Race, Place And Bodily Difference David Arnold

Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India* Original Race, place Articles bodily difference 2004 in early nineteenth-century India Blackwell Oxford, Historical HISR © 0950-3471 May 0 1 2 77 00 Institute 2004 UK Research Publishing ofand Historical LtdResearch

David Arnold School of Oriental and African Studies, London

Abstract

Changing ideas of race, place and bodily difference played a crucial part in the way in which the British in India thought about themselves, and more especially about Indians, in the half-century leading up to the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857. But in seeking to make this case, this article aims to do more than merely illustrate the importance of ‘the body’ to the ideology and practice of nineteenthcentury colonialism in one of its principal domains. Without, I hope, invoking too crass and simplistic a binary divide, it seeks to restate an argument about colonialism as a site of profound (and physically-grounded) difference. Binary divisions and dichotomous ideas may have passed out of favour of late among historians, with a growing barrage of attacks on Edward Said and Orientalism.1 But even if Orientalism provides an unreliable guide to the complex heterogeneity of imperial history, there is an equal danger that, in reacting so strongly against ideas of ‘otherness’, historians may too readily overlook or unduly diminish the ways in which ideas of difference were mobilized, in ideology and in practice, in the service of an imperial power.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no small part of the European sense of ‘otherness’ with regard to India was grounded in place. Indeed, at times the power of place, particularly as manifested through the perceived influences of climate and disease, appeared almost overwhelming. Writing in the same broadly deterministic vein as Montesquieu and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, 2 authors like Robert Orme and Alexander Dow dwelt on the manner in which the extreme climate of India, its heat and humidity, coupled with * An earlier version of this article was presented as a lecture to the Anglo-American Conference of Historians on ‘The Body’ in July 2003. 1 E. W. Said, Orientalism (1978); cf. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600 –1850 (New Delhi, 1999); D. Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001); L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600 –1850 (2002); W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in EighteenthCentury India (2002). 2 A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 108 – 21. © Institute of Historical Research 2004. Historical Research, vol. 77, no. 196 (May 2004) Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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the natural abundance of its soil, had profoundly shaped the physical and moral condition of its people. Thus, Dow in 1770 declared that the ‘languor occasioned by the hot climate of India’ naturally inclined ‘the native to indolence and ease; and he thinks the evils of despotism less severe than the labour of being free’.3 The ‘seeds of despotism’, sown among the Hindus by ‘the nature of the climate and the fertility of the soil’, had been ‘reared to perfect growth by the Mahommedan faith’. The combination of nature and custom, Dow believed, reduced Hindus to a state of abject slavery, and accustomed ‘an indolent and ignorant race of men’ to the ‘simplicity of despotism’.4 All this ‘slavery’ and ‘languor’ existed, of course, in perceived contrast to the stimulus of the more barren soils and more temperate climate which had fuelled civilization and fed thoughts of freedom in the more northerly lands of Europe. Writing in the seventeen-sixties, Orme likewise observed that ‘Breathing in the softest of climates; having so few real wants; and receiving even the luxuries of other nations with so little labour, from the fertility of their own soil; the Indian must become the most effeminate inhabitant of the globe; and this is the very point at which we now see him’. 5 This scornful view of Indians in general, and Bengalis in particular, continued to find expression well into the middle of the nineteenth century, and never more so than in the uncompromising prose of Thomas Babington Macaulay. Writing in 1840, Macaulay (until recently a member of the governor-general’s supreme council in India) described Bengal’s virtues as a place of great natural abundance, with no other part of India possessing ‘such natural advantages both for agriculture and for commerce’. But, echoing Orme, he promptly added that the race by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft climate and accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe . . . Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. His favourite pursuits are sedentary. He shirks from bodily exertion . . . There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.6

Macaulay was only getting into his stride. The following year he returned to the charge, in words that have become notorious for their racial stereotyping: The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of 3 A. Dow, ‘A dissertation concerning the origin and nature of despotism in Hindostan’, in A. Dow, The History of Hindostan (3 vols., 1770), iii. vii. 4 Dow, pp. xx– xxi. 5 R. Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1782), cited in S. Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002), p. 85. 6 T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays (2 vols., 1907), ii. 502 – 3.

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bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance.7

But against this self-preening polemic of racial pride and denigration, we need to set the voluminous literature, appearing from the seventeennineties onwards, that emphasized the physical or, as it was commonly put, the constitutional frailty of Europeans when immersed in precisely that same Oriental ‘vapour bath’. William Tennant, a clergyman writing from Calcutta in 1796, stated that ‘the climate of almost every intratropical region is unfavourable to European constitutions. Those flat countries where moisture is combined with heat, are unexceptionally more injurious to health than such as are dry’.8 This stamped the climate of Bengal (like that of Dutch Batavia) as being ‘a severe trial to every European constitution’. Its effects were clearly marked on the bodies of its victims. Among European men a ‘sallow and livid complexion’ was ‘universal’, while among women (so often in this discourse the markers of both climatic and racial difference) ‘there is hardly a single female complexion in Bengal that retains the bloom of health. Beauty in every country is a fading flower’, Tennant continued; ‘here it is almost ephemeral’.9 In so insalubrious a climate there seemed little prospect that British men and women could for long survive in health, or reproduce themselves beyond one, or at most two, puny generations. As one doctor of the Bengal Medical Service put it, in seeking to explain why ‘white creoles’ could thrive on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion but not in India, ‘The enervating atmosphere of Bengal would dwarf a race of giants in three generations, if they lasted so long’.10 The searing rays of an overhead sun, the extremes and sudden variations of temperature, and the energy-sapping humidity were considered to act not just directly upon the European body but also to operate indirectly through the lethal miasmas generated by heat and moisture in abundant swamps and jungles.11 Here, it might seem, was painful testimony to the peculiar vulnerability of Europeans, their inability to adapt to a tropical climate (even through acclimatization and ‘seasoning’), and their inherent susceptibility to a host of deadly diseases. 7 Macaulay, p. 562. For an equally contemptuous view of Bengalis, by a Dutch admiral who visited Bengal in 1769 – 70, see J. S. Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies by J. S. Stavorinus (3 vols., 1st edn., 1798; 1969), i. 407–8; and for the impact and significance of such observations, see M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late 19th Century (Manchester, 1995), pp. 15–16. 8 W. Tennant, Indian Recreations (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1803), i. 76. 9 Tennant, pp. 78– 9. 10 F. J. Mouat, Rough Notes on a Trip to Reunion, the Mauritius and Ceylon (Calcutta, 1852), p. 62. 11 For medical topography in 19th-century India, see Harrison, Climates, chs. 2 – 3.

