“A point that escapes Darwin”: Crises of colonial self in the nature essays of Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson

Abstract

This article shows how the colonial nature essay both spoofs and affirms crises of the European self in British India’s post-Rebellion era (1857–1947). Authored by English civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the nature essay’s exaggerated misadventures with quotidian animals such as ants, beetles, and mosquitos parody British accounts of the 1857 Rebellion, while dehumanizing caricatures of uncooperative servants reduce Indian society’s complex hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and race to buffoonery. Taking as a case study two of the genre’s exemplars, Edward Hamilton Aitken and Philip Robinson, I read the colonized animals and people in these texts as agents who destabilize the material and psychic life of empire. Historians and postcolonialists agree that censorship, paranoia, and violence defined British rule over India between 1857 and 1947, yet they overlook the everyday life of empire. The nature essay’s peculiar synthesis of humour and science grants surprising insights into how colonial agents understood themselves as Raj hegemony shifted into its final stages. As the nature essay’s colonized people and animals thwart the daily work of empire, they also reveal the colonial class’ failure to confront its anxieties about the sahib’s political and epistemic stability as a rational, post-Enlightenment agent destined to master the colony.

Introduction

A crudely sketched Goanese tailor on all fours, head tilted such that his absurdly massive turban brushes his shoulder blades, rear end in the air, adorns Behind the Bungalow, Edward Hamilton Aitken’s 1889 collection of satirical vignettes about domestic life in the Bombay Presidency (1889: 113). Aitken (writing under the moniker “Eha”) variously refers to the tailor as a “little human animal” (1889: 104) and “quadruped” (1889: 106). To ensure that his readers make no mistake about this minstrel scene’s eugenic connotations, he adds:

I suppose the current quid of pan suparee [a confection of betel and areca nut] is temporarily stowed away under that swelling in the left cheek, where the fierce black patch of whiskers grows. The survival of a cheek pouch in some branches of the human race is a point that escapes Darwin. (1889: 105)

Eha then admits to a tinge of regret for his racialized “specimen,” noting that “the advancing tide of civilization is surely crumbling down [the tailor’s] foundations” (1889: 112).

Behind the Bungalow belongs to a minor canon of Anglo-Indian literature from the late nineteenth century. ¹ Authored by civil servants who took to naturalism as a hobby, the genre — which Shashank Kela dubs the “nature essay” (2018: n.p.) — intermingles comic anecdotes about small animals with dehumanizing caricatures of post-Rebellion India’s domestic workers. Through a combination of irony and literary flair punctuated with textual references ranging from the Bhagavad Gita to William Wordsworth’s Prelude, the genre riffs on imperial hunting (shikar) memoirs, natural history, political events, and government dispatches complaining of pests — human and otherwise — that destroy imperial records, furniture, and colonial bodies. In the nature essay’s irreverent world beetles, crows, mosquitoes, rabbits, squirrels, termites, and other quotidian animals torment the memsahib, policeman, sport hunter, and other figures familiar to British ex-colonials and Anglo-Indians. Domestic servants reduced to subhuman flotsam further complicate the sahib’s life — in addition to the animalized tailor, for example, an overbearing ayah recalls for Eha a charging hippopotamus (1889: 89), and a syce’s children rank as “half-anna bits of humanity” (Robinson, 1878: 155).

Through its facetious descriptions of people and animals, the nature essay spoofs the everyday irritations of life abroad while reiterating the colonizer’s anxieties about European civilization’s material and existential supremacy in the post-Rebellion zeitgeist. The tension between these affective registers grants surprising insights into how animals and domestic labourers disclose colonial insecurities about the British Empire’s permanence and the European human’s epistemic validity as the pinnacle of creation — “the being of being human itself,” to borrow Sylvia Wynter’s felicitous phrase (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 31). As satire, the nature essay poked fun not only at nature history, but Anglo-Indian writing and culture in general. Hunting memoirs, household guides, husbandry manuals, and the English literary canon were all up for grabs. A jocular composite of Anglo-Indian culture, the nature essay presents a rich perspective into the complexities and contradictions of colonial subjectivity at the turn of the twentieth century. This article considers how Philip Robinson and Eha, two of the genre’s exemplars, disclose the upheavals and uncertainties of colonial life through their misadventures with the people and animals who disrupted and contributed to their everyday experiences.

