A Taste of Empire.

Food, the Colonial Kitchen and the

Representation and Role of Servants in India, Malaysia and
Singapore, c.1858-1963.

Cecilia Yun Sen Leong-Salobir

BA (Hons), UWA

DipEd, UWA

A thesis presented in fulfilment of the degree Doctor of Philosophy,

School of Humanities, History Discipline, University of Western Australia

October 2009



Abstract

This thesis is a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and
Singapore and of the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the
development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. This approach locates the thesis
within the increasingly important historical literature on ‘foodways’ – practices
associated with food and eating – within the colonial context.

It departs from other scholarship which maintains that colonizers (Europeans) followed
a completely different diet from the colonized (Asians) in order to differentiate the
rulers from the ruled. Instead, it argues that a distinctive colonial cuisine emerged as a
result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people.
The cuisine evolved over time and was not subject to a deliberate act of imposing
imperialistic designs but involved a process of consuming local and European foods
through the efforts of indigenous servants. The memsahib’s supervisory role in the
household, the servants’ local knowledge, the lack of European foods and the
availability of local ingredients contributed towards the colonial cuisine. Nevertheless
there was space for social distance and separation.

This study emphasises one of the paradoxes of the hierarchical relationships between
the ruling elite and the ruled (domestic servants) and the development of the colonial
cuisine. Essentially, domestic servants were generally represented as dirty, dishonest
and lacking in intelligence in colonial circles and yet they were responsible for the
preparation of food for the family. The study employs the media of domestic
cookbooks (Victorian, Anglo-Indian, Malayan and Singaporean), household
management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues to investigate the culinary
practices in the colonial household, clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants.
Responses from thirty-one ex-colonials to a questionnaire who were resident in the
three colonies supplemented the above primary sources.

The hybrid cuisine took on dietary components of British culinary traditions and food
practices from South Asia and Malaya. This acculturation has contributed to the
development of peculiarly colonial dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree,
country captain and pish pash. The colonial culinary experience was a fluid enterprise
and foods eaten by colonizers in each colony made geographical leaps to other colonies.
i
In the process, a pan-colonial cuisine emerged, with subtle regional differences. Asian
servants were also essential to the running of the clubs, hill stations and resthouses that
were omnipresent on the colonial landscape and were crucial to British rule. These
institutions of leisure were an extension of the colonial home and were all carefully
guarded against the encroachment of the colonized environment and its people.
Nineteenth-century thinking on health and race and anxieties about dirt and disease
contributed to the gulf that existed between colonizers and the colonized. This thesis
builds on the scant scholarship of the colonial cuisine and highlights both the role and
representation of domestic servants in the colonies.

ii
Acknowledgements

In writing this thesis I have relied on the advice and assistance of many people whose
generosity I wish to acknowledge. Firstly my thanks go to my three supervisors.
Norman Etherington first inculcated my love of imperial history in my undergraduate
years and patiently supervised my honours dissertation. Jeremy Martens was
enthusiastic from the start of my thesis and gave me the freedom to pursue my interests
and has been invaluable at helping me look at ‘the big picture’. Jeremy has been most
encouraging in times of self-doubt and is the perfect counsel for the over-anxious
student. Susie Protschky’s advice and insight have helped me develop this thesis, with
her attention to detail instilling discipline in my analysis and writing. In addition, her
warm nature and professionalism makes for a great supervisor. The other staff
members from the History Discipline, School of Humanities, at The University of
Western Australia (UWA) who have assisted in many ways I would like to thank are:
Rob Stuart, who until recently, as the Humanities Postgraduate Co-ordinator, has taken
his role in ‘nurturing’ postgraduates very seriously and has been a great support; Sue
Broomhall for all the assistance in preparation for the postdoctoral life. Thank you too,
to Muriel Mahony for great administrative assistance and for always being there to
smooth the path between the History Discipline and Graduate Research School.

I would like to acknowledge the following institutions for financial support towards my
doctoral studies: UWA, with unarguably the most beautiful campus in Australia,
provided the scholarship that has sustained the life of this candidature (The University
Postgraduate Award and later The Australian Postgraduate Award); the various travel
and conference grants from the School of Humanities and Graduate Research School
that has enabled research and conference trips to London, Oxford, Kuala Lumpur, Kota
Kinabalu and Singapore in 2006 and 2007. The Deans Postgraduate Award 2008 and
Frank Broeze Postgraduate Scholarship 2008 financed research trips to Cambridge,
Leeds and London in 2008. I am also grateful to the following institutions for giving
me the opportunity to present seminars and conference papers: The South Asian Studies
Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of
Singapore, Singapore, on 15 November 2006; Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery,
St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 8-9 September, 2007; World History in Foods, Hawai’i
Pacific University, Honolulu, 17-18 June 2008, Third Singapore Graduate Forum on

iii
Southeast Asia Studies, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 27 to
31 July 2008; ‘Using Lives’, Australia National University and National Museum,
Canberra, 8-12 September 2008; World History Workshop, St John’s College,
University of Cambridge, 10 October 2008.

I am most grateful to Joyce Westrip for allowing me to access the largest library
collection on Anglo-Indian cookbooks in her home right here in Western Australia. I
wish to record my thanks to Danny Wong, History Department, The University of
Malaya for access to his private collection. My grateful thanks to librarians of the
following libraries and archives: Sabah Museum Library; Sabah State Archives; Asian
and African Studies, British Library; Archives and Manuscripts, School of Oriental and
African Studies; Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes
House, Bodleian Library, Oxford; The Cookery Collection, Leeds University Library;
Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge; and the Royal Commonwealth
Society’s Collection, Cambridge University Library.

The Scholars Centre of UWA has been a second home for the last few years, the staff
has contributed much to the pleasant environment for scholarly pursuits. The reference
librarians and interlibrary loan staff of Reid Library have also been exceedingly helpful.
I am grateful to Vivian Forbes for the many contacts and for advice on maps.

I thank Bridget Lai for making her home my home always and for providing car and
chauffeur to The University of Malaya and to The Sabah State Archives. Thank you to
Ilsa Sharpe and Julian Davison for offering their insights on colonial Singapore. I am
indebted to Joanne McEwan for helping me in mastering the finer points of Endnote,
Srilata Ravi for assistance in understanding Tamil and Hindi terms, Gauri Sanjeev
Pathak for sharing her knowledge of tiffinwallahs, Fiona Groenhout and Ryota Nishino
for reading some of my chapters and Anthony Lepere for reading the whole thesis.

The goodwill of fellow aspiring historians at university merits a special mention.

Margaret Dorey has been generous to a fault in sharing her culinary knowledge from the
outset; Michael Crouch, Bill Walker and Bob Weston were always ready to alert me to
an article or a book relevant to my thesis. The friendships formed at UWA have been
special. Romit Dasgupta’s loan of travel books and our coffee sessions have been a
welcome break in the last few months of thesis-writing. I have enjoyed the company
iv
and discussion over endless bowls of roast duck noodles with Aaron Hales and Russell
Harwood. Thanks also to Ildy Button and Lisa Elliot on pontification over politics and
Stephen Fry respectively. Thank you to Jillian Kroemer and Frank Molloy for their
friendship and for their kindly urging me towards the finishing line.

I would like to record my thanks and love to the memory of my parents and to my
siblings for a great childhood in Sandakan. Finally I am grateful and privileged to have
the love and support of my husband Stane and my daughter Nena. While each of us
have been totally self-absorbed in our individual projects over the past few years, the
mutual respect we have for each other’s work has sustained and encouraged us. It is to
them that I dedicate this work.

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Glossary

à la Française food served all at the same time

à la Russe food served course by course
amah maid or nursemaid (Southeast Asia)
ayah maid or nursemaid (British India)
ayam chicken
babu nursemaid (Dutch Indies)
ballachong shrimp paste
bari hazri main breakfast
bawarchi cook
bawarchi khana kitchen
boy male servant or houseboy
boxwallah Indian travelling salesman or British businessman in India
buksheesh payment as a tip or bribe conditional on good service
bummelo small fish, dried and fried, also known as Bombay duck
caravanserai roadside accommodation for travellers and their animals
chatties pots
chota hazri an early light breakfast
chota peg a measure of alcoholic drink, usually brandy or whisky
chowkidar caretaker, or watchman
chummery a house shared by bachelors
chupatties flat bread
cookie a cook (Malaya, Singapore and Borneo)
coolie labourer
dabbawalas or tiffinwallahs, ‘lunchbox men’, who deliver lunches daily from
homes to offices and schools in Mumbai.
dak bungalow rest-house for travellers
dapur kitchen
detchie aluminium pan with no handles

vii




dhaye wet nurse
dhobi washerman
godown store room or warehouse
gula malacca palm sugar or sago pudding with palm sugar sauce
haute cuisine preparation of fine food by highly skilled chefs in the French
tradition
housie-housie bingo
jharans thick cotton
kedgeree rice dish cooked with lentils and/or fish
keema roti a spicy minced meat served with bread
khansamah male servant (cook)
khitmatgar a servant who waits at table
kokki a cook in the Dutch Indies
krupuk prawn crackers
mahjong a game of Chinese origin played by four persons using tiles
makan food, dish or meal
mem abbreviated form for memsahib in Malaya, Singapore and the
Borneo states
memsahib address for a European woman in the British colonies
mulligatawny pepper soup
mofussil rural areas or country stations
nabob a wealthy Anglo-Indian businessman or retired East India
Company official of the eighteenth century
nimbo pani lime and barley water
nyai concubine
pugri cloth (for turban)
purdah seclusion of women from men or strangers
réchauffés re-heated food
rijsttafel meal of many dishes served with rice as the centrepiece
sahib address for a European man in British India
sais or syce groom, horse-keeper or chauffeur
viii




sambal spicy side dish
sepoy Indian troops
sogit compensation
stengah a half measure of whisky, mixed with one half soda

tiffin light lunch or midday snack

tuan mister, master or sir
temenggung old Malay title for minister in charge of defence, justice and
palace affairs
ubis sweet potatoes or tapioca

ix




Contents

Abstract i
Acknowledgements iii
Glossary vii
Map x

Introduction 1

Chapter One
The Literature So Far 16

Chapter Two
What Empire Builders Ate 52

Chapter Three
The Colonial Appropriation of Curry 92

Chapter Four
Servants of Empire: the Role and Representation of
Domestic Servants 121

Chapter Five
Leisure and Segregation: Clubs, Hill Stations
and Rest-houses 158

Chapter Six
Dirt and Disease 195

Conclusion 223

Appendices 230

Bibliography 235

vi
Introduction
‘We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an Indian
household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and
prestige, than an Indian Empire.’1

The subject of this thesis is the cuisine associated with the British expatriates who
governed, worked and settled in India, Malaysia and Singapore between 1858 and 1963.
This colonial food was a unique hybrid; it was distinct and different from the food
practices of Britain and Asia, but at the same time incorporated dietary components of
British culinary traditions and embraced indigenous ingredients and practices from the
colonies. In this respect it can be seen as one of the precursors of contemporary fusion
food. In examining the development of this cuisine, this thesis advances two central,
interrelated arguments. The first of these is that this food was developed largely
through the dependence of British colonists on indigenous domestic servants for food
preparation; and that this dependence has a wider significance in terms of the
development of colonial culture. In making this argument, this thesis disagrees with
much of the current historical scholarship on colonial food that suggests British
colonists consumed a totally different diet to local peoples in a deliberate attempt to
differentiate themselves as rulers from the ruled. The evidence presented in the
following pages will show that there was no clear-cut colonial divide between the two
opposing sides and that in relation to food production a close relationship existed
between British colonizers and their subjects.

The second, closely related argument put forward here is that British colonists did not
control nor direct many of the domestic tasks, including food production, that were
central to the functioning of colonial homes and recreational venues; nor were these
spaces as segregated as colonial rhetorical imagery would suggest. The reality and
practicality of settling in lands vastly different from Britain, along with colonists’
dependence on the local inhabitants, necessitated negotiation and collaboration,
especially between mistresses and servants. This dependence resulted in colonists
seeking to maintain social distance in ways that were contradictory and paradoxical.
The local servants were seen as dirty and carriers of disease but were intimately
involved in the preparation of food; the hill stations were established as refuges from
the local people and the unhealthy tropical lowlands but relied upon domestic servants

1
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress
and Servants the General Management of the House and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its
Branches, London, William Heinemann, 1898, p9.

1
to provide essential services; clubs were an extension of the white colonial home but
were staffed by armies of local servants. In this regard this thesis builds on the scant
extant histories of domestic service in the British colonies and highlights the importance
of the role of local servants in the colonial household. The image perpetuated by
colonists and other Europeans of incapable, dirty and dishonest servants under their
employ was quite different from their role of feeding their colonial masters. I argue that
domestic servants were fundamental to the well-being of Europeans in the colonies;
they were responsible for performing the physical tasks of maintaining the home, the
hill stations, rest-houses and clubs; leaving the memsahib (a European woman in the
British colonies) ample time for leisure and for promoting and maintaining the image of
European colonial prestige. Furthermore, native servants, particularly cooks, were
instrumental in the development of the colonial cuisine that is the subject of this study.
Their knowledge of local ingredients and where to source them from; their cooking
skills; their resourcefulness; and the cheapness of their labour together contributed to
the development of a uniquely hybrid style of food.

India is the primary focus of this study because, in its 200 years of being the ‘jewel in
the crown’, the Raj served as both an inspiration and a benchmark for British colonial
culture. Civil servants and soldiers; entrepreneurs, missionaries and adventurers; the
British men and women known generically as sahibs (a European man in British India)
and memsahibs all attempted to uphold the image of empire through their codes of duty
and responsibility. This study also includes an analysis of Malaysia and Singapore, not
as a comparison to India but rather to illustrate that colonial culture in the form of food
and patterns of domestic service was transplanted to, or replicated in other colonies in
Asia. This wider examination is in keeping with American historian Thomas R.
Metcalf’s notion that ‘ways of thinking formed during the Indian colonial experience
found expression, as the British struggled to come to terms with their new colonial
subjects, in comparable, if different forms of knowledge elsewhere’.2 Some of these
practices took hold and evolved around local conditions while others were discarded. If
scholarly work on food history and domestic service is rather thin on the ground for
India, the situation for Malaysia and Singapore is even more dire. I have considered
Malaysia and Singapore together in this thesis because for the purposes of this thesis,
the two societies were and are socially and culturally similar.

2
Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2007, p47.

2
Cookbooks and other alternative sources as historical documents
Historical narratives traditionally do not portray a sense of the day to day routine chores
and tasks colonials engaged in, particularly those of the women in the colonies. This
thesis employs cookbooks, household management guides, memoirs, diaries and
travelogues as well as a questionnaire for ex-colonists as primary sources. These
sources provide important insights into the daily activities of colonial life.

There are two contrasting views of memsahibs portrayed in colonial literature and
cookbooks and household guides of the era. First, in colonial fiction, there is the
Kiplingesque observation that memsahibs led frivolous lives, flitting between tennis
and bridge parties. Second, colonial household guides prescribed in meticulous detail
how to maintain and showcase the white, pristine household in the colonized land. In
this thesis nineteenth and early twentieth century cookbooks, household management
manuals, diaries, personal and official accounts and travelogues written for the colonies
are examined for insights into British colonial food practices and the role of domestic
servants in their households. As the wives of civil servants and others under colonial
rule had no formal official role to play, no archival records of their presence existed. As
Mary Procida points out, the work of the historian, in ‘recovering the lived experiences
of women in the empire, therefore necessitates the investigation of alternative sources
such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews’.3

Cookbooks teem with instructions (in prefaces or after the recipe pages) on topics
ranging from managing servants, to cleanliness in kitchens and home remedies. I argue
that within these parameters, my examination of the cookbooks, household guides,
personal accounts and responses to my questionnaire demonstrates that memsahibs, as
nurturers and gatekeepers of the imperial home, helped to devise, through the services
of domestic servants, a cuisine that was peculiarly colonial. Cookbooks and household
guides of the colonial era, besides providing specific instructions on how to run a
household, manage servants and prepare and serve food, can also be seen as instruments
for perpetuating the values and representations of empire. Between the 1880s and
1920s the number of cookery and household guides published increased significantly as

3
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, p4.

3
a result of the growing numbers of British women travelling to India.4 These were the
second generation of middle-class British women who resided in India after the uprising
of 1857.5 The prescriptive nature of the manuals conveys with the unmistakable
message that memsahibs were expected to follow the appropriate code of behaviour that
was becoming of colonising women.

Increasingly, cultural and social historians have employed household manuals and
cookbooks as texts on domesticity and commensality.6 Just as fiction, diaries and
biographies do not totally mirror lived events, conduct guides and cookbooks and other
different genres, examined together, add nuance and significance to the historian’s
conception of the mistress-servant relationship. These publications reinforced the
unequal relationships between the memsahibs and their servants; their instructions on
maintaining scrupulous cleanliness and meticulous storekeeping reiterated the perceived
inferiority of the domestics.

The early Indian cookery books first published in Britain from the 1830s were
collections of original recipes7 and were developed into anglicised versions of Indian
cookery for English cooks in England while other publications were specifically written
for memsahibs in Anglo-India. The number of Anglo-Indian cookbooks far outnumber
those published for the Malayan and Singaporean markets as evidenced by the
bibliography in this thesis. However, personal accounts in diaries, journals and
travelogues and official accounts in government handbooks and annual reports are
mines of information on colonial food practices and domestic service in these two
colonies. It is through the medium of cookbooks that recipes of colonial dishes were
made popular and accessible to the memsahib community. Even though the memsahibs
were not directly involved in cooking the colonial dishes, the documentation of the
recipes provides a permanent record of the existence of such dishes.

4
Wayne E. Franits, Paragon of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p66.
5
Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.24, no.4, 1999, p422.
6
See Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food, London,
Faber and Faber, 2005; Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, London, Penguin Books, 2008; Lucy
Delap, Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain: Culture, Memory, Emotions, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2010 (forthcoming); Eileen White, ‘First Things First: The Great British Breakfast’, in
C. Anne Wilson (ed.), Eating with the Victorians, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2004.
7
Elizabeth Driver, A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain 1875-1914, London, Prospect
Books, 1989, p31.

4
I also sent out forty questionnaires and received thirty-one responses to British
expatriates who lived in the three colonies in the period covered and are now resident in
various parts of the world. The questionnaire, designed with open-ended questions,
attempted to elicit comments on types of dishes consumed, ingredients associated with
colonial food, the significance of curry, meal times and types, the relationship between
master or mistress and servant, the role that servants played, the kitchen, language used
with servants, and the purchase of food. The questionnaire is reproduced in Appendix
A. These sources provide important insights into the daily activities of colonial life.

Scope
The time period chosen for this thesis, from 1858 to 1963, is extensive, primarily due to
the different colonial periods of the countries discussed. The individual chapters deal
with selected themes and regions and are deliberately designed such that there is no
strict chronological order in the conventional sense of narrative history. Thus, topics
are discussed backwards and forwards in time within the century-long time-frame.
Each broad theme of the five core chapters discussed is intertwined with analysis of the
complex mistress-servant relationship.

The starting point of this thesis, 1858, denotes the beginning of Crown colonial rule of
India. This period, which ended when India attained independence in 1947 is known as
the Raj. Present-day Malaysia and Singapore are the successor states to the former
British colonies and protectorates.8 Malaysia today consists of thirteen states, eleven on
the Malay Peninsula and two in Borneo: Sabah and Sarawak. Sabah was known as
British North Borneo during British rule. The Malay states became independent of
British rule in 1957 and were known as the Federation of Malaya. Sabah and Sarawak
joined the other states, forming the Federation of Malaysia in 1963.

Although British interests in Malaya first dated to the founding of Penang in 1786, the
English East India Company took control of Penang, Province Wellesley, Melaka and
Singapore under the presidency government of the Straits Settlements in 1826, with
headquarters in Penang. British interests in Singapore were further cemented in 1819
when Thomas Stamford Raffles signed a treaty with the temenggung (minister in charge

8
C. Mary Turnbull, A History of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, London, Allen & Unwin, 1989, pxv.

5
of defence, justice and palace affairs),9 of Riau-Johor, and obtained rights to start a
factory on the island.10 In 1830, facing financial difficulties the settlements were
downgraded to a residency and became part of the Bengal presidency.11 Although the
European population was small in the Straits Settlements – in 1860 there were 466 in
Singapore, 316 in Penang and a few officials in Melaka – it was forthright and
clamoured for independent rule from Calcutta. In 1867 the Straits Settlements became a
crown colony.12

British interests in North Borneo date back to 1763 when Alexander Dalrymple of the
East India Company planted the EIC flag on Balambangan, an island off the
northernmost part of Borneo. It did not become the flourishing trading post the British
company had envisaged and was abandoned in 1805. Labuan, an island off the west
coast of Borneo, was another strategic point coveted by the British and in 1846 the
island was ceded to Britain by the Sultan of Brunei. In 1881 when a royal charter was
granted to a private company, the British North Borneo Company, it was given
sovereign rights to run the state.13 Labuan was added to the territory when British
North Borneo became a crown colony in 1946. In 1841 James Brooke, a cavalry officer
in the Indian army, became the self-styled raja of Sarawak and established the capital,
Kuching on the western central coast of Borneo. He started a dynasty of ‘White Rajas’
ruling Sarawak until the Second World War.14 In 1888, North Borneo and Sarawak
(also Brunei) became British protectorates. This thesis does not discuss food
consumption among the British who were interned during the Japanese Occupation of
Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states as the period is seen as ‘out of the ordinary’
years.

I have used ‘Malaya’, ‘British North Borneo’, ‘Sarawak’ and ‘Singapore’ in their
historical context interchangeably with Malaysia and Singapore, for convenience,
although there was no such entity as ‘Malaya’ in the nineteenth century. ‘Anglo-
Indians’ cited throughout this thesis refer to British men and women resident in India
and not the present-day meaning of Eurasians, that is, people of mixed racial origins.

9
Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, Honolulu, University of
Hawai’i Press, 2001, p375.
10
Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, p114.
11
Turnbull, A History of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, pp98-99.
12
Turnbull, A History of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, p106.
13
Cecilia Leong, Sabah: The First 100 Years, Kuala Lumpur, Percetakan Nan Yang Muda Sdn. Bhd.,
1982, p45.
14
Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, p129.

6
The terms sahib and memsahib were first used in India to address the white man and
white married woman respectively.15 In Malaysia and Singapore the white man was
addressed by the local population as tuan (mister or sir) while the white married woman
was addressed as mem and never memsahib. The term ‘Malayan’ was used by the
British to describe the people of Malaya and those of long residence, sometimes even
including Europeans,16 not dissimilar to the term ‘Indian’ as used by some Britons who
had lived for many years in India.

India is geographically separated from the Peninsular Malaysian states by the Indian
Ocean while the Borneo States of Malaysia are separated from the peninsula by the
South China Sea. In spite of the separation by ocean and sea of the dozens of disparate
states within India, Malaysia, and Singapore, during colonial rule there were more
distinct links than there were differences in culinary practices and domestic service. In
colonial India, Malaysia and Singapore, the complete dependence of the British on their
servants, and the ingestion of local foods illustrate the irony of concerns about
separation and hygiene.

Chapter One reviews the historiography of colonial foodways (practices associated with
food and eating), mistress-servant relationships (race, gender, caste and ethnicity) and
cookbooks as historical documents. In the last few decades the culture of colonial
societies has become increasingly important in world historical analysis and the concept
of ‘foodways’ – the customs of a group of people concerning food and eating – is seen
as one way of examining the ritualized patterns of colonial life. Foodways is used in
this thesis to examine imperial domesticity and the role and image of domestic servants
in India, Malaysia and Singapore. Foodways is one way of looking at the porous
boundaries of colonialism in areas of race and domestic relationships.17 It gives
testimony to one aspect of colonialism: the close relations that existed between
colonizers and the colonized as domestic servants were wholly responsible for
providing sustenance to their colonial masters. European colonial society delegated to

15
Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary: A Spice-Box of
Etymological Curiosities and Colourful Expressions, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1996,
(first published in 1886). According to Yule and Burnell, the hybrid term ‘memsahib’ is a respectful
designation of a European married woman, with the first part of the word representing ma’am.
16
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in
Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979, p3.
17
Ann Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century
Colonial Cultures’, in Jan Breman (ed.), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social
Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice, Amsterdam, VU University Press, 1990, pp36-37.

7
its women the role of enacting rituals that marked the boundaries between the rulers and
the ruled. In analysing the emergence of the colonial cuisine, it is necessary to establish
what constitutes a cuisine. Chapter One discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that the
food consumption patterns of different social classes are determined by their
experiences. Bourdieu contends that food tastes are not acquired individually but
collectively and are derived through interaction from different social classes.18 Stephen
Mennell, goes one step further and examines the reasons why a particular social group
embraces certain food practices and whether social and cultural mores play any part in
this.19 Pierre L. van den Berghe’s study on ethnic cuisine suggests that a community
strengthens its social connections through food sharing both in the home and in the
public sphere.20 This is relevant in discussing the development of the colonial cuisine
in relation to the cohesiveness of the colonial community. Among the current scholars
who discuss the relationship between colonizer and colonized in the context of
foodways are E.M. Collingham, Nupur Chaudhuri, Uma Narayan and Susan Zlotnick.21
These scholars contend that British colonizers followed a British diet and rejected
Indian dishes in order to differentiate themselves from their subjects, a notion
challenged by this thesis.

Cookbooks and household guides form an important part of the methodology of this
thesis and I have looked at literature in the field that either support or reject these
publications as historical documents. While Edward Higgs22 and Edith Horander23
dismiss the use of recipe books as historical documents, others like Karen Hess24 stress
that analysing cookbooks is the best methodology for studying food history. This thesis

18
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London, Routledge, 1989,
p79.
19
Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages
to the Present, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1985.
20
Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol.7, no.3,
1984, p390.
21
See E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001; Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’,
Victorian Studies, vol.31, no.4, 1988; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and
Third-World Feminism, New York, Routledge, 1997; and Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism:
Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol.16, no.2-3,
1996.
22
Edward Higgs, ‘Domestic Service and Household Production’, in Angela V. John (ed.), Unequal
Opportunities. Women’s Employment in England 1800-1918, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1986, pp126-127.
23
Edith Horandner, ‘The Recipe Book as a Cultural and Socio-historical Document: On the Value of
Manuscript Recipe Books as Sources’, Food in Perspective, (Proceedings of the Third International
Conference on Ethnological Food Research, Cardiff, Wales, 1977), Edinburgh, John Donald Publishers
Ltd, 1981, p119.
24
Karen Hess, The Digest, A Newsletter for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food, vol.1, no.1, November
1977, p4.

8
takes the middle ground, that a combination of the use of cookbooks, household guides,
diaries, memoirs and travelogues can establish clearly defined patterns of colonial food
practices. Mary Procida suggests that Anglo-Indian cookbooks help the historian to
understand the domestic sphere of British colonialism in India, particular on gender in
empire. Procida adds that Anglo-Indian cookbooks should be examined beyond their
instructive and prescriptive function because they were an important source for
spreading the word and work of empire.25 Arjun Appadurai in his study of
contemporary India, notes that while some of these cookbooks are written for the Indian
diaspora many others are written to reminisce and reconstruct Indian food of the
colonial era, with curry as the master trope and as of colonial origin.26

The mistress-servant relationship in the colonial household encompasses racial and

gender roles, class and caste in India, and ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore.
Ann Stoler suggests that the perennial European anxieties about servants in the colonies
existed because domestic service pervaded both the private and public spheres.27
Procida disagrees with those historians who suggest that the imperial home was
designated as a feminized space, separate from the public sphere where the man of the
house conducted the work of empire. Instead, she argues that the Anglo-Indian
domestic sphere was a site of cultural interactions and interchange where ‘the home was
an arena for political discussion and administrative action’28 with servants, the majority
of whom were males. Using household guides in her study of domesticity in India,
Alison Blunt concludes that the unequal relationship between British women and their
Indian servants reproduced imperial power relations on a domestic scale.29 Swapna M.
Banerjee’s work on domestic service in colonial Bengal looks at how the caste-class
and, ethnic, prejudices in Singapore and Malaysia of the employers influenced the
selection of and treatment of the servants.30 Banerjee also raises the issue of food and
servants, from the different kinds of servants working in the kitchens of European and
Indian aristocratic households to those of middle-class families in colonial Bengal. As

25
Procida, Married to the Empire, p87.
26
Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Journal of
the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, vol.30, no.1, 1988, p18.
27
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, p136.
28
Procida, Married to the Empire, pp57-58.
29
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p429.
30
Swapna M. Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial
Bengal, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004.

9
maintained throughout this thesis, foodways were indistinguishably linked with the
contribution made by domestic servants in the colonial household.

Chapter Two demonstrates that the colonial table neither featured dishes that were only
British or European nor comprised only local dishes but that the salient characteristics
of the hybrid colonial cuisine were evident. This is in spite of the diverse backgrounds
of British colonists; they were from the armed forces, the administration and commerce,
all coming from different classes, with different dietary habits. The diets of the
colonized Asians were just as different; Indians were from different castes and while
there was no caste system in Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo there were numerous
racial and ethnic groups with varying dietary practices.

The types of meals consumed by the British colonial community of the three colonies
certainly fit the criteria laid out by anthropologist Sydney Mintz’s definition of what
constitutes a ‘cuisine’.31 Mintz regards a cuisine as legitimate when the community
claims ownership of it through knowledge of, and familiarity with, the dishes.32 This
ties in with sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s assertion that ‘culinary
preparations become a cuisine when, and only when, the preparations are articulated
and formalized, and enter the public domain’.33 Thus, the collection of a number of
hybrid dishes of countless types of curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, chicken chop, pish
pash and the inimitable meal of tiffin, do constitute a cuisine. Sahibs and memsahibs
claimed ownership of their dishes by consuming them at certain times and occasions,
they wrote about them, exchanged their recipes and critiqued them.

No other colonial dish was more consumed, debated and critiqued than curry. Chapter
Three analyses curry as the signature dish of British colonial cuisine and traces its
origin and development. This thesis integrates the notion, prevalent in the existing
scholarship, that curry powder was ‘fabricated’ by the British in India and commodified
it for British taste, thereby fulfilling an ideological function of empire. Instead, I argue
that colonists did not deliberately choose curry to domesticate in the colonial project but
appropriated and modified it in numerous dishes to enhance and transform poor quality
chicken, fish and meat. Even when the colonial dinner party table was overladen with
31
Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1996, p96.
32
Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p96.
33
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press, 2006, p19.

10
large roasts of mutton and beef, turkey, chicken, and so on, curry and rice and other
colonial dishes were nevertheless part of the menu.

The British adopted curry from the earliest days of colonial rule. In fact, its popularity
reached its height in the days of the East India Company from the seventeenth century
to the mid-nineteenth century. Its history was influenced by the availability of local
ingredients, the culinary skills of the colonial cook and the tastes of the British in a
particular location. It developed both temporally and geographically and was the
perfect example of food appropriation. Each Indian presidency’s curry was subtly
different and it differed even from household to household. Its popularity spread to
other colonies from its home in India. While Lizzie Collingham sees Anglo-Indian
cookery as the first pan-Indian cuisine,34 curry is clearly the single most important dish
that defined the culinary history of British imperialism. Although it has obscure
beginnings, curry’s legitimacy is reinforced by the contest for ownership of it by the
different communities. This claiming of ownership and the questioning of its
authenticity occurred both in the colonial era as well as in postcolonial times. I have
drawn from Anglo-Indian, Malayan, Singaporean and British North Borneo cookbooks,
memoirs, diaries and travelogues to demonstrate that curry evolved as a hybrid and
practical dish. In the British household it was often made from leftover meat and
poultry and incorporated spice ingredients specifically selected for their preservative
and nutritious qualities, according to the prevailing medical thinking of the time. The
commercialisation of curry powders from the nineteenth century has contributed to the
diverse range of curries that were subsequently developed, and indeed, curry can be
seen as one of the British Empire’s enduring legacies. In appropriating curry, Britons
debated the merits of the dish and judged the authenticity of different curries by district,
region or presidency. While a household could lay claim to the superiority of its own
curry, and a club could become renowned for its curries (such as the Madras Club,
which became famous for its prawn curry) it was always the indigenous cook who was
responsible for preparing the curry.

The cook formed part of the large coterie of servants who were responsible for the well-
being of Europeans both at home and at other colonial institutions. Chapter Four
examines the role of domestic servants and the representation of servants by colonizers.
Histories on domestic servants working in the colonial household, particularly in

34
Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, London, Chatto & Windus, 2005, p118.

11
connection with the preparation of food, have long been neglected. Writers of popular
literature, cookbooks, household guides, diaries and travelogues have, for the most part,
disparaged servants in the colonial household, questioning their honesty and loyalty.
There are countless anecdotes of servants’ stupidity and dirty habits (several are cited in
this thesis) that contributed to the mirth at colonial gatherings as well as making it into
print. For all their poor standards of hygiene and ostensibly low intellect, however,
servants were involved in food preparation and other personal tasks for the colonial
family. This thesis examines the role and image of servants who were engaged in the
purchasing, preparation and serving of food in the colonial household. While the
memsahib holds the supervisory role of head of the household it was the physical
contribution of the domestic servants that enabled her to fulfill this function. The large
number of servants employed meant that she was able to facilitate the colonial home
seamlessly between the private domain of home and operate as the official venue for
empire’s tasks. That the memsahib was able to extend hospitality in the form of meals
and accommodation to European travellers was due largely to the work of her servants.
Domestic servants did more than just the menial and physical work. It was the servants’
local knowledge on where to procure food (even if they were usually suspected by their
employers of being cheated on food purchases) that contributed to the emergence of the
colonial cuisine. The cooks yielded far more influence on the diet of the British than
what has been acknowledged. Many of the hybrid colonial dishes had origins from
local dishes and were adapted for what servants thought were more to European tastes.

Servants also performed other intimate tasks, including serving early morning breakfast
to their colonial employers in bed as well as feeding and looking after their children.
The negative image of servants perpetuated by their masters and mistresses was
symptomatic of the contradictions of colonial life. As labour was cheap in the colonies,
particularly in India, the colonial household could afford to have large numbers of
servants. If servants cheated their employers one could speculate that if they had been
paid more they might not have had to resort to stealing food in the kitchen.

The mission of keeping the home pristine fell to the memsahib but as the kitchen was
the focal point for food preparation and as native servants were in charge it seemed like
a losing battle. By most accounts, the memsahib chose not to improve the working
conditions of the kitchen where servants were employed. Paradoxically she relied on
and yet mistrusted her servants to maintain cleanliness in the kitchen. Instead of

12
equipping the kitchen properly and providing clean water and proper disposal of waste
water, most memsahibs were content to associate their servants and the kitchen with
dirt. It was not for lack of knowledge of local conditions that the memsahib or indeed,
the sahib, was reticent in taking a more proactive stance in the kitchen. The household
guides and cookery books that were present in most homes and clubs gave detailed
instructions on equipping and maintaining the tropical kitchen. Many of these
household guides recommended the morning parade of inspecting the cleanliness of
kitchen premises and equipment stores and disbursing of supplies. Because the kitchen
was some distance away memsahibs would have found it too hot and tiresome to get
there and inspect its cleanliness.