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But within the medical discourse of the time the supposed effects of climate were seldom understood in isolation – in terms of what tropical heat and humidity did to the European body alone – but by constant comparison with Indians. James Ranald Martin, one of the leading medical topographers of the period, was fond of quoting the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson to the effect that ‘all observation is suggested by comparison’,12 and the medical texts of early nineteenth-century India constitute an extended exercise in comparative physiology and pathology in which European and Indian bodies are constantly compared (despite the difficulty of obtaining Indian bodies for dissection).13 The main sites of institutional observation – the hospitals, jails and above all the army (which brought European and Indian soldiers under the scrutiny of a single medical corps) – facilitated this process of comparison and gave it a practical purpose and urgency.14 Thus James Annesley of the Madras Medical Service set out in 1825 to examine the ‘comparative effects of disease upon the constitutions of the Europeans and natives, of the same military class, subject to the same duties, and exposed to similar vicissitudes’.15 After a lengthy investigation, he concluded that Europeans and Indians were susceptible to different diseases: Indians suffered most from fevers and ulcers, while among Europeans dysentery and liver diseases were twenty to thirty times more common than among Indian soldiers. With respect to cholera, one of the most dreaded and widely prevalent diseases of the period, Indians were, Annesley believed, more likely than Europeans to die, ‘their powers of life being readily over-powered’.16 His contemporary, William Twining at Calcutta’s General Hospital, undertook a similar exercise in comparative pathology in 1832, concluding each chapter of his book with observations on ‘the modifications of disease to which the Natives of the country are liable’.17 He, too, pointed to a number of apparent differences in the incidence and impact of diseases (agreeing, for instance, that among Indians cholera was ‘usually a more rapid and more fatal disease than we find it in Europeans’), and he reported the existence of Indian ailments (such as nakra, ‘the nose disease’) seemingly unknown to European inhabitants of Bengal. 18 12 J. R. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, 1837), p. 75; J. R. Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1856), p. 2. 13 One doctor claimed that, because of the practice of cremation, ‘the body of the Hindoo is almost unattainable’ (R. Young, ‘On the inhabitants of Lower Bengal’, in Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (hereafter B.A.A.S.) (1851), p. 96). Others noted the strong Indian aversion to post-mortems. Nonetheless, medical reports relating to Indian soldiers, prisoners and hospital inmates show that a small number of autopsies were carried out. 14 For the main sites of colonial medicine in India, see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in 19th-Century India (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), ch. 2. 15 J. Annesley, Sketches of the Most Prevalent Diseases of India (1825), p. 251. 16 Annesley, pp. 128, 312. 17 W. Twining, Clinical Illustrations of the More Important Diseases of Bengal (Calcutta, 1832), p. xxii. 18 Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), pp. 515, 700 – 3.

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Different constitutions demanded different treatments. Indians, it was said, being constitutionally weaker, could not stand such ‘heroic’ measures as Europeans and accordingly (the metaphors of the battlefield invading the hospital ward) were more likely to succumb to the onslaught of disease. Twining noted that although fevers were very common among Bengalis of all classes, the frequent use of purgatives was less necessary than among Europeans. He had found ‘the constitution of the Natives of Bengal soon subdued by those febrile disorders which come on after fatigue and privations, in damp unhealthy situations, where the air is contaminated with malaria, and the water is bad’. Under such circumstances, ‘they sink rapidly into a very low state’.19 The heavy bloodletting widely deployed to arrest paroxysms in the ‘cold stage’ of intermittent fever had to be moderated in their case (the physician drawing a mere four to ten ounces of blood from a frail Indian rather than the twelve to sixteen ounces taken from a plethoric Englishman), and mercury (one of the mainstays of Western therapeutics) was to be avoided because Indians reputedly could not withstand its often alarming effects.20 Indians and Europeans might be exposed to the same climate, but its impact, and the response deemed appropriate to its bodily effects, was not necessarily the same. It is significant that this medical literature spoke primarily in terms of constitutional rather than racial differences. Skin colour was not here the main issue, although there were physicians, led by the naval surgeon James Johnson, with his elaborate theory of the ‘sympathy’ between the surface of the body and the functions of the liver (as a principal seat of disease), who argued that Indians’ skins made them naturally better able than Europeans to cope with the violent effects of tropical heat and humidity. 21 Twining, like many of his contemporaries, invoked J. F. Blumenbach’s classification of racial ‘types’ of sixty years earlier and readily identified Bengalis as ‘Caucasians’. Indeed, by contrast with Macaulay’s opinions quoted earlier, he described them in 1835 as a handsome race who ‘possess in common with the most distinguished inhabitants of Europe the Caucasian conformation of the head . . . Their features are regular and well formed, with an expression of mildness and intelligence’. Despite their relatively small, slight frame, he believed them capable of great powers of endurance. However, he continued to argue (following Johnson) that ‘The effect of different states of the functions of the skin, on the condition of internal organs in natives, appears not to be 19

Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), pp. 696 – 7. Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), p. 570; Annesley, pp. 318 –19. Indians, on the other hand, were said to be better able to survive the effects of injuries and surgical operations that were considered ‘too dangerous’ for Europeans ( J. Murray, On the Topography of Meerutt (Calcutta, 1839), pp. 48 – 9). 21 J. Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on European Constitutions (1813), pp. 144 – 5, 265, 421. 20

