Race, place and bodily difference in early

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LtdResearch in early nineteenth-century India

nineteenth-century India*
David Arnold
School of Oriental and African Studies, London

Abstract
Changing ideas of race, place and bodily difference played a crucial part in the
way in which the British in India thought about themselves, and more especially
about Indians, in the half-century leading up to the Mutiny and Rebellion of
1857. But in seeking to make this case, this article aims to do more than merely
illustrate the importance of ‘the body’ to the ideology and practice of nineteenth-
century colonialism in one of its principal domains. Without, I hope, invoking
too crass and simplistic a binary divide, it seeks to restate an argument about
colonialism as a site of profound (and physically-grounded) difference. Binary
divisions and dichotomous ideas may have passed out of favour of late among
historians, with a growing barrage of attacks on Edward Said and Orientalism.1
But even if Orientalism provides an unreliable guide to the complex heterogeneity
of imperial history, there is an equal danger that, in reacting so strongly against
ideas of ‘otherness’, historians may too readily overlook or unduly diminish the
ways in which ideas of difference were mobilized, in ideology and in practice,
in the service of an imperial power.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no small part

of the European sense of ‘otherness’ with regard to India was grounded
in place. Indeed, at times the power of place, particularly as manifested
through the perceived influences of climate and disease, appeared
almost overwhelming. Writing in the same broadly deterministic vein
as Montesquieu and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, 2
authors like Robert Orme and Alexander Dow dwelt on the manner in
which the extreme climate of India, its heat and humidity, coupled with

* An earlier version of this article was presented as a lecture to the Anglo-American

Conference of Historians on ‘The Body’ in July 2003.
1
E. W. Said, Orientalism (1978); cf. M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race,
Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600 –1850 (New Delhi, 1999); D. Cannadine,
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001); L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and
the World, 1600 –1850 (2002); W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-
Century India (2002).
2
A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966),
pp. 108 – 21.

© Institute of Historical Research 2004. Historical Research, vol. 77, no. 196 (May 2004)
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 255

the natural abundance of its soil, had profoundly shaped the physical
and moral condition of its people. Thus, Dow in 1770 declared that the
‘languor occasioned by the hot climate of India’ naturally inclined ‘the
native to indolence and ease; and he thinks the evils of despotism less
severe than the labour of being free’.3 The ‘seeds of despotism’, sown
among the Hindus by ‘the nature of the climate and the fertility of the
soil’, had been ‘reared to perfect growth by the Mahommedan faith’. The
combination of nature and custom, Dow believed, reduced Hindus to
a state of abject slavery, and accustomed ‘an indolent and ignorant race
of men’ to the ‘simplicity of despotism’.4 All this ‘slavery’ and ‘languor’
existed, of course, in perceived contrast to the stimulus of the more
barren soils and more temperate climate which had fuelled civilization
and fed thoughts of freedom in the more northerly lands of Europe.
Writing in the seventeen-sixties, Orme likewise observed that ‘Breathing
in the softest of climates; having so few real wants; and receiving even
the luxuries of other nations with so little labour, from the fertility of
their own soil; the Indian must become the most effeminate inhabitant
of the globe; and this is the very point at which we now see him’. 5
This scornful view of Indians in general, and Bengalis in particular,
continued to find expression well into the middle of the nineteenth century,
and never more so than in the uncompromising prose of Thomas
Babington Macaulay. Writing in 1840, Macaulay (until recently a member
of the governor-general’s supreme council in India) described Bengal’s
virtues as a place of great natural abundance, with no other part of India
possessing ‘such natural advantages both for agriculture and for commerce’.
But, echoing Orme, he promptly added that the
race by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft climate and
accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation to other Asiatics
which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe
. . . Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. His favourite pursuits are
sedentary. He shirks from bodily exertion . . . There never, perhaps, existed a
people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.6
Macaulay was only getting into his stride. The following year he returned
to the charge, in words that have become notorious for their racial
stereotyping:
The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives
in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his
movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of

3
A. Dow, ‘A dissertation concerning the origin and nature of despotism in Hindostan’, in
A. Dow, The History of Hindostan (3 vols., 1770), iii. vii.
4
Dow, pp. xx– xxi.
5
R. Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1782), cited in S. Sen, Distant Sovereignty:
National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002), p. 85.
6
T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays (2 vols., 1907), ii. 502 – 3.

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256 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to
which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable. His mind bears
a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of
manly resistance.7
But against this self-preening polemic of racial pride and denigration,
we need to set the voluminous literature, appearing from the seventeen-
nineties onwards, that emphasized the physical or, as it was commonly
put, the constitutional frailty of Europeans when immersed in precisely
that same Oriental ‘vapour bath’. William Tennant, a clergyman writing
from Calcutta in 1796, stated that ‘the climate of almost every intra-
tropical region is unfavourable to European constitutions. Those flat
countries where moisture is combined with heat, are unexceptionally
more injurious to health than such as are dry’.8 This stamped the climate
of Bengal (like that of Dutch Batavia) as being ‘a severe trial to every
European constitution’. Its effects were clearly marked on the bodies
of its victims. Among European men a ‘sallow and livid complexion’ was
‘universal’, while among women (so often in this discourse the markers
of both climatic and racial difference) ‘there is hardly a single female
complexion in Bengal that retains the bloom of health. Beauty in every
country is a fading flower’, Tennant continued; ‘here it is almost
ephemeral’.9
In so insalubrious a climate there seemed little prospect that
British men and women could for long survive in health, or reproduce
themselves beyond one, or at most two, puny generations. As one doctor
of the Bengal Medical Service put it, in seeking to explain why ‘white
creoles’ could thrive on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion but not
in India, ‘The enervating atmosphere of Bengal would dwarf a race of
giants in three generations, if they lasted so long’.10 The searing rays of
an overhead sun, the extremes and sudden variations of temperature, and
the energy-sapping humidity were considered to act not just directly
upon the European body but also to operate indirectly through the
lethal miasmas generated by heat and moisture in abundant swamps and
jungles.11 Here, it might seem, was painful testimony to the peculiar
vulnerability of Europeans, their inability to adapt to a tropical climate
(even through acclimatization and ‘seasoning’), and their inherent
susceptibility to a host of deadly diseases.
7
Macaulay, p. 562. For an equally contemptuous view of Bengalis, by a Dutch admiral who
visited Bengal in 1769 – 70, see J. S. Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies by J. S. Stavorinus
(3 vols., 1st edn., 1798; 1969), i. 407–8; and for the impact and significance of such
observations, see M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate
Bengali’ in the Late 19th Century (Manchester, 1995), pp. 15–16.
8
W. Tennant, Indian Recreations (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1803), i. 76.
9
Tennant, pp. 78– 9.
10
F. J. Mouat, Rough Notes on a Trip to Reunion, the Mauritius and Ceylon (Calcutta, 1852),
p. 62.
11
For medical topography in 19th-century India, see Harrison, Climates, chs. 2 – 3.