One of the reasons Europeans in the colonies sought refuge in hill stations was to escape to
the ‘clean’ and cool climate of the highlands, away from the dirt and disease of the
tropical lowlands and the local inhabitants. Chapter Five investigates the colonial
creations of hill stations, rest-houses, dak bungalows (rest-house for travellers), clubs,
hotels or restaurants that were exclusive enclaves built for leisure and recuperation. The
existence and maintenance of these institutions were dependant on the colonized people,
significantly, for food preparation. In Malaya and the Borneo colonies rest-houses were
colonial government-owned dwellings maintained in every town for the accommodation
of travelling government personnel.35 Fully-furnished, these brick-built buildings were
smaller than hotels and meals were prepared by the rest-house cook. Rest-houses were
most likely to have originated from the dak bungalows of India. The services provided
for the rest and recreation of the colonials were dependant on the local inhabitants and
not the least for food preparation. Dane Kennedy points out the irony that the British,
by isolating themselves in the hill stations, in efforts to get away from the Indians, in
fact depended on their services for life in the hills.36

European ideas for devising places for rest and recreation in the tropical colonies were
largely derived from nineteenth-century notions of race, of the need to isolate
themselves from the colonized, of the home leave policies of the colonial administration
and of a nostalgic longing for the home country. The three institutions of hill stations,
clubs and rest-houses, with their customs and codes of conduct, reinforced those of the
35
Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, 4th edn., London, The Malay
States Information Agency, 191136 Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996.

13
carefully guarded colonial home – against the encroachment of the colonized
environment and its people. Western medical thinking at the time conceived that
Europeans, particularly women and children were not to live for long periods of time in
the tropics. It decreed that women and children were at greater risk in the harsh rigours
of the tropics than their male counterparts and hill stations became important places for
refuge and respite from the tropical lowlands.

Some hill stations became centres of government for several months of the year. In
addition, the Indian population, comprising those engaged in commerce, service and
administration swelled to large numbers.37 The bazaars became overcrowded and due
to lack of toilets, typhoid fever, cholera and other diseases were rampant in the later half
of the nineteenth century. There were no toilet facilities in the servants’ quarters as the
British left the Indians to their own devices (as was generally the case in the lowlands).
The colonizers initially ignored the sanitation problems in the bazaars but eventually the
problems spilled dangerously close to the colonial enclaves. It was only when the
spread of these diseases threatened the British population in the hill stations that
authorities paid attention.38

Chapter Six examines the fear and anxiety of colonizers who believed that indigenous
people were inherently dirty and were seen as carriers of diseases. Such anxieties were
supported by medical thinking from the eighteenth century – that diseases were rife in
India and were attributed to the tropical heat and humidity.39 This thesis examines the
contradiction between the discourses of dirt and disease and the reality of dependence of
the Europeans on their indigenous servants. The high mortality rate of Europeans in
India and the other colonies (due to malaria and other infectious diseases) added to the
apprehension. The increasing numbers of British women who went to the colonies from
the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries was heralded with the gendered role
imposed on them as gatekeepers of empire. The memsahib was responsible for creating
a pure and pristine imperial household, both for display and as a barrier against the
colonized environment and its inhabitants. As maintained throughout this thesis,
cookbooks and household manuals were the medium to which the memsahib could refer
for instructions on how to manage her household, including maintaining cleanliness in

37
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p191.
38
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p191.
39
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856, Delhi,
Permanent Black, 2005.

14
the home. These publications also contained advice on medical aid and hygiene rules.40
Domestic servants were the ordinary colonized people that British housewives were the
most likely to come into daily contact. The omnipresence of cooks, bearers and other
servants, who on one hand were seen as carriers of disease, was a constant,
uncomfortable and yet necessary presence in the personal space of the home.

From the eighteenth century until the 1870s, when modern germ theory emerged,
medical thinking attributed epidemic disease transmission to contamination and not to
contagion. European medical thought at the time was based on the humoral
understanding of disease, that sickness occurred from the noxious air or miasmas
produced in humid and unhealthy places. In particular, colonial ideology situated
colonized areas of the world as dirty and impure and European knowledge and skills as
being able to cleanse and purify these places and people.41 At the same time early
nineteenth-century thought held that tropical diseases affected Europeans differently
than the local people. Sanitation ideas were similarly developed in other colonies. In
his study on the bubonic plague and urban native policy in South Africa in the early
1900s, Maynard W. Swanson refers to the ‘sanitation syndrome’ when medical officials
and other authorities associated the imagery of infectious diseases as a ‘societal
metaphor’.42 He states that disease was both a biological fact and a social metaphor.43
This metaphor became so powerful that it influenced British and South African racial
attitudes and paved the way towards segregation, culminating in the creation of urban
apartheid.44 In India and the Southeast Asian colonies the segregation of the colonial
community from the colonized subjects were due both to imperial prestige and anxieties
about dirt and disease associated with the indigenous peoples.

40
See for example, Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. Chapter XV is
titled ‘Simple hints on the preservation of health and simple remedies’, pp171-188.
41
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 1999,
p42.
42
Maynard W. Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the
Cape Colony’, Journal of African History, vol.XVIII, no.3, 1977, p387.
43
Swanson, 'The Sanitation Syndrome', p408.
44
Swanson, 'The Sanitation Syndrome', p387.

15
Chapter One
The Literature So Far
‘In creating a home in the empire, therefore, Anglo-Indians did not, nor did
they intend to, faithfully recreate metropolitan British domesticity. Such an
undertaking would have been not only impossible in physical and cultural
terms, but actually antithetical to imperial needs. In general, Anglo-Indians
did not exchange a traditional European lifestyle for indigenous customs;
rather, they adopted and adapted Indian stratagems for dealing with the
demands of a climate and geographic situation very different from that of
Britain, while maintaining certain hallmarks of European domesticity
which, they believed, distinguished the Anglo-Indian home from the Indian
dwelling. Materially and symbolically, the British household in India was
truly an Anglo-Indian space, incorporating various elements of European
and Indian cultures to create a domestic environment that could uphold the
imperial ethos and facilitate the business of empire in a physical and
ideological environment vastly different from that of Great Britain’.1

This chapter reviews current literature that concerns the central themes of this thesis:
food consumption and its associated social meaning; domestic servants as agents of
food practices; class, caste; race and gender in the master-servant relationship; the
medium of cookbooks as historical documents; the colonial institutions of clubs and hill
stations; and dirt and disease. This thesis attempts to build on the scant scholarly work
on food practices relating to British colonialists in the three countries. Similarly,
limited historical writing on domestic service in Asia exists, much less that focuses on
India and even less so on Malaysia and Singapore. While anthropologists have
traditionally studied food and culture, scholars in other fields have only recently turned
their attention to food studies. R.S. Khare and M.S.A. Rao point out that nineteenth
century British administrators and writers wrote on land tenure rather than about food
production, and on caste and tribal food restrictions rather than food practices. Khare
and Rao reason that this was due to British politico-economic interests, the colonial
preference for the exotic and the difficulty of investigating Indian food habits as they
fell under the domestic sphere of the Indian people.2 For the section on culinary
historiography I have drawn on scholarship from a multi-disciplinary mix in the
humanities.

1
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, p61.
2
R.S. Khare and M.S.A. Rao, ‘Introduction’, in R.S. & M.S.A. Rao Khare (eds), Aspects in South Asian
Food Systems: Food, Society and Culture, North Carolina, Carolina Academic Press, 1986, p3.

16
Food consumption and its associated social meaning
It is indisputable that the emergence of a cuisine peculiar to the itinerant colonizing
population was due to the development of a distinctly social, cultural and political
grouping. While there is a plethora of work on the history of regional Asian foodways3
and periods, specific research on colonial cuisines forms only a small subset. French
sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, shares the same view that food preferences are conditioned
by social groups.4 He conducted a survey research of the tastes and preferences of
different class factions in France in the 1960s. Bourdieu’s project demonstrates how the
different food tastes and practices of different classes are meaningful because they are
fixed within class cultures and tensions exist within and between these classes as part of
a broader power struggle. Bourdieu concludes that food tastes are far from individual;
rather, they have their basis in the social relationships between different groups,
particularly social classes. Furthermore, Bourdieu asserts that the style of meal that
people offer is a good indicator of the image they wish to give or avoid giving to
others.5 Bourdieu’s findings are relevant in establishing how cohesive the Anglo-Indian
community and British colonials from Malaysia and Singapore were as social groupings
and how a distinctive colonial cuisine evolved. Bourdieu’s premise is that the
experiences of different social classes predisposes them to consume differently and
consequently a class culture emerges in which those within it distinguish themselves
from others.

This thesis contends that Anglo-Indians and the British in Malaya and Singapore
constructed themselves as a distinct class identity and this identity significantly
influenced their food choices and associated food practices. At the same time it is clear
that the colonizers did not follow a strictly British diet nor did they eat exclusively local
foods. In addition, the colonial cuisine was externally influenced, as the domestic
servants’ input was as much responsible as the availability of ingredients for the
evolution of a distinctly colonial cuisine.

The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s work offers valuable insights relating to food
and the exchange of culture, particularly food and imperialism. Fernández-Armesto

3
See for example, Sidney Cheung and Chee-Beng Tan, Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition
and Cooking, London, London, Routledge, 2007. Although this is an excellent anthropological inquiry
into ethnographic analysis of food production in several countries in Asia it has no direct relevance to this
thesis.
4
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London, Routledge, 1989.
5
Bourdieu, Distinction, p79.

17
suggests that one of the forces ‘capable of penetrating cultural barriers and
internationalising food’ is war as armies are ‘great vectors of cultural influence…’.6 He
gives the example of British Armed forces bringing kushuri, probably from the Indian
kitchri, a popular Cairo street food of rice and lentils with onion and spices, to Egypt.7
It is, however, his reference to one of the three types of imperial cuisines that is central
to this study, that is, ‘the colonial cookery which juxtaposes the food of elite colonists
from the “mother country” with the “subaltern” styles of their local cooks and
concubines’.8 Fernández-Armesto’s analysis refers to the hybrid nature of the colonial
table, a variegated array of British dishes and local dishes of the colonized, creating a
distinctly colonial cuisine. Fernández-Armesto also argues that ‘no source of influence
in cookery – perhaps, in the exchange of culture generally – has exceeded
imperialism’.9

Although some research on colonial cuisines focuses on other European colonial

contexts,10 David Burton’s culinary history of the British in India and Lizzie
Collingham’s biography of curry are most relevant to this thesis.11 Burton’s work on
India is particularly useful as, although not intended for the academy, its description of
individual dishes, meal times, kitchen facilities and servants provided useful
background detail on foodways in British India. Most of Burton’s primary sources
(Burton claims) are mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Anglo-Indian cookbooks.
However, it is difficult to verify Burton’s sources as the references are not annotated
and this, to some extent, undermines the study’s credibility. An example is the
description (seemingly taken word for word from Michael Edwardes’s The Sahibs and
the Lotus) of the scrawny chicken served at dak bungalows.12 Numerous recipes listed
give a clear indication of the kinds of foods eaten by colonizers. Burton claims that of
all the legacies of the Raj, none is more firmly rooted in British popular culture than

6
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, New York, The Free Press,
2002, p138.
7
Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables, p138.
8
Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables, p140.
9
Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables, p140.
10
See for example, Susie Protschky, ‘The Colonial Table: Food, Culture and Dutch Identity in Colonial
Indonesia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol.54, no.3, 2008, pp346-357; David Burton,
‘Curries and Couscous: Contrasting Colonial Legacies in French and British Cooking’, in A. Lynn Martin
and Barbara Santich (eds), Gastronomic Encounters, Brompton, East Street Publications, 2004, pp49-61.
11
David Burton, The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India, London, Faber & Faber,
1993; and Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, London, Chatto & Windus, 2005.
12
Burton, The Raj at Table, p110. Burton writes, ‘sudden death – chicken that had been decapitated,
plucked, grilled and served up within twenty minutes of being ordered.’ This description is also found in
Michael Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus: The British in India, London, Constable, 1988, pp103-104.

18
curried food.13 This thesis makes a similar claim, devoting a chapter to the study of
curry as part of the colonial cuisine.

Collingham’s Curry is the definitive work on British foodways in India. This thesis
also engages with other scholars who have written on curry, namely, Nupur Chaudhuri,
Uma Narayan and Susan Zlotnick.14 Collingham’s approach is both scholarly and
popular, with a substantial bibliography. Collingham employs curry to tell the history
of India and traces the history of curry from the courts of Delhi to the curry houses of
England. Whole chapters are devoted to individual curries and other dishes and recipes
are given at the end of each chapter. Collingham also engages with race and gender
discourses in her discussion of curry. She points out that with the demise of the East
India Company in 1858, the racial thinking of the time encouraged civil servants and
military officers of the Crown to draw lines to distinguish the colonizer from the
colonized. Curry and rice, once part of everyday fare, was consumed less frequently
from the late nineteenth century onwards.15 Curries were prepared to use up leftover
foods and this was seen as an efficient and economic means of managing the household
budget. Collingham argues that the domestic ideology of Britain’s middle classes
‘celebrated the virtuous housewife and transformed thrift into a mark of
respectability’.16 Chapter Three of this thesis builds on Collingham’s work on curry by
analysing the popularity of curry among colonists. It is my contention that curry was
the omnipresent dish because servants were responsible for cooking in the colonial
kitchen and they cooked curry particularly well; all the ingredients used, the cooking
method and utensils were local. While Collingham’s work touches on curry in Britain
and other countries this thesis only focuses on India, Malaysia and Singapore.

James P. Johnston’s book on the history of food consumption in Britain was one of the
first studies on culinary history and attempts to demonstrate ‘the significance of food,
not only in terms of the physical needs of men, but also as an essential element in

13
Burton, The Raj at Table, pvii.
14
See Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and
Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press, 1992; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-
World Feminism New York, Routledge, 1997; and Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry
and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol.16, no.2-3, 1996.
15
Collingham, Curry, p159.
16
Collingham, Curry, p138.

19
economic and social life’.17 In order to understand foodways in the British colonies it is
important to look at food practices in Britain. Johnston’s outline of the development of
dietary change through technology is useful for the study of why colonizers adhered to
certain culinary practices. Advances in technology, particularly in transport in the late
nineteenth century, had a major effect on the diet of all classes of society in Britain.
This resulted in large quantities of cheap imported foodstuffs like meat, grain, fish and
tinned products being made available on the British market.18 Before the 1850s the
British diet was made largely of bread, bacon, cheese, potatoes and tea.19 New products
such as margarine and condensed milk became cheap substitutes for fresh produce.20
Although the memsahib kept tinned food in her kitchen stores both as an emergency
measure and for variety there is no evidence to prove that many colonial households
consumed large quantities of these convenience food instead of fresh local produce.
Charles Bruce, a colonial government official on recalling his twenty years spent in
Borneo stated tinned food was served to break the monotony of chicken and rice.21 In
any case, imported tinned food was too expensive and was considered a treat as noted
by Indian-born Jonquil Mallinson.22 Other scholars who made the point that the British
ate a strictly British diet in the colonies assumed that colonizers preferred to eat tinned
imported vegetables instead of making use of fresh ones. Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Black
Mischief, helped propagate this myth when he wrote of dinner with the
‘…So-and-so’s where seven courses, all out of tins were served: tinned grapefruit,
tinned soup, tinned lobster with bottled mayonnaise, tinned asparagus with melted
butter, a chicken with tinned peas, tinned fruit salad, tinned anchovies or
mushrooms or sardines on toast, and probably tinned ginger and chocolates for the
dessert, or perhaps he was referring to the tinned cigarettes.’23

The colonial diet was a mixture of European food and local dishes, fresh produce and
tinned or frozen foods (in later years), spicy and bland foods. European type foods that
17
James P. Johnstone, A Hundred Years Eating: Food, Drink and the Daily Diet in Britain Since the Late
Nineteenth Century, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1977.
18
Johnstone, A Hundred Years Eating, p8.
19
Tea had replaced coffee as a hot beverage in England by the 1740s, even the poorest households drank
it. See Troy Bickham, ‘Defining Good Food: Cookery-Book Illustrations in England’, Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.31, no.3, 2008, p475.
20
Johnstone, A Hundred Years Eating, p10.
21
Charles Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo; London, Cassell and Company Ltd, 1924, p125. In the Dutch
Indies in the first half of the twentieth century, imported tinned food and increased cultivation of
European types of vegetables in the highlands meant that the Dutch changed from a rice based diet to
more Europeans meals, see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses and Canned Food, European
Women and Western Lifestyles in the Indies, 1900-1942’, in Henk Schulte Nordholt (ed.), Outward
Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, Leiden, KITLV Press, 1997.
22
Cited in Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1939-1950, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, p79.
23
E.G. Bradley, A Household Book for Tropical Colonies, London, Oxford University Press, 1948, p87,
citing Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief.

20
were tinned would have been enjoyed for their familiarity.

In tracing the development of the colonial cuisine in India, it is worth noting though that
during the early years of the East India Company more Indian dishes were eaten than
during the Raj. As discussed in Chapter Two, less Indian food was eaten together with
the abandoning of adopting local customs as in Indian dress, smoking the hookah, and
so on in a deliberate act of creating social distance between the colonizer and colonized.
Nicola Humble’s work on cookbooks and the transformation of British food also refer
to this embracing of Indian foods even in Britain.24 In Humble’s analysis of Britain’s
most famous cook book, Beeton’s Book of Household Management of 1861 she notes
that a large number of recipes were from India: mulligatawny, different kinds of curries,
kedgeree and a variety of chutneys. Humble explains that until the 1870s there was
little consumption of European food in the homes of British officials in India. She
states that ‘Indian cooks tended to be left to their own devices and produced a series of
curries’.25 Humble suggests that the British spread recipes of those foods that they liked
both in Britain and in India and ‘in the process of translation and transmission [they]
gradually mutated – the development of kedgeree from a vegetarian dish of rice and
lentils to one containing smoked fish and eggs is a notable example’.26 This gradual
evolution of recipes is consistent and pertinent to my thesis, that the emergence of the
colonial cuisine was a combination of various factors. In the colonial home, the
interpretation and translation of recipes would have suffered from misunderstanding
between both memsahib and cook. The memsahib-cook relationship was a peculiar one
– the memsahib was reliant on the cook for turning out meals and yet the kitchen
remained out of bounds for her. Ingredients were under lock and key and daily portions
were measured out because the servant was perceived to be dishonest. And yet, these
ingredients were procured in the first place by the cook from markets in which the
memsahib would not set foot.

A number of scholars discuss how and why social groupings adopt certain food
practices to reinforce their identities, which is pertinent to the emergence of a colonial
cuisine with its distinct and hybridised dishes. My thesis challenges the current premise
that the colonizers’ diet was an exercise in image-building: of exerting their roles as

24
Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food, London,
Faber and Faber, 2005, p19.
25
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.
26
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.

21
imperialists and racial superiors. Existing scholarship emphasises that foodways served
as identity and boundary markers, that rulers of Empire followed a completely different
diet to their subjects as a deliberate act of differentiating themselves to the ruled. I will
demonstrate throughout this thesis that the diet of the colonizers was a combination of
consuming what was available in the local market and what was palatable to Europeans;
and that their domestic servants had a significant influence in this choice. It was this
combination of hybrid dishes that characterised the colonial cuisine, it did not feature
only Indian-type or Asian dishes – just as Anglo-Indians or the colonizers in Malaysia
and Singapore did not see themselves as part of the local community.

E.M. Collingham’s book on colonial India analyses the British experience as intensely
physical.27 She examines food, dress, domestic space, domestic servants and modes of
conduct to illustrate distinctly Anglo-Indian practices by the British. She maintains that
the body was central to the colonial experience and her study of the British body in
India traces the transformation of the early nineteenth-century East India Company
servant to the mid-nineteenth century sahib, the civil servant of the Crown. The
premise of Collingham’s chapter on ‘The Social Body’ is that the Anglo-Indian
community developed into a distinct culture that demonstrated its racial superiority to
the Indians through specific patterns of behaviour.28 Collingham makes the contentious
assumption that the ‘consumption of British food became an important element in
prestige as it differentiated India’s ruler from their subjects’.29 In my thesis this view is
challenged in several aspects, ranging from types of meals, dishes and meal times. The
consequence of Collingham’s view is that there would not have evolved a distinctly
Anglo-Indian cuisine which, this thesis demonstrates is not the case. At one point
Collingham claims that the ‘perverse adherence to British food was one of the clearest
indications Anglo-Indians gave that they were unwilling to adapt to India’. However on
the same page she cites references to describe the monotony of Anglo-Indian food
because there was ‘a strong flavour of spices in the simplest things’.30 Indeed
Collingham details the types of food consumed and times they were consumed with
Indian influences found in Anglo-Indian food practices. For example, chota haziri, an
Indian meal for early rising, was adopted to take account of the climate that became
hotter as the day progressed. A large breakfast or brunch called tiffin, was another
27
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001.
28
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p150.
29
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p159.
30
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p158.

22
Indian influence and this usually included a curry.31 Clearly there is a tension in
Collingham’s work that remains unresolved, contradictions that she cannot or does not
explain.

There is a tendency among scholars to echo Collingham’s notion of European

colonizers’ adherence to European foodways. The same unresolved contradiction
occurs in other works. Historian Elsbeth Locher-Scholten also argues that Europeans
continued to follow a European diet in the colonies. In Locher-Scholten’s essay on
clothing and food among Dutch women in colonial Indonesia, she claims that because
food habits are one of the most enduring cultural patterns of behaviour, it is logical that
‘Europeans kept to their own menu’.32 In the same essay, however, Locher-Scholten
describes rice as ‘the staple food in the diet of Europeans living in the Indies’; that in
1919 ‘the rijsttafel (rice table) was still considered the main meal of the day for well-to-
do Europeans. Poorer Europeans as well as the indigenous population ate meals of rice
three times a day’.33 She further notes that household manuals written by Indo-
European women in the 1900s and 1910s contained Indonesian recipes.34

Nupur Chaudhuri’s chapter ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’
attempts to examine the role played by British women in shaping the imperial world
view of Victorians.35 She does this by highlighting how memsahibs transferred Indian
artefacts and gastronomic cultures to English society in the mid and late Victorian era.
Chaudhuri makes the disputable point that to protect their status as rulers and defend
British culture in nineteenth century India, the Anglo-Indians chose racial exclusiveness
and rejected Indian goods and dishes but were actively promoting these items to people
in England. Her argument follows similar patterns taken by other scholars of Indian
colonial history that British women were responsible for maintaining social distance
between the rulers and the ruled.36 Two thirds of Chaudhuri’s chapter discusses how
memsahibs transferred sought-after Indian artefacts such as Kashmiri shawls and Indian
jewellery to England. The last part of the chapter focuses on how memsahibs helped to
modify the food habits of middle-class Britons through the publication of curry, rice and

31
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp156-165.
32
Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses and Canned Food’, p143.
33
Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses and Canned Food’, pp141-142. Locher-Scholten states in a
footnote that rice had been eaten as porridge for breakfast from in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in the Indies.
34
Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses and Canned Food’, p141.
35
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’.
36
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, p232.

23
other recipes in books, magazines and other media. Chaudhuri states that while they
promoted Indian cuisine to the Victorians in Britain the Anglo-Indian wives rejected
these dishes in India. Chaudhuri details the popularity of curry dishes and curry powder
in Britain in popular journals, books and pamphlets. These journal articles and letters to
the editors discussed the authenticity of curries and curry powder. She lists three
reasons why curry became popular: curry was an economical way to use up leftover
meats, fish and spices were ingredients considered nutritious, and curry added taste to
British cookery in the Victorian era (largely seen as plain and mediocre).37

Although the cuisine that the British adopted in the colonies did not have a specific
name, it was recognizable and familiar to the colonists and other Britons. Cookery,
according to sociologist Claude Fischler, gives food and its consumers a place in the
world and a sense of who they are38 and food and cuisine are an important element in
the sense of collective belonging. Fischler notes that in some migration of minority
cultures certain features of cuisine are known to have been retained even when the
group’s original language has been abandoned.39 Anglo-Indians and other colonizers
constructed themselves as a separate community, as the ruling elite of colonies. They
were no longer strictly and only ‘British’, nor were they part of the local community.
They were Britons, representing Britain; it was through their occupation, dress, homes,
furnishings and the clubs to which they belonged that made them the colonizing class.
The food practices they adopted also gave them this identity. Although hybrid food
habits were followed on a daily basis, colonizers abandoned them at special occasion
meals. As outlined in the next chapter, only European, mainly French, dishes were
served at official functions, particularly at banquets at Government House in the three
colonies. Pierre L. van den Berghe explains that food sharing pervades all aspects of
human social life and it is ceremoniously shared in different ways: to establish, express
and consolidate social ties.40 In the colonial era, at the official and ceremonial level,
Britons felt the need to exert racial and class superiority by only consuming European
type food, and haute cuisine no less. Van den Berghe observes that through the
communal and ritualised ingestion of food, social bonds are reinforced. This is relevant
to the construction of colonial cuisine. Without the sharing of recipes through
cookbooks (even if the cooking was done by domestic cooks) and at recreational centres
37
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, pp240-241.
38
Claude Fischler, ‘Food, Self and Identity’, Social Science Information, vol.27, 1988, p286.
39
Fischler, ‘Food, Self and Identity’, p280.
40
Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Ethnic cuisine: Culture in Nature’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol.7, no.3,
July 1984, p389.

24
like clubs and hill stations a colonial cuisine would not have evolved. Van den Berghe
observes that a community’s cuisine is ‘the symbolic expression of its sociality, first in
the intimate domestic sphere, and by extension with the larger group that shares a
specific culinary complex: the inventory of food items, the repertoire of recipes, and the
rituals of commensalism.’41

Stephen Mennell looks at why one social group adopts certain foods, ways of cooking
and serving these foods over another group and whether culinary likes and dislikes are
conditioned by social and cultural influences.42 This resonates with my discussion on
why certain ingredients and dishes were appropriated by colonizers and not others. The
chapter on curry in this thesis analyses the appropriation of the dish from a range of
social and cultural factors from both British and Indian influences. One of the other
issues that Mennell explores in his book is the idea of acquired taste – people like what
they are accustomed to. He also discusses food preferences, dislike of the unfamiliar
and the physiological explanation for foods avoided by some groups.43 Further he
observes how social groups develop standards of taste and even ‘ways of cooking
become woven into the mythology and sense of the identity of nations, social classes
and religious groups’.44 Similarly, Deborah Lupton agrees that food consumption
habits are not simply tied to biological needs but serve to mark boundaries between
social classes, geographic regions, nations, cultures, genders, life-cycle states, religions
and occupations, to distinguish rituals, traditions, festivals, seasons and times of day.45
All these factors are relevant to my discussion of food appropriation in the colonies.

A perception of British food as mediocre is common and was acknowledged by Britons

themselves. Kate Colquhoun illustrates this by quoting both Blackwoods Magazine, ‘…
the aim of foreign cookery is to make it [meat] tender, of English to make it hard’; and
Charles Dickens’ (the great mid-Victorian novelist) Household Words in 1851, that ‘the
real art of stewing is almost unknown in Great Britain … Everything that is not roasted
or fried is boiled at “a gallop” till the quality of tenderness is consolidated to the
consistency of caoutchouc [rubber]’.46 Others have described the concept of a British

41
van den Berghe, ‘Ethnic cuisine: Culture in Nature’, p392.
42
Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages
to the Present, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1985, p4.
43
Mennell, All Manners of Food, p4.
44
Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp2-3.
45
Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self, London, Sage Publications, 1996, p1.
46
Cited in Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking, London, Bloomsbury, 2007,
p286.

25
national diet as ‘culinary desert’ and that the English have embraced foreign food
influences.47 All through the nineteenth century, the British middle classes looked to
France for culinary practices.48 Food historians trace the beginning of French influence
to the aftermath of the French revolution when chefs who had cooked for the French
aristocracy started to work in London restaurants. Clearly the English cuisine has a long
history of ‘fusion’, hence it is not surprising that Indian influences were incorporated in
the food habits of Britons who were domiciled in India and other colonies. This trend
filtered through to cookbooks and menus in the colonies. However Britain has also
been influenced by other cuisines. A London restaurateur has been quoted as saying
that, ‘Indian food capturing the British imagination and the British palate is not such an
amazing thing. It had to happen … In terms of food culture Britain was a total
vacuum’.49 It is worth remembering that in the early 1800s Britain was in a period of
social transition when new dietary habits were formed. John Burnett states that the
choice of foods, preparation, order of service and times of eating became socially
important and helped class demarcation, ‘the dinner party became a prestige symbol’.50

In the concluding chapter of her postcolonial feminist book, Uma Narayan deals with
the links between the ‘fabrication’ of curry powder, colonial attitudes to Indian food and
colonial attitudes to India.51 Narayan engages with the notion of ‘food colonialism’ and
‘curry imperialism’ and ‘ethnic food’ but from the perspective of the Indian diaspora in
England.52 Arguing from the viewpoint of a ‘Third World feminist’, Narayan discusses
‘food as metaphor and symbol as a material practice’. Narayan acknowledges that her
chapter does not claim to address the complex general history of food and colonialism
nor does she attempt a study of the colonial history of curry. Rather, she utilizes curry
‘to talk about identities engendered by the colonial experience’.53 Narayan argues that
curry powder is a ‘fabricated’ entity, a colonial commercial term signifying a particular
type of dish from a mixture of spices and becoming a fixed and familiar product. She
goes further to say that the British were incorporating not Indian food but their own
invention of curry powder. Thus, Narayan claims that ‘for the British, eating curry was

47
Colin Campbell, Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones & Ben Taylor (eds), Food and Cultural
Studies, London, Routledge, 2004, p77.
48
Campbell et.al., Food and Cultural Studies, p77.
49
Campbell et.al., Food and Cultural Studies, p78.
50
John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day,
London, Scolar Press, 1979, p77.
51
Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism, New York,
1997.
52
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p162.
53
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p163.

26
in a sense eating India’. However, she views the incorporation of curry into ‘British’
cuisine into English homes as being in contrast to attitudes of British colonizers resident
in India.54

Colonial cookbooks
This thesis employs the medium of Victorian and colonial domestic cookbooks and
household management manuals to trace the construction of a colonial cuisine.
Biographies, diaries, travelogues and responses from my questionnaire (reproduced in
Appendix A) are consulted to create a sense of how servants contributed to the culinary
history of colonizers in India, Malaysia and Singapore. It is important to establish the
valuable role that recipe books perform as historical documents. Edward Higgs
cautions against relying on the use of domestic manuals when writing about domestic
service, comparing it to ‘reconstructing the average modern home from the pages of
Vogue’.55 Similarly other historians have also argued against using cookbooks as
historical documents as they are seen as prescriptive and do not reflect actual practices
of the time.

Scholar Edith Horander states that it is ‘exaggerated and imprudent to declare that food
research could best be pursued by means of recipe books’.56 On the other hand, another
scholar, Karen Hess views that the study of recipe books as the best method of historical
food research.57 This thesis takes the position of somewhere in between the two
extreme views and cookbooks and household guides are used in this thesis to gauge the
frequent use of local ingredients and dishes, to establish that local servants were mainly
responsible for food preparation and to what extent the British adopted other local food
practices. A combination of the use of these publications have presented clearly defined
patterns of behaviour: that British colonizers depended on local domestic service for
their food practices; that local cooks largely cooked a mixture of European and local
meals for their colonial masters; and that the treatment of domestic servants resonated

54
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p165.
55
Edward Higgs, ‘Domestic Service and Household Production’, in Angela V. John (ed.), Unequal
Opportunities. Women’s Employment in England 1800-1918, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1986, pp126-127.
56
Edith Horandner, ‘The Recipe Book as a Cultural and Socio-historical Document: On the Value of
Manuscript Recipe Books as Sources’, Food in Perspective, (Proceedings of the Third International
Conference on Ethnological Food Research, Cardiff, 1977), Edinburgh, John Donald Publishers Ltd,
1981, p119.
57
Karen Hess, The Digest, A Newsletter for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food, vol.1, no.1, November
1977, p4.

27
strongly with mistress-servant behaviour of the middle and upper classes of Britain in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Cookbooks transmit knowledge and a recipe functions as part of a permanent record
rather than as oral tradition passed from chef to apprentice.58 Cookbooks and household
guides were published in large numbers in Britain in the eighteenth century and helped
men and women from the middle and upper classes in food purchases, preparation and
presentation.59 While it is acknowledged that cookery books and household guides can
be seen as prescriptive of ideals and aspirations it is argued that both the Victorian and
colonial cookbooks were followed more arduously by readers in the colonies for a
number of reasons. Firstly, colonial readers were too geographically distant from the
metropole when trends or practices came into vogue, or secondly, they were simply too
isolated from family or friends for domestic advice.60 Thirdly, colonial cookbooks were
reference texts for the memsahib and the domestic servant to refer to recipes for the
emerging colonial cuisine. The aspirational meals calling for sophisticated and
prescriptive recipes such as turtle soup and French classical dishes were for formal
banquets in Government House. The recipes for run-of-the-mill curries, mulligatawnies
and other colonial dishes were consulted and pointed out by the memsahib to the cook
for the day’s meals.

Although Sandra Sherman’s article is based on eighteenth-century cookbooks, certain

aspects of her work are relevant to my study of Victorian cookbooks written for the
colonies. She states that by the late eighteenth-century cookbooks appealed to women
who were keen to relegate food preparation to the servants. The cookbooks were seen
as an aid to servants of middle and upper class women.61 This thesis will examine this
point in as far as to what extent cookbooks were used by the memsahib to teach her
servants culinary skills. It was during the Victorian era and the expansion of Empire
that British writers started to include their travel experiences in culinary writing. No
book of the eighteenth century or earlier had a chapter dedicated to Indian cookery.62

58
Amy B. Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession, Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p12.
59
Bickham, ‘Defining Good Food, p473. In France, cookbooks written for the bourgeois housewife or
her domestic servant also became popular from the eighteenth century: see Trubek, Haute Cuisine, p12.
60
Bickham, ‘Defining Good Food’, p476. Bickham notes that in eighteenth-century England, the
domestic guide was a helpful source of information for the middling housewife who was either too far
away from family advisors or who had newly acquired higher social status.
61
Sandra Sherman, ‘“The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking”: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the
Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, vol.28, no.1, Winter 2004, p119.
62
Alan Davidson, ‘The Natural History of British Cookery Books’, American Scholar, 1982-1983,
vol.52, no.1, pp. 98-106. For a discussion on the notion of food colonialism when ‘food colonizers’ go in

28
Alan Davidson cites an 1827 book, Domestic Economy and Cookery by ‘A Lady’ which
includes ‘the mullakatanies and curries of India’. Davidson states that all the main
genres of cookery books had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century.63 In her
study on the recipe tradition in Germany, Cecilia Novera notes two main reasons why
women tried out foreign recipes in the first half of the twentieth century.64 First,
cooking an exotic dish at home brought variety to the family’s daily fare, and secondly,
it evoked memories of the colonial experience, helped by the Kolonialwaren (imported
groceries) available in the country.65 Novero also states that German women travelers
who cooked once back in Germany were ‘useful collaborators in the colonial project,
which for Germany was a civilizing one’.66

To help manage the imperial household Anglo-Indians depended on the emerging genre
of Anglo-Indian cookbooks and household management guides. Resembling similar
books written for the metropolitan British housewife, the Anglo-Indian texts prescribed
recipes for Indian foods and other suggestions on how to run a household in India.67
The essence of these guides, states Mary Procida was the ‘daily round’ (of deciding the
day’s menus, sorting out the accounts for the previous day’s purchases, measuring out
ingredients for the day’s meals), culinary hygiene and kitchen finances.68 Further, she
adds that the imperial ideal was the household with well-trained domestic staff requiring
no managerial intervention.69 Procida’s premise that the Anglo-Indian housewife had
only a supervisory role in the running of the household implies that food preparation
was largely in the domain of servants. This effectively means that servants were, to a
large extent, responsible in deciding what types of foods were purchased and prepared
for colonizers.