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regulated by exactly the same scale of sympathies, and the external and internal organs do not seem to exercise corresponding mutual influence to what exists in Europeans’.22 Whether this difference arose from their ‘habits of life’ or from ‘peculiarities of original conformation’, Twining was unable to say. 23 But as this passage suggests, many medical writers of the time saw the constitutions of Indians and Europeans as being shaped differently by cultural as much as by climatic influences. Early in the century, Johnson was one of those who argued that Indians followed a range of cultural practices which (whatever their original intentions) made them well adapted to the climate in which they lived. These included frequent bathing and the wearing of cool, loose clothing (neither of which Europeans were much given to at the time), as well as Indians’ ‘temperate’ abstention from the large quantities of meat and strong drink to which Europeans appeared to be so recklessly addicted.24 As J. R. Martin remarked forty years later, while Indians were clearly of Caucasian origin, their constitutions had for so long been influenced not just by the effects of climate, but also by religion and custom, that they had come to differ physically as well as morally from Europeans. ‘These general causes’, Martin concluded, ‘together with the premature development of the generative function, produce an excitability of the nervous system, [and] diminished volume, enervation, and relaxation of the muscular system as compared to Europeans’.25 If there was one cultural factor that seemed more than any other to affect constitutions, it was diet. Johnson observed in 1807 that it was ‘out of the question’ that a European, on his arrival in India, should ‘turn Hindoo, and live upon rice’, but ‘if he were to relax a little his passion for beef-steaks in the morning, a sumptuous dinner at seven in the evening, with a bottle of wine to crown the whole’, he would ‘not only avoid a few of those fashionable Oriental diseases, the liver complaint, bilious fever, &c., but enjoy the invaluable blessing of good health’. 26 The contrast, however, was repeatedly made not just between abstemious Indian and indulgent European diets, but, as physicians grew more aware of regional differences within India itself, between the rice diet of the supposedly ‘effeminate’ Bengalis and the wheat diet of the reputedly ‘martial’ inhabitants of northern India, especially the Rajputs, ‘a stronger and more hardy race’, as Twining described them.27 22 W. Twining, Clinical Illustrations of the Most Important Diseases of Bengal (2nd edn., 2 vols., Calcutta, 1835), ii. 419–20. 23 Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1835 edn.), p. 420. 24 Johnson, Influence, pp. 416 –50. 25 Martin, Influence, pp. 212–13. 26 J. Johnson, The Oriental Voyager (1807), p. 89. 27 Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1835 edn.), p. 418. A similar contrast between the diets and health of prisoners in north India and Bengal was made in J. Hutchinson, A Report on the Medical Management of the Native Jails (Calcutta, 1835), p. 7.

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It might be argued, as Mark Harrison has recently done, that this accumulating medical testimony amounted, from the imperial perspective, to a doctrine of pessimism, indicative of Europeans’ physical vulnerability and their consequent inability to survive and settle in India, especially if this view were compared with the belief, attributed to the previous century, that Europeans abroad were capable of fairly rapid acclimatization, even in the tropics.28 It is doubtful, however, that racial pessimism was really the dominant doctrine drawn from this extended physiological and pathological comparison, and for three main reasons. First, although it is easy to identify climatic determinism in the medical, as in the philosophical, works of the period, in practice the despotism of nature appeared far from absolute. It was the task of medical practitioners, armed with their accumulating topographical knowledge, to evade the malevolent effects of place and climate by identifying those locations which would, by virtue of their elevation, aspect or freedom from ‘rank’ vegetation, provide a safe site for a barrack or jail. Even if human constitutions were not easily amended, environments could be substantially modified, as by draining marshes or clearing the jungles in which lethal miasmas lurked.29 The coming of the railways (obviating the need for long European troop marches) and the slow growth of sanitary science seemed further to diminish the pathological power of place and to free Europeans, at least, from the tyranny of the tropics. In that sense, colonial medicine seemed ultimately to endorse the view that the burden of climate weighed more heavily upon Indians than Europeans. Second, the medical discourse of the period was as much about class as race, about the bodies of rank-and-file soldiers rather than those of officers and civil servants. In the army, lower-class Europeans were seen to be more vulnerable to cholera than were their officers, just as poor Indians were thought to be.30 High mortality among European soldiers was attributed in no small part to their ‘degenerate’ lifestyle, to their ‘promiscuous’ relations with Indian women and especially their heavy drinking, rather than to climate as such. It might be argued that British soldiers were no more likely to give up their grog than Bengalis to relinquish their rice, but the ideal of greater temperance in the army was one to which many doctors subscribed.31 That British officers and civilians also died or were invalided out of India in considerable numbers did not so much provoke ‘pessimism’ about the possibility of European rule in the tropics as occasion ‘melancholy’ reflection on its high personal cost. 28

M. Harrison, ‘“The tender frame of man”: disease, climate and racial difference in India and the West Indies, 1760 –1860’, Bull. Hist. Medicine, lxx (1996), 90–2; Harrison, Climates, pp. 11– 20. 29 E.g., Martin, Medical Topography, pp. 86 – 91. 30 E.g., J. Jameson, Report on the Epidemick Cholera Morbus (Calcutta, 1820), pp. 110–12, 150 –1. 31 Martin, Influence, pp. 402–12; J. Ewart, A Digest of the Vital Statistics of the European and Native Armies in India (1859), pp. 2, 27–8, 127–8. © Institute of Historical Research 2004.

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And finally, while authorities like Martin certainly concluded that the climate and diseases of India prohibited, as if by nature, any thought of European colonization,32 that ambition had never been widely deemed appropriate for British rule in India and was never adopted as official policy. Indeed, the last thing the East India Company wanted was an influx of Europeans, especially of the lower classes, believing that they could never compete with Indian labour and would, by their rowdy behaviour and abusive conduct, undermine the respect (or at least the acquiescence) on which the authority of British rule over Indians was deemed ultimately to depend.33 Turning more directly from place to race, two general considerations need to be borne in mind. The first is that there was an undoubted growth in the British emphasis upon racial difference, and especially the perceived physical characteristics of race, over the course of the nineteenth century. The concept of race, presented as biological fact, became one of the governing ideas of the high imperial era, and sustained attempts were made in the name of science to give race an anatomical, even mathematical, precision. H. H. Risley, the civil servant who in the eighteen-nineties and nineteen-hundreds did most to promote physical anthropology in the service of the colonial state, has become notorious for the extent to which he sought to define and differentiate Indian society in biological terms. He held that ‘race sentiment’, ‘far from being a figment of the intolerant pride of the Brahman’, rested upon ‘a foundation of fact which scientific methods confirm’. He further believed that it had ‘shaped the intricate groupings of the caste system’ and had ‘preserved the Aryan type in comparative purity throughout Northern India’.34 In his avid pursuit of anthropometry and craniology, as the principal tools of a race-oriented ethnography, Risley strongly endorsed the view that ‘Physical characters are the best, in fact the only true tests of race, that is of real affinity; language, customs, etc., may help or give indications, but they are often misleading’.35 And one can see stark evidence of this belief in the physicality of race not just in colonial ethnography and the census reports, but also institutionally embedded in prisons and penal practice, in the identification and disciplining of the ‘criminal tribes’, and in recruitment to (and internal management of ) the 32

