which can be acquired only by living in the jungles in close association with wildlife”; it is, at root, “the development of the subconscious warning of danger.”42 This acute ability to sense unseen predators must encompass a deep love for one’s natural surroundings. His autobiography is filled with this sensibility: Here as we sit in this beautiful and peaceful spot in the shadow of the mighty Himalayas, . . . we can forget for a spell the strains and stresses of our world, and savour the world of the jungle-folk . . . In the air all round there is sound, and each sound has meaning.

He rhapsodizes about the “liquid notes” of a shama bird, a song that is “the most beautiful of all . . . in our jungles.”43 This intimacy with the “jungle-folk,” and his habit of including himself in their number, sets him apart not only from an ordinary British reader, but also from his fellow Anglo-Indians and from the rare (at the time) Indian reader. No wonder, then, that Corbett, not unlike Kipling before him, styles himself an outsider intruding “into a world of stark realities and the rule of tooth and claw.” He commiserates with the village folk, whose terrifying encounters with man-eaters compel them “to tell and retell” their experiences “through the long night watches behind fast-shut doors” (12). Corbett sets up each tale as an invitation to the reader to join the company of these night watches, even though I cannot expect you who read this at your fireside to appreciate my feelings at the time. The sound of the growling and the expectation of an attack terrified me at the same time as it gave me hope. If the tigress lost her temper sufficiently to launch an attack, it would not only give me an opportunity of accomplishing the object for which I had come, but it would enable me to get even with her for all the pain and suffering she had caused.44

As with the mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi, Corbett the hunter, whose identity is frequently, as here, demarcated from his domesticated civilian identity (the phrase “my feelings at the time” functioning to distance his emotions from the unruffled and reasonable prose of professional hunter), wants to “get even” with

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a predator for having disturbed the natural equanimity. At the same time, his much-vaunted identification with the wild jungle folk leads him into passages of unashamed homage to nature’s glory, to the point of falling back on favorite nineteenth-century British terms for India, such as “fairyland”: “The moment the hail stopped the sun came out, and from the shelter of the tree I stepped into fairyland, for the hail that carpeted the ground gave off a million point of lift to which every glistening leaf and blade of grass added its quota.”45 There is, however, no exoticism, no classic Romanticism (by which I mean, in this context, idealization) in Corbett’s outlook, and only rarely does he wax poetic about his surroundings. Rather, his words convey his homegrown attachment to his world. The combination of his poetic and professional sensibilities is caught wonderfully, for example, in his description of the notorious “man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag,” which is also the title of Corbett’s second (and, in some reviewers’ eyes, best) book.46 Corbett declares: I have lived too long in silent spaces to be imaginative. Even so there were times a-many during the months I spent at Rudraprayag sitting night after night . . . watching bridges, or crossroads, or approaches to villages, or over animal or human kills, when I could imagine the man-eater as being a big, light-coloured animal . . . with the body of a leopard and the head of a fiend.

He further imagines this fiend to be “watching me through the long night hours” and “lick[ing] his lips in anticipation of the time when . . . he would get the opportunity . . . of burying his teeth in my throat.” This “most beautiful and . . . graceful of all the animals in our jungles, and who when cornered . . . is second to none in courage,” is also at times a most devilish creature, carrying off its victims “for no apparent reason” as if it were a sportsman trying simply “to secure a human kill.”47 Corbett attempts to resolve this paradox—his sympathy for the animal and his anger and frustration at its stealthy slaughter—by interrupting his narratives from time to time to ponder the workings of arbitrary fortune: “The working of the intangible force which sets a period to life, which one man calls Fate and another calls Kismet, is incomprehensible.”48 In the earlier Man-Eaters of Kumaon, he similarly speaks of the slender “threads of life” that “Fate, Kismet, [Atropos] or what we will,” snips away.49 Like the villagers’ understanding of the killer as an incarnation of amorphous evil—the local pundit (learned Brahmin) calls the leopard an evil spirit—Corbett’s agnostic musings in the face of his many-seasoned and nearly unsuccessful bid to corner the Rudraprayag man-eater can make sense of the cat’s path of destruction only by anthropomorphizing it, by ascribing to it precisely the motivation and actions of

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a human recreational hunter.50 This is apparently the only means by which both author and the villagers are able to go on, and eventually bring to conclusion, the narrative of their interactions with the jungle folk. But whereas the villagers in their understandable fear attribute human cunning to the leopard, Corbett, although well aware that the cat’s actions are driven by instinct, is surprisingly quick to believe that it is behaving in accord with some benign natural “intangible” propensity. Ironically, it is the “murderous” activity of this leopard that moves Corbett to condemn the very hunting for which he is famous. When at last he shoots the old cat, he discovers that “here was no fiend” as he had imagined, no shaitan (satan) but instead only an old leopard, . . . the best-hated and the most feared animal in all India, whose only crime—not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man— was that he had shed human blood, with no object of terrorizing man, but only in order that he might live; and who now, with his chin resting on the rim of the hole and his eyes half-closed, was peacefully sleeping his long last sleep.51

This is a significant finale to his only novel-length narrative, for The ManEating Leopard of Rudraprayag is not, like Man-Eaters of Kumaon or The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon, a collection of independent tales. Indeed, Rudraprayag is far more an integrated litany of failed hunts than a record of success; and this is precisely the text’s attractiveness. Corbett candidly admits to “the feeling of depression” following his two seasons of unsuccessful effort—the “accumulated effect” of “bad luck.”52 This leads, despite his last-minute success in the pages that immediately follow, to his doleful conclusion—a significant conclusion because it connects directly to a growing sense of unease that had been increasing in the course of Corbett’s own books and in the Anglo-American press about the harmful presence of humans in a sublimely wild environment. Early in Rudraprayag, he points in this direction: Having tracked, located, and stalked a leopard, far more pleasure is got from pressing the button of a camera than is ever got from pressing the trigger of a rifle. In the one case the leopard can be watched for hours, and there is no more graceful and interesting animal in the jungles to watch. The button of the camera can be pressed as fancy dictates to make a record which never loses its interest. In the other case a fleeting glimpse, one press of the trigger, and—if the aim has been true—the acquisition of a trophy which soon loses both its beauty and its interest.53

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This echoes a sentiment he had expressed to a friend after taking up wildlife photography in the 1930s. He had, he said, been sickened by the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of waterfowl by three military officers simply “for the crude pleasure of it.”54 There is, of course, some irony in Corbett’s condemnation of the peak excitement offered by the hunt, for his perennially popular prose has effectively preserved those very moments. Corbett did indeed take many photographs of tigers later in his life, though most have been lost. He was clearly interested by the growing field of nature photography, which his friend, the Oxford-educated Imperial Forestry Service official F. W. Champion, helped promote in India. By carefully placing cameras rigged with tripwires along known tiger and leopard trails, the cats essentially took their own pictures. Such photographs would have been difficult to get without Champion’s mechanism—and other photographers soon replicated it.55 Champion, however, is quick to note the limitations of tripwires, and insists that “the only possible way to produce . . . a photograph [of a tiger doing his deadly work]” of feasting on prey “is to sit in a machan [blind] in a tree all night.”56 The publication of his rare nocturnal images of tigers and leopards stalking and eating prey became instantly popular and did much to bring public awareness to the animals’ plight. Like Corbett, Champion takes pains to defend “these splendid beasts”57 against a long history of denigration and the “business of romance,” to use the words he quotes from another writer.58 Corbett was thus able to learn from a small but growing band of nature writers and photographers. Yet if it is now clear that Corbett’s outlook was distinct from that of most of his fellow hunters, we need to ask how his Anglo-Indian eye differs from that of his fellow conservationists (a term not yet in wide use), most of whom were, unlike Corbett, England-born. Would they not share very much the same outlook as Corbett’s despite their different upbringings? To answer this, we should recall Corbett’s own words in the Rudraprayag passage quoted above: with its frequent references to spaces that are intimately familiar, the “silent spaces” in which he has “lived too long,” and the “bridges,” “crossroads,” and villages he has known all his life. Unlike the descriptions of other hunters-cum-conservationists of the time, Corbett records his intimacy with a land that, besides warranting preservation, is empty of Europeans. Other hunters of the day celebrate their companionable adventures in comparatively bloodless prose—“I shot the old male [lion] first, and the rest in quick succession”; “my wife had shot a tiger . . . and wanted me to shoot this one”—that elicits little sympathy for their victims even as the same hunters subscribe to “An Appeal for the Preservation of Wild Life.”59 With the advent of wildlife photography, Corbett’s modesty about his own narrative “record” caused him to value

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photography over prose. Although his increasingly passionate concern for the conservation of tiger habitat may underlie statements that contrast the value of the camera trigger and gun trigger, my interest is the evidence of Corbett’s own prose as a record not only of the predator-human relationship in the context of colonialism, but also the marked spatiality of his writing. By this I mean the specific words Corbett uses to convey direction, geography, and human perspective, which demonstrate how India’s unique terrain shapes an equally unique AngloIndian sensibility, one that photographs cannot convey as effectively. Often, a single sentence, such as the following example, encapsulates all these spatial markers: “The hill in front of me, rising to a height of some two thousand feet, was clothed in short grass with a pine tree dotted here and there, and the hill to the east was too precipitous for anything but a ghooral [mountain goat] to negotiate.”60 Corbett, apparently quite unconsciously, refers continuously to these prominences as “our hills.”61 He sees no differentiation between himself and the hills, no separation of his identity from that of his surroundings of the kind that Timothy Mitchell, for instance, argues as being a foundational constitutive of the colonial worldview inasmuch as the European observer viewed the colonized space as a duplication of some original world.62 Corbett’s spatialized jungle idiom in fact supplants, both in terms of narrative space and imaginative impression, the more conventional colonial spaces of the bungalow and the garden that Corbett occasionally feels obliged to mention. Although Corbett claims less weight for his stories than for photographs of the region, he frequently reminds us that, in fact, the reader can “picture the scene[s]” he describes with “little imagination.”63 It is worth noting that although photography had by the 1920s long outgrown the notion of strict verisimilitude and become a viable art form, Champion’s (and other nature photographers’) animal photos are even now treated by the public and the photographer alike as mimetic documents rather than aesthetic images. Champion, for example, states in the introduction to his book that “natural history photography” shows “wild animals, just as they live their every-day lives in the great Indian jungles.” He feels obliged to reiterate a few lines later that his photos “are all . . . of absolutely wild and free animals.” His accompanying descriptions, moreover, “are strictly accurate and are based on notes carefully prepared at the time.” His notes, in other words, are essentially equivalent to his photographs in being the factual evidence for his self-consciously nonaesthetic vocation. This self-consciousness leads Champion to comment on the “style” of his book, which, he asserts, tries to strike a balance between the “dry reading of technical works” and the other extreme of popular writing, which possesses “little or no scientific accuracy.”64 Following W. J. T. Mitchell’s lead in arguing for the spatial dimension of

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words,65 I find in Corbett’s writing not a lesser form of documentation, as he himself would have it, but a verbal complement to the rise of nature photography. I go further in claiming that the nuances of Corbett’s Anglo-Indian sensibility would be all but impossible to convey through photographs alone. For example, the lines quoted above emphasize, as one would expect in such a memoir, the hunter’s watchfulness. Practically every page of Corbett’s many accounts are filled with words that indicate this, words like “see,” “observe,” “scan,” “search,” “find,” and “picture” (as in “to picture a scene”). Again, this preoccupation with ocular sensitivity is just what one expects of such a first-hand hunting account. We find the same in A. I. R. Glasfurd’s popular 1896 book, Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle. Like Corbett, Glasfurd speaks time and again of the vital importance of staying alert while tracking tigers, regardless of the discomforts, such as the sleeplessness required to do “night-watching in trees.” Like Corbett, the earlier writer likewise describes the suspense of waiting long hours in a machan so that he (and the reader) can be rewarded with the sight of a leopard: “Suddenly, as I gazed hard through the [binocular] lenses, the brute’s outline shifted and enlarged; he was coming a little nearer!” Finally, like writers before him, including Kipling, Glasfurd feels compelled to compare an Indian forest guide’s tracking abilities to that model for all such practices, “the marvelous craft of the American Red Indian.” “I doubt,” Glasfurd has an old English hunter declare, “if a ‘Deerfoot’ or ‘Pathfinder’ ever existed who could hold a candle to” the Indian tribal tracker’s abilities. Glasfurd quotes the old hunter’s recollection of the tribal’s promise before a particularly difficult hunt: “ ‘See! Tigers shall be present, sahib, this very night, and without fail! They shall assuredly come. Behold! I see them approach the machan.’ ”66 The advent of high imperialism in the late 1800s created a British-Indian desire, on display here in Glasfurd’s references to “Pathfinder,” to supersede their American brethren in the skills of the hunt. British writers like Henty borrowed and reshaped the image of the athletic white frontiersman, whose outdoor skills assured the advance of a nation. But in India, as John MacKenzie and others have observed, writers grafted the Victorian enchantment with a medieval code of chivalric derringdo onto Cooper’s iconic Deerslayer figure, with the tiger or leopard standing in for the dragon.67 In light of his admiration for and even identification with the tiger, one can immediately see why the image of heroic tiger-slaying made Corbett cringe. By needlessly killing a healthy tiger or leopard, the Anglo-Indian kills his self-reflection, not to mention his jungle home’s ecological balance. In Kipling’s Mowgli, we saw a nascent incarnation of the self-conflicting identity that Corbett’s tiger represents. But whereas Mowgli fights his other self by triumphantly putting Shere Khan to death, Corbett finds only tragedy in his tiger

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brethren’s demise. In psychological terms, Corbett’s hunting, however necessary its occasion, fractured the childhood illusion of an undivided self. Although in Lacanian terms the shattering of an idealized self-image is a mainspring of human behavior, Corbett’s recognition of this fracturing is far more acute given British India’s self-imposed cultural and racial boundaries.68 It is, in fact, within the line of fracture—the shadow-land between known and unknown, between angelic beauty and devilish rapacity—that Corbett attempts to locate and articulate his Anglo-Indian self. This intuitive recognition of a fractured world not surprisingly compels Corbett to try to project onto the Indian jungle his own desire for harmony. At the same time, he fills this terrain with disruption—usually human, but sometimes animal. The ambivalence Corbett exhibits in his urge, while on the hunt, to “get even” even as he pleads for a sympathetic understanding of his target, is a reflection of the kind of narrative ambiguity we see in Kipling, where reason and instinct frequently trade places.69 Thus, there are in Corbett’s tales numerous eruptions of “pandemonium” and admissions of “madness” on the part of panicked villagers.70 But once the panic subsides, reason appears to reassert itself, as when a villager admits to the author, “We were mad, sahib, when we saw our enemy, but the madness has now passed, and we ask you and Tahsildar sahib to forgive us.”71 Reason in this case necessarily spells doom for precisely those “gentlemen” creatures that Corbett respects. They are, however, gentlemen whose instincts frequently lead them to commit indescribable acts of “pitiful” rapacity. The harmony that Corbett wishes to project onto animals is thus disrupted by the reality of the creatures’ unavoidably dangerous behavior. Having related a villager’s account of finding one victim of a man-eater, a young, half-naked woman, Corbett pronounces early in Man-Eaters of Kumaon that an outsider entering this environment would “feel that he had stepped right into a world of stark realities and the rule of tooth and claw, which forced man in the reign of the sabre-toothed tiger to shelter in dark caverns.” “[T]here is,” he concludes, “no more terrible thing than to live and have one’s being under the shadow of a man-eater.”72 The harsh law of the jungle intrudes into Corbett’s yearning for reconciliation between man and beast. Yet in recording his ambivalence, Corbett exposes the inherent ambivalence of his outlook as well as of the wilds. What, then, are we to make of the Corbett’s well-known sympathies for the fast-diminishing (even in the 1940s) species, the Bengal tiger? That is, how do we reconcile the very reasons for the book’s success—the high drama and tension of the unassisted hunt couched in enthralling detail—with the author’s clear calls for conservation? To be sure, he distinguishes man-eaters from the