Lynne Ireland’s ‘The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways Autobiography’ is relevant to

my thesis in so far as it states that ‘compiled cookbooks make a statement about the

search of exotic cuisines – where exotic means the unfamiliar and the unusual, see Lisa Heldke, ‘Let’s
Cook Thai: Recipes for Colonialism’, in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds), Food and
Culture: A Reader, New York, Routledge, 2008.
63
Davidson, ‘The Natural History of British Cookery Books’, pp105-106.
64
Cecilia Novero, ‘Stories of Food: Recipes of Modernity, Recipes of Tradition in Weimar Germany’,
Journal of Popular Culture, vol.34, 2000, p178.
65
Novero, ‘Stories of Food’, p178.
66
Novero, ‘Stories of Food’, p178.
67
Procida, Married to the Empire, p86.
68
Procida, Married to the Empire, p94.
69
Procida, Married to the empire, p87.

29
food habits of the groups which produce them.70 The ‘compiled cookbook’, also known
as the fund-raising cookbook, first emerged in America during the Civil War in the
1860s.71 They are compilations of favourite recipes of members of organisations with
proceeds of sale of the cookbooks going to charity. Ireland asserts that the ‘compiled
cookbook’ has recipes that reflect what is eaten in the home in contrast to magazines
and cookbooks of the popular press that set standards and attempt to influence
consumption.72 The ‘compiled cookbook’ is worth comparing to Anglo-Indian and
other colonial cookbooks as the latter can be seen as prescriptive documents for
Victorian women both to uphold the image of Empire as well as for those who aspire to
the lifestyle of the upper classes. Ireland goes further by stating that the ‘compiled
cookbook’ can be viewed as autobiographical, that is, the recipes can be examined for
insights into food preference.73 The ‘compiled cookbook’ can be used as a research
guide for gauging preferred food through frequency of inclusion of the recipes.74 This
can certainly be applied to Anglo-Indian cookbooks where curry recipes are almost
certain to be included in every volume. Examples of ‘compiled cookbooks’ pertinent to
this thesis were published variously by a church, a youth organization and women’s
organizations.75

Procida’s observation that in ‘rethinking the purpose of the cookbook in a society where
only the servants cooked,’ one should not accept the view that cookbooks were intended
for a female audience only.76 She states that both the authorship and readership of
Anglo-Indian cookbooks reveal the fluid nature of gender in the imperial household.
Although most of these cookbooks were written by experienced memsahibs for new
arrivals to the colony, other cookbooks were by male officials of the Raj. Procida
suggests that Anglo-Indian cookbooks served ‘many imperial purposes beyond the
functions of simple didactic or prescriptive texts’.77 They helped to reconfigure the

70
Lynne Ireland, ‘The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways Autobiography’, Western Folklore, vol.40,
no.1, January 1981, pp107-114.
71
Ireland, ‘The Compiled Cookbook’, p107.
72
Ireland, ‘The Compiled Cookbook’, p108.
73
Ireland, ‘The Compiled Cookbook’, p109.
74
Ireland, ‘The Compiled Cookbook’, p110.
75
Wesleyan Methodist Church, What to Tell the Cook; or the Native Cook’s Assistant; Being a Choice
Collection of Receipts for Indian Cookery, Madras, Higginbotham, 1910; A.E. Llewellyn, The Y.W.C.A.
Of Malaya and Singapore Cookery Book: A Book of Culinary Information and Recipes Compiled in
Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, The Y.W.C.A. of Malaya and Singapore, 1951; Friend-in-Need Women,
Hindustani Cookery Book, Madras, 1939; Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, A Friend in Need
English-Tamil Cookery Book, Madras, 1950.
76
Mary Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite: Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Domesticity’,
Journal of Women’s History, vol.15, no.2, 2003, pp130-131.
77
Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p143.

30
domestic sphere of the Raj, to construct new ideas about gender in the empire and to
contribute to the dissemination of imperial knowledge.

Susan Zlotnick is another historian who asserts that women did not simply play the
confined role of the frivolous memsahib in colonial India. She too rejects the notion
that gender is a unitary term in nineteenth-century colonial discourse in her work,
‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’.78 Like
Procida, Zlotnick employs cookbooks to address the ideological work of gender.
Zlotnick however focuses on Victorian cookbooks, particularly on the curry recipes.
Her essay examines the relationship between domestic ideology and imperialism in the
early 1800s by ‘charting the domestication of curry’. However this thesis disagrees
with Zlotnick’s argument that ‘Victorian women neutralized the threat of the Other by
naturalizing the products (such as curry) of foreign lands.79 Zlotnick also maintains that
through this process, Victorian women domesticated imperialism at both the symbolic
and the practical level. I argue against these notions in the chapter on curry in Chapter
Three.

Arjun Appadurai’s essay, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in

Contemporary India’, promotes the idea that cookbooks, as the ‘humble literature of
complex civilizations’ have unusual cultural tales to tell.80 It examines cookbooks
catering to Indian food written in English and directed at an Anglophone readership in
the mid-twentieth century. Appadurai sees the construction of an Indian national
cuisine as a postindustrial and postcolonial process and explains the ‘new Indian
cookbooks’ as being fueled by the spread of print media and the cultural rise of the new
middle classes. This line of thought is similar to those of other historians who view the
rise of Victorian cookbooks as the result of printing technology as well as Britons’
desire to emulate food habits of the upper classes. Appadurai stresses that the
textualization of culinary traditions was intensified by the arrival of the printing press.
The prototypes of the modern cookbook were greatly encouraged by the proliferation of
presses, journals and books in the nineteenth-century context.81 Further, Appadurai
suggests that although the colonial version of Indian cuisine is ‘the most significant
precursor of the emergent national cuisine’ of recent years, it was neither confined to
78
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, pp51-53.
79
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating imperialism’, p53.
80
Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Journal of
the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 1988, vol.30, iss.1, pp3-24.
81
Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’, p13.

31
the homes of the colonial elite, nor did it end with colonialism.82 Appadurai concludes
by stating that the Indian national cuisine has developed in recent years in spite of a
historical disinterest in gastronomic issues in Hindu traditions and the ‘textualization of
the culinary realm’ and culinary standards as recent processes.83 Perhaps one can argue
that it was the British who led the development of the Indian national cuisine, initially
by popularizing ‘curries’ in Britain from the eighteenth century. This reinforces the
position taken in this thesis that the British, in spite of, or because of their bland diet,
adopted and adapted the hybrid dish of curry, made it distinctly and recognizably
colonial, imported it to Britain, exported it to other colonies and eventually to the rest of
the world.

Books on Indian cookery were increasingly being published in Britain from the 1830s
as the colonial administration in India expanded and consolidated.84 In her bibliography
of cookery books Elizabeth Driver observes that the early books were collections of
genuine recipes. Gradually both the authors and readership became more diverse with
most writers presenting an anglicised version of the cuisine. Retired Indian officers and
their wives offered recipes for British women running households in India, adapting
British cuisine to Indian conditions but all included instructions for Indian dishes.
Driver quotes Grace Johnson’s cookery book as ‘Oriental cookery modified by English,
French and Italian methods’. Some of the publications were aimed specifically at the
‘returned exiles’ market.85

In her analysis of cookbooks, Janet Theophano describes them as ‘cooking manuscripts,

intimate documents of daily life and kitchen artefacts’ and cautions the reader against
thinking that all women ‘who wrote or contributed to one another’s books were social
equals’.86 Theophano draws a distinction between the household advice books and the
personal recipe books of the nineteenth century. She points out that the former were
aimed at educating middle-class women on how to treat and teach their servants while
the latter were indirectly discussing class, race and ethnicity.87 These publications
enabled women to reach beyond their family and friendship circles through the choice

82
Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’, p14.
83
Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’, p22.
84
Elizabeth Driver, A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain 1875-1914, London, Prospect
Books, 1989, p31.
85
Driver, A Bibliography of Cookery Books, p31.
86
Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, New
York, Palgrave, 2002.
87
Theophano, Eat My Words, p35.

32
of language that was ‘as prosaic and nontechnical as they could muster to reach the
widest possible audience’. Theophano observes that these cookbooks, aimed mainly at
British readers and exported to the colonies, were ‘not simply a reflection of the social
and occupational hierarchy of eighteenth century England and the gentry’s dependence
on a servant class, but attempts to reach entire “communities of readers”.’ 88

In his study on cookery-book illustrations in eighteenth-century England, Troy Bickham

focuses on three groups: diagrams for table settings, portraits of the authors and kitchen
scenes.89 These illustrations informed mistresses of the ideal kitchen and of how guests
would expect the meal to appear. Bickham notes that cookery book authors and social
commentators placed great importance on these details as running an efficient kitchen
‘reflected the quality of the household and its mistress and master’.90 These books
became the standard bearer of the Anglo-Indian and other colonial cookbooks in which
the colonial’s standing in the community could be seen as reflected in how dinner
rituals were observed.

The served and the servants

Existing scholarship on domestic service in colonial societies generally employs the
conceptual frameworks of gender, class and the racial structure of power to explain the
household. Some studies have focused on the political implications of the domestic and
public spheres of colonial men and women and their relationship with domestic
servants.91 Yet other authors, such as Ann Stoler, suggest that European anxieties about
servants in the East existed because domestic service permeated both the private and
public spheres.92 Part of these anxieties, according to Stoler, stems from the fact that
native women who served as domestic servants or mistresses of European men often
bore the children of those men and continued to live with them. She states that the
domestic servants ‘represented more than the “domesticated outsiders of the bourgeois

88
Theophano, Eat My Words, p190.
89
Bickham, ‘Defining Good Food’, p473.
90
Bickham, ‘Defining Good Food’, p473.
91
For example, see Swapna M. Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics Articulating Middle-Class
Identity in Colonial Bengal, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004, and Kathinka Froystad, ‘Master-
Servant Relations and the Domestic Reproduction of Caste in Northern India’, ETHNOS, vol.68, no.1,
2003, pp73-94.
92
Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 2002, p136 (in chapter on ‘A sentimental education: children on the
imperial divide’).

33
imagination”’.93 Stoler describes how servants ‘policed the borders of the private,
mediated between the “street” and the home, and occupied the inner recesses of
bourgeois life’ and labels them ‘the subaltern gatekeepers of gender, class, [and] racial
distinctions’.94 The recurrent themes of her book are ‘domestic arrangements, affective
ties and the management of sex’ and how these transcended the divide between the
political and the personal; the challenge of identifying what was private or public.95 For
example, she states that employing ‘[a] full staff of servants was a marker of privilege
and class…’.96

Procida holds the view that Anglo-Indians relinquished control over the domestic space
to Indian domestic servants,97 because ‘the crucial mechanisms for running both home
and empire were entrusted to Indians, with the British relegated to the role of symbolic,
if authoritative, presence. … [I]n India, the burden was borne by domestic servants, not
Anglo-Indian wives’.98 Procida’s study deals with female participation in imperial India
and her analysis applies just as well to other colonies, for example to colonial Malaysia
and Singapore. Broadly, Procida’s book discusses domesticity, violence and race in
India during the Raj. Part One of the book, on domesticity, has particular relevance for
this thesis, especially the two chapters ‘Home is where the empire is’ and ‘Servants of
empire’.99 Other Raj historians promote the idea that the imperial home has been
designated as a feminized sphere, quite apart from the public sphere where men wielded
imperial power.

Procida’s ‘Feeding the imperial appetite; imperial knowledge and Anglo-Indian

Domesticity’ is a subsequent study to Married to the Empire.100 As in Married to the
Empire, Procida rejects the assumption that the Anglo-Indian kitchen was a strictly
feminized sphere; rather, for Procida, it was a site of cultural interactions and
interchange. ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’ utilizes the medium of Anglo-Indian
cookbooks for this purpose. Procida disagrees with other historians, as this thesis does,
who argue that British women were unwilling to adopt culinary Indian tastes and habits

93
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p136. Stoler citing James Clifford, The Predicament of
Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
1988, p4.
94
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p133.
95
Stoler, Carnal knowledge and Imperial Power, p7.
96
Stoler, Carnal knowledge and Imperial Power, p139.
97
Procida, Married to the Empire, p82.
98
Procida, Married to the Empire, p82.
99
Procida, Married to the Empire, pp56-108.
100
Procida,‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p123.

34
and therefore encouraged the colonial divide. Procida points out that this interpretation
of imperial power means cookbooks became tools of imperial hegemony and that
women continued to follow British food practices in order ‘to make India more
British’.101 She rejects this rigid view of imperial culture, again as this thesis does,
arguing instead that the practicalities of daily life in the colonies were much more
complex.

In her article on British domesticity in India between 1886 and 1925, Alison Blunt
considers the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space when middle-class
British women established homes in the colonies.102 Blunt looks at three key issues:
how domestic discourses were translated over imperial space; what the imperial and
domestic implications of British women setting up homes in India were; and, how
imperial domesticity was embodied by British women, their children and their servants.
Blunt examines household guides written for and by middle-class British women who
set up homes in India. The period 1886-1925 saw an increased number of British
women travelling to India. Blunt indicates that it was also a time of political upheaval
and the household guides helped ‘to maintain imperial rule on a domestic scale by
concentrating on the unequal relationships between British women and their Indian
servants’.103 While her paper explores imperial geographies of home in British India
relating to the raising of children and travelling beyond the home, her focus on how the
British wives managed Indian servants is particularly relevant to this thesis.

Blunt argues that establishing and maintaining imperial domesticity was seen as an
important duty of British women, which enshrined both imperial and domestic roles and
responsibilities. She asserts that imperial power relations underpinned the domestic
roles of British women, likening the feminine ‘dignity and prestige’ displayed on a
domestic scale to the successful exercise of domestic rule. She states that the unequal
relationship between British women and their Indian servants reproduced imperial
power relations on a domestic scale and was the main preoccupation of the guides.104
Like Procida, Blunt considers that ‘rather than represent British homes in India as
spheres of racial and gender exclusivity and exclusion, these guides suggest more
complicated relationships between memsahibs and their servants, shaped by embodied
101
Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p9.
102
Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925’ Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.24, no.4, December 1999, pp421-440.
103
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p423.
104
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p429.

35
discourses of gender, race and class’.105 Blunt also examines advice in household
guides that looked at the racially demarcated compounds housing Indian servants. The
guides advised readers to inspect their servants’ quarters regularly. Blunt suggests such
advice simultaneously breach and yet reinforce imperial and domestic divisions
constructed along racial lines. This has led her to conclude that ‘the spatial inscription
of a compound in terms of racial distancing was constantly transcended, as Indian
servants worked within the British homes’.106 This thesis builds on Blunt’s discussion
of the memsahib-servant relationship by focussing on food preparation being handled
directly by servants and the reasons for this. It was a symbiotic relationship that was
complex and contradictory: native servants were considered unreliable, disease-ridden,
childlike and lazy but at the same time they were entrusted with handling, cooking and
serving food. In addition they worked in close proximity with the colonial family, in
child care (which lies outside the scope of this thesis), in cleaning and maintaining the
home and in other intimate chores like bringing early morning tea to the sahib and
memsahib in their bedroom.

For Blunt, Indian servants are seen as ‘the domesticated outsiders of a British imperial
imagination, helping to reaffirm imperial domesticity, the imperial power of the family
whom they served and, in particular, the British women with whom they had closest
contact.’107 Blunt argues that household guides advised readers to treat their servants as
children and states that by ‘infantilizing Indian servants, and representing the parental
care, discipline and wisdom of their white employers, household guides fixed
immutable differences between rulers and ruled within the home’.108 Other scholars
have also discussed the notion of colonizers infantilising servants, notably in colonial
Africa which is examined in more detail in Chapter Four on servants. In Blunt’s view
the household guides both assumed and repeated the domestic and imperial roles of
their readers and the domestic and imperial spaces of their homes in India.

Domestic servants played such a significant role in the lives of colonial women in India
that the domestic guidebooks written for Anglo-Indian women frequently started with
an account of the domestics.109 Discussion on food consumption by colonizers must
necessarily be looked at with the role servants played. Historically, while domestic
105
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p429.
106
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p429.
107
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p430.
108
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p430.
109
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p45.

36
servants in India were predominantly male, in Malaysia and Singapore, both female and
male servants were employed.110

Colonizers in India employed larger numbers of servants than their counterparts in

Malaysia and Singapore. E.M. Collingham argues that the main reasons for the large
number of servants the British employed in India was the desire to create impressive
status symbols.111 She observes that the Britons from the merchant class used the
‘grandeur of ceremony’ and deference by servants to belie their lowly origins. Company
officials, according to Collingham, were keen to style themselves as the Anglo-Indian
aristocracy in India. Those from the professional class – the engineers, lawyers and
chaplains as well as hotel keepers and craftsmen – aspired to join the Anglo-Indian
aristocracy.112 It was a different story in Malaysia and Singapore as most colonial
households there generally had the domestic services of a cook, a kitchen helper, a
gardener, a driver, a dhobi (person who looked after the laundry) and an ayah (maid or
nursemaid) or amah (maid or nursemaid). In contrast, Swapna M. Banerjee, in her
study on domestic service in colonial Bengal, notes a household of four British officials
as having 110 servants.113 Apart from the European desire to have large retinues of
servants the Indian tradition of caste necessitating single tasks for single castes also
contributed to the employment of numerous household servants.

Class and caste in India

The study of domestic servants in India is complex with issues of caste, class, race and
gender operating at many levels. Servants in India are from the lower classes and castes
of Indian society. Class differences and identities were reinforced in the colonial
mistress-servant relationship while single-task servants were employed due to the
sensitive issue of caste. Historian Frank F. Conlon defines caste as ‘the distinctive
moral system of India which defines the population in birth-ascribed, hierarchically
ranked corporate units …’.114 Additionally, the notion of race was played out as the

110
See Jocelyn Armstrong, ‘Twenty Years of Domestic Service: A Malaysian Chinese Woman in
Change’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, vol.24, no.1, 1996, pp64-82; Janice Brownfoot,
‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony and Protectorate, 1900-
1940’ in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds) The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984; and
Raka Ray, ‘Masculinity, Feminity, and Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the late Twentieth
Century’, Feminist Studies, vol.26, no.3, 2000, pp691-718.
111
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p20.
112
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp19-20.
113
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p44.
114
Frank F. Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.

37
Indian servant was also the colonized. Domestic servants in the Indian colonial
household were usually male except for the ayah (child carer and, or personal servant to
the memsahib). Procida concedes that while some Anglo-Indian women did have
sexual relations with their servants, the majority of them did not and viewed Indian
servants as non-sexual beings.115 Banerjee’s book touches on the issue of food and
servants on many levels – from the different kinds of servants working in the kitchens
of European and indigenous aristocratic households to the advent of cooks in ordinary
middle-class families in colonial Bengal.116 It shows how caste, class and ethnic
prejudices of the employers influenced the selection and treatment of servants and their
employment in the family kitchen. Chapter Three of Banerjee’s work refers to the
domestic manuals published in Britain and the United States along with the ones that
came out in Bengal. Men, Women, and Domestics also addresses issues of how servants
were blamed by the employers for contaminating and stealing food and polluting the
latter’s children.117 Banerjee’s work is particularly relevant to this thesis where he
describes Europeans’ attitude towards domestic servants, stating,
‘[N]ative servants played an indispensable role in the lives of women who settled
in India as wives of European officials. The extent of influence that the domestics
had on the European households was evident from the domestic guidebooks
written for the Anglo-Indian women, which almost always started with an account
of the domestics. While the British manual writers did not display any sense of
surprise about Indian servants, their tone was cautionary and negative.’118

Banerjee traces the genealogy of servants in India to the earliest recorded history, in
Kautilya’s Arthasastra, the Asokan edicts, and also in Buddhist and Jain literature that
describes slaves and sudras, of both sexes, working as domestic servants. The hiring of
numerous household servants in India was not a tradition started by the British but was
a legacy of the imperial Mughals and was adopted by elite groups across India.119
Banerjee states that ‘European travelers, particularly artists and painters, and British
officials who visited India in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, were struck by the
retinue of servants employed in the Indian households’.120 Banerjee queries why early
European travellers to India were surprised at the large numbers of domestic servants

115
Procida, Married to the Empire, p99.
116
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, pp55-68.
117
For a discussion on servants and European children see Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial
Power, pp133-137.
118
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p45. Banerjee quotes R. Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy
and Cookery, Madras, 1870:‘the misdeeds of Indian servants appear to be a general and unfailing source
of complaint amongst all … the complaint of them is universal – laziness, dishonesty, falsehood, with a
host of other vices, seem to be inherent in them’.
119
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, pp34-35.
120
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p35.

38
employed by affluent families, noting that large numbers of servants were the norm
among prosperous households in the West in the nineteenth century.121 The historian
reasons that the
‘characteristic surprise of the Europeans at a large number of servants may be
indicative of their own socio-economic and cultural background in their home
countries that did not indulge in such elaborate services of servants. The more
compelling reason could have emanated from their preconceived, mostly negative
notion of India and its people that developed in Europe in the course of the
nineteenth century. The large number of servants in Indian families was most
likely incompatible with the poor and heathen “Indian” they imagined.’122

Even as late as the 1950s the upper classes in Britain had large numbers of servants with
etiquette books always including chapters on how to deal with them.123 In 1921 there
were 1,209,704 domestic servants in the country, rising to 1,410,713 in 1931; in
London, the 181,980 domestic servants accounted for 14.8 per cent of the work-force in
1921.124

Alison Light’s investigation of the servant class in twentieth century Britain portrayed
through the novelist Virginia Woolf’s various domestic servants reveal strong parallels
between how servants were perceived and treated in the metropole and in the
colonies.125 Light discusses domestic service as a silent brigade of workers who
unobtrusively and effortlessly made the family home an ‘ideal haven of domestic
calm’.126 The servants were kept in place in the basements and attics, using separate
entrances and staircases, with kitchens located at the back of the main house.127 To
minimize the individuality of servants, nicknames such as ‘Cook’ or ‘Boots’ were
given.128 All of these practices resonate with Chapter Four, which discusses servants in
Anglo-India and British Malaya and Singapore, and in which I present evidence that
domestic service was the silent backdrop to the colonial household.

Banerjee’s other work on domestic workers explores another facet of the employer-
servant relationship by looking at narratives of members of a particular middle class

121
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p42.
122
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p42.
123
Margaret Pringle, Dance Little Ladies: The Days of the Debutante, London, Orbis Publishing, 1977,
p1.
124
Pringle, Dance Little Ladies, p51.
125
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, London, Penguin Books, 2008.
126
Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, p25.
127
Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, pp1, 23.
128
Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, p1.

39
group in colonial Bengal.129 While this work deals with British colonial households, it
also provides useful information on the history and representation of the servant culture.
Banerjee states that the excessive focus of South Asian scholars on the middle class is
due to the abundance of data and written documents available from the elite group.130
On the other hand, she adds that there is little direct evidence on or from servants in
colonial India because of the low rate of literacy among domestic servants.131 She
questions therefore, whether literary representations provide a ‘real’ picture of the
servants’ lives and their own world. Banerjee argues that ‘servants figured as part of a
whole and never as complete actors; they appeared as marginal characters to make a
case, illustrate an incident, prove a point, resolve an action, or fulfil a need’.132

Kathinka Froystad’s article examines the significance of master-servant relations for the
133
domestic reproduction of inequality. Froystad locates her fieldwork in Kanpur, a
large city in Uttar Pradesh. She argues that master-servant relations are also influenced
by caste and states that the employment of servants is partly motivated by the masters’
avoidance of defiling tasks and substances. While it has been well documented that the
caste system meant large numbers of single-task servants were employed, Collingham
asserts that the British were also instrumental in encouraging and legitimizing the
134
differentiation of domestic service by cataloguing castes and their occupations.
Collingham explains that prior to the arrival of the British, Indian ideas of caste were
fluid and it was the British who arranged caste categories of jobs as fixed sets of rules.
This benefited the Indians as with the decline of the Mughal aristocracy large numbers
135
of servants were seeking employment. Froystad asserts that the notion of caste was
reproduced in everyday family life. Master-servant interaction ‘is governed by tacit
knowledge and mute practices rather than by reflexive thought and articulate
136
statements’.

129
Swapna M. Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class
Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History, vol.37, no.3, Spring 2004, pp681-709.
130
See study on personal accounts of Indonesians who worked as servants in Dutch colonial homes by
Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, ‘Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in “New Order” Java’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.42, no.1, 2000.
131
Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane’, p683.
132
Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane’, p699.
133
Froystad, ‘Master-Servant Relations’, pp73-94.
134
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p18.
135
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p18.
136
Froystad, ‘Master-Servant Relations’, p90.

40
This thesis contends that British colonizers did not arbitrarily enforce practices in the
colonies solely from their perspective. In particular, it argues that the issue of the
British employing large numbers of servants was not a deliberate act of displaying
imperialistic power. Rather, it can be seen that colonizers picked up on existing
hierarchical domestic servant categories and acquired codes of behaviour for the
elaborate servant culture in each colony. Just as the colonial cuisine was an
amalgamation of food practices from both colonizer and colonized, the British adopted
labour practices that were already in place and adapted their lifestyle around them. In
India where labour was cheap, plentiful and the complex single-task caste system
existed, the British household was served by large numbers of domestic servants.
Sources such as household manual guides, even cookbooks, diaries and biographies on
India are replete with information on large armies of servants employed, with each
individual performing his or her designated task.

Domestic Service in Malaysia and Singapore

As in India, colonizers depended on domestic servants to ensure the smooth running of
the colonial household in Malaysia and Singapore. In these colonies, the number of
servants employed per household was markedly smaller than in India. Further, unlike
India, servants were hired from both immigrant and local ethnic groups. Although the
caste question does not arise here, there was clear-cut occupational specialization by
race among servants, with colonial households employing a range of multi-racial
137
staff. In colonial Malaya, development was synonymous with the establishment of an
export economy geared towards supplying tin and rubber to the international market and
the import of manufactured British consumer goods.138 Christine Chin’s In Service and
Servitude explores contemporary domestic service in Malaysia against the background
of global economic transformation. Her insightful analysis of colonial practices helps
the historian to understand the subsequent association of different peoples with different
economic functions. This is pertinent for my study in trying to understand why British
colonizers assigned different jobs to different racial groups in Malaysia and Singapore.
Chin states that the
‘[C]olonial construction of the categories of “Malay”, “Chinese”, and “Klings”
presumed that physiognomic differences and subsequent lifestyles among the
peoples could be traced to different biological foundations, hence the social

137
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p197.
138
Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian
‘Modernity’ Project, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, p34.

41
 construction of “races of peoples” – and concomitant hierarchical ordering – as
opposed to a race of human beings’.139

One ethnic Chinese group that featured predominantly in domestic service in colonial
times were the Hainanese in Malaysia and Singapore. As with other Chinese groups,
the Hainanese emigrated to Southeast Asia due to economic hardship in China.
However, as late arrivals (compared to groups like the Hokkiens, Teochew and
Cantonese) the Hainanese were left out of the more lucrative industries. As well, due to
dialect and clan difficulties with other groups, the Hainanese were excluded from the
local Chinese networks.140 With the arrival of the British, the Hainanese were
employed as ‘cookboys’, barmen and waiters in the local hotels, bars, restaurants and
officers’ mess at the British military bases.141 Often, a British family also employed a
Hainanese man as the ‘number one boy’-cum-cook-cum-butler while his wife worked as
an amah in the household.142 Yap suggests that it was from this association with the
British that the Hainanese became skilful at preparing Western food and mixing
cocktails.143 Today, the Hainanese continue to work as cooks and waiters in the older
institutions dating from the colonial years such as the Raffles Hotel, Cricket Club and
Tanglin Club in Singapore.144 Yap states that the British and other Westerners preferred
hiring the Hainanese for their perceived neat appearance and diligence.145 This fits with
the general view among Europeans in Southeast Asia from the nineteenth century that
the Chinese were ‘naturally’ hard working and more diligent and focused than the
indigenous peoples.146

The ‘black and white amahs’ are another specialized servant category of Malaya and
Singapore. The majority of single Cantonese women from Guangdong province who
came to Malay in the 1930s worked as domestic servants and were known for their
diligence, reliability, sense of duty and loyalty to their employers. As they wore the
traditional black trousers and white tunics, they became known as black and white

139
Chin, In Service and Servitude, p35.
140
Mui Teng Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, in Thomas T.W. Tan (ed.),
Chinese Dialect Groups: Traits and Trades, Singapore, Opinion Books, 1990, p79.
141
Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, p79.
142
Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, p80.
143
Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, p80. It was a Hainanese barman who
invented the ‘Singapore Sling’, a cocktail for the Raffles Hotel that remains famous still today.
144
Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, p85.
145
Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, p85.
146
See Syed Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and
Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism,
London, Frank Cass, 1977.

42
amahs.147 Ooi Keat Gin’s article describes the Chinese woman servants in Penang,
tracing their beginnings, their role and function in society, the social organizations
related to them and their characteristics.148 Ooi’s principal source of materials were
interviews with former servants and former employers. Ooi claims that factors that
encouraged the emigration of Chinese women included escaping harsh treatment from
mothers-in-law; bids for personal freedom; reuniting with husbands and attempts at
seeking for better job opportunities. Ooi claims that amahs preferred working with
English or European families as these were more generous and less strict in household
matters compared to Chinese families.149

Brownfoot’s chapter, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a

British Colony and Protectorate, 1900-1940’ presents an interpretive account of the
lives and experiences of memsahibs in colonial Malaya. It came about partly to test W.
Somerset Maugham’s stereotypical images of ‘bored, empty-headed, flirtatious mems’
in his Malayan stories of the 1920s. The underlying theme of Brownfoot’s chapter is
that as a group, the wives of colonial men in Malaya, were limited in their roles and
activities due to the male-dominated colonial world. The memsahib took her status
from her husband and her obligations and duties were defined by their husbands’
position and functions.150 Victorian thinking at the time dictated that white women had
the duty of maintaining ‘civilizing influences’ on their menfolk in the British Empire.
The colonial territories were seen as a ‘seemingly decadent tropical world of heat,
luxuriant vegetation, diseases and “strange, heathen customs”, the community’s
bungalows and clubs were oases of European civilization to which wives and families
brought normality…’.151

Brownfoot suggests that wives were intrinsic to the defence of the British imperial race
by recreating metropolitan domestic and social life.152 It was a wife’s ‘civilizing
mission’ to provide ‘efficient and competent home management’ and, in this

147
Keat Gin Ooi, ‘The Black and White Amahs of Malaya’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society, vol.65, Part 2, no.263, December 1992, p73.
148
Ooi, ‘The Black and White Amahs of Malaya’, pp. 69-85.
149
Ooi, ‘The Black and White Amahs of Malaya’, p74. Jocelyn Armstrong’s paper ‘Twenty Years of
Domestic Service: A Malaysian Chinese Woman in Change’ documents the story of a Malaysian Chinese
woman’s work as a domestic servant from colonial times to the present. No analysis of any issue is given
but it is useful in the description of the servant’s parents being in the domestic service in colonial
households and of what colonial homes and gardens looked like. See Armstrong, ‘Twenty Years of
Domestic Service’, pp64-82.
150
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p188.
151
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, pp189-190.
152
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p190.

43
connection, she was assisted by domestic servants. Brownfoot mentions that as in other
colonies, most servants in Malaya were male.153 Her comment that ‘customs and
circumstances (notably wood fires and kerosene tin “stoves”) meant that mems relied
particularly on their servants’ assistance for cooking and budgeting’ reinforces the
proposition that domestic servants had significant input in the preparation of food in the
colonial household.154 Brownfoot, like other writers, acknowledges that historians
know little about servants’ feelings towards Europeans. She adds that from the
European perspective servants were a primary point of contact with the Asian
communities.155

Racial and gender roles

Banerjee views the British attitude towards their Indian caregivers and servants as
negative, noting that the British seldom treated them as friends or equals. She states
that ‘British interaction with native servants thus proclaimed the dominance and racial
superiority of the British over the Indian population’.156 Further, Banerjee states that
the British portrayed Indians ‘as a crouching, sneaking, lazy homogeneous mass serving
an indolent, “effeminate”, uncivilized race of native masters’ and reinforced the
European notion of Indians as ‘distant’ and the ‘other’ and of being primitive, dirty,
lazy and inferior physically and mentally.157 Banerjee makes the point that although the
British viewed Indian servants in such a negative light it did not stop them from
employing large numbers of servants. In fact, some of the British brought their
‘faithful’ servants back to England.158

Procida challenges the myth that Anglo-Indian wives were ensconced in the feminized
private realm of the colonial home and instead, argues that Anglo-Indian life was much
159
more complex than the ‘model of an unyielding monolithic British imperial culture’.
She asserts that Anglo-Indian wives, as managers of the household, were expected to
inspect ‘the domestic premises and the persons of her servants, issue general orders, and

153
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p196.
154
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p196.
155
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p197. For a discussion on servants’ views towards their
colonial masters see Stoler and Strassler, ‘Castings for the Colonial’.
156
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p52.
157
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p94.
158
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p53.
159
Procida, Married to the Empire, p61.

44
ensure that an efficient housekeeping routine was in place, but would rarely bother with
the myriad details of daily household management’.160

Georgina Gowans, in ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, discusses recent debates

concerning transnational and diasporic populations in particular the complex and fluid
senses of belonging experienced by those moving or being moved across borders and
away from homelands.161 Gowans refers to the sense of ‘plurilocality’ – movements
evoking intense and privileged understandings of the homeland. Gowans highlights the
multi-directionality demonstrated by such populations and reflects on the implications
that physical movement between imagined and material geographies of home have for
senses of belonging. She explores the experiences of middle-class British women and
children who travelled repeatedly between India and Britain in the first half of the
twentieth century. Gowans discusses their sense of belonging, self and home as they
moved between the two countries and examines the implications of maintaining notions
of Britain as home. Gowans considers ‘whether material experiences of Britain
influenced their understanding of it as an imperial “homeland”, a site of inspiration and
superiority, a yearned-for destination at the end of their husband’s or father’s career in
India’.162 Gowans reflects on what happens when the borders between imaginary
understandings and material experiences of distant homes are crossed.163

Gowans suggests that although women travelling to India often did so in order to set up
homes at the household scale, they were ‘empowered by the distance from home, as the
female efficiency and domestic discipline required for successful housekeeping in the
sub-continent was seen to be part of the imperial project’. She reasons that the
establishment of British homes in India meant that women could not only directly
contribute to imperialism but also earn recognition for their labour. She considers the
importance of both location and mobility to the construction of identities for these
women, who were privileged both by race and class.164

Gowans states that the notions of home for women travelling between Britain and India
were also linked to imperialism, influencing a sense of belonging within both

160
Procida, Married to the Empire, p83.
161
Georgina Gowans, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain,
1915-1947’, Cultural Geographies, vol.10, no.4, 2003, pp424-441.
162
Gowans, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p425.
163
Gowans, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p425.
164
Gowans, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p428.

45
households and nations. In India, women’s domestic activities were linked to practices
of British imperial domesticity. She suggests that ‘the ritualization of “everyday”
activities (including instructing the servants and drinking morning tea, for example),
were constructed as vital to the maintenance of imperial boundaries…’.165

While Adams and Dickey’s book on domestic service is on contemporary South and
Southeast Asia, it is nevertheless relevant to the analysis of the employment of servants
166
in colonial times. Adams and Dickey dispute the roles of ‘masters’ and ‘servants’ as
colonial inventions and state that these were derived from caste and class within Indian
society. They distinguish the relationships of current expatriate and Indian servants
167
with the expatriates’ outsider status and postcolonial privilege. This would clearly
apply to the colonials’ outsider status and colonial privilege as well.