Martin, Medical Topography, p. 175. A. T. Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (1962), pp. 166– 9; D. Arnold, ‘White colonization and labour in 19th-century India’, Jour. Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xi (1983), 133 – 58. 34 H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (4 vols., Calcutta, 1891), i. i–ii. 35 H. H. Risley, The People of India (1908; 2nd edn., 1915), p. 6. For Risley’s impact, see C. Pinney, ‘Colonial anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’, in The Raj: India and the British, 1600 –1947, ed. C. A. Bayly (1990), pp. 252 – 8; C. Bates, ‘Race, caste and tribe in central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. P. Robb (Delhi, 1995), pp. 241– 9. 33

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Indian police and army. But when and how did this extreme biologizing and essentializing of race come about? How far can we import ideas about the ‘physical characters’ of race which were clearly dominant by the eighteen-nineties and nineteen-hundreds back into the earlier part of the century?36 Were such ideas already embedded in the earlier medical discourse of climates and constitutions, or was it, as many historians have suggested, only after 1857 (aided by the traumatic events of that year) 37 that race assumed so powerful and so physical a meaning? A second, related, issue takes us back from the late nineteenth to the late eighteenth century. In one fundamental sense the struggle for racial segregation and supremacy in India had been decided well before 1857, long before there had been much intellectualizing or scientific discourse around the question of race. From the seventeen-nineties, the East India Company began to exclude Indians and Eurasians from positions of authority in the bureaucracy and the army, and even from the social and ceremonial life that surrounded the governing elite. A critical step was the decision in 1791 to exclude Eurasians from the covenanted ranks of the civil service and army and to designate them ‘Natives of India’ rather than British subjects. Several factors lay behind this exclusionism. In part it was done to root out corruption in the administration, assuming (partisanly) that Indians were the principal source of that contagion; it was fostered, too, by a desire to concentrate the lion’s share of Company patronage in the hands of the court of directors in London. It has further been argued that the exclusion of Eurasians was motivated by a fear that a powerful creole class in India might, like its American counterparts, become a platform for anti-colonial sentiment; and that, in an age in which British nationhood was becoming more clearly defined, particularly in opposition to others, the existence of a growing class of ‘half-castes’ was perceived as a threat to Britons’ racial identity and moral reputation. 38 Whatever the precise reason, or reasons, behind this racial revolution, the investment of power in one self-defined racial group to the exclusion or strict subordination of others was already well established by the eighteentwenties and thirties. 36 Harrison, in Climates, p. 12, adopts from Robb (p. 1) a ‘working definition’ of race as ‘any essentialising of groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis’. Harrison adds that the term ‘race’ in the 19th century ‘often referred to a combination of biological and cultural traits but it was generally rooted in a supposed biological essence, which determined all other characteristics’. As the following discussion will show, this greatly overstates the importance of biological characteristics in the representation of race in India before the 1840s and 50s. 37 V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 47 – 8; D. A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-19th Century (Leicester, 1978), pp. 167, 184; Images of Race, ed. M. D. Biddiss (Leicester, 1979), p. 21. 38 P. Spear, The Nabobs: a Study of the Social Life of the English in 18th-Century India (1932; 2nd edn., 1963), pp. 137 – 9; Embree, pp. 167 – 9, 264 – 5; C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773 –1833 (Richmond, 1996), ch. 4.

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This legal and administrative revolution was, moreover, supported, among Europeans in India, by a discourse of racial discrimination and abuse that identified a non-white skin with every kind of unsavoury physical and moral attribute. Macaulay’s verdict on Bengalis in the eighteen-forties was one of the more refined versions of this; but there were many less sophisticated expressions of similar sentiments, more often delivered verbally than put into print, addressed to, or declared about, Indians of all kinds. Among many sections of the European population in India by the eighteen-thirties Indians were habitually referred to as ‘black’ (usually accompanied by some other insulting epithet) and not uncommonly as ‘niggers’ (one indication, among several, of how the language and sentiments of ‘race’ in the Atlantic world were being echoed in South Asia).39 Although physical violence against Indians was officially frowned upon by the Company, and occasionally punished, 40 it was too entrenched to be exorcized, even had the political will existed to do so. But, because the British sense of national superiority had become so marked by the eighteen-thirties, it was possible to deploy a language and typology of race not so much to police a racial frontier between Britons and others as to differentiate among Indians themselves. From this supposedly secure and superior vantage point, Europeans presented themselves as an ideal physical and racial type which no Indian could match and adjudicated among Indians on the basis of their appearance as if at some eternal beauty contest. In the earlier discussion of constitutions, attention was drawn to the importance of institutional sites, especially with regard to the army, in the articulation of a discourse of physical difference between Europeans and Indians. With the extension of British power over most of South Asia by the eighteen-twenties (following wars against Mysore, the Marathas and the Gurkhas of Nepal), and given Europeans’ relative freedom to roam, the travelling gaze significantly augmented the institutional one. The political and cultural geography of India lent itself to a narrativization of place and race as travel through a diverse physical and ethnological landscape fed the European appetite for comparisons and contrasts. The alliance of a Romantically-inspired language of nature with an AngloIndian vocabulary, replete with such evocative topographical terms as jungles, topes, jheels and nullahs,41 gave a new expressiveness and specificity to the colonial sense of place and provided new spatial contexts for the understanding and representation of race.42 39

Kiernan, pp. 35, 44; T. Bacon, First Impressions and Studies from Nature in Hindostan (2 vols., 1837), ii. 64–5; H. Bevan, Thirty Years in India (2 vols., 1839), i. 89, 141. 40 E. Eden, Letters from India (2 vols., 1872), ii. 148–50; Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie, ed. J. G. A. Baird (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 165, 169. 41 See Hobson-Jobson, ed. H. Yule and A. C. Burnell (1866; 2nd edn., 1968), pp. 457, 470, 632, 934. 42 Notably R. Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824 – 5 (3rd edn., 3 vols., 1828); E. Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (3 vols., 1835). © Institute of Historical Research 2004.