© Institute of Historical Research 2004.

 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 257

But within the medical discourse of the time the supposed effects of
climate were seldom understood in isolation – in terms of what tropical
heat and humidity did to the European body alone – but by constant
comparison with Indians. James Ranald Martin, one of the leading
medical topographers of the period, was fond of quoting the Scottish
philosopher Adam Ferguson to the effect that ‘all observation is suggested
by comparison’,12 and the medical texts of early nineteenth-century India
constitute an extended exercise in comparative physiology and pathology
in which European and Indian bodies are constantly compared (despite
the difficulty of obtaining Indian bodies for dissection).13 The main sites
of institutional observation – the hospitals, jails and above all the army
(which brought European and Indian soldiers under the scrutiny of a
single medical corps) – facilitated this process of comparison and gave it
a practical purpose and urgency.14
Thus James Annesley of the Madras Medical Service set out in 1825
to examine the ‘comparative effects of disease upon the constitutions of
the Europeans and natives, of the same military class, subject to the same
duties, and exposed to similar vicissitudes’.15 After a lengthy investigation,
he concluded that Europeans and Indians were susceptible to different
diseases: Indians suffered most from fevers and ulcers, while among
Europeans dysentery and liver diseases were twenty to thirty times more
common than among Indian soldiers. With respect to cholera, one of
the most dreaded and widely prevalent diseases of the period, Indians
were, Annesley believed, more likely than Europeans to die, ‘their powers
of life being readily over-powered’.16 His contemporary, William Twining
at Calcutta’s General Hospital, undertook a similar exercise in comparative
pathology in 1832, concluding each chapter of his book with observations
on ‘the modifications of disease to which the Natives of the country
are liable’.17 He, too, pointed to a number of apparent differences in the
incidence and impact of diseases (agreeing, for instance, that among Indians
cholera was ‘usually a more rapid and more fatal disease than we find it in
Europeans’), and he reported the existence of Indian ailments (such as nakra,
‘the nose disease’) seemingly unknown to European inhabitants of Bengal. 18

12
J. R. Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta, 1837), p. 75; J. R. Martin,
The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1856), p. 2.
13
One doctor claimed that, because of the practice of cremation, ‘the body of the Hindoo
is almost unattainable’ (R. Young, ‘On the inhabitants of Lower Bengal’, in Report of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science (hereafter B.A.A.S.) (1851), p. 96). Others noted
the strong Indian aversion to post-mortems. Nonetheless, medical reports relating to Indian
soldiers, prisoners and hospital inmates show that a small number of autopsies were carried out.
14
For the main sites of colonial medicine in India, see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in 19th-Century India (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), ch. 2.
15
J. Annesley, Sketches of the Most Prevalent Diseases of India (1825), p. 251.
16
Annesley, pp. 128, 312.
17
W. Twining, Clinical Illustrations of the More Important Diseases of Bengal (Calcutta, 1832), p. xxii.
18
Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), pp. 515, 700 – 3.

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258 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

Different constitutions demanded different treatments. Indians, it

was said, being constitutionally weaker, could not stand such ‘heroic’
measures as Europeans and accordingly (the metaphors of the battlefield
invading the hospital ward) were more likely to succumb to the onslaught
of disease. Twining noted that although fevers were very common among
Bengalis of all classes, the frequent use of purgatives was less necessary
than among Europeans. He had found ‘the constitution of the Natives
of Bengal soon subdued by those febrile disorders which come on
after fatigue and privations, in damp unhealthy situations, where
the air is contaminated with malaria, and the water is bad’. Under such
circumstances, ‘they sink rapidly into a very low state’.19 The heavy
bloodletting widely deployed to arrest paroxysms in the ‘cold stage’ of
intermittent fever had to be moderated in their case (the physician
drawing a mere four to ten ounces of blood from a frail Indian rather
than the twelve to sixteen ounces taken from a plethoric Englishman),
and mercury (one of the mainstays of Western therapeutics) was to be
avoided because Indians reputedly could not withstand its often alarming
effects.20 Indians and Europeans might be exposed to the same climate,
but its impact, and the response deemed appropriate to its bodily effects,
was not necessarily the same.
It is significant that this medical literature spoke primarily in terms of
constitutional rather than racial differences. Skin colour was not here the
main issue, although there were physicians, led by the naval surgeon
James Johnson, with his elaborate theory of the ‘sympathy’ between the
surface of the body and the functions of the liver (as a principal seat
of disease), who argued that Indians’ skins made them naturally better
able than Europeans to cope with the violent effects of tropical heat
and humidity. 21 Twining, like many of his contemporaries, invoked
J. F. Blumenbach’s classification of racial ‘types’ of sixty years earlier
and readily identified Bengalis as ‘Caucasians’. Indeed, by contrast
with Macaulay’s opinions quoted earlier, he described them in 1835 as a
handsome race who ‘possess in common with the most distinguished
inhabitants of Europe the Caucasian conformation of the head . . . Their
features are regular and well formed, with an expression of mildness and
intelligence’. Despite their relatively small, slight frame, he believed them
capable of great powers of endurance. However, he continued to argue
(following Johnson) that ‘The effect of different states of the functions of
the skin, on the condition of internal organs in natives, appears not to be

19
Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), pp. 696 – 7.
20
Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1832 edn.), p. 570; Annesley, pp. 318 –19. Indians, on the
other hand, were said to be better able to survive the effects of injuries and surgical operations
that were considered ‘too dangerous’ for Europeans ( J. Murray, On the Topography of Meerutt
(Calcutta, 1839), pp. 48 – 9).
21
J. Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on European
Constitutions (1813), pp. 144 – 5, 265, 421.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 259

