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Afterword
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282 Afterword The preceding chapters have shown how various writers expressed their conflicted Anglo-Indian sensibilities by describing equally incompatible colonial spaces. It is important to recall that well before Anglo-Indian writers opened this vein of colonial irony, other writers, including many who had never been outside Europe, had begun to tap into the wellspring of this iconography in order to sustain their narratives. These earlier British narratives are filled with characters made credible by the associational power of their “Eastern” surroundings . Colonial spatiality, in other words, was at play in British literary texts long before its representation by Anglo-Indians, but the earlier texts were usually motivated by a desire to guarantee the integrity of European social space. Notable among such narratives was Thomas de Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, with its famous rendition of the iconic “oriental” London opium den. Quincey’s opium den in fact came to represent “the site of orientalist disgust and desire, hybridity and degradation.”1 Even Dickens could not resist drawing upon this site in his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The threatening nature of the transposed “Eastern” space was part of a larger discourse about the presence in the European cities of the poor (Chadwick’s “great unwashed”), non-European workers (such as Malay sailors), wandering and therefore suspect “tribes,” prostitutes, and criminals. Racially charged descriptors for these degenerate types ranged from gypsy, heathen and wild to hulking, coarse, and repulsive,2 all of which signaled a visual and moral assault upon polite society. As Raymond Williams observed, one response to this perceived assault was emigration to the colonies, which authorities “seized as a solution to the poverty and overcrowding of the cities.”3 But just as consequential as bodily AFTERWORD 283 transportation was material transposition, as when Britons sought to re-create an English town in the Indian hills. Entwined in this development was the rhetorical transposition of Europe to India, and of an exoticized India to Europe, which came to assume an authentic cast that continues to shape representations of the subcontinent. These representations are clearly very different from the conflicted tropes of Anglo-India. Anglo-Indian texts, as I have argued, articulate colonial iconography to quite different ends. We have seen, for example, how Kipling populates his narratives with spatial images and words that alternately confirm and destabilize imperial ideologies. His double -consciousness demands the kind of “tale [that] must be told from the outside —in the dark—all wrong.”4 Kipling’s gardens are also jungles, his Grand Trunk Road an exemplar of “happy Asiatic disorder” into which Kimball O’Hara dives and from which he can view “all India spread out to left and right.”5 At the same time, Kim is obliged to acknowledge the disciplinary demands of imperial statecraft, which threatens to extinguish his wanderlust—much as middle-class Londoners of the time wished to confine “wandering tribes” ethnographically as well as physically. Ultimately, the narrative’s engagement with Anglo-Indian duplexity enables it to rely on and celebrate inherently transgressive engagements with colonial space. Kim’s road, in other words, like the partitioned Simla Club, proves to be less in the service of colonial fixity than an enabler of Anglo-India’s trespassing prolixity. To Kim’s Anglo-Indian sensibility, roads are simultaneously real in a territorial sense, with proper proportion,6 and disconnected from established territorial demands. Roads are not subsumed into a larger whole that reconfirms a particular stasis. Likewise, the Anglo-Indian narrative establishes its own spatial multiplicity and sense of fracture through equally fractured characters precisely because of their facility for territorial trespass, engaging in—and producing—the “the monstrous hybridism of East and West.”7 This phrase is another name for the geographical and rhetorical inflections of Anglo-India set forth in this book. Notes 1. These are John Marriott’s words, cited from his The Other Empire: Metropolis , India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2003), 169. Marriott helpfully cites another description of the nineteenth-century opium den, that of James Greenwood, whose 1874 “A Visit to Tiger Bay” gives us “lascars, degraded [English] women, and dark-skinned snake-like Hindoos” (ibid.). The debt to De Quincey seems clear. 2. Cited in Marriott, The Other Empire, 122–123. [34.204.52.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:42 GMT) 284 out of bounds 3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 281...