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It was commonly assumed that in moving from Bengal (the dark skins of its inhabitants tribute to the tropic sun), the European traveller progressed towards the north-west where the cold winters (ignoring, for this purpose, the fierce heat of summer suns) left skins ‘light copper’ coloured or, better still, ‘wheaten’ (like their diets), and so closer to the European ideal.43 In these terms Indian men were allowed to be ‘handsome’ as well as ‘manly’, especially when, like most of the sepoys in the Bengal army, they came from northern India and not from Bengal itself.44 But in a situation in which ideas of race and gender were often mutually reinforcing (or equally debasing), it was often women (if young) who were singled out as having a near-European face or form, at least to the extent of resembling southern Europeans: even the most attractive of Indian women were seldom, in this cartography of colour, allowed to penetrate far into northern Europe. Thus, according to Captain Herbert in 1830 the ‘Hindustani beauty’ was, ‘in all that regards form and feature, . . . a Greek; only with a darker skin’.45 Surgeon John M’Cosh in 1837 denied that the Assamese were ‘a degenerate and weakly race, inferior even to the Bengalies’. Assamese women appeared to him ‘very fair indeed; fairer than any race I have seen in India’, having ‘a form and feature closely approaching the European’. They further found favour in his eyes as being free from ‘that artificial modesty practised by native ladies in other parts of India’. But there was a catch. The women of Assam may have been ‘acknowledged beautiful in any part of the world’, but ‘unfortunately’, M’Cosh added, ‘their morality is at a very low ebb’. 46 Richard Burton, a lieutenant in the Bombay army before he turned his ambitious eyes towards Mecca and the African lakes, observed in 1851 that high-caste women in Sind included ‘individuals very little darker than the Spaniards or the Portuguese’ (but it is necessary to know how little Burton thought of the Portuguese to understand the full significance of that remark!).47 Clearly regarding himself as a connoisseur in these matters, Burton described the Sindis (‘a semi-barbarous race’) as a ‘halfbreed between the Hindoo, one of the most imperfect, and the Persian, probably the most perfect specimen of the Caucasian type. His features are regular, and the general look of the head is good; the low forehead and lank hair of India are seldom met with in this province’. They also had (to his discerning eye) ‘handsome’ beards, a clear sign of a ‘masculine’ race, although they were not quite as good as the Persians’ and Afghans’. But, in this perpetual game of morality and corporality, the ‘native’ could 43 44 45

A. D[eane], A Tour through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823), pp. 12–15. Eden, i. 128; Baird, p. 22. J. D. Herbert, ‘Particulars of a visit to the Siccim Hills’, Gleanings in Science, xvi (1830),

122. 46

J. M’Cosh, Topography of Assam (Calcutta, 1837), pp. 21–2. R. F. Burton, Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), p. 416; cf. R. F. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), pp. 88–100. 47

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never win: in this case, the ‘dark complexion’ of the Sindi pointed him out, Burton alleged, ‘as an instance of arrested development’.48 In India, as in Europe, the term ‘race’ still commonly lacked the specificity it was later to acquire,49 and an author like Burton, or Sir John Malcolm in his Memoir of Central India in the eighteen-twenties, often used ‘race’ interchangeably with ‘tribe’ or ‘caste’. One of the commonest usages of the term ‘race’ was to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims (as Burton did in his account of the ‘races’ of Sind, although that work also detailed the manners, customs and traditions of many who would later be identified ethnographically in terms of ‘castes’ and ‘tribes’). Malcolm freely termed both Brahmins and Rajputs ‘races’, but allowed the Marathas, by virtue of their history and patriotism, to rise to the more honoured status of ‘nation’.50 In the Punjab, where many ‘tribes’, ‘races’ and religions mingled, the Sikhs hovered uneasily somewhere in between. 51 A further indication of the relatively indeterminate ideas of race that existed in early nineteenth-century India can be found in the use of the word ‘countenance’. It could be used (and was increasingly so) to describe the facial characteristics attributed to a particular race, but it was also used in a more personal way to describe the appearance, and hence character, of a particular individual. Thus Malcolm in the eighteen-twenties described the cultivated and devout Ahalya Bai, a Maratha princess, as having a ‘countenance’ which was ‘agreeable and expressive of that goodness which marked every action of her life’.52 But J. B. Fraser, in his excursion into the Himalayas a few years earlier, was struck by the apparent mixture of ‘Tartar’ and ‘Hindoo’ features among the local inhabitants. ‘The general cast of their countenance’, he remarked, ‘is Hindoo, but they seldom possess the softness and even intelligence that may be considered a marked characteristic of the Hindoo physiognomy’.53 J. D. Herbert, travelling in the eastern Himalayas a decade later, similarly commented on the Lepchas: The peculiarity of feature that marks this race is very striking. A broad, flat face; the nose little elevated, but with extended nostrils; the eyes small and set obliquely in the head . . . , a rather large mouth but with thin lips; and a great deficiency of beard; form the elements of a countenance, which, though it cannot, according to European notions, be pronounced handsome, is yet often, from the expression of intelligence and good humour that distinguishes it, more prepossessing than the regular features of the Hindustani.54 48

Burton, Sindh, p. 283. N. Hudson, ‘From “nation” to “race”: the origins of racial classification in 18th-century thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxix (1996), 247–64. 50 J. Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India (2nd edn., 2 vols., 1824), i. 43–4, 73–6. 51 J. D. Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs (1849), pp. 6–17. 52 Malcolm, i. 192. 53 J. B. Fraser, Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains (1820), p. 67. 54 Herbert, ‘Particulars’, p. 93. 49

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But, from this fairly indeterminate state, a more precise notion of race was beginning to emerge, stimulated by both internal and external developments. By the eighteen-thirties, as the interior of India became more accessible to Europeans, an increasingly explicit ‘racial’ contrast was being drawn between the Indians of the plains, who were seen broadly to conform to the Caucasian ‘type’ and whose ancestors were thought centuries earlier to have brought the Aryan or Indo-European languages into South Asia, and the ‘aboriginal’ or ‘tribal’ peoples of India who inhabited hills and forests, especially across central India. In this evolving representation of India’s ‘aboriginals’ several sets of antithetical ideas were brought together – the almost naked versus the fully clothed, hunting and shifting cultivation as against settled agriculture as the primary mode of subsistence, and the jungle-dweller as opposed to the denizen of the plains. That the ‘aboriginals’ were mostly understood to be jungle-dwellers aligned them with one of the most potent topographical (and, by implication, moral) concepts in the mental world of the colonizers, for the term was indicative of all that was deemed wild, uncivilized and uncouth. It was sometimes in the depiction of the ‘aboriginals’ that the most extreme language of race, especially the physicality of race, was employed, with the supposedly debased physical type of ‘the Negro’ (rather than that of the allegedly elevated ‘Caucasian’) as the principal guide. One anonymous British traveller in the early eighteen-twenties described Bengalis as an ‘inferior race of men’ – ‘small, slightly made, and very black’ – and contrasted them with north India sepoys whom he approvingly dubbed ‘tall, stout, handsome looking men’. But on visiting the Rajmahal hills on the western borders of Bengal he fell into paroxysms of disgust at the sight of the local ‘tribal’ inhabitants, whom he described as being ‘a short, thick-set, sturdy-built race, with the African nose and lip’.55 He became still more apoplectic when a few months later he encountered the Bhils of western India, describing them as ‘a short, thick-set people, with hideous countenances, flat noses, and thick lips, but far less handsome and finely formed men than the Africans; . . . they look stupid’. That left only one thing more to complete their condemnation: ‘Their women are even more hideous than the men.’ 56 But such abusive and physically explicit representations of India’s ‘aboriginals’ were not necessarily the norm. Major Bevan of the Madras army, who spent some time among the Bhils in 1817, was full of praise for their dexterity and fondness for hunting (being a keen huntsman himself ) and in the course of several pages about them made no reference to their physical appearance.57 Far from being models of racial 55 56 57

