“This splendid book uses ideas about food, fasting and famine to explore the Indian colonial sensorium in a truly original manner. It should be of great interest to historians of colonialism, of cuisine and of the affective practices through which the colony–and the post-colony–produce their effects. It is beautifully and forcefully written, thus itself a sensory bonus for the reader.”–Arjun Appadurai, New York University

Parama Roy is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India and an editor of States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia.

Alimentary Tracts

APPETITES, AVERSIONS, AND THE POSTCOLONIALBy Parama Roy

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4802-3

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………….ixIntroduction……………………………………………………….11. Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857…………………312. Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity………………………753. Dearth: Figures of Famine…………………………………………1164. Appetite: Spices Redux……………………………………………154Remains: A Coda…………………………………………………….191Notes……………………………………………………………..195Select Bibliography…………………………………………………241Index……………………………………………………………..269

Chapter One

Disgust

FOOD, FILTH, AND ANGLO-INDIAN FLESH IN 1857

Introduction: Traumas of the Mouth

Perhaps there are few revolutions and rebellions in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth that are not subtended by a belly politics-as witness the French revolution of 1789, the Taiping rebellion, and the food riots in late eighteenth-century England that produced E. P. Thompson’s famous formulation about the bread nexus and the cash nexus. Nonetheless, even when placed within such a concatenation, there is a kind of fantastical excess associated with the gastropolitical imaginary of the event known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58. Historians as well as literary critics have taken sometimes embarrassed note of the often fantastic phenomena-tales of greased cartridges, perambulating and encrypted chapatis, rumors of contaminated foods, and reports of raped and mutilated Englishwomen-that have marked the narrative of the Mutiny. In practically all the histories, journalism, and fiction of the colonial period and even of the period after 1947 two objects in particular, the greased cartridges and the migratory chapati, have played an inescapable if refractory role. As Homi Bhabha has noted, these have constituted the totemic foods of the Mutiny and as such require a brief gloss. The proximate cause of mutiny has typically been understood to be the introduction of greased cartridges for the new Enfield rifles, cartridges greased with beef and pork fat that had to be bitten off before being inserted into the rifles-and that therefore were obnoxious to both high-caste Hindu and Muslim sepoys of the Native Infantry regiments of the British Indian army. The cartridges, combined with rumors of contaminated food sup plies and a mysterious circulation of chapatis that apparently served as a signal to mobilization, have generally served as the mise-en-scne of the events of 1857-58. They have been glossed by many colonial commentators and historians as well as by some postcolonial Indian ones as symptoms of a deeply reactionary, feudal, and outmoded social order struggling against the doctrines of modern social equality and material progress embedded in the reformist impulses of the East India Company in midcentury. Most typically, these irreducibly somatic and vulgar details have been read in terms of a clash of civilizations that finds its most expressive form in the institution of caste, the most striking and nonnegotiable sign of a Hindu/Indian difference from the subcontinent’s colonial rulers.

Writers of a more critical cast have objected from the beginning to Sir John Lawrence’s official finding after the Mutiny that it was caused primarily by the cartridges and secondarily by poor discipline in the army; they have objected as well to the trivialization of the causes of the revolt by reducing them to the opposition between religious fanaticism, represented by mutinous Indians, and modern values and modern technology, represented by the British and the East India Company. In Ranajit Guha’s words, they have sought to establish cartridges and chapatis as red herrings rather than as causes of the Mutiny and the civil rebellion that accompanied it. Nonetheless, every tale of the Mutiny must reckon with cartridges, rumors of contaminated flour, and chapatis before proceeding to more seemingly profound causes. They are clearly excessive, absurd, embarrassing even, and in some cases inexplicable; yet no history of the Mutiny can help passing through them. The very ubiquity and narrative force of these trivial details, which are the detritus, indeed the indigestible part, of any sober accounting, are the focal point of this chapter. Indeed I will suggest that the British or Anglo-Indian historian or writer’s focus on the Mutiny as a peculiar problem of cartridges and chapatis-and therefore of caste embodiment and caste anxiety-exists in a complex, productive relationship with Anglo-Indian experiences of bodily purity and bodily violation during the Mutiny. The digestive troping of rebellion and counterinsurgency may be something more than accidental or eccentric; like the equally charged trope of the ravished English lady, to which it is occasionally linked, its workings may illuminate one’s sense of the irreducibly embodied and irreducibly shared vernaculars of rule and rebellion.