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vast majority of big cats, but this does not counterbalance the rhetorical weight of Corbett’s “personal war,” as the Bantam edition’s front cover blares. I would argue that Corbett’s book is split along its own generic obligations, simultaneously fulfilling the dictates of the colonial eyewitness adventure tale and questioning that form’s motivations. His generally dispassionate prose occasionally gives vent to disgust with his task, even so far as to slip into lamentation. Speaking of yet another man-eater’s demise, he concludes: “[N]ever again would the jungle folk and I listen with held breath to his deep-throated call resounding through the foothills, and never again would his familiar pug-marks show on the game paths that he and I had trodden for fifteen years.”73 The tiger’s death presents an occasion not for simple nostalgia, but for contemplating the sometimes tragic vicissitudes of jungle life. A thin line, Corbett suggests, separates the primeval from the poetic, predator from prey. Just as the jungle is always pressing in on the edges of the garden, so does the garden flirt with the jungle.74 That they frequently prove difficult to disentangle, physically as well as figuratively, is not surprising. It is this fault line that Corbett’s writing captures so well, and that a photograph cannot. Corbett’s representation of a vast and glorious yet fearsome habitat therefore seems, on casual reading, to approximate the wondrous terror of the Burkean sublime. His ambivalence in relation to space is, however, far from Burke’s Orientalist eighteenth-century perspective, which sought to find a balance between despotism and iconoclasm.75 Although Corbett’s preoccupation with sight seems to resemble Burke’s similar preoccupation, we can gauge the difference between Corbett’s representation of India’s natural beauty and Burke’s recourse to Indian stereotype by recalling Glasfurd’s more typical romanticized vision of the tropical jungle, a vision that was particularly influential owing to the popularity of Glasford’s books on hunting. Glasfurd, whose book title announces his interest in “natural romance,” follows Burke in maintaining the dream of a world mediated and kept in order by a healthy respect for traditional codes of conduct—in Glasfurd’s case, a hunter’s code—without which the natural world goes out of whack. This view characteristically leads Glasfurd to the following kinds of pronouncements, this one following the description of another hunter’s death: Such calamities shock the keen shikari, and a narrow escape may teach him greater caution; but it is rare that these deter him from again embarking on his engrossing pursuit. The jungle again exercises its compelling fascination; the mind’s eye pictures its delights; the rifle—old friend—emerges from its case, caressed once more of fond hands; Time, healer of scars physical and mental, does his

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appointed work; and Nature leads the wanderer once more to her beloved solitudes. At first the hunter returned may start . . . at a rustle in the bushes; . . . but gradually he will, with a smile, return to the old ways, and his experiences of the past become but additional jungle lore to enrich his memory. . . . Yet, after all, what is it that exercises that unfailing attraction that his hobby possesses for the true follower of Nimrod? Not the bare collection of trophies; nor, indeed, the mere satisfying of a hunting instinct. It is more than that; something that appeals even to a mind insensible to Nature’s beauties, to her charms . . . It is the partial return to man’s pristine wild life, in a land where the artificialities of civilization have not yet greatly affected the pursuit of game. It is that broad free feeling; the ability to throw out a wide-sweeping arm and say to yourself, “This is all mine to rove!” . . .

Glasfurd closes this section, which occurs at the end of his 400-page book and so functions as a summing-up, by describing the pleasure of eventually “landing” a large bull, in part through the aid of “a strong binocular glass wherewith to scrutinize our ground and endeavor to eliminate the element of chance.” The hunt soon concludes: The colossus . . . rolls ponderously on his side . . . Need one expatiate further, on the gazing, admiring, examining, measuring, and further viewing of the grand old fallen monster—on the clicking of the camera, the well-earned snack of tiffin, the cleaning and fondling of the cherished rifle, and the homeward path with lightsome tread?

I quote Glasfurd at length not simply because his prose is representative of the hunting-as-adventure genre, but also because these passages lay bare views of hunting and of the jungle that contrast markedly with Corbett’s. Another measure of how potent the romanticized view of hunting had become is G. O. Trevelyan’s best-selling description of it in his 1864 satire of British-Indian life, The Competition Wallah, where his own shooting expedition into the “wild romantic charm” of the Indian forest leads him to indict his colonial compatriots’ “over-done” descriptions of “hair-breadth escapes.” That book’s popularity (it went through many reprintings) ensured that Trevelyan’s depictions of AngloIndians, especially their recreational habits, became a standard of comparison between Britishers in India and those back Home. Trevelyan determines to counter his hosts’ bombast with an accurate, suitably comic account of his own tiger-hunting experience, in which guns are dropped and shots misfired. If the British actors (Trevelyan included) do not acquit themselves well in this affair,

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the account in no way diminishes the majesty of the tiger itself, whose sudden “roar, flash of . . . tail, and tremendous bound” create panic in the elephantseated hunting party. “I have a very dim recollection of what happened,” writes Trevelyan. “Bullets were whizzing all around,” and “the tiger [was] at one time on the head of [one] elephant, at another between the legs of mine.” When calm finally returns after “what seemed ten minutes, and perhaps was ninety seconds, the tiger lay dead amidst the trampled grass, with six balls in his body, one in the foreleg, and another through the brain.”76 Trevelyan’s more authentic-sounding description is, however, a rarity, and met with critical (though not popular) reproval even in its day.77 Notwithstanding occasional stabs of condescension from England-based writers, the shooting life continued to attract new adherents who produced more mythopoetic memoirs, such as Glasfurd’s. This trend was in no small measure due to the era’s larger exhibitionary impulse as well as to the modern colonial unease surrounding the notion of home. This unease, I believe, explains why Glasfurd chooses to place the quoted defense of his adventurous hobby toward the end of his book. It is a rhapsodizing attempt to situate his hobby in an epic tableau of arcadian splendor that is described at length in the book’s previous pages and thereby justify the hunt’s unrestrained pleasures. Glasfurd’s exhilaration at the “free feeling” of the hunt and the happy prospect of a “homeward trek” dramatizes the need to contrast the exotic romance of the hunt with the comforting space of home. He can measure his intense pleasure in roaming “free” only by comparing its possibility—a possibility afforded by an expansive colonial setting—to his homeland. His final sentences demonstrate this: “All too rapidly will those [halcyon days in beloved jungles] pass, and, with them, perchance our youth; opportunity perhaps gone, . . . an Indian sun grown strangely fiercer than of yore . . . Until at last, the time of our exile o’er, we set our faces homeward—to the West.”78 By contrast, Corbett, locates his home not outside the jungle, but within it. There is no single geographical location in his experience, unlike Glasfurd’s, that can serve as a point of difference from which to survey a distant homely space. Where Glasfurd and other colonials use their geographical and cultural exile as the basis of nostalgia for Home, and do so most effectively through the convention of tropical adventure, Corbett registers his homely sensibility on the jungle path and within his jungle tales. His prose is for this reason meandering and episodic rather than plotted. Man-Eaters of Kumaon contains no grand denouement, simply an ending as abrupt as the end of a forest trail. The book’s final narrative, about the successful hunt for the “Thak man-eater,” ends on a laconic, almost anticlimactic note: “After having skinned the tigress I bathed and dressed, and though my face was swollen and painful and I had twenty miles of

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rough going before me, I left Chuka [village] walking on air, while the thousands of men in and around the valley were peacefully sleeping.” Then, following a break in the page, he arrives at the book’s conclusion: “I have come to the end of the jungle stories I set out to tell you and I have also come near the end of my man-eater hunting career.” “There have,” his final, single-sentence paragraph tells us, “been occasions when life has hung by a thread and others when a light purse and disease resulting from exposure and strain have made the going difficult, but for all these occasions I am amply rewarded if my hunting has resulted in saving one human life.”79 This headlong rush of this, as if Corbett is embarrassed by the necessity of finding a pertinent point to his jungle sojourns, contrasts even with a writer as unromantic as F. W. Champion. When introducing his own book, Champion cannot resist pairing his insistence on factual representation with a note on how nature photography is like “a sport which is obviously much more difficult than the mere shooting of an animal.” “[B]ig-game photography,” he further declares, “provides all the excitement of the stalk and the pitting of one’s wits against those of the ever-alert inhabitants of the jungle.” He concludes his book by similarly arguing that his camera work “provides all the pleasures and excitements so dear to the heart of the big-game hunter.”80 Champion, despite his genuine conservationism and his ultimate claim that photographs of animals “give pleasure . . . in a way that mere horns and skins can never do,”81 is obliged to authenticate his work by placing it alongside the colonial hunt—a strategy that was no doubt bold for its time, but which means accepting the attributes of the conventional hunt. Corbett’s conservationist sentiment, with its strikingly moral underpinnings, is all the more surprising and credible given his hunting credentials. As perhaps the most successful stalker of man-eaters, Corbett’s defense of big cat behavior could not be ignored. More importantly, his motivation for this stemmed from a homegrown mix of proprietary interest in the tiger and its habitat and his identification with creatures that, like himself, occasion admiration as well as dread—a mix at odds with the strict hierarchies of British India. Forest, Food, and Fabula: Corbett’s Territorial and Textual Location

Mowgli’s wild innocence, which so engaged the imagination of Kipling’s readers, confronted a reality that the author himself recognized, namely, increasing deforestation. In a broader interpretation, the cost of that (colonial) imaginative license was deforestation. In fact, an important ingredient in the formation of Kipling’s ambivalent relationship to the idea of home is his personal response to actual developments in British India’s management of forest space. Kipling’s

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sympathy with the natural environment in the face of the very engineering feats he celebrates in “The Bridge-Builders,” where the animal congress sensitizes Findlayson to the environmental degradation caused by the railway, is, as I have argued, a result of his hyphenated outlook. In 1860 Henry Cleghorn, an early and relatively rare exponent of forest conservation in India, had published Forests and Gardens of South India, which criticized the imperial government for being “most regardless of the value of the forests” within its domain. What the East India Company had started, with its insatiable appetite for timber, the Raj was accelerating. As Gadgil and Guha report in their ecological history of India, “With oak forests vanishing in England, a permanent supply of durable timber was required for the Royal Navy as, in the words of self-styled sportsman and naturalist E. P. Stebbing, ‘the safety of the empire depended on its wooden walls.’ ”82 Indian teak was especially prized for ships, and other sources of timber for railway cars and fuel. The result was that, by the 1880s, when Kipling begins writing and Corbett starts his boyhood walks in the Kumaon region, there was “considerable deforestation in the Doab” (which includes the Kumaon hills).83 It was the unmistakable evidence of the land’s denudation that prompted Governor-General Dalhousie to establish in 1862 a forestry department to find a road to reasonable sustainability. By 1866, the Imperial Forestry Service had been formed, following closely the guidelines of the Indian Forest Act of 1865. A debate arose as to how far state control of forests should go, with Lord BadenPowell advocating full state control and the inspector-general of forests, Dietrich Brandis, proposing the moderate position of allowing forest villagers to largely maintain their “traditional form of forest preservation.” Brandis praised India’s age-old valuation of sacred groves as a particular example of this preservation.84 Brandis’ challenge to his government’s position was, however, ultimately unsuccessful. As Gadgil and Guha show, Baden-Powell’s original expression of Britain’s manifest destiny prevailed, and in the act of 1878 the Raj enacted its policy of reserving to its own discretion the systematic harvesting of timber in India’s forests.85 This logic and legislation gave rise to perhaps predictable consequences. Gadgil and Guha note, for one thing, “intimate connection between the Raj and shikar (i.e., hunting)” that directly resulted from government control of the forests. Roads and bungalows were built to facilitate logging and communication, and settlers and forest workers followed. The combination of the state’s license over forests; the deployment of military personnel with increasing amounts of time on their hands, and in the late nineteenth-century children and wives to impress; and the spread of plantations built and operated by Europeans who were allowed to purchase huge swaths of forest land all resulted in an unmiti-

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gated slaughter of fauna. The era of the great hunt had begun, with viceroys imitating planters, and maharajas competing with viceroys over bragging rights for bagging the most animal trophies. Tribal inhabitants of the forests likewise suffered, and the weakening of their customary rights fed the steady degradation of the ecosystem.86 Decades later, from 1910 through the 1940s, these policies would, as Ranajit Guha demonstrates, give rise to myriad forms of peasant protest. Apart from demonstrating the messy history of forestry during the Raj, these facts point to the impulses behind Kipling’s and Corbett’s Anglo-Indian narratives, which in different ways attest to the conflict between colonial governance and tribal interests, and to industrial encroachment and natural decline. Their narratives also reveal how these developments frequently converged in odd ways. Corbett, for instance, relates in his autobiography how he once helped a government force track down the dreaded bandit Sultana, “India’s Robin Hood,” so named because, “[h]aving known what it was to be poor, really poor,” he “had a warm corner in his heart for all poor people. It was said of him,” Corbett goes on, “that . . . he never robbed a pice from a poor man, never refused an appeal for charity, and paid twice the price asked for all he purchased from small shopkeepers.” Sultana was “a member of the Bhantu criminal tribe,” and Corbett candidly acknowledges the government’s habit “of classing a tribe as ‘criminal’ and confining it within the four walls of the Najibadad Fort”—though Corbett professes indifference to this judicial decision.87 Ranajit Guha cites Sultana as an example of a tribal who was driven to acts of official deviance by existing forest policies. Like Robin Hood, Sultana, argues Guha, is very much a conscious agent of his time. Like the eighteenth-century laws against poaching in England, which had led to Robin Hood’s outlaw status and populist image, early twentieth-century forestry laws in India had incited Sultana to, as Corbett tells it, “chaf[e] at his confinement,” turn against the government, and earn his fellow peasants’ admiration.88 Such laws were, Guha argues, principally symbolic, for they sought to de-legitimize those of a certain class who dared to question the idiom of elite rule.89 Like Sultana, Corbett is proud of his comparatively lowly (by Home standards) birthright. “Having lived so much of my life in jungles in which it is very easy to get lost I have,” he declares, “acquired a sense of direction which functions as well by night as it does by day.”90 Here, unlike Kipling’s impersonated foray into Rajputana’s labyrinthine palaces or Calcutta’s darkened streets, Corbett boasts of a mental compass that can never be learned, only lived. The reference points for his spatial orientation are, moreover, indistinct from his cultural orientation: To be at home in the jungle is to know one’s way through it; conversely, to be lost here means you are a neophyte, one who may

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not deserve the jungle’s rewards. Thus, it is not surprising that Corbett should sympathize with the bandit he finally helps capture, and who dies at the end of an executioner’s rope. As Corbett puts it in concluding the section on Sultana: Society demands protection against criminals, and Sultana was a criminal. He was tried under the law of the land, found guilty, and executed. Nevertheless, I cannot withhold a great measure of admiration for the little man who set at nought the might of the Government for three long years, and who by his brave demeanor won the respect of those who guarded him in the condemned cell. I could have wished that justice had not demanded that Sultana be exhibited in manacles and leg-irons, and exposed to ridicule from those who trembled at the mere mention of his name while he was at liberty. I could also have wished that he had been given a more lenient sentence, for no other reasons than that he had been branded a criminal at birth, and had not had a fair chance; that when power was in his hands he had not oppressed the poor; that when I tracked him to the banyan tree he spared my life and the lives of my friends. And finally, that he went to his meeting with Freddy [Corbett’s Indian Police service friend], not armed with a knife or a revolver, but with a water melon in his hands.91

Corbett thus ends his entertaining and sometimes even comical story of Sultana on a poignant note, composing a final paragraph whose subjunctives— “I could have wished,” etc.—are an effort to undo the injustice, in Corbett’s eyes, of Sultana’s death. In rounding out the chapter, Corbett’s mention of a benign watermelon in the dacoit’s hands points to the narrative’s recurring theme of food. For, as the chapter’s opening lines inform us, it is a “teeming population chronically on the verge of starvation,” despite a rich bounty of crops (“sugarcane, wheat, barley, rape seed, and other cereals”), that compels men like Sultana “to embark on a life of crime.” Although Corbett does not spell this out, his implicit criticism of governmental policy is clear: The qausi-feudal zamindari, or wealthy landlord system, sanctioned by the British over the past century prevented an equitable distribution of food.92 Far from being the incorrigible criminal that the Raj makes him out to be, Sultana is in Corbett’s eyes a kindred spirit. Each of them, as Corbett says of Sultana, is “out of his element [with no forests in which to shelter].” Similarly, each man prefers to operate alone, free from societal restraint. Finally, the two men, however different their cultural attributes or status, similarly orient themselves according to social and geographical spaces whose iconographic symbols—tigers, trees, rifles, wild melons—code them as rebel (in Sultana’s case) or solitary outsider (in Corbett’s).