regulated by exactly the same scale of sympathies, and the external and
internal organs do not seem to exercise corresponding mutual influence
to what exists in Europeans’.22
Whether this difference arose from their ‘habits of life’ or from
‘peculiarities of original conformation’, Twining was unable to say. 23
But as this passage suggests, many medical writers of the time saw
the constitutions of Indians and Europeans as being shaped differently by
cultural as much as by climatic influences. Early in the century, Johnson
was one of those who argued that Indians followed a range of cultural
practices which (whatever their original intentions) made them well
adapted to the climate in which they lived. These included frequent bathing
and the wearing of cool, loose clothing (neither of which Europeans
were much given to at the time), as well as Indians’ ‘temperate’
abstention from the large quantities of meat and strong drink to which
Europeans appeared to be so recklessly addicted.24 As J. R. Martin
remarked forty years later, while Indians were clearly of Caucasian origin,
their constitutions had for so long been influenced not just by the effects
of climate, but also by religion and custom, that they had come to differ
physically as well as morally from Europeans. ‘These general causes’,
Martin concluded, ‘together with the premature development of the
generative function, produce an excitability of the nervous system, [and]
diminished volume, enervation, and relaxation of the muscular system as
compared to Europeans’.25
If there was one cultural factor that seemed more than any other to
affect constitutions, it was diet. Johnson observed in 1807 that it was ‘out
of the question’ that a European, on his arrival in India, should ‘turn
Hindoo, and live upon rice’, but ‘if he were to relax a little his passion
for beef-steaks in the morning, a sumptuous dinner at seven in the
evening, with a bottle of wine to crown the whole’, he would ‘not only
avoid a few of those fashionable Oriental diseases, the liver complaint,
bilious fever, &c., but enjoy the invaluable blessing of good health’. 26 The
contrast, however, was repeatedly made not just between abstemious
Indian and indulgent European diets, but, as physicians grew more aware
of regional differences within India itself, between the rice diet of the
supposedly ‘effeminate’ Bengalis and the wheat diet of the reputedly
‘martial’ inhabitants of northern India, especially the Rajputs, ‘a stronger
and more hardy race’, as Twining described them.27
22
W. Twining, Clinical Illustrations of the Most Important Diseases of Bengal (2nd edn., 2 vols.,
Calcutta, 1835), ii. 419–20.
23
Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1835 edn.), p. 420.
24
Johnson, Influence, pp. 416 –50.
25
Martin, Influence, pp. 212–13.
26
J. Johnson, The Oriental Voyager (1807), p. 89.
27
Twining, Clinical Illustrations (1835 edn.), p. 418. A similar contrast between the diets and
health of prisoners in north India and Bengal was made in J. Hutchinson, A Report on the
Medical Management of the Native Jails (Calcutta, 1835), p. 7.

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260 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

It might be argued, as Mark Harrison has recently done, that this

accumulating medical testimony amounted, from the imperial perspective,
to a doctrine of pessimism, indicative of Europeans’ physical vulnerability
and their consequent inability to survive and settle in India, especially
if this view were compared with the belief, attributed to the previous
century, that Europeans abroad were capable of fairly rapid
acclimatization, even in the tropics.28 It is doubtful, however, that racial
pessimism was really the dominant doctrine drawn from this extended
physiological and pathological comparison, and for three main reasons.
First, although it is easy to identify climatic determinism in the medical,
as in the philosophical, works of the period, in practice the despotism of
nature appeared far from absolute. It was the task of medical practitioners,
armed with their accumulating topographical knowledge, to evade the
malevolent effects of place and climate by identifying those locations
which would, by virtue of their elevation, aspect or freedom from ‘rank’
vegetation, provide a safe site for a barrack or jail. Even if human
constitutions were not easily amended, environments could be substantially
modified, as by draining marshes or clearing the jungles in which lethal
miasmas lurked.29 The coming of the railways (obviating the need for long
European troop marches) and the slow growth of sanitary science seemed
further to diminish the pathological power of place and to free Europeans,
at least, from the tyranny of the tropics. In that sense, colonial medicine
seemed ultimately to endorse the view that the burden of climate weighed
more heavily upon Indians than Europeans.
Second, the medical discourse of the period was as much about class
as race, about the bodies of rank-and-file soldiers rather than those of
officers and civil servants. In the army, lower-class Europeans were seen
to be more vulnerable to cholera than were their officers, just as poor
Indians were thought to be.30 High mortality among European soldiers
was attributed in no small part to their ‘degenerate’ lifestyle, to their
‘promiscuous’ relations with Indian women and especially their heavy
drinking, rather than to climate as such. It might be argued that British
soldiers were no more likely to give up their grog than Bengalis to
relinquish their rice, but the ideal of greater temperance in the army was
one to which many doctors subscribed.31 That British officers and civilians
also died or were invalided out of India in considerable numbers did not
so much provoke ‘pessimism’ about the possibility of European rule in
the tropics as occasion ‘melancholy’ reflection on its high personal cost.

28
M. Harrison, ‘“The tender frame of man”: disease, climate and racial difference in India
and the West Indies, 1760 –1860’, Bull. Hist. Medicine, lxx (1996), 90–2; Harrison, Climates,
pp. 11– 20.
29
E.g., Martin, Medical Topography, pp. 86 – 91.
30
E.g., J. Jameson, Report on the Epidemick Cholera Morbus (Calcutta, 1820), pp. 110–12, 150 –1.
31
Martin, Influence, pp. 402–12; J. Ewart, A Digest of the Vital Statistics of the European and
Native Armies in India (1859), pp. 2, 27–8, 127–8.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 261

And finally, while authorities like Martin certainly concluded that the
climate and diseases of India prohibited, as if by nature, any thought of
European colonization,32 that ambition had never been widely deemed
appropriate for British rule in India and was never adopted as official
policy. Indeed, the last thing the East India Company wanted was an
influx of Europeans, especially of the lower classes, believing that they
could never compete with Indian labour and would, by their rowdy
behaviour and abusive conduct, undermine the respect (or at least the
acquiescence) on which the authority of British rule over Indians was
deemed ultimately to depend.33

Turning more directly from place to race, two general considerations

need to be borne in mind. The first is that there was an undoubted
growth in the British emphasis upon racial difference, and especially
the perceived physical characteristics of race, over the course of the
nineteenth century. The concept of race, presented as biological fact,
became one of the governing ideas of the high imperial era, and sustained
attempts were made in the name of science to give race an anatomical,
even mathematical, precision. H. H. Risley, the civil servant who in the
eighteen-nineties and nineteen-hundreds did most to promote physical
anthropology in the service of the colonial state, has become notorious
for the extent to which he sought to define and differentiate Indian
society in biological terms. He held that ‘race sentiment’, ‘far from being
a figment of the intolerant pride of the Brahman’, rested upon ‘a
foundation of fact which scientific methods confirm’. He further believed
that it had ‘shaped the intricate groupings of the caste system’ and had
‘preserved the Aryan type in comparative purity throughout Northern
India’.34 In his avid pursuit of anthropometry and craniology, as the
principal tools of a race-oriented ethnography, Risley strongly endorsed
the view that ‘Physical characters are the best, in fact the only true
tests of race, that is of real affinity; language, customs, etc., may help or
give indications, but they are often misleading’.35 And one can see stark
evidence of this belief in the physicality of race not just in colonial
ethnography and the census reports, but also institutionally embedded in
prisons and penal practice, in the identification and disciplining of the
‘criminal tribes’, and in recruitment to (and internal management of ) the
32
Martin, Medical Topography, p. 175.
33
A. T. Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (1962), pp. 166– 9; D. Arnold, ‘White
colonization and labour in 19th-century India’, Jour. Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xi (1983),
133 – 58.
34
H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (4 vols., Calcutta, 1891), i. i–ii.
35
H. H. Risley, The People of India (1908; 2nd edn., 1915), p. 6. For Risley’s impact, see
C. Pinney, ‘Colonial anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’, in The Raj: India and
the British, 1600 –1947, ed. C. A. Bayly (1990), pp. 252 – 8; C. Bates, ‘Race, caste and tribe in
central India: the early origins of Indian anthropometry’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia,
ed. P. Robb (Delhi, 1995), pp. 241– 9.

