‘We Went Bravely On … ’: The Theatre and Spectacle of Everyday Life in British Written Representations of Colonial South Asia

ABSTRACT

Analysing how British women and men in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial South Asia made ‘theatre’ or ‘spectacles’ of everyday life in personal correspondence, this article examines the foundations of a particular kind of imagery of empire which often survived beyond decolonisation. It examines constructions of the quotidian in different arenas of the colonial experience – the ship, the environment and climate, and the household – to consider the textual, epistolary and discursive tools that writers used to feed seemingly innocuous details about daily life into the broader coercive work of the British Empire. The British in India reconfigured the everyday into a ‘spectacle’, framing experiences as imperial burden and sacrifice. The article uses a selection of personal, unpublished letters written by British women and men in India, to show how they rendered themselves as spectacles, staging everyday life as a theatre in which to construct identity and convey racial and cultural difference, and from which to be ‘seen’ educating and ‘civilising’ and struggling against domestic servants. In particular, this article uses the revealing, and hitherto unexamined, correspondence of missionary wife Agnes May Johnston between 1915 and 1926 from Calcutta, written to her family in Wolverhampton, England. The upkeep of regular communications about the discomfort and dangers of travel, the oppressive climate, and the maintenance of order within the household, allowed correspondents to fashion themselves as ‘out of place’ and incongruous with the colonial environment, thereby affirming their Britishness and stabilising imperial identity. The article conceptualises everyday life as an imperial construction in these terms, and foregrounds ‘the familiar’ in historical, literary and postcolonial analytical frameworks. In doing so it demonstrates how imperial conceptions of power operated through the language, gestures, and behaviours that texture day-to-day experiences, and which shape, in the process, a specific imperial gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Spectacle
• everyday life
• empire; South Asia
• correspondence
• domestic
• colonialism

Introduction

‘Spectacle’ implies a break from convention, an opportunity to be seen, to be ‘interesting’.¹ It is not typically associated with the monotony, familiarity and reality of everyday life. This article utilises the concept of spectacle to suggest that everyday life operated as a site or theatre for the display of power and identity in British written representations of three spheres of the colonial ‘everyday’ in South Asia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: travel, environment, and domesticity. In doing so it responds to the issue’s themes of imperial memory and legacy, by expanding our understanding of the narrative strategies and cultural processes that continue to impact the way nationhood and identity is received, imagined, and reinforced in the postcolonial and present moment. It reveals what Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler have shown are the colonial ‘“legacies” and “influences” [which] are embodied in our comportments and leisures, lodged in our everyday accoutrements and embedded in the habitus of the present’.² How might, in other words, the logic of a colonial past continue to be embedded in the ways we perceive, experience and represent everyday life in the present?

In their correspondence back to the British metropole, writers amplified the significance and pageantry of everyday routines in colonial contexts, through specific discursive repetitions which described and elevated aspects of the quotidian. By drawing attention to these constructions of the colonial experience, the article asks how and why, as anthropologist Greg Dening has noted, ‘we make theatre about trivial and everyday things’.³ Michel Foucault also sought to reconstruct the ‘emphatic theatre of the quotidian’ that structures human life by grappling with the emergence of ‘ordinary’ ‘unfamous’ men and women in the archive as they clashed with power and the state.⁴ The following seeks to interpret the workings of the quotidian in the British Raj, using hitherto unexplored archival collections to unmask new understandings of colonial vocabularies that have shaped the way we continue to perceive everyday life, and understand how this plays into ongoing identity work around Britishness. A deeper grasp of how everyday rituals are represented and the ideological work they perform, will reveal that conceptions of racial and cultural difference and identity are most powerfully enacted and circulated within textual constructions of everyday circumstances.

British correspondents in India presented daily life on the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century as a heightened colonial struggle against the hazards of climate and disease, and the threatening slippages of racial, class, and cultural boundaries. They also conveyed an imperial sense of duty to minister to and maintain imperial ‘order’ in societal and environmental disorder.⁵ Everyday routines and behaviours acquired theatrical weight, transforming domestic and administrative chores into forms of burden shouldered exclusively by white colonisers, which would feed into self-conceptions of an imperial identity into which broader discourses around imperial sacrifice and exile could be read.⁶ This article is grounded in the historiography of imperial identity formation in many ways. It seeks to develop the field’s current conceptual focus upon performance and ‘performativity’, to suggest how the concept of ‘spectacle’ might offer a new opportunity to address the manifestations of imperial power and identity in theatres of the everyday and the mundane. In The Island Race, Kathleen Wilson, working within an earlier eighteenth-century frame, posited that identities relating to self, race, nationality, class and gender, were constituted through iterative performances and ‘performativity’ in everyday social encounters.⁷ Onni Gust has also since suggested that letters and other forms of self-writing from the colonies were sites for the performative ‘recitations’ of white, metropolitan identity and difference.⁸ Crucially, Wilson extended her analysis of ‘performance’ to explore the social ‘masquerade’, ‘mutual spectatorship’ and ‘theatre’ through which identities were configured and displayed, teetering upon, but without fully articulating, the significance of making a ‘spectacle’ of oneself, of becoming spectacle beyond the literal space of the theatre or play in ways that clearly moved beyond ‘performance’.⁹ This article picks up this particular thread of enquiry.

Anne McClintock’s study of the ‘imperial spectacle’, in relation to commodity use and advertising, display and exhibition, offered important insights, not least into the imperial men for whom ‘the world appear[ed] as a spectacle, stage, performance’.¹⁰ Antoinette Burton, drawing from McClintock, questioned who the ‘spectacle’ really was in the power dynamics of colonial relationships, and Lisa Lowe also hinted at moments when British bodies, rather than those of the colonised, were themselves subverted into the ‘“circus,” as the viewed object of study’.¹¹ Most studies of ‘imperial spectacle’ have been associated with British parades, military drills, martial displays, theatrical performance, exhibitions and photographic sets where imperial power and exceptionalism was staged in powerful but momentary glimpses of significance, paling out into a broader existence of everyday humdrum and workaday presence.¹² Yet can we extend the spectacle beyond the ‘spectacular’? If so, what work was a consciously formed ‘spectacle’ of the British body and self doing in sites of the colonial ship, environment, and home, as constructed in their texts, particularly those produced by women?¹³ What kind of power did the ‘everyday’ acquire when the British set themselves up to be ‘on show’ in these sites, ‘struggling’ against hardship and deterioration in visible and striking ways? In new work on colonial everyday life, Esme Cleall has shown how nineteenth-century European missionary culture formed discourses of difference through representations of sickness in the missionary field, and steeping these experiences in a narrative of sacrifice and progress for the mission.¹⁴ Narratives reinterpreted British weakness, anxiety or failure as the celebratory burden of colonial power and governance. Moments of domestic routine and banality were re-articulated and represented by members of the ruling class as powerful affirmations of what they saw as their own personal, everyday contributions to the ‘white man’s burden’, or the ‘civilising mission’, in British colonial territories.¹⁵ Yet where spectacle does appear in this historiography, it is still centred on the ‘native’ body or staged ‘exhibitionism’.¹⁶ The purpose of this article, however, is to consider how ‘spectacle’ as a conceptual device might capture something more of the ways that colonial experiences of the ordinary and everyday were textually reproduced or rendered as theatre, where British identity was most emphatically constructed and visible.