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Sultana and Corbett thus represent a “territoriality” that Ranajit Guha defines as an “ambiguous” nexus of spatial and temporal, social and ethnic coordinates.93 It is, significantly, a territoriality that defies official categories, and evades, in ways both subtle and explicit, conventional definitions of identity. Its ambiguity stems from the fact that it does not fit into prescribed patterns of behavior, with the result that the Raj can only interpret Sultana’s actions, for example, as “criminal,” thereby disconnecting them from their environmental and social context. No wonder the administrative apparatus fails to comprehend Sultana’s activities or the villagers’ collateral trust in the bandit. In a related manner, Corbett’s “hard and fast rule to go alone when hunting man-eaters”94 has no truck with the imperial dictate to join the Club. More radically, Corbett’s stories celebrate the hill people with whom he enjoys “smok[ing]” and “talk[ing] of many things,” and whose plight he frequently makes his own. When he laments “The felling of the forest” that has “disarranged the normal life of the jungle folk” (here, the animals) whose company he relishes, it is hard to miss his angst over the degradation of the forests and forest cultures in which he feels at home.95 As a result of this intimacy with his spatial milieu, Corbett produces a narrative that is, like Kipling’s Jungle Book, radically atypical in its representation of time and place. This native-born antipathy toward colonial forestry practices, based as it is in a strange yet familiar vision of home and of history, dramatizes the breach of boundaries I have been highlighting. Like the modernists’ experimentation with narrative framing and plot time during this period—upending the illusory power of fabula (real time) and the supposed subordination of sjužet (presented time)—the Anglo-Indian narrative subverts the conventional division between jungle and home, and between the time of reading and the space of reading. Here I am drawing specifically on W. J. T. Mitchell’s argument that the denial of literature’s spatial dimension because of its supposed predisposition to time is misplaced, and that in fact literature, like the visual arts, sustains its appeal precisely because it is at once spatial and temporal.96 It has become common to say that form and content are intertwined, and that each influences the other. Yet this is more acutely the case in a milieu in which individuals are constantly reminded of spaces that are “out of bounds,” and whose world is therefore constituted more by prohibition than by sanction. Those who occupy an in-between stratum, such as tribal peoples, suffer even more restrictions to their habits of living. To examine the relationship between narrative space and temporality in Kipling’s and Corbett’s Anglo-India is, therefore, to expose the fault lines that are never far beneath the surface of any text. In particular, these two writers’ depiction of forest life reveals an economy of signs that depend on the interpenetration of spatial and temporal motifs.

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Corbett’s very focus on Sultana, a figure who breaks down, or rather transposes, expected notions of criminal and heroic rebel, points to the intermingling of history and local legend, of temporality and iconicity. In this light, the textual space Corbett awards to a favorable description of Sultana (as opposed to the more common colonial portrayal of the amoral dacoit or the bloodthirsty thuggee) is bound up with the space he awards to the jungle, which is both a literal home-ground and a forest of symbols. The repercussions of colonial forest policy for Sultana’s people are likewise entwined in Corbett’s own sensibility to the landscape and its inhabitants, and thus to the calculations governing his narrative motivations and choices. One measure of this is Corbett’s proclivity for a leisurely pacing that demands his reader’s attentiveness to what at times seems to be the minutiae of forest life. For instance, he regularly interrupts his story of Sultana to provide explanations of village customs and to remind us laconically of such facts as “the Forest Department was felling a portion of [the] forests” in which Sultana’s men are camping.97 Corbett thereby hijacks the reader’s expectation of adventure to slyly connect the dots of Sultana’s own understandable motivation, namely, the plundering of his forested homeland. In other words, the time of reading, measured by the syncopated interruptions Corbett believes are vital to a proper understanding of his subject, is greatly determined by occurrences on the ground. It is not a stretch to say that these interruptions are reminiscent of the abrupt changes both to the land and to its peoples that result from colonial forestry. For Corbett, there is no demarcation between the supposed real, authentic, or original sequence of a tale and its narrational recollection (as both remembrance and re-collecting): each is an indivisible part of the other, and the narrative is indivisible from the geographies it depicts. To be sure, Corbett was not the first to recognize the consequences of colonial forestry, and it is important to situate his views in the context of his European predecessors as well as his contemporaries. For example, the aforementioned Bishop Heber remarked in the 1820s on the environmental stress he witnessed in the Kumaon region: “Unless some precautions are taken, the inhabited parts of Kemaoon [sic] will soon be wretchedly bare of wood, and the country, already too arid, will not only lose its beauty, but its small space of fertility.”98 Despite some overlap in ecological interest, however, the difference between the two men’s accounts is striking. Where Heber’s romanticism leads him to self-consciously set himself apart from “the most sublime and beautiful” Indian hills, whose grand scale reminds him of “Alpine tracts” and (his favorite comparison) “the Norwegian Alps,” and to naturalize the mountains’ various inhabitants as either “very ugly and miserable” or “modest, gentle, respectful people,”99 Corbett’s homegrown eye leads to a visceral identification with the

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surrounding forests. Like the Kumaon villagers with whom he converses, Corbett sees the wooded hills not as inherently threatening and in need of domestication, but as the very source of life, even if (or perhaps because) that life harbors always-imminent death. Not unlike Kipling’s character Puran Bhagat, Corbett finds in these hills a retreat from the superficialities of colonial culture, echoing in some sense Lord Ram’s legendary exile with wife Sita and brother Lakshman in the northern Indian forests, where his urban eye relearns the forest’s values. There is, in fact, a pseudo-religious tone to Corbett’s relationship to the land, albeit quite different from the spirituality expressed by Heber and others. Even when Heberian romanticism gives way later in the century to imperial cartography’s self-styled rationality, the general presumption remains: The self-aware European observer’s “representation of reality,” as Timothy Mitchell puts it in his study of colonial Egypt, “set[s] up” the colonial world as an exhibit to exoticize that locale so he may continually reestablish, rhetorically as well as materially, by such means as by mapping and curio-collecting, his sense of being separable from this exhibit.100 Hence the constant use in Heber’s account of authoritative yet confessional registers of the personal pronoun: “My attention was completely strained, and my eyes filled with tears, every thing around was so wild and magnificent that man appeared as nothing . . . and to my surprise I still saw, even in these Alpine tracts, many venerable peepul-trees.”101 Compare that to Flaubert’s oft-cited impression of Egypt in 1850: “What can I say about it all? . . . each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you . . . Then gradually all this becomes harmonious. . . .”102 Later still, in the 1880s, an English visitor to India, Nora Scott, compared India to her former residence in Egypt, again by consciously distinguishing her European self from the land: “Here [in Bombay] . . . you can have in no part such a space between you and the sunshine as we could get in our Egyptian houses.” The combination of heat and a “strange country” prompts her, while “watching the [high] road from the window,” to quote from Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” with the rueful addendum that the road “goes to Poona, not to Camelot, and instead of the cool, beautiful English fields, . . . there are yellow, parched hills on either side, stretching away in one unbroken glare.”103 These writers’ compulsion to compare and contrast their colonial experiences to Europe may seem an unavoidable feature of travel writing, but Scott’s account in particular is, unlike Heber’s or Flaubert’s, characteristically centered on Victorian constructions of domesticity (as her frequent comments on houses attest), and there is no denying the texts’ rhetorical egocentrism. To paraphrase Timothy Mitchell, these examples demonstrate a modern “metaphysics of representation” that helps to constitute the modern self. While I would not go so far as Mitchell does in

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arguing that the colonial world is principally a construct of Europe’s, he does accurately identify the contradiction in the desire “to separate oneself from the world” and simultaneously “to lose oneself within” it.104 In either case, the self is believed to remain intact—precisely the presumption that Bhabha’s Lacanian reading unpacks. From our vantage point, it is impossible to miss the disavowal of difference from the Other that is at the heart of such texts. In reality, of course, the argument that such texts betray a unitary “Indiaas-exhibit” assumption runs aground on a number of points. To begin with, their pointed contrast of exotic subcontinent to European modernity ironically occludes the determined, even systematic Europeanization of Indian spaces that had begun early on under colonial rule. Hill stations, cantonments, and forests were all cast or recast in the image of Europe—but with a twist. Heber’s and Scott’s frequent comparisons of Indian and European hills are literal as well as figurative, for their delight in finding “European plants” amidst a terrain at once familiar and alien is a self-fulfilling effect of imperial botany: For in their zeal to transplant indigenous floral species across oceans (Indian palms to Kew Gardens, South American jacaranda to India, and so on), European botanists endeavored to create versions of paradise in Europe as well as in their colonies. Heber himself recounts his delight in discussing the biblical Garden of Eden with Hindu pundits, and, as noted above, records his awe of the Calcutta Botanical Garden’s resemblance to “Milton’s idea of Paradise” in its abundance of the “most beautiful plants of India” as well as “a vast collection of exotics” from around the globe.105 In almost the same moment, he can imagine himself “back home” (“I saw many European plants to-day”) and in a tropical realm of heavenly verdure.106 As Richard Grove points out, this kind of belief in recreating a reflection of heavenly arborescence on earth through the efforts of science was only one of many impulses behind the surprising development of natural conservation in nineteenth-century India. Bishop Heber’s Anglican variety of paradise, after all, had to contend with utilitarian economic factors and later modern imperial ideology. The outcome nevertheless favored the regulation and replanting of forests and, as a kind of miniature reflection of this, bungalow gardens. Still, these forests and gardens were not the sole outcome of Mitchell’s notion of a colonial-capitalist “exhibitionary complex,” nor did they exemplify the system of “enframing” that Mitchell defines as “a method of dividing and containing, as in the construction of barracks” or (we might add) cantonments, railways, and civil lines. Each of these, as I have been arguing, was, despite the stated political and moral necessity of segregated and bounded environments, quite porous. Thus, the transplantation of floral species made it more and more likely that an English traveler could look upon India’s verdure in two ways simultaneously:

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As a tropical Eden quite unlike Europe; or as an uncanny reflection of Europe. Once again, Nora Scott: “We forgot the heat, and India, and everything . . . it was so English,” she says after eating a plate of strawberries. And, in the same entry, a reminder of foreignness: “We caught an immense beetle last night, and we have preserved it; I think it is the same as one in the collection we sent home.”107 Lost in all these developments was the health of the forests’ human and animal inhabitants, the principal subjects of Corbett’s tales. Like other colonialera European writers, Corbett, as demonstrated in the paragraphs on Sultana, clearly feels at home in his use of the first-person pronoun. However, his use of it is quite distinct from the likes of Heber and Scott. Heber and Scott, whom I shall continue to cite as representative examples of different ends of the nineteenth century, are both visitors to India and thus refract their initial experiences there through the lens of England-as-home. For all their differences, their travelogues also exemplify features of what Mary Louise Pratt has called the active discourse of unquestioning (even if unspoken) faith in the globally redemptive power of science.108 Both texts therefore register their admiration of European botanists, health officials, and engineers, and their corresponding derision of native practices. We have seen, too, how these writers likewise luxuriated in the subcontinent’s floral richness. More important to my examination of the AngloIndian idiom, and especially to Corbett’s variety of domiciled territoriality, is the latter’s lack of spatial suspense or expectancy that drives most descriptions of colonial space. By this I mean Heber’s and Scott’s deployments of the metaphor of imperial travel,109 with its adventuring, mobile, unitary eye, that continually anticipates the secrets behind the next hill, so to speak, and thereby generates narrative suspense. By contrast, Corbett’s prose derives its suspense not by anticipating an as-yet unseen picturesque scene, but by the quest for a beast whose mobility and eyesight the hunter cannot hope to match. Thus, whereas Heber tends to advertise his authoritative intrepidness by means of a elevated perspective—“On seeing the impenetrable nature of this whole country [ from the Himalayan foothills], one cannot help wondering how it ever should have been conquered”110—Corbett keeps his eye to the ground, dramatizing his comparative inconsequence when within a man-eating tiger’s territory. He writes, for instance, of how his first serious effort to track a man-eater, the “Champawat terror,” causes his imagination to run wild: [T]his was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater. The length of road immediately in front of me was brilliantly lit by the moon, but to right and left the overhanging trees cast dark shadows, and when the night wind agitated the branches and the shadows moved, I saw a dozen tigers

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advancing on me, and bitterly regretted the impulse that had induced me to place myself at the man-eater’s mercy. I lacked the courage to return to the village and admit I was too frightened to carry out my self-imposed task, and with teeth chattering, as much from fear as from cold, I sat out the long night . . . and it was in this position my men an hour later found me—fast asleep; of the tiger I had neither heard nor seen anything.111

Corbett does, of course, eventually kill the big cat that has been terrorizing the nearby village. Indeed, his narrative pacing is at times recognizably in debt to the still-popular (in the 1940s, when he published his first book) genre of the colonial hunting memoir. He cannot help, for instance, exclaiming pleasurably when this Champawat tiger, after eluding his pursuit despite her wounds, confronts him by “[l]owering her head” and “giving me a beautiful shot . . . at a range of less than thirty yards.”112 The tension Corbett patiently builds up in each of his tales meets the reader’s expectation in these close-range encounters; it is a payoff reminiscent of many such tales. There are the “bared teeth” after the tigress flinches at receiving Corbett’s last bullet (but her first serious wound), the determination “to stand her ground,” and the imminence of a charge against a now-defenseless human predator. An Indiana Jones–like denouement seems inevitable. Even Corbett’s earlier confession of being inept and frightened, and feeling therefore like “a wretched imposter” before the villagers’ admiring expectancy, seems in this light to be falsely modest. However, he continuously transitions, often abruptly, back to a tone less of triumph than of poignant regret. Upon finding the now-dead animal, whom he had shot once more in “the right paw” after grabbing the antique gun of a villager, he pensively chimes a theme that will recur in all his stories: When the tiger had stood on the rock looking down at me I had noticed that there was something wrong with her mouth, and on examining her now I found that the upper and lower canine teeth on the right side of her mouth were broken, the upper one in half, and the lower one right down to the bone. This permanent injury to her teeth—the result of a gun-shot wound—had prevented her from killing her natural prey, and had been the cause of her becoming a man-eater.113

Placed alongside other such pronouncements, Corbett’s words here reveal a genuine preoccupation with the tiger’s territorial rights; for it is the reshaping of land and demography that has, after all, led the ailing animal to this impasse. Corbett’s descriptions amount to a reversal of imperialism’s self-pro-