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262 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

Indian police and army. But when and how did this extreme biologizing
and essentializing of race come about? How far can we import ideas about
the ‘physical characters’ of race which were clearly dominant by the
eighteen-nineties and nineteen-hundreds back into the earlier part of the
century?36 Were such ideas already embedded in the earlier medical
discourse of climates and constitutions, or was it, as many historians have
suggested, only after 1857 (aided by the traumatic events of that year) 37
that race assumed so powerful and so physical a meaning?
A second, related, issue takes us back from the late nineteenth to the
late eighteenth century. In one fundamental sense the struggle for racial
segregation and supremacy in India had been decided well before 1857,
long before there had been much intellectualizing or scientific discourse
around the question of race. From the seventeen-nineties, the East India
Company began to exclude Indians and Eurasians from positions of
authority in the bureaucracy and the army, and even from the social and
ceremonial life that surrounded the governing elite. A critical step was
the decision in 1791 to exclude Eurasians from the covenanted ranks of
the civil service and army and to designate them ‘Natives of India’ rather
than British subjects. Several factors lay behind this exclusionism. In part
it was done to root out corruption in the administration, assuming
(partisanly) that Indians were the principal source of that contagion; it was
fostered, too, by a desire to concentrate the lion’s share of Company
patronage in the hands of the court of directors in London. It has further
been argued that the exclusion of Eurasians was motivated by a fear that
a powerful creole class in India might, like its American counterparts,
become a platform for anti-colonial sentiment; and that, in an age in
which British nationhood was becoming more clearly defined, particularly
in opposition to others, the existence of a growing class of ‘half-castes’
was perceived as a threat to Britons’ racial identity and moral reputation. 38
Whatever the precise reason, or reasons, behind this racial revolution, the
investment of power in one self-defined racial group to the exclusion or
strict subordination of others was already well established by the eighteen-
twenties and thirties.
36
Harrison, in Climates, p. 12, adopts from Robb (p. 1) a ‘working definition’ of race as
‘any essentialising of groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent
or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis’. Harrison
adds that the term ‘race’ in the 19th century ‘often referred to a combination of biological and
cultural traits but it was generally rooted in a supposed biological essence, which determined all
other characteristics’. As the following discussion will show, this greatly overstates the importance
of biological characteristics in the representation of race in India before the 1840s and 50s.
37
V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the
Imperial Age (rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 47 – 8; D. A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the
Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-19th Century (Leicester, 1978), pp. 167, 184;
Images of Race, ed. M. D. Biddiss (Leicester, 1979), p. 21.
38
P. Spear, The Nabobs: a Study of the Social Life of the English in 18th-Century India (1932;
2nd edn., 1963), pp. 137 – 9; Embree, pp. 167 – 9, 264 – 5; C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making
of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773 –1833 (Richmond, 1996), ch. 4.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 263

This legal and administrative revolution was, moreover, supported,

among Europeans in India, by a discourse of racial discrimination and
abuse that identified a non-white skin with every kind of unsavoury
physical and moral attribute. Macaulay’s verdict on Bengalis in the
eighteen-forties was one of the more refined versions of this; but there
were many less sophisticated expressions of similar sentiments, more often
delivered verbally than put into print, addressed to, or declared about,
Indians of all kinds. Among many sections of the European population
in India by the eighteen-thirties Indians were habitually referred to as
‘black’ (usually accompanied by some other insulting epithet) and
not uncommonly as ‘niggers’ (one indication, among several, of how
the language and sentiments of ‘race’ in the Atlantic world were being
echoed in South Asia).39 Although physical violence against Indians was
officially frowned upon by the Company, and occasionally punished, 40 it
was too entrenched to be exorcized, even had the political will existed
to do so. But, because the British sense of national superiority had
become so marked by the eighteen-thirties, it was possible to deploy a
language and typology of race not so much to police a racial frontier
between Britons and others as to differentiate among Indians themselves.
From this supposedly secure and superior vantage point, Europeans
presented themselves as an ideal physical and racial type which no Indian
could match and adjudicated among Indians on the basis of their
appearance as if at some eternal beauty contest.
In the earlier discussion of constitutions, attention was drawn to the
importance of institutional sites, especially with regard to the army, in the
articulation of a discourse of physical difference between Europeans and
Indians. With the extension of British power over most of South Asia
by the eighteen-twenties (following wars against Mysore, the Marathas
and the Gurkhas of Nepal), and given Europeans’ relative freedom to roam,
the travelling gaze significantly augmented the institutional one. The
political and cultural geography of India lent itself to a narrativization
of place and race as travel through a diverse physical and ethnological
landscape fed the European appetite for comparisons and contrasts. The
alliance of a Romantically-inspired language of nature with an Anglo-
Indian vocabulary, replete with such evocative topographical terms as
jungles, topes, jheels and nullahs,41 gave a new expressiveness and specificity
to the colonial sense of place and provided new spatial contexts for the
understanding and representation of race.42

39
Kiernan, pp. 35, 44; T. Bacon, First Impressions and Studies from Nature in Hindostan (2 vols.,
1837), ii. 64–5; H. Bevan, Thirty Years in India (2 vols., 1839), i. 89, 141.
40
E. Eden, Letters from India (2 vols., 1872), ii. 148–50; Private Letters of the Marquess of
Dalhousie, ed. J. G. A. Baird (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 165, 169.
41
See Hobson-Jobson, ed. H. Yule and A. C. Burnell (1866; 2nd edn., 1968), pp. 457, 470, 632, 934.
42
Notably R. Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay,
1824 – 5 (3rd edn., 3 vols., 1828); E. Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (3 vols., 1835).