Spectacle

With future prospects of return and re-acceptance into metropolitan society, India was not a site for permanent settlement, rather, British life and service on the Indian subcontinent was peripatetic and mobile in nature. The British celebrated short-lived commitments to, and triumphs against, tropical, malarial climates and racialised ‘others’, rewarded with periods of furlough or retirement back to the metropole.¹⁷ The failure of British bodies to acclimatise to the heat, pests, and ‘squalor’ of colonial sites, marked out claims to Britishness and ‘civilisation’. Their efforts to remain aloof and maintain distance from Indian bodies had similar effects. As a key analytical tool, ‘spectacle’, as a means of generating claims to whiteness and British exceptionalism, is used differently in this piece, but it is critical to fully engage with the loaded meanings and colonial origins attached to this term. In colonial and global contexts, it refers to the display, exhibition, and dehumanisation of Indigenous and racialised bodies. Empires exploited the violent exoticisation of colonial subjects in science and popular culture, which exposed and objectified Indigenous bodies for display in exhibition spaces, anthropometric photography studios, and advertisements for imperial goods and tourism.¹⁸ ‘Spectacle’ also has particular resonance with the empowerment of the ‘colonial gaze’, of the privileges of British and other imperial regimes to see and be seen. It is associated with ceremonies such as durbars and highly orchestrated aristocratic and militaristic displays of imperial opulence, authority, and rulership. Such ceremonies established cultural hegemony and positioned the colonial population as spectators and props of, or exotic appendages to, these displays.¹⁹

This article examines these imperial optics differently, suggesting that part of the British experience in South Asia was to actively render the white, imperial body as a form of spectacle. In doing so they could access forms of cultural power and agency in when, how, and why they were observed and when to remove themselves from that gaze. There was also a mindedness about acceptable or unacceptable forms of spectacle in line with class and gendered expectations and behavioural norms.²⁰ The failure to control and contain one’s body, to maintain standards of sobriety and habits of politeness and sexual morality, worked negatively against white bourgeois respectability and the ‘white prestige’ that underpinned European imperial power.²¹ Through letters and other forms of text, the British devised a theatre for the display of their own conformity to these codes of corporeal, sexual and classed behaviours. Text, I argue, was different to photography or other visual spectacle, where, to an extent, meanings were more mutable and open to interpretation.²² Writing could be constructed and fashioned in ways that foregrounded particular aspects of the lived colonial experience and transformed them into spectacles of imperial life.²³

This article reflects on the sites, spaces, and materials where and in which empire could be showcased, shifting attention to the identity work that ensued in more personal or intimate domains.²⁴ I draw on Dening’s important remarks throughout, that ‘the familiar is more difficult to observe. The theatre in everyday life is too close for comfort’.²⁵ I engage with the micro-politics embedded in everyday patterns of behaviour, drawing out the complexity of ‘the familiar’.

Sources and Methodology

For the first time, this article introduces the large and detailed collection of letters of a self-identified ‘memsahib’ or ‘mem’, Agnes May Johnston (1881–1973). Agnes was a missionary wife who wrote long letters to her mother Hannah Nicholls, a ‘milk dealer’ (her father, William, was a butcher) who was born in Wolverhampton, and her two sisters, Constance or ‘Connie’ and Ida. She wrote about her new conjugal life in Calcutta (now, Kolkata) largely during the First World War, and then Masulipatam (Machilipatnam) in the south of India.²⁶ In September 1915, thirty-four-year-old Agnes, an assistant secondary school teacher, departed alone from Tilbury for Bombay (now, Mumbai) on the P&O steam liner, the R.M.S. Mongolia, to marry her fiancée the Reverend Alec Bowman Johnston. Alec was sent by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to Calcutta in 1910 to work in St Paul’s College. In 1922 he was transferred to the Telugu Mission where he became principle of Noble College, and ‘contributed much to the growth of the Christian Church in South India’, until his retirement in 1935 on account of Agnes’s poor health.²⁷ Her letters will be particularly valuable for highlighting the specific gender dynamics at stake within the relationship between empire and the everyday. Yet in addition to the history of the Johnston family, the article also draws out the domestic and quotidian details in the letters of both men and women in similar collections, from missionary, mercantile, and military backgrounds, to begin to think about Agnes’s letters as representative and part of a wider discursive practice of British colonial society. The narrative and discursive strategies located across these collections marked out white, British belonging, and enabled writers to shape how their service in empire was received and remembered. The article incorporates examples of men’s correspondence into this analysis to function as a reminder that both men and women participated in this kind of personal, supposedly ‘feminised’, epistolary labour, and that both men and women accrued power through constructing ‘spectacles’ of everyday life.²⁸

Letters and other textual narratives often began with outward journeys towards India and thus so does this article. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, steam travel had improved the passage to India. Journeys were made by way of Marseille (or Brindisi largely after 1870), and stopping at ports or entrepôts like Gibraltar and Port Said, then onward through the Suez Canal which opened in 1869 and into the Red Sea, stopping at Aden and eventually arriving into the ports of Bombay or Colombo in Ceylon (now, Sri Lanka), for instance.²⁹ The ship was the first space in which everyday experiences were narrated in a different register; it was a testing ground for colonial service and the formation of an imperial identity. Writers magnified the difficulties of living at close quarters, interacting with strangers and different classes of passengers, the dangers of ports, and the discomforts of travelling. Britons then constructed their initial impressions of India on shore or land through the environment, channelling ideas around ecological and climatic extremity, which emphasised the perceived difference in constitutions between European and South Asian bodies. Heat, humidity, monsoonal trends and tropical ecologies generated a new sensation of corporeality felt as they reached the Red Sea and once ashore, particularly in the Indian plains. The article ends by entering its third spatial focal area, the household, and asks how new domestic routines, housekeeping practices, and relationships with staff were configured and negotiated. Most British texts constructed narratives of British fortitude against the ‘trickery’, incompetence, uncleanliness and petulance of Indian servants, as well as the permeability or porosity of Indian bungalows, ceilings, doors and walls, characterised by constant invasions of insects, rodents, germs and diseases. In the final section it considers how the burden of maintaining these domestic boundaries was gendered, gesturing towards the specificity of this engagement with everyday ‘spectacles’ as female. Most importantly, the article suggests that mishaps, anxieties, and the breakdown of order, were explicitly part of the spectacle of everyday life that the British were producing, in order to play into imperial narratives of burden, Britishness and alterity. In addition, the article will also start to gesture towards the continuing politics and legacies at stake in everyday life in the present and the ongoing ‘political purchase’ of everyday aspects of travel, climate and ‘home’.³⁰