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claimed watchfulness. Distinct from the colonialist’s all-seeing human perspective, Corbett’s narratives award the prerogative to see, to hear, and to roam to the tiger, rather than to the hunter. Where Heber sprinkles his travelogue with moments of exhilaration and disappointment, feeling either pleased or alarmed by the sights that alternately meet or exceed his expectations,114 Corbett, though retaining the drama of the final confrontation with his man-eating prey, accords a greater portion of his narratives to the tiger’s own trepidation as well as to that of the villagers. Not unlike his sympathy with Sultana’s impulse to preserve his territorial imperative, Corbett nearly always sees in a dead tiger or leopard a victim of human intrusion, one who “had committed no crime against the jungle code,” as he says of the hapless Temple Tiger.115 Moreover, the sahib hunter’s expressed fear of the Champawat man-eater in fact matches the villagers’, who admit to him that they have done nothing to track it down, “for we were afraid.”116 Of course, by daring to track the tiger, Corbett exhibits his comparative courage. But he continually reminds us of two qualifying points: first, that he has the luxury of possessing an excellent firearm, as compared to a village’s occasional antique weaponry, and, second, that he has the further luxury of being able to quit the territory. After listening to one of many tiger stories from terrified villagers, he observes that . . . it is little wonder that the character and outlook on life of people living year after year in a man-eater country should change, and that one coming from outside should feel that he had stepped right into a world of stark realities and the rule of tooth and claw . . . I was young and inexperienced in those far-off Champawat days, but, even so, the conviction I came to after a brief sojourn in that stricken land, that there is no more terrible thing than to live and have one’s being under the shadow of a man-eater, has been strengthened by thirtytwo years’ of subsequent experience.117

While there is certainly a sense here of Orwell’s indictment of the passivity that imperialism generates in a populace that has been forced to look upon the white and often inexperienced imperial agent as the guarantor of order (even if the threat is a rogue elephant), it is important once again to distinguish Corbett’s homegrown, proximal interpretation of his actions from Orwell’s distanced cynical one. Corbett is never cynical, and the irony that emerges from his prose is dramatic, not intentional—as when his own eye mistakes the handles of stacked axes for guns in a nighttime camp of forest workers, and concludes that they are part of Sultana’s elusive dacoit gang. He candidly records his cha-

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grin on realizing his mistake.118 The important point is that the stark distinction between indigenous people and imperial agency that Orwell spotlights so effectively is largely absent here. There is never a question of interpreting the villagers’ speech, for Corbett takes for granted his own fluency in the Hindi dialect of Kumaon; nor is there any indication of a sense of disconnection from the land. Nor is he, in fact, an imperial agent in the conventional sense. He speaks naturally of “our hills,” meaning anyone who has been bred in the mountains.119 Corbett’s Anglo-Indian outlook thus inevitably leads him to depict his home jungle in terms that would fit well with more traditionally domestic concerns. His frank admiration for the villagers’ dogged courage in continuing to eke out their living amidst often-dangerous terrain, his obvious enjoyment of the jungle trek, and his own inclination to recount his adventures for a rapt audience—all are of a piece with a natal sensibility that is, at root, just as territorial as that of the villagers and indeed the tigers. This homely territorial sensibility is a distinguishing connective between Corbett’s and Kipling’s otherwise different experiences and narrative styles. Whereas Kipling inclines toward scenes of industrial activity and city bylanes, Corbett clearly relishes jungles. Yet at times Corbett’s natural habitat resembles the Anglo-Indian bungalow to which he must return after a period in the jungle, where he is, after all, most at home. For instance, in the midst of his Champawat adventure near the beginning of Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Corbett writes: On returning to the bungalow I found the Tahsildar [the district’s Indian revenue officer] was back, and as we sat on the verandah I told him of my day’s experience. Expressing regret at my having had to go so far on a wild-goose chase, he rose, saying that as he had a long way to go he must start at once. This announcement caused me no little surprise . . . It was not the question of his staying the night that concerned me, but the risk he was taking; however, he was deaf to all my arguments and, as he stepped off the verandah into the dark night, . . . to do a walk of four miles in a locality in which men only moved in large parties in daylight, I took off my hat to a very brave man. Having watched him out of sight I turned and entered the bungalow. I have a tale to tell of that bungalow but I will not tell it here, for this is a work of jungle stories, and tales “beyond the laws of nature” do not consort well with such stories.120

Corbett thus ends the story’s first section by signaling his awareness of generic propriety: “I will not tell it here,” he says of the bungalow tale. He expresses the conventional view that the bungalow is meant for domestic con-

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cerns and veranda tales. It establishes a boundary between civility and wildness that he claims to be unwilling to cross. Yet despite tossing this bone to convention, Corbett, like Kipling, views (with evident delight) the bungalow as less a boundary-marker than a space in which jungle and garden frequently merge. The bungalow, particularly one like Corbett’s that borders the forest, helps constitute the jungle, just as the jungle provides the bungalow with its reminders— mounted trophies, plants, and photographs—of its infusion into Anglo-Indian life. Conversely, the jungle itself is home to Corbett and to the animals that live in it. In describing the “Bachelor” man-eater, for instance, Corbett characteristically empathisizes with an animal whose “home was in a ravine” that “he had chosen . . . wisely.”121 Corbett’s ostensible wish to “not tell” a tale in his house is a wink to the reader, for he is, after all, telling a tale. Indeed, his juxtaposition of bungalow, veranda tale-telling, and the Tahsildar’s characteristic bravery in the passage quoted above frame the subject that is on everyone’s—especially the reader’s—minds, namely, the hunting of the tiger. The hunt, after all, becomes known only by its telling, just as the telling requires domestic space. But Corbett’s entering the bungalow after seeing off the Tahsildar, is no more a retreat from the jungle’s dangers than is the local villagers’ habit, if a man-eater is about, of barricading themselves inside their homes at night. Corbett’s imaginative habitus blurs the lines between jungle and bungalow, so that, as we have seen, the jungle is the more homelike. More revealing still is Corbett’s habit, when entering a new jurisdiction in pursuit of a man-eating tiger, of requesting that he “be shown round the jungle” as if he were a guest whose hosts were showing him around their home. This host-guest relationship, so intrinsic to domestic concerns in India, in fact is a larger metaphor for Corbett’s own narrative style. Like a proud homeowner, he invites his readers to “have a clear picture” of his well-appointed world. In the context of Corbett’s spatial consciousness, then, the reference points we would expect to reflect the psychological interplay between observer and observed, as in Fanon, are in constant flux. There is no definable mirror of alterity in which the white hunter can satisfy the outline of an idealized reflection—unless that mirror is the tiger itself, about which I will have more to say in the next section. Here, I want to emphasize that if the suspenseful frisson of Corbett’s tales owes much to the author’s concurrent feelings of dread and hope about meeting a tiger, so that when his “heart . . . stop[s] beating” one can attribute it to both emotions at once, the stories’ similar mixture of conventional but seemingly discordant images is an equally vital reason for these tales’ effectiveness. In sum, the imaginative contradictions that structure this bicultural territoriality ultimately, as in Kipling’s works, account for the surpris-

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ing denouement of the Anglo-Indian “jungle story.” The inversion of inside/ outside so evident in Kipling’s jungle tale similarly informs Corbett’s propensity for motifs that entwine spatiality, of both the geographical and literary varieties, with a sensitivity to narrative time—that is, to the time of reading and the reading of history, whose repercussions on the environment are pointedly described. Skinning a Tiger

In more specific and self-evident ways, Corbett’s debt to Kipling is visible in that iconic moment of triumph, the skinning of a tiger that has broken jungle law by killing needlessly. Mowgli, we recall, skins Shere Khan’s carcass after he and his wolf brethren have trapped the tiger in a ravine and coordinated a stampeding herd of buffaloes to trample Shere Khan to death. It is significant that the reader shares Mowgli’s elevated view of the scene: “At last Mowgli rounded up the bewildered herd at the head of the ravine on a grassy patch that sloped steeply down to the ravine itself. From that height you could see across the tops of the trees down to the plain below; and he saw with a great deal of satisfaction that they ran nearly straight up and down, while the vines and creepers that hung over them would give no foothold to a tiger who wanted to get out.” Kipling, as we have seen in his travel accounts, favors such bird’s-eye, panoramic perspectives. Such lofty camera-like views are, to be sure, common in nineteenth-century literature, for they provide vantage points that were commonly unavailable to the average reader, and which captured the imagination. (No wonder that early skyscraping temple to industrialism, the Eiffel Tower, figured in so many paintings and novels almost as soon as it was constructed.) The “view from the hill,” if I may call it that, finds special resonance in colonial literature in that it usually mimics the all-seeing ideological provenance of European colonialism. Here, I first want to note briefly the effects of Mowgli’s viewpoint in the context of the tiger’s death, and then compare this to Corbett’s later hunting tale to draw some conclusions about the power and limitations of Anglo-Indian representations of wild India. To begin with, it is not just the act of killing Shere Khan that is important in Mowgli’s journey toward self-awareness and his eventual self-realization of innate as well as learned abilities as a leader who truly knows India. The tiger’s skin is perhaps more significant. As soon as the big cat is dead, Mowgli “feel[s] for the knife he always carried in a sheath round his neck now that he lived with men.” To the wolf pack, he declares, “ ‘His hide will look well on the Council Rock’ ” (113). Although Mowgli possesses a knife, an artifact of human life, we are told:

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A boy trained among men would never have dreamed of skinning a ten-foot tiger alone, but Mowgli knew better than any one else how an animal’s skin is fitted on, and how it can be taken off. But it was hard work, and Mowgli slashed and tore and grunted for an hour, while the wolves lolled out their tongues, or came forward and tugged as he ordered them. (113)

When the old musket-carrying villager Buldeo comes upon Mowgli in the midst of his bloody task, he scorns the boy’s capability. “ ‘What is this folly?’ said Buldeo angrily. ‘To think thou canst skin a tiger!’ ” Mowgli, instantly recognizing Buldeo’s ulterior aim of taking the valuable skin for himself, and without pausing in his work, asks his wolf friend Akela to deal with the old hunter. “Buldeo . . . found himself sprawling on the grass, with a gray wolf standing over him, while Mowgli went on skinning as though he were alone in all India.” Stunned by this development, and with injured pride, Buldeo concludes that Mowgli is a sorcerer: A wolf who obeyed the orders of this boy who had private wars with man-eating tigers was not a common animal. It was . . . magic of the worst kind . . . He lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli turn into a tiger, too. (114)

Let go by Mowgli’s order, Buldeo flees back to his village to tell “a tale of magic and enchantment and sorcery that made the priest look very grave” (115). This episode presents several points that bear on the representation of liminal identities and on the tropes of shikar memoirs. The sight that allows Mowgli to plan the kill, his skill in slicing hide from muscle, and his isolation in the vastness of jungle India—all presented with remarkable brevity in a handful of paragraphs—serve, on one hand, to confuse Mowgli even more about his connection to humans while, on the other hand, confirming his animal brothers’ loyalty. Stung by the villagers’ rage at his “magic,” and by the Brahmin priest’s ostracizing him (“Go away!”), Mowgli cries out, “ ‘Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it is because I am a wolf. Let us go, Akela’ ” (116). Unmoored by the villagers’ contradictory attitude, and urged by his human mother to save himself, Mowgli returns to the jungle, shouting to his adoptive Mother Wolf, “ ‘They have cast me out from the Man-Pack, Mother, but I come with the hide of Shere Khan to keep my word.” Mother Wolf’s “eyes glowed as she saw the skin.” She claims that she always knew that her human son, Little Frog, would become a true hunter (117). Mowgli and the animals then climb the Council Rock, where “Mowgli spread the skin out on the flat stone where Akela used to sit, and pegged it down with four slivers of bamboo, and Akela sat on it, and

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called the old call to the Council.” Thus seated upon the hide of their fearful enemy, Akela reasserts his leadership of the Pack. The skin thus becomes symbolic of the jungle folk’s conquest of evil, both the homegrown tiger variety and the outside, human kind. Mowgli’s searing experience, moreover, sensitizes him to the precariousness of life and the contingencies of everyday actions. Indeed, just as critics have pointed to the Buddhist concerns that quietly inhabit Kim, it is tempting here to compare the particular contradictions in Mowgli’s life to Krishna’s discourse about similar perplexities that confront Arjuna in the great Hindu meditation, the Bhagavad Gita. But Mowgli’s predicament is less susceptible to spiritual consideration than it is to a reading of the existential conundrum that the story’s insistent oppositions—wildness and civility, jungle and garden, light and shade, hills and ravines, the forest’s “dark warm heart”122 and the endless plain—so starkly illuminate. Shere Khan’s skin is itself, after all, a symbol of past ferocity that is very much alive in the animals’ and villagers’ tales even as this ferocity is now signified by a lifeless skin that adds gravity to the Council leader’s position. Mowgli’s demonstrated skill with a knife is protective as well as alienating: His fingers will henceforth feel the itch to “play . . . round the haft of the skinning-knife” when he angrily faces a threat (161), even as this very skill reminds him that he can, as he frequently grumbles, “hunt alone” if necessary (219). On yet another level, the tiger’s skinning represents the sloughing off of a visible mark of identification that then comes to mean something else entirely. In Mowgli’s case, the skinning is triumphant; in Corbett’s hunting accounts, it is anticlimactic and often poignant. In both cases, the tiger itself matters less than its effects on human characters. Mowgli’s heartfelt lament, in the tale “Letting in the Jungle,” that “ ‘Men must always be making traps for me, or they are not content’ ” (164), encapsulates the opposing desires of his still-evolving self. Only in the final paragraphs of the first Jungle Book, at the end of “The Spring Running,” when Mowgli “goes back to Man,” does the narrative make the motif of skin and skinning explicit: “ ‘It is hard to cast the skin,’ said Kaa as Mowgli sobbed and sobbed.” It is fitting that the snake, who knows something about shedding skins, and whose character is at once menacing and helpful, should utter this line. Just as race figures prominently in any colonial history, so does skin here figure as a psychic weight that plays havoc with the central character’s competing desires. The slender hope of coming to a harmonious understanding to which Mowgli and his bestial band have clung is lost in the face of ever-present danger from without—and, in Shere Khan’s case, from within. The episodic narratives, in the form of short tales, suit Mowgli’s perplexing experiences, for each tale is a kind of skin that the reader sloughs off, only to serially inhabit

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other stories and interstitial poems that together add up to a semblance of the social solidarity that the jungle folk see in their skin-draped Council Rock. Compare the initial note of satisfaction in Mowgli’s skinning of Shere Khan to Corbett’s opposite sentiments when he performs this task, one that has become familiar to him. He describes the task as unpleasant rather than triumphant, and chiefly an opportunity to examine the tiger “to ascertain, more or less accurately, the reason for the animal having become a maneater.”123 In this case, two wounds explain the tiger’s recourse to human prey. The words here reflect an almost juridical interest in finding the evidence to prove that the tiger’s appetite for humans is merely an instinctive need for survival, not, as the villagers imagine, the result of devilish vindictiveness. We experience the anticlimactic realization, replayed again in each of Corbett’s tales, that the dead tiger is less a threat than a victim, its claws and teeth “broken” or “worn down to the bone,” as he says of the Chowgarh cat.124 Despite this obvious difference in tone between Kipling’s and Corbett’s scenes of tiger death, we find that in both works the act of skinning and the skin itself are important points in the narratives’ trajectories. For Mowgli and his jungle community, Shere Khan’s skin achieves an iconicity that links together a number of tales following the feared tiger’s death. The hide is a sign of good over evil. But although the lone cat’s demise at first seems to reassert the balance of jungle law that is said to be vital to the community’s survival, it is, after all, humans who first ushered in the act of arbitrary killing, as both Kipling’s and Corbett’s stories make clear. This is one reason that Mowgli’s sad parting from his brethren at the end of the first set of tales is compared by Kaa to a casting off of one skin for another: The unmistakable note of mourning reminds the reader of a lost dream of society untarnished by human corruption.125 The initial mood of triumph at Khan’s death thus gives way to a deep sense of loss, a sentiment that is replenished in tale after tale. It is not only human intrusion (including Mowgli’s own) that bedevils the peaceable jungle parliament. More importantly, it is the anxious realization, on Mowgli’s part at least, that hybridity (the mix of human and animal sensibilities) so integral to his survival and happiness cannot sustain the definitive, unambiguous sign of vanquished evil demanded by both animal and human societies, namely Khan’s skin. Mowgli’s very encounters with both jungle and human societies underscore a crucial theme, that clear-cut divisions are mere illusions to which we cling. There is indeed, as the reader knows (and as Mowgli learns only later), a larger, more powerful world beyond the jungle—namely, the British Raj. Kipling’s contemporary readers were also well aware that the innumerable tiger skins that adorned the floors and walls of Raj bungalows were contiguous with authority, as