While the nature essay’s depictions of unruly animals poked fun at natural history writing and colonial culture, its dehumanizing sketches of the Indian labouring castes served an important symbolic function for colonial officers after the 1857 Rebellion. By the century’s end, tensions between colonizer and colonized had erupted into grassroots revolts, religious revivalism, and upper caste movements such as the Arya Samaj (1875) and Indian National Congress (founded in 1885). The nature essay’s caricatures of Indian servants appropriated the labouring castes — many of whom had no interest in the upper castes’ brand of anticolonialism — to reduce the bogeymen of anti colonial insurgency to subhuman buffoons. Given the extent of post-Rebellion India’s racial tensions, European and Anglo-Indian audiences’ warm reception of the nature essayist’s minstrel show is unsurprising. Less expected is the way some contemporaries also insisted that the genre reflected these writers’ love for the subcontinent’s cultures and animals. The naturalist Thomas Radford Bell eulogized Eha — he of the animalized tailor — as “gentle and lovable and a rare example of a man without a single enemy” (1909: 541), while The Graphic notes Eha’s “undercurrent of sympathy” for domestic workers in Behind the Bungalow (W. Thacker & Co., 1894: 9). Philip Robinson writes with “so much sympathy for the Asiatic side of our Empire” that the Orientalist Edwin Arnold “should not know where to send an uninformed English reader for better hints of the out-of-door look and spirit of things” (1878: viii). The World, however, discerns a sinister undertone in Eha’s writings. According to its unnamed reviewer, Behind the Bungalow offers “more than fun for those with eyes to see. These sketches may have an educational purpose beyond that of mere amusement; they show through all their fun a keen observation of native character and a just appreciation of it” (Thacker & Co., 1894: 9). Indeed, those with “eyes to see” might read in Eha’s “just appreciation” for India’s “native character” a discursive tit-for-tat that caricatures the labouring castes in response to the sepoys and rural insurgents that nearly toppled an empire.

Although Eha and Robinson’s writings both draw on the English satirical tradition, their responses to colonized insurgents otherwise diverge. Eha revels in self-pity, violence, and evangelical commentary to acquaint readers with his ironic take on Indian ecology. For Eha, the natural world represents a passive frontier to be civilized by the colonizer. Its disorderly inhabitants, human and otherwise, thwart the colonizer’s efforts to impose himself on his environment such that Eha’s comic violence recalls English anxieties about the subcontinent as a chaotic and ultimately unknowable place. Robinson, a self-styled aesthete in the Enlightenment tradition, takes it upon himself to poeticize India’s natural beauty, yet he cannot help but fixate on human and animal bodies that violate his sense of poetic propriety. Just as the colonial state imposes military, commercial, and economic constraints to exploit the colony for its own ends, Robinson decides who and what fits into his aesthetic vision of the subcontinent’s ecology. Yet its inassimilable remnants — working children, bugs, wild dogs — continue to haunt him. Eha and Robinson’s caricatures of India’s animals and people both lampoon and affirm the colonial class’ anxieties about a vast and unruly subcontinent that the colonial government cannot entirely comprehend or control.

The local autonomy of Empire’s animals and people

Self-styled iconoclasts influenced by the eighteenth century satires of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne (Kela, 2018: n.p.), the nature essayists thumbed their noses at the Indian Civil Service and colonial taxonomists. At first blush, the average Civil Servant under the Crown Raj — trained on a hefty regiment of bureaucracy and sport with little time for humanist concerns (Hutchins, 1967: 102) — would not necessarily square with a motley array of writers who augmented their offbeat anecdotes about the subcontinent’s plants, animals, and labouring castes with French aphorisms; scraps of Latin; and ironic glosses of Milton, Wordsworth, and Longfellow (Robinson, 1878: xi–xii). Nevertheless, audiences familiar with English satire got the joke, as Crown administrators abroad and Victorian audiences at home adored the nature essay. For Edwin Arnold, these texts fulfilled a crucial patriotic duty, aestheticizing “many a bygone happy hour and old association of [the Indian Civil Servant’s] Eastern home” (1878: vii–viii). Arnold continues, “None but Anglo-Indians know what a treasure-mine of art, literature, and picturesque description lies unworked in the common experiences of our life in India” (1878: vii–viii). Moreover, the nature essay’s wacky animals continue to garner acclaim amongst Western and Indian readers alike. For Shashank Kela, Eha’s “comic passages” about India’s rats, birds, and butterflies provide reprieve from the “cloying nostalgia” of Jim Corbett (Kela, 2018: n.p.), the reformed shikari whose memoirs Oxford Press reprints to this day. M. Krishnan, one of twentieth century India’s most celebrated wildlife photographers, peppers his sardonic, post-Independence essays with references to Douglas Dewar, Eha, Philip Robinson, and other amateur naturalists from the colonial school (Krishnan et al., 2014: 53). Salim Ali, colonial Bombay’s premier ornithologist, noted in 1947 that EHA’s “charm,” “wit,” and “humour” “distinguish his writings from most of the writings of other naturalists” (1947: ix), while Anglo-Indian children’s author Ruskin Bond, who penned the foreword to a 2007 version of The Tribes on My Frontier, “devoured” moth-eaten first editions of Eha’s work (2007: x).