At Sea

From East India Company sailing ships to the coming of steam, the passage to South Asia can be conceived as a staging ground or dress rehearsal for imperial encounters on land. A microcosm of empire, the ship sometimes provided the first point of exchange with Indian society, tightly packaged in the orientalised bodies and sights of lascars, travelling ayahs and amahs, and Mediterranean and Middle Eastern port communities.³¹ Encounters with and observations of, tigers and other migratory wildlife on deck and in the sky, and aquatic life in passing waterways, enabled passengers to acculturate to the tropical ecosystems they were voyaging towards.³² Extended journeys could often entail significant life events within the confines of the ship, such as shipboard marriages and funerals, inducting travellers into new social milieus and signalling the life-altering effects of their mobility and passage.³³ Centring the oceanic and maritime, over terracentric perspectives, brings the lived experiences during the passage to India into view, suggesting the importance of framing the ocean, coastlines, ports, and ships as key spaces of empire.³⁴ Prior to departure, the metropolitan everyday was also a critical site for initial engagements with empire. Evidence of colonial connections were present in the consumption and acquisition of global commodities, the design of country houses, and in migration patterns which brought Indian emigrants and visitors such as students, and princes into contact with society in London, British ports and other urban centres.³⁵ However, the ship, I argue, was the first and most productive space for imperial spectacle.³⁶ Ships, naval technology, and ocean navigation were, Renisa Mawani states, the British Empire’s ‘most vital agents and expressions of imperial power’.³⁷ The seas and oceans, we recognise, were agents in violent economic, mercantile, and colonising systems and structures of nineteenth-century migration and mobility across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, through extractive and exploitative trade, naval warfare, and the transportation of enslaved, convicted, impressed and indentured peoples.³⁸ The focus of this section is to consider the micro-politics at stake in the weekly passages of British ships en-route to and from India, to re-think everyday life on steamers and for ‘floating’ communities as theatres, through which to work out and formulate new imperial identities and demeanours. Gestures marking British sojourners as members of the ruling class were learned, refined, and enhanced in these sites. Sweaty hands, headaches, insomnia, anxiety, discomfort and regret first experienced at sea, contributed to the development of a wider network of identity and belonging that affirmed their continuing adherence to white, British, middle-class, evangelical norms, as they adjusted to imperial voyaging and expatriation.

Though ships were a powerful symbol of Britain’s nineteenth-century economic, political and technological global dominance, life on board, when inspected closely within and through unpublished private accounts, also appears messy and disordered. The vulnerability and exposure of the ship to atmospheric and oceanic forces, offered passengers the first opportunity to narrate imperial hardship, and facilitate broader discourses around the burdensome effects of colonial service on British minds and bodies. Sickness and unease shaped Agnes’s first India-bound journey and she amplified the physical and mental torment of travel. Graphic accounts were sent to her mother and sisters about her adjustment to maritime routines and seafaring, and physical and sensory relationships with fellow passengers, including the sights, sounds, and smells of guests and crew at close quarters in cabins and communal saloons. Migratory correspondents sought to confront the beginnings of their colonial experience by managing their departure and absence through maintaining epistolary relationships and creating ‘interrupted presences’ with metropolitan kin.³⁹ Correspondence, journals, diaries, and other forms of life-writing reaffirmed attachments to home and reshaped their absence as less permanent, less final: an interruption of everyday presence.

Agnes continued to provide a personal commentary about her health and body to her mother and sisters in letters, to strengthen and reinforce maternal and sibling bonds. Diarised in nature, Agnes’s letters onboard the R.M.S. Mongolia give hourly accounts of ship routines, beginning at 1:45pm on Wednesday 29 September 1915: ‘we have had a simply dreadful time in the Mediterranean’.⁴⁰ She continued, ‘when I begin to get sick I perspire furiously, get awfully faint and such a lassitude creeps over me that I cannot move. The result was I could not stir a limb at breakfast time and there I had to stay all day long in that baking cabin’ and added, ‘you could have squeezed the perspiration out of my sheets’, and again: ‘it is simply torture to try to get up when you are sea sick and the ship is still rolling  – as soon as the head is raised the results are disastrous’.⁴¹ Personal infirmity is absorbed into a broader communal struggle, ‘torture’, associated with the removal and movement of British bodies from home and land, feeding into ideas about British and European alterity and difference. ‘With all my experiences though,’ she later qualified,

I think some were worse. There was a poor woman in the next cabin heaving all day. I had to put my fingers in my ears not to hear her, until I got too weak for that, then I had to put up with it. Another lady went along to the lavatory and fell flat in a faint … there was hardly a soul at either sitting for dinner in the evening.⁴²

Sickened and ailing British bodies in globalised and colonial contexts are ascribed particular value in an imperial spectacle of Britishness. In the liminal space of the ship, not grounded in either metropole or colony, but afloat, in transit, every observation, description, word, accrued heightened meaning, becoming signifiers for racial, national and class identity.⁴³ Seasickness was part of the discursive repertoire available to mobile Britons in correspondence, especially women. It was a social rite in the gradual development of an imperial identity on the passage to India. Discomfort with colonial travel and mobility, and feeling and looking out of place, moored these men and women to an imagined sense of ‘Britishness’ and British belonging, a process which unfolded during their departing voyage and began to establish ideas of difference.

On the Mongolia, the sociability of ship life had given way to cabin isolation and communal suffering. Episodes of affliction were punctuations in Agnes’s long commentaries about the unease of travel, despite nineteenth-century advancements in passenger liners. In April 1926, The Times of India ran a feature entitled ‘A Bombay Woman’s Causerie: Suggestions for Comfort When Travelling’. The anonymous contributor of the causerie addressed the continuing challenges of modern travel, by framing these in dialogue with the more rudimentary eighteenth-century age of sail when voyages to India around the Cape of Good Hope took months:

those of us who are apt to grumble at the discomforts one has still to put up with when travelling, should take heart of grace when they read that a lady travelling from Scotland in 1774 wrote: “We are jaulted [sic] to death by the motion in these rough seas. … I am like[ly] to beat out my teeth every time I try to drink and often[,] after all[,] am not able to bring the cup to such a direction as to obtain my desire … ”.⁴⁴

The nature of twentieth-century and eighteenth-century seafaring coalesce in the causerie to produce an enduring rhetoric about the unsuitability of women’s travel, pre  – and post-steam, which is reflected and reproduced in private letters.

Indeed, incompatible with the environment of the ship as a masculine domain, it was believed that the feminine form was more susceptible to the dangers of sea travel, particularly through the perceived vulnerability of women’s sexual and reproductive health.⁴⁵ Though women were likely to remark on the discomforts of travel, we might also identify here a specifically feminised burden of empire that women dramatised themselves as bearing, through particular gendered and sexualised experiences at sea and in port. Agnes herself played into these perceptions when writing about the fragility of mobile or independent women on the move, recounting an incident of the ship running aground on a sandbank. At the beginning of the journey, she wrote,

I was sitting at the edge of the boat and slipped right against the rails as we listed. There was quite a scrimmage. People came running out … and one girl – silly thing – fainted … what a panic people get into … I am really surprised at my own calmness though I must confess I was a bit frightened as she tilted more & more & thought it was nearly time for lifebelts. She groaned and wobbled awfully when they got her off.⁴⁶

Agnes’s letters were not only a conduit to communicate her own, but also other women’s discomfort, which fed into narratives about the complications surrounding the displacement of British women from the safe and ‘civilised’ anchors of ‘home’.⁴⁷ Anthropomorphising the ship itself as female, ‘groaning’ and ‘wobbling’ ‘awfully’, further compounds this overarching theatricality and visual spectacle around feminine misfortune at sea, alluding to the sacrifice that destined ‘memsahibs’ were making by substituting home for travel and exploration.