Adams and Dickey argue that domestic service provides an ideal domain for examining
the production of class relations and identities. They maintain that it is an area in which
class is reproduced and yet challenged on a daily and intimate basis. At the same time,
they observe that ‘domestic service interactions constitute the most intense, sustained
contact with members of other classes that most of its participants encounter’.168

Adams and Dickey argue that the relationships between Western expatriates in India
and their servants ‘do not lie simply on an axis of domination and subjection…’ as the
hierarchy is not linear. They state that the servants’ knowledge (of local day-to-day
activities) and the master’s dependence on his servants for this knowledge makes the
169
relationship complex. While expatriates have far more purchasing power they also
have far less knowledge and skill for living in India than in the home country. The
writers state that the ‘hierarchy of domination and subordination is based on expatriates’
money and privilege, but the master’s nearly total dependence on servants disrupts the
linear order’.170 They view the expatriates as economically dominant but personally
dependent on their servants, a common characteristic of the relationship between
colonials and their servants. Indeed, Stoler suggests that in colonial fiction, memoirs

165
Gowans, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p436.
166
Kathleen M. Adams and Sara Dickey, Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in
South and Southeast Asia, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
167
Adams and Dickey, Home and Hegemony, p209.
168
Adams and Dickey, Home and Hegemony, p32.
169
Adams and Dickey, Home and Hegemony, p208.
170
Adams and Dickey, Home and Hegemony, p209.

46
and children’s literature, servants were the supporting cast and scenic backdrop and
171
often the main (or only) source of local knowledge. Procida, on the other hand,
queries then ‘if the Anglo-Indian woman was not a paragon of domesticity, then what
exactly was her role in the home and, by extension, in the empire?’172 Procida suggests
that the memsahibs played an actively imperialist role in India – in merging private and
public spheres, particularly in their relationship with domestic servants. Procida’s text
examines ‘how and why women became a part of imperialism in India’ and explores the
idea of gender as relational and societal constructs intertwined in the histories of Indians
and Europeans.173

In the hiring of domestic servants for the imperial household, colonizers were aware of
gender issues that were at play in India. Raka Ray’s article on domestic workers in
Calcutta in the late twentieth century is outside the period of study for this thesis but her
argument on how work and the way work is constructed feed into gender identities
informs this thesis’s understanding of the role played by domestic servants in the
colonial era. Ray contends that ‘relations between worker and employer are refracted
through the lens of gender and are used by the workers to build and reflect upon their
gendered selves’. While domestic servants in India have historically been both female
and male, Ray’s interviews with middle and upper middle class European employers in
Calcutta found that there was a distinct preference for male servants. Even though
Indian society is predominantly sex-segregated, female expatriate employers were not
sensitive to male servants working at close proximity in the home. ‘A servant isn’t
really a man’, was how one respondent put it.174 Procida suggests that Anglo-Indians
often perceived Indian men as effeminate and desexualized and so their presence as
servants in the home did not transform domestic space as a masculine arena.175

Rest and recreation

One of the reasons for the creation of hill stations in the colonies as places for rest and
recreation was the belief that the high altitude and temperate climate offered a healthier
environment for Europeans.176 Another reason was the need to get away from the dirt
and disease of the Indians. However, the paradox remains that it was not possible for

171
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p173.
172
Procida, Married to the Empire, p81.
173
Procida, Married to the Empire, pp1-2.
174
Ray, ‘Masculinity, Feminity, and Servitude’, p4.
175
Procida, Married to the Empire, p102.
176
Chapter Five of this thesis looks at hill stations in India and Malaya.

47
the British to totally segregate themselves from the Indians as they were required to
cook and clean for the colonial family and large numbers of Indian staff were needed to
administer and support the European community.

In discussing the Penang Hill Station, S. Robert Aiken argues that the primary functions
of hill stations were refuge and resort for the colonials, and pointed to early Penang Hill
as a refuge from the disease hazards and enervating climatic conditions of the lowlands
and as a social place.177 It was the immigrant society of Chinese and Indians and the
Malays who provided the hill station residents with food and services.178 Thomas
Metcalf looks at the ideology of ‘difference’ in colonial India and asserts that the
landscape provides the binary of ‘plains’ and ‘hills’.179 When the presumed benefits of
residing in the hills (the absence of ‘miasmatic’ fevers and cholera and malaria
outbreaks, for example) were disproved, justification for their existence rested on the
logic of social distance.180

It was social distance and the British tradition of ‘clubbing’ that led to the mushrooming
of clubs all over the colonies. In the first half of the nineteenth century, they proved
popular due to the large number of single or married British men living alone in India
and also to the constant travel of colonial officials to various parts of the colony.181
Clubs provided accommodation and meals. Mrinalini Sinha’s study of the English
clubs in India looks at their racial exclusiveness and how white women were seen as not
‘clubbable’.182 Chapter Five of this thesis notes that unlike the original British clubs of
Britain where women were excluded, white women in the colonies were allowed in
most of the clubs. One seemingly altruistic reason was that the club provided a venue
for white women to socialize and lessen the sense of isolation. However, European
women socialized at the clubs as spouses of member or as guests and were not members
themselves. John Butcher points out that women were banned from the bar and were
confined to sit in the reading room or on the verandah in clubs in the Malay states.183

177
S.R. Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, Geographical Review, vol.77, no.4, 1987, p422.
178
Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, p423.
179
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p182.
180
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p182.
181
Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere’, in Tony Ballantyne and
Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, London,
Duke University Press, 2005, p185.
182
Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability’, p183. Sinha defines ‘clubbable’ as ‘capable of that male-defined
collegiality that was thought to underwrite English national charter’.
183
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in
Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979, p62.

48
E.M. Collingham, in analyzing the physical experience of the Raj, explains that the club
was where colonial men and women reinforced their collective identity in a social
setting. However this thesis maintains that the club did more than this, by providing a
venue where colonizers shared meals and recipes and propagated the colonial cuisine.

Fear and anxiety of dirt and disease

The employment of so many domestic servants in the colonial home and in such close
proximity to the occupants contributed to another anxiety, that of the perception that
Indians and other colonized people were dirty and disease-ridden. In discussing the
colonial fear of dirt and disease in the colonies, it is useful to refer to the anthropologist
Mary Douglas’s classic work, Purity and Danger, which states that ‘dirt is essentially
disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder’.184
Douglas also states that eliminating dirt is not ‘a negative movement, but a positive
effort to organize the environment’. These ideas are pertinent to Chapter Six, which is
concerned with dirt and disease in the colonial context. To a large extent the British
colonizers viewed India and her inhabitants as dirty but no effort was made to improve
public sanitation until the spread of endemic diseases threatened the European
community.

In keeping with colonial enterprise, the less funds expended on public works the better
it was for the colonial government. This was true of sanitation for the masses in Delhi
from the second half of the nineteenth century. Vijay Prashad’s study of the technology
of sanitation in colonial Delhi points to the question of profitability that influenced any
colonial reform to be undertaken. Prashad argues that the dense population of Delhi and
its poor sanitation did not merit any improvement works from the government as
‘sanitation reform was saddled with the difficulty of providing its commercial
viability’.185 In addition, Prashad states that colonial officials engaged with the
stereotyping of the ‘insanitary native’ who would not see the benefits of improved
systems of sewage disposal. Prashad quotes a guide on sewage disposal that there was
no need to construct sewage systems since the works would be wasted on the natives.186
On the other hand, colonial officials and ‘a few of their native allies’ lived in an area
with good sanitation and drainage, in the Civil Lines. Lenore Manderson states that in
184
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Penguin,
1970, p12.
185
Vijay Prashad, ‘The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.35, no.1,
2001, p116.
186
Prashad,‘The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi, p124.

49
British Malaya in the 1880s, there was little incentive to invest in public sanitation.
This was despite colonial officers recognizing the association between cholera and
sanitation (notwithstanding their uncertainty about the means of transmission of those
diseases).187

India was seen as a hostile and primitive land by the British and the preservation of
European health became a priority. Anil Kumar states that colonial medical men
practiced what they called tropical medicine in the Victorian era. He disputes that there
was nothing tropical about it except that it was practiced in the tropics.188 Other
scholars claim that colonial medicine was practiced mainly ‘to make the tropics fit for
the white man to inhabit’.189 As the British segregated themselves from their subjects
(by situating their homes in separate compounds, by relocating to hill stations for
several months a year and by having their own racially exclusive clubs) they were not
just practicing social distance but were genuinely (if misguidedly) anxious about the dirt
of the natives. This fear would have stemmed from the high mortality rate of Europeans
from cholera, malaria and dysentery in early nineteenth century India.190 Malaya fared
no better in this respect, for example, of the thirty-four civil servants recruited between
1805 to 1825, twenty died before 1830.191

Manderson notes that until the late nineteenth century colonial administrators
subscribed to the miasmatic theory which held that disease was transmitted through the
environment from bad air in low lying areas. Manderson states that this belief
specifically referred to the air and soil that ‘could be contaminated by miasmas,
poisonous vapours from putrefying organic matter and stagnant water.192 It was only by
the early twentieth century that germ theory and infectious diseases were better
understood.193

This thesis on food consumption and the role and image of domestic servants in the

187
Lenore Manderson, ‘Public Health Developments in Colonial Malaya: Colonialism and the Politics of
Prevention’, American Journal of Public Health, vol.89, no.1, 1999, p103.
188
Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911, New Delhi, Sage
Publications, 1998, p11.
189
Manderson, ‘Public Health Developments in Colonial Malaya’, p102.
190
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856, Delhi,
Permanent Black, 2005, pp42-43.
191
Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, p430.
192
Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p71.
193
Lenore Manderson, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health in Early Twentieth Century Malaya’,
in Peter J. A Rimmer and Lisa M. Allen (eds), The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes,
Plantation Workers, Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1990, p194.

50
British colonies in Asia locates itself firstly, among studies within the broader field of
comparable studies on foodways and employer-servant relationships. Secondly, it
engages with the limited but significant literature on British food consumption in the
colonies and how British dependence on indigenous servants for preparation have
influenced colonial cuisine. This study is informed by the growing works on food and
its associated social meaning by anthropologists, sociologists and historians. Their
analyses on how social behaviour impact food choices has contributed to my
understanding of the development of colonial cuisine.

Much of the current literature on the employer-domestic servant relationship in the

British colonies depicts the relationship as one that was complicated by the interplay of
race, gender and class. This thesis departs from those scholarships that portray the
unequal mistress/servant relationship as starkly clear-cut: European-Asian and
dominant-subordinate. Instead, this thesis argues that domestic servants played an
influential role in shaping the development of the British colonial cuisine. In many
respects, this relationship was one of respect, collaboration and negotiation.

The development of the colonial cuisine was a gradual transformation of Britons’

appropriation and adaptation of local foods and ingredients into their own diet.
Contrary to other studies that advance the idea of colonizers eating strictly British
foods, this thesis argues that such attempts would have been impossible given that the
types of ingredients required for British food were not readily in the colonies,
particularly in the time before refrigeration. The culinary history of the British in the
colonies must also be seen through the prism of domesticity and imperialism. The
colonial woman held a supervisory role in housekeeping and food preparation, the
physical demands of these fell to the domestic servants. The memsahib-servant
relationship was fraught with the tensions of race, caste, local customs, the perceived
dishonesty and filth of servants and anxiety of dirt and disease.

51
Chapter Two

What Empire Builders Ate

‘With the curry – mutton, chicken, fish, prawns, or hardboiled ducks’ eggs–
came a dozen different side-dishes and savouries, some of them calculated
to make the curry even hotter that it was already. As well as one or two
dishes of curried vegetables, there would be an assortment of little dishes
containing mango chutney from India, ikan bilis (tiny dried fish), red chilli
sauce, a salty relish called “Bombay duck”, shredded coconut, fried
peanuts, chopped-up tomato and white onion, sliced banana, cucumber, and
other bits and pieces... . The curry was always followed in the old Straits
tradition by a local sweet called Gula Melaka. This was really the Malay
name for the native brown sugar, but in a curry tiffin it referred to the whole
combination of sago and the syrup that one poured over it.’1

The fundamentally hybrid character of the colonial cuisine derived from a multiplicity
of influences, including the food practices of the Britons who ruled India, Malaysia and
Singapore and the food traditions of the indigenous peoples from these colonies. The
development of this distinct and separate hybrid cuisine among Britons can arguably be
seen as the precursor of fusion food. Significantly, this cuisine developed largely
through the reliance of colonizers on their domestic servants for food preparation.
Among the handful of scholars to have considered food history and imperialism, some
assume that consumption of certain types of foods became markers in distinguishing the
colonials from the colonized. This school of thought contends that British colonizers
consumed only British types of food in order to differentiate themselves from the
colonized.2 This chapter, in contrast, argues that the British did not eat only British
foods but foods strongly influenced by Asian cuisines. Indeed, it demonstrates that the
food practices of the British in India, Malaysia and Singapore constitute a recognizable
and legitimate cuisine with distinctive features. Furthermore, this colonial cuisine
evolved over time and was not a deliberate act of imposing imperialistic designs but
involved a process of combining local and European ingredients and dishes through the
efforts of the indigenous servants, under the broad direction of their memsahibs. In
departing from what other scholars maintain, this thesis contends that a distinct colonial
cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate

1
Description of the Sunday curry tiffin in Singapore in the years under British rule in George L. Peet,
Rickshaw Reporter, Singapore, Eastern Universities Press Sdn Bhd, 1985, p51. Peet worked as a
journalist for the Singapore Straits Times from 1923 to 1945.
2
See E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, p159; and Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain, in
Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and
Resistance, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1992, p232.

52
British and local people. Nevertheless, within this relationship there was space for
social distance and separation. This chapter reconstructs the emergence of the colonial
cuisine by examining Anglo-Indian and other colonial cookbooks, personal accounts
from my questionnaire, diaries, autobiographies and travelogues. Curry is the subject
for discussion in Chapter Three and so does not appear here.

In the case of food production and consumption, there was no clear-cut colonial divide
between two opposing sides. I have examined whether certain foods consumed by the
colonizer were peculiar to each colony. This study argues that the colonial experience
was a fluid enterprise and foods eaten by colonizers in each colony made geographical
leaps to other colonies, and in the process, post-colonial societies adopted and adapted
to ‘colonial foods’. Anglo-Indians came from different occupational backgrounds:
from the armed forces, the administration and in commerce, and different classes with
different dietary habits. The colonized in India were from different castes and classes,
again with different dietary practices, and, these to a large extent, influenced the food
practices of Anglo-Indians. Thus, the colonial cuisine was a hybrid cuisine with some
elements of British foodways and components of foodways from the colonies.

The cuisine that was adopted by the majority of the British in India, Malaya and
Singapore was replete with peculiarities and idiosyncracies that evolved over decades
and were influenced by various factors, such as the availability of Western and local
food, cooking facilities, input by domestic servants and traditions from the home
country as well as the colonies. This was in spite of the diverse groups of British
colonizers that came under varied backgrounds, from among the government sector
were the administrators, health professionals, educators, military personnel; in the
private sector were the importers and exporters, the retailers, those working on
agricultural plantations and still others engaged in missionary work. Each group
adopted food practices peculiar to their social standing and their professional status.
Within India there were differences in foodways in the presidencies, districts, hill
stations and urban centres. In colonial Malaysia and Singapore dietary habits differed
between those who lived in urban centres and those in rural environments. Differences
also existed temporally – food habits were markedly different from the time when
colonial rule first began to the period immediately preceding independence. In addition,
the groups from which domestic servants in the colonies came were just as disparate
groups. The diversity of the groups that were in differing castes, ethnicity, races and

53
religions added their peculiar influences to food and food preparation. The colonial
cuisine with its hybrid dishes of countless types of curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree,
chicken chop, pish pash and the inimitable meal of tiffin (light lunch or snacks, the
Sunday curry tiffin is discussed in more detail in Chapter Three) was familiar and
recognizable to the colonial community and only absent in the grand banquets at
Government House. The colonial cuisine persisted well beyond the end of colonial rule
for both ex-colonizers and postcolonial societies and has survived in some of the clubs,
hotels, restaurants and rest-houses in the colonies as well as in the homes of former
colonials spread across the globe. Respondents to my questionnaire indicate that they
re-visit their favourite dishes of the colonial era at home. At the same time there seems
to be a following among the elite in postcolonial societies who frequent those clubs and
hotels where the cuisine survives.

Victorian meal times and food practices in Britain and its Asian colonies
In order to examine the food practices of British colonizers it is necessary to look at the
food habits practised in Britain in the nineteenth century and to examine the social
transformation of Britain in the early 1800s when new dietary habits were introduced.
The choice and preparation of foods, meal times and order of service were socially
important and defined class demarcation. As the preparation and consumption of food
became the focus of Victorian life, this task became a housewifely responsibility.3 This
gendered role was transplanted to the colonies where the memsahib’s role as
homemaker became even more important, to be elevated where possible, as the
exemplary imperial household. This section highlights the food habits of the affluent in
the Victorian era, as it was the British upper classes in England that the Anglo-Indians
and other colonials in Southeast Asia tried to emulate in their lifestyle. The increasing
size and wealth of the middle classes in Victorian England from the 1850s contributed
towards setting the trends in homes, dress, employment of servants and food.4 Fruit
orchards and vegetable gardens expanded and processed foods became popular. Food
manufacturers processed new and exotic foods. Crosse & Blackwell manufactured
about forty different pickles and sauces, Colman’s mustard went on the market, curry

3
Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home, London, B.T.Batfsford Ltd, 1977, pp35-37.
4
John Burnett, Plenty & Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day
London, Scolar Press, 1979, p78; James P. Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating: Food, Drink and the Daily
Diet in Britain since the Late Nineteenth Century, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1977, p1.

54
powders were sold and ‘Indian’ sauce or Worcestershire sauce was invented.5 The
variety of foodstuffs increased even more as more produce from the colonies was
brought back to Britain. As well, food distribution was made easier with the
development of the railway system.6 In the Edwardian era, the new monarch, as the
leader of the fashionable elite, entertained with huge feasts. Johnston stated that King
Edward, noted for his epicurean tastes, set the standards in haute cuisine and this was
imitated by those who could employ a first-class French chef and a large retinue of
servants. Breakfast at Sandringham included haddock or bloater, poached eggs, bacon,
chicken and woodcock. Luncheon and dinner were twelve-course affairs and the late
night snack might consist of plovers’ eggs, ptarmigan and salmon.7 As for the middle
class, their dinner parties consisted of eight to ten courses and displayed the ‘culinary
savoir faire of the mistress of the house as well as the economic well-being of the
household’.8 In early nineteenth-century India, the same largesse was evident on
dinner party tables that boasted a large turkey as the centerpiece, an enormous ham, a
sirloin or round of beef, a saddle of mutton, boiled and roasted legs of mutton, chicken,
geese, ducks, tongues, ‘humps’, pigeon pies, curry and rice, more mutton (chops) and
chicken (cutlets).9

Breakfast was established as a meal among the affluent by the eighteenth century, eaten
at about nine in the morning.10 Between 1837 to 1901, however, breakfast came into its
own as an important meal for the well-to-do, particularly in the years between 1860 to
1914.11 The morning meal was substantial and included cold meat such as ham, tongue,
collared and potted meats, game, poultry, all placed on the sideboard in the breakfast
room. Hot dishes were broiled fish, mutton chops, rump steaks, kidneys, sausages,
bacon, ham, poached and boiled eggs, omelettes, muffins, toast, butter and marmalade;
drinks included ale, beer and wine.12 By the 1830s, tea and coffee had replaced
alcoholic drinks for breakfast, due, in part, to commuters departing for the train in the

5
Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, p276.
Colquhoun notes that Worcestershire sauce was invented by a British chemist, Lea & Perrins at the
urging of a former Governor of Bengal.
6
C. Anne Wilson, ‘Introduction: Meal Patterns and Food Supply in Victorian Britain’, in C. Anne Wilson
(ed.), Eating with the Victorians, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2004, pxvi.
7
Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating, p6.
8
Johnston, A Hundred Years Eating, p6.
9
David Burton, The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India, London, Faber & Faber,
1993, p18.
10
Eileen White, ‘First Things First: The Great British Breakfast’, in C.Anne Wilson (ed.), Eating with the
Victorians, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2004, p3.
11
White, ‘First Things First’, p5.
12
White, ‘First Things First’, p5.

55
morning.13 Many of those who could afford these protein-filled breakfasts, particularly
those in the country, would have had several hours of physical activity prior to
breakfast.14 The popularity of heavy breakfasts in the colonies was most likely a
tradition carried on from Britain but the morning horse ride would have been the most
strenuous exercise sahib and memsahib would have endured.

The eating habits of returning East India Company merchants and officials had
popularised curries in private homes and coffee houses in the eighteenth century.15 As
discussed in Chapter Three curries were served on a daily basis in many colonial homes
and this practice was adopted in Britain. Curries featured regularly in breakfast menus
in British cookbooks by the second half of the nineteenth century. The Breakfast Book,
published in 1865, listed ‘curries’ among the eggs, preserved meats, steaks, chops, offal,
fish and preserved fruit for breakfast.16 Other breakfast recipe books also featured
curried pigs’ feet, dry curry of mutton and/or dry curry of salmon.17

Seen as filling the gap between breakfast and dinner, lunch or luncheon was already an
established meal by the time Queen Victorian came to the throne.18 The working
classes had their ‘dinner’ at midday and ‘tea’ in the evening while servants and children
had lunch as the main meal of the day. Others considered lunch as ‘the ladies meal’ as
it was seen as an indulgence.19 These ‘ladies’ meals’ were supplements to morning
calls.20 It is probable that in the colonies, particularly in Singapore and colonial
Malaysia that the popular Sunday curry tiffin developed into a long and leisurely lunch
after the Victorian fashion. In the late eighteenth century it was fashionable to eat
dinner at five or six o’clock but by the nineteenth century the dining hour was pushed to
seven, eight or even ten in the evening.21 Dining late in the evening was due partly to
the development of gas lighting and office hours.22 This change meant supper was
either eliminated or replaced by tea or coffee and cakes (cold punch or wine for the

13
Calder, The Victorian Home, p40.
14
Calder, The Victorian Home, p40.
15
Chapter Three of this thesis discusses curry consumption in the eighteenth century.
16
White, ‘First Things First’, pp6-7.
17
Other breakfast recipe books that featured similar dishes were M.L. Allen’s Breakfast Dishes for Every
Morning of Three Months and A. Kenney Herbert’s Fifty Breakfasts.
18
C. Anne Wilson, ‘Luncheon, Nuncheon and Related Meals’, in C. Anne Wilson (ed.), Eating with the
Victorians, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2004, p32.
19
Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, p301.
20
Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season, London, Croom Helm 1973,
p49.
21
Colquhoun, Taste, p300.
22
Colquhoun, Taste, p300.

56
men) served at nine-thirty or ten o’clock.23 In the eighteenth century, dinner was eaten
before going to the theatre or public gardens but in the next century the meal became
the highlight of the social day.24 The à la Russe style of dinner presentation that
emerged in the nineteenth century originated from the Russian nobility and was first
introduced into France and later England.25 Food was served on to the guests’ plates
from a sideboard by servants, course by course, starting with soup, fish, meat,
vegetables and dessert.26 This meant there was space at the centre (contrasting with the
à la Française, where the table would be laden with dishes of food) of the table for
elaborate decorations of flowers and fruits.27 Menus were handwritten in French or in
French and English. Elaborate cutlery added to the crowded table; formal etiquette also
contributed to define class and maintain social distance. While the à la Russe style was
adopted by the upper classes, the suburban family could never afford nor manage this
style of entertaining (with the average household having only one servant at the most).

It was in the colonies that the Victorian style of gargantuan feasts and extravagant table
décor was played out by the middle classes of Britons who became the ‘new’ elites.
The majority of the colonials in Malaysia and Singapore were from middle-class
Britain.28 Three-fourths of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) personnel were also from the
professional middle classes between 1860-1874.29 In the colonies, the average
household employed numerous servants and, although food supplies were not of the
best quality, they were cheap. The rationale for the large number of servants employed
are outlined in Chapter Four. The domestic servants’ contribution to food preparation
was one of the most important influences in the development of colonial cuisine. The
domestic servants’ knowledge of local produce, how to source and prepare food and
their willingness to work with primitive facilities were compelling factors. However

23
J.C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English
Diet, London, Jonathan Cape, 1939, p397.
24
Davidoff, The Best Circles, p47.
25
Valerie Mars, ‘A La Russe: The New Way of Dining’, in C. Anne Wilson (ed.), Eating with the
Victorians, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2004, p116. The upper classes in Britain dined in the à la
Française manner prior to the advent of à la Russe. The à la Française style, dating from the feasts of
the Middle Ages, involved all the dishes being placed on the table and diners helped themselves or other
diners. This enabled displays of abundance and elaborate presentation.
26
Colquhoun, Taste, p251.
27
See Mars, ‘A La Russe’, p117 and Colquhoun, Taste, pp251-256.
28
For a discussion on the social origins and recruitment of the British for the civil service as well as the
private sector in Malaya see John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a
European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press,1979, pp33-
46.
29
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2006, p40.

57
this is not to say that the domestic servant was singularly responsible for what went on
at the colonial table. Jean Raybould, who spent eight years with her medical doctor
husband in Sabah, acknowledges that it was the ‘amahs, local people and shops’ that
were most influential in introducing local foods to the colonials.30 Beryl Kearney, who
accompanied her husband on two tours of duty in Malaya in the mid-twentieth century,
credited the local cooks and Chinese and Malay businessmen (the latter who ‘laid on
huge dinner parties with all local dishes’) with introducing them to local food.31 As
with other analyses of colonial discourses, there was no single predominant factor that
precipitated a particular development. That is, it was not a case of the servants deciding
that they would cook a certain dish and this becoming part of the colonial’s cuisine.

In spite of the social distance between the colonizer and the colonized, there was room
for manoeuvre as well as negotiation and none more so than in foodways. There were
the distinctly hybrid dishes of curry, mulligatawny, kedgeree, pish pash, chicken
country captain and some of the dishes of European origin such as caramel custard,
chicken chop and others that became the mainstays of the colonial cuisine.32 In India,
during the time of the Raj, the British continued to consume these colonial dishes, even
though many British imported foodstuffs were available. While other scholars have
pointed out that some colonial families ate only British-type food, they were not
representative of the majority of this community. Far from it, instead this thesis uses
evidence from cookbooks, household guides, diaries, travelogues and personal records
to argue that in spite of the availability of European food in these colonies by the middle
of the nineteenth century, most of the British continued to eat the hybrid dishes that
their antecedents did before them. In adapting to local conditions, the British
expatriates adopted not only local foods but consumed them in ways that were prepared
differently from those they were used to. George Woodcock, in his social history of
Malaya and Singapore wrote,
‘there were variations within this general pattern of feeding, depending on the
kind of materials that were locally available. In Malaya the beef was tough and fit
only for use in soup, but poultry was abundant and cheap, mutton usually
excellent; … In Malaya it was tropical fruits that gave an individual touch to
every menu; they included plantains, ducoos, mangoes, rambutans, pomeloes and
mangosteens’.33

30
Questionnaire response, Jean Raybould.
31
Questionnaire response, Beryl Kearney.
32
Curry has been discussed comprehensively in Chapter Three.
33
George Woodcock, The British in the Far East, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, p179.

58
Although curry was the ubiquitous dish in the repertoire of colonial cuisine,
mulligatawny soup was the next most important dish associated with the colonial table.
The invention of mulligatawny soup is credited to the British settlers of Madras in
Tamil Nadu and is a corruption of the Tamil words, ‘milagu-tannir’ meaning pepper
water, a soup-like dish.34 The soup was so popular among the British in Madras that
they were called ‘Mulls’, a contraction of ‘mulligatawny’.35 Similarly, those resident in
Bombay were nicknamed ‘Ducks’, as they were fond of the dried fish, bummelo, also
known as Bombay Duck.36 Chitrita Banerji, a writer on Bengali food, states that the
transformation of pepper water into mulligatawny soup ‘rests on the colonial need to
replicate the Western meal that consisted of separate courses’. Banerji notes that there
was nothing in the Indian cuisines that could be served as a soup with the exception of
the Muslim shorba.37 Mulligatawny is another dish that the British in India hybridized
– by adopting a local dish and adding other ingredients to it to make it a colonial dish.
Initially it would have been the East India Company men in the 1700s38 who re-
invented the peculiar-sounding soup and this dish, like other colonial dishes evolved
over the years and was transported to colonial Malaysia and Singapore. The peppery
soup was supplemented with pieces of meat or chicken, stock, fried onions and spices.39
In fact, every cook or memsahib had his or her own mulligatawny soup recipe, and any
kind of meat could be added. The Victorian explorer, Richard Burton, in his account of
his journey to the Nilgiri mountains at the hill station of Ootacamund, wrote about
hunting the ‘Neilgherry Sambur’ (Cervus Aristotelis) or elk and observed that the elk’s
flesh was coarse but made excellent mulligatawny.40 In his book on social life in
British India between 1608 and 1937, Dennis Kincaid stated that lunch on Sundays
always began with mulligatawny soup and this was ‘an unalterable rite’ in every
household there.41 A.R. Kenney-Herbert attempted to reverse the trend of serving

34
See Chitrita Banerji, Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices, New
Delhi, Penguin Books, 2007, p101; and Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of
Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical,
Geographical and Discursive, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1996, p595.
35
Michael Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus: The British in India, London, Constable, 1988, p67.
36
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p67.
37
Banerji, Eating India, p101. Banerji states that mulligatawny’s equivalent today in Tamil and South
Indian cuisines is the soup-like dish, rasam.
38
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p595. The first mention of mulligatawny according to Hobson-
Jobson is 1784.
39
Banerji, Eating India, p101.
40
Richard F. Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains; or, Six Months of Sick Leave, Berkeley, University
California Press, 1991, pp318-319. Burton wrote that the elk weighed about seven hundred pounds and
noted that the shin bones yielded good marrow, the hoofs were converted into jelly and the tongue was
edible.
41
Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608-1937, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974,
p241.

59
mulligatawny soup as a starter to the luncheon party as his version of it was a
substantial one and, ‘if properly made, the soup was a meal in itself’.42 Kenney-Herbert
clearly viewed the soup as a comfort food and declared that it should be enjoyed alone,
at home, with rice and nothing else. He extolled the virtues of mulligatunny, stating that
‘there are so many condiments, spices and highly flavoured elements in its composition
– not to mention the concomitant ladleful of rice which custom decrees – that he who
partakes of it finds the delicate power of his palate vitiated ...’.43

It was not just in the home or clubs and hotels that mulligatawny was served however.
The Blue Train that began its three days’ journey from Bombay’s Victoria Rail
Terminus to Calcutta served ‘lentil or mulligatawny soup, chicken curry or mutton,
steamed sponge pudding or plum duff’.44 Travelling in the 1940s, Tony Orchard
recounted that meals were ordered from a station menu, telegraphed to and served at the
next station restaurant during a halt.45 Lurking in the trains and railway stations in
India, however, was the popular Brown Windsor Soup, clearly one dish from the
metropole (a soup omnipresent on the train menus of British Railways at the time). The
original soup was not brown but white and was called Calves Feet Soup a la Windsor,
created as a nutritious broth for Queen Victoria on the birth of her first child in
November 1841.46

In the early 1800s, dinner parties in Britain usually started with ‘brown’ soup, made up
of hare, giblet, beef and ‘oleaginous ox rump’ and ‘white’ soup of almonds and sieved
chicken.47 The new soup, mulligatawny, made its appearance with the return of
merchants and administrators from India and other colonies. As in India, the soup was
accompanied by rice and cut lemons. Daniel Santiagoe, a cook who was brought back
to work in England by John London Shand, was perplexed that mulligatawny was not
spelled as ‘mollagoo tanney’, asking, ‘[W]hy English people always spell this word
wrong? Everybody knows this – Mollagoo, pepper; tanney, water. In proper Tamil the

42
A.R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras, or a Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed
Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles, Devon, Prospect Books, 1994, p186.
43
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p186.
44
Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1939-1950, vol. II, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, p42.
45
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol. II, p42.
46
Gladys Mann, Traditional British Cooking for Pleasure, London, Paul Hamlyn, 1967, p10.
47
Colquhoun, Taste, p265.

60
mollagoo tanney is pronounced ‘Mollagoo Neer’ and ‘Mollagoo Tannir’.48 Santiagoe’s
recipe included ingredients such as gravy of mutton or beef or chicken stock, rice
powder, milk, coriander, onions, ginger, garlic, cumin, saffron, and, of course, pepper.49

Another dish associated with British colonial cooking is kedgeree. Spelt variously as
kitchery, kitchri or kichiri, Nigel Hankin defines it as an Anglicism of the Hindi word
khichree, khichri or khichdi, a rice dish cooked with pulses.50 Like other foods that the
early settlers and later the Anglo-Indians adopted, recipes for kedgeree in India and in
Britain were adjusted and improved. Peter Reeves’ study of kedgeree suggests that it
started out as an Indian breakfast dish, dating back to the fourteenth century. The
inclusion of mung dal also made it ideal as a recuperative dish for those who needed
simple foods.51 Colonials in India came to know of kedgeree first as a vegetarian dish
but in time it developed into the hybrid dish of smoked fish and eggs.52 Often served
for breakfast at Anglo-Indian tables, kedgeree sometimes included fish although Yule
and Burnell have stated that this was inaccurate as fish was frequently eaten with the
dish but was not part of it.53 It figured so prominently in British cuisine that Somerset
Maugham is thought to have said that ‘to eat well in England, you should have a
breakfast three times a day and with kedgeree in it’. Kenney-Herbert placed kedgeree
under the chapter ‘réchauffés’ or reheating of leftover meals although he qualifies it as
‘Kegeree of the English type’.54 Kenney-Herbert’s recipe consists of boiled rice,
chopped hard-boiled egg, cold minced fish heated with pepper, salt, and herbs like
cress, parsley or marjoram. A kedgeree recipe of 1857, in a women’s magazine used
similar ingredients: fish, rice, butter, mustard, eggs, salt and cayenne pepper.55

Kedgeree was one colonial dish that spawned another, the comfort food, pishpash, that
was developed by Indian cooks for European children.56 As a nursery food, pishpash
which a rice gruel cooked with small pieces of meat in it. ‘Ketab’, author of Indian
dishes for English tables, had mutton in her pishpash recipe and instructed that the rice

48
Daniel Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant; or Curries, How to Make Them in England in Their
Original Style, London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1889, p51.
49
Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant, p51.
50
Nigel Hankin, Hanklyn-Janklin: A Stranger’s Rumble-Tumble Guide to Some Words, Customs and
Guiddities Indian and Indo-British, New Delhi, Tara Press, 2003, p259.
51
Peter Reeves, Hobgoblin Magazine, issue 2, May 2000, pp3-5, 25.
52
Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food, London,
Faber and Faber, 2005, p19.
53
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p476.
54
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p171.
55
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1857, vol.v, no.1, p128.
56
See Hankin, Hanklyn-Janklin, p259; and Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p715.