Sketches of India (4th edn., 1826), pp. 100 –1, 154. Sketches of India, pp. 257 – 8. Bevan, Thirty Years, i. 124 – 7.

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‘degeneration’, ‘aboriginals’ were sometimes represented in positive contrast to the Hindu population and, from their apparent freedom from caste and other social constraints and from their seeming closeness to nature, in a more romantic light. In an article on the ‘aboriginal races’ of central India in 1840, Lieutenant Tickell of the Bengal army, described their ‘different languages, manners, and origins’, but made little comment on their physical appearance. Among the Hos, the main subject of his ethnographic account, the men were ‘fine, powerful fellows, and while young, very handsome’. Ho women might go ‘about in a disgusting state of nudity’, but they were free of the ‘stupid shyness and false modesty thought proper among Hindoo women’. Some of the young Ho women, with their ‘open, happy countenances, snowy white teeth, and robust, upright figures’ even put him in mind (somewhat bizarrely) of ‘Swiss peasant girls’.58 Perhaps the crucial difference between these descriptions of India’s ‘aboriginals’ was that army officers like Bevan and Tickell knew India relatively well (Bevan was writing a memoir of his thirty years in India), while the anonymous author quoted earlier was new to India and writing a book expressly, as its sub-title indicated, for ‘fire-side travellers at home’ and so sought (at a time when issues of race and slavery were being hotly debated in Britain) to give his account of India’s inhabitants a more dramatic and seemingly relevant character. Alongside this increasingly differentiated internal landscape of race and place, colonial India was influenced by the development of ‘race science’ in Europe.59 By the eighteen-thirties the use of the term ‘Caucasian’ was fairly commonplace among educated Europeans in India, but there were increasing attempts to employ the rest of Blumenbach’s classificatory schema, and so to categorize other sections of the Indian population as ‘Mongolian’ (or more often ‘Tartar’), ‘Negro’ or ‘Malay’, or (more commonly) as some combination of these idealized racial ‘types’. 60 Ethnographers in India seemed to be in no doubt that there was a single human species from which any number of ‘mixed’ races had descended, especially in regions like the Himalayas where ‘Tartar’, ‘Caucasian’ and ‘aboriginal’ met and intermingled.61 There was, moreover, an ardent desire to demonstrate the worthiness of colonial science by meeting the growing metropolitan demand for detailed ethnographic information. With the circulation of an ethnological questionnaire by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841 (to which a number 58

Lt. Tickell, ‘Memoir on the Hodesum’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, ix (1840), 695, 784 – 5. N. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800 –1960 (1982); M. Banton, Racial Theories (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1998), ch. 3. 60 J. Briggs, ‘Report on the aboriginal tribes of India’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1850), pp. 169 – 76. For the ‘Oriental Negro’, see W. J. Crawfurd, ‘On the negro races of the Indian Archipelago and Pacific Islands’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1851), pp. 86 – 8. 61 R. Strachey, ‘On the physical geography of the provinces of Kumaon and Garhwal in the Himalaya Mountains, and of the adjoining parts of Tibet’, Jour. Royal Geographical Soc. of London, xxi (1851), 57 – 85, at pp. 80– 5. 59

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of informants in India responded),62 and the founding of the Ethnological Society of London in 1843 (‘formed for the purpose of inquiring into the distinguishing characteristics, physical and moral, of the varieties of Mankind’),63 colonial India became increasingly active in providing the kinds of anatomical data required in Europe, even to the extent of meeting its thirst for human skulls.64 At this point it may be helpful to turn to one individual, Brian Houghton Hodgson, who captures many of the complexities and contradictions of the ‘race’ idea in early nineteenth-century India, but whose important contribution has been largely ignored.65 Born in Cheshire in 1800, Hodgson joined the Bengal Civil Service in Calcutta in 1818.66 He almost immediately fell seriously ill, possibly from hepatitis, and thereafter, for the rest of his forty years in south Asia, regarded himself as a semi-invalid, whose life would be endangered by any lengthy stay in the plains. He secured a posting firstly in Kumaon in the Himalayan foothills and then soon after, in 1820, in Kathmandu, where for nearly a quarter of a century he was the assistant resident and then resident, the principal British representative in the kingdom of Nepal. There Hodgson formed a liaison with a Kashmiri Muslim woman, a relationship that lasted twenty years and from which two children – a boy and a girl – were born. Such interracial relationships had been common enough among the British Indian elite thirty years earlier, but they had decidedly passed out of fashion by the eighteen-thirties. Hodgson was well aware of this. He deplored the rising tide of racial abuse and discrimination in India and lamented the fate that his ‘mixed-race’ children were likely to suffer at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. Eventually he sent them off to his sister, in Holland, where they died shortly after. In Nepal Hodgson became a great collector: he assembled vast numbers of Buddhist manuscripts and did much to stimulate early Western interest in that religion. He also collected and described hundreds of Himalayan birds and mammals, and began to investigate the ethnology of the region, a study which he pursued with even greater vigour when, having been ousted from the residency, he found a second Himalayan home at Darjeeling in 1845.67 In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century the Himalayas were an important frontier of scientific knowledge 62

Young, pp. 95–7. Lorimer, p. 134. 64 For this and the connections with phrenology, see S. Kapila, ‘The making of colonial psychiatry, Bombay presidency, 1849–1940’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 2002), pp. 187–96. 65 Apart from T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), ch. 5. 66 The following account is taken from W. W. Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson (1896). 67 For Hodgson’s importance as an Orientalist and naturalist, see The Origin of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, 1820 –58, ed. D. Waterhouse (forthcoming). 63