Sexual danger also threatened unaccompanied women in the ports, and sometimes aboard the ship and amid fellow passengers.⁴⁸ Again Agnes constructed a shared female experience of misfortune in empire, through the reports and rumours she conveyed about the potential kidnap and rape of British female travellers and tourists by lustful and predatorial ‘native’ men. Agnes reassured her mother:

I expect I shall not land at Port Said, after all the dreadful tales I hear. My cabin mate told me this morning that two ladies she was travelling with last time got out and ordered a carriage to take them to some well-known gardens there[,]  – the one lady had been before  – they talked for a time and did not notice where they were going[,] but after some time the one lady began to wonder where they were. She did not recognise the route at all and spoke to the driver. He declared he was on the right road and drove on and on. As they had only a limited time in which to go and get back to the boat, they told him to drive back but he would not & drove as hard as he could. They got up and shouted but no one took any notice  – so the one, a big strong woman, tried to knock him off his seat & the other caught the reins. It was by mere luck that an English soldier came along, because they would soon have been surrounded and these men have so many accomplices that there would have been no escape. The soldier brought them back to the boat and told them never to leave the main street again unless with a man.⁴⁹

Agnes integrates the skirmishes of other women into her own self-fashioned identity as a new and cautious ‘memsahib’. The women were reprimanded by the English soldier for their independence and for trusting the driver, whereas Agnes is able to demonstrate her vigilance and restraint, heeding the ‘dreadful tales’ of others and avoiding the consequences of moral and sexual exposure as a white woman beyond the ship. Through letters, Agnes could reveal particular forms of knowledge she had already developed about ‘Eastern’ customs and ‘peril’, imposing her understanding of the moral superiority of the evangelical, middle class and feminine self onto colonial encounters in the port cities.⁵⁰ By recapitulating the terror of other women, she also assumed their struggle as her own, giving her the opportunity to catastrophise her own journey and elevate the hazardous nature of her move ‘Eastward’. Nineteenth-century images and propaganda of empire, as well as global travel and tourism visualised the orientalised and sexualised bodies of ‘native’ women and men for the voyeuristic pleasure of a metropolitan spectatorship. Yet British women themselves were also prominently positioned in media such as ‘Dandy cards’ (showing them being carried by servants) as a spectacle of empire, consumed for the curiosity of ‘white women’s presence in the colony’.⁵¹ Through her correspondence, Agnes was attentive to showcasing her presence or absence in these spaces. Women wrote and positioned themselves into the ‘danger’ zones of empire to articulate the sacrifices they were making for empire, but they also extricated themselves out of these scenarios, to maintain their alignment to particular codes of propriety and respectability. Aboard the ship, and through port excursions, women could rehearse and begin to construct imperial experiences as spectacle, to both assert Britishness and socialise into the class and gender behaviours and codes specific to their belonging to the ‘white race’, which was the apex of the colonial hierarchy.

As recent studies have shown, disappointment and disillusionment with empire in the later nineteenth century, framed the ways colonial lives and careers were represented. The growing administrative and clerical duties of British magistrates and collectors, as part of the intensifying bureaucracy of the Indian Civil Service, jarred with earlier representations of adventurous nabobs who acquired riches, Indian concubines or ‘bibis’, and engaged with Indian culture, exploration, and political diplomacy.⁵² Correspondence shows that the British negotiated the increasing disillusionment of empire and participated in the work of producing representations of South Asia, through constructing imperial and moralistic meaning out of the mundane and quotidian. Everyday life was re-worked into humorous carnivalesque situations of errors, involving disobedient servants and surreal mishaps, and at other times the quotidian became inflected with spectacles of danger and violence associated with imperial adventure literature.⁵³ Emphasis was given, in this instance, to the overexposure of white women. Altercations of travel and mobility, sexual encounters with ‘native’ men, and new climatic extremities and changes to body and health were part of the myths surrounding imperial women.⁵⁴ This section has given space to the ocean as a historical agent. It has suggested how the ship affected the ways British travellers constructed, performed, and stepped into imperial identities on the journey to colonial sites. The ship was the testing ground for Britons to assume a masochistic imperial hubris, that rendered visible the burden they were carrying for nation and empire.⁵⁵ Life onboard had become dramatised in many of these representations to reflect this ongoing accumulation of hardship.

Climate

The passage to India often brought British men and women into their first contact with tropical weather and dramatic fluctuations of climate, but this was most prominently felt on land. Climatic references were deeply embedded in the British vocabulary, and continue to be, but performed more significant ideological work in colonial contexts.⁵⁶ Through the climate, writers could describe the theatricality of their resistance to South Asian life and culture, with reference to sweating, the removal of clothing and partial nudity, illness, death, and fear. The imperial experience itself was fundamentally sensory. Most accounts describe the impacts of the heat and monsoon rains on British bodies, in contrast to milder, temperate conditions in Britain and Europe.⁵⁷ Tormented bodies struggling against the heat and humidity were made to be looked at in a spectacle of Britishness and incongruity with an arid landscape. There was theatre in being too hot, and writers played upon British inadaptability to colonial surroundings, drawing out a spectacle of colonial burden related to enduring the climate.

As shown in Agnes’s letters aboard the Mongolia, correspondents documented the corporeal changes they witnessed for themselves and others during the passage to India. In early Victorian science and emerging disciplines such as ethnography and ethnology, the constitutions of British and European bodies were believed to be different to bodies in the ‘tropical zones’. Climatological theories were increasingly entangled with developing ideologies about racial degeneration.⁵⁸ Beyond escaping to the hill stations of the Himalayas in the summer, sustaining a consistent language of physical discomfort in the tropical climate was an available means of retaining difference and antipathy to the local environment.⁵⁹ In her letters, Agnes records the change of climate and her protestations to the heat, using references to sweat and perspiration to draw out a new sensation of corporeality in foreign climates, particularly on the way through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean: ‘I have perspired at last! And know the misery of sweaty hands now! I have to rest a hand[k]erchief under my hand while I am writing [or] else I could not get along at all.’⁶⁰ Her husband, Alec also explained in one of his CMS annual letters from Masulipatam, ‘pardon any blots; it is a sticky 92 degrees at 9.p.m. and my arms are dripping!’⁶¹ Sweaty and unclean bodies were largely associated with the physical exertions of the labouring urban poor and working classes in Britain, whereas in colonial spaces, sweat held particular racialised connotations. Depictions of skin, sweat, and colour conveyed complex messages about racial hierarchy and difference in imperial iconography.⁶² In correspondence, emphasis lies with white British bodies that perspire and resist their environment, compared to the ‘innate’ capacity of Indian bodies to withstand the climate and its torpid effects.

On the P&O steamer Nubia, as it crossed the Red Sea on the approach to Aden in June 1859, Captain Henry Fox Bunbury of the Bengal Army wrote to his mother, ‘I am precious near melted where I am writing … I have to keep a handkerchief going like a mop all the time I am sitting here but next month it will be still hotter’.⁶³ Shortly after, he added that ‘we have got an Indian crew aboard and a noisy, lazy lot they are, the only use they really are is to pull the punkahs for us. There is a punkah running the whole length of the saloon & continually going at meal times’.⁶⁴ Attributing the racialised characteristics of his crew as noisy and lazy to the enervating heat, Henry suggests that climate affected the distribution and nature of colonial labour.⁶⁵ Henry and Agnes, and other British passengers, required the material trappings of handkerchiefs, punkahs (fans), ‘cholera belts’, ice-cubes, thermometers, linens and sola topi (pith sun hats or helmets) to manage the new climate.⁶⁶ Where the punkah is pulled for Henry and his fellow officers, the Indian crew acted as the intermediaries who worked these technologies, rather than being relieved by them. Where the British seek to resist the heat by adopting certain preventative rituals and material tools, Indian bodies have already surrendered to it and become ‘lazy’, ‘noisy’; they have ‘degenerated’ physically and intellectually in consequence. The ‘handkerchief’ here speaks volumes for British protocol in response to effusing bodies and operates as a key symbol in the everyday theatre around the refusal to become ‘Indianised’. Notably, thirty years later, Henry’s son, William Clement Hanmer Bunbury, a lieutenant in the British Army wrote to the same woman as Henry did, his grandmother, from Benares (or Varanasi) in June 1890, also graphically describing the materials, and lack thereof, to contain and control his body’s response to the heat, leaving his grandmother little for the imagination: ‘I am writing this lying on my bed, in a state of nature, under an enormous punkah & with several handkerchiefs to use as mops’.⁶⁷