61
should be cooked to a mash and was suitable for children or ‘invalids’.57 Another pish-
pash recipe by ‘A Thirty-five Year Resident’ included rice, chicken, ginger, onions,
peppercorns and ‘hotspice’ and instructed that the chicken should be cooked until tender
and the rice ‘quite pappy’. That recipe, too was recommended as a nutritious one for
‘invalids’.58 Rice was as permanent a fixture on the daily menu of the colonial as curry.
‘A Thirty-five Year Resident’ wrote that
‘Rice is consumed by most European families at breakfast, tiffin, and dinner. It is
eaten at breakfast with fried meat, fish, omelet, country captain, or some other
curried dish, and, being invariably followed by toast and eggs, jams, fruit, &c., …
The rice at dinner is usually preceded by soup, fish, roast, and made dishes’.59

Another dish that was altered and became a permanent favourite is the curry puff.
Wendy Hutton attributes the origin of curry puffs to one of the Asian dishes that were
modified to suit Western tastes. She explains that the Indian savoury stuffed pancake
known as samosa, underwent modifications and became a ‘curry puff’ to suit English
tastes. Lillian Allan Newton, who grew up in Singapore in the 1890s thought that curry
puffs were ‘the oriental cousin of our sausage rolls but much nicer! Cookie made curry
puffs also and they were a stand-by for picnics and parties’.60 Today, curry puffs are
sold everywhere in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia and are eaten by people
who have never heard of samosa.61 A similar dish that developed from British and
Singaporean origins is Roti John. Hutton notes that in the 1960s, a spicy minced meat
stew served with sliced French bread (Keema Roti) was very popular among the British
Armed Forces stationed in Changi. The combination then evolved into Roti John –
bread spread with a layer of minced meat and eggs, then fried. Hutton explains that the
name came about because in colonial days, every Englishman was nick-named ‘John’
by the Singaporeans.62

Government administrators in India and colonial Malaysia did an inordinate amount of

travelling, visiting other stations under their jurisdiction and throughout the empire. In
hot weather, travelling was done usually at night and the rest-house or dak bungalow at

57
Ketab, Indian Dishes for English Tables, London, Chapman and Hall, 1902, p8. Ketab claimed that all
his or her were ‘genuine Indian recipes, collected by the compiler during many years’ residence in India.
58
A Thirty-Five years’ Resident, The Indian Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in
India, Adapted to the Three Presidencies; Containing Original and Approved Recipes in Every
Department of Indian Cookery; Recipes for Summer Beverages and Home-Made Liqueurs Medicinal and
Other Recipes; Together with a Variety of Things Worth Knowing, Calcutta, Wyman & Co., 1869, p35.
59
A Thirty-Five years’ Resident, The Indian Cookery Book, p9.
60
Lillian Allan Newton, More Exquisite When Past, Manuscript, RCMS 108/2/1, Chapter VI, pp5-6.
61
Wendy Hutton, Singapore Food, a Treasury of More Than 200 Time-Tested Recipes, Singapore, Time
Books International, 1989, p12.
62
Hutton, Singapore Food, p173.

62
principal routes were often places of rest during the day. In the days of poor
communication and difficult travelling conditions, arrival at rest-houses and dak
bungalows would have been unannounced and it fell to the cook to come up with a meal
unexpectedly. Chicken was usually the main dish as poultry was commonly reared in
villages and as a meat it could be handled by both Muslim and Hindu cooks. Chapter
Five describes the speed in which chickens could be caught, killed, curried and served
by indigenous cooks for travelling colonials. This dish was also known as ‘country
captain’ or ‘chicken country captain’.63 Lizzie Collingham puts forward the suggestion
that this well-known Anglo-Indian curry acquired its name as it was invented by the
captain of a ‘country’ boat.64 Another hypothesis by Chitrita Banerji is that it was the
brainchild of a native captain of the sepoys or Indian troops working for the British.65
While Collingham notes that the freshly-killed chicken was flavoured with turmeric and
chillies, Banerji states that the chicken, seasoned with ginger, chillies and pepper was
fried in ghee and simmered in water.66 Yet another explanation was given by a
Singaporean cookery writer, describing Chicken Curry Captain ‘as a very mild dish
created for Western tastes, supposedly by a Chinese cook who told his captain that the
evening meal was going to be “Curry, Captain”’.67 As Britons travelled through the
Asian part of the empire, so did curry – the development of the dish is discussed
comprehensively in the following chapter.

While Anglo-Indians and the British in colonial Malaysia and Singapore indulged in a
variety of European type desserts to end a meal the two most familiar colonial desserts
were caramel custard and gula malacca or sago pudding. As a Western dish originating
from medieval times, caramel custard employs the ingredients of eggs, milk and sugar.68
Probably due to the ready availability of these ingredients caramel custard was the
standby for most meals in colonial households in India, Malaysia and Singapore.69 As
they featured so frequently on the colonial menu, the familiarity of this dish did on
occasion breed contempt. Wendy Suart, a memsahib of many years in North Borneo
wrote of her time at the Jesselton rest-house: ‘[A]fter lunch, consisting of scrawny
water buffalo, stringy chicken or scraggy pork in strict rotation, followed by the eternal

63
Michael Edwardes, Bound to Exile: The Victorians in India, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1969, p173.
64
Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, London, Chatto & Windus, 2005, p124.
65
Banerji, Eating India, p103.
66
Collingham, Curry, p124 and Banerji, Eating India, p103.
67
Hutton, Singapore Food, p157.
68
Alan Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food, London, Penguin Books, 2002, p285.
69
Sir John Cotton, SOAS: OA1/18/1-6, 1930-1946, Political Officer, IPS, transcript 68 pp, 5 Sept 1973 –
1015-1330 H58x. Cotton noted that caramel custard featured in every meal in a military mess.

63
caramel custard or fresh fruit salad …’70 When Lionel Fielden, a radio broadcaster,
recounted his lonely five years in India he complained of having to dine with the same
twelve English officials and their wives in Delhi during his first winter there. He wrote,
‘[N]ot only were their houses and furniture identical – they were built and supplied to
the same pattern – but also the food, the guests, and the conversation were identical.
There were always twelve people, and usually the same twelve. The dinner was always
thin soup, wet fish, tasteless beef, and caramel custard’.71

Another dish that was synonymous with colonial desserts, particularly in Malaya, the
Borneo states and Singapore, was sago pudding.72 The sago is made to a jelly
consistency upon which a palm sugar syrup over which coconut milk is poured.
Usually served at the end of the Sunday curry tiffin, the sago pudding became a
favourite among colonials but it was one dish that never became an enduring dessert in
Britain. One memsahib described sago pudding as ‘cooling and delicious’ after a
Malayan curry73 and an Australian tin miner, reminiscing on his time in Malaya,
exclaimed, ‘[T]o eat this dainty is to forget one’s troubles and to slide into a voluptuous
dream of gastronomic joy’.74 Margaret Shennan stated that ‘[A]ccording to hallowed
tradition curry makan (meal) was followed by gula Malacca … altogether an
unforgettable experience’.75 However another Malayan ‘old hand’ thought ‘Gula
Melaka was delicious, but it was far too rich a sweet to eat on top of a big plateful of
curry and rice with all the trimmings’.76

The development of a discernible colonial cuisine

The types of food consumed by the British colonial community of the three states being
studied fit the criteria laid out by anthropologist Sydney Mintz’ definition of what
constitutes a ‘cuisine’.77 Mintz’s conception of a cuisine requires that a population
consume particular foods frequently enough to consider itself knowledgeable about
70
Wendy Suart, The Lingering Eye: Recollections of North Borneo, Edinburgh, The Pentland Press
Limited, 1993, p66.
71
Lionel Fielden, The Natural Bent, London, Andre Deutsch, 1960, p179.
72
Sago pudding is also known as gula malacca, or gula melaka: the Malay name refers to the palm sugar
used as the sauce for the pudding. Sago is a light, pure starch, made from the trunk of the sago palm tree
and is used to thicken soups or sauces, see Davidson, The Penguin Companion to Food, p816. See also
Sylvia Tan, Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cook, Singapore, Landmark
Books, 2008, p24.
73
Sim, Malayan Landscape, p140.
74
Ambrose Pratt, Magical Malaya, Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens Ltd, 1931, p265.
75
Margaret Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya 1880-1960, London, 2000, p206.
76
George L. Peet, Rickshaw Reporter, Singapore, Eastern Universities Press Sdn Bhd, 1985, p51.
77
Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1996, p96.

64
those foods. This community believes that they know what the cuisine consists of, how
it is made and how it should taste. This makes the cuisine genuine and makes up the
food of the community.78 Beyond that, sociology scholar Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson,
in her study of French cuisine, states that ‘the cornerstone of culinary discourse and the
discipline that it represents is cuisine – the code that structures the practice of food and
allows us to discuss and to represent taste’.79 Ferguson adds that ‘culinary preparations
become a cuisine when, and only when, the preparations are articulated and formalized,
and enter the public domain’.80 It is fair to conclude then the food practices adopted by
British colonisers certainly fit the criteria outlined by Ferguson.

It may be argued that, although food was prepared by indigenous servants, Europeans in
the colonies were still be knowledgeable about each colonial dish, not the least on how
they should taste. This would be true of any privileged group that relied on servants for
food preparation and could claim to call a particular cuisine their own. In any case,
Deborah Lupton asserts that food consumption habits are not just tied to biological
needs but ‘serve to mark boundaries between social classes, geographic regions,
nations, cultures, genders, life-cycle states, religions and occupations, to distinguish
rituals, traditions, festivals, seasons and times of day’.81 Pierre L. van den Berghe
concurs, stating that ‘[O]ur cuisine is the symbolic expression of our sociality, first in
the intimate domestic sphere, and by extension with the larger group that shares our
specific culinary complex: the inventory of food items, the repertoire of recipes, and the
rituals of commensalism’.82 While van den Berghe discusses food practices of a
specific group as a badge of ethnicity he could just as well be describing the culinary
traditions of the British colonizers, be they at the colonial dinner party, the club meal or
the Sunday tiffin. In this context, food differentiation does not necessarily depict a
mark of racial superiority but a sense of belonging to a particular group.

The consumption of certain types of food can be seen as more than fulfilling a
biological function. Helen Pike Bauer prescribes it to a form of security: ‘consuming

78
Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p96.
79
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press, 2006, p18.
80
Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, p19.
81
Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self, London, Sage Publications, 1996, p1.
82
Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Ethnic Cuisine: Culture in Nature’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol.7, no.3,
1984, p392.

65
the familiar reinforces one’s sense of a persistent personality and set of values’.83 She
asserts that Anglo-Indians found replicating an English diet and pattern of meals often
proved both difficult and unhealthy. However, this thesis does not entirely agree with
Pike Bauer’s view that Anglo-Indians developed a peculiarly Anglo-Indian cuisine by
learning to prefer fresh local ingredients to tinned imports from England, by learning
about the herbs available in the bazaar and by keeping their own animals for meat and
milk.84 In my view, Anglo-Indians and other colonials did not singularly and actively
devise food practices as the acquisition and adaptation of local food patterns into
acceptable European food habits were performed by the local domestic servants. While
the memsahib in her half-hour of morning consultation with the cook discussed the
meals for the day, it was the cook and other support staff who went to the markets to
purchase the ingredients and who were responsible for the cooking of them. Thus, I
find Pike Bauer’s statement that for the Anglo-Indians, ‘[F]ood became a means of both
ethnographic education and self-definition’85 does not take account of the role that
Indian servants played. Further, it is only a partial truth when Pike Bauer states that in
the cookbooks, fiction and diaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
that ‘the struggles of Anglo-Indians to develop a knowledge of the indigenous culture
and to maintain, [was] at the same time, a [struggle for] sense of self’.86 Jeffrey M.
Pilcher states the obvious when he claims that ‘colonial rulers often acquired a taste for
the foods of their subjects. Indian curry and chutney, for example became mainstays of
the British diet’.87

The colonial cuisine was influenced by the colonized, more specifically by the local
cooks and other servants who bought and prepared the food. To a certain extent,
servants decided what ingredients were acceptable for provision to the colonizer’s
palette and what dishes were fitting for presentation to the colonizer. For example,
Daniel Santiagoe, a servant who had been a cook to English residents in India since the
age of sixteen, in his recipe for mulligatawny, included mutton, beef or chicken. He
explained that while the natives usually did not include meat but only ‘plain curry
stuffs’ and tamarind, this was ‘not worth for Europeans’.88 Collingham, in her

83
Helen Pike Bauer, ‘Eating in the Contact Zone: Food and Identity in Anglo-India’, in Tamara S.
Wagner and Narin Hassan (eds), Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of
Consumption, 1700-1900, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2007, p95.
84
Pike Bauer, ‘Consuming Culture’, p95.
85
Pike Bauer, ‘Consuming Culture’, p95.
86
Pike Bauer, ‘Consuming Culture’, p95.
87
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Food in World History, London, Routledge, 2006, p52.
88
Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant, p51.

66
biography on curry, relates incidents where servants in the Gwillim household in
Madras refused to serve the hare that Elizabeth Gwillim obtained for dinner.89 When
asked for an explanation, the butler said that guests would laugh if a country hare was
served for a grand dinner. The Gwillims’ servants would also not serve the small fish
that resemble whitebait, saying that white gentlemen could not eat that type of fish.
Collingham makes the observation that Indian servants served the British with food
consumed by the previous Mughal rulers – the Mughlai pilaus and ‘dum poked’
chickens – the high-status dishes which were familiar to the Muslim cooks employed by
the Anglo-Indians.90 Indian cooks also frequently modified recipes to suit what they
thought were British tastes. Curries were made less aromatic with reduced spices like
cloves and cardamom and the amount of ghee and yoghurt was also lessened.91

Mintz takes the view that food preferences, once established, are usually deeply
resistant to change; and adds that it is far more common to add new foods to one’s diet
than to give up old and familiar ones.92 This certainly helps explain the practice of
colonizers holding on to their roast beef and puddings or saddles of mutton alongside
curry and rice, chutnies and sago pudding. Added to this is the notion of comfort food.
Historian Donna R. Gabaccia refers to comfort food as that food which provides
‘comfort, security, and love of childhood’ and asserts that people turn to comfort foods
when they must cope with stress.93 Julie L. Locher et al, go further and contend that the
meaning of comfort foods should not only be examined from the individual’s
perspective, but also from the larger, societal perspective. Locher and others cite C.
Fischler that in consuming particular foods individuals can exercise ‘control over the
body, the mind and therefore over identity...’94 Closely related to comfort food is
another idea of ‘nostalgic foods’. Locher et al, state that nostalgic foods are those
identified with a particular time and place in one's history. They argue that ‘nostalgic
longing and consumption of particular food items sustain one's sense of cultural,
familial, and self-identity’.95 They state that ‘when we are physically disconnected
from a community, a family, or any primary group that defines who we are, our sense of

89
Collingham, Curry, p114.
90
Collingham, Curry, p114.
91
Collingham, Curry, pp116-117.
92
Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p24.
93
Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 2000, p179.
94
Julie Locher et al., ‘Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey into the Social and Emotional
Significance of Food’, Food & Foodways: History & Culture of Human Nourishment, no.273-297, 2005,
p274.
95
Locher et al., ‘Comfort Foods’, p280.

67
self may become fractured. In these instances, consuming food items intimately linked
with one’s past may repair such fractures by maintaining a continuity of the self in
unfamiliar surroundings.96 For these reasons, it is not difficult to explain Britons’
adherence to certain foods in the colonies when they found themselves in a strange land.

Cookbooks and household manuals

In Europe, domestic conduct books and cookery books first made their appearance in
the early sixteenth century, with the former advocating roles and responsibilities for
family members. Publication of both genres gathered pace at the end of the sixteenth
century and into the seventeenth century.97 In the world of printing, cookery books
were among the earliest publications, and by the mid-sixteenth century cookery books
had been printed in most of the languages of Western Europe.98 However, it was in
England at the turn of the seventeenth century that the most detailed domestic conduct
books were published. These publications were fairly uniform in their outlook, with
clearly codified familial duties on household matters, appealing to the middle and upper
classes.99 The vast number of cookery books printed in Britain from the 1730s were
cheap, costing between two and six shillings and were written for middle class women
and their servants rather than professional chefs.100 Gilly Lehmann estimates that
531,250 cookery books were published in Britain between 1700 and 1799.101 While
some cook books carried just recipes, others were a combination of a recipe book and
household manual, as was the famous Isabella Beeton’s Beeton’s Book of Household
Management. While cookery books can be seen as historical documents on food
practices, Stephen Mennell advises that they should be interpreted with caution.
Mennell refers to Elizabeth David’s belief that there was a lag of about forty years
between changes in practice taking place in the English kitchen and their appearance in

96
Locher et al., ‘Comfort Foods’, p280
97
Wayne E. Franits, Paragon of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p66.
98
Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages
to the Present, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1985, p65. Mennell notes that the first printed cookery book was
Kuchenmeisterey, published at Nuremberg in 1485.
99
Franits, Paragon of Virtue, p66. Franits note that these treatises were based on writings from classical
authors and Christian humanists, the Pauline Epistles and the Ten Commandments. These texts promoted
unity and godliness in families.
100
Troy Bickham, ‘Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-
Century Britain’, Past and Present, vol.198, no.1, 2008, p97; see also Natalie Kapetanios Meir, ‘“A
Fashionable Dinner Is Arranged as Follows”: Victorian Dining Taxonomies’, Victorian Literature and
Culture, vol.33, 2005, p136.
101
Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Britain, Devon, Prospect Books, 2003, p65.

68
cookery books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.102 The flood of cookery
books published in Britain also allowed its readers to engage with other cultures,
encouraging cooks to try foreign dishes, such as ‘Indian pickle, curry, pilau and
‘Mulligatawny, or Currie-Soup’ and others.103 An important factor to consider in
determining whether a cookery book reflected what the readership cooked is whether
the cookery book was written by a practicing cook for other cooks or if it was written to
promote a fashion trend for the elite.104

In Antoinette Burton’s work on the postcolonial career of South Asian writer Santha
Rama Rau, Burton examined Rau’s The Cooking of India as a means of understanding
the difficulties Rama Rau faced in ‘introducing’ India to the postwar American
public.105 Rama Rau’s book includes ‘imagining a “national” cuisine106 for middle-class
Western and diasporic Indian consumption, ‘ended up being part autobiography, part
travelogue, part social and cultural history, and part political platform.’107 Thus, Rama
Rau, just as cookbook authors in colonial times, utilized the cookbook genre as a means
of disseminating more ideas than just culinary ones.

It is quite clear that in colonial India, Malaysia and Singapore, cookery books were
written for sahibs and memsahibs.108 Implicit in some of the instructions in the
household management manuals for the colonies were prescribed codes of conduct that
defined the boundaries between British rulers and the indigenous people. It also served
as the reference manual on how to deal with native servants. Author W.E. Kinsey in the
preface of her cookery book for Singapore, wrote ‘with the hope that it will generally
assist to combat the pernicious policy of the native cooks who not only overcharge in
the prices of local commodities, but generally will not produce them, or attempt to raise
non-existent difficulties’.109 The Malayan Cookery Book, published in 1930,
‘constitutes a serious attempt to aid the housewives of Malaya the art of cooking … a
representative list of the recipes handed from generation to generation of Malayan

102
Mennell, All Manners of Food, p65.
103
Bickham, ‘Eating the Empire’, p99.
104
Mennell, All Manners of Food, p65.
105
Antoinette Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau, Durham, Duke University Press,
2007.
106
Santha Rama Rau, The Cooking of India, New York, Time-Life Books, 1970, pp26-27. Rau disclaims
the notion of an Indian ‘national’ cuisine.
107
Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau, pp110-111.
108
Before the arrival of large numbers of British women to the colonies before 1857, nabobs and head
bearers would have supervised the cooks on what meals to be prepared for the day.
109
W.E. Kinsey, The ‘Mems’ Own Cookery Book, Singapore, 1929, Preface.

69
housewives will reflect the march of Malaysia’s history. There are first the dishes
known to many generations of Indians’.110 This cookery book typifies colonial notions
of their own identity in the lands they occupied. The ‘housewives’ mentioned are the
British or European, not the local women. Similarly, ‘Indians’ refer to the British in
India and not the people of India.

Although this thesis does not cover food consumption of the British interned during the
Japanese Occupation in the 1940s, one cookbook worth mentioning was published as a
result of the war years. P.C.B. Newington’s Good Food became one of the few
cookbooks published in the colony. Newington was interned in Singapore by Japanese
forces between 1942 and 1945 and wrote that ‘it is an extraordinary thing how one’s
thoughts turn to food when one is starving’.111 Newington related that he started a
Gourmets’ Club outside his hut at the Sime Road Camp and fellow internees would
meet once a week to discuss food preparation. Club members wrote down recipes;
recipes were also obtained from the Women’s Camp.112 Recipes in the cookbook are
eclectic and includes the standard colonial dishes of curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree,
sago pudding and so on. Significantly, Britons interned in wartime were not just
thinking of British food but craved for Indian and Southeast Asian dishes, a powerful
example of food appropriation. A.J.H. Dempster, the assistant food controller of Perak,
in his foreword on this wartime cookbook, noted that ‘no epicure came to Malaya to
live on roast beef’.113

Memsahibs have been constructed and maligned in novels in colonial settings for their
frivolous existence, their intolerance of Asian people and for their adulterous affairs.114
However, cookbooks and household guides can be seen as a means to encourage
behaviour that was representative of the ruling elite. These publications contained
instructions on how to maintain the colonial household and on appropriate conduct. A
manual published in 1909 in Madras by Mrs C. Lang was offered as ‘a help to many
young inexperienced English girls starting housekeeping in India’.115 In an obvious
attempt to coach the memsahib to be a productive member of the imperial family, the

110
J. Hubbard, The Malayan Cookery Book, Singapore, Rickard Limited, 1930, Introduction.
111
P.C.B. Newington, Good Food, Ipoh, Charles Grenier & Co. Ltd.,1947, pi. Newington was interned
in Changi Criminal Prison and Sime Road Camp Singapore between February 1942 to August 1945.
112
Newington, Good Food, ppi-ii.
113
Newington, Good Food, Foreword.
114
See, for example, Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, London, MacMillan and Co., 1931.
115
(Mrs) C. Lang, ‘Chota Mem’ the English Bride in India: Being Hints on Indian Housekeeping,
Madras, Higginbotham & Co., 1909.

70
first chapter titled ‘The Daily Routine’, advised on the daily meeting with the domestic
servants, with the suggestion that ‘punctuality in seeing your servants after breakfast
and trying to keep to the same hour daily, as a good housekeeper should show an
example to her servants, in keeping to a good routine and method’.116 Lang instructed
that after the morning’s meeting with the servants and inspection of the kitchen and
stores the memsahib should do her accounts, engage in writing and in dressmaking, and
making things for the house, such as curtains, cushion covers, lampshades. She
admonished, ‘I have no patience with the woman who says she finds the days so long
and has nothing to do. I am quite sure in the hot weather, if you are always busy at
something, you do not notice the heat so much’.117

Cookbooks in late eighteenth-century Britain that were written for middle and upper
class women addressed another duty, that of encouraging servants to work from recipes
given in cookery books.118 The same encouragement was given to domestic servants in
British India and British Malaysia and Singapore when recipes were translated into the
local languages.119 In Victorian times, even though knowledge of cookery and
housewifery were seen as assets, earning money from writing cookbooks was not
unacceptable and so many women authors wrote anonymously. An example is the book
‘[B]y a Lady’.120 In India, author anonymity was represented by the following: ‘An
Anglo-Indian’, ‘An Old Lady-Resident’, ‘A Lady Resident’, ‘The Englishwoman in
India’, ‘A Thirty-five Years’ Resident’. Others simply used their initials, such as A.K.
D-H. and J.H.121

Even if the Anglo-Indians and the British in Malaysia and Singapore intended to follow
a British diet, their environment ensured that they would become more amenable to

116
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, p4.
117
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, pp5-6.
118
Sandra Sherman, ‘“The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking”: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the
Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, vol.28, no.1, 2004, p119.
119
See Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, A Friend in Need English-Tamil Cookery Book, Madras,
Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, 1950; Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, Friend-in-Need
Women, Hindustani Cookery Book; Madras, 1939.Only some recipes and notes were translated into
Malay in Hubbard’s The Malayan Cookery Book.
120
Sarah Freeman, Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd,
1989, p156.
121
Other publication titles for Anglo-India with author anonymity are: An Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery:
‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Bombay, Imperial Press, 1883; Anonymous, The Duties of Servants: A
Practical Guide to the Routine of Domestic Service, London, Frederick Warne & Co, London, Frederick
Warne & Co., 1890; Anonymous, Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables, Calcutta, W. Newman & Co., 1879;
G. V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties or the Absurdities of Artificial Life, London, Chapman and Hall, 1862;
and G.L.R., The Economical Cookery Book: Simple and Dainty Dishes (for India), Calcutta and Simla,
Thacker, Spink & Co.,1920.

71
local ingredients and cooking methods. Cookbooks written for these colonies more
than merely provided recipes but became the standard bearer for the colonial culture
that educated and advised their readers about the purchase, preparation, cooking and
serving of food by their servants.122 While the focus of the cookbooks was necessarily
on food, the overt messages in the hints and tips on household management widened to
disseminate ideas on class distinctions and race relations. Helen Pike Bauer asserts that
Anglo-Indians who acquired knowledge of local material life could help to define
themselves as different and superior. However, she also acknowledges the few Anglo-
Indians who, in utilizing this knowledge to construct the Anglo-Indian diet, also created
for themselves an Anglo-Indian identity.123

In Britain, when new orders of service and other food practices became fashionable
these ideas were not uniformly adopted due to lags in time before the ideas reached, and
grown acceptance, in different geographical areas. Similarly, new trends set from
Britain were picked up in the colonies at different times. Entertaining was much more
formal and substantial in India in the years of the East India Company than in the
1860s.124 Generally, entertaining was less formal in colonial Malaysia and Singapore.
However, as the majority of the colonial elite was from the middle classes and as the
tendency was to emulate the ethos of the upper classes of Britain some of the food
practices of emerging trends from the home trickled down to the dining tables of the
colonies. In parallel, there emerged in the colonies practices that were distinctly
extracted from the local cultures. This thesis suggests that as the colonial cuisine
developed, it became self-perpetuating: as food items or dishes became accepted in
colonial circles, they were legitimated and perpetuated as recipes of these dishes were
then shared and cookbooks included them.

Unquestionably, meal times were adapted from local customs, in part due to the tropical
conditions. E.M. Collingham acknowledges that ‘traces of Indian influence were still to
be found in patterns of food consumption’.125 I contend that colonial food habits took
more than ‘traces’ from local practices: the names, and times of meals were clearly of
local origin. For instance, the first meal of the day, the chota hazri, variously translated
as ‘little breakfast’, ‘early morning tea’ or ‘bed tea’ was the first meal of the day for
122
See Pike Bauer, ‘Eating in the Contact Zone’, p95.
123
Pike Bauer, ‘Eating in the Contact Zone’, pp95-96.
124
A.R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras, or a Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed
Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles, Devon, Prospect Books, 1994, p1-5.
125
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp156-157.

72
Anglo-Indians, consumed between 5.30 and 6am consisted of tea, boiled or poached
eggs, toast and fruit.126 Hobson-Jobson notes that the term was originally peculiar to
the Bengal Presidency and in Madras this meal was known as ‘early tea’.127 A.R.
Kenny-Herbert compares chota hazri to the Frenchman’s café au lait, with a roll.128
The second or large breakfast or brunch or tiffin, was usually served with curry.
Edward Wilkie, who served in the military in Malaya (ten years), Singapore (seven
years) and India (two years), recalled that his chota hazri consisted of fruit and tea; he
would then eat the later and larger breakfast of mulligatawny soup and kippers or eggs
and bacon or porridge.129

Food practices in India

Food in daily life in India is a complex subject that involves different customs and
regulations, differences in religion, race, ethnicity, caste and a host of other
considerations. South Asian writer in postwar America, Santha Rama Rau, emphasises
that ‘there is no major body of dishes and techniques of cooking that one can combine
to call a “national cuisine”’.130 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that food is a
focus of much taxonomic and moral thought because foods are regarded as important
media of contact between human beings, in a society that rests on the regulation of such
contact.131 Appadurai goes on to say that cuisine is both highly developed and highly
differentiated. For instance, he states that food avoidances, for different persons in
different contexts, are developed to a remarkably high degree and can signal caste or
sect affiliation, life-cycle stages, gender distinctions and aspirations toward higher
status.132

However scholars R.S. Khare and M.S.A. Rao believe that although the South Asian
diversity is enormous it has an overlapping gastronomic culture with the Hindu, Islamic,
tribal, and Western food systems all having influenced India’s gastronomic culture.
They cite the Ayurvedic schemes of food classification as being easily detected within
the Muslim, Christian and tribal groups, as are the Unani and tribal influences among

126
See J. Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian, London, Chatto & Windus, 1961, p81; Kincaid, British
Social Life in India, pxv.
127
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p210.
128
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p186.
129
Questionnaire response, Edward Wilkie.
130
Rama Rau, The Cooking of India, pp26-27.
131
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, American Ethnologist, vol.8, no.3, 1981,
p495.
132
Appadurai, ‘Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia’, p495.

73
the Hindus.133 Further, they state that ‘the subcontinent carries not only a civilizational
configuration of interpenetrating gastronomic schemes but … also has had a Pan-Indian
zone of influence’.134 On setting up home in India, the memsahib was confronted with
what was permitted on her dining table based on the caste or ethnic group that her
domestic servants belonged to and the quality of the food supplies available. Agatha
Florence James, writing in the late nineteenth century observed,
‘Beef and mutton are very inferior in India, the former hardly eatable unless grain-
fed. … A boiled hump of beef is not by any means to be despised, and cured in
the same way as hunter’s beef, it makes a good cold dish for luncheon. Pork is
rarely, if ever, eaten in India; the natives look on the pig as unclean, and your
cook would probably leave your service rather than roast a joint of pork. You will
most likely have to eat goat, without knowing it, unless you have a Khansaman
who is really honest. It is so cheap that until you really know the taste of bakra,
as it is called, you will have it palmed off on you as mutton. Fowl, the old
familiar Moorghee, the abhorrence of all Anglo-Indians, eaten under certain
conditions, that is when young and well-fatted, is by no means bad; but game is
the great standby. Teal are delicious in whatever way they are cooked. Stuffed
with tamarinds, with a well-made hot gravy, with a small wine-glass of good
claret in it, they tempt the appetite even in the hot season. Sand grouse are also
good, and the native partridge and pheasant are nice, but do not possess the gamey
flavour of the English birds. Quails are another delicacy … stuffed with green
chillies and sent to table with green limes to squeeze over them, they make a
dainty meal even for an invalid’.135

One factor that has contributed to the development of a colonial cuisine in India was the
limited public dining enterprises such as restaurants for public dining. Although the
notion of eating away from homes in restaurants did not eventuate until the late
eighteenth century in Europe, public eating places remained absent in India and the
other colonies meant that European travellers or those travelling on business found it
necessary to eat in the homes of other Europeans.136 Historian Frank F. Conlon gives
several reasons why India has had no enduring tradition of restaurants or public dining,
using Bombay as the locale of his study.137 Conlon states that, within the Hindu and
Muslim cultures, there was no motivation for commercial enterprises such as restaurants

133
Khare and Rao, ‘Introduction’, p3.
134
Khare and Rao, ‘Introduction’, p3.
135
Agatha Florence James, ‘Indian Household Management’, in The Lady at Home and Abroad: Her
Guide and Friend Consisting of Articles Contributed by the Pens of Expert Lady Writers on All Subjects
of Interest and Fact in the Daily Life and Duties of Matron Wife and Maid, London, Abbott, Jones & Co.
Ltd, 1898, pp376-377.
136
The tradition of roadside stands and ‘cook-food’ shops dates to the fourteenth century in France and
the emergence of the restaurants (as places of commercial production of food and public food
consumption) did not take place until the eighteenth century. See Amy B. Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How
the French Invented the Culinary Profession, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp32-
35.
137
Frank F. Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, in Carol Breckenbridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity:
Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

74
for public dining.138 Commensality is a cardinal concept of Islam which stresses the
obligation to share food with others.139 He states that ‘Hindu ideological concerns for
commensality and purity’ had ‘contributed to anxiety regarding the provenance and
purity for consumption – matters that are not subjects of inherent certainty in places of
public dining’.140 During Mughal rule, the introduction of the caravanserai (roadside
accommodation for travellers and their animals) by medieval Islamic conquerors from
Iran provided ‘food, wood, and pots for preparation of a meal’. Conlon states that
where ‘culture cookshops’ and other facilities had sold food in the cities, they were not
widespread nor permanent enterprises.141 British rule too did not bring about an
increase in restaurants and other eating places. Although there were four large hotels in
Calcutta in 1843, Bombay’s first European-style hotel, Watson’s Hotel, was established
only in the late 1860s. This hotel had a restaurant and a ‘dining saloon’ for European
merchants and tradesmen of the city. During this time, ‘tiffins’ or luncheons were
provided for men working in the central Fort district. Conlon mentions Jewanjee’s
Exchange offering ‘Hot chops, Steaks and Oysters’ in their ‘First Class Tiffin and
Billiard Rooms and the Jerusalem Tiffin and Billiard Rooms.142

In the countryside, Conlon states that Europeans obtained meals prepared by a dak
bungalow cook and sometimes ate from wayside taverns or inns. They also carried their
own tea, sugar, wine and bread.143 Europeans in Bombay generally entertained at home
or in the club and dining out in the late nineteenth century was limited to special
occasion banquets for visiting royalty and other dignitaries. During the Raj, British
officials and others offered hospitality to travelling colleagues before the building of
dak or Public Works Department bungalows.144

Entrepreneurs had little incentive to establish hotels and restaurants145 as the British
practice of offering hospitality, accommodation and meals to newcomers and travelling
colleagues in India was legendary. This phenomenon of open house hospitality was
made possible by the myriad domestic servants who coped with the additional labour of
taking care of houseguests. As well, the idea of helping fellow Europeans in a ‘foreign’

138
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p92.
139
K.T. Achaya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, p107.
140
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p92.
141
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p93.
142
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p95.
143
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p94.
144
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p90.
145
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p94.

75
country and the likelihood of needing accommodation at a future date from travellers
reinforced this sense of hospitality. The ‘duty’ of being a gracious hostess fell to the
memsahib, providing her home as a welcoming venue for the British or European
community to socialize and particularly for the men to talk shop.146 Writing on daily
life and work in India in the late nineteenth century, W. J. Wilkins noted,
‘[I]t is a custom of the country coming down from the good old times when
people kept almost open house, for an extra plate and knife and fork to be always
placed on the dinner table. The servants do it without an order, so that if a guest
come in there is a chair ready for him. In country stations where there are no
hotels, it is not uncommon for a traveller to be commended to the care of a
resident through a mutual friend, though host and guest have never met nor is it
unusual for a perfect stranger to write to ask for entertainment for a day or two’.147

In his study of Anglo-Indian attitudes within the Indian Civil Service, Clive Dewey
quoted the Darlings’ displeasure when they were not invited to stay with the deputy
commissioner when they visited Multan, with the latter stating, ‘There was an unwritten
law that you show hospitality to members of your own service when they come to your
district’.148 In the more isolated stations the sense of solidarity building among the
British was even more pronounced. Hospitality among Assam planters was
exceptional, according to George M. Barker, as he recounted a tea planter offering
accommodation to the European traveller, ‘[A]lthough an utter stranger, is he not a
white man[?] and is it not probable that your present guest will at some future date act
in the capacity of your host?’149

Playing hostess to European travellers was another of the memsahib’s duties in addition
to her role as homemaker and maintaining the household as a symbol of imperialism.150
Being a gracious hostess was part and parcel of the ideal wife at whose home her
husband’s colleagues would gather for socialization and for business discussion.151
G.L.R., a 1920s British author of a cook book for India, maintained that,
‘entertaining is one of the most wholesome forms which a housewife’s energies
can take, provided she keeps it entirely subservient to her other home interests.
To have a house of your own, and never to extend its hospitality to others is
hiding under a bushel, the light with which you have been intended to illuminate
your little corner of the world, and at how very small a cost can great glow
146
Beverley Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’, in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener Callan
(eds), The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984. p170.
147
W.J. Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, London, T. Fisher Unwin,1883, pp60-61.
148
Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, the Mind of the Indian Civil Service, London, The Hambledon
Press, 1993, p156.
149
George M. Barker, A Tea Planter's Life in Assam, Bombay, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1884, p101.
150
Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’, p170.
151
Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’, p170.