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264 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

It was commonly assumed that in moving from Bengal (the dark skins
of its inhabitants tribute to the tropic sun), the European traveller
progressed towards the north-west where the cold winters (ignoring,
for this purpose, the fierce heat of summer suns) left skins ‘light copper’
coloured or, better still, ‘wheaten’ (like their diets), and so closer to
the European ideal.43 In these terms Indian men were allowed to be
‘handsome’ as well as ‘manly’, especially when, like most of the sepoys
in the Bengal army, they came from northern India and not from Bengal
itself.44 But in a situation in which ideas of race and gender were often
mutually reinforcing (or equally debasing), it was often women (if young)
who were singled out as having a near-European face or form, at least
to the extent of resembling southern Europeans: even the most attractive
of Indian women were seldom, in this cartography of colour, allowed to
penetrate far into northern Europe. Thus, according to Captain Herbert
in 1830 the ‘Hindustani beauty’ was, ‘in all that regards form and feature,
. . . a Greek; only with a darker skin’.45 Surgeon John M’Cosh in 1837
denied that the Assamese were ‘a degenerate and weakly race, inferior
even to the Bengalies’. Assamese women appeared to him ‘very fair indeed;
fairer than any race I have seen in India’, having ‘a form and feature
closely approaching the European’. They further found favour in his eyes
as being free from ‘that artificial modesty practised by native ladies in
other parts of India’. But there was a catch. The women of Assam may
have been ‘acknowledged beautiful in any part of the world’, but
‘unfortunately’, M’Cosh added, ‘their morality is at a very low ebb’. 46
Richard Burton, a lieutenant in the Bombay army before he turned his
ambitious eyes towards Mecca and the African lakes, observed in 1851
that high-caste women in Sind included ‘individuals very little darker
than the Spaniards or the Portuguese’ (but it is necessary to know how
little Burton thought of the Portuguese to understand the full significance
of that remark!).47 Clearly regarding himself as a connoisseur in these
matters, Burton described the Sindis (‘a semi-barbarous race’) as a ‘half-
breed between the Hindoo, one of the most imperfect, and the Persian,
probably the most perfect specimen of the Caucasian type. His features
are regular, and the general look of the head is good; the low forehead
and lank hair of India are seldom met with in this province’. They also
had (to his discerning eye) ‘handsome’ beards, a clear sign of a ‘masculine’
race, although they were not quite as good as the Persians’ and Afghans’.
But, in this perpetual game of morality and corporality, the ‘native’ could

43
A. D[eane], A Tour through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823), pp. 12–15.
44
Eden, i. 128; Baird, p. 22.
45
J. D. Herbert, ‘Particulars of a visit to the Siccim Hills’, Gleanings in Science, xvi (1830),
122.
46
J. M’Cosh, Topography of Assam (Calcutta, 1837), pp. 21–2.
47
R. F. Burton, Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), p. 416; cf.
R. F. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), pp. 88–100.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 265

never win: in this case, the ‘dark complexion’ of the Sindi pointed him
out, Burton alleged, ‘as an instance of arrested development’.48
In India, as in Europe, the term ‘race’ still commonly lacked the
specificity it was later to acquire,49 and an author like Burton, or Sir John
Malcolm in his Memoir of Central India in the eighteen-twenties, often
used ‘race’ interchangeably with ‘tribe’ or ‘caste’. One of the commonest
usages of the term ‘race’ was to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims
(as Burton did in his account of the ‘races’ of Sind, although that work
also detailed the manners, customs and traditions of many who would
later be identified ethnographically in terms of ‘castes’ and ‘tribes’).
Malcolm freely termed both Brahmins and Rajputs ‘races’, but allowed
the Marathas, by virtue of their history and patriotism, to rise to the more
honoured status of ‘nation’.50 In the Punjab, where many ‘tribes’, ‘races’ and
religions mingled, the Sikhs hovered uneasily somewhere in between. 51
A further indication of the relatively indeterminate ideas of race that
existed in early nineteenth-century India can be found in the use of the
word ‘countenance’. It could be used (and was increasingly so) to describe
the facial characteristics attributed to a particular race, but it was also used
in a more personal way to describe the appearance, and hence character, of
a particular individual. Thus Malcolm in the eighteen-twenties described
the cultivated and devout Ahalya Bai, a Maratha princess, as having a
‘countenance’ which was ‘agreeable and expressive of that goodness which
marked every action of her life’.52 But J. B. Fraser, in his excursion into
the Himalayas a few years earlier, was struck by the apparent mixture of
‘Tartar’ and ‘Hindoo’ features among the local inhabitants. ‘The general
cast of their countenance’, he remarked, ‘is Hindoo, but they seldom
possess the softness and even intelligence that may be considered a marked
characteristic of the Hindoo physiognomy’.53 J. D. Herbert, travelling in the
eastern Himalayas a decade later, similarly commented on the Lepchas:
The peculiarity of feature that marks this race is very striking. A broad, flat
face; the nose little elevated, but with extended nostrils; the eyes small and set
obliquely in the head . . . , a rather large mouth but with thin lips; and a great
deficiency of beard; form the elements of a countenance, which, though it
cannot, according to European notions, be pronounced handsome, is yet often,
from the expression of intelligence and good humour that distinguishes it, more
prepossessing than the regular features of the Hindustani.54

48
Burton, Sindh, p. 283.
49
N. Hudson, ‘From “nation” to “race”: the origins of racial classification in 18th-century
thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxix (1996), 247–64.
50
J. Malcolm, A Memoir of Central India (2nd edn., 2 vols., 1824), i. 43–4, 73–6.
51
J. D. Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs (1849), pp. 6–17.
52
Malcolm, i. 192.
53
J. B. Fraser, Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains
(1820), p. 67.
54
Herbert, ‘Particulars’, p. 93.

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266 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

But, from this fairly indeterminate state, a more precise notion of race
was beginning to emerge, stimulated by both internal and external
developments. By the eighteen-thirties, as the interior of India became
more accessible to Europeans, an increasingly explicit ‘racial’ contrast was
being drawn between the Indians of the plains, who were seen broadly
to conform to the Caucasian ‘type’ and whose ancestors were thought
centuries earlier to have brought the Aryan or Indo-European languages
into South Asia, and the ‘aboriginal’ or ‘tribal’ peoples of India who
inhabited hills and forests, especially across central India. In this evolving
representation of India’s ‘aboriginals’ several sets of antithetical ideas were
brought together – the almost naked versus the fully clothed, hunting and
shifting cultivation as against settled agriculture as the primary mode
of subsistence, and the jungle-dweller as opposed to the denizen of the
plains. That the ‘aboriginals’ were mostly understood to be jungle-dwellers
aligned them with one of the most potent topographical (and, by
implication, moral) concepts in the mental world of the colonizers,
for the term was indicative of all that was deemed wild, uncivilized
and uncouth.
It was sometimes in the depiction of the ‘aboriginals’ that the
most extreme language of race, especially the physicality of race, was
employed, with the supposedly debased physical type of ‘the Negro’
(rather than that of the allegedly elevated ‘Caucasian’) as the principal
guide. One anonymous British traveller in the early eighteen-twenties
described Bengalis as an ‘inferior race of men’ – ‘small, slightly made, and
very black’ – and contrasted them with north India sepoys whom he
approvingly dubbed ‘tall, stout, handsome looking men’. But on visiting
the Rajmahal hills on the western borders of Bengal he fell into
paroxysms of disgust at the sight of the local ‘tribal’ inhabitants, whom
he described as being ‘a short, thick-set, sturdy-built race, with the
African nose and lip’.55 He became still more apoplectic when a few
months later he encountered the Bhils of western India, describing them
as ‘a short, thick-set people, with hideous countenances, flat noses, and
thick lips, but far less handsome and finely formed men than the Africans;
. . . they look stupid’. That left only one thing more to complete their
condemnation: ‘Their women are even more hideous than the men.’ 56
But such abusive and physically explicit representations of India’s
‘aboriginals’ were not necessarily the norm. Major Bevan of the Madras
army, who spent some time among the Bhils in 1817, was full of praise
for their dexterity and fondness for hunting (being a keen huntsman
himself ) and in the course of several pages about them made no reference
to their physical appearance.57 Far from being models of racial