Accentuating the difference between ruler and ruled, British men and women depended on medical and sartorial paraphernalia to enclose and shield their bodies. Too close an affinity to the tropical climate was also seen to corrupt and sexualise its inhabitants in different ways. The perceived licentiousness of Indian men and their propensity towards violence and ‘mutiny’ was captured for the British in the events of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, also referred to as the First War of Indian Independence. Racial otherness was seen to distinguish the rebellious and libidinous sepoy (from the Persian ‘sipahi') from the white, masculine and chivalrous Highland or British Christian soldier and civilian.⁶⁸ The nineteenth-century post-1857 sahib, unlike the eighteenth-century orientalist, shuttered away the body from external colonial and ‘native’ influences.⁶⁹ In the popular memoir of an Indian officer in the Bengal Army, Sita Ram Pandey, entitled From Sepoy to Subadar, published in multiple editions over the course of 1873 to 1970, the author ruminated: ‘nowadays the Sahebs do not go out all day in the hot weather; but formerly they bore the heat as well as, if not better than, us black men.’⁷⁰ As such, the vulnerability of British bodies was a cultural signifier for the emergence of this nineteenth-century ‘sahib’. As this article argues, part of this ritualised shutting out involved a masochistic indulgence in overheated bodies that shaped the narratives they sent home. The imagery of overheated bodies continually appeared in letters as part of the writer’s conscious resistance to Indian society. To endure the hot weather without complaint was to succumb to the colonial environment and compromise and complicate racial barriers.

Climatic extremity was also critical to the narrativization of imperial and settler-colonial experiences, as it gave white British men in particular the chance to claim pioneer status, to overcome environmental forces in pursuit of imperial expansion and exploration.⁷¹ Emphasis on the climate, atmosphere, and wider ecosystem in epistolary narratives, often erased ‘native’ bodies, leaving only dust storms, wild terrains, and barren landscapes, or overabundant tropical jungle growth to be conquered or ‘tamed’.⁷² The opportunity for spectacle and theatricality came with regular negotiations of the boundaries of the household, and the extent to which the colonial environment and natural elements could enter the home. British figures worked against a battery of problems, attempting to monitor what and who came in and out the household. In July 1850, Major Francis William Brown wrote of entrapment in his house whilst stationed with the army in Satara between 1850 and 1851. To ‘papa’ he stated:

Nelly [his sister] remarks that she is as hot as I can be but I just wish she was here in the hot weather to get a sniff of the hot wind for [I] can’t leave a door or window open in the day time without being nearly suffocated.⁷³

Missionary wife, Lucy Bach, as well as Florence Harriet Esther Emery, the wife of Frederick William Emery (a jeweller in Madras (now, Chennai)), both describe disturbances of the colonial domestic sphere by the intrusion of the natural elements and climatic forces. The women describe extreme weather with biblical, divine or eschatological analogies to make sense of the peculiarity of the colonial climate, particularly the radical shifts between drought and monsoon rains. Staging the weather as a spiritual encounter, Florence frames her South Asian experiences to reflect Victorian aspirations surrounding the ‘providential plan’ of imperial progress.⁷⁴ Florence recounted that the

the lightening [sic] every evening is very vivid & the thunder, sometimes for hours at midday, is incessant with not a cloud to be seen. So many things make the bible verses clear[,] the moon here at the full is very dangerous if you walk without a hat, [it] gives you something like sunstroke, Miss Harrington reminded me of the verse “the sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night”.⁷⁵

As a ‘deathscape’, India had long been seen as a land of death, disease and decay. In crafting these depictions, the British could imagine themselves as part of a legacy of British colonialists risking premature death caused by a tropical malarial and monsoonal climate, to ‘nurse’ or reform colonial sites ‘back to life’.⁷⁶ Alec alluded to the sacrifices of his family for missionary service in Masulipatam, through referencing in annual reports to the CMS headquarters their place within a line of heroic missionaries and other imperial servants who gave their lives to empire. He describes having at Easter, a ‘short service by the graves of [Robert Turlington] Noble [founder of Noble College], and Sharkey [Noble’s colleague] … we were also close to the grave of the collector’s only child when he died. India asks its price of all’.⁷⁷ Conflating the colonial space and climate with the providential or divine lent weight to women’s work in the management of imperial households as a spiritual endeavour, part of the predestined path for British civilisation, for which they risked their children, themselves, and their maternal duties. Women were seen to be particularly tormented by these climatic disruptions, because of the implications they presented for the ‘feminine’ domestic domain. Part of their maternal responsibility in empire was to transpose and model an ordered and regimented English domestic sphere into the colonies, in the imperial campaign to rescue and civilise ‘primitive’ and premodern non-Western societies.⁷⁸ Whilst environmental disturbances threatened this work, women enhanced these domestic challenges to highlight their sacrifices for empire.

In another instance, in Kannammoola (now in Kerala) in June 1896, Lucy conveyed her exasperation with these kinds of climatic disturbances. To family she described how:

We have to dodge the weather so. The monsoon is here & the days vary very much; sometimes it will rain steadily all day long; other days are more like April sunshine in between the storms, but when the storms do come they are very alarming to a new comer. Quite suddenly a hurricane will blow up, [blowing] all doors & windows, blowing everything over, & if lamps are alight, puff every one out. The other night at dinner we were left in total darkness. Then the rain will come in a terrific downpour, the noise of which almost frightens me, & gradually the wind dies away again. This will occur several times a day.⁷⁹

The cycles of extreme Asian weather fronts equated for Lucy with the breakdown in the domestic milieu. Lucy’s anxieties around the security and safety of the household, and the invasions of the colonial environment past the boundaries of the home, were antithetical to nineteenth-century instructions for maintaining the ideal Victorian private sphere.⁸⁰ Yet adversity also enabled her to reproduce quotidian details as an intrepid contest against colonial forces. It is important then to see letters, and specifically the everyday nature of these narratives, as part, if not integral cogs, in circulating racial, political, scientific and religious knowledge and discourses of empire. Correspondence valorised the ‘burdens’ carried by the British in India in everyday life. They reconfigured the mundane and bore evidence for the narratives and legacies that families were forming about their service and contribution to the British Empire.⁸¹ The climate became and continues to operate as a familiar marker of British identity to make sense of these experiences.

