Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent c. 1800-1947 (review)

In this visually rich survey of public and private spaces of the Raj, Robin D. Jones leads us though bungalow after bungalow in search of answers to the question of what their material possessions meant to Anglo-Indians who inhabited South Asia but yearned continuously for home. If it is a truism that Anglo-Indians (here, Britons living in India and Ceylon) displaced their homesickness onto household engineering projects, recreating what they imagined to be quintessentially British forms of domesticity (the tea service, the sitting room) in what many viewed as inhospitable quarters, Jones's book provides a rare account of what such spectacles actually looked like. Those conversant with Victorian travel writing will find much that is familiar here. From Emma Roberts to Mrs. Beeton to Maud Diver, images of the "compleat Indian housekeeper" have been staples of British colonialism in India, conjuring not just the material realities of home (re)construction on the subcontinent but also evoking its ideological work in sustaining the affective bonds between exiles and the mother country. In this sense, Indian interiors served as a form of memorabilia for expatriate Britons, not least because they refracted back to their inhabitants a memory of home—shoring up and even enhancing a sense of national-imperial identity that could be fragile in an often unforgiving colonial environment, climatologically and otherwise. For white women especially, staging English domestic practice in South Asia had high stakes. A test of their ability to reproduce the English home as a model of civilizational superiority, it also marked their capacity for conquering alien terrain, its rebellious servants, recalcitrant dirt, and untamable cookery.

To this recognizable story Jones adds a number of interesting dimensions. The catalog of interiors he provides offers a fascinating glimpse into what Elaine Freed-good, in The Ideas in Things (2006), calls Victorian "thing culture." The estate and auction records Jones has mined are replete with the tables, chairs, candlesticks, almirahs, and rugs that filled the drawing rooms of middling Anglo-Indians, many of whom lived quite well by metropolitan English standards, if their possessions are anything to go by. Despite the palpable overstimulation of all this "stuff," contemporary observers persisted in representing the Anglo-Indian home as sparsely furnished and generally underdone. Jones notes that this apparent contradiction is semantic: "unfurnished" evidently meant without curtains, fireplace, or wallpaper. Yet the slippage probably warrants more scrutiny for what it could tell us about the way material culture oriented the eye—and the self—in the context of colonialism on the ground. And although Jones is at pains to illustrate the impact of local architecture and artifacts on English interior design and furniture, what is as remarkable is the global signature that domestic consumption left on native Indian and Anglo-Indian homemaking alike. Like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy's mansion in Rampart Row, Bombay, the interiors we are privy to are chock-full not just of Madras matting and Persian carpets but French pier glass, Continental chairs, Venetian blinds, China trunks, and "gypsy" tables. Clearly the impact of empire was to Indianize its English subjects, Anglicize its Indian subjects, and cosmopolitanize them both, making the Indian home a monument to imperial Britain's role as a global delivery system for consumer durables.

Unusually for studies of British India, colonial power in Sri Lanka figures as a consistent object of analysis throughout. One advantage of this is that we get to see the overlay of Dutch imperial style in the material culture of the Colombo elite as well as its gradual displacement by Anglo-Ceylonese decor, as in the Cinnamon Gardens home of the England-returned barrister James Peiris and his wife. Hybridity was certainly a common feature of Raj interior design, as the "Shearwood" Ottoman couches suggest. But bricolage was, too: a morah (a cane or reed stool) might be covered with Berlin wool embroidery, while an English...