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– in geography and geology, in botany, zoology and ethnology – and Hodgson made significant contributions to many of these fields. Primarily through the study of language and the compilation of extensive wordlists, he sought to establish that the ‘aboriginal’ populations of the Himalayas and a large part of peninsular India, were not ‘Aryans’ or ‘Caucasians’, but belonged to a different race, for whom he used the term ‘Tamulian’, and whom he believed to be unique to India (or perhaps remotely connected to the Mongolian ‘type’). They were the original inhabitants of India, he believed, until expelled by the ‘usurping Hindus’ and driven into the jungles and hills.68 In his belief that racial affinities were primarily discernable through language, Hodgson was following Sir William Jones, who in the seventeen-eighties had first established the shared linguistic origins of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin (and hence the existence of an Indo-European family of languages), and more especially the work of German philologists, commencing with Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 essay on the ‘language and wisdom of the Indians’. He was also well aware of the work of Blumenbach and of J. C. Prichard, the pioneering British ethnologist, whose work also drew heavily on philology for its understanding of race.69 In 1847 Hodgson circulated a paper on three ‘aboriginal’ tribes, the Kocch, Bodo and Dhimal, inhabiting the forests of the eastern Himalayan foothills, in which he focused primarily on their vocabularies and what these might indicate of their origins and level of civilization. Hodgson, a compulsive writer of marginalia, inscribed on the title page of this essay: ‘Their languages and mythology constitute the internal, true and only history of primitive races and are by far the best exponents of their real condition as thinking and acting beings’.70 (This was almost exactly the reverse of the position held half a century later by Risley and cited earlier). Further on Hodgson wrote in his continuing marginalia: the more I see of these primitive races the stronger becomes my conviction that there is no medium of research yielding such copious and accurate data as their languages. Their physical and mental condition is exactly portrayed in their speech and he who can analyse it and separate the foreign elements, has the key to the amount and sources of their civilization.71

As to bodily features, Hodgson remarked that ‘their physical aspect is of that oculant and vague stamp, which indicates rather than proves any thing; or rather, what it does prove, is general, not particular’.72 68 B. H. Hodgson, ‘A brief note on Indian ethnology’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, xviii (1849), 238–9. 69 Trautmann, ch. 5; J. C. Prichard, ‘On the relations of ethnology to other branches of knowledge’, in Race: the Origins of an Idea, 1760 –1850, ed. H. F. Augstein (Bristol, 1996), pp. 213– 39. 70 B. H. Hodgson, On the Aborigines of India: the Kocch, Bodo and Dhimal Tribes (Calcutta, 1847) (copy in London, Royal Asiatic Society, Hodgson Papers). 71 Hodgson, Aborigines, pp. ii–iii. 72 Hodgson, Aborigines, p. v.

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But, while Hodgson considered language to be the methodological and intellectual key to understanding race and its relationship to civilization, he did not confine his attention to language alone, nor even to those cultural practices and beliefs on which language seemed to shed such light. A diligent ecologist, before such a term existed, Hodgson’s account of the tribes and races of the Himalayas was deeply embedded in an understanding of the topography of the region. His description of people was often woven seamlessly into an account of the topographical divisions and natural history of the Himalayas, and over very extended periods of time, in his view, race became adapted to the peculiarities of place. 73 The most striking illustration of this for Hodgson lay in the Terai, the tract of swamp and forest at the foot of the Himalayas, rendered deadly for six months of the year by malaria. The Terai, he observed in his 1847 essay, ‘is malarious to an extent which no human beings can endure, save the remarkable [aboriginal] races which for ages have made it their dwelling place’. They ‘not only live but thrive in [this region]’, he reported, ‘exhibiting no symptoms whatever of that dreadful stricken aspect of countenance and form which marks the victim of malaria’. He considered the same immunity to be characteristic of all the ‘aboriginal’ peoples of India. ‘This single fact’, he wrote, ‘is to my mind demonstration that the Tamulians have tenanted the wilds they now dwell in for many centuries, probably 30 [that is, since the supposed date of the Aryan invasions], because a very great lapse of time could alone work so wonderful an effect upon the human frame’.74 Despite the primacy that Hodgson gave to language, he did in fact provide material for a more anatomical understanding of race, assuming, no doubt, that it would support his philological observations. At the end of his 1847 tract, he gave an extended physical description of the Kocch tribe and the anatomical measurements of a young Bodo male. Despite what otherwise appears as a sympathetic approach to India’s ‘tribals’, Hodgson juxtaposed his account of the ‘physical type’ of the Tamulian with the customary idealization of the ‘Caucasian type’ in ways that aligned him emphatically with the latter. ‘In the Arian [Aryan] form’, he wrote, there is height, symmetry, lightness and flexibility: in the Arian face, an oval contour with ample forehead and moderate jaws and mouth; a round chin, perpendicular with the forehead; a regular set of distinct and fine features; a well raised and unexpanded nose . . . , a well sized and finely opened eye . . . ; no want of eye-brow, eye-lash or beard; and lastly, a clear brunet complexion, often not darker than that of the most southern Europeans.75 73 B. H. Hodgson, ‘On the aborigines of the sub-Himalayas’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xvi (1847), 1235 – 44. 74 Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 148. Hodgson was not alone in making this observation, cf. M’Cosh, p. 101, on the immunity to malaria among the Garos of Assam. 75 Hodgson, Aborigines, pp. 149 – 50.