If these texts bring a humanist zing to the otherwise stodgy genre of natural history, their caricatures of the labouring castes and misadventures with quotidian animals raise important questions about interspecies encounters for scholars at the nexus of postcolonial thought and critical animal studies. In 2002, Philip Armstrong posited as a “common antagonist” for thinkers in these fields the “continued supremacy of that notion of the human that centers upon a rational individual self or ego” (2002: 414). Since Armstrong’s intervention, numerous theorists have integrated postcolonial thought with posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, animal studies, and more-than-human geographies to challenge longstanding assumptions about race and the species boundary in colonial and postcolonial contexts. ² Moreover, animal historiographers have started to investigate how British India’s animals adapted to, and at times disrupted, colonial ecologies throughout both the Crown and Company eras. Rohan Deb Roy illustrates how developments in pest control by colonial actors signaled the destructive power of termites between 1857 and 1947 (2020: 419). Burmese elephants’ “willful behaviours” animate Jonathan Saha’s analysis of how these animals worked independently and inflicted violence on their keepers even as colonial actors appropriated their labour for military efforts and construction projects (Saha, 2017: 17). Mahesh Rangarajan argues that man-eating by tigers denoted a deliberate survival strategy in response to imperial infrastructure projects that destroyed tiger habitats and feeding grounds (Rangarajan, 1998).

While this article takes inspiration from historiographies of imperial animal control and resistance, it departs from their emphases on specific species in the government archives to instead investigate, first, how myriad animals and labouring castes in the colonial nature essay disrupt the daily business of colonial life, and, second, how such disruptions — while not a coordinated effort between species — expose the colonial imaginary’s failure to resolve its fears of the colonized people and animals it cannot control. Although disruptive, colonized actors in these texts do not suggest anticolonial rebellion by dint of their autonomous actions alone. Yet, as I will demonstrate below, local autonomy under the colonial gaze represents English fears of revolt and resistance that find their expression as satire in Eha and Robinson.

The nature essay’s animals recall recent theorizations of animal agency, the way in which non humans unsettle the power networks that surround them. Drawing on actor-network theory, animal agency evokes Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s challenge to acknowledge ecology’s material entanglements in colonial history without reducing one to the other (2011: 4). However, as Jonathan Saha reminds us, animal agency also:

requires scholars to distinguish the concept of agency from the historian’s desire to recover subjective experiences of the past (although this remains a productive strand of inquiry for animal historians). Bracketing issues of animal subjectivity, there is a growing post-humanist consensus around considering agency to be the effect of material entanglements and networks between interacting entities. (Saha, 2017: 171)

Saha’s distinction between animal subjectivity and agency clarifies how we may theorize animal movements through colonial spaces without anthropocentric assumptions about an animal’s intentions. Crucially, his distinction does not preclude the latter as a line of inquiry so much as it emphasizes the material implications of animals’ autonomous actions in their lived environments. In effect, animals’ disruptive movements — beetles swarming the bungalow, rabbits eviscerating an English garden, the pinprick puncture of malarial mosquitos — render legible empire’s failure to both contain animal bodies and assert the human subject’s symbolic dominance over the lower beasts under the sign of Enlightenment humanism.

Animals obviously do not conceive of anticolonial resistance on human terms. Hence, Neel Ahuja helpfully forwards the notion of “species critique”, a strategy to rethink “transnational circuits of power and identity” that subsume colonized people and animals:

By tracing the circulation of nonhuman species as both figures and materialized bodies within the circuits of imperial biopower, species critique helps scholars reevaluate “minority” discourses and enrich histories of imperial encounters. (2009: 556–557)

Ahuja disentangles assumptions about race and species that erase the political agency of colonized beings, animal and otherwise, under the sign of the non-European other. Analyses of how people and animals differently resist, disrupt, and deform empire sharpen histories of anticolonial agency by analyzing how the autonomous movements of humans and other animals in a given historical context coincide and diverge.

When theorizing anticolonial resistance across the species divide in this way, however, scholars must also remain mindful of how imperial power animalized black and brown humans. Claire Jean Kim thus corrects Western animal studies critiques that, in their condemnation of the dehumanization of racialized populations, assume that such groups would have once registered as fully human to begin with (2015: 24). For Kim, the “borderland” in which racialized humans are neither fully human nor fully animal enables a historically rigorous site of anti-imperial critique. By critiquing how ethnological discourses established animal hierarchies between racialized groups — with Europeans qualifying as “fully human” and Africans as essentially animal, with all other non whites in between — Kim demonstrates how racial power kept non whites separated from each other. The human/animal borderland thus casts into relief the racial hierarchies that erase the material differences between race and species under the sign of a subhuman other, revealing the slippages and differences between racialized groups within the European hierarchy of species and race (2015: 24).