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much as to say that nature itself was no match for British power. The boy who vengefully wishes to “call in the Jungle to stamp out your (the villagers’) lines” (187) does not yet know this. But as he gradually becomes aware of human connivance and gratuitous hunting, his sense of loss—or rather, his dawning recognition of the fictionality of sanctuary—becomes correspondingly more acute. Corbett pushes this sentiment much further. Thus, early in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, in the story “Robin,” his recollection of an old jungle saying, “It is never safe to assume that a leopard is dead until it has been skinned” (35)—a sentiment Kipling must have had in mind—sets up a predictable charge by a leopard he has just wounded. The story’s denouement, however, typically subverts its generic obligations by ending with a mournful tribute to the dead animal that “had put up such a game fight, and had so nearly won the last round” (37). Corbett thus inherits and amplifies the sense of loss we find in Kipling’s tales. Conclusion

Like Kipling’s fictional Mowgli, who straddles the chasm between the bureaucratic, confining will to know and the wild, liberating absence of such a will, Jim Corbett’s self-described “jungle sensitivity” occasionally serves the larger interest of the State. Although the jungle described by both these Anglo-Indian writers contains the familiar dualism of danger and pleasure, which is embodied most famously by the tiger, their version of the jungle differs from that of their colonial peers, who cannot see the nuances that Kipling and Corbett see. For this reason, these Anglo-Indian writers’ jungle representations are part of what I have called an Anglo-Indian sublime. This sublime inherits the feelings of terror and extremity from its eighteenth-century precursor, but goes further in registering the ambivalence that India instills, imaginatively as well as physically, in its country-born European inhabitants. The AngloIndian sublime, in other words, exposes the conflicted loyalties of those who express it. It is fitting, therefore, that Kipling should conclude his description of a hunt, in Letters of Marque, by referring to the alluring freedom of the Road. The hunting of a pig and a panther that he has just witnessed, as a “gunless” English observer, appalls him. He watches the panther as it “lay shot through the spine, feebly trying to drag herself downhill to cover. It is an awful thing to see a big beast die, when the soul is wrenched out of the struggling body in ten seconds.” It is, he declares, no less than a murder. Kipling ends the episode by abruptly announcing, “This ended the beat, and the procession returned to the Residency” with its dead panthers. Immediately thereafter—and doubtless to

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escape as quickly as possible the horror he has witnessed—the young reporter turns his eyes to the road. Only there, he feels, can he find men who are “kind,” as opposed to the self-important shikaris who are obsessed with counting animal skins. It is equally fitting that Kipling should open this episode with a reference to the geographical location of the low hills in which the hunt occurs, hills that rise abruptly from “the Durbar Gardens” of his host, the Indian king. The cries from the Indian tribals, who beat the grass to corral the panther, disorient Kipling so much that he is suddenly reminded of a cacophonous set piece in the Gardens of the Crystal Palace. “So curiously,” he concludes, “do Sydenham and Western Rajputana meet!” The juxtapositions of garden and jungle, of royal politesse and “murder,” and of Crystal Palace Exhibition and an Indian hunt together cause the author to recoil and quickly “return to the road in search of new countries.”126 The irony, of course, is that he is embedded in—and therefore attuned to—the very juxtapositions he seeks to escape. Like Corbett, Kipling will return to the jungle, but this time to an imaginative one in which he can lay down the rules. But those rules, not unlike Corbett’s own perception of jungle law, can be maintained only in an impossible world in which the pastoral dream reposes untouched by human hands. This world of childhood innocence is impossible because it depends, after all, upon the beneficence of colonial forest-lovers like the forestry officer who must continually resist the acquisitive instincts of a world that wishes to profit from deforestation—the very world that provides their livelihood. Although Corbett’s jungle tales are memoirs rather than fictions, they too possess the kind of ambivalence one finds in Kipling. However, we do not see in Corbett’s narratives the progression from a pre-lapsarian to a post-lapsarian world, nor the elision of Mowgli’s naturalism with a state-centered apparatus that is always thirsty for information. Instead, Corbett’s jungle routes (and roots) are the interstices between the hidden and the known, the hunter and the hunted. Corbett dramatizes the iconography of cultural ambivalence by deconstructing the catchphrase reserved for tigers: beautiful yet devilish. That label, Corbett shows, depends upon one’s perspective—“perspective” in both its attitudinal and geographical senses. A villager’s view of a man-eater is virtually eye to eye, therefore terrifying, but the armed hunter’s distanced view allows the tiger to be aesthetically pleasing, if still dangerous. It is from this vantage a sublime presence, one whose skin may properly dignify the colonial home after an adventurous hunt. To Corbett’s more empathetic Anglo-Indian eye, the tiger is, like him, simply a survivor, inseparable from its surroundings. If it is devilish, so are we all.

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Notes Epigraph. A. I. R. Glasfurd, Rifle and Romance In the Indian Jungle: A Record of Thirteen Years (London: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1906), vi. 1. See for example Peter Broks’ summary of this in John MacKenzie, Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 158. 2. Maj. Gen. William Rice, Tiger-Shooting in India (London, 1857), quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, Tiger-Wallahs: Saving the Greatest of the Great Cats, in Geoffrey Ward et al., Tigers and Tigerwallahs: Tiger-Wallahs/Man-Eaters of Kumaon/The Secret Life of Tigers/ Tiger Haven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42; also see 37–38. 3. See Richard Grove, “Colonial Conservation, Ecological Harmony and Popular Resistance: Towards a Global Synthesis,” chapter 2 in MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World, 15–50. Also see Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, chapter 5 (146–180). 4. Editorial, “Speaks From Our Anvil,” in Pearson’s Magazine 23 (1907), 14, quoted in Peter Broks, “Science, the Press and Empire: ‘Pearson’s’ Publications, 1890–1914,” in MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 159. 5. John MacKenzie rightly observes that the Victorian hunter allegorized contemporary “perceptions of ‘Civilisation’ and ‘barbarism.’ ” In India, however, the added sense of homeliness (and homesickness) among Anglo-Indians makes this split more diffuse, less abrupt than that suggested by the hunt in European Arcadia. See MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 34. 6. See for example Grewal, Home and Harem, 9–10, 53–56, and chapter 2 (57–84), for a discussion of the women’s movement in the context of empire. 7. For a historical overview of English women’s involvement in colonial sports, see Procida, Married to the Empire, chapter 5 (136–162). 8. Procida, Married to the Empire, 50. 9. Tytler, An Englishwoman in India, 58–59. 10. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 21–22. 11. For an enlightening discussion of the complexities surrounding British authorities’ masculine/feminine categorization of Indians, and for this idea’s pragmatic consequences for Indian and English women, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). As one example of such consequences, Sinha notes the irony of the famous Indian woman nationalist campaigner, Sarala Debi, arguing in the 1890s for young Bengali nationalists to cultivate a more physical, militant response to British rule precisely in order to

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counteract the powerful perception of Bengalis as effeminate and, therefore, weak nationalists (21). 12. A Britisher serving in southern Africa in the mid-1800s thus records his pleasure at being able to hunt in “my forest home.” Roualeyn Gordon Cumming (1850), quoted in MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 99. 13. John MacKenzie notes how Britishers in India “fused” the Indian and European “hunting traditions.” The Empire of Nature, 168. 14. Rowland Ward, Empire of India Exhibition 1895: Illustrated Guide to the Jungle (London: Rowland Ward & Co., 1895), 6. 15. Henty, In Times of Peril, 19–20. 16. See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 17. Rev. Francis E. Clark, “Introduction,” in Rev. Jacob Chamberlain’s In the Tiger Jungle, and Other Stories of Missionary Work Among the Telegus of India (Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1897), 10–11. 18. Henty, In Times of Peril, 139–141. It is significant that the Anglo-Indian youth in the novel, Ned, chooses to do here what nearly every Englishman in India desired to do, and that is to dive headlong into the jungle, that space of danger and vitality, of the manly hunt and elemental solitude. The scene evokes these contradictory associations in having the boys elude one “tiger,” the rebel leader Nana Sahib, thanks to the appearance of another. The familiar literary motif of predation, normally identifiable as a clear and present danger, appears here as both beneficent and ominous. In this case, the man-eating tiger burns bright as an omen of imminent, natural (and thus providential) vengeance enacted upon “treacherous” sepoys, whereas the conniving and therefore eminently rational Nana augurs all that is morally ill in the “Eastern” heart. Usually, however, colonial writers characterized the sepoys’ mutinous designs as a “madness” that stalked the land, much as an idiopathic contagion erupts at the heart of a well-ordered and otherwise reasonably minded community (such as cantonments or civil lines). 19. Martin Booth, Carpet Sahib: A Life of Jim Corbett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 229–230. 20. Ibid., 230. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Eurasians (or, to use the term they have since adopted, Anglo-Indians) accept as fact that the Corbetts were of mixed blood, as my own interviews with Anglo-Indian residents of India, in March–May 2007, attest. The Corbett family’s disinclination to discuss this was common at the time, and in a racialized colonial landscape understandable. Livelihood and upward mobility, as I note elsewhere in a discussion of John Masters’ fiction, usually trounced racial identity among those Eurasians who could

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pass for white. See my “Reading John Masters’s Bhowani Junction,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Summer 2000): 3–26. 23. IOLR/MSS.EUR.R90/1, F. C. Ford-Robertson, taped interview. 24. Jim Corbett, My India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123, 125. 25. Corbett frequently uses this phrase in his books; see for example Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) (New York: Bantam, 1966) and My India. 26. F. W. Champion, With a Camera in Tiger-Land (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928), 108. 27. Kipling tries to resolve this tension in a later tale, “In the Rukh” (in The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Randall Jarrell [Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1961] , 176–195), in which Mowgli enters government service as a forestry worker and begins a family. Mowgli’s forest home thus enables him to achieve the equilibrium of both belonging—“[The jungle] is my home,” he declares to the forest official Gisborne—and betrothal: “The jungle is my house,” he says to the “girl” he woos (179, 193). Kipling hints at these developments in the Jungle Book’s “Tiger! Tiger!” story, which concludes by announcing that “years afterward [Mowgli] became a man and married. But that is a story for grown-ups.” There is, in other words, no uncertainty as to Mowgli’s eventual fate and his seemingly satisfied repatriation to civilization. 28. Ian Hay, “Foreword” to Todd, Tiger, Tiger!, 7–9. 29. To further contextualize this, it is worth noting that Hallett’s words are informed by both wartime fervor and the death of his son. See Indivar Kantekar, “A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–1945,” Past & Present 176.1 (Aug. 2002): 194. 30. R. E. Hawkins, “Introduction,” Jim Corbett’s India (New York, 1978), quoted in Geoffrey Ward et al., Tiger-Wallahs, 68. 31. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, xiii. It is important to note here that Corbett, India-born like Kipling, went on to become an early advocate for the establishment of wildlife sanctuaries in India as well as in Kenya, to which he emigrated at the time of India’s independence in 1947. 32. Ibid., xvii–xviii. 33. Corbett, “The Mohan Man-Eater,” in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 125. 34. Corbett, “Author’s Note,” in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, xviii. 35. Stebbing, Jungle By-Ways of India, 167–168. 36. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 285. 37. Quoted in E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 126. 38. See for example, Ward, Tiger-Wallahs, 53. 39. Broks, “Science, the Press and Empire,” 158. 40. The friend was Rev. A. G. Atkins; quoted in Booth, Carpet Sahib, 183.

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41. I refer, of course, to George Orwell’s canonical 1936 essay, “Shooting An Elephant,” about his experience as a young imperial policeman. See for instance A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), 148–156. 42. Jim Corbett, Jungle Lore, 1953. ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 163. 43. Ibid., 160–161. 44. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 17–18. 45. Jim Corbett, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, 1948, in The Jim Corbett Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 126. 46. See, for instance, Martin Booth’s biography of Corbett, Carpet Sahib, 233. 47. Corbett, Leopard of Rudraprayag, 6, 17, 20, 29. 48. Ibid., 145. 49. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 65. 50. Corbett, Leopard of Rudraprayag, 153. 51. Ibid., 135, 160. 52. Ibid., 148. 53. Ibid., 31. 54. A. G. Aitkins, from “an article for The Hindustan Times a year after Jim’s death,” quoted in Booth, Carpet Sahib, 183. 55. See Booth, Carpet Sahib, 168–169. 56. Champion, With a Camera, 94–95. 57. Ibid., 83. 58. J. W. Best, quoted in Champion (93). Ironically, given his antihunting stance, the jacket of Champion’s book, like that of Corbett’s, advertises it in the typical language of the hunting adventure: “He has met the objects of his observations face to face, has come as close as man can come to the tigers and the other animals of the Indian jungle.” 59. A. B. Combe and E. A. Smythies, in Stanley Jepson, ed., Big Game Encounters: Critical Moments in the Lives of Well-Known Shikaris (London: H. F. and G. Witherby, Ltd., 1937), 6, 8, 92, 187. 60. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 19. 61. See, for example, ibid., 8, 126. 62. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. 63. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 101. 64. Champion, With a Camera, xv, xviii. 65. See my earlier references to W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. 66. Glasfurd, Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle, 190, 280, 286. 67. See MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 44–47. 68. Indians, of course, faced equally self-conflicted loyalties, as a glance at the biographies of nationalist leaders demonstrates. The belief among Anglo-Indians (that

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is, Eurasians) today—a belief I share—that Corbett was himself Eurasian underscores this point. 69. F. W. Champion occasionally reverts to such language too, as when he speaks of “tiger-infested forests.” With a Camera in Tiger-Land, 86. 70. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 21, 23. 71. Ibid., 23. 72. “The Champawat Man-Eater,” in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 12. 73. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 155. 74. Leonard Woolf begins his 1913 novel about his colonial service in Sri Lanka by emphasizing how “the jungle surrounded” the village and always “pressed in upon it.” “It was a living wall about the village,” he continues, “a wall which, if the axe were spared, would creep in and smother and blot out the village itself.” The Village in the Jungle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 3. 75. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, chapter 5 (190–229). 76. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, 99, 88, 106. 77. Laura Trevelyan notes that one admiring reader, recognizing Trevelyan’s aim of exposing the inconsistencies of colonial rule in India, went so far as to compare the book to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. See A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2006), 74. 78. Glasfurd, Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle, 387–388. 79. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 199–200. 80. Champion, With a Camera, xvii, 217. 81. Ibid., 217. 82. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 119. For more on Stebbing, see his Jungle By-ways in India (1910). 83. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 120. 84. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, chapter 4 (113–145); Brandis quoted in same, 132. Interestingly, he found specific exemplars of this within the outlying princely states of Rajputana, regions that in colonial eyes had always hinted at subterfuge. 85. Ibid., 125–127, 133–134, and chapter 4 passim. Manu Goswani notes that the Forest Department was founded in 1864, with the 1878 Forest Act providing the “principle of eminent domain” that its architect, Baden-Powell, wanted and that led to the appropriation of forest land into the colonial state. The Act, Goswani points out, remains in effect today. Goswani, Producing India, 57–58. 86. Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, 140–144. 87. Corbett, My India, 98–99, 101. 88. Ibid., 99–101. 89. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 77–79, 90–91, 106–108.