76
 result.’152

In fact spacious European houses in Calcutta and India were built because of the
frequent need to entertain large numbers of people and also due to the shortage of hotels
and recreation facilities.153 Swati Chattopadhyay states the well-to-do British home in
Calcutta in the late nineteenth century would often have fifteen people for breakfast and
twenty-five would be at the dinner table. Chattopadhyay also notes that ‘even for casual
visits, each person was accompanied by his or her retinue of servants, adding to the
numbers already present in the household’.154

Malaysia and Singapore and the colonial cuisine

Colonial households in Malaysia and Singapore also adopted this hospitality in
welcoming European travellers and newcomers. In Singapore where the British
population consisted of government officials, merchants, bankers, doctors and military
officials, it was the merchants who hosted weekly ‘magnificent’ dinners for the
European population.155 Editor of The Straits Times in Singapore, John Cameron, wrote
in 1865 that,
‘[I]t is wonderful how perfect too, is the knowledge possessed of the measure of
the hospitality of each house, and how soon new arrivals and visitors become
acquainted with the comparative degrees of excellence in this respect. The
discreet bachelor scarcely allows a week after his landing to pass by before he
makes his calls upon the residents; and it is remarkable how closely they follow in
the ascertained order of hospitality. In addition to household hospitality, picnics
to various parts of the island are of frequent occurrence’.156

In defining the colonial life, rituals were seen as important and the niceties of social
etiquette featured predominantly. The colonial dinner party stands out as the social
function that involved the most distinctive characteristics and these were passed on
from the earliest years of colonization right up to independence. Whether given in a
bungalow in a rubber plantation in Malaya or hosted at Government House in British
Borneo the dinner party followed set patterns of behaviour to which host and guest
strictly adhered.

As Nancy Pence Britton recalled in her years spent in Singapore and Malaya,

152
G.L.R., The Economical Cookery Book, p262.
153
Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny,
London, Routledge, 2006, pp121-123.
154
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, pp121-123.
155
John Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan India, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press,
1965, p287.
156
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p288.

77
 ‘The V.I.P.s who asked us to the dinner-party did so not because they liked us, or
indeed had ever met us, but because we had signed the visitors’ book in the little
kiosk by their front gates, and this signing of the book was, in turn, not an entirely
free act on our part, as it was all laid down in a brochure on Colony etiquette. We
shared our hostess’s hospitality that evening with some twenty other people who
were presumably all in the same boat, and as we none of us had laid eyes on each
other before, and had not, as far as I could discover, anything in common except
that we were all breathing in and out in the same room, the result, while not
wildly light-hearted, made for a very interesting lesson in British stamina and the
survival of Victorian protocol’.157

The dinner party at Government House undoubtedly surpassed all other dinners in
formality and rituals. In Sandakan, ‘Government House was not only the international
meeting ground but it is the promulgator of local social custom,’ wrote Agnes Keith,
one of North Borneo’s first authors, who publicised the British colony with her book,
Land Below the Wind in 1939.158 Keith observed that functions at Government House
were dignified and formal and guests were expected to dress accordingly. The governor
and his wife, Keith wrote, ‘extend an unceasing hospitality to the Europeans of our
community, a hospitality which we cannot return, as it is the accepted custom that the
Governor should not dine away from Government House’.159 It was the custom to ‘sign
in the book’ belonging to the Governor and his wife held in the sentry box at the
entrance to the grounds of Government House. This had to be done within twenty-fours
hours of dining at Government House; failure to do so meant not being invited again.160
Wendy Suart, another memsahib, who wrote of her years in North Borneo, also stated
that colonials were also expected to sign the Governor’s book on leaving the colony, on
the King’s birthday as well as a note of thanks after receiving Government House
hospitality. Suart also explained that the Governor and his wife could not be asked to
dine away from Government House as a reciprocal gesture.161 At a lower level, the
Resident, as head of the Residency, and his wife also followed the protocol of not
accepting invitations to meals but had to do most of the entertaining themselves.162

One overriding commonality in food practices among the colonial community was that
it was the domestic servants who prepared and cooked the food. The colonial setting

157
Nancy Pence Britton, East of the Sun, London, William Blackwood & Sons Ltd.,1956, p102.
158
Agnes Keith, Land Below the Wind, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1939, p60.
159
Keith, Land Below the Wind, p61.
160
Keith, Land Below the Wind, p61.
161
Suart, The Lingering Eye, p202.
162
Jean Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers: Memories of Malaya, Edinburgh, The Pentland Press
Ltd, 1992, p108.

78
could be the civil servant and his family in a bungalow in Sandakan, the rubber planter
in an isolated estate or the merchant and his wife residing in Singapore. In most cases
procurement of food was also done by servants; it was more the norm than the
exception that servants scoured the markets for food items, thereby playing a big role in
deciding what the colonial family ate. Tina Rimmer, who was recruited to work in the
education department under the British North Borneo government in 1949 stated that,
‘for my part, I almost always left it to cookie to shop except for things like butter and
cheese. I remember in Sandakan my cookie holding out some green cheese at arms’
length and saying “are you still eating this?!”’.163 Owen Rutter, colonial government
officer and later a planter for several years in North Borneo in the early twentieth
century remarked in his day by day account in the colony,
‘the resources of the Borneo larder are enough to cramp any cook’s style, and
after about after about a month one recognizes that his various efforts come round
in a cycle as unvarying as that of the planets themselves. Fowl, pork chop and
French beans; “mincee,” buffalo kidney, anaemic scrambled eggs and a slab of
beef from the local Indian’s kill … and those everlasting pancakes, that seaweed
jelly or the batter in which half a hard-boiled egg is shrouded on days when there
is no fish’.164

Rutter wrote that while the Europeans in the bigger towns like Jesselton or Sandakan
had cold storage and incoming ships that brought in supplies of cheese, butter and legs
of mutton, for those posted in the outstations the Borneo ayam (chicken) was
omnipresent on the dining table.165 Similarly, K.R. Blackwell who worked in the
Malayan Civil Service and was posted to various parts of Malaya wrote in his
autobiography manuscript166 that in the 1920s food in Kuala Lipis167, was ‘neither good
nor varied’, complaining that the cattle and sheep were ‘poor scraggy beasts with flesh
tough and tasteless’. Blackwell, like other Europeans looked forward to supplies from
Cold Storage freighted once a week from the larger towns, in this case, Singapore.

Writing on the architectural history of residences and British life in Singapore between
1819-1939, Norman Edwards observed that ‘the purchase of food was very much the

163
Questionnaire response, Tina Rimmer. Rimmer married fellow Briton who was also working for the
colonial government and she still lives in Malaysia today (then aged 89).
164
Owen Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, Resources and Native Tribes, London,
Constable & Company, 1922, p379.
165
Rutter, British North Borneo, p379.
166
K.R. Blackwell, Malay Curry, 1945, p25, MSS.Ind.Ocn.s.90, Rhodes Collection, Bodleian Library,
Oxford.
167
Kuala Lipis is a small town in the state of Pahang in Malaya and was Blackwell’s first posting.

79
cook’s responsibility’.168 The cook was assisted by the ‘head boy’ who also helped
with the cooking, serving and waiting at the table. Edwards added that sometimes the
memsahib would accompany the cook to the markets to supervise the purchases.
Although Singapore boasted three ‘reputable’ hotels by the middle of the nineteenth
century, the most fashionable of which was the London Hotel, the town area was still
small and surrounded by swamps.169 Emily Innes and her husband James spent two
years in the ‘godforsaken spot’ of Kuala Langat in the state of Selangor in Malaya. On
their three weeks’ local leave in Singapore in mid-1877, they stayed at the Hotel de
l'Europe and ate ‘fresh beef and mutton instead of the eternal fowl’.170 The end of the
local leave meant the return to Kuala Langat which Emily viewed as a ‘butcherless,
bakerless, tailorless, cobberless, doctorless, bookless, milkless, postless and altogether
comfortless jungle’.171 At the time, meat in Malaya and Singapore was either local
buffalo meat or imported from Thailand; pork was either from local, Chinese or
Balinese supplies; milk and bread were sold by Bengali vendors; and, potatoes came
from Java. For the European community the establishment of Cold Storage in 1905
along Orchard Road,172 Singapore’s first Western-style shop stocking imported frozen
meat, the discomforts of tropical life seemed considerably lessened. However it was not
until 1909 that the retail store expanded with frozen meat and dairy products from
Australia. Across the peninsula in the Malay states, large new rubber estates sprang up,
and the increasing number of workers included Chinese, Indian and local workers.173
The European community was increasing in size too and a Cold Storage retail branch
was opened in Kuala Lumpur in 1910.174 Cold Storage also started manufacturing ice
in Singapore in 1916 and, as with its retail branches of frozen foods, ice factories too
were set up in Malaya: in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Taiping, Teluk Anson, Klang,
Kampar, Seremban, Sungei Patani, Kota Bharu and Kuantan.175

168
Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life:1819-1939, Singapore, Oxford
University Press, 1990, p192.
169
C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore:1819-1975, London, Oxford University Press, 1977, p47.
According to Turnbull, the London Hotel was renamed the Hotel de l’Europe, today known as the
Cockpit Hotel, p47. Raffles Hotel opened in 1899, p116.
170
John Gullick, ‘Emily Innes: Keeping up One’s Standards in Malaya’, in John Gullick (ed.),
Adventurous Women in South-East Asia: Six Lives, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1995, p171.
171
Gullick, ‘Emily Innes’, p171.
172
K.G. Tregonning, The Singapore Cold Storage: 1903-1966, Singapore, Cold Storage Holdings Ltd.,
1967, p5. Although Singapore Cold Storage Co. Ltd. was registered on 8 June 1903 its retail shop on
Orchard Road opened for business only in 1905.
173
Tregonning, The Singapore Cold Storage, p10.
174
Tregonning, The Singapore Cold Storage, p13.
175
Tregonning, The Singapore Cold Storage, pp14-15.

80
In the 1930s there were six markets in Singapore: at Tanglin Road, Orchard Beach
Road, Serangoon Road, Market Street and Maxwell Road.176 In later years, when Cold
Storage had established its premises in the colony, the memsahib would buy some items
from the European-style shop while the cook went to the markets nearby (as for
example, did Jean Falconer and her cook).177 Cold Storage was the first Western style
supermarket that stocked fresh dairy products and frozen foods in Malaya and
Singapore. Other branches sprang up all over the two colonies, initially to cater for
European communities. In British Borneo other ‘cold storage’ shops were established
retailing butter and other dairy produce, frozen meat from Australia and other European
goods. A.M. Findlay, who lived on a rubber estate in present-day Sabah, kept a
monthly account with the Cold Storage store and purchased ham, bacon, beef steak,
liver, kidney and alcoholic drinks there.178 Robert Bruce Lockhart first went to Malaya
in 1908 at the age of twenty-one to open up a rubber estate in a Malay district. Dinner
for Lockhart at the time was stuffed eggs, tinned mulligatawny soup, ikan merah (red
snapper) and ‘scraggy chicken’. Lockart returned twenty-years later and found that
Cold Storage, electricity and the motor-car had ‘entirely changed life in the tropics and
have robbed it of nearly all its discomforts’.179 By then, Lockhart found that Malaya
and Singapore were getting fresh meat from Australia, fresh butter from New Zealand,
swede turnips from Sumatra, potatoes from Palestine, tomatoes from Java, rhubarb from
Australia, oranges from China, and cabbages, lettuces and salads from the Malayan hill-
stations of Cameron Highlands.180

In exploratory expeditions into the unchartered regions for agricultural or mining

prospects in the early years of British settlement, explorers depended on local guides for
the purchase and cooking of local foodstuff. In his diary outlining his account of a trip
through North Borneo from 30 July 1882 to 17 January 1883, L.S. von Donop only
made scarce mention of food and meal times.181 This was not strictly an official nor

176
Edwards, The Singapore House, p193.
177
Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers, p18.
178
Questionnaire response, A.M. Findlay.
179
Bruce R.H. Lockhart, Return to Malaya, London, Putnam, 1936, p86. Lockhart was in a rubber estate
where there were no other white men and caused a sensation in the Malay district ‘by carrying off Amai,
the beautiful ward of Dato’ Klana, the local Malay prince’.
180
Lockhart, Return to Malaya, p86.
181
L.S. von Donop, Diary of L.S. Von Donop, Travelling through North Borneo or ‘New Ceylon’, Ceylon
Observer, Colombo,1883. The following entries in von Donop’s diary show minimal description of food
and meals when these were mentioned. 1 August 1882: ‘Mrs Data soon came to the front with a cup of
tea and some sweet cakes, and while refreshing ourselves, I made enquiries about the promised men, but
found to my regret nothing as yet had been arranged.’ 10 August 1882: ‘... there is nothing like making an
early start in these expeditions; so having had our morning meal and procured a guide, we continued our

81
scientific paper as von Donop wrote vividly of local life, describing the home
furnishings of Data Tomangong, the local chief; of the author having his first buffalo
ride, and of his refreshing bath in the river at Timbangbattu.182 Although the account of
his exploratory journey was to present findings from the prospecting of suitable
agricultural land for cash crops, the few references to food and meals are illuminating.
The reticence in description or discussion of food by Donop and other explorers in the
colonies could possibly be attributed to the peculiarly British attitude towards food.
Roger Scruton asserts that ‘the repression of the English extended into all those areas
where pleasure might overwhelm discretion’. He states that they take their pleasures
sceptically, anxious not to care more than they should, leading ‘to one of their least
celebrated triumphs – a cuisine in which ingredients were systematically deprived of
their flavour, so that everything tasted roughly the same and manly stoicism prevailed
over sensory enjoyment’.183 K.P. Tabrett who went with his parents to North Borneo in
1947 as a fifteen-year old said that his family never took much interest in food, ‘we just
ate and got it over with, we were so much more interested in what goes on in the
country’.184

Public dining, even in its most rudimentary form, was limited in the nineteenth century
and did not develop into a tradition until the arrival of immigrant groups in both
colonial Malaysia and Singapore. These groups were brought in by British
administrators in the early twentieth century to work on agricultural plantations, mines
and to develop the hinterland. From 1786 to 1957 more than 4,250,000 Indians arrived
in Malaysia and 3,000,000 departed. In 1940 the number of overseas Chinese in
Malaya was 2,358,000.185 The indigenous people practised a slash and burn form of
cultivation and hunting and fishing helped supplement their diet. When British North
Borneo, present-day Sabah, came under Chartered Company rule the British faced
manpower shortages in two areas: Europeans preferred to work in India, Hong Kong or
the Straits Settlements rather than in Borneo; and Asian labour in the plantation estates

journey ...’ 10 August 1882: ‘It being 8 o’clock we had our breakfast on the banks of the river and then
continued our journey skirting the plain’. 21 September 1882: ‘After dinner we settled ourselves down to
sleep, when the rain commenced, blowing straight in and wetting us baggage and all’. 22 September
1882: Donop reported that at their previous place they had to go to bed without any food. 12 October
1882: Arriving at a place called Ralin, villagers served them ‘large quantities of sugar cane, Indian corn
and potatoes. These myself and my men enjoyed, as there was no rice to be had’. See pp4-9.
182
von Donop, Diary of L.S. Von Donop, p8.
183
Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy, London, Chatto & Windus, 2000, p51.
184
Interview with K.P. Tabrett, 4 Dec 2006, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.
185
Peter J. Rimmer, Lenore Manderson and Colin Barlow, 'The Underside of Malaysian History', in Peter
J. Rimmer and Lisa M. Allen (eds), The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation
Workers …, Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1990, p7.

82
was scarce. Unlike the influx of Indian labourers to the estates in Malaya, the British
were successful in recruiting Indians only to its administration, mainly in the police
force.186 Chinese merchants were already trading on the west coast when Labuan island
(off the west coast of British North Borneo) was ceded to the British in 1846. Most of
these early traders were from the Straits Settlements of which Labuan was part of, but
on the east coast the Chinese who engaged in business were from Hong Kong and
Guangdong.187 In 1882, a year after British North Borneo came under Chartered
Company rule, Sir Walter Medhurst, as commissioner for Chinese immigration went to
China to recruit labourers and farmers for the colony.188 The first hotel in Sabah, the
Sandakan Hotel, was established in 1885 by Wong Sow Chuan, a Cantonese, probably
from Hong Kong. It provided its European clientele food and accommodation and was
managed by a European.189 It was likely that the eating shops in the towns of the
British North Borneo were first started by the early Chinese immigrants.

In Singapore, most nineteenth-century European visitors when dining out did so in the
few tiffin rooms and dining rooms of the European-style hotels, namely the Hotel de
L’Europe, Adelphi Hotel and Hotel de la Paix, where British meals and Anglo-Indian
curries were served.190 In private homes, meal times were similar to those adopted by
Anglo-Indians. An early breakfast of tea or coffee and toast after five preceded the
morning walk. In Singapore, Frederick William Burbridge, writing in 1877, reported
strolling in the main thoroughfares, returning home about eight and having a bath and
the second breakfast of ‘[B]eef-steaks and mutton-chops, one or two well-made curries
and rice, eggs and bacon, cold ham, boiled eggs, salads, vegetables and plenty of fresh
fruit’. This was followed by ‘bottled Bass, claret, or Norwegian beer’.191 Lunch or
tiffin at one o’clock, usually comprising curry and rice.192 Dinner was between half-
past six to seven, starting with soup and fish; the ‘substantials’ of roast beef or mutton,

186
Danny Tze Ken Wong, Historical Sabah: Community and Society, Kota Kinabalu, Natural History
Publications, 2004, p121.
187
Wong, Historical Sabah: Community and Society, pp37, 45.
188
Cecilia Leong, Sabah: The First 100 Years, Kuala Lumpur, Percetakan Nan Yang Muda Sdn Bhd,
1982, p106. Medhurst’s task to recruit labourers and farmers failed as he had carelessly rounded up
steamers-full of Chinese who had been unsuccessful shopkeepers in Hong Kong. See also K.G.
Tregonning, Under Chartered Company Rule (North Borneo 1881-1946), Singapore, University of
Malaya Press, 1958, pp130-131.
189
Wong, Historical Sabah: Community and Society, p45.
190
Peter A. Knipp, The Raffles Hotel Cookbook, Singapore, Raffles Hotel, 2003, p14. The hotels: Hotel
de L’Europe, Adelphi Hotel and Hotel de la Paix were established well before the still famous Raffles
Hotel opened its doors in 1887. Singapore was ceded to the East India Company in 1824.
191
F.W. Burbridge, The Gardens of the Sun: A Naturalist's Journal of Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago,
Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1991, p17.
192
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p297.

83
turkey or capon; curry and rice; side dishes tongue, fowl, cutlets and vegetables; these
were followed by pudding or preserve and local fruit. Drinks were sherry, bitters and
beer.193

Malaysia and Singapore and the colonial cuisine

As in India, colonials in Malaysia and Singapore ate a mixture of local and European
foods; fresh foods were bought locally while tinned and frozen foods were imported
from Europe or Australia or New Zealand. In travelogues, diaries, memoirs and other
accounts there were detailed descriptions of local fruit and vegetables. Cyril Alliston’s
account of his missionary work in Jesselton in British North Borneo mentioned that his
first cook prepared ‘tough buffalo meat and pancakes like leather, helped on with bread
and rice’.194 He also stated that ‘imported meat is expensive in North Borneo and we
would only have it occasionally, sometimes on a Sunday, instead of the immensely
popular Sunday curry tiffin’.195

Alice Berry Hart’s description of the primitive conditions of her kitchen on a Malayan
rubber estate, where she set up home, also included reports of the local fruit and
vegetables. In such an isolated posting it is plausible that the bananas, jackfruit,
mangoes, guavas, pineapples, coconuts, pomeloes, brinjals and ladies’ fingers that she
described were included in her family’s diet.196 Others left no such ambiguity in
enthusiastically eating local foods. Isabella L. Bird, in her travels in the Malayan jungle
in 1879, must have been one of the first European women to taste local food, describing
‘blachang’ as ‘a Malay preparation much relished by European lovers of durian and
decomposed cheese. It is made by trampling a mass of putrefying prawns and shrimps
into a paste with bare feet. This is seasoned with salt. The smell is penetrating and
lingering.’197

L.W.W. Gudgeon, as assistant manager of a tobacco plantation in Borneo, described

how he had to try the ‘strange dishes of a German “bludwurst,” Dutch salted “girkins”

193
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, pp300-302.
194
Cyril Alliston, In the Shadow of Kinabalu, London, The Adventurers Club, 1963, p33. Jesselton is the
old name for the capital of present-day Sabah, Kota Kinabalu.
195
Alliston, In the Shadow of Kinabalu, p35.
196
Alice Berry Hart, ‘Housekeeping and Life in the Malayan Rubber’, Blackwood’s Magazine,
no.CCXXI, 1927, p599.
197
Isabella L. Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, London, Oxford University Press,
1967, p180; see also pvi – Daniel J. Boorstin’s Introduction to the 1960 edition of A Lady’s Life in the
Rocky Mountains, it states that Bird travelled for five months in Malaya, in fact she spent only five weeks
there.

84
[on a] new Eastern menu’. He stated that on ‘the tobacco estates everything comes in to
make a change in diet – Chinese “mee”, Malay “nasi-goring”, and a British steak and
onions, all being served at breakfast, tiffin, and dinner indiscriminately’.198 Where
other Europeans had described the taste of the durian fruit as ‘a mixture of custard,
onions, and bad eggs,’ Gudgeon declared that this was ‘a libel on a fine fruit. The
flavour must be delicious, because after the first trial everyone likes it, and many old
planters and Government officials, resident for a long time in Borneo, crave for this
fruit with a craving that will take no denial. Far and wide they send to buy it’.199
Gudgeon also sang the praises of two other local fruits: ‘the “rhambutan”, as ‘a small
red fruit with a thick peel covered with green hairs, that somewhat resembles the
chestnut, while the “langsat” is a fruit the size of a large gooseberry, covered with a peel
resembling suede leather. Both of these have a delicious jelly-like pulp and bitter
pips’.200

A spill over of colonial food practices from India to Malaysia and Singapore was the
early breakfast, the chota hazri, as mentioned by Cuthbert Woodville Harrison201 in his
notes to travellers in the Federated Malay States. While clearly enjoying some of the
local produce he also listed certain foods to be avoided. He described coconut juice as
‘cool, sweet yet sub-acid water’ for quenching thirst and declared that there was ‘no
better drink in all Malaya. Some people drop whisky into the nut and drink the
sophisticated compound’.202 Harrison cautioned curry lovers to ‘shun the little dried
prawns which appear so innocently amongst the sambals or little side dishes which
accompany the main dish of curried fowl’ and claimed that they caused food poisoning,
an ‘exceedingly painful, often dangerous’ experience.203 Harrison stated that little or no
fruit was imported and was obviously familiar with the different kinds available locally,
mentioning ‘the fierce joys of the durian’’ the ‘tame’ jak fruit and the soursop; the
grapelike duku, the delicate mangosteen, the mango, rambutan, jambu, lime, water
melon, banana and pineapple.204

198
L.W.W. Gudgeon, Peeps at Many Lands: British North Borneo, London, Adam and Charles Black,
1912, p57.
199
Gudgeon, Peeps at Many Lands, p28.
200
Gudgeon, Peeps at Many Lands, p29.
201
Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, London, The Malay
States Information Agency, 1923, p32.
202
Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, p161.
203
Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, p166.
204
Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, pp185-186.

85
Grace Elizabeth Tidbury extolled the culinary skills of the Chinese women cooks in
Sandakan, North Borneo, stating that her ‘Number One girl’, Ah Yeuk, ‘could give an
afternoon tea, scones, fancy cakes with icing, or again a luncheon or late dinner fit for a
prince or princess to eat’.205 Ah Yeuk could also provide ‘a varied menu such as
chicken soup, fried fish delicately browned with quarters of lemon on top, roast fowl
browned to a turn, potatoes baked and boiled, perhaps a cabinet pudding with white
sauce, biscuits, cheese and coffee’. Tidbury stated that all the meals were cooked on a
stove of bricks built over a large iron with holes for saucepans on top.206

Cameron gave a detailed account of the meals eaten by the colonials in Singapore in the
mid-nineteenth century. Breakfast took about half an hour with a little fish, some curry
and rice, and perhaps a couple of eggs, washed down with a tumbler or so of good
claret.207 Cameron observed that tiffin was not an elaborate meal as in Java, for it
usually consisted of a plate of curry and rice, some fruit or a biscuit, accompanied by a
glass of beer or claret.208 Dinner was usually between half-past six to seven and was a
substantial meal, with soup and fish usually preceding the ‘substantials’, consisting of
roast beef or mutton, turkey or capon. These were supplemented by side dishes of
tongue, fowl, or cutlets, accompanied by a variety of vegetables. According to
Cameron, ‘the substantials are invariably followed by curry and rice which forms a
characteristic feature of the tables of Singapore’.209 There were usually two or more
different curries with accompanying side dishes of different side dishes of sambals.210
Beer or pale sherry was served during the main part of the meal.211 The abundance of
year-round tropical fruit meant that dessert consisted of a colourful display of fruit:
pineapple, plaintains, ducoos, mangoes, rambutans, pomelos and mangosteens.212

Another account of meals in the same period by John Turnbull Thomson shows
similarly heavy meals for dinner: after the soup came fish, joints of Bengal mutton,
Chinese capons, Kedah fowls, Sangora ducks, Yorkshire hams, Java potatoes, Malay
ubis (either sweet potatoes or tapioca), curry and rice accompanied by sambals (spicy

205
Grace Elizabeth Tidbury, My Journey to British North Borneo and Twenty Months Sojourn Therein,
London, The Mitre Press, 1952, p30.
206
Tidbury, My Journey to British North Borneo, p30.
207
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p295.
208
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p297.
209
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p300.
210
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p300.
211
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p301.
212
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p302.

86
side dishes), Bombay ducks, salted turtle eggs and omelettes. Pale ale was served with
these dishes. Then desserts of macaroni pudding and custard were washed down by
champagne, followed by a large cheese and finally a variety of tropical fruit finished the
meal.213

The colonial cuisine in India

Cookbooks for the colonies can be seen as more than prescriptive and instructional
manuals as they helped to establish and disseminate information on an emerging cuisine
and accepted norms of behaviour for the ruling class. Recipes were exchanged among
memsahibs and eventually these would end up in cookbooks either written for or by
them. Cookbooks provide not only an insight into the ideals and ideas aspired to during
the period but demonstrate the variety of foods consumed.

The cookbook that dispels beyond all doubt the myth that colonizers ate only British
type foods in India is What to tell the Cook; Or the Native Cook’s Assistant, Being a
Choice Collection of Receipts for Indian Cookery, Pastry, etc. etc.214 Published in 1910
by an anonymous author it suggested Indian dishes for daily menu planning and aimed
to make life easier for the memsahib by suggesting that the latter had only to point out a
recipe in the book for the cook to prepare without further instruction. It provided
‘family dinners for a month’; of the thirty-one menus for dinner only the meal for the
twenty-sixth day did not feature a curry dish. Among the curry dishes listed were
chicken, ‘kabob’, prawn, ‘ball’, sardine, ‘toast’ salt fish and egg, cutlet, mutton, fish,
sheep’s head, curry puffs, brain, Malay and gravy. Other Indian dishes were
mulligatawny, sago pudding, mango fool, plaintain fritters, coconut pudding and
Bombay pudding.

Indian dishes for English tables by ‘Ketab’ promised that the recipes were all ‘genuine
Indian recipes, collected by the compiler during many years’ residence in India’. It
featured more than twenty curry dishes, two khitchrees and pish-pash. Mrs John
Gilpin’s Memsahib’s guide to cookery in India (1914) was written to help memsahibs as
she had felt lost when newly arrived in India.215 In the ‘Complete Menus for Ninety
Days’ Mrs Gilpin declared that ‘the object has been to use the materials at hand and not
213
Maya Jayapal, Old Singapore, Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp39-40: Jayapal citing John
Turnbull Thomson in Some Glimpses Into Life in Malayan Lands, London, Richardson & Co., 1864.
214
What to Tell the Cook; or the Native Cook’s Assistant, Being a Choice Collection of Receipts for
Indian Cookery, Pastry, Etc. Etc, Madras, Higginbothams Ld., 1910.
215
(Mrs) John Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, Bombay, A.J. Combridge & Co., 1914, p1.

87
that of expensive tinned foods’, thereby encouraging the use of local ingredients.216 Her
recipe for Bombay toast utilized minced anchovy or redfish while another breakfast dish
was ‘curry balls’, consisting of rice cooked with curry powder, sugar and salt, chopped
apple and onion, then rolled into balls with minced meat, parsley and egg and fried or
baked. Her cookbook also featured a fish kitcheree recipe. Sheep’s head was a regular
dish in England and the recipe for curried sheep head was frequently included in Anglo-
Indian cookbooks. Mrs Gilpin’s sheep’s head curry was cooked in coconut milk and
curry powder and served with rice.217 In another cookbook on Anglo-Indian cookery,
Constance E. Gordon’s aim was ‘to suggest a variety of dishes’.218 Indeed, the menus
for breakfasts, tiffins and dinners were wide-ranging and included English fare
intermingled with unmistakably Indian dishes. Some of the dishes itemized were
‘breakfast brawn’, fricassee of tripe, tripe to dress, hot pot, Irish stew, porter-house
steak, sea pie, Spanish stew, toad in a hole, lamb sauté, guinea fowl a la Francaise,
kidney in onion, kidneys sautéd with potato or cheese, fried chicken, fillet a la Carlton,
calf’s brain a la St James, sweet-bread a la Savoy, chutnies, curries cold meat, hors
d’oeuvres, soups, fresh and tinned fish, entrees, joints, toasts and savouries, puddings
and sweets.219 Different types of curry mixtures were itemized for the following curry
dishes: ‘for cold meat, for paste for a quick curry, Bombay curry powder, Ceylon curry
powder, Madras curry powder, Indian country captain, Indian kababs, moli, pallow, rice
to boil, cocoanut rice, and chutnies for mango, potato, tamarind, mint, cucumber and
tomato.220 Where single men lived together in a household, known as a chummery, the
head servant or khansamah took charge over the food preparation.221 Gordon ensured
that the British single male was well-versed in household supplies, Gordon devoted a
section on ‘[A] little aid to the bachelor’s store list for the month’.222

Written specifically for the memsahib, Angela C. Spry’s The Mem Sahib’s Book of
Cookery also shows evidence that Indian-type foods were consumed everyday.223
Published in 1894, it stated, ‘[C]urry is eaten in almost every household at lease once

216
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, p1.
217
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, p40.
218
Constance E. Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine and Domestic Economy, Calcutta and Simla, Thacker,
Spink & Co., 1913.
219
Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine and Domestic Economy, pp97-102.
220
Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine and Domestic Economy, pp103-108.
221
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, p110.
222
Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine and Domestic Economy, p92.
223
Angela C. Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery,1894 (publisher unknown).

88
daily, generally at breakfast or Bari Hazri’.224 Nicola Humble notes that until the 1870s
the British ate little European food as Indian cooks had free rein in the kitchen and
cooked mainly curries.225 In this connection, Humble believes that Isabella Beeton
included a significant number of recipes in Household Management such as
mulligatawny, curries, kedgeree and chutneys because they were familiar to British
readers.226

Ironically, Spry blamed poor supervision by the memsahib when curry routinely
became too bland as the cook, to make the dish cheaper, would add fewer spices.227 She
was satisfied though with the standard of rice cooking, saying, ‘rice is always eaten with
curries ... The natives prepare it to perfection, so that no remarks are necessary. Rice
Kidgeree is much appreciated with curry’.228 Spry’s menus for breakfast were
substantial, with even the chota hazri including mullet a la Russe, fried fish to be eaten
cold, fish a la Bretagne, pudding of fish, corquettes of fish, fish quenelles, fish a
l’Espagnole, kedgeree, fish scallops, fish omelette, fish au parmesan, fish
a’lEgyptienne, fish on toast, fish with spinach, dainty fish rolls, devilled shrimps and
potted mullet. Recipes for breakfast or bari bazri included molynda, hautbegins,
Turkish delight, queen’s rissoles, French pie, Russian hash, china chilo, devilled
sardines, stewed kidneys, roasted pigeons, gobbits, bubble and squeak, Irish stew and
different types of curries. Other Indian recipes were for pickles and chutneys.

While readers may assume that the content of Gems from the Culinary Art and a Ready
Help to Every Wife in India was aimed at the memsahib, most of the recipes were of
European origin. The poultry used for dishes such as ‘salmis’ (a wine-based stew made
with minced game birds and mushrooms or other vegetables) however, were local, and
included as rock pigeons, quails, or teal.229 Following the tradition of Victorian
cookbooks with special sections on foreign cookery, a separate chapter on Indian
cooking listed recipes for mulligatawny, pilau, curried macaroni, prawn curry, chicken
curry with tomatoes, dry mutton curry, toast curry, kubbab curry, pumpkin hulva and
pemilo sweet meat (Indian sweets).230 Another cookbook with a title that that implied

224
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p60.
225
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.
226
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.
227
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p60.
228
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p60.
229
Eleanor, Gems from the Culinary Art and a Ready Help to Every Wife in India, Madras, Printed by
Hoe and Co. at the ‘Premier Press’, 1916, p33.
230
Eleanor, Gems from the Culinary Art, pp95-99.

89
recipes for Indian meals was Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables. The recipes were mostly
European and included chutney, curries made of eggs, fish, fowl, rabbit and toast.
There were also recipes for rice, sago pudding, mulligatawny and soojee pudding.

R. Riddell’s Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book (1849) was aimed at targeting
all Anglo-Indians in both government and the private sector. It listed numerous local
Indian dishes with detailed notes and hints on how to cook them.231 For example,
Riddell explained how curries were made,
‘...the meat, fish or vegetable being first dressed until tender, to which are added
ground spices, chillies and salt, both to the meat and gravy in certain proportions;
which are served up dry, or in the gravy; in fact a curry may be made of almost
any thing, its principal quality depending upon the spices being duly proportioned
as to flavour, and the degree of warmth to be given by the chillies and ginger.
The meat may be fried in butter, ghee, oil, or fat, to which is added gravy,
tyre,(sic) milk, the juice of the cocoanut, or vegetables, &c. All of these when
prepared in an artistical manner, and mixed in due proportions, form a savoury
and nourishing repast, tempting to the organs of scent and taste, but if carelessly
prepared, are as equally disagreeable to the eye and stomach.232

Several curries and quoormah were listed with local names. There were three recipes
for mulligatawney soup, using chicken, rabbit, mutton or pea fowl. Two recipes were
given for a particularly pungent dish, ballachong, which was consumed in colonial
Malaysia and Singapore as well and there were seventeen recipes for chutnies.

