Abstract
Colonial domesticity in India was often a fraught exercise. Guidebooks such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook offered advice on how a household may be run. This essay examines the above work to argue that domesticity was in fact political. It involved the organization of material objects in the English home in the colony, and the organization of native servant bodies. These were two sites of imperial anxiety. Steel and Gardiner present a cosmopolitan Englishness in the choice of material objects, where the English home was to be a space where products from multiple cultural origins may be found. Then, even when representing the docile bodies of the native servants, Steel and Gardiner implied a dangerous agency. Both objects and bodies, given how they determined Englishness, demanded control – which is effectively the advice of Steel and Gardiner.
Highlights
John Malcolm, early in the nineteenth century, had issued a set of instructions for the English officers for their official-public interactions with their Indian subordinates: Our power in India rests on the general opinion of the Natives of our comparative superiority in good faith, wisdom, and strength, to their own rulers
The domestic equivalent of this management appears in the form of works like Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s best-selling The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888, it had seven editions by 1909)
Misapprehensions and misunderstandings over the role, behaviour and lifestyles of the Memsahibs were rife, as these cited and other texts demonstrated, in nineteenth and early twentieth century British India. In this context of varied views of the Englishwoman in India, advice books such as the above offered detailed instructions from cooking to dealing with recalcitrant native servants in an attempt to codify practices of the Memsahib running a colonial household. Commentators reading such texts and colonial fiction have argued that the space of the English home and family in colonial India was constructed within, and occasionally in contest with, imperial ideologies (George; Buettner; Joseph)
Summary
In the course of just two pages of their work, Steel and Gardiner list the various brands of items to be procured to cook, serve and furnish the household are listed: Snowflake American, Norwegian Anchovies, Acerboni and Co. (wine merchants in Calcutta), Maypole Soap, Bolton sheeting, Hall’s sanitary paint, and others (12–13, 29–30). For the British, as envisioned by works like Steel and Gardiner’s, objects, especially those chosen, purchased, maintained and organized in specific ways and from specific stores/brands, are a means of intervening between the realities of India and their Englishness. The objects define Englishness, in their brand value, which is reinforced and even amplified through detailed processes of maintenance, usage and arrangement This suggests that the English home was not merely an index of Englishness, but an Englishness defined by its ability to acquire and deploy goods from diverse global locations as well. Such a line of argument moves us to consider Englishness as acquired through objectification and through the transnational movements of material objects
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