Of the scholars who have taken these illicit or anomalous forms of orality seriously, a few stand out. In Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983), his remarkable work on subaltern modes of understanding and contesting authority, Guha identifies rumor, or orality more broadly, as a mode of communication specific to preliterate peasant cultures. He notes the several aspects of rumor-its anonymity and ambiguity, its improvisatory character as it “leaps from tongue to tongue,” its relationship to tale and myth, its unverifiability, its centrality in insurrection, and its creation of comradeship in transmission-that separate it from news. All of these qualities were seen as offenses against rationality, utility, and clarity in the official accounts of the Mutiny and as the part of the adulterations of a native bazaar that trafficked in shoddy goods, illicit sexualities, and loose talk. The chapati-read by some as a time-honored mode called chalawa of using a ritually consecrated animal or object to act as the carrier of an epidemic, cholera in this case, and bear it outside the limits of a designated territory-also functions for Guha as part of this apparatus of preliterate and subaltern transmission of rebel agency. For him, the event of subaltern rebellion involved a form of code switching which permitted an idiom hitherto reserved for the management of disease to be pressed into service for quite another purpose.

Unlike Guha, who reads the chapati as something that came to be transformed from the semiotic of epidemic to that of rebellion in 1857-58, Bhabha reads its agency in more disseminated, less purposive ways, focusing less on its performative intentionality than on its impact upon Anglo-India. For him it is precisely the impossibility of clarifying the cryptic character of the chapatis and the archaic modes of their iteration that produced a blockage in an Anglo-Indian information order; this had a curiously powerful and hystericizing effect upon Company officials. “The organizing principle of the sign of the chapati is constituted,” he suggests, “in the transmission of fear and anxiety, projection and panic in a form of circulation in-between the colonizer and the colonized. Could the agency of peasant rebellion be constituted through the ‘partial incorporation’ of the fantasy and fear of the Master?”?

All these readings gesture toward the indubitably somatic origins and vectors of the Mutiny’s affect for Indians and Britons alike. As I noted in the introduction, the contact zone of the colonial period was located quite decisively in the alimentary tract. The events of 1857 in particular laid bare the ways in which the body in its moments of appetite, disgust, pollution, and purification was key to grasping the psychopolitical arrangements of the colonial order. Bread, grease, contaminated food supplies, bazaar gossip, and rumor were not the picayune details of a historically consequential event, but the very grammar-affective, symbolic, material, and political-of that history. This is true, I suggest, not just of the Hindus, Muslims, and other Indians who experienced appetites, incorporations, and aversions as the quotidian facts of colonial rule, but of Anglo-Indians as well. For Indians and Anglo-Indians alike, the experience of the Mutiny was routed through some fundamental questions of somatic and affective integrity: What did it mean to eat? What was food? And what were the dangerous supplements that threatened to metabolize it? What constituted an “eating well” in which one could not but eat the other?

The Mutiny was a stunning reminder to Anglo-Indians of their status as fragile, vulnerable bodies in the subcontinent, subject in entirely unexpected ways to experiences of violence, decay, deprivation, disease, and exhaustion. Their texts of the Mutiny provide both an extraordinarily literal sense of the shock of bodily encounter and a highly charged metaphorics of bodily contamination and dissolution. Their sense of outrage was profoundly tied to the rough handling their hitherto inviolable bodies received at the hands of mutinous Indians bent upon the extermination of the colonial order and of all whites and Christians. The pedagogy of the alimentary canal enacted by these texts intimates that palate, sinew, and gut were central to the self-fashioning of both dominator and dominated in a colonial order. The proliferation of literal and vulgar details like hunger, stenches, drunkenness, flux, and wounding, in addition to cartridges and chapatis, serves to underline the often-overlooked social and embodied grammars of that process that have been described as civilizing. Reading Mutiny texts in relation to midcentury discourses (indigenous and Anglo-Indian) of ingestion, pollution, and purgation lays bare certain insistent somatic tropes, tropes that are metaphorical indices of widely shared cultural fantasies and panics about rule and rebellion, purity and pollution. What this reading proposes is that the event generated an enormous gestural repertoire of intimacy and pollution that encompassed Anglo-Indians and Indians within a shared affective and corporeal circuit and that their dietary and sexual permissions and prohibitions were braided together rather than disjunct. What Bhabha has described as an iterative or mimetic logic and what in this specific case can be described as a form of alimentary circularity works to bind the Mutiny’s antagonists in strange intimacies.