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90. Corbett, My India, 111. 91. Ibid., 130–131. 92. For more on the repercussions of the zamindari system, see for instance Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 7–8, 86–87. 93. See Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, chapter 7 (278–337). 94. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 18. 95. Corbett, My India, 105, 134. 96. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. 97. Corbett, My India, 100. 98. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, vol. II, 216. 99. Ibid., 59, 192–193, and passim. 100. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, ix–xvi and passim. 101. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, vol. II, 193. 102. Quoted in Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 21. 103. Nora Scott, An Indian Journal, 1, 7–8, 12. 104. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 27. 105. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, vol. I, 52. At another point, as he camps in a “grove of mangoe-trees,” Heber expresses his wish that his wife could join him “in this Eden.” Vol. II, 134–135. 106. Ibid., vol. II, 202. 107. Scott, An Indian Journal, 10–11. 108. Pratt, “Introduction” in Imperial Eyes, 1–29 and passim. 109. For more on the “ontological discourse” at the heart of the travel metaphor, see Grewal, Home and Harem, 4 and passim. 110. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, vol. II, 207. 111. Corbett, “The Champawat Man-Eater,” in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 3. 112. Ibid., 21. 113. Ibid., 23. 114. Heber writes: “Some of the other trees, of which I had formed the greatest expectations, disappointed me, such as the pine of New Caledonia, which does not succeed here, at least the specimen which was shewn me was weak looking and diminutive in comparison with the prints in Cook’s Voyage, the recollection of which is strongly imprinted on my mind, though I have not looked at them since I was a boy.” Narrative of a Journey, vol. I, 53. 115. Corbett, “The Temple Tiger,” 1954, in The Temple Tiger and Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28. 116. Corbett, “The Champawat Man-Eater,” 11. 117. Ibid., 12. 118. Corbett, My India, 105.

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119. “The people of our hills are Hindu,” he straightforwardly and characteristically asserts near the start of “The Champawat Man-Eater,” 8. 120. Ibid., 13. 121. “The Bachelor of Powalgarh,” in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 86. 122. In the first of The Jungle Book tales, “Mowgli’s Brothers,” we are told that the young Mowgli “loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest.” The Jungle Book, 15. 123. Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 73, 199. 124. Ibid., 73, 86. 125. The villagers’ willingness to kill their own kind appalls the jungle folk. If on one level Mowgli and Buldeo share the necessary skill of self-invention, and a corresponding talent for crossing boundaries, on another level Buldeo betrays that skill by intentionally putting it to nefarious use. In this light, Bagheera’s earlier recognition of something “more in the Jungle now than Jungle Law” points to what is essentially a battle for territorial control, with Buldeo and his fellow villagers ready to remove, by force, the threats to their community’s peace. 126. Kipling, Letters of Marque, 95–105.

Afterword

The preceding chapters have shown how various writers expressed their conflicted Anglo-Indian sensibilities by describing equally incompatible colonial spaces. It is important to recall that well before Anglo-Indian writers opened this vein of colonial irony, other writers, including many who had never been outside Europe, had begun to tap into the wellspring of this iconography in order to sustain their narratives. These earlier British narratives are filled with characters made credible by the associational power of their “Eastern” surroundings. Colonial spatiality, in other words, was at play in British literary texts long before its representation by Anglo-Indians, but the earlier texts were usually motivated by a desire to guarantee the integrity of European social space. Notable among such narratives was Thomas de Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, with its famous rendition of the iconic “oriental” London opium den. Quincey’s opium den in fact came to represent “the site of orientalist disgust and desire, hybridity and degradation.”1 Even Dickens could not resist drawing upon this site in his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The threatening nature of the transposed “Eastern” space was part of a larger discourse about the presence in the European cities of the poor (Chadwick’s “great unwashed”), non-European workers (such as Malay sailors), wandering and therefore suspect “tribes,” prostitutes, and criminals. Racially charged descriptors for these degenerate types ranged from gypsy, heathen and wild to hulking, coarse, and repulsive,2 all of which signaled a visual and moral assault upon polite society. As Raymond Williams observed, one response to this perceived assault was emigration to the colonies, which authorities “seized as a solution to the poverty and overcrowding of the cities.”3 But just as consequential as bodily 282

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transportation was material transposition, as when Britons sought to re-create an English town in the Indian hills. Entwined in this development was the rhetorical transposition of Europe to India, and of an exoticized India to Europe, which came to assume an authentic cast that continues to shape representations of the subcontinent. These representations are clearly very different from the conflicted tropes of Anglo-India. Anglo-Indian texts, as I have argued, articulate colonial iconography to quite different ends. We have seen, for example, how Kipling populates his narratives with spatial images and words that alternately confirm and destabilize imperial ideologies. His double-consciousness demands the kind of “tale [that] must be told from the outside—in the dark—all wrong.”4 Kipling’s gardens are also jungles, his Grand Trunk Road an exemplar of “happy Asiatic disorder” into which Kimball O’Hara dives and from which he can view “all India spread out to left and right.”5 At the same time, Kim is obliged to acknowledge the disciplinary demands of imperial statecraft, which threatens to extinguish his wanderlust—much as middle-class Londoners of the time wished to confine “wandering tribes” ethnographically as well as physically. Ultimately, the narrative’s engagement with Anglo-Indian duplexity enables it to rely on and celebrate inherently transgressive engagements with colonial space. Kim’s road, in other words, like the partitioned Simla Club, proves to be less in the service of colonial fixity than an enabler of Anglo-India’s trespassing prolixity. To Kim’s Anglo-Indian sensibility, roads are simultaneously real in a territorial sense, with proper proportion,6 and disconnected from established territorial demands. Roads are not subsumed into a larger whole that reconfirms a particular stasis. Likewise, the Anglo-Indian narrative establishes its own spatial multiplicity and sense of fracture through equally fractured characters precisely because of their facility for territorial trespass, engaging in—and producing—the “the monstrous hybridism of East and West.”7 This phrase is another name for the geographical and rhetorical inflections of Anglo-India set forth in this book. Notes 1. These are John Marriott’s words, cited from his The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2003), 169. Marriott helpfully cites another description of the nineteenth-century opium den, that of James Greenwood, whose 1874 “A Visit to Tiger Bay” gives us “lascars, degraded [English] women, and dark-skinned snake-like Hindoos” (ibid.). The debt to De Quincey seems clear. 2. Cited in Marriott, The Other Empire, 122–123.

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Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 281. Kipling, “Beyond the Pale,” 129; and “False Dawn,” 35, in Plain Tales from the Kipling, Kim: A Critical Edition, 56, 57. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 199.

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INDEX

Adas, Michael, 58, 207, 211 adolescent adventure: adolescent adventure tale, 176; colonial desire for, 12 aesthetics, colonial: Anglo-Indian, 49, 274; of geography, 58, 66, 68, 245; of history, 64; including beauty, 14, 31, 47, 50, 53, 56, 61, 65, 67, 70, 72, 83, 97, 120, 126, 216 Amber Fort: in Rudyard Kipling, 1, 7, 11, 15, 32 Anand, Mulk Raj, 123, 136n37 Anderson, Benedict, 3 Anglo-Indian: aesthetics of, 49, 239–240; childhood and youth as trope for, 12, 127, 222; cultural contradiction, 192; defined, 5; dialectical persona of, 20; divided (bicultural, ambivalent) self, 8–9, 23, 34, 47, 107, 184, 196, 227, 249, 252, 267, 282; domesticity, domestic sensibility, 176, 179, 233; and hunting, 235–236; idioms, 30, 264; imaginary, 20; in-between, conflicted perspective, 24, 128, 245, 273; irony in, 282; masculinity, 190; narrative,

narration, narrator, 9, 12, 17, 23, 28, 63, 84, 103, 115, 182, 260, 283; nostalgia, 156; perspective of, 8, 17, 126, 185, 244, 274; poise, 151; sensibility, 19–20, 22, 34, 65, 191, 222, 242, 245, 282; sensitivity to geography, 3, 129; slippage in definition, 7; spatial disjunctions and, 91; spatial sensibility, 31; sublime, 273; urban world of, 138, 153; wives, 198; writers, contradictory outlook of, 10, 282–283. See also Corbett, Jim; geography, British-Indian; Kipling, Rudyard; narrative, narration; representation; space; spatial, spatiality; Steel, Flora Annie; territorial rights animal biography, genre of, 72–73 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 50–51 architecture: colonial Gothic, 28, 83, 123n21, 216; hybrid, 216; Indian, 2; Indo-Saracenic, 216; of Lucknow, 194; Military Board style, 122; and space, 169 Arnold, David, 12, 52, 164 Arnold, Edwin, 55, 61 303

304

Assam, 71, 95 Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park, 25–26 Awadh (also Oude), King of, 62, 64, 73, 198, 219 ayah, 12, 22, 24, 40n61, 49, 79n80, 87, 197–98 babu figure, 21, 23–24, 48, 142, 169, 197, 216, 235 Bachelard, Gaston, 8, 26, 34 Baden-Powell, Lord, 176, 257 Bagehot, Walter, 138, 145–147 Bahadur Shah: in Steel, 178, 186, 189, 194 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28–29 Banks, Joseph, 52 Baucom, Ian, 83, 94, 125–126 Baudelaire, Charles, 139–142, 147– 148; Fleurs du Mal, 142; “Sept Vieillards,” 147 bazaar, Indian colonial, 4, 8, 12, 14, 26–27, 35, 60, 65, 69, 86–87, 99, 102–103, 114, 118, 121, 125, 142, 163, 167, 174, 182, 222; alleged role in Mutiny, 171–173, 180, 191, 196; illicit space of, 172 Behdad, Ali, 94 Bellew, Captain, 48. See also Memoirs of a Griffin, or A Cadet’s First Year in India Bengali, colonial view of, 14, 144, 235 Benjamin, Walter, 27–28, 33, 140, 145–147, 149–150 Bennett, Tony, 26 Bentick, William, 3 Bhabha, Homi, 18–23, 31, 131, 138, 263 Bhagavad Gita, 271 biblical allusions: in James Tod, 17; in John Ruskin, 82 Black Forest of Germany: as model for primitivism, 57, 59 Blair, Eric (George Orwell), 245 Blake, William, 222 body: in cantonment, 175; English or

index

European, 99, 115; fragmented, 23; of last Mughal, 197; moral contamination of, 175; non-English and “Native,” 21, 122; politic, 99; of prostitute, 99; racialized, 175; of woman, 191 Boehmer, Elleke, 52 Bombay, colonial, 5, 73, 83, 155 borderline: concept and theme in Rudyard Kipling, 115, 125–126, 133n13 boundaries: British colonial obsession with, 57, 184; colonial (social and spatial), 11–12, 24, 29, 60, 128, 140, 148, 182, 252; conflicted attitude toward, 57; conventional boundaries of British India, 217; crossing of, 29–30; and disease, 168; high and low, 149; inter-mingling of, 48; of jungle, 220–221 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26. See also habitus, concept in Bordieu Boy Scouts, 176 Brandis, Dietrich, 257 bridges, 8, 10, 48, 165, 207–217, 229n2. See also Findlayson; Kipling, Rudyard; Peroo Britain: as global concept, 57 British Raj, 4, 10, 85, 87–88, 100, 105, 119, 124, 126, 128, 132, 165, 171, 182, 184, 193, 217–218, 233–234, 257–260, 272 Broks, Peter, 72 Buldeo: village character in Kipling, 221, 225, 238–239, 270, 281n125 bungalow, colonial, 4, 8, 10, 32, 46, 49, 70–72, 88–89, 114, 165–167, 173, 183–184, 191, 234, 242, 244–245, 257, 263, 267–268, 272; as sanctuary, 243 Burke, Edmund, 13–14, 50–51, 82, 216, 253 Burton, Sir Richard, 12, 52

index

Calcutta, colonial, 14, 22, 53, 73, 106– 107, 126, 150, 221, 258; Botanical Garden in, 263; as colonial modern, 140, 157; and corruption of civility, 145; as false copy of European city, 142, 144, 258; and flanerie, 148; fragmentation of, 152; homelike, 158; and idea of home, 155; and knowability, 154; and mimicry, 138; and modernity, 139; police in, 150–153; and prostitution, 150; spaces of, 153; as uncanny, 143. See also city, cities; Kipling, Rudyard; modern, modernity; urbanism, European canals, 48 Canning, Viceroy Lord, 183 cantonment, 4, 10, 15, 20, 32–34, 48, 60, 65, 73–74, 85, 88, 109n25, 113, 119–121, 135n24, 166–168, 175, 183, 197, 206, 222, 233, 263; cantonment culture, 32 Cantonments Act, 119, 123 Carter, Paul, 8 Cartesian division of colonial world, 30. See also Mitchell, Timothy caves: Ajanta and Elephanta, 50 Cawnpore (Kanpur), 178 Chadwick, Edwin, 122, 163, 282 Chamberlain, Rev. Jacob, 237, 245 Champion, F. W., 242, 249–250, 256 Chatterjee, Partha, 26, 42n93 Chatterjee, Piya, 71 Chaudhuri, Nirad, 10, 37n32 Chevers, Dr. Norman, 163 Christianity, colonial, 44n116, 164–165. See also missionaries Chunder, Bohlanauth, 121 city, cities: cityscape, 2; colonial, 27, 32, 81, 88, 107, 121, 138, 153, 155, 158, 182, 191; European, 282–283; fragmentation of, 152. See also London, nineteenth-century civil lines, 15, 167, 190, 197

305

Civil Station, 4 civility: colonial, 85, 141, 144, 218, 222; and incivility, 59; sly civility, 2 civilizing mission, 29, 164 class: in British India, including middle-class sensibility, 31, 47, 52, 60, 69, 86, 88, 91, 113–115, 139, 140, 142, 144, 158, 167, 171, 219, 232, 235, 244, 283 Cleghorn, Henry, 257 Clive, Robert, 50, 65 club, colonial, 4, 10, 27, 33, 47, 71, 88–90, 112–118, 124, 245, 260, 283; clubbishness of colonial Europeans, 9. See also Simla Cohn, Bernard, 178 collecting and exhibiting, 73. See also exhibition Colley, Linda, 3 Collins, Wilkie: Moonstone, 54 colonial world: nostalgia of, 236; split view of, 58–59. See also geography, British-Indian; representation; space; spatial, spatiality; territorial rights commodities: capitalist, 27; commodity culture, 236; commodity fetish, 147. See also Lefebvre, Henri Conrad, Joseph, 52, 148 conservation, 257, 263; theme in Corbett, 242, 256. See also Corbett, Jim Contagious Diseases and Cantonments Act, 167–168 Cook, Captain James, 52, 82 Cooper, James Fennimore, 245, 251 Coopland, Ruth, 196 Coorg, Coorgs (place and hill tribe), 57–59 Corbett, Jim, 4, 6, 9–10, 23, 70, 81, 84, 87, 102, 220, 271; ambivalent (hybrid) Anglo-Indian outlook of, 3, 239–240, 244–245, 249, 252, 267, 274; bicultural upbringing and outlook, 238; boundaries,

