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Victorian Studies 46.1 (2003) 151-153



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Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800-1947, by E. M. Collingham; pp. xii + 213. Cambridge: Polity, 2001, £50.00, £15.99 paper, $72.95, $33.95 paper.

E. M. Collingham's book rests on the premise that the British experience of India was intensely physical. She exemplifies this point through a lively analysis of the food, the dress, the toiletry, the domestic space, the child-rearing practices, the ceremonials, and the modes of sociality that shaped the lives of a particular group of British—the elite official community of civil servants—in India. In the process this group produced distinctively Anglo-Indian bodies that, despite their pretensions to a metropolitan "Britishness," were indelibly marked by their colonial Indian experiences. The further argument of the book is that the Anglo-Indian bodies so constituted articulated the changes in the expression of British power in India from the early nineteenth century to the end of British rule. While Collingham invokes the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault to situate her study of the bodily practices of the British in colonial India, her engagement with the theoretical literature on the body remains superficial. The result is a book that has less to say about the methodological implications of paying attention to the body for the study of imperialism than about the concrete physical experiences of particular Anglo-Indian bodies.

The constraints of such an approach to "body history" are evident in an unresolved tension between the chronological framework that organizes the study and the explicit arguments about its significance. The book adopts a fairly conventional periodization [End Page 151] of the Raj: part 1 focuses on the period from 1800 to 1857 and part 2 on the period from 1858 to 1939, ending with a brief epilogue that brings the study up to the transfer of power in 1947. Given that Collingham explicitly downplays the break represented by the revolt of 1857 for her bodily history of British civil servants in India, her use of that year to divide the two halves of the study is curious. Whatever the power of its impact on British policies of governing India, according to Collingham, the rebellion had only minor significance for the changing bodily practices of Anglo Indians. Far more significant for her study, in fact, is an earlier shift that had begun to replace the "Indianized" bodies of the early British administrators in India—represented in the figure of the nabob—by the new "Anglicized" bodies represented in the figure of the burra sahib. To be sure, Collingham acknowledges that the events of 1857 provided a certain impetus for these changes, but, as she emphasizes, this process was already well in motion before then. Hence the climax of the process of anglicization in the late-nineteenth century—the racially aloof and faux- British figure of the Anglo-Indian official—is attributed to factors other than the fears that were the legacy of 1857. These Anglo-Indian bodies, Collingham further suggests, persisted into the twentieth century, largely impervious to the political and social changes that began to render them increasingly archaic and fossilized.

The peculiar place of 1857 in this study—as both shorthand for a convenient chronology and as a relatively insignificant factor in the history of the bodily politics of Anglo India—is symptomatic of an overly narrow understanding of the body as a category of analysis. For the expression of British power in India, the aftermath of 1857 was characterized by an increased British military presence, including the British Tommy, and by a greater accommodation of differing Indian responses to this British presence. Yet Collingham justifies relegating both these factors to the margins. "The lower orders of British society," she insists, "play a lesser part in the analysis due to their more shadowy role in the expression of British power" (6). Similarly, Indian responses "play only a small part in this history" because of the "curious lack of attention paid to them by the...

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