55
Sketches of India (4th edn., 1826), pp. 100 –1, 154.
56
Sketches of India, pp. 257 – 8.
57
Bevan, Thirty Years, i. 124 – 7.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 267

‘degeneration’, ‘aboriginals’ were sometimes represented in positive

contrast to the Hindu population and, from their apparent freedom from
caste and other social constraints and from their seeming closeness to
nature, in a more romantic light. In an article on the ‘aboriginal races’ of
central India in 1840, Lieutenant Tickell of the Bengal army, described
their ‘different languages, manners, and origins’, but made little comment
on their physical appearance. Among the Hos, the main subject of his
ethnographic account, the men were ‘fine, powerful fellows, and while
young, very handsome’. Ho women might go ‘about in a disgusting state
of nudity’, but they were free of the ‘stupid shyness and false modesty
thought proper among Hindoo women’. Some of the young Ho women,
with their ‘open, happy countenances, snowy white teeth, and robust,
upright figures’ even put him in mind (somewhat bizarrely) of ‘Swiss
peasant girls’.58 Perhaps the crucial difference between these descriptions
of India’s ‘aboriginals’ was that army officers like Bevan and Tickell knew
India relatively well (Bevan was writing a memoir of his thirty years in
India), while the anonymous author quoted earlier was new to India and
writing a book expressly, as its sub-title indicated, for ‘fire-side travellers
at home’ and so sought (at a time when issues of race and slavery were
being hotly debated in Britain) to give his account of India’s inhabitants
a more dramatic and seemingly relevant character.
Alongside this increasingly differentiated internal landscape of race and
place, colonial India was influenced by the development of ‘race science’
in Europe.59 By the eighteen-thirties the use of the term ‘Caucasian’ was
fairly commonplace among educated Europeans in India, but there were
increasing attempts to employ the rest of Blumenbach’s classificatory
schema, and so to categorize other sections of the Indian population
as ‘Mongolian’ (or more often ‘Tartar’), ‘Negro’ or ‘Malay’, or (more
commonly) as some combination of these idealized racial ‘types’. 60
Ethnographers in India seemed to be in no doubt that there was a single
human species from which any number of ‘mixed’ races had descended,
especially in regions like the Himalayas where ‘Tartar’, ‘Caucasian’ and
‘aboriginal’ met and intermingled.61 There was, moreover, an ardent
desire to demonstrate the worthiness of colonial science by meeting the
growing metropolitan demand for detailed ethnographic information.
With the circulation of an ethnological questionnaire by the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841 (to which a number
58
Lt. Tickell, ‘Memoir on the Hodesum’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, ix (1840), 695, 784 – 5.
59
N. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800 –1960 (1982); M. Banton, Racial
Theories (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1998), ch. 3.
60
J. Briggs, ‘Report on the aboriginal tribes of India’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1850),
pp. 169 – 76. For the ‘Oriental Negro’, see W. J. Crawfurd, ‘On the negro races of the Indian
Archipelago and Pacific Islands’, in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1851), pp. 86 – 8.
61
R. Strachey, ‘On the physical geography of the provinces of Kumaon and Garhwal in
the Himalaya Mountains, and of the adjoining parts of Tibet’, Jour. Royal Geographical Soc.
of London, xxi (1851), 57 – 85, at pp. 80– 5.

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268 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

of informants in India responded),62 and the founding of the Ethnological

Society of London in 1843 (‘formed for the purpose of inquiring into
the distinguishing characteristics, physical and moral, of the varieties of
Mankind’),63 colonial India became increasingly active in providing
the kinds of anatomical data required in Europe, even to the extent of
meeting its thirst for human skulls.64

At this point it may be helpful to turn to one individual, Brian Houghton

Hodgson, who captures many of the complexities and contradictions of
the ‘race’ idea in early nineteenth-century India, but whose important
contribution has been largely ignored.65 Born in Cheshire in 1800,
Hodgson joined the Bengal Civil Service in Calcutta in 1818.66 He almost
immediately fell seriously ill, possibly from hepatitis, and thereafter, for
the rest of his forty years in south Asia, regarded himself as a semi-invalid,
whose life would be endangered by any lengthy stay in the plains. He
secured a posting firstly in Kumaon in the Himalayan foothills and
then soon after, in 1820, in Kathmandu, where for nearly a quarter of
a century he was the assistant resident and then resident, the principal
British representative in the kingdom of Nepal. There Hodgson formed
a liaison with a Kashmiri Muslim woman, a relationship that lasted twenty
years and from which two children – a boy and a girl – were born. Such
interracial relationships had been common enough among the British
Indian elite thirty years earlier, but they had decidedly passed out of
fashion by the eighteen-thirties. Hodgson was well aware of this. He
deplored the rising tide of racial abuse and discrimination in India
and lamented the fate that his ‘mixed-race’ children were likely to suffer
at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. Eventually he sent them off to his
sister, in Holland, where they died shortly after.
In Nepal Hodgson became a great collector: he assembled vast numbers
of Buddhist manuscripts and did much to stimulate early Western interest
in that religion. He also collected and described hundreds of Himalayan
birds and mammals, and began to investigate the ethnology of the region,
a study which he pursued with even greater vigour when, having been
ousted from the residency, he found a second Himalayan home at
Darjeeling in 1845.67 In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth
century the Himalayas were an important frontier of scientific knowledge
62
Young, pp. 95–7.
63
Lorimer, p. 134.
64
For this and the connections with phrenology, see S. Kapila, ‘The making of colonial
psychiatry, Bombay presidency, 1849–1940’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis,
2002), pp. 187–96.
65
Apart from T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), ch. 5.
66
The following account is taken from W. W. Hunter, Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson (1896).
67
For Hodgson’s importance as an Orientalist and naturalist, see The Origin of Himalayan
Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, 1820 –58, ed. D. Waterhouse
(forthcoming).