I align myself with these scholars to suggest that the nature essay both lampoons and affirms post-Rebellion anxieties about the British empire’s failure to control people and animals. Remaining mindful to not conflate India’s labouring castes with non human animals — thereby rehashing Marjorie Spiegel’s trope of the “dreaded comparison” (1988) in which enslaved human populations were reduced to beasts of burden — I consider human and animal autonomy in light of how the nature essay invokes the colonizer’s latent, yet persistent, fear of anticolonial insurgence. The figures who disrupt the sahib do not represent coordinated strategies of subversion amongst colonized people and animals, but they nevertheless unsettle the material and psychic life of empire. I thus read the nature essay’s comic scenarios of bumbling, subhuman servants, and recalcitrant animals as colonial symptoms of material and psychological insecurity that the sahib cannot articulate. Eha stages comic insurgencies by small animals such as beetles, ants, and mice in his bungalow, verandah, and garden. These animals, in Eha’s retellings of his encounters with them, echo the threat — real or perceived — of anticolonial violence and nascent demands for independence in the latter nineteenth century. Robinson pokes fun at colonial taxonomists and administrators to subtly express his disapproval of the post-Rebellion government’s heavy-handed policies against its subjects. Yet he cannot account for plants, animals, and people that violate his Eurocentric framework of ecological beauty. When faced with mosquitos, labourers, or wild dogs, Robinson turns his attention inward, displacing his observations of environments and figures he finds unpleasant or baffling with an insular meditation on how ugly bodies perpetuate the sahib’s suffering.

In spite of the British empire’s expansive military, administrative, economic, commercial, and archival infrastructure, post-Rebellion administrators realized that the Raj could neither control nor understand the colonized. How, then, might the movement of human and animal bodies in empire’s domestic spaces suggest political agency against colonial control? How do people and animals that exercise their autonomy challenge scholars to tell the story of interspecies resistance in imperial space? Might colonial paranoia signal subtle examples of interspecies solidarity under colonial incursion? The upcoming sections read Eha and Robinson’s nature essays as case studies that demonstrate how colonial insecurity and the autonomous movements of people and animals articulate the shared intimacies between colonized and colonizer in British India at the turn of the twentieth century. I highlight small moments of recalcitrance, resistance, and agency by empire’s animals and people not to draw a spurious parallel between colonized species, but to articulate disparate expressions of colonized assertion that Eha and Robinson express as anxiety, paranoia, violence, and befuddlement.

Taxonomies of grievance in Eha and Robinson

An amateur naturalist and civil servant who co-founded the Bombay Natural History Society, Edward Hamilton Aitken penned dispatches about India’s plants and animals for newspapers and scientific journals from the 1870s until his death in 1909. His writing flourished as ennui plagued post-Rebellion India’s colonial class, the Crown Raj’s mind-numbing bureaucracy eclipsed only by heatstroke, bugs, malaria, and fears of anticolonial insurgents. Eha thus peddled naturalism as a pastime that “touches the soul”, a spiritual balm for disillusioned officers in the hill station or cantonment (1883: 9). In a late essay, Eha insisted upon his regret for having killed birds for study earlier in his career, hoping “to make atonement now by helping others to know [of birds] without killing, as far as it lies in me” (Eha 1900: 2). The “gun and net I would gladly leave behind”, Eha asserts in A Naturalist on the Prowl, urging his fellow naturalists to “Cherish the tender place in your nature which feels a pang when you pick up the little corpse, so happy two minutes ago. And when you have killed enough, stop” (1894: 3–4). Eha speaks here to the delight in both nature and bloodshed that typifies the writings of contemporary naturalists like Allan Octavian Hume, who waxes poetic about the “delicate pearly grey” of the sea eagle as he takes aim with his rifle (1876: 422).

Yet Eha habitually undermined his reverence for India’s natural wonders with derisive caricatures of gulls, mosquitoes, rabbits, geckoes, rats, and domestic servants. For “good, bad, or indifferent”, writes Eha, India’s colonized people and animals “give us their company whether we want it or not” (1883: 10). Rajarshi Mitra suggests that Eha’s potpourri of contempt and “enchantment” mimics the “Janus faced” colonial officer whose “anxieties over [. . .] authority and the fear of counter invasion” informed colonial life after the 1857 Rebellion (2014: 42). To build on Mitra’s insight, I suggest that the animals and people who provoke Eha’s ire reveal more about the sahib than he might care to admit. In his writing, Eha hates India’s people and animals behind a loving façade while loving them behind a façade of hate. He stages insurgencies not by rural militants or man-eating beasts in the colonial wild — a common literary trope of shikar authors like Kenneth Anderson, Jim Corbett, or R. W. Burton — but labouring castes, refigured as quasi-animals, and uncharismatic beasts that disrupt the naturalist’s peace and quiet.