The Household

Building upon the penetrability of colonial households and the instability of these homes, the final section of this article explores the household as a site of spectacle. So far the article has identified a pattern of interest and indulgence in the breakdown of order. This was seen even more explicitly in the nineteenth-century home, a space where privacy and domestic order was supposed to reign. Feelings of ambivalence around empire and homesickness have long been part of broader ideological agendas of delineating between ‘home’ and ‘exile’, whiteness and otherness.⁸² Imperial power was derived just as strongly from feeling ‘not at home in empire’ in anxious and unsettling ways, and in identifying the colonial home as a ‘threatening’ space and seeking to ‘domesticate’ it.⁸³ This section suggests how imperial correspondence made theatre of this process of ‘domesticating’ empire as it unfolded day to day, for instance, in housework or managing servants. In letters the colonial bungalow became a parody of English domesticity, never fully or successfully replicating the ideals of an authentic English household.⁸⁴ In many ways, through English architectural and design practices, hygiene regimes, décor, housekeeping, and domestic etiquette, British identity in India could be claimed and regularly re-affirmed as a means of maintaining status as ‘out of place’. Domicile and belonging fed into wider stratifications between coloniser and colonised, of those destined to return to the metropole and those who could not afford to or were not entitled to leave India, including members of the Indian population and the ‘Eurasian’ (termed ‘Anglo-Indian’ after 1911) community and ‘poor whites’.⁸⁵ It will also become apparent that the readers of letters enjoyed following narratives of disobedient servants and wild pet mongooses, and specifically invested in the spectacles of empire that correspondents were constructing.⁸⁶

Rich insights can be gained from settler colonial histories which have made deep inroads into using the ‘everyday’ as a conceptual framework, linked to homemaking as a metaphor for colonisation.⁸⁷ Adele Perry has written of settlers’ relationship with the everyday as a declaration of belonging:

surveying the land, noting its progress or lack thereof, its weather and its changes, was an oft-repeated act of imperial dispossession and patriarchal, bourgeois affirmation: this is my place. This also exposed the settler’s contradiction: this can never be my place.⁸⁸

The masculine enactments of possession that Perry identified are also applicable to women’s claims to imperial power through everyday acts in the home, and the burden of managing housework, servants, and claiming possession over space, objects, and bodies within the domestic sphere.⁸⁹ In the elevation of particular voices in colonial relationships, some everyday experiences become simultaneously obscured and silenced. Indigenous, marginalised and colonised peoples under British occupation were often erased in archives through the prioritisation of these British narratives.⁹⁰ An emphasis on British hardship diminished and trivialised the constant cycles of dispossession, exploitative labour, and disempowerment endured by subject populations in daily life. Discursive practices around the everyday within British texts are seen to have produced the ‘legible, livable, and uncontested settler home’ by removing or silencing Indigenous presence and voice.⁹¹ In the analysis that follows, Indian bodies are not entirely removed in these accounts but become minor actors in a broader showcase or theatre of British activity.⁹² The imperial burden is played out on Indian bodies, particularly servants, who become the regular objects of household ‘inspections’ by master and ‘memsahib’, they are argued with, often endure physical, verbal, mental and sexual abuse, ridiculed, and operate as ‘props’, utilised with other objects in the home to produce British spectacles.⁹³ Uncovering the power dynamics entrenched in everyday life in this way gives space to thinking about the familiarity of processes of imperial silencing and absence in the present day, allowing us to consider which iterations of the ‘everyday’ are accepted, remembered and reproduced and which experiences are erased or forgotten.

Women explained their methods of overseeing servants and housework as household managers in regular correspondence. Once Agnes had begun to settle into her new residence in St Paul’s College she continued to write long, weekly missives about daily life and routines. Her letter at the beginning of November 1916 complained that

housework is very exhausting out here  – the houses are so big & there are so many extras we don't have at home  – mosquito nets, choti hasri [chhota haazri, a breakfast dish] etc. It simply tires me out marching about the house.⁹⁴

As household management was imagined as an exercise in imperial power and possession, the British colonial home was a regimented space shaped by the managerial labour of white women, inspections and disciplinary regimes, and tight hierarchies of family members, visitors, and servants, and policed movements.⁹⁵ British women complained about the burden of housework in India, even though most colonial bungalows and households employed much larger entourages of Indian domestic servants than families in Britain. The need for more servants largely derived from the demands of the Indian caste system which prohibited certain servants from carrying out particular duties, necessitating large retinues of staff for each role.⁹⁶ Colonialism reinforced and expanded the duties of British women; it conflated housework with the administration and superintendence of empire at large, and afforded women the opportunity to maximise their sphere of influence and place within the imperial ruling class.⁹⁷ Agnes wrote again just under ten days later and continued to complain about her household duties, perhaps because at that time, ‘everybody seems to be having servant troubles just now’ and like much of the ‘memsahib’ literature, Agnes describes shouldering the labour of incompetent, absent or deserted servants.⁹⁸ Detailing her new Indian routine, she says:

then I go down on my rounds. First the kitchen. If I don't [then] the floor does not get washed, and insects get a chance [in], then the milk, [I] measure it out and scrutinise the colour  – if it is blue I record it against the mali [gardener] & he gets “cut” at the end of the month. Then the dusting – [I] pick up vases, examine [the] legs etc. They think memsahibs are lunatics. Often I have all the rugs taken up again and “teek” (properly) shaken. Then I have to watch [what goes into] the Jamadar's [sweeper’s] bucket. Often he is washing the hall and study in “mud”.⁹⁹

The reader follows Agnes intimately through the household as she scrutinises the mali, examines the vases, and observes the jamadar, within her larger inspection of the home itself. The ‘memsahib's’ ‘inspections’ of the servants, their work, and the household, reveal the ocular nature of the home, a space in which to play out spectacle, to watch and be watched in order to achieve order, power, and cleanliness.

The work of women in the colonial home was bound to a wider imperial agenda. The ‘home’ and ‘harem’ distinction in colonial discourse denoted racial and cultural difference between ‘east’ and ‘west’ and legitimised the ‘civilising’ work of the empire.¹⁰⁰ The presence of male servants distinguished British home life from the ‘eastern’ harem or the zenana which was populated by Indian women, and where men, aside from male kin, were not allowed to enter. Indian women were seen to be veiled and excluded by traditional religious practices such as purdah (seclusion) and the zenana (female quarters).¹⁰¹ British women, in contrast, in their accounts are presented as visible, and their visibility was an aspect of their imperial labour or ‘burden’ which involved educating and civilising servants, and observing and modelling behaviour. Unlike the zenana, the British household becomes a space where women were visible and imitable, and tasked with moral responsibilities surrounding the education and civilisation of servants and other visitors to the home. On 22 July 1919, the staff and students at St Paul’s College, Calcutta, gifted Alec an embroidered address to commemorate his nine years at the college as principal and hostel warden, and express their gratitude as he approached his and Agnes’s furlough to England. They praised Alec and Agnes for showing ‘us that unpretentious toil which many would disdain as drudgery must not be shirked, for even drudgery may become divine when lit up by a spirit of humility and self-sacrifice’.¹⁰² At St Paul’s, missionaries had cultivated relationships of tribute through which the Indian servant or student honoured and revered their British teachers, missionaries or patrons for their work and service to the college as ‘divine’ and ‘self-sacrificial’.¹⁰³ The everyday, the ‘unpretentious toil’ or ‘drudgery’, is significant in the imperial context as it could be presented as a constant exercise in colonial guardianship and instruction from which women, in particular, could draw and establish their authority. In staking their contribution to these kinds of moral missions of empire, they could participate in wider narratives about the everyday responsibilities of being British in India.