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 269

– in geography and geology, in botany, zoology and ethnology – and

Hodgson made significant contributions to many of these fields. Primarily
through the study of language and the compilation of extensive wordlists,
he sought to establish that the ‘aboriginal’ populations of the Himalayas
and a large part of peninsular India, were not ‘Aryans’ or ‘Caucasians’, but
belonged to a different race, for whom he used the term ‘Tamulian’, and
whom he believed to be unique to India (or perhaps remotely connected
to the Mongolian ‘type’). They were the original inhabitants of India,
he believed, until expelled by the ‘usurping Hindus’ and driven into the
jungles and hills.68
In his belief that racial affinities were primarily discernable through
language, Hodgson was following Sir William Jones, who in the
seventeen-eighties had first established the shared linguistic origins of
Sanskrit, Greek and Latin (and hence the existence of an Indo-European
family of languages), and more especially the work of German philologists,
commencing with Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 essay on the ‘language
and wisdom of the Indians’. He was also well aware of the work of
Blumenbach and of J. C. Prichard, the pioneering British ethnologist,
whose work also drew heavily on philology for its understanding of
race.69 In 1847 Hodgson circulated a paper on three ‘aboriginal’ tribes,
the Kocch, Bodo and Dhimal, inhabiting the forests of the eastern
Himalayan foothills, in which he focused primarily on their vocabularies
and what these might indicate of their origins and level of civilization.
Hodgson, a compulsive writer of marginalia, inscribed on the title page
of this essay: ‘Their languages and mythology constitute the internal, true
and only history of primitive races and are by far the best exponents of
their real condition as thinking and acting beings’.70 (This was almost
exactly the reverse of the position held half a century later by Risley and
cited earlier). Further on Hodgson wrote in his continuing marginalia:
the more I see of these primitive races the stronger becomes my conviction that
there is no medium of research yielding such copious and accurate data as their
languages. Their physical and mental condition is exactly portrayed in their
speech and he who can analyse it and separate the foreign elements, has the key
to the amount and sources of their civilization.71
As to bodily features, Hodgson remarked that ‘their physical aspect is
of that oculant and vague stamp, which indicates rather than proves any
thing; or rather, what it does prove, is general, not particular’.72
68
B. H. Hodgson, ‘A brief note on Indian ethnology’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, xviii
(1849), 238–9.
69
Trautmann, ch. 5; J. C. Prichard, ‘On the relations of ethnology to other branches of knowledge’,
in Race: the Origins of an Idea, 1760 –1850, ed. H. F. Augstein (Bristol, 1996), pp. 213– 39.
70
B. H. Hodgson, On the Aborigines of India: the Kocch, Bodo and Dhimal Tribes (Calcutta,
1847) (copy in London, Royal Asiatic Society, Hodgson Papers).
71
Hodgson, Aborigines, pp. ii–iii.
72
Hodgson, Aborigines, p. v.

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270 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

But, while Hodgson considered language to be the methodological

and intellectual key to understanding race and its relationship to civilization,
he did not confine his attention to language alone, nor even to those
cultural practices and beliefs on which language seemed to shed such
light. A diligent ecologist, before such a term existed, Hodgson’s account
of the tribes and races of the Himalayas was deeply embedded in an
understanding of the topography of the region. His description of people
was often woven seamlessly into an account of the topographical divisions
and natural history of the Himalayas, and over very extended periods of
time, in his view, race became adapted to the peculiarities of place. 73 The
most striking illustration of this for Hodgson lay in the Terai, the tract of
swamp and forest at the foot of the Himalayas, rendered deadly for six
months of the year by malaria. The Terai, he observed in his 1847 essay,
‘is malarious to an extent which no human beings can endure, save the
remarkable [aboriginal] races which for ages have made it their dwelling
place’. They ‘not only live but thrive in [this region]’, he reported,
‘exhibiting no symptoms whatever of that dreadful stricken aspect of
countenance and form which marks the victim of malaria’. He considered
the same immunity to be characteristic of all the ‘aboriginal’ peoples of
India. ‘This single fact’, he wrote, ‘is to my mind demonstration that the
Tamulians have tenanted the wilds they now dwell in for many centuries,
probably 30 [that is, since the supposed date of the Aryan invasions],
because a very great lapse of time could alone work so wonderful an effect
upon the human frame’.74
Despite the primacy that Hodgson gave to language, he did in fact
provide material for a more anatomical understanding of race, assuming,
no doubt, that it would support his philological observations. At the end
of his 1847 tract, he gave an extended physical description of the Kocch
tribe and the anatomical measurements of a young Bodo male. Despite
what otherwise appears as a sympathetic approach to India’s ‘tribals’,
Hodgson juxtaposed his account of the ‘physical type’ of the Tamulian
with the customary idealization of the ‘Caucasian type’ in ways that
aligned him emphatically with the latter. ‘In the Arian [Aryan] form’, he
wrote,
there is height, symmetry, lightness and flexibility: in the Arian face, an oval
contour with ample forehead and moderate jaws and mouth; a round chin,
perpendicular with the forehead; a regular set of distinct and fine features; a well
raised and unexpanded nose . . . , a well sized and finely opened eye . . . ; no
want of eye-brow, eye-lash or beard; and lastly, a clear brunet complexion, often
not darker than that of the most southern Europeans.75
73
B. H. Hodgson, ‘On the aborigines of the sub-Himalayas’, Jour. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xvi
(1847), 1235 – 44.
74
Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 148. Hodgson was not alone in making this observation,
cf. M’Cosh, p. 101, on the immunity to malaria among the Garos of Assam.
75
Hodgson, Aborigines, pp. 149 – 50.

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 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 271