A misadventure with red ants, which parodies warfare, governance, and mysticism, epitomizes Eha’s highwire act of comedy and bloodshed at the same time as it provokes questions about the limits of individual life and death. Eha reports that poison, smoke, and fire only infuriated the ant colony that invaded his tent. Flummoxed, he:

offered the end of my cheroot with about an inch of ash on it. Several seized it instantly. The heat killed them, but others laid hold of their charred limbs, and by their united strength they positively wrenched off the ash, which remained hanging from the tent rope by their jaws, while scores hurried from both sides, with fiendish fury, to help in worrying it. I then presented the hot end. The foremost ant offered battle without a moment’s hesitation and perished with a fizz, but another and another followed, and I saw plainly that I was beaten again, for the cheroot was going out, while their fury only burned the more fiercely. (1894: 189)

Eha initially perceives the ants as killable life: faceless and nameless bodies to whom he denies individual recognition or agency. But the ants persist, and Eha’s vermin morph into a swarm of insurgents whose collective will grants no thought to individual lives or deaths. Overwhelmed, Eha admits to “forced admiration” for the ants’ tenacity. “I had done everything I could, short of burning down my tent, and they remained masters of their field” (1894: 190), he reports.

Eha’s ants recall Renisa Mawani’s formulation of insects as “antithetical” to both humans and all other animals (2015: 182). For Mawani, insects’ apparent indifference to other lifeforms places them on a scale of existence beyond that of other species even as their bodies intersect with ours. ³ Mawani locates the insect’s curious onto-phenomenological status in its plasticity, “a life and death force that runs through, between, and across human and non-human divides” (2015: 160). Moreover, insect plasticity suggests “vital impulses animating, interrelating, and exploding the uneven terrains of human and nonhuman life and death, thus rendering its political potentiality all the more ambiguous” (2015: 162 emphasis in original). Even as insect plasticity gestures toward a utopian state of being, state actors such as the American military use bees for counter-terrorism operations or model tactical strikes after insect swarms (Mawani, 2015: 176). Consequently, insects can both liberate and oppress. Their unique liberatory potential resides for Mawani in their status as entities beyond human and animal life as we know it, beckoning us toward an as yet unrealized collective existence. Eha’s ants, a collective will to life indifferent to individual deaths, regard the human from a “deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or redemption”, to borrow from Hugh Raffles’ poetic insights into insect life (2010: 44). Eha might register the ant as vermin, but the ant likewise thinks little of Eha, a nuisance to be eradicated in the indestructible path of collective ant life.

Eha’s ants provoke us to reimagine how insects respond to human incursion. Philip Robinson, on the other hand, erases the ant’s strangeness by anthropomorphizing it for his colonial audience. Some ants recall for Robinson the humorless Indian Civil Service man whose notions of fun begin and end with work (Hutchins, 1967: 102). With ant colonies boasting a “head office in most verandahs” and “branch establishments in bath-rooms” (Robinson, 1878: 39), others mirror the post-Rebellion bureaucracy’s industriousness. Meanwhile, the “blustering ‘soldier’ or ‘policeman’ ant” — a parody of the colonial tax collector — “goes about wagging his great head and snapping his jaws at nothing, exceedingly furious when insulted, but as a rule preferring to patrol in shady neighbourhoods the backwaters of life, where he can peer idly into cracks and holes” (1878: 41). At first blush, Robinson’s ants gently mock the colonial tropes of the day. But as their behaviours recall imperial habits and activities with which he is already familiar, they also reflect his political and aesthetic conservatism. For Robinson, satire and parody do not signal Indian ecology as an open, unknown space that demands a new conception of the world, but a passive canvas for his literary aesthetic.

Robinson’s mosquito thus invokes an extended meditation about the sahib’s suffering. ⁴ Such considerations he finds wanting in the taxonomic preoccupations of colonial scientists. An entomologist who dismisses a particularly vicious variety as a sandfly, for instance, earns Robinson’s ire:

if, at the time of writing, the author had a few of these “small sandflies” reconnoitring [sic] the back of his head, he was justified in writing anything; but he should have said so, or else he stands the risk of being sent by public subscription to Phocis, to undergo a course of hellebore—a reputed cure for lunacy; or back to India, that he might be tormented out of his flippancy. (1878: 160)

The naturalist who fails to adequately poeticize the mosquito’s horror offends Robinson over and above the mosquito itself. “There is no feeling, no poetry in such treatment of a mosquito”, he complains of natural history writing, “and the knowledge is of a lower kind than seems required” (1878: 161). To capture the mosquito’s wretched excesses, Robinson highlights the torments it inflicts:

