Abstract
This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The discussion of food and drink in this context was not simply a means to add color or compelling detail to these accounts, but was instead a vital ingredient of the authors’ understanding of health and medical treatment. These texts suggest a broader colonial medical understanding of the importance of regulating diet to maintain physical health. Concern with food, and the lack thereof, was understandably a key element in diaries, and in the eyewitness accounts kept by British soldiers, doctors, and civilians during the rebellion. At a narrative level, mention of food also functioned as a trope serving to increase dramatic tension and to capture an imagery of fortitude. In references to drink, by contrast, these sources reveal a conflict between professional and lay opinions regarding the use of alcohol as part of medical treatment. The accounts show the persistent use of alcohol both for medicinal and restorative purposes, despite growing social and medical anxieties over its ill-effects on the body. Close examination of these references to food and drink reflect the quotidian habits, social composition, and the extent of professional and lay knowledge of health and medicine in colonial British India.
Highlights
Colonial India has always occupied a place at the extremes of the British imagination
This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857
Much of the history of medicine in British India has drawn its focus on bodily health, exploring, as Mark Harrison notes, the linked concepts of “normative ecology” and “medical topography,” with attention to how varying physiological types responded to the Indian environment, and to traditional aspects of place, such as “airs, waters, [and] customs.”[4]. Under the ever-present threat of epidemic disease, and of the physical maladies likely to befall a European body in the spaces of the subcontinent, the preservation of life in British India depended, as Collingham argues, on quotidian “bodily practices,” such as grooming, dress, washing, eating, and drinking
Summary
Polehampton writes with elation on the nineteenth of November that the soldiers gave her “tea with milk and sugar, and bread and butter, the first we had tasted in months!” Polehampton, A Memoir, 351. Especially in Britain, the debate over alcohol centered on the actions and reaction to the Temperance Movement and other drives towards public health; for information see James Kneale, “The place of drink: Temperance and the public, 1856–1914,” Social & Cultural Geography 2, Issue 1 (2010) 43-59; Harald Fischer-Tine and Jana Tschurenev, eds., A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs (London: Routledge, 2014); Harald Fischer-Tine, “‘The Drinking Habits of Our Countrymen’: European Alcohol Consumption and Colonial Power in British India,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40, no. Indra Munshi Saldanha, “On Drinking and ‘Drunkenness’: History of Liquor in Colonial India,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 37 (1995) 2323-2331
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