Readers showed particular interest in narratives of everyday life in India, especially surrounding servants. Agnes frequently recalls the interactions and arguments she experienced with one specific member of staff, the babachi (cook, bawarchi) in her letters upon the previous requests of her mother. In one instance she wrote to her sisters about an incident with the bawarchi which resulted in a heated argument over him overcharging the couple for food. Agnes included a postscript to the story as follows: ‘all this has happened since I wrote to Mother. Please tell her the story. She likes babachi [sic] stories’, which shows that Agnes’s mother was entertained by her daughter’s daily encounters with Indian servants.¹⁰⁴ Ephemera, notes and materials collected from around the household were also enclosed and enfolded within letters specifically for the enjoyment of correspondents. In the CMS records, hundreds of Agnes’s letters from India were saved and preserved within their original envelopes, some still containing old scraps of paper, notes, photographs, sewing patterns, postcards, telegrams, newspaper clippings, bills and pressed flowers. One note, for example, titled ‘Telephone Message’ has survived and is referred to by Agnes in an accompanying letter.¹⁰⁵ Often these kinds of notes formed evidence of how Indian servants addressed, greeted or received callers to the household.¹⁰⁶ Lucy Bach sent a dinner menu that her butler had created within a letter intended for her British readers, and explained how:

the first evening as soon as we sat down to [the] table Tom burst out laughing & I frowned him into order, wondering whatever had upset him. When my eye caught a “menu”, however, I joined in the outburst. I enclose it for your edification. The butler’s spelling is very good – considering! Mrs Fell’s butler spells stew – [as] “histo”.¹⁰⁷

Through the enclosed menu, readers were invited to participate in the racialised humour that Lucy and Tom enjoyed around their servant’s attempts at British dinner etiquette. Letters carried material traces of the colonial everyday, which in turn embodied certain relationships, encounters, or occurrences, drawing readers into shared experiences of empire. Exotic or aesthetic items – peacock feathers, bangles, botanic specimens – are often prioritised in the colonial archive for their insights into the colonial gift economy and material transactions taking place within family networks at this time.¹⁰⁸ Yet the ephemera of everyday life, the newspaper clippings, business cards, and scribbled notes, and everyday stories, were also an important part of this exchange economy, and through correspondence, readers became familiar with the culture of British India at the everyday level.¹⁰⁹

Conclusion

This article has explored the construction of spectacles pertaining to everyday life in three colonial sites in British India, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thinking about what this might say about the ongoing work of experiences of travel, climate and home in marking out difference and identity. Everyday experiences of pain, discomfort and aggrievement reinforced ideas of being ‘out of place’, and fed into wider imperial discourses of the self-sacrifice and burden attached to British activities in colonising and ‘civilising’. In early historiographical and postcolonial understanding and popular culture, the ‘memsahib’ had been interpreted as overbearing, callous, and dramatic, which feminist historians in the 1980s argued and challenged was miscalculated and misjudged. This article has given space to these gendered characteristics on their own terms, to understand why such representations had become so dominant and to what extent women assumed these kinds of behaviours in theatrical ways to elevate their place in empire, and also to make ‘spectacle’ of being ‘out of place’.

In thinking about the everyday as a concept and a site/space through which to enact colonial identity, this article has argued that the imperial mindset operates in the most familiar of places. By uncovering the ways the imperial experience was narrated and represented, the article has begun to address and unmask imperial practices and their legacies in the postcolonial period. We might recognise and reflect on how the imperial gaze still shapes today the way we encounter different cultures through travel and tourism, the ongoing infantilisation of Indigenous populations, and the racialisation of particular bodies through references to climate and environment, and the unequal division of labour. I return to the words of Dening in the introduction to this article: ‘the theatre in everyday life is too close for comfort’.¹¹⁰ Exploring the way the empire was showcased in the past, in and through everyday life, is significant for how we understand the minutiae, the ordinary imperial behaviours, and gestures, that continue to impact and shape our interactions and perceptions of self, nation, and otherness in the present. It is about unmasking that which is too close to home, too close for comfort.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to the editors of this special issue, Berny Sèbe, Dega Rutherford, and Sara Mechkarini, and to the reviewers for their incredibly insightful comments and suggestions. The author is also especially grateful to Clare Anderson and Kate Smith for their support with this article. Her thanks go to Rachel Bynoth as well for her comments on an early draft, and the assistance of the British Library and Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections staff, particularly Ivana Frlan. Aside from the essential funding provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, research for this article was also conducted through the award of a Royal Historical Society Adam Matthew Digital subscription in 2020.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership [grant number AH/AH/R012725/1].

Notes

1 See the following: ‘Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real – that is, interesting – to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media’ in Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 109; See also Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Elias, The Court Society; Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity.

2 Stoler and Strassler, “Castings for the Colonial,” 4; Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia.”

3 Dening, “Performing on the Beaches of the Mind,” 6; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Dening, Beach Crossings; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life; Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life; Bohnet, Toward a Philosophy of Protest; Sztompka, “The Focus on Everyday Life”; Brigstocke, The Life of the City, 11–14.

4 Foucault, Power, 165.

5 Procida, Married to the Empire; Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power; Annelise Heinz et al., “AHR Roundtable: Unsettling Domesticities”; Cleall, “Far-Flung Families and Transient Domesticity.”

6 Buettner, Empire Families; Gust, Unhomely Empire.

7 Butler, Gender Trouble; Wilson, The Island Race, 3.

8 Gust, Unhomely Empire; Gust, “The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging,” 24.

9 Wilson, The Island Race, 2, 129–68.

10 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 16, 34, 122.

11 Burton, “Making a Spectacle of Empire”; Lowe, Critical Terrains, 112.

12 See for instance, Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India”; Cannadine, Ornamentalism.

13 Mills, Discourses of Difference.

14 Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference, 109–10, 116; Stanley, “The Scriptural Economy”. See also, Crozier (now Greenwood), “Sensationalising Africa”.

15 Kucich, Imperial Masochism; Poon, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period; Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana,” 238; Burton, Burdens of History; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness; Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing; Hall, Civilising Subjects; Agnew, Imperial Women Writers; Ghosh, “Who Counts as Native?”.

16 Agnew, Imperial Women Writers, 158; Auerbach, Imperial Boredom, 87; Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference, 79, 81, 97.

17 Gilmour, The British in India; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 246; McAleer, “The Little Nothings of Our Life”; Buettner, Empire Families; Bhandari, The Raj on the Move; Wilkinson, Two Monsoons.

18 Qureshi, Peoples on parade; Mills and Sen, eds., Confronting the Body; McAleer, MacKenzie, eds., Exhibiting the Empire; Wintle, Colonial Collecting; Andreassen, Human Exhibitions.

19 Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’; Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition; Cannadine, Ornamentalism; Ryan, Picturing Empire; Kaul, Reporting the Raj; Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 3.

20 Poon, Enacting Englishness, 21–47; see also Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India.

21 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Fischer-Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans.

22 Green and Troup, The Houses of History: 300–1.

23 Agnew, “Refracting the Raj,” 87.

24 Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties.”

25 Dening, Beach Crossings, 225.

26 University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library (CRL), CMS/ACC767 F1. Letters from Agnes May Johnston to her mother and sisters, 1915–1926; Staffordshire County Council, D3239/2. Staffordshire Baptisms, 10 July 1881; Kew, The National Archives (TNA), RG12/2379, folio 12, p.22. England, Wales & Scotland Census, William Street, Birmingham, 1891; TNA, RG14/17019. England, Wales & Scotland Census, 37 Avondale Road, Wolverhampton, 1911.