The desiderata of information are, whether it is possible that mosquitoes lead very unhappy lives, and scream at you only under pressure of great domestic affliction, and whether they couldn’t be subjected to utilization, made into glue or something. It may lessen the mortification to know that it was a sancudos or a culex pipiens that had outmanœuvered you, your punkah, and your curtains of net, and not an ordinary vulgar “mosquito,” but it would not lessen the irritation. (1878: 161)

Beyond Robinson’s sardonic veneer persists the question of how aesthetics might represent the sahib’s miseries. Moreover, his insistence on a language of feeling suggests a colonial imperative to catalogue and document not just the plants and animals of the colony, but the officer’s emotional and embodied experiences of them. Beyond articulating the grandiloquence of “natural” landscapes like the colonial garden with literary language, Robinson’s language of feeling infuses biological taxonomies and post-Enlightenment aesthetics with the mundane irritations of life in the colonial outpost. Yet his aesthetic remains self-interested and insular, for his object of lyrical investigation centers not the mosquito, but the sahib’s suffering.

The mosquito notwithstanding, Robinson tends to celebrate Indian ecology. In so doing, however, he shapes the natural world according to his intellectual pedigree as both satirist and nature enthusiast. The opening pages of Robinson’s (1878) In My Indian Garden announce as much. For Robinson, the colonial garden “is to the natural world beyond its walls very much what a Review number is to the rest of literature” (1878: 3). Yet Robinson also emphasizes the garden’s grander significance for colonial culture in general. As “nature’s museum — a gallery of curiosities for the indifferent to admire, the interested to study,” the Indian garden “is a Travellers’ Club, an Œcumenical Council, a Parliament of buzzing, humming, chirping, and chattering things” for those with the “will to learn of the curious humanity of beasts and birds and little insects” (1878: 3). Implicit in Robinson’s metaphors of the garden as a whimsical hub for all things colonial is the argument that science alone cannot account for Europe’s ecological dominion abroad. To properly “learn” of India’s “beasts”, “birds”, and “little insects” is to tap into their “curious humanity”, an exercise reserved for literature above and beyond the dry pedantry of natural history. Although nature may not be conquered through literature alone, Robinson suggests, only literature gives expression to humanity’s dominion over nature.

Robinson’s menagerie — coupled with his knack for florid pose and Latin aphorisms — doubtless informed his conviction that mastery over Indian ecology and the lower beasts demands literary expertise. As he was penning nature essays, he also published The Poets’ Birds (1883), a 500 page compendium of English bird poems organized by species, and The Poets’ Beasts (1885), an equally voluminous catalogue of cats, wolves, goats, and other animals in the Western canon. While Robinson expressed clear admiration for India throughout his writing — certain animals and, indeed, people notwithstanding — his aesthetic echoed how Victorian culture figuratively and materially relied on animals to, paradoxically, assert humanity’s superiority over them (Fudge, 2002: 10). Consequently, Robinson does not engage with animals so much as he uses them as figures to highlight human foibles in extant cultural contexts.

A facetious portrait of the hen, for instance, foregrounds the implications of imperial paranoia more generally:

in no circumstance of life does [the hen] behave with a seemly composure. Should a bird pass overhead, she immediately concludes that it is about to fall upon her head; while if she hears any sound for which she cannot account to herself, she sets up a woeful clucking, in which, after a few rounds, she is certain to be joined by her comrades, who foregather with her to cluck and croon, though they have not even her excuse for having heard the original noise. But their troubles are many. (1878: 8–9)

To the hen’s “troubles” Robinson attributes “suspicion”, a flaw that derailed none less than Oliver Cromwell, Adam Smith, and a laundry list of gods in the Greek pantheon (1878: 9-10). “Think of the lives cursed by suspicion, and confer your pity on the hen”, he counsels (1878: 9). Roosters fare no better for Robinson, for whom “[s]uspicion is the fungus that, taking root in the mind of the dâk-bungalow fowl, strangles all its finer feelings (though fostering self-reliance), and makes miserable by its gigantic growth the bird’s daily life” (1878: 9, emphasis in original). The implications of paranoia, a malady or “fungus” that plagues all from the lowly hen to the redoubtable Cromwell, would not be lost on colonial readers in the 1870s, a decade that witnessed Section 124A and the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, legislation that restricted the civil liberties of colonized subjects to quash sedition in the wake of 1857.