A familiar historical event seen from the seemingly anomalous perspective of the belly or, more broadly speaking, of alimentation confirms on a surprisingly corporeal register what one knows of the severe retraction of Anglo-India from intimacy with Indian bodies and modes of life following the Mutiny. But why might this have happened? Certain texts of the events of 1857 might give a semblance of an answer, and I will examine some of them to that end. Some of the gastropolitical tracts I read here are the familiar ones: Hindu and Muslim texts of unwonted and abominated caste intimacies. This is a set of texts altogether familiar to readers of the anthropological literature on the subcontinent, which has tended to emphasize a thematics of purity and pollution. Some of the others, however, are less familiar but equally somaticized texts in which Anglo-Indians reveal themselves to be somewhat like secret sharers of allegedly irrational Hindu and Muslim fears, archaic interdictions, and ritual outrage. The racial, ethnic, and religious gap that presumably divides the Anglo from the Indian into two mutually antagonistic, distanced forces under conditions of normality breaks down under the crisis precipitated by insurgency. In its aftermath one sees Anglo-Indians reassert the boundaries of their breached, fragile subjecthood by processes of abjection and self-purification that, perhaps surprisingly, draw their inspiration from the caste-bound other. The moment of the Mutiny, then, is not so much the well-rehearsed face-off of caste and modernity as an encounter between caste anxiety and something I will denominate as caste envy. This renders a new inflection to the meanings of the hyphen that separates but also welds together the Anglo and the Indian at the level of the phenomenological body and at the level of ritual and moral-cosmological ordering.

A note about the documentation of the uprising is in order here. The texts of the Mutiny are almost overwhelmingly colonial in their origin and character; even twentieth-century accounts, whether British, Anglo-Indian, or Indian, rely perforce on these. In the existing historical archives there is an insufficiency of material from Indian eyewitnesses. The notable functionary Munshi Jivanlal, a go-between for the governorgeneral’s agent at the Mughal court in Delhi, and the kotwal (police inspector) Mainodin Hassan Khan provided accounts of events as they unfolded in the Mughal capital; these were translated and prepared for publication by Charles Theophilus Metcalfe after the writers’ deaths. Of the other prominent residents of Delhi, the famous poet Ghalib left a personal account of the siege of the city and of the expulsion of its Indian population once it was retaken by British forces in September 1857. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, then a subjudge, wrote an analysis in 1858 of the causes of the Mutiny and, later, the only Indian account of the uprising in Rohilkhand. In Cawnpore, the primary evidence from the Indian side was produced by the pleader Nanak Chand, an avowed foe of the rebel leader Nana Saheb; his journal came to be regarded by many Anglo-Indian contemporaries and by Indian historians of a later date as the work of a time-server. In addition there were the depositions produced in Cawnpore for the enquiry headed by Lt. Col. G. W. Williams in 1858-59. Williams found his task a difficult one, given the animosity in the region against British rule and a reluctance to testify to involvement in actions against the sahibs; not surprisingly, the testimonies he gathered either overlapped or conflicted with one another.

There are accounts of the Mutiny, though not always from the perspective of the eyewitness, in several Indian languages, especially Urdu, Marathi, and Bangla, though these feature less prominently than they ought to in one’s understanding of the events of 1857-58. Recently, the popular writer William Dalrymple has examined the Persian and Urdu documents, including petitions to the Mughal court, paperwork from the secretariat of the Mughal prince and anti-British leader Mirza Mughal, spies’ reports, and Urdu newspapers, that comprise the Mutiny Papers in the National Archives of India in order to produce a detailed account of the last months of the reign (however minimally one must gloss that term) of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and his court at Delhi. While this offers a densely textured sense of developments in court circles in Delhi, it must be remembered that what is called the Mutiny was to a large degree a disaggregated set of events rather than a coherent one, with multiple centers and sometimes multiple targets of rebellion. As yet, there are no comparable or easily available records for the other centers of the Mutiny, in Lucknow, Jhansi, Bundelkhand, and Cawnpore/Kanpur. Ranged against a plethora of Anglo-Indian and British eyewitness accounts, diaries, journalism, histories, and fiction from and on 1857-practically every Anglo-Indian gentleman or lady who survived the Mutiny rushed into print, it seems-and produced, as many of these were, under conditions of the most marked duress, this is often a slender record. A very small number of scholars and writers have turned to folk ballads, popular stories, and other nonelite sources; the best known among these is Mahasweta Devi’s biography of one of the most highly regarded leaders of the uprising, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi, 1956). A good deal, though by no means all, of the Indian understanding and experience of the Mutiny belongs to the obscurity of an irretrievably subaltern past. When this experience is recorded, it often comes to readers refracted through Anglo-Indian and British eyes. These entailments haunt any engagement with the materials of the Mutiny, this one included.

This reading is not an analysis of the events of 1857-58 in toto, but of the Anglo-Indian experience in particular. My relatively modest task here is the examination of the tropological figurations of an occurrence that acquired an almost mythic status in the nineteenth-century imagination; such an examination reinforces for us that what we know as history is both trope and event. Moreover, in acknowledgement of the mythopoetic charge with which many of the places and events of 1857-58 have been invested in the colonial accounts, I have retained specifically colonial designations and names such as Mutiny, not rebellion or war of independence, Oudh (not Awadh), and Cawnpore (not Kanpur), bypassing the nominalist questions with which modern accounts of the events almost invariably begin in order to focus on more humble topics like food, filth, and intimacy.

(Continues…)

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