Colesworth Grant, in writing on Anglo-Indian domestic life, berated his compatriots for
eating too much ghee.233 Quoting Williamson, Grant wrote ‘ghee and idleness cause
one-half of the natives’ ailings’.234 His following comment adds to my opinion that by
and large, Anglo-Indians did not keep strictly to British or European ingredients in their
diet.
‘Indeed Europeans themselves, almost unconsciously, consume this article (ghee)
to a degree that cannot but be very unwholesome. Instead of being provided with
food of that plain nature best suited to the climate, it seems to be the opinion of
our Indian purveyors, when left to themselves, that nothing is so proper as that
which is swimming in grease, or burning hot with chillies, -- and the habit thus

231
R. Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book; Comprising Numerous Directions for Plain
Wholesome Cookery, Both Oriental and English; with Much Miscellaneous Matter Answering for All
General Purposes of Reference Connected with Household Affairs, Likely to Be Immediately Required by
Families, Messes, and Private Individuals, Residing at the Presidencies or Outstations, Bombay, printed
at the ‘Gentleman’s Gazette’ Press, 1849.
232
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, pp304-305.
233
Colesworthy Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life. A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in
England, Calcutta, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1862. Ghee is a form of clarified butter that is widely used in
Indian cooking.
234
Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, p62.

90
 acquired by many Europeans, but more particularly by persons born and bred in
the country, of living on rich and stimulating food, so strengthens with its growth
as to be neither observed nor checked’.235

Contrary to the limited current scholarship on colonial food history, this chapter proves
that the British colonists did not eat a totally different diet to the local people as a
deliberate attempt to differentiate themselves as rulers from the ruled. This analysis of
cookbooks, memoirs, travel guides and responses from my questionnaire demonstrates
that British colonists enjoyed a peculiarly hybrid cuisine. This chapter has established
that colonial foodways constituted a legitimate cuisine insofar as it meets the criteria of
a cuisine: frequent consumption of the dishes, knowledge about preparation and taste of
the foods, articulation and debate about the dishes.236 The colonial cuisine retained
elements of British food practices and at the same time incorporated ingredients and
practices from the colonies. This cuisine was not wholly British nor was it totally
Asian. At any given meal European dishes sat side by side with colonial dishes, that is
dishes that has been adopted and adapted for British taste. The colonial table includes
the uniquely colonial dishes of mulligatawny, country captain, kedgeree, pish pash,
chicken chop, gula melaka (sago pudding) and innumerable kinds of curry, the last of
which will be discussed in the next chapter.

235
Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, p63.
236
Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p96; Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, pp18-19.

91
Chapter Three

The Colonial Appropriation of Curry

First we had Mulligatawny soup,

Which made us all perspire,
For the cook, that obstinate nincompoop,
Had flavoured it hot as fire.

Next a tremendous fragmentary dish

Of salmon was carried in, --
The taste was rather of oil than fish,
With a palpable touch of tin.

Then, when the salmon was swept away,

We'd a duckey stew, with peas,
And the principal feature of that entree,
Was its circumambient grease.

Then came the pride of my small farm-yard, --

A magnificent Michaelmas goose:
Heavens! his breast was a trifle hard;
As for his leg, the deuce!

Last, we'd a curry of ancient fowl:

In terror a portion I took, --
Hot? -- I could hardly suppress a howl --
Curse that fiend of a cook.

– ‘The Police-Wallah’s Little Dinner’1

Curry, a dish wholeheartedly embraced by the British both during and after the colonial
era, evolved and mutated both in temporal and geographical terms. Its popularity
peaked in the days of the East India Company when its employees embraced all things
Indian. Even in its colonial heyday, curry was a dish that was the perfect example of
food appropriation; it leapt from presidency to presidency in the sub-continent and
across the colonies in the British Empire. Just as Anglo-Indian cookery was seen as the
first pan-Indian cuisine,2 curry is the single most important dish that defines the culinary
history of British imperialism. Specious claims of ownership and the authenticity of
curry are contested and questioned by different communities. Curries were created,
adapted and modified through the input of indigenous cooks, by the availability of
ingredients in particular regions, by the social mores of the time and also by health and

1
Hilton Brown, The Sahibs: The Life and Ways of the British in India as Recorded by Themselves,
London, William Hodge & Co., 1948, p56.
2
Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, London, Chatto & Windus, 2005, p118. See Santha Rama Rau,
The Cooking of India, New York, Time-Life Books, 1969, pp26-27, where Rama discusses the absence of
a national cuisine in India.

92
nutritional thinking of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Anglo-Indian, Malayan
and Singaporean cookbooks, memoirs, diaries, travelogues and other primary sources I
demonstrate in this chapter that curry evolved as a hybrid, practical dish that could be
made from leftover meat and poultry and which incorporated spice ingredients
specifically selected for their preservative and nutritious qualities. The diverse range of
curries that were created, along with the commercialisation of curry powders in the
nineteenth century, has made this food a stubborn relic of the Raj and a defining dish
that helped to form culinary links between British colonies.

This chapter expands on one of the central arguments in this thesis, namely, that the
British in India and Malaya and Singapore consumed local foods far more frequently
than existing literature suggests. In particular, it focuses on curry, the ubiquitous dish
that appeared daily in most colonial households. Furthermore, this chapter takes issue
with existing interpretations that simply characterise ‘curry’ as a colonial fabrication
and the argument that the British deliberately set out to appropriate curry in order to
domesticate the colonial environment. I argue in contrast that although curry was
adopted and adapted by colonizers, it was not invented by them. Essentially, curry
figured prominently in the colonial imagination, its culinary creation was a collective
but haphazard effort of both the colonizer and the colonized. I will demonstrate that
imperial ‘appropriation’, in particular of foodways, is a slippery concept. In the
collaboration between memsahib and cook there was respect for Indian and Southeast
Asian foodways. Undoubtedly curry has left its long-lasting taste, a legacy that
survives into the postcolonial present. A discussion of curry in the post colonial period
is outside the scope of this study but the popularity of curry today is a primary reason
why the study of its history is significant.

The problem with curry: its definition and claims of ownership

While most scholars agree that ‘curry’ by itself is not a dish that had its genesis in India
it is, for all intent and purposes, the most identifiable dish that has been associated with
India. The word curry itself however is problematic, both etymologically and in its
culinary origins. Hobson-Jobson, a historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and
expressions used in languages from the ‘East’ from the sixteenth to the end of the
nineteenth centuries, attempted not only to offer several definitions of it but also to
justify curry’s existence. Its authors, Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, first published
Hobson-Jobson in 1886 and explained that ‘curry’ was a savoury dish made up of

93
‘meat, fish, fruit or vegetables cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric’
served to flavour the two staple foods of the east – bread and rice, both of which are
bland dishes.3 This combination of dishes, using curry to flavour the starchy foods, the
authors declared, was ‘the proper office of curry in the native diet’.4 They stated that
‘curry’ was a corruption of the Tamil word ‘kari’, (meaning sauce), but also made clear
that the Portuguese colonizers adopted the Kanarese (of Western India) form, ‘karil’, a
term still in use in Goa today. The authors acknowledged that the kind of curry
prepared by Europeans and Indians was not of purely Indian origin, but could have
evolved from the spiced cookery of medieval Europe and Western Asia.5 Yule and
Burnell added to the confusion as they mistook ‘capsicum or red pepper’ for chilli when
they stated that it was brought to India by the Portuguese and observed that ‘curry’
dishes of the Sanskrit books of cookery did not include the pepper ingredient. They
were in no doubt however that ‘capsicum or red pepper’ was introduced into India by
the Portuguese and that ‘this spice constitutes the most important ingredient in modern
curries’. The authors stated unequivocally that Europeans understood ‘curry’ to have
several incarnations: as ‘savoury concoctions of analogous spicy character eaten with
rice’; as a stew of meat, fish or vegetables; or “dry” curry’.6 The dictionary authors also
claimed that the oldest indication of Indian curry was cited by Athenaeus from
Megasthenes, who recorded that ‘[A]mong the Indians, at a banquet, a table is set before
each individual and on the table is placed a golden dish on which they throw, first of all,
boiled rice and then they add many sorts of meat dressed after the Indian fashion’
[emphasis in the original]. However it is my opinion that Yule and Burnell could have
erred by interpreting the ‘golden dish’ to be the yellow coloured curry dish. In fact,
another account of this description of the golden dish refers to the gold vessel in which
rice and other relishes were served. J.W. McCrindle’s interpretation of Megasthenes’
account of his second book on ‘Indika’, under the heading ‘Of the Suppers of the
Indians’ states, ‘when the Indians are at supper a table is placed before each person, this
being like a tripod. There is placed upon it a golden bowl, into which they first put rice,
boiled as one would boil barley, and then they add many dainties prepared according to

3
Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and
Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Hertfordshire,
Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1996, p281.
4
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p281.
5
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p281.
6
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, p282.

94
Indian receipts’.7

One of the earliest references to ‘cury’ is found in England’s oldest surviving cookery
book, significantly in its title, The Forme of Cury, written around 1390 by King Richard
II’s cook, Samuel Pegge.8 Pegge explained that ‘[C]ury, … was ever reckoned a branch
of the Art Medical; and here I add, that the verb _curare_ signifies equally to dress
victuals, as to cure a distemper; that every body has heard of _Doctor Diet, kitchen
physick_, &c….’ ‘Cury’ then meant food preparation, probably a derivative of the verb
‘cure’ in the sense of restoration and preservation of health. This definition ties in the
thinking of the early modern period when diet occupied a prominent place in notions of
health. Margaret Dorey in her study of food adulteration in the sixteenth century quotes
Thomas Cogan’s work of 1584: ‘Meates and drinkes doe alter our bodies, and either
temper them or distemper them greatly … And no marvaile seeing that such as the food
is, such is the blood; and such as the blood is, such is the flesh’.9 A few centuries later
Britons, as colonizers in India and Southeast Asia, made curry the most significant dish
in their diet (including in terms of daily consumption). In India these Britons used a
variety of spices in the preparation of curry, in many instances to make the less than
ideal chicken, beef or mutton more palatable and digestible and indeed, perhaps, as in
earlier centuries less harmful.

Thus, there is no clear definition of curry, only various explanations of its earliest
origins as a dish, or, in its efficacy as a health-restorative food from the early modern
period to the twenty-first century. What is certain is that curry is a dish cooked with
several spices with varying degrees of hotness, either as a stew or a ‘dry’ dish.
Collingham’s 2005 history of curry simply states that,
‘[T]he idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s
food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names and their
servants would have served the British with dishes which they called, for
example, rogan josh, dopiaza or quarama. But the British lumped all these
together under the heading of curry’.10

7
John Watson McCrindle, McCrindle’s Ancient India, as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian, New
Delhi, Today & Tomorrow's Publishers, 1972, p74, citing Fragm.XXVIII Athen.iv.p153, Fragments of
the Indika of Megathenes.
8
Samuel Pegge, The Forme of Cury: A Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled, About A.D. 1390,
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8102, The Project Gutenberg Ebook, downloaded 2 February 2009.
9
Margaret Dorey, ‘Unwholesome for Man’s Body?’ English Concerns about Food Purity and Regulation
c.1600-1740, PhD Thesis in Progress, University of Western Australia, citing Thomas Cogan, Haven of
Health, 1584.
10
Collingham, Curry, p115.

95
Several scholars argue that although foods have ‘defining physical properties’, attempts
to fix them ‘in essentialist terms’ become contentious in the context of cross-cultural
consumption.11 John Thieme and Ira Raja quote examples such as ‘Hungarian goulash’
not being considered Hungarian goulash in Hungary and ‘English muffins’ not being
considered English muffins in England. They cite Uma Narayan’s work in which she
posits ‘curry’ as a colonial fabrication (as discussed in this chapter).12 David Burton
notes that the Indian people who grind and mix fresh spices in appropriate proportions
for each individual dish find the idea of using a generic ‘curry powder’ to cook meat,
fish or other food items preposterous.13 Burton refers to Madhur Jaffrey who states that
the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India's great cuisine as ‘chop suey’ was to China’s.14
However, Jaffrey still uses ‘curry’ in her cookbooks. Thieme and Raja contend that in
contemporary parlance, curry is ‘a central part of a discourse of spice and exoticism, a
form of Orientalism that pervades virtually all aspects of Western societies’.15 South
Asian author, Santha Rama Rau, writing in 1969 bemoaned that Indian food ‘remains
virtually unexplored, and a great and varied cuisine evolved from indigenous sources
and outside cultures seems to have been reduced in Western minds (those that consider
the matter at all) to the comprehensive and meaningless category “curry”. To most of
them curry is simply a floury, yellow cream sauce that can be used indiscriminately
with meat or fish or chicken, and served with rice. … No Indian cook would ever use a
prepared curry powder, because each dish must have its own distinct masala’.16 Rama
Rau, of course, was writing forty years ago and many in the Western world today are
knowledgeable about Indian cuisine.

Curry as the master trope of the colonial cuisine?

Scholarship on curry is scant but its ubiquity as a dish means that it has to some extent
navigated its way into colonial discourse. However, various scholars have also added
confusion and contradictions to what curry has come to symbolise. Unlike other
scholars whom she describes as having a ‘rigid view of imperial culture’ Mary Procida
states that the ‘peculiar Anglo-Indian style of culinary and domestic management

11
John Thieme and Ira Raja, The Table Is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing,
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007, pxx.
12
Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism, New York,
Routledge, 1997, p164.
13
David Burton, The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India, London, Faber & Faber,
1993, p73.
14
Burton, The Raj at Table, p73.
15
Thieme and Raja, The Table Is Laid, pxx.
16
Santha Rama Rau, The Cooking of India, New York, Time-Life Books, 1970, pp24-26.

96
resulted in cultural appropriation and interchange in Anglo-India cuisine and dining
habits’.17 Procida does not agree with those historians who construe imperialism
hegemonically by assuming that Anglo-Indians’ eating habits were similar to those of
Britons in Britain.18 This view, according to Procida, is that British women were
‘unwilling to adopt the cultural attributes, including culinary tastes and habits’.19 This
thesis argues that the realities of Anglo-Indian life were such that while the British did
not follow an all-Indian diet they adjusted to eating different foods in different
circumstances. However, even as Anglo-Indians and the British in other colonies
regularly ate local food they steadfastly maintained a British imperial identity in other
respects. As discussed in Chapter Two of this thesis, formal dinners or banquets did not
usually feature local dishes, instead French food (or at least food with French names)
was served. It can be established beyond doubt that curry formed an important part of
the culinary repertoire of everyday life in British India. And yet the hierarchal nature of
British society, and by extension, Anglo-Indian society, infiltrated into the food
practices of the colonies. Procida cites the following story of 1913, illustrating the
snobbery of Anglo-Indian society. The army officers and their wives of the British
Army Regiment that was temporarily posted in India refused to eat the curry and rice
served at the dinners hosted by the families of the Indian Army regiment (who were also
British). Procida recounts that one day, a woman from the Indian Army contingent, on
paying a surprise visit to the British Army camp, discovered the wife of a British Army
officer,
‘squatted on the sofa demolishing a plate of curry-and-rice! The curry was
obviously fiery with chillies … Then realising that she had been properly caught
enjoying the very stuff for which she and her set evinced such contempt; stuff that
“the servants eat and which never appeared on her table” – the wretched woman
uttered a shriek of dismay and fled from the room!’20

In using foodways to depict the social distance created between the colonial elite and
the colonized, some scholars have singled out curry as the dish that colonizers used to
delineate themselves. Nupur Chaudhuri has examined the dialogue between memsahibs
and British women at home on different ways of cooking curry and other Indian dishes
through the various women’s publications such as Ladies’ Own Paper, Queen, The
Young Ladies Journal and The Ladies Companion. Chaudhuri states that ‘the

17
Mary Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite; Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Domesticity’,
Journal of Women’s History, vol.15, no.2, 2003, p138.
18
Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p138.
19
Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p138.
20
Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p140.

97
memsahibs transformed as well as transmitted Indian culinary culture’. 21 If Anglo-
Indian families did not eat curry in India as Chaudhuri insists, it calls into question
where memsahibs acquired the knowledge and taste of curry to impart the expertise.
Chaudhuri reinforces this by saying, ‘the publication by memsahibs of recipes and
articles on cookery in women’s periodicals helped infuse the cookery of the colonized
into the dietary world of the dominant culture’.22 However Chaudhuri also states that
authors of cookbooks that had curry recipes in them had probably never been to India.23
Chaudhuri acknowledges that curry became a familiar dish in England when officials of
the East India Company started to return on home leave and popularised it. Chaudhuri’s
analysis is flawed on two counts. Firstly, Anglo-Indians (and Britons in the other
colonies as well) ate a variety of food, both British and local dishes appeared on the
dining table with curry being consumed on a daily basis, as illustrated in cookbooks and
other instruction manuals of the time. For example, in Elizabeth Garrett’s household
management manual of 1887, which she dedicated ‘To my countrywomen in India’, she
suggested that lunch was generally ‘a light repast’ of cold meat, pasty, curry, and so
on.24 She also noted that fish curry was a favourite dish in the colony.25 G.L.R., author
of an ‘economical cookery book for India’, suggested that as ‘curries form an important
part of an Anglo-Indian breakfast, and as there are such a nice variety, I have compiled
them separately, so that the housewife will find no difficulty in the choice of one for
breakfast’.26 W.J. Wilkins, writing on daily life in India was critical that Anglo-Indians
in the second half of the nineteenth century ate too much, consuming three heavy meals
a day, for example with lunch consisting of ‘chops, steaks, curry and rice, puddings,
&c’.27 Wilkins was also critical that the English ate fewer of the Indian dishes than the
earlier colonials, stating that ‘[O]rdinary dishes are supplanting the once loved curries
and kedgeri, or rice and dhall boiled together’.28 Secondly, contrary to Chaudhuri’s
claims, the proliferation of cookbooks with curry and other Indian recipes in them in
nineteenth-century Britain were not all written by a monolithic group of women who
had never set foot in India. The cookbooks (published in Britain and in India) examined

21
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’ in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret
Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Indianapolis, Indiana
University Press, 1992, p232.
22
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, p241.
23
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, p231.
24
Elizabeth Garrett, Morning Hours in India, Practical Hints on Household Management, the Care and
Training of Children, & C., London, Trubner & Co., 1887, p7.
25
Garrett, Morning Hours in India, p15.
26
G.L.R., The Economical Cookery Book: Simple and Dainty Dishes (for India), Calcutta and Simla,
Thacker, Spink & Co., 1920, p212.
27
W.J. Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1883, p63.
28
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, p62.

98
for this thesis were written by a diverse range of authors, including returning
memsahibs, retired British Army officers, veteran cookery book writers, a Victorian
palace cook and an Indian cook who was brought to work in Britain.29

In her essay on the ideological work of gender, based upon her examination of Victorian
domestic cookbooks and the curry recipes in them, Susan Zlotnick claims that to
validate their domesticity, Victorian women in England attempted to neutralize the
threat of the Other by naturalizing the products of foreign lands.30 One of these
‘naturalized’ products, Zlotnick states, was curry. Thus she argues that curry was first
appropriated from India in the first half of the nineteenth century, later marketed in
India as a commodity at the end of the century.31 Zlotnick claims that curry powder was
‘fabricated’ by British colonials and that the commodification of it for British taste was
linked to the notion of eating India itself.32

Zlotnick uses curry advertisements of the time to highlight its ‘ideological function’.
She refers to bottle and tin labels of curry powders, pastes and chutneys of ‘The
Empress’ brand owned by J. Edmunds, proclaiming that ‘[t]he sun in her dominions
never sets’.33 It is more likely however that curry powder was developed by the British
to pander to the fondness for curry that the colonials had acquired in India. Returning
colonials could eat curry at the numerous coffee houses in London, many of which
featured curry on their menus. There were also those who were wealthy enough to have
brought back Indian cooks which meant they could have curry at home. Indian cooks in
England either pounded their own curry pastes or purchased a variety of curry powders
on the market. Indian cooks, ayahs and manservants were brought back by both nabobs
(wealthy Anglo-Indian businessman or retired East India Company official of the
eighteenth century) and later Anglo-Indians to work for them in England.34 Others who
craved for curry could have bought these curry powders and followed recipes in the
large number of cookbooks that included curries. I would suggest therefore that

29
The most notable cookery writer from the British Army was of course Colonel Arthur Robert Kenny-
Herbert who wrote Culinary Jottings for Madras, or a Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery
for Anglo-Indian Exiles of 1878. See also G. Tschumi, Royal Chef: Recollections of Life in Royal
Households from Queen Victoria to Queen Mary London, London, William Kimber, 1954; and Daniel
Santiagoe, an Indian cook, who published The Curry Cook’s Assistant; or Curries, How to Make Them in
England in Their Original Style in1889.
30
Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies, vol.16, no.2-3, 1996, p53.
31
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p64.
32
See Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, pp64-65, and Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, pp164-165.
33
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, pp64-65.
34
Collingham, Curry, p131.

99
merchants such as Edmunds were simply ‘cashing in’ on the idea of empire.

Narayan not only agrees with Zlotnick’s theory about the fabrication and
commercialisation of curry powder as an imperial design but acknowledges that her
observations about the links between curry, colonialism and Indian identity were
inspired by Zlotnick’s work.35 Narayan supports the idea that the fabrication of curry
powder was part of the logic of colonial commerce, ‘imposing a term that signified a
particular type of dish onto a specific mixture of spices, which then became a fixed and
familiar product’.36 Narayan supports Zlotnick’s claims that the British did not
incorporate Indian food but invented their own curry powder, similar to the way in
which ‘India itself was ingested into the empire’.37 Completely ignoring the fact that
there were two Indias under British rule, Narayan argues that,
‘India as a modern political entity was “fabricated” through the intervention of
British rule, which replaced the masala of the Moghul empire and various
kingdoms and princely states with the unitary signifier “India,” much as British
curry powder replaced local masalas’.38

While it is tempting to elevate curry as a master trope in colonial discourse a cautionary

note is required here: it is hard to imagine that the memsahib and the native servant in
poring over recipe books and stirring the curry pot on a primitive stove were
consciously having imperial designs over the hybrid dish and culturally appropriating it
for empire. Yet this is exactly what Susan Zlotnick suggests when she analyses how the
Victorians naturalized and nationalized curry.39 She notes that in the Victorian era,
curry was already part of the national cuisine; it was commonly served to guests in
homes and in cookbooks curry recipes were found among British recipes.40 Zlotnick’s
article addresses the ideological work performed by gender through the medium of
Victorian domestic cookbooks and the curry recipes in them. Domestic in focus, her
work examines ‘the tangled relationship between the potent domestic ideology and
imperialism in the first half of the nineteenth century by charting the domestication of
curry, which, in the words of the Victorian cookery expert, had become a “completely
naturalized” English food by mid-century’.41 Zlotnick states that colonialism’s

35
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p163.
36
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p164.
37
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p165.
38
Narayan, Dislocating Cultures, p165.
39
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p60.
40
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p60.
41
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p60, citing Elizabeth Hammond’s Modern Domestic Cookery,
(1851), p311.

100
 ‘desire for the other, and the fear of hybridity it unleashes, could be deactivated
through the metaphors of domestication. Middle-class women, as morally
regenerative and utterly domestic figures, could take into their homes a hybrid
like curry, the mongrelized offspring of England's union with India, and through
the ideological effect of domesticating it, erase its foreign origins and represent it
as purely English. So alongside the trope of hybridity (the self becoming Other)
we can place the trope of incorporation (taking the Other and making it self) as
one way early Victorian England imagined its relationship with India’.42

This passage reveals Zlotnick’s assumption that British middle class women, either at
home or in the colonies, formed both a monolithic and ‘utterly domestic’ group. For
example, Zlotnick assumes that all British women were middle class, and that all
women in the colonial home were British. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century
there were Eurasian and Indian women married to or in marriage-like relationships with
British men. In Malaya, it was common practice for the colonial civil servants to keep
Malayan mistresses until 1914, when the Secretary of State for the Colonies ruled
against it.43 Even then, practices often contravened policy; Somerset Maugham in a
number of his short stories, depicted the main characters (European) as having Malayan
mistresses.44 I will argue that colonists did not deliberately pick curry as the dish of
choice to domesticate in the colonial project but adopted it for its multifarious ways in
which less than perfect meat, poultry or fish could be enhanced and transformed.
Moreover, as the British Empire expanded, the ubiquitous curry dish on the Anglo-
Indian dining table evolved and mutated with other dishes and ingredients in other
colonies and settlements.

Curry in cookbooks
Increasingly, historians have taken up the study of recipe books as historical documents.
Arjun Appadurai sees contemporary Indian cookbooks as ‘literature of exile, of
nostalgia and loss’ as they are generally written by authors who live outside India.
Others are written for Indians in the diaspora and there are still others written ‘to
recollect and reconstruct the colonial idea of Indian food, and in such cases their master
trope is likely to be curry, a category of colonial origin’.45 Appadurai further asserts
that colonial cookbooks serve to capture the ‘nostalgia for the glow of empire, in which
42
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism’, p54.
43
Margaret Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya 1880-1960, London, John Murray,
2000, pp67-68. Shennan notes that with this ruling, the Secretary of State forced several officers to marry
their mistresses including Charlton Maxwell, brother of the Chief Secretary of the Federated Malay
States.
44
An example is Maugham’s The Force of Circumstance, published in 1926.
45
Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Journal of
the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, vol.30, no.1, 1988, p18.

101
recipes are largely a Proustian device’.46 Jean Duruz, in her study of food and nostalgia,
notes that ‘when traditional meanings of “home” seem most under threat, it is not
unusual to resort to comfort foods as embodiments of “homely” meanings’.47 While
cookbooks in general can be seen as prescriptive manuals and may not reflect meals
cooked, those written for and in the colonies were certainly referred to in everyday life
more frequently. Memsahibs ordered their meals for the day from the cook with the
help of these cookbooks as discussed in Chapter Two.

East India Company officials in eighteenth century India lived as nabobs or Englishmen
behaving like Indian princes – eating Indian meals, wearing comfortable loose Indian
dress at home and smoking the hookah. However, two developments from the 1800s
heralded new standards of social behaviour. First, during the first half of the nineteenth
century there was a steady increase of British women arriving to the colony. Some of
these women travelled to India to join their husbands while others hoped to find
marriage partners there. The latter group was known as the ‘fishing fleet’. The chances
of successfully finding husbands were high as the ratio of European men to European
women was about three to one.48 Improved travel technologies between Europe and
India and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 also meant that more women could
travel to India. Secondly, when India became a Crown colony in 1858, Anglo-Indians
adopted a different attitude towards the Indian population. Variously known as The
Indian Mutiny, The Indian Revolt of 1857 or The First War of Independence, the
rebellion against British rule originated in Indian unhappiness over interferences by the
British over Indian tradition and culture.49 The ensuing violence and loss of lives on
both sides hardened British feelings against the colonized Indians. Racial theories of
the time and the legitimising of British rule encouraged distance between ruler and
subjects, demonstrating British racial superiority.50 This distance took the form of
denigrating domestic servants, isolating the colonial household from the local

46
Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’, p18. ‘Proustian device’ refers to the concept developed
by Marcel Proust in which he refers to the ‘involuntary memory’ of recalling the past without conscious
effort.
47
Jean Duruz, ‘Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering’, Gastronomica, vol.4, no.1, 2004, p57.
48
Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in
India, New York, Random House, 2007, pp3-4.
49
See Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, Penguin, 2004, pp145-
153; and Michael Edwardes, British India: 1772-1947, A Survey of the Nature and Effects of Alien Rule,
New Delhi, Rupa & Co., 2006, pp149-152.
50
For a discussion on the era of the nabobs in British India, see Michael Edwardes, The Sahibs and the
Lotus: The British in India, London, Constable, 1988, ‘Nabobs and nautches’, pp42-52. For a discussion
on Anglo-Indians in consuming fewer Indian meals than nabobs, see Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings
for Madras, p1.

102
population through adopting the bungalow as a housing style and removing the
household for long periods of time to the hill stations.51 Nabobs in the days of the East
India Company were said to have consumed substantially more Indian or Indian-
influenced dishes than Anglo-Indians. In his 30-chapter treatise on Madras cuisine for
the Anglo-Indian, A.R. Kenny-Herbert bemoaned that ‘our dinners of to-day would
indeed astonish our Anglo-Indian forefathers’; noting that the tendency then was a
preference for light wines and ‘a desire for delicate and artistic cookery’. By all
accounts Anglo-Indians continued to consume local dishes on a daily basis and Kenny-
Herbert himself stated that although curry or mulligatunny were ‘very frequently given
at breakfast or luncheon’, they no longer featured in the ‘dinner menu of
establishments’.52 One could suggest that the reason why curry and mulligatunny were
not served in the more formal venues then was British effort to present a more British
presence in dining establishments. Other cookery authors agreed that Anglo-Indians
and other British colonials did consume local foods, particularly curry, on a daily basis.
Angela C. Spry, author of a cookbook for memsahibs, stated in 1894 that ‘[C]urry is
eaten in almost every household at least once daily, generally at breakfast or Bari
Hazri’; she went on to advise that every memsahib should supervise the making of the
daily curry.53 Another author, ‘GLR’, in his or her ‘economical’ cookery book for India
wrote in 1920 that ‘curries form an important part of an Anglo-Indian breakfast, I have
compiled them separately, so that the housewife will find no difficulty in the choice of
one for breakfast’.54 Writing in the same vein for the Malayan market, J. Hubbard
wrote in 1930 that, in Malaya, ‘the preparation of rice and curry is an important branch
of cookery, though unfortunately much neglected, as a result of which many of the old
tasty curries are forgotten or totally unknown to most of the present generation’.55

Curry as a tool and symbol of thrift and nutrition

Prior to the 1850s there was some resistance in Britain to curry, as it was viewed as a
stew for the lower classes.56 It was only when the middle classes had developed into a
powerful social and economic grouping in the 1850s that curry became familiar in
British homes.57 In time curry became the dish that helped to stretch meals, which fitted

51
For a study on ideas of difference and of separation, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp177-178.
52
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras, pp1-2.
53
Angela C. Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, 1894, p60.
54
G.L.R., The Economical Cookery Book, p212.
55
J. Hubbard, The Malayan Cookery Book, Singapore, Rickard Limited, 1930, p62.
56
Collingham, Curry, p138.
57
Collingham, Curry, p138.

103
in with Victorian ideal of the woman of thrift. As Collingham has convincingly argued,
the domestic ideology of the middle-classes elevated thrift into a mark of respectability
by celebrating the virtuous housewife. Collingham observes that curries became ‘an
excellent way of using up cold meat’.58 Importantly, Collingham also notes that
Isabella Beeton’s most famous recipe book of the era placed all the beef and chicken
curries under the ‘cold meat cookery’ category and not in the foreign cookery section.
Collingham notes the irony of how most British consumers of curries were unaware that
the consumption of leftovers was taboo among the majority of Hindus.59 Kate
Colquhoun agrees that rehashing leftover meals was seen as a sign of frugality and
curries became one way of using up yesterday’s dinner.60 Similarly, Zlotnick argues
along the same lines that, as figures of domesticity, British women ‘helped incorporate
Indian food into the national diet and India into the British Empire; and this process of
incorporation remains etched on the pages of the domestic cookery books written by
middle-class women like E Acton and I Beeton’.61 Thus, Indian food, and more
specifically, curry, though first consumed in colonial India soon became familiar in
British homes and cookery books.

Just as curries were seen as an economical way of stretching family meals in Britain,
this was even more essential in India, as quality meat and poultry were in short supply.
But there were other compelling reasons for the popularity of curry, one of which was
that, as servants were responsible for cooking in the colonial household, curry was one
dish that needed no supervision from the memsahib. The following cookbook writers
clearly demonstrate that curry was cooked in many ways to bring variety to meals, to
stretch meals and to improve meat and poultry in the colonies and not for any particular
imperial design. ‘J.H.’, author of a cookbook using tested recipes collected ‘during 23
years’ residence in India’, stated that the popular vegetable curry soup of the time was
made from the vegetable curry left from breakfast. Writing in 1902, J.H. advised
placing ‘what curry remains into the stock, oil well together, rub it through a coarse
sieve and serve’.62 The curried soup recipe in Marie de Joncourt’s Wholesome Cookery
was simple: she instructed to toss in some curry powder with onion fried in butter, add

58
Collingham, Curry, p138.
59
Collingham, Curry, p138.
60
Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain through Its Cooking, London, Bloomsbury, 2007, p216.
Colquhoun notes that turmeric, ginger, stock, cream and sometimes lemon juice formed part of the curry
spices.
61
Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating imperialism’, p65.
62
J.H., Household Cookery. Tested Recipes Collected During 23 Years’ Residence in India, Allahabad,
Pioneer Press, 1902, p2.

104
liquid, strain and add in cooked rice.63 E.G. Bradley’s household book for ‘tropical
colonies’ contained culinary advice aimed at helping the bachelor ‘district officer,
missionary, farmer, mining engineer, tinker, tailor, soldier’; wives – ‘especially
beginners’; and ‘bachelor girls’; suggesting that any left-over beef, mutton, pork,
chicken, game, fish (fresh or tinned) could be curried. He went further to say that if the
‘meat or fish is not very promising, prolonged cooking in a thick hot, dry curry sauce
will do wonders for it’.64 Another work that supported this view was R. Riddell’s
comprehensive cookery book of 1849, which promised wholesome cookery with
‘Oriental’ and English recipes, for families, messes and private individuals. Riddell
declared that ‘in fact a curry may be made of almost anything,’ the key ingredients
being the quality of the spices. He suggested that when prepared ‘in an artistical
manner, and mixed in due proportions, [curries] form a savoury and nourishing repast,
tempting to the organs of scent and taste’.65

Nupur Chaudhuri contends that curry was adopted by Britons not only for economy but
also for its nutritious values. She states that curry was seen as useful for adding to
leftover meats and fish curries were seen as a health food.66 Certainly that was a
popular notion promoted in nineteenth century cookery books. In his introduction to a
book by a native servant on curries John Loudon Shand asked rhetorically why ‘East
Indians’ lived so long. The answer, he stated, was that because ‘so many of them are
Curry eaters’. He continued, ‘all human nature requires to be occasionally stimulated,
and a mild curry acts upon the torpid liver, reacts upon the digestive organs, and
provides the necessary stimulant without injurious consequences’.67 Harvey Day, who
wrote several recipe books devoted entirely to curry was of a similar mind, stating that
the pungency of curries aided perspiration, one of nature’s ways of cooling the body and
at the same time ridding it of toxins.68 He declared that in a curry,
‘[e]very spice used in their making is a preservative. All have some antiseptic

63
Marie De Joncourt, Wholesome Cookery, London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885, p26.
64
E.G. Bradley, A Household Book for Tropical Colonies, London, Oxford University Press, 1948, p68.
65
R. Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book; Comprising Numerous Directions for Plain
Wholesome Cookery, Both Oriental and English; with Much Miscellaneous Matter Answering for All
General Purposes of Reference Connected with Household Affairs, Likely to Be Immediately Required by
Families, Messes, and Private Individuals, Residing at the Presidencies or Outstations, Bombay, printed
at the “Gentleman’s Gazette” Press, 1849, pp304-305.
66
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, pp240-241.
67
Daniel Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant; or Curries, How to Make Them in England in Their
Original Style, London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889, px. Santiagoe’s book is rare in that it was
written by a servant, it contained not only recipes but also his opinions on the food practices of Anglo-
Indians, see more discussion on his master-servant relationship in Chapter Four of this thesis.
68
Harvey Day, Curries of India, London, Kaye & Ward Ltd., 1969, p8.