For a liberal thinker such as Robinson, the paranoid fowl subtly criticizes draconian legislation predicated on anxieties about anticolonial insurgence. Meanwhile Eha, who drew on English fears of the colonized for his comic encounters with insurgent animals, lets slip jingoist commentaries that would make even Rudyard Kipling blanch. Drudging up contemporary England’s naval and military quagmires, Eha associates a family of sparrows in his ceiling with the “Czars of all the Russias” before yearning for the East India Company’s unchecked rapacity:

We are plundered, insulted, phlebotomized under our own vine and fig tree. We might make head against the foe if we laid to heart the lesson our national history in India teaches, namely, that the way to fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage them to cut one another’s throats, and then step in and inherit the spoil. But we murder our friends, exterminate our allies, and then groan under the oppression of the enemy. (1883: 10)

Spoken in both jest and earnest, Eha’s nostalgic endorsement of the Company’s legacy of land grabbing, deceit, and murder at the turn of the nineteenth century further destabilizes the naturalist-cum-jester who beseeches contemporary readers to “cherish” their tender feelings.

The unruly bungalow

Considered against the surfeit of guides that instructed bourgeois women on the finer points of overseeing the Indian household, Eha’s Behind the Bungalow (1889) is a curious text indeed. Akin to a field guide of the servant class, Behind the Bungalow establishes the sahib as hapless victim to his underlings’ insubordination. Animal comparisons and disorder abound. Some figures, such as Eha’s dog walker (“dog-boy” in Anglo-Indian parlance), embody racialized specimens genetically predisposed to servitude:

I have always felt an interest in the smart little race of Bombay dog-boys. As a corps, they go on with little change from year to year, but individually they are of short duration, and the question naturally arises, What becomes of them all when they outgrow their dog-boyhood? From such observations as I have been able to make, I believe the dog-boy is not a species by himself, but represents the early, or larva, stage of several varieties of domestic servants. (1889: 17-18)

As a “larva” genetically predisposed to a lifetime of servitude, the dog-boy represents the template that will characterize the bulk of Eha’s ensuing entries, which marvel at his subhuman servants’ penchant for avoiding work and lack of hygiene.

Those figures who do manage to perform their tasks do more harm than good. A washer, compared to a “puppy rending slippers” (1889: 79) and “mungoose killing twenty chickens to feed on one”, (1889: 79) habitually destroys Eha’s clothes. Theft is also a constant problem, as Eha’s complaints about the butler (1889: 40–41), lamp-man (1889: 52), and gardener (1889: 115) attest. Eventually, Eha concedes that European norms make no sense to the locals, expresses a qualified affection for his subject reminiscent of a well-disposed but mischievous pet, and concludes with ironic admiration for how skillfully his domestics avoid any actual work.

Eha’s animalization of his servants echoes racial tropes in household guides for memsahibs from the late nineteenth century (Dussart 2015: 716). According to Fae Ceridwen Dussart, such characterizations secured the memsahib’s power in a household dominated by male servants. In effect, ascriptions of childlike or animal traits sought to “neutralise the sexual and physical power of the male servants, circumventing the problem of their gender and rendering them as theoretically powerless and dependent (while allowing the possibility that they were inherently sinful)” (Dussart 2015: 716). Claire Jean Kim complicates this line of reasoning, however, when she suggests that racialized groups were never considered fully human to begin with (2015: 24). For Kim, the “taxonomy of race differentiates nonwhite groups according to how animal they are or how closely associated with nature they are” (2015: 25). Western ethnological frameworks, Kim continues, situated the Chinese on a hierarchy in which they were less human and more animal than whites, but more human and less animal than Africans. Indigenous peoples, not as animal as Africans, were nevertheless tantamount to the plants and animals they lived with (Kim, 2015: 25). This hierarchy’s play of “lumping and splitting” racial groups made race “flexibly adaptive as a structure of power” (2015: 25). That is, the play of similarity and difference between nonwhite groups, “forged in the crucible of ideas about animality and nature” (2015: 25), kept them separated from each other.

Eha’s servants add a further layer of nuance to Kim’s schematic insofar as they fluctuate between childlike humans and animal-like children. Racial tropes before the 1857 Rebellion tended to infantilize and effeminize Indians, with the Raj as muscular, disciplining patriarch (Metcalf 1995: 146). In addition to symbolically positing Britons’ racial superiority over the colonized, the infantile Indian also legitimated legislative reforms that would secure England’s “permanence” in the subcontinent even as it granted nominal power to Indian constituents after demands for independence gained national momentum at the turn of the twentieth century (Hutchins, 1967; cf. Sarkar, 1983: 165). As Keridiana Chez demonstrates, however, 1857 also marked a sea-change in Victorian attitudes toward Indians that likened rebels to tigers, “sneaky” and “dishonourable” predators that represented the shocking “treachery” of a subject race that failed to appreciate civil authority (Chez, 2020: 285). Like mutineers, the tiger, which had taken to man-eating amidst infrastructure projects that destroyed its natural habitat, disrupted the natural order of things by attacking the white man. The Indian, as both treacherous predator and effeminate child, finds further variance in Eha’s satire. Unfavourably likened to flies (1889: 58), cows (1889: 70), elephants (1889: 88), and a range of other miscellaneous animals, Eha’s incompetent domestics figuratively deflate organized hill folk, trained sepoys, and religious revivalists who, like the tiger, disrupted a natural order in which neither Indians nor tigers may prey on the white man, India’s proper apex predator.