In the Kocch Tamulian, by contrast, there was

less height, less symmetry, more dumpiness and flesh; in the Tamulian face, . . .
less perpendicularity in the features to the front, occasioned not so much by the
defect of forehead or chin, as by excess of jaws and mouth; a larger proportion
of face to head, and less roundness of the latter; a broader, flatter face with
features less symmetrical but perhaps more expressive, at least of individuality;
a shorter wider nose, often clubbed at the end and furnished with wide nostrils,
eyes less and less fully opened . . . ears larger; lips thicker; beard deficient . . .76
In this extended description Hodgson repeatedly privileged the perceived
normality and beauty of the ‘Caucasian type’ over the supposedly
‘degenerate’ form and ‘misshapen’ features of the non-Aryan Tamulian.
As to skin colour, the Tamulians varied widely, Hodgson believed, further
confirming his view of the unreliability of mere physical appearance
as a true guide to racial identity. Some were little darker than the Aryans,
or, in the Himalayan region, seemed close to the yellow hue of the
‘Mongolian type’, while others, among the ‘tribals’ of the plains, could
be ‘nearly as black as negros’.77
This was not all. In 1844 Hodgson presented to the British Museum
a collection of ninety human skulls from Nepal. It seems extraordinary
that Hodgson could have amassed such a collection: Nepal was an
independent state, deeply suspicious of Europeans; cremation was widely
practised there as in India. The skulls were taken up for examination by
Richard Owen, professor of comparative anatomy and the man in charge
of the British Museum’s natural history collection. In his account of
the different groups of skulls, carefully labelled by Hodgson according to
their ‘tribe’ or ‘race’, Owen duly noted that many were of the ‘Indo-
European’ type while others approached the ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Ethiopian’
type; but, most strikingly, skulls from the same ethnic group showed a
great diversity of form. Thus, one Lepcha skull exhibited the ‘beautiful
Indo-European form’ while another from the same tribe ‘closely resemble[d]
the Australo-Papuan type of cranium’. Indeed, Owen confessed that, with
the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines, without labels or
other kinds of supplementary evidence it was difficult to identify any race
on the basis of skulls alone.78
Hodgson’s scepticism about interpreting race solely from physical
features might, thus, seem to be confirmed by Owen’s cautious analysis.
Nevertheless, it should be clear from his extensive writing about India’s
‘aborigines’ in the late eighteen-forties, as from Max Müller’s address to
the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford in 1847,79
76
Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 150.
77
Hodgson, Aborigines, p. 150.
78
R. Owen, ‘Report on a series of skulls of various tribes of mankind inhabiting Nepal’, in
Report of the B.A.A.S. (1859), pp. 95–103.
79
M. Müller, ‘On the relation of the Bengali to the Arian and aboriginal languages of India’,
in Report of the B.A.A.S. (1847), pp. 347 – 9.

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272 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India

that the discussion of race as it concerned India was assuming a far more
explicitly physical emphasis in the eighteen-forties than it had even a
decade or two earlier. The supposedly biological differences between
India’s different racial ‘types’ were increasingly foregrounded and even
the idea of a centuries-old ‘race war’ between Aryans and ‘aborigines’
was well established before the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Writers like
W. W. Hunter, who in the eighteen-sixties developed these ideas of racial
identity and conflict and (following the publication of Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species in 1859) gave them a new evolutionary twist, were
greatly indebted to Hodgson’s earlier work.80 If there was one moment
when the idea of race as a biological ‘fact’ came of age in India, it was
surely in the late eighteen-forties, even if it was to be two or three
decades before that idea became fully embodied in official discourse.
It is impossible, though, to leave Hodgson without one further
observation. Among his many other engagements with the complex and
rapidly evolving world of race, Hodgson was a leading advocate for the
European colonization of the ‘temperate’ regions of Kashmir, Nepal and
Sikkim. Writing in 1856, he presented the security of British rule (in the
face of a perceived Russian threat) as the principal reason for this; but it
was also that the soil, climate and salubriousness of the hills seemed to
him to cry out for white settlement, if this seemingly under-populated
region were ever to realize its full potential. According to Hodgson, the
‘loyal hearts and stalwart bodies of Saxon mould’ were what the region
required. Neither Tamulian ‘aboriginals’ nor Hindu ‘Arians’ were deemed
to have ‘the skill and energy’ needed to carve out India’s White Highlands
from the Himalayas.81

Over the course of the early nineteenth century there was a marked shift
in emphasis from place to race in the colonial understanding of Europeans
in India and of Indians themselves. In the British perception, Indians
were clearly not an undifferentiated ‘other’, and indeed much of the dis-
cussion of race in the colonial context revolved around perceived
racial differences within the indigenous population rather than between
Europeans and Indians. But this reflects a deeper dichotomy – the extent

80
S. Bayly, in Caste, Society and Politics in India from the 18th Century to the Modern Age
(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 126–38, stresses Hunter’s importance through his Annals of Rural Bengal
(1868), and seems to suggest that ‘race theory’ only became of major importance in India after
1857 and after the Darwinian revolution. But, as Hunter himself pointed out in Hodgson, ch.
12, his own ideas were greatly influenced by Hodgson’s work of the late 1840s. In an earlier
essay, ‘Caste and “race” in the colonial ethnography of India’ (in Robb, pp. 165–218), Bayly
gives a more nuanced account of the rise of race ideas in India, but still assigns them mainly
to the period following the Santhal Rebellion of 1855 and makes no mention of Hodgson’s
earlier contribution.
81
B. H. Hodgson, ‘On the colonization of the Himalaya by Europeans’ (1856), repr. in
B. H. Hodgson, Essays on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of Nepal and Tibet (1874),
pt. 2, pp. 83 – 9.

© Institute of Historical Research 2004.

 Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-century India 273

to which the British already by the eighteen-twenties and thirties saw

themselves as a race apart, and so able to observe, from a seemingly secure
and privileged position, the racial differences that characterized a
highly variegated indigenous population. Some Indians might be deemed
to have European-like complexions or physiques, they might even
be regarded as fellow ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Aryans’, but that did not signify a
shared ethnic identity in the present nor a common social and political
destiny in the future.82 Concepts of race were gradually becoming detached
from their earlier environmentalist and linguistic moorings, and from
a comparative discussion of the differential effects of India’s climate on
European and Indian ‘constitutions’. Race, by the eighteen-forties and
fifties, was becoming a more self-sufficient, self-explanatory idea,
grounded in ideas of racial ‘types’ and their attendant physical and moral
attributes. In these respects, the evolution of racial thought in India
was not very different from elsewhere, 83 although notions of place
and climate, perhaps because they were held to be such important
explanations of difference in colonial or semi-colonial situations, remained
remarkably tenacious.84
This article has only attempted to discuss British ideas of place and race,
but there is, of course, an Indian side to all this. Indians, too, had their
ideas of place (as manifested, for example, in their medicine, visual arts
and devotional literature) and so, too, of race. Many Indians also saw their
bodies as physically as well as culturally distinct from Europeans’. It was
not just that Europeans were topi-wallahs – wearing hats instead of turbans
– but that eating beef and swilling beer, coming from a cold climate and
never washing, they were clearly a race apart. A sense of racial difference,
even if it was not loaded with so many pseudo-scientific attributes, was
much in evidence in India (and Nepal) by the eighteen-thirties and
forties. If 1857 was a war of race (one explanation, at least, for its singular
ferocity), it was because that intensity of racial feeling was felt on both
sides of a deeply divided domain.

82
J. Leopold, ‘The Aryan theory of race’, Indian Econ. and Soc. Hist. Rev., vii (1970), 271.
83
Biddiss, pp. 12–16.
84
Cf. M. A. Stewart, ‘“Let us begin with the weather”: climate, race, and cultural
distinctiveness in the American South’, in Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. M. Teich,
R. Porter and B. Gustafsson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 240 – 56.

© Institute of Historical Research 2004.