306

sensitivity to, 239, 245; compared to Kipling, 239, 269; and conventional readers, 244; domiciled territoriality in, 264, 267–268; food as theme in, 259; genre in, 253, 267; hunting, mixed attitude toward, 238; hunting, unease about, 248; hunting as (ostensibly) solitary, 244; and hunting memoir, 240–242; identification with tiger, 238, 251–252, 256, 268; jungle as home, 238–240, 245–246, 255, 258, 260–261; “jungle sensitivity” in, 273; and landscape, idealization of, 244, 247, 262; Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 34, 237–238, 240– 241, 247–248, 252–253, 255, 267, 273; Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, 247–249; narratives as distinct, 241, 254, 260; as outsider, 246; and photography, 251; popularity of, 237; regret in, 265; sensitivity to narrative time, 269; spatial consciousness of, 268–269; spatialized jungle idiom of, 250, 261, 264, 268; split view of tiger and leopard, 238, 240, 247–248, 274; Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon, 248, 266; territorial sensibility of, 267–268 cosmopolitan, cosmopolitanism: colonial, 24, 140 country-born: as term for AngloIndians, 5–6, 12, 21, 26, 33, 70, 238, 273 Creighton, Colonel: character in Kipling, 125, 129, 227 crowd: man of the, in Poe, 139, 147; urban, 147, 149–150, 155, 158 Crystal Palace Exhibition (Great Exhibition of 1851), 3, 34, 71, 183, 215, 274 Cumming, Gordon, 73, 85

index

Dalhousie, Governor-General, 100, 257 Daniell, Thomas and William, 63 Dante, Dantesque, 14, 82, 150 darshan, 213 De Certeau, Michel, 8 De Quincey, Thomas, 15, 282 deathscapes, 12, 164; death as commonplace, 63; images of death, 164; spaces of death, 148 deforestation, 256, 274 degeneration, degenerescence: colonial concept of, 55, 113, 163 Delhi, 4, 9, 191; Delhi Ridge, 178, 196; Siege of, 64 Derrida, Jacques, 27 Devji, Faisal F., 136n32 Dickens, Charles, 91, 142, 153, 282; Bleak House, 142 disease: and illness, 11, 55, 64, 85, 96, 132, 163–164, 198 disguise: as theme, 103, 105, 180, 187. See also impersonation displacement: as theme, 20, 107, 192. See also geography, British-Indian Diver, Maud, 130–131, 165, 232; Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 177; Unsung, 232 domesticity, imperial, 167, 179–180, 183, 185, 191–192, 197, 235, 244; in Steel, 183, 185, 187, 191–192 domiciled Europeans: domiciled territoriality, 264; in India, 6–7, 14, 22, 244 Doré, Gustave, 155 Douglas, Mary, 49 durbar: colonial, 62; as hybrid ceremony, 61; Mughal, 170 East India Company, 2–3, 13, 54, 115, 123, 164, 170, 198, 216 Eden, Emily, 53 Edenic: vision of nature, 66–67, 224, 233, 245, 263–264 Edney, Mathew, 64

index

Edwardes, Herbert, 146, 148 ego: Anglo-Indian, 22; fracturing of, 21; white colonizing, 21 Egypt, colonial, 26, 31, 68, 139, 262. See also Mitchell, Timothy Elwin, Edward F.: Indian Jottings: From Ten Years’ Experience in and Around Poona City, 48 Empire, fringes of, 104, 158 Engels, Friedrich, 163 engineers, engineering: British colonial, 32, 54, 68, 130, 206 England, as Mother, 9 Englishman: colonial typology of, 46, 61, 97, 165; persona in Kipling, 7–8, 17, 117, 152; persona in Steel, 167 Englishness, 6, 21, 56, 105, 126, 181 Englishwoman, 197; colonial typology of, 165, 188, 190, 198; mobility of, 198 Eurasian, 6, 12, 20, 34, 37n20, 86, 104–105, 115, 152–153, 238, 276n22. See also half-caste; mixedrace population of India Europe: as idea and place, 2 exclusion, politics of, 34. See also spatial, spatiality exhibition, 70; exhibiting animals, 73; exhibitionary complex, 26, 263; exhibitionary impulse, 255; Indian Exhibit, London (1895), 236 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 19, 24, 113, 268 femininity: colonial preservation of, 235; feminization of hill station, 89; of Indians, by British, 131; of subcontinent, by Europeans, 197, 235 feuilleton: feuilletonnier, 153; as genre, 22, 148, 153, 158 Findlayson: character in Kipling, 206–217 First War of Independence, 4. See also Mutiny

307

flanerie, 22, 73, 126, 145, 150 flaneur, colonial, 138, 140–141, 143, 147–149, 150, 158; flaneuse, 150; gaze of, 150 Flaubert, Gustave: and colonial Egypt, 68, 262 forest, 60, 66, 104, 260–261, 263; beauty of, 81; conservation of, 257; and deforestation, 274; road in, 9; sacredness of, 57–58. See also jungle Forest Act of 1878, 279n85 Forest Department, 261, 279n85 forestry: in British Raj, 258 Forster, E. M., 81, 124, 170; Passage to India, 81, 170 Foucault, Michel, 27–28, 48–49, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 146–147, 149, 160n44 Gadgil, Madav and Ramachandra Guha, 58, 223, 226, 257 Gandhi, Mahatma, 139 Ganges (Ganga) River, 14, 54, 207, 214, 229n2 garden: British Indian, 4, 8, 10, 50, 52, 66, 71, 183, 206, 222, 234, 253, 263, 268; distinct from jungle, 55, 283; feminized space of, 52; linked to jungle, in Kipling, 32, 70–74, 183, 218, 234, 283; Mughal, 204n69; Renaissance vision of, 52; tea garden, 71. See also Kipling, Rudyard: “Rikki-tikki-tavi” Garrick, H. B. W., 17 gaze: colonizing, 21; domiciled, 24; male, 144, 149 genre. See feuilleton; Mutiny novel subgenre; narrative, narration geography, British-Indian, 64, 97–98; aesthetics of, 66, 216; diminution of, 215; displacement of, 7, 97, 107; and health, 163–164, 193; homeliness of, 9; imaginary, 5; militarization of landscape, 170;

308

and organic metaphors, 66; and representation, 125, 128, 261; reshaping of environment, 207; rhetoric of, 66; sensibility, 27. See also representation; space; spatial, spatiality; territorial rights Glasfurd, A. I. R., 232, 252, 253–255 Gonds: aboriginal jungle dwellers, 223–227 gone, or going, native: colonial concept of, 29, 103, 168 Gordon, General, 176–177 Gosse, Edmund, 148–149 gossip: in colonial station and club, 88, 115, 117, 119 Goswani, Manu, 20, 40n74, 279n85 gothic, gothicism, 15, 23, 47, 66, 83; in Kipling, 15 Grand Trunk Road, 10–11, 13, 17, 33, 99, 118, 124–126, 130–131, 165, 229n2, 283 Gray, Thomas, 82 Great Exhibition. See Crystal Palace Exhibition (Great Exhibition of 1851) Great Game: in Kipling, 13, 99, 125, 146, 168 Gregory, Derek, 26 Grove, Richard, 66, 263 Growse, F. S., 54 Guha, Ramachandra and Madav Gadgil. See Gadgil, Madav and Ramachandra Guha Guha, Ranajit, 26, 32, 171–172, 224, 258; “Prose of CounterInsurgency,” 32 Guha, Sumit, 174 Gupta, Narayani, 26, 169 habitus, concept in Bourdieu, 26 Haggard, Rider, 148 Hagiioannu, Andrew, 94 Halbfass, Wilhelm, 36 half-caste: as colonial term in Kipling, 6, 29, 128. See also Eurasian;

index

Kipling, Rudyard: characters in; mixed-race population of India Hallett, Sir Maurice, 240–241 Hardwar, 118 Hastings, Warren, 3, 13 Haussmann, Georges, 153 Hawkins, R. E., 241 health, as concern in British India, 54, 71, 120–121, 163–199 Heber, Bishop Reginald, 13–14, 39n52, 261–263, 266, 280n114 Hegel, F. W., 139, 141 Henty, G. A., 68–69, 84, 166–167, 176, 181, 237, 241, 276n18; In Times of Peril, 32, 84, 166, 181, 236–237, 251 heterotopia, 43n106 hill station, 4, 10, 20, 26, 32–34, 61, 83, 88–90, 92, 100–101, 107, 112, 233– 234, 263, 276n18; as cantonment, 109n25; female population of, 112; functional contradictions of, 87; as sanitarium, 86–87. See also hills; Simla hills: contrasted with plains, 20, 130; and mountains, 4, 8, 58, 81–83, 92, 113, 119, 126, 132, 283. See also hill station; Simla Himalayas, including foothills (terai), 82, 86, 91, 114, 127, 238 Hindu gods, 201, 206 Hindu woman: in Steel, 189, 193 Hinduism, 170, 194 Hirsch, August, 85 Hobbes, Robert, 67 Hodges, William, 51, 65 home: as ambivalent British-Indian concept, 6, 20, 23, 32, 46–47, 52–53, 56, 66, 70, 114, 138, 140, 144, 146, 148, 156, 158, 183, 193, 207, 233, 238, 254–255, 268; homelessness, unhomed, 26, 107, 147; homeliness, 9; homely, conflicted space, 34, 46–47, 49, 52, 56, 60, 66, 68, 70, 95;

309

index

homesickness, 56, 148, 157; metropolitan, 155. See also Corbett, Jim; Kipling, Rudyard; Steel, Flora Annie homosocial: colonial milieu, 85, 131 Hooker, Joseph, 55, 60 Humanitarian League: and romanticism, 52 Humboldt, Alexander von, 66–67 hunt, hunter, hunting: era of great hunt, 258; hunting memoir, 4, 24, 32, 34, 52, 55, 73, 102, 219, 232– 268, 270, 274; as imperial ritual, 235. See also Corbett, Jim; shikar Hurree Babu: hybrid character in Kim, 6, 125–127 Hutcheon, Linda, 142 Hutchins, Francis, 2, 85 Hyam, Ronald, 68 hybrid: characters, 6, 105, 125, 128, 207; engineering, 216; narrative style in Kipling, 100, 209, 213. See also Hurree Babu; Lurgan Sahib; Peroo; Strickland, Colonel hybridity, 21, 48, 96, 103, 216, 218, 282; human and animal, in Rudyard Kipling, 272 identity, colonial discourse of, 5 imperial allegory, 72 Imperial Assemblage of 1877, Delhi, 120, 170 Imperial Forestry Service, 249, 257 Imperial Gazetteer of India, 54 imperialism, British, 25, 30, 84, 193; allegory of, 72; anxiety of, 84; domestication of wildness, 73; and duty in, 198, 235; as heterogeneous, 5; as masculine discourse, 185, 190, 192–193; and sport, 101–102, 232–233 impersonation: colonialist interest in and theme, 12, 85, 96, 103, 167, 181, 197, 258. See also disguise

India: as alien colonial space, 46; colonial ambivalence toward, 53; geography of, 24; immensity of, for Europeans, 60; naturalism of, 63; as uncanny double of Europe, 144, 244 Indian crafts movement, 84 Indian Forest Act of 1866, 257 Indian Forestry Service, 217, 239 Indian towns, 169 Indianness: as concept, 6 Indo-Anglian literary representations, 114 Islam: vis-à-vis Hinduism, in Steel, 189, 193–195, 197 itihasa, 213 Jaipur, 1, 17, 22 James, C. L. R., 29 Jones, Sir William, 13, 53 Joseph, Betty, 201n25 Joy, G. W., 177. See also Gordon, General jungle: beauty of, 239; boundary of, 220–221; as colonial space and trope, 8, 12, 20, 22, 24, 50, 55, 58, 61, 66, 140, 176, 183, 207, 217, 222, 233, 239, 253, 260, 268, 274; gods of, in Kipling, 210; as harmonious space, in Corbett, 252, 261; and hunting, 233; “jungle folk” in Corbett, 240, 245, 248; “jungle folk” in Kipling, 281n125; Law of, 219–220, 223, 239, 252, 272, 274, 281n125; linked to garden, in Kipling, 32, 55, 70–74, 183, 218, 234, 283; lore of, as colonial genre, 209; sensitivity to, in Corbett, 246, 258, 273 Kaiser-I-Hind Bridge, 229n2 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 216 Kanwar, Pamela, 86, 101, 115 Kemp, Martin, 51 Kennedy, Dane, 66, 87, 89, 96

310

Kensington Museum, 67 Kern, Stephen, 2, 26, 28 Kimball O’Hara (Kim), 11–12, 18, 22, 33–34, 69, 81, 99, 105, 124–130, 168, 212, 218–219, 226, 283; Irishness of, 18 Kincaid, Dennis, 90 King, Anthony, 119, 123 King, Ross, 26 Kipling, John Lockwood, 119–120, 134n21, 170, 216 Kipling, Rudyard: alienation in, 157; ambivalent Anglo-Indian outlook of, 3, 11, 23, 70, 84, 106, 117, 145, 153; “Beyond the Pale,” 134n18; “Bisara of Pooree,” 33, 116–117, 119; “Bridge-Builders,” 34, 131, 206–226, 257; “By Word of Mouth,” 97; City of Dreadful Night, 14, 33, 138–158, 221; codeswitching in, 141; contradictions in, 11; Corbett’s debt to, 269; “Cupid’s Arrows,” 101–102; Day’s Work, 206; double-consciousness of, 283; as emblematic of AngloIndian perspective, 11; globe-trotter in, 7, 11, 16–17; gossip in, 119; Gothic in, 15; home in, 70; hybrid style of, 100, 209, 213; implied author in, 17; “In the House of Sudhoo,” 227; “In the Rukh,” 277n27; in-between perspective of, 98; irony in, 9–10, 14, 16, 22, 97–98, 217, 222, 225; journalism of, 15, 222; Jungle Book, 19, 24, 70, 94, 118, 209, 215, 217–219, 221, 227–228, 233, 238, 242, 268, 271, 273, 277n27; Kim, 5–6, 10–12, 17, 22, 33, 69, 84–85, 94, 96–97, 99, 102–103, 124–125, 165, 168, 207, 218, 227, 271, 283; “King’s Ankus,” 24–25; knowability, as trope in, 141, 154, 158; Letters of Marque, 11, 15, 17, 22, 273; “Letting

index

in the Jungle,” 223; “Lispeth,” 33, 90–100, 104, 117; loss in, 156, 221; “Madness of Private Ortheris,” 33, 156–157; Man Who Would Be King, 149; mimicking stance in, 22; “Miracle of Purun Bhagat,” 228, 262; mobility as theme in, 18, 118, 126; mocking of spatial limits in, 141; narrative framing in, 215; narrative strategy of, 15, 140; narrator and narrative wandering in, 17, 117; other Anglo-Indians’ annoyance with, 48; partitioned self, 11; “Phantom Rickshaw,” 41, 157; “Pig,” 104, 227, 234; Plain Tales from the Hills, 85, 94, 96, 99, 102, 104, 124, 128; Puck of Pook’s Hill, 213, 226; “Rikkitikki-tavi,” 32, 70–74, 183, 218, 234, 246; Road in, 17–18, 81, 273, 283; as satirist, 4, 11, 33, 83, 100; as “savage” outsider, 22, 95, 138, 143, 152, 246; scandal in, 85, 90, 96, 101, 105; Second Jungle Book, 72, 228; Something of Myself, 40n61; spatial poetics of, 83; “Spring Running,” 271; “Tale of Two Cities,” 106; “Three Musketeers,” 136n38; tonal shifts in, 17, 20; tragicomic vision in, 148; transgression in, 11; trickster figure in, 15; “Undertakers,” 229n16. See also Creighton, Colonel; Hurree Babu; Kimball O’Hara (Kim); Lispeth; Lurgan Sahib; Mowgli; Peroo; Shere Khan; Strickland, Colonel Kirby, Kathleen, 26 Kodaikanal, 108n16 Kumaon (Himalayan foothills region), 24, 238, 257, 261, 267 Lacan, Jacques, 19–20, 22–23, 131, 252, 263

index

Lahore, 127, 130, 155 lama: character in Kim, 81, 92, 124–130 Lawrence, Henry, 87, 94, 146 Lawrence, John, 94 Leask, Nigel, 39n50 Lefebvre, Henri, 27, 116; Production of Space, 27 Levine, Philippa, 198 liminal, liminality: of colonial spaces, 5, 24, 29, 33, 43n106, 167, 183, 190–191, 270 Linlithgow, Viceroy Lord, 243 Lispeth: character in Kipling, 92–94, 97–99, 104, 125–126, 128–130; inbetween status of, 98 location: concept of, 9; politics of, 9, 26 Lock Hospital, 168, 175. See also prostitute, prostitution; venereal disease London, nineteenth-century, 15, 90, 121, 143, 282; as imperial center, 157; Kipling’s criticism of, 221; surreal, 157; textualized, 155 Low, Gail Ching-Liang, 44n116 loyalty, disloyalty: colonial dynamic regarding Mutiny, 59, 85, 96, 120, 164–165, 182, 195 Lucknow, colonial, 4, 122, 126, 194 Lurgan Sahib: hybrid character in Kim, 85, 124–125, 128 Lytton, Viceroy, 170–171 Macaulay, Thomas B., 7 MacKenzie, John, 251 madness: as colonial concept, 63, 68, 96, 164, 179, 182, 194; as panic, 252; and reason, 164. See also Mutiny magic: theme in Kipling, 117–118 Mahbub Ali: character in Kipling, 17, 124 Mangal Pandey, 172 Mani, Lata, 93, 193