27 CRL, CMS/G/C1/96. CMS Executive Committee Minutes, page 259, 29 May 1935; CRL, The CMS Home Gazette, November 1910, page 326; Crowther Mission Studies Library, The Church Missionary Outlook, May 1967, page 20.

28 Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves. On women’s literary and epistolary labours in particular, see Smith, “Widows, Violence and Death.”

29 Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress.

30 Langhamer, “Who the Hell are Ordinary People?” 195.

31 Robinson, “Travelling Ayahs”; Gaw, Superior Servants; Conway, “Ayah”.

32 McAleer, “As Pretty a Thing as I Have Ever Seen,” 7.

33 For insights into the creation of family units onboard ships, see for instance, Finn, “Colonial Gifts” as well as her forthcoming work; Reid, “Ocean Funerals.”

34 Burton et al., “Sea Tracks and Trails”; Menon et.al., Ocean as Method; Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South; Amrith, Unruly Waters.

35 Examples of this rich scholarship include: MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire; Finn and Smith, The East India Company at Home; Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire; Fisher, Counterflows to colonialism; Burton, At the Heart of the Empire; Darwin, Unlocking the World; Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.

36 Kucich, Imperial Masochism; Poon, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period, 77–83.

37 Mawani, Across Oceans of Law, 12.

38 Ibid., 32; see also, Bahadur, Coolie Woman; Anderson, Convicts; Sell, Trouble of the World.

39 Stanley, “Settler Colonialism and Migrant Letters,” 403.

40 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, 27–30 September 1915.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Dening, “Performing Cross-Culturally,” 8; Hall, The Fateful Triangle.

44 Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, 20; “A Bombay Woman’s Causerie.” The Times of India, 10 April 1926.

45 Nath, “Migrant Memsahibs.”

46 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, c. 5 October 1915.

47 McKenzie, The Right Sort of Woman.

48 Woollacott, “All This Is the Empire,” 1023.

49 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, 27–30 September.

50 Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire.

51 Mathur, “Wanted native views,” 107.

52 Tomkins, Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation; Auerbach, Imperial Boredom; Joshi, “Mutiny Echoes,” 78.

53 Dawson, Soldier Heroes; Kucich, Imperial Masochism.

54 Sharpe, Allegories of Empire.

55 Kucich, Imperial Masochism.

56 Harris, Weatherland; Flint, “How Does English Weather Relate to National Identity?”; Mount, “The British: How Insularity and the Weather Shaped our National Identity”; “Weathering Identity”; Corton, London Fog; Bergmann, Weather, Religion and Climate Change; Kennedy, The Magic Mountains.

57 Rotter, Empires of the Senses.

58 Adamson, “The Languor of the Hot Weather”; Driver and Martins, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire; see also Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze; Harrison, Climates & Constitutions; Mark Harrison, Public health in British India.

59 Kennedy, The Magic Mountains.

60 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, c. 5 October 1915.

61 CRL, CMS G2 AL 1917–1934. Annual Letters, Group 2 Committee 1917–1934, Johnston, Rev. A.B., Masulipatam, 31 August 1927.

62 Nead, “The Secret of England’s Greatness”; Edwards, “Womanizing Indochina,” 126.

63 India Office Records and Private Papers (IOR PP), Mss Eur C493. Letter from Capt. Henry Fox Bunbury to Mrs Hanmer Bunbury, 9 June 1859.

64 Ibid.

65 Varma, Coolies of Capitalism, 15, 20, 38.

66 Sen, “Memsahibs and Health,” 263.

67 IOR PP, Mss Eur C495. Letter from Lt William CH Bunbury to Mrs Bunbury, 18 June 1890.

68 Sharpe, Allegories of Empire; Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination.

69 Collingham, Imperial Bodies; see also Levine, “States of Undress”; Levine, “Naked Truths.”

70 Seetaram, From Sepoy to Subadar, 15; on questions of the text’s authenticity see: Safadi, “From Sepoy to Subedar” and Welsch, The Company’s Sword, 240–6.

71 Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities.

72 McKittrick, “Talking about the Weather”; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 87–8.

73 National Library of Scotland, NLS MS.1857. Letter from Major Francis William Brown to his father, 20 July 1850. Research into the Brown papers was made possible by the generous support of Adam Matthew Digital and the Royal Historical Society.

74 Brown, Providence and Empire, 205; Satia, Time’s Monster.

75 IOR PP, Mss Eur D1029/1. Letter from Florence Harriet Esther Emery to her sister, 2 June 1883.

76 Arnold, “Deathscapes,” 348.

77 CRL, CMS G2 AL 1917–1934. Annual Letters, Group 2 Committee 1917–1934, Johnston, Rev. A.B., Masulipatam, 25 August 1928; CRL, CMS/G/Y/I8/2. General Correspondence, Annual Letters from A. B. Johnston, Noble College, Masulipatam, 1933.

78 Myers, Antipodal England.

79 School of Oriental and African Studies Archive, CWM/LMS/20/05/05. Letter from Lucy Bach to her family, 21 June 1896.

80 Hall and Davidoff, Family Fortunes; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?”; Cleall, “Far-Flung Families.”

81 Patterson, The Cult of Imperial Honor; Jones et al., “Decolonising Imperial Heroes”; Hall and Pick, “Thinking About Denial.”

82 Gust, Unhomely Empire; Guha, “Not at Home in Empire.”

83 Ibid.; Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 75–6.

84 Duggins, “A Lily of the Murray: Cultivating the Colonial Landscape.”

85 Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants”; Mizutani, The Meaning of White.

86 Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire.

87 Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About; Perry, “Is Your Garden in England,”

88 Perry, “Is Your Garden in England,” 79. For South and South East Asian studies see Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties”; Chaudhuri and Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism; Chaudhuri, “Memsahibs and Their Servants”; Sen, “Colonial Domesticities, Contentious Interactions.”

89 Davidoff, “Mastered for Life,” 411.

90 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

91 Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home about, 148; Nair, “Uncovering the Zenana,” 238.

92 Robbins, The Servant’s Hand.

93 Willcock, “Aesthetic Bodies”; Nayar, “The Colonial Home.”

94 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, 9 November 1916.

95 Finn, “The Female World of Love & Empire,” 20.

96 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 100; Sinha, “Domestic Servants and Service in Early Colonial India.”

97 Burton, Burdens of History.

98 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, 17 November 1916.

99 Ibid.

100 Grewal, Home and Harem, 44–5.

101 Burton, “Contesting the Zenana”; Weitbrecht, The Women of India; Dey Jhala, Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India.

102 CRL, CMS/ACC634. Collection of presentation addresses given to Reverend Alec Johnston during his missionary career, 1910–1934.

103 Tschurenev, Colonial Education in India.

104 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Letter from Agnes to mother, nd.

105 CRL, CMS/ACC767 F1. Telephone Message, 17 November 1916.

106 See for instance, IOR PP, Mss Eur C326, f.16., in the letter from Nancy Dearmer in India to her mother, describing the fabrications her servants would create about her whereabouts to enquirers on the telephone, 17 November 1916.

107 SOAS, CWM/LMS/India/Personal/Box 5. Letter from Lucy to family, 26 November 1896.

108 Finn, “Colonial Gifts”; Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity, 146; Cohen, Household Gods; Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor”; Jasanoff, Edge of Empire.

109 McMahon, et.al., The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life; Te Heesen, The Newspaper Clipping; Miles, All That She Carried.

110 Dening, Beach Crossings, 225.