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In the Kocch Tamulian, by contrast, there was less height, less symmetry, more dumpiness and flesh; in the Tamulian face, . . . less perpendicularity in the features to the front, occasioned not so much by the defect of forehead or chin, as by excess of jaws and mouth; a larger proportion of face to head, and less roundness of the latter; a broader, flatter face with features less symmetrical but perhaps more expressive, at least of individuality; a shorter wider nose, often clubbed at the end and furnished with wide nostrils, eyes less and less fully opened . . . ears larger; lips thicker; beard deficient . . .76

In this extended description Hodgson repeatedly privileged the perceived normality and beauty of the ‘Caucasian type’ over the supposedly ‘degenerate’ form and ‘misshapen’ features of the non-Aryan Tamulian. As to skin colour, the Tamulians varied widely, Hodgson believed, further confirming his view of the unreliability of mere physical appearance as a true guide to racial identity. Some were little darker than the Aryans, or, in the Himalayan region, seemed close to the yellow hue of the ‘Mongolian type’, while others, among the ‘tribals’ of the plains, could be ‘nearly as black as negros’.77 This was not all. In 1844 Hodgson presented to the British Museum a collection of ninety human skulls from Nepal. It seems extraordinary that Hodgson could have amassed such a collection: Nepal was an independent state, deeply suspicious of Europeans; cremation was widely practised there as in India. The skulls were taken up for examination by Richard Owen, professor of comparative anatomy and the man in charge of the British Museum’s natural history collection. In his account of the different groups of skulls, carefully labelled by Hodgson according to their ‘tribe’ or ‘race’, Owen duly noted that many were of the ‘IndoEuropean’ type while others approached the ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Ethiopian’ type; but, most strikingly, skulls from the same ethnic group showed a great diversity of form. Thus, one Lepcha skull exhibited the ‘beautiful Indo-European form’ while another from the same tribe ‘closely resemble[d] the Australo-Papuan type of cranium’. Indeed, Owen confessed that, with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines, without labels or other kinds of supplementary evidence it was difficult to identify any race on the basis of skulls alone.78 Hodgson’s scepticism about interpreting race solely from physical features might, thus, seem to be confirmed by Owen’s cautious analysis. Nevertheless, it should be clear from his extensive writing about India’s ‘aborigines’ in the late eighteen-forties, as from Max Müller’s address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford in 1847,79 76

Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 150. Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 150. R. Owen, ‘Report on a series of skulls of various tribes of mankind inhabiting Nepal’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1859), pp. 95–103. 79 M. Müller, ‘On the relation of the Bengali to the Arian and aboriginal languages of India’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1847), pp. 347 – 9. 77 78

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that the discussion of race as it concerned India was assuming a far more explicitly physical emphasis in the eighteen-forties than it had even a decade or two earlier. The supposedly biological differences between India’s different racial ‘types’ were increasingly foregrounded and even the idea of a centuries-old ‘race war’ between Aryans and ‘aborigines’ was well established before the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Writers like W. W. Hunter, who in the eighteen-sixties developed these ideas of racial identity and conflict and (following the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859) gave them a new evolutionary twist, were greatly indebted to Hodgson’s earlier work.80 If there was one moment when the idea of race as a biological ‘fact’ came of age in India, it was surely in the late eighteen-forties, even if it was to be two or three decades before that idea became fully embodied in official discourse. It is impossible, though, to leave Hodgson without one further observation. Among his many other engagements with the complex and rapidly evolving world of race, Hodgson was a leading advocate for the European colonization of the ‘temperate’ regions of Kashmir, Nepal and Sikkim. Writing in 1856, he presented the security of British rule (in the face of a perceived Russian threat) as the principal reason for this; but it was also that the soil, climate and salubriousness of the hills seemed to him to cry out for white settlement, if this seemingly under-populated region were ever to realize its full potential. According to Hodgson, the ‘loyal hearts and stalwart bodies of Saxon mould’ were what the region required. Neither Tamulian ‘aboriginals’ nor Hindu ‘Arians’ were deemed to have ‘the skill and energy’ needed to carve out India’s White Highlands from the Himalayas.81 Over the course of the early nineteenth century there was a marked shift in emphasis from place to race in the colonial understanding of Europeans in India and of Indians themselves. In the British perception, Indians were clearly not an undifferentiated ‘other’, and indeed much of the discussion of race in the colonial context revolved around perceived racial differences within the indigenous population rather than between Europeans and Indians. But this reflects a deeper dichotomy – the extent 80

S. Bayly, in Caste, Society and Politics in India from the 18th Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 126–38, stresses Hunter’s importance through his Annals of Rural Bengal (1868), and seems to suggest that ‘race theory’ only became of major importance in India after 1857 and after the Darwinian revolution. But, as Hunter himself pointed out in Hodgson, ch. 12, his own ideas were greatly influenced by Hodgson’s work of the late 1840s. In an earlier essay, ‘Caste and “race” in the colonial ethnography of India’ (in Robb, pp. 165–218), Bayly gives a more nuanced account of the rise of race ideas in India, but still assigns them mainly to the period following the Santhal Rebellion of 1855 and makes no mention of Hodgson’s earlier contribution. 81 B. H. Hodgson, ‘On the colonization of the Himalaya by Europeans’ (1856), repr. in B. H. Hodgson, Essays on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of Nepal and Tibet (1874), pt. 2, pp. 83 – 9. © Institute of Historical Research 2004.

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to which the British already by the eighteen-twenties and thirties saw themselves as a race apart, and so able to observe, from a seemingly secure and privileged position, the racial differences that characterized a highly variegated indigenous population. Some Indians might be deemed to have European-like complexions or physiques, they might even be regarded as fellow ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Aryans’, but that did not signify a shared ethnic identity in the present nor a common social and political destiny in the future.82 Concepts of race were gradually becoming detached from their earlier environmentalist and linguistic moorings, and from a comparative discussion of the differential effects of India’s climate on European and Indian ‘constitutions’. Race, by the eighteen-forties and fifties, was becoming a more self-sufficient, self-explanatory idea, grounded in ideas of racial ‘types’ and their attendant physical and moral attributes. In these respects, the evolution of racial thought in India was not very different from elsewhere, 83 although notions of place and climate, perhaps because they were held to be such important explanations of difference in colonial or semi-colonial situations, remained remarkably tenacious.84 This article has only attempted to discuss British ideas of place and race, but there is, of course, an Indian side to all this. Indians, too, had their ideas of place (as manifested, for example, in their medicine, visual arts and devotional literature) and so, too, of race. Many Indians also saw their bodies as physically as well as culturally distinct from Europeans’. It was not just that Europeans were topi-wallahs – wearing hats instead of turbans – but that eating beef and swilling beer, coming from a cold climate and never washing, they were clearly a race apart. A sense of racial difference, even if it was not loaded with so many pseudo-scientific attributes, was much in evidence in India (and Nepal) by the eighteen-thirties and forties. If 1857 was a war of race (one explanation, at least, for its singular ferocity), it was because that intensity of racial feeling was felt on both sides of a deeply divided domain.

82

J. Leopold, ‘The Aryan theory of race’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., vii (1970), 271. Biddiss, pp. 12–16. 84 Cf. M. A. Stewart, ‘“Let us begin with the weather”: climate, race, and cultural distinctiveness in the American South’, in Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustafsson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 240 – 56. 83

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