At the same time, Eha’s harried sahib stands in comic relief to the stately mistress, whose structures of order and discipline recall the administrative hierarchies of the Raj’s “public” sphere (Blunt, 1999: 423). As Alison Blunt has shown, the household guide both reproduced and transformed the racial hierarchies of British India’s public spaces in the ostensibly “private” space of the home by insisting the memsahib maintain “domestic and imperial status” over her racialized servants (Blunt, 1999: 431). ⁵ Household guides from the period reiterated to the aspiring memsahib that Indian domestics, because of the “inborn inertness and physical weakness of their race” (Wilson qtd. in Blunt 1999: 430), needed a combination of discipline, patience, and maternal care from their English superiors. Behind the Bungalow, with its bedraggled and overwhelmed protagonist, caricatures the household guide’s rigid hierarchies of matronly order while maintaining the colonizer’s superiority over the colonized. Eha’s animalized funhouse thus suggests itself as an in-joke for readers of both Eha’s works and the household guide, wherein his menagerie of unruly servants riffs on the animals of his excursions into the wild whilst playing on the memsahib’s tendency to animalize and infantilize the help.

Amidst the bungalow’s chaos, Eha picks up on small acts reminiscent of James C. Scott’s “everyday resistance” (1985). His description of the “Oriental salaam” as both a “claim” and a “tribute” reflects the dizzying antagonism between colonizer and colonized at the turn of the century:

I have met some men with such lordly souls that they would not condescend to acknowledge the status of menials; but you gain nothing by this kind of pride in India. They only conclude that you are not […] a born saheb [sic], and rejoice that at any rate you cannot take away their right to do obeisance to you. And you cannot. Your very bhungie does you a pompous salutation in public places and you have no redress. (1889: 19)

The salaam to which the civil administrator “has no redress” signals both deference and hatred, a double valence that, according to David Arnold, reflects the “political tension between gesture and meaning” in post-Rebellion India (2009: 206). In effect, the salaam-as-claim expresses ironic respect toward the colonialist who fails to quash the colonized resister. Moreover, the sahib in this exchange bears the risk of insurgency while embodying empire’s failure to conquer its subjects. If animals and the working class disclose Eha’s worst impulses, the ambivalent salaam, refracting the sahib’s racist sneer through a gesture of both deference and hatred, distills the sahib’s double-failure: as colonizer, he fears the colonized; as colonial agent, he bears responsibility for British India’s failure to civilize the natives.

Given that both Robinson and Eha enjoyed reputations as keen-eyed enthusiasts of the subcontinent’s culture and ecology, the conjoined twins of jovial naturalist and colonial thug that articulate their writings suggest a startling collective neurosis amongst these writers and their readers. As representatives of the best of Bombay’s Anglo-Indian community, Robinson and Eha seem unable to distinguish racial hatred from geniality. Convinced that the colonist, through no fault of his own, endures attacks from all he encounters, these writers cannot disentangle the contradictory impulses that collapse their love for the subcontinent with justifications for the colony’s cultural and ecological destruction. What then, does their fraught psychology say about the colonial community that celebrated them?

Scientific tract, shikar memoir, instructional guide, literary commentary — the nature essay is all and none of these. By accident or design, Eha and Robinson’s satirical jabs at Anglo-Indian writing and culture distill the complexities and contradictions embedded in colonial subjectivity. While their writing recycles the standard tropes of racial hierarchies and the presumed superiority of English governance that defined colonial culture, it also conveys a unique candor that, in satirizing British conventions in India, lays bare the anxieties, insecurities, and failures that permeated colonial subjectivity at the turn of the twentieth century. Eha and Robinson appropriate animals and the working-class to lampoon anti-British insurgents, imperial governance, and the self-serious hierarchies of imperial culture itself, sources of anxiety amidst the empire’s insistence of its strength upon the world stage. But such appropriations depend upon the autonomous actions of colonized people and animals. Consequently, the colonized are more than their representations insofar as their embodied movements respond to constraints that the colonial condition imposes upon them. Yet their autonomous actions also represent the tangle of contradictions and anxieties that articulate British rule over post-Rebellion India. Agency in this context is inseparable from appropriation and subjection, but appropriation and subjection in the nature essay reveal the fragility of empire even as it reinforces hierarchical assumptions about race and species. The undecidability of autonomy and subjection, expressed as a send-up of the day’s cultural norms, gives the nature essay its peculiar richness.