311

map-making, and surveying, 29, 98, 125, 141 Markham, C. R., 55, 59, 64 masculinity: colonial, 112, 129, 131, 190, 192–193, 195; English, 23; and hunting, 235; sport, 233. See also Sinha, Mrinalini Masters, John, 114, 131–132 McBratney, John, 12, 19, 21, 28, 94, 213, 218, 220 media: role of, in Imperial Assemblage, 171 medical topography and topographers, 34, 163–199; defined, 199n4; trope in Steel, 181, 197–198 Meerut, 172, 182 Memoirs of a Griffin, or A Cadet’s First Year in India [anon.], 48 Metcalf, Thomas, 39n56, 216 military settlement, 26. See also cantonment Military Topography, Department of, 163 mimicry: colonial, 5, 18, 21–22, 23, 93, 138, 144, 169; of Mowgli, 226 mirror stage, in Lacan, 19 missionaries: British, and Christian mission space, 95–99, 128. See also Christianity Mitchell, Nora, 108n16 Mitchell, Timothy, 26, 30–31, 139, 250, 262–263 Mitchell, W. J. T., 28–29, 31, 250, 260 Mitter, Partha, 50–51 mixed-race population of India, 6. See also Eurasian; half-caste modern, modernity: colonial sense of, 2, 8, 139, 141, 147, 149, 157, 221, 255, 263; state apparatus, 100 Mohanty, S. P., 168 monuments, 48, 61 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 5, 93 Morris, Jan, 176 mountains. See hills Mowgli: character in Kipling, 12, 22,

312

34, 94, 97, 105, 212, 230n26, 238–240, 245, 251, 256, 269–274, 281n125; as distinct from villagers, 225; duality of, 220; and duty to British Raj, 217; and jungle law, 219, 223; and Kim O’Hara, 218; and mimicry, 226; mix of wildness and civility in, 222; and remembrance of jungle, 219; return to human world, 228; sense of loss in, 273; trampling of village, 224; as “translated man,” 221 Mughal rule, 16, 120, 178, 186, 193–197; British identification with, 194; enfeebled image of, in Mutiny novel, 195; as feminized, 187; iconography of, 189; romanticization of, 170 Muir, John, 242 Mulvey, Laura, 150 museum: colonial, 30, 96; Lahore museum, 127, 130 Mutiny, 3–4, 9, 33, 47, 57, 59, 62, 64– 65, 70, 88, 93, 99, 122, 146, 164– 165, 168–169, 170–173, 232, 234, 238; aftermath of, 184; as backdrop for romantic plot (in Steel), 178; as contagious illness and madness, 169, 171, 182; as “madness,” 63, 68, 164, 179, 182, 194; Mutiny veteran in Kim, 125; and prostitute’s role in signaling, 179– 180; sepoys in, 165; as watershed event for British, 177. See also First War of Independence; Steel, Flora Annie Mutiny novel sub-genre, 35, 175–176, 191, 195; Mutiny fiction, 69 Nana Sahib, 65 Nandy, Ashis, 44n116, 218, 227 narrative, narration, 8; Anglo-Indian, 260; of colonial adventure,

index

74; modernist, 260; of spatial inhabitance, 25, 197. See also Anglo-Indian; Corbett, Jim; Kipling, Rudyard nationalism, Indian, 167 Native lines, 123 Native town, 4, 167 native-born, 72, 100; defined, 36n10 nature, colonial concept of, 88–89, 91, 215 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 133n6 noble savage, concept of, 93, 96, 225 nomadism, colonial desire for, 12 Northwest Frontier, 170 Oldenberg, Veena Talwar, 4, 122 Ooty, 90. See also hill station oriental: Burke’s treatment of, in sublime, 51 oriental romance: as genre, 14. See also Southey, Robert orientalism: as concept, 26, 54 orientalist, 1, 13; images, 52, 54, 282 Orwell, George, 112, 266–267 out of bounds: colonial concept and injunction, 15, 33, 56, 60, 123, 260 Padamsee, Alex, 189, 194 Pandey, Gyanendra, 35 Parks, Fanny, 53, 63; Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, 63 parody: in Kipling, Rudyard, 140, 142, 151 pastoralism: versus industrialism, 34, 274. See also Edenic; romance, romanticism Paxton, Nancy, 68–69, 176, 187 Peroo: hybrid character in Kipling, 34, 207–218 Philip, Kavita, 19 photography, 31, 68, 149, 164, 177, 249–250, 256 picturesque, 2, 12, 14, 31, 50–52, 61–63, 67–68, 195, 264

index

place: and space, 9, 24–25. See also space; spatial, spatiality plains: contrasted with hills, 20, 130; of India, 4, 8, 60, 88–89, 112, 119, 127 plantations, 48, 257; English planter, as colonial fixture, 71 Poe, Edgar Allan, 139 police: colonial Calcutta, 151–153; Indian Police, 259 Poona, 171 postcolonial: conflicted idiom of, 34; spatiality, 25; writers, 9 Prakash, Gyan, 211 Pratt, Mary Louise, 264 predation, as theme, 102, 253. See also Corbett, Jim Princely States, Native, 15–16 Procida, Mary, 234 prostitute, prostitution, 49, 86, 149–150, 167–168, 174–175, 182, 184, 190, 198, 282; registration of, 175–176, 179 Public Works Department (PWD), 57–58, 60, 215, 240–241 Punjab Style of governance, 94, 227–228 Puri, 117, 119 race: in colonial India, 6, 18, 21, 24, 69, 72, 83, 93, 97, 103, 115, 148, 154, 175, 177, 198, 201n25, 252; entwined with space, 20 Radcliffe, Ann, 14 railways, 2, 48, 120, 165, 170, 173; railway station, 4, 48, 81; railway travel, 215 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 193 Rajput, 7, 11 Rajputana, 1, 7, 24, 258, 274 Ramayana, 210, 214; Ram and Sita in forest, 262 Rani of Jhansi, 68–69 Rao, Raja, 10

313

rape: colonialist trope following Mutiny, 69. See also Sharpe, Jenny reason: European concept of, 72; reason-madness binary, 70 Red Fort, 195–196 Reede, Hendrik van, 67 representation: Anglo-Indian, 269–270; colonial, 24, 30, 61, 64, 97, 125, 149, 189, 260, 283; and materiality, 8; modern, 149, 262; of space, 61, 88, 177. See also geography, British-Indian; space; spatial, spatiality; territorial rights reterritorialization, 20. See also territorial rights rhetoric, colonialist, 16, 153, 283 Richards, Private Frank, 132 Richards, Thomas, 236 road: as motif in Kipling, 17–18, 81, 273, 283; roads in colonial India, 92, 173, 257 Robinson Crusoe: as model for colonial image, 73 romance, romanticism: colonial, 9–10, 30, 51–53, 58, 63, 68, 82–83, 91, 93, 177, 207, 225, 236, 242, 247, 249, 253, 261–262; of hunt, 255; romantic novel, 47 Rose, Gillian, 26, 30–31, 44n116 Roy, Arundhati, 10 Roy, Parama, 18, 36n17 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (1863), 168 Royal Geographical Society, 82 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: and romanticism, 52 ruins: as colonial motif, 16–17, 82 rumor, 88; function of in Mutiny, 59, 172–174, 180; transcending time and place, 172 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 218; Midnight’s Children, 34

314

Ruskin, John, 32, 51, 66–68, 82–84; on Indian Rebellion, 107n7 Russell, William Howard, 195 Rutherford, Andrew, 84 Sahiba: character in Kipling, 125, 128 Said, Edward, 54, 68; Culture and Imperialism, 25; home and homelessness in, 26; Orientalism, 26 Sanitary Commissions, 164 sanitation, colonial, 163 savage: as concept in Kipling, 95, 138, 140, 143, 145, 152 Schama, Simon, 66, 83 Scotland, eighteenth-century, 91 Scott, Nora, 87, 262–264 Scriver, Peter, 7 self-exhibition: in Walter Benjamin, 27. See also exhibition: exhibitionary complex servants, 49, 87. See also ayah Sharpe, Jenny, 178, 185, 193 Shenstone, William, 67 Sher Shah: Mughal king, 65 Shere Khan: tiger character in Kipling, 219–221, 251, 269–272 shikar, 55, 73, 102, 105, 232, 234–236, 243–244, 253, 257, 270, 274. See also hunt, hunter, hunting Shivelbusch, Wolfgang, 215 Simla, 48, 84–86, 88–89, 95, 100–107, 115, 116, 118, 124–125, 128, 157, 283. See also hill station; hills Sinha, Mrinalini, 70, 275n11 Smiles, Samuel, 165 Soja, Edward, 27 Southey, Robert, 14 space: colonial, 8, 19, 86, 131, 167; and commerce, 140; diminution of, 215; domesticity of, 183, 185, 187, 191–192, 197, 268; empirical notions of, 9; and identity, 67; Indian, in Kipling, 19; literary

index

depiction of, 8; literary (narrative) space, 28, 260–261; male-centered depiction of, 129; and place, 8, 25; reconstitution of, 120; and time, 28, 30, 260; transgression of, 35, 107. See also geography, BritishIndian; representation; spatial, spatiality; territorial rights spatial, spatiality: of body politic, 99, 139; boundaries of, 12, 29, 140, 149; of city, 155; colonial, 8, 25, 29, 125, 185, 260, 264, 282; compression of, 2; consciousness of, in Corbett, 268; contradictory idiom of, 34; contradictory notions of, 91; disjunctions and dislocations, in Anglo-Indian culture, 91, 152; and domesticity, 49, 187; English space, 157; European logic of, 65; fracture of, in Anglo-Indian narrative, 283; “fuzzy” space, 70; gendered, 188; and health, 163–164, 167–176, 180–184, 190–192, 196–198; iconography of, 179; interstices of, 27; and masculinity, 188; materiality of, 49; medicalspatial policy, 164; and narrative time, 269; and power, 27; reordering of cultural spaces, 213; retransformation of, 2; of social life, 27; social spaces, 20; spatial idioms, 34; spatial poetics, 83; spatial representations, 64; spatial textures, 27; as split, 107; textuality of, 282; textual-spatial nexus, 100; virtuous space, 64, 175; and words, 250–251. See also geography, British-Indian; representation; space; territorial rights Stallybrass, Peter, 99, 114, 149. See also White, Allon Stebbing, E. P., 115, 243–244, 257 Steel, Flora Annie, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 33, 99,

index

163, 176–199, 232; Anglo-Indian outlook (sensibility) of, 3, 191–192; bazaar gossip function in, 180; bungalow verandah in, 183–185; Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 177; countering colonial myth, 190, 192; disguise of Tiddu character in, 181; disguises of women characters in, 187; domestic space in, 185–187; domesticity in, 187; gendered spaces in, 188, 192; historical veracity in, 188, 190; illness as trope in, 180, 196; and imperial plot revision, 192; In the Garden of Fidelity (autobiography), 177; India (guidebook), 189; malefemale role-switching in, 198; medical topography trope in, 181, 197, 199; Mughal iconography in, 186, 189, 193–196; Mutiny as madness and contagion in, 182; narrative compared to other works, 181, 183; narrative logic of, 179, 182; narrative space of, 197; On the Face of the Waters, 7, 33, 166, 177; as popular AngloIndian author, 177; and postMutiny British recriminations, 190; prostitute’s role signaling rebellion in, 179; semiotics of colonial distress in, 167; spatial iconography in, 179; and uncanny, 191; vision, metaphors of, in, 185, 190; woman-centered narrative of, 193; women (English [Kate] vs. Indian [Tara]) in, 193; and women’s changing roles in, 184, 186, 188–189, 190, 193, 198; zenana as space in, 181 Stoler, Ann Laura, 49, 69, 167–168 Strickland, Colonel: character in Kipling, 33, 102–106, 115, 126; as Eurasian, 105–106

315

subaltern agency, 32 Subaltern Studies Collective, 32 subjectivity, modern European, 31 sublime, 13, 50–51, 72, 253, 261, 273; Anglo-Indian, 273–274. See also Burke, Edmund Suleri, Sara, 13, 63–64, 94, 197 Sullivan, Zohreh T., 124 Sultana, “India’s Robin Hood,” in Corbett, 258, 261, 264, 266 Sutlej River Bridge, 216 syncretism: of India, 97, 213, 215, 217 taxidermy, 156–157, 236 Tennyson, Alfred Lord: “Defence of Lucknow,” 201n26; “Lady of Shalott,” 262 territorial rights, 265–266; bicultural territoriality, 268; territorial sensibility, 267; territoriality, territorialization, 167, 260, 264. See also geography, British-Indian; representation; space; spatial, spatiality theatricality: colonial trope of, 24, 106, 157, 215 theodolite, 231n33 Thomson, James, 151, 155 tiger, man-eating, 24, 34, 233, 244, 251– 252, 260, 264, 266, 274; death of, in Corbett and Kipling, 272; defined, 241; image of in Steel, 183; in Kipling, 269–272; mobility and territory of, 264; territorial rights of, 265 tiger-hunting memoir, 9, 47 Tilt, Edward J., 169 time: acceleration of, 2; homogeneous empty time in Walter Benjamin, 28; and space, 26, 28, 30, 145, 260, 269; temporality of text, 28, 260 Tipu Sultan, 54; tomb of, 64–65 Tod, Colonel James, 16 Todas: hill tribe, 59, 91, 110n48

316

Todd, W. Hogarth, 240, 245 Transgression: as theme, 11, 35, 107, 182. See also space Trevelyan, George Otto, 5, 9, 46–47, 90, 121, 172–173; Competition Wallah, 254 Twain, Mark, 11 Tytler, Harriet, 32, 62–63, 73, 170–171, 198, 219, 234. See also Mutiny uncanny, uncanniness, 26, 140, 143, 145–147, 149, 160n44, 171, 173, 191, 213, 264 urbanism, European, 33, 87, 142 Varanasi, 118 venereal disease, 132, 168, 175, 198 veranda, 22, 27, 49, 166–167, 172, 183– 185, 191, 195, 242, 267–268; as in-between, liminal space, 184, 190–191 Vicinus, Martha, 69 Victoria, Queen: as Empress of India, 4, 120 Victoria Terminus: Bombay, 83 Vidler, Anthony, 26 virgin soil, trope of, 32, 49, 58, 65, 197 Viswanathan, Gauri, 44n116

index

Ward, Rowland, 236 Weber, Max, 213 White, Allon, 99, 114, 149. See also Stallybrass, Peter whiteness: as concept, 154 Williams, Raymond, 5, 282 Windham, William, 66 women: Anglo-Indian, 10; changing societal roles of, 184, 186; European, 69, 88–89, 92, 167, 185, 193, 197, 234–235; Indian, 4, 10, 89, 91, 167, 169, 181, 193, 197; memsahib, imperial, 24; Muslim, 193; “Native,” 49, 69; occlusion of women in colonial narrative, 34; and rape, as colonial trope, 69; and sport, 101–102, 235. See also Steel, Flora Annie Woolf, Leonard, 279n74 Wurgaft, Lewis, 2, 118, 146 Yeats-Brown, Francis, 57, 114 Younghusband, Francis, 81–82 zamindari system: in British India, 259 Zeenat Mahal: in Steel, 196 zenana, 181, 197, 203n64 zoo, colonial, 73

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alan Johnson is professor of English at Idaho State University. He teaches postcolonial literature, with an emphasis on India, his birthplace.

Production Notes for Johnson / Out of Bounds Series design by Leslie Fitch with text in Scala and display in Berthold Azkidenz Grotesk Composition by Terri Miyasato Jacket design by Julie Matsuo-Chun Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. Printed on 60 lb. House Opaque, 500 ppi