105
 value and many are carminatives: that is, they tend to reduce flatulence, as do dill
and caraway, which are so innocuous that they are given to babies. The paprika
and chilli families are extremely rich in vitamin C, an anti-scorbutic vitamin,
which is good for the skin. This may be one reason why so many Indian women
have such remarkably clear skins’.69

Day went on to list the health benefits as they were then understood of each ingredient
used in a curry spice mixture. He noted that ginger had long been used as a medicine by
both the Chinese and Indian people, and had been mentioned in Chinese medical books,
in Sanskrit literature and the Talmud. He alluded to the aphrodisiacal qualities of ginger
which had been highly regarded by Henry VIII. Turmeric, according to Day was
widely used ‘in the East for skin diseases, healing bruises, leech-bites and as a
carminative’. Calling garlic and onions ‘Nature’s medicines’, Day declared these two
ingredients to be blood cleansers, containing vitamins B, C and D, and noted that in the
First World War, distilled onion juice was given in blood transfusions. Day added that
clove, cinnamon and coriander were powerful antiseptics and went on to state that
nutmeg had properties that aided digestive problems as well as curing insomnia. Hay
stated that black pepper helped to bring fever down while aniseed was eaten to promote
appetite and as a cough cure. He also asserted the potency of fennel but did not state for
what ailment.70

The appropriation of curry by the British

By the eighteenth century the British in India and the other colonies had become so
enamoured with curry, they began currying all manner of animal flesh, including
sheep’s head, rabbit and calf’s foot. There were curry connoisseurs, each with an expert
opinion on what constituted the best curry. There was also rivalry over which
presidency, colony or region cooked the finest curry.71 The different ingredients used
also highlighted the diverse range of curries cooked in the different regions. For
example, a Madras curry was quite distinct from a Malay curry. For the latter,
coriander and cumin were not used but coconut milk and lemon grass were added.72

69
Day, Curries of India, p9.
70
Day, Curries of India, pp9-12.
71
See rivalry over the finest or hottest curry in: Day, Curries of India, p7; John Cameron, Our Tropical
Possessions in Malayan India, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1965, p300; and Jean Chitty (ed),
Anna Chitty – Musings of a Memsahib: 1921-1933, Hants, Belhaven, 1988, p56.
72
See Denning, Margaret B., Dainty Cookery for the Home: The Triple Cookery Book containing
English, American and Indian Dishes, Madras, M.E. Publishing House, 1899, p117; and G.L.R., The
Economical Cookery Book, p226.

106
Martha Careful’s manual on household hints to ‘young housewives’ of 1853 advised
that ‘any meat that is well impregnated with the curry powder is designated a curry;
white meats are usually selected; fowl, rabbit, turkey, veal, &c.’.73 Careful also
suggested that the jointed cuts could be stewed in a gravy and, when nearly done, curry
powder mixed with flour, butter and cream added to the stew.74 In other recipes, a
dusting of curry powder on or added to a substantial dish was sufficient to call it a curry
dish. For example, Mrs John Gilpin’s recipe for curried sheep’s head suggested
sprinkling a tablespoonful of curry powder to diced portions of a sheep’s head.75
Another dish that made use of the obligatory tablespoonful of curry powder was a
breakfast dish called curry balls which consisted of cooking rice with curry powder,
salt, sugar, chopped apple and onion. The cooked rice mixture was then rolled into
balls with minced meat, parsley and egg, rolled in flour with a little curry powder and
fried or baked.76

E.G. Bradley in his household manual for the colonies, gave a recipe for the ‘ordinary
household curry’ typifying the quintessential British colonial curry that was eaten all
over the colonies and is still popular today among ex-colonizers.77 It uses a mish-mash
of ingredients – fresh or left over chicken, fish, prawn, beef, mutton or any other meat
or seafood; the essential tablespoon of commercial curry powder and dried fruit or fruit
relish that gives it the unmistakable sweet taste of the colonial curry. The tablespoon of
curry powder is the mixture of spices that distinguishes curry from any other stew or
casserole. Turmeric, a brilliant yellow root vegetable gives curry its distinctive golden
colour; chillies are another ingredient that contribute to the uniqueness of curry – their
spicy hot flavour is adjusted according to one’s threshold for hot food. The typical
colonial curry, however, is mild. The foundation of this curry is the gravy, based on the
roux sauce method. Bradley’s recipe was typical of the type of curry that was cooked
by servants for colonial households in India, Malaysia and Singapore. Onions and
raisins were first fried in fat, a tablespoonful each of flour and curry powder were then
added and stirred until absorbed. Water or stock was poured in; then left over meat or
chicken was added and cooked for more than an hour. Then more raisins, chutney, even

73
Martha Careful, Household Hints to Young Housewives with the Arrangements and Receipts for Forty
Dinners, &C., London, Dean and Son, 1853, p80.
74
Careful, Household Hints to Young Housewives, p80.
75
(Mrs) John Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, Bombay, A.J. Combridge & Co., 1914, p40.
76
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, pp147-148.
77
The majority of the responses to my questionnaire indicate that they remembered the curries they ate in
the colonial era as being delicious and they profess to continue eating them today.

107
jam or sweet pickle and a teaspoon of Worcester sauce were stirred in. Finally, when
dished up, desiccated coconut or chopped hard-boiled egg was added. 78

Sir John Cotton, who served as a political officer in India between 1930 and 1946,
commented in his private papers on food availability. In many of the Indian states beef
consumption was forbidden by the local Indian ruler so that he and his wife had to fall
back on ‘very tough’ mutton, goat or chicken.79 Equally, where beef eating was
allowed in non-Hindu communities, the beef was tough. Lady Cotton wrote that the
tough meat or scraggy chicken were usually curried to make them tasty.80 An Anglican
missionary in North Borneo, Cyril Alliston complained about the tough buffalo meat
cooked to a leather texture by his cook and stated that as imported meat was expensive
it was eaten occasionally, on a Sunday, ‘instead of the immensely popular Sunday curry
tiffin’.81 The following incident related by Alliston, illustrates that the tendency to
curry less than ideal foods was picked up by local servants. He described how once,
when the Sunday joint was hauled away and torn apart by four or five dogs, his Chinese
cook, Ah Kiew, suggested he would ‘bikin cully’ (make curry) of the mangled meat.82
These anecdotes suggest curry as a way to make meat palatable so that the British did
not have to subsist on poverty food, supporting British elite behaviour but using Indian
techniques (in ways not approved by Indians for food purity reasons).

The fact that curry was eaten at least once daily according to many accounts, contradicts
the notion that colonizers only ate British meals. Curry was usually eaten at breakfast,
according to ‘A.C.S.’, author of a recipe book and household manual for Anglo-Indian
women in 1894.83 In Singapore, curry was even more ubiquitous, consumed at every
meal, as recounted by John Cameron, editor of the Straits Times in 1865.84 He asserted
that curry made its appearance three times a day, starting with breakfast, with ‘[a] little
fish, some curry and rice, and perhaps a couple of eggs, washed down with a tumbler or

78
Bradley, A Household Book for Tropical Colonies, p69.
79
John Sir Cotton’s manuscript, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, OA1/18/1-61,
1930-1946, Political Officer, IPS, transcript 68pp 5 September 1973-1015-1330H58X. When Sir John
retired in 1947 he was ‘the sixth generation in an un-broken male line who had served either the East
India Company prior to 1857 or subsequently in the Indian Civil Service’. Sir John and his wife used to
go to Mount Arble to shoot for variety in their diet. They were fond of ‘a type of Indian jungle fowl
which made extremely good eating and which our friends were always very glad to partake of’.
80
Cotton’s manuscript, SOAS manuscript, OA1/18/1-61.
81
Cyril Alliston, In the Shadow of Kinabalu, London, The Adventurers Club, 1963, p35.
82
Alliston, In the Shadow of Kinabalu, p35.
83
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p.60.
84
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, pp287-300. The first edition was published in 1865 by Smith,
Elder and Co. in London.

108
so of good claret,’ forming ‘a very fair foundation on which to begin the labours of the
day.’85 Tiffin comprised ‘a plate of curry and rice and some fruit or it may be a simple
biscuit with a glass of beer or claret’.86 An everyday dinner in Singapore was a sizeable
repast and was comparable to a special occasion dinner in Britain: starting with soup,
then the ‘substantials’ of roast beef or mutton, turkey or capon, accompanied by side
dishes of tongue, fowl, cutlets and a variety of vegetables. This course was followed by
two or more different kinds of curry, rice and accompaniments of all manner of sambals
(a spicy mixture served as a side dish) or native pickles and spices’.87 Curry was even
jellied, served probably either as a starter or a savoury at the colonial dining table.88

The British had a penchant for giving French names to home-grown dishes. This can be
seen as an effort to add prestige and sophistication to a menu. Formal dinners at
Government House and European hotels in the colonies almost always featured menus
in French. Curry dishes did not escape this practice, further demonstrating that the
British, having appropriated curry as part of their culinary repertoire, went one step
further and formally legitimised it, by giving the different curries French names.89 This
was a deliberate attempt to elevate Indian food, particularly curry, to a high culinary art.
Nancy Lake’s book, published in the 1930s in Britain, instructed on how to order dinner
and give the dishes their French names, as she believed that cooks ‘are not generally
gifted with fertile imaginations’.90 Further, she viewed that ‘the French of cookery is a
language of itself, and those who are not learned in it are often entirely at a loss when
suddenly called on to write out a correct French menu with no other assistance than that
of a dictionary’.91 She assisted her readers by giving French names to the following
Indian dishes. Kabobs à l’Indienne are pieces of curried mutton on skewers with small

85
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p295.
86
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p297.
87
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p300.
88
Grace Johnson, An Anglo-Indian and Oriental Cookery, London, W.H. Allen & Co., Ltd., 1893.
There are 12 pages of advertisements of by Armour & Co. Among the advertisements at the back of
the 1893 recipe book, was a recipe for ‘Currie Jellie’. It consisted of boiling together fried garlic,
onions and cloves, a tablespoon of curry powder, a teaspoon of tomato pulp, a teaspoon of beef
extract, gelatine and a pint of water. Salt and lemon juice was added and poured into a mould.
89
From the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it was fashionable to adopt French cookery and
employing French names for dishes on menus indicated sophistication. See John Burnett, Plenty &
Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day, London, Scolar Press, 1979,
pp82-85, and Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food,
London, Faber and Faber, 2005, p18.
90
Nancy Lake, Menus Made Easy, or, How to Order Dinner and Give the Dishes Their French Names,
Melbourne, E.W. Cole. This 25th edition does not give a publication year but one edition traced was
published in 1939 by Frederick Warne.
91
Lake, Menus Made Easy, p9.

109
whole onions and slices of tomatoes, served with rice and curry sauce.92 Poulet en kari
is chicken curry served with rice; when garnished with small heaps of grated coconut
and sultanas it is à la Simla.93 Pilau de veau à la Madras is veal dressed with curried
rice, spice and raisins and garnished with rolls of fried bacon.94 Kari de boeuf or Boeuf
à l’Indienne is curried beef, and when garnished with olives and gherkins it becomes à
l’Orient.95

Curry connoisseurs: owners and judges of curry

From the days of the East India Company, curry as a dish had become familiar, known,
and even ubiquitous to the British across the colonies and colonizers began to view the
dish as their own. British merchants and army officers had enthusiastically consumed
Indian food, and curry in particular. When A.R. Kenney-Herbert arrived in India to join
the Indian Army as a nineteen-year old in 1859, he was invited to tiffin parties where
‘eight or nine varieties of curries’ were included. Twenty years later Kenney-Herbert
wrote the best-selling Culinary Jottings for Madras and attributed the fine curries of the
pre-Raj era to the memsahibs in the 1840s who took special care in supervising their
servants in curry making. He devoted a whole chapter to ‘Our Curries’ and the next
‘Curries – continued, and Mulligatunny’.96 Kenney-Herbert complained that
memsahibs in the 1870s were slack in this regard as they ‘have ceased to be cumbered
about this particular branch of their cook’s work’.97 The ‘alleged decay of the curry-
making knack’, according to Kenney-Herbert, was the ‘want of care in the preparation
of powders and pastes, and the loss of recipes’.98 Still, Kenney-Herbert observed that in
the 1870s ‘curries now-a-days are only licensed to be eaten at break-fast, at luncheon,
and perhaps at the little home dinner, when they may, for a change, occasionally form
the pièce de résistance of that cosy meal’.99 In Britain, curry made its way into its
culinary consciousness when returning East India Company employees brought home
Indian cooks and Indian restaurants. Curries were served at the Coffee House on the
Haymarket, London, from 1773 and the customers at the Jerusalem Coffee House in
Cornhill were East India Company merchants and officials.100 In 1811, Sake Dean

92
Lake, Menus Made Easy, p76.
93
Lake, Menus Made Easy, p90.
94
Lake, Menus Made Easy, p63.
95
Lake, Menus Made Easy, p55.
96
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, pp285-313.
97
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p286.
98
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p286.
99
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, pp286-287.
100
Collingham, Curry, pp130-131.

110
Mahomed established the first curry house in Britain, the Hindostanee Coffee House,
near Portman Square, London.101 Nothing signals knowledge of a product or service
better than declaring ownership and critiquing it. Thus, there was no shortage of
opinions on what made a good curry and accounting for taste in the colonial era. These
discourses of expertise and taste are part of the British appropriation of curry –
familiarity with, the ability to judge curry, even associating it with British, supposedly
masculine traits, such as stamina. As befitting a dish that was both exotic and familiar,
curry attracted its own legends of what constituted a good curry. One of these was that
when the human body perspired from heat, the whole forehead dripped with sweat,
while the curry eater always sweated just above the eyes and across the top of the
nose.102 Harvey Day recalled meeting an English guest at the Indian Gymkhana at
Osterley in Middlesex, England in the 1950s who, on being served a curry, declared it
to be ‘very tasty, but of course, this is not the real stuff. I had some curry in Bombay in
[19]42 which was so hot that it well nigh took the skin off my tongue. That was real
curry’.103 It seems that the individual or group first appropriated curry and then
declared sole ownership of it, insisting there was only one way of making the ideal
curry. While it was acknowledged that curry had become a dish known and loved by
the British, colonizers were fiercely possessive about their version of it as consumed by
their own community. Colonials were in the habit of comparing the authenticity and
quality of curries across the colonies. In Singapore, Cameron, writing in 1865,
commented proprietarily on the curries there, stating that ‘though Madras and Calcutta
have been long famed for the quality of their curries, I nevertheless think that those of
the Straits exceed any of them in excellence.’104 Wendy Suart, who spent four years in
British North Borneo from 1949, agrees: ‘a Malay curry to my mind is far superior to
Indian! It has fragrance, flavour and is not just hot. It is thickened with peanuts and
coconut milk and is not watery’.105 Author Martha Careful insisted that curry ‘is always
garnished with an edging of rice’.106

Often, when a social practice becomes popular or ubiquitous it invites much discussion
in the public arena. ‘G.V.’, writing in 1862, was among the burgeoning cohort of

101
Collingham, Curry, p129.
102
Chitty, Anna Chitty, p56.
103
Day, Curries of India, p7. Founded in 1916, The Indian Gymkhana Club is the oldest Asian sports
club in the United Kingdom and still operates today in Osterley, Middlesex.
104
Cameron, Our Tropical Possessions, p300.
105
Questionnaire response by Wendy Suart.
106
Careful, Household Hints to Young Housewives, p80.

111
cookery writers who not only helped popularise curries in the colonies but laid down
pedantic rules on how they should be cooked. While curries were seen as an economic
way of using up leftover food, he or she advised caution on the use of ingredients. He
stated that ‘it is silly to suppose that any kind of meat will do for a curry; it is only the
impostor dinner-giver that thinks so; a rabbit should not be used, it is in some seasons as
strong in smell as a cat’.107 The author advised that white meats like chicken, pork and
breast of veal were the best for curries. Further he stated that it was a mistake to boil
the meat with the curry powder as the ingredients were ‘extremely volatile, and fly off’.
Instead, he suggested that ten minutes before serving, the gravy should be poured out
and mixed with two tablespoons of curry powder and a tablespoon of arrowroot. The
mixture should be mixed well and added back to the curry pot and simmered. G.V. also
suggested adding in the juice of half a lemon and a tablespoon of chutney.108

The Madras Club, open only to men, was reputed to have a curry so hot that even iced
lemon barley water could not cool off the eater.109 Indeed, Harvey Day claimed that a
‘Madras curry may make a person unused to it imagine that his mouth is on fire; but
curries elsewhere can be extremely mild and cause discomfort to none’.110 Henrietta A.
Hervey’s 1895 Anglo-Indian curry cook book also praised Madras as ‘par excellence,
the home of curry and rice, and where the ingredients are produced and blended to
perfection. There is an on dit down there that when the Prince of Wales was on his
Indian tour he was actuated into wishing to visit Madras solely by a desire of tasting a
Madras prawn curry at our famous club’.111 Residents of Calcutta thought that their
prawn curry was also exceptional. As Rummer Godden wrote in 1929, ‘Sunday lunches
were usually prawn curry – Calcutta's prawns were delectable’.112

The commercialisation of curry powders

Curry powder, the spicy mixture that transformed leftover meals or added new
dimensions to meat or poultry, was a distinct colonial invention. It was yet another way
in which the British appropriated curry; they gathered the types of spices required for a

107
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties or the Absurdities of Artificial Life, London, Chapman and Hall,
1862, p74. This is the second edition, published in February 1862, the first being January of the same
year.
108
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties, pp74-75.
109
Chitty, Anna Chitty, p56.
110
Day, Curries of India, p7.
111
Henrietta A. Hervey, Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home: A Short Treatise for Returned Exiles, London,
Horace Cox, 1895, p2.
112
Laura Sykes, Calcutta through British Eyes, 1690-1990, Madras, Oxford University Press, 1992, p44.

112
curry, configured the proportions according to their ideals of a curry and called it their
own. Irrespective of the rationale for the manufacture of curry powder, it is
indisputable that this commodity effectively defined the curry eaten solely by the
colonizers. While its ingredients were familiar to the servants who cooked the curries
for the colonial family, the manufacturing and commodification of it had rendered curry
powder less authentic and potent in the eyes of the indigenous populations. These
servants would not have used generic curry powders for their own families and
continued to pound their own different pastes for different dishes.

The processing of mixed spiced powders or ‘kitchen pepper’ in Britain dates back to the
seventeenth century. A recipe of 1682 prescribed two ounces of ginger and an ounce
each of powdered pepper, cloves, nutmegs and cinnamon, ‘mingled with a further
pound of pepper’.113 While these early mixed spice powders may not closely resemble
the curry powders of the Anglo-Indian variety, it seems likely that these were the
forerunners of curry powder. Ready-mixed curry powders spread widely from the 1780s
in Britain and were included in cookery books from this period.114 These spice
mixtures were more potent than the spice powders of the early 1700s, when the highly
regarded mace and nutmeg provided a subtler flavour.115 Although chilli was not in the
early mixed spice powder recipes, pepper and ginger provided heat. However, chilli
was not an unknown ingredient then as chilli peppers had made their way to London
and Antwerp via Lisbon and Seville by the 1540s.116 To make curry, returned East
India Company employees to Britain bought their curry spices – coriander and cumin
seeds, cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks – from their local chemist. For example,
G.V., in his book, on dinners and dinner parties published in 1862, recommended
buying curry powder from the chemists, Hanburys, at Plough Court Lombard Street.117
The popularity of curry went further afield when, as at the 1889 Universal Paris
Exhibition, the composition of curry powder was set by decree: 34g tamarind, 44g

113
C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to Recent Times, London, Constable,
1973, p294. Wilson states that coriander seeds found by archaelogists on the floor of a late Bronze hut in
Kent represents earliest record of a spice from the Mediterranean.
114
Colquhoun, Taste, p216. See also Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, p294.
115
Colquhoun, Taste, p216.
116
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, pp52-54. Collingham states that while it is unclear when the Portuguese brought chilli
pepper to India but by 1528, there were three different types of chilli plant growing in Goa.
117
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties, p107.

113
onions, 20g coriander, 5g chilli pepper, 3g turmeric, 2g cumin, 3g fenugreek, 2g pepper
and 2g mustard.118

Curry and rice was cooked in the royal kitchens of Queen Victoria by two Indian cooks,
‘whose sole duty was to prepare the curry that was served each day at luncheon whether
the guests partook of it or not’.119 G. Tschumi, a palace chef, described these details in
his Royal Chef: Recollections of Life in Royal Households from Queen Victoria to
Queen Mary London, published in 1954. Tschumi’s memoir recounted that the Indian
cooks refused to use the standard issue curry powder in the kitchen (although ‘it was of
the best imported kind’, according to Tschumi) and special premises were allocated for
the cooks to grind their own spices between two large round stones.120 Thus even in the
kitchen of the highest echelon of British society curry was contested and debated.

Just as the British had appropriated curry to form part of the colonial cuisine, their
manufacture of curry powder generated opinions and debate on the ideal curry powder.
G.V. wrote that ‘Indian curry powder is mostly compounded by Jews, and of the worst
materials, and when brought to England has lost its flavour and not worth using, and if
much eaten will cause paralysis’.121 He suggested sealing bought curry powder in six or
eight small bottles and keeping away from light in order to preserve its colour and
quality.122 An Indian cook brought to England by John Loudon Shand was not so
dismissive of curry powders, declaring that the best curry powder was made of
coriander seed, saffron, dry chillies, cumin seed, mustard seed and pepper corns.123
Henrietta Hervey, author of a cookbook for Anglo-Indians in Britain, found Crosse and
Blackwell’s ‘the nearest approach to the real article in the way of curry powder’.124
Although she advised that curry powder and paste were best bought from Messrs.
Spencer and Co., or Messrs. Oakes and Co., both of Mount Road, Madras, Hervey also
gave recipes for Bombay curry powder, Bengal curry powder and Madras curry powder

118
The Concise Larousse Gastronomique: The World’s Greatest Cookery Encyclopedia, London,
Hamlyn, 1998, p409.
119
Tschumi, Royal Chef, p195.
120
Tschumi, Royal Chef, p201.
121
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties, p107.
122
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties, p107. G.V. recommended the curry powder should consist of 12
ounces of turmeric, 4 ounces of dry ginger, 4 ounces of white pepper, 4 ounces of coriander seed, 1 ounce
and a half of cayenne, 2 ounces of cardamom seed, 2 ounces of cummin seed and 1 ounce of fenugreek
seed.
123
Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant, pxii. Santiagoe noted that for a sour taste in curry the Tamils
added tamarind while the Singalese used a sour fruit, Corakka and lime juice.
124
Hervey, Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home, p2. Hervey’s cookbook contained recipes for 15 curries.

114
and paste.125

Curry and servants

While the British had embraced curry as a daily staple as well as other local dishes, the
cooking of these, and indeed all their meals, were left to the servants as ‘virtually no
one in the Anglo-Indian community cooked’.126 Curry as the defining dish of the
colonial cuisine was concocted daily in the colonial kitchen by native servants who
were seen as dirty, unreliable and dishonest. It is highly probable that if servants were
not responsible for cooking for the colonizers, then curry would not have emerged as
such a significant dish from the colonial era. Until the 1870s, little attempt was made to
introduce European food into British homes in India.127 Nicola Humble states that,
instead, ‘Indian cooks tended to be left to their own devices and produced a series of
curries’.128 She adds that the British passed around recipes of dishes they particularly
enjoyed, in both India and Britain, and in the process, these dishes became altered and
modified. As an example of this process, she cites ‘the development of kedgeree from a
vegetarian dish of rice and lentils to one containing smoked fish and eggs’.129

British writers of cookery books and household manuals in the colonial era seemed to
overlook the irony of teaching Indian servants how to cook curry. Two diverging views
emerge from these manuals: first, that the native servant could not be trusted with a
sophisticated palette for the authentic taste of curry; and, secondly, that he or she was
not honest enough to use all the necessary spices for a curry. In her cookery book
specifically written for memsahibs, A.C.S. lamented that the cooking of curry was often
left entirely to the cook or khansamah (head servant) ‘with the result that a very
tasteless compound is served,’ stating that the servant would have left out vital
ingredients while still charging his mistress for them. A.C.S. declared, ‘I would
strongly advise every “memsaheb” to superintendent [sic] the making of the daily curry.
If she cannot spare the time to watch the whole process or prepare the same herself on
an oil cooking stove, let her cook or khansamah show her all the necessary condiments,

125
Hervey, Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home, p2.
126
Mary Procida, ‘Feeding the Imperial Appetite’, p127. Procida states that Anglo-Indian women from
the middle and upper-middle classes always had their meals prepared by a cook. She states that lower
class British women in India – mainly wives of soldiers in the British Army were perhaps the only
women who cooked for their families. It is worth noting that this class division of labour has similar
parallels to British women at the time.
127
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.
128
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.
129
Humble, Culinary Pleasures, p19.

115
which should be brought to her neatly arranged and pounded on a plate’.130 She added
that rice was always eaten with curries and conceded however that the ‘natives prepare
it to perfection, so that no remarks are necessary’.131 It is unclear whether Elizabeth
Garrett was untrusting of her cook’s taste or honesty when she wrote that, with ‘curries,
it is better to make your own powder, giving it out when required, than to trust to your
cook’s taste in the matter’.132 Margaret MacMillan highlights the irony that although
few memsahibs knew it, Indian women thought the former were shockingly lax for
buying their flour and their spices ready-ground as the good Indian housekeeper always
ground her own.133

The Sunday curry tiffin: a colonial institution

Not only did curry become a signature dish on the colonial menu it also developed into
the centrepiece of a uniquely colonial meal of its own, known as the ‘Indian tiffin’ on
the subcontinent or simply the ‘Sunday tiffin’ in Borneo, Malaya and Singapore.
Hobson Jobson suggests several versions of the origin of ‘tiffin’, ranging from the verb,
to tiff – to take luncheon or the 1785 definition of eating or drinking out of meal
times.134 The British in India referred to ‘tiffin’ as a light lunch and the Sunday tiffin
was ‘an occasion for over-indulgence, with mulligatawny soup (always), curry and rice,
roast beef and Yorkshire pudding washed down with a bottle of iced beer, and tapioca
pudding’.135 Food writer, Chitrita Banerji recalled in 2007 the tiffin of her childhood as
‘a snack-like meal usually taken at midday’ and attributes this meal to the Anglo-Indian
presence.136 Today, tiffinwallahs, also known as dabbawalas, meaning lunchbox men,
are a group of five thousand Indians in Mumbai who deliver about 175,000 lunches
daily from homes to offices and schools, using the local train network.137 There are
different accounts of the first tiffin delivery, one being that it was delivered to a Briton,

130
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p60.
131
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, p61.
132
Garrett, Morning Hours in India, p13. Garrett’s recipe for curry powder on page 13 reads: 6 chittacks
of turmeric, 2 chittacks of dry ginger, 2 chittacks of white pepper, 2 chittacks of coriander seed, 1 chittack
of red pepper, 1 chittack of cardamom seeds, ½ chittack of feungreek seeds.
133
MacMillan, Women of the Raj, p163.
134
Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, pp919-920. In India today tiffin refers to the millions of meals
delivered to office workers in the cities at lunchtime by men on bicycles known as tiffin wallahs or
dabbawallah.
135
Burton, The Raj at Table, p90.
136
Chitrita Banerji, Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices, New Delhi
Penguin Books, 2007, p102.
137
Gauri Sanjeev Pathak, Bridging the Home and the World: Iconic Representation and the Negotiation
of Cultural Brand Value in the Dabbawalas of Mumbai, Unpublished Thesis, National University of
Singapore, 2008, p97.

116
another to a Parsi.138 Mumbai office workers and school children have their home-
cooked lunches delivered this way as the city is seen not to have wholesome and
reasonably-priced meals. Another reason is religious dietary restrictions and health
concerns.139

The Great Eastern Hotel in colonial Calcutta served a tiffin of ‘steak or chop, bread and
vegetables’ for one rupee to its Anglo-Indian clients.140 However, in Malaya, Singapore
and the Borneo states, the magnificent ‘curry tiffin’ on a Sunday afternoon was a
colonial institution. Responses to the questionnaire that I sent out to ex-colonials who
had lived and worked in Malaya and Singapore now residing in various parts of the
world all indicated that curry tiffin was a Sunday occurrence that was much looked
forward to.141 Invariably the curry tiffin was a relaxed lunch held in private homes, a
chance for friends and work associates to socialise. The verandah was a favourite part
of the house to have the tiffin.142 The party sat around a large table and food was passed
around, or, servants were there to pass the dishes around. The curry tiffin in Malaysia
and Singapore is similar to the Dutch colonial rijsttafel (or ‘rice table’) from the Indies,
where numerous dishes are laid out buffet-style with the rice dish as the main dish.
However in an account by Aldous Huxley on his travel to Java in the 1920s he
described a rice table served in a hotel where individual dishes were presented by a long
line of waiters, each offering a dish for the guest’s plate.143 There is conjecture that the
curry tiffin evolved from the rijsttafel as Indonesian cooks were recruited to work for
British colonizers in Malaysia and Singapore.144 Indeed, Tony Lamb, one of the last
technical officers (in agriculture) to be recruited by the Colonial Government in North
Borneo, stated that the curries prepared by his cooks were of the Javanese style.145
David Burton argues that the practice of placing all the dishes on the table was an
Indian and Southeast Asian custom as the diner could pick and choose whatever took

138
Pathak, Bridging the Home and the World, p87
139
Pathak, Bridging the Home and the World, p87.
140
Banerji, Eating India, p102.
141
See Appendix A for questionnaire.
142
Questionnaire response by 89-year old Tina Rimmer (nee Mary Christina Lewin), 4 January 2007. Mrs
Rimmer was employed by the education department in British North Borneo colonial government.
143
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, London, Chatto and Windus, 1936, pp184-
185.
144
For a discussion on the rijsttafel in the Indies, see Susie Protschky, 'The Colonial Table: Food, Culture
and Dutch Identity in Colonial Indonesia', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol.54, no.3, 2008,
p350-352; http://www.sriowen.com/rijsttafel-to-go/; Julian Davison (in his questionnaire response)
agrees with others that the curry tiffin of Singapore and Malaysia must have originated from the
Indonesian rijjstafel.
145
Author’s interview with Tony Lamb in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, on 5 December 2006.

117
his or her fancy.146 By all accounts, the curry tiffin comprised numerous dishes –
several main dishes such as chicken, beef, mutton, prawn, fish or vegetable curry were
accompanied by even more side dishes. These side dishes, loosely called sambals,
could number as many as twenty.147 Included among these were prawn crackers
(krupuk), chopped egg, spirals of omelette, peanuts, cucumber in coconut milk, sliced
onion, dried prawns, dried fish, ‘100-year old’ eggs (preserved duck eggs – a Chinese
speciality, again showing how the British took to local foodways), green peppers,
bananas, tomato, pineapple, papaya, mango, desiccated coconut, raisin and mango
chutney.148 The curry tiffin also always included plenty of rice. Sir Leonard Gammans
and Lady Ann Gammans described having curry tiffin in the home of Benjamin
Talallas: ‘great mounds of Chetty rice, parboiled and fried in Ghi’ were served with
‘curried fowl, and mutton and prawns and vegetables: sambals and garlic and chutney
and pickles – a real feast’.149

In his memoirs of his time in Malaya and Singapore, George L. Peet recounted a visit to
a rubber estate carved from ‘virgin jungle’ in the Kluang district of Johore. On
Sundays, planters from D.V. Byles’ estate and a neighbouring estate would gather in
Byles’ bungalow for a curry tiffin. Peet wrote that there were four kinds of curry –
pigeon, chicken, beef and hardboiled eggs, all prepared by his Indian cook.150 Julian
Davison remembers the Sunday curry tiffin in 1950s Singapore as ‘a grand feast’ with
many guests.151 Davison recalls feasting on chicken in coconut cream with potatoes,
beef rendang, assam fish, a spicy fish Mornay, curried hardboiled eggs, ladies’ fingers,
beansprouts with salted fish, coconut vegetable stew and long beans. Besides the
relishes there would be little bowls of sliced bananas, chopped tomatoes, sliced
cucumber, freshly grated coconut, peanuts, sultanas and anchovies fried in chilli and
lime, various sambals and a selection of Anglo-Indian chutneys and pickles.152

Restaurants and clubs that Europeans frequented also served the Sunday curry tiffin.
The Coliseum Cafe and Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, continued to serve this
Sunday meal until 1991, decades after the British relinquished rule in Peninsular

146
Burton, The Raj at Table, p27.
147
Questionnaire response by Suart.
148
Questionnaire response by Suart.
149
Leonard Sir Gammans and Ann Lady Gammans’ manuscript, School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), London #174: Box 5 Vol 1, book 20, Sunday 15 April, 1934, pp5-7.
150
George L. Peet, Rickshaw Reporter, Singapore, Eastern Universities Press Sdn Bhd, 1985, p172.
151
Questionnaire response by Julian Davison on 15 February 2008.
152
Questionnaire response by Davison.

118
Malaysia. The Coliseum was the only European restaurant in Kuala Lumpur and the
all-male cooks from the Chinese Hainanese clan made a special effort to lay out an
impressive curry tiffin on Sunday. Served in imported English crockery, the tiffin
consisted of curry chicken with large chunks of chicken and potatoes and side-dishes of
ladies’ fingers, pineapple, cucumber, white rice and anchovies. Desserts included
chocolate ice-cream and caramel custard.153 K.P. Tabretts remembers well from British
North Borneo, the Sunday tiffin curry, featuring curry chicken with side dishes of
bacon, peanuts with anchovies, chopped banana, coconut, pineapple, cucumber,
tomatoes and raisins. Again Tabretts compares the curry tiffin to the rijsttafel and
mentions beer as the standard drink for this meal.154 Even on the colonial’s day of rest
in Malaya and Singapore, curry featured prominently on the longest meal of the week,
the Sunday curry tiffin.

The dish curry had ambiguous origins, its definition was contested, the ingredients to be
used were debated and there was rivalry over which colony or region made the best
curry. In culinary and historical terms, curry certainly stands as a dish that fits the term
‘food appropriation’. In the colonial context the appropriation of curry has come about
through the cooperation and negotiation between the colonizer and colonized. This
chapter contends that curry was appropriated by British colonizers with respect and
sympathy. It was particularly in curry that they ingested local ingredients, depended on
the local cooks who prepared the dish and promoted and gave it due respect by calling
the dish their own. This chapter has demonstrated that the widespread consumption of
curry challenges the argument made by some recent scholars that British colonizers
consumed different foods to the colonized in order to differentiate themselves from the
ruled. In fact, eating curry on a daily basis (in combination with both local and
European dishes) by many colonizers demonstrates the opposite. This is not to say that
the British deliberately set out to appropriate curry as part of the colonial project. There
were practical reasons why curry became a staple food among the British in the colonies
as the spices in a curry helped to preserve meat that tended to putrefy in the tropical heat
within twelve hours.155 This practice went back to the East India Company days, when
the British lived as nabobs, adopting Indian dress and local customs and eating local
foods. The eating of curry was part and parcel of nabob culture and survived the demise

153
Author’s interview with Janet Loi, manager of The Coliseum Café and Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, 23
November 2006.
154
Author’s interview with K.P. Tabrett, Kota Kinabalu, 4 December 2006.
155
Day, Curries of India, p8.

119
of the East India Company. This observation supports recent scholarship that suggests
that, in the colonial period, the British had not entirely distanced themselves from
Indian society. Indeed, to be Anglo-Indian meant to eat curry as part of one’s diet.
While memsahibs took pride in their particular curry that appeared on her dining table,
it was the cooks and other servants who bought the ingredients and prepared the dish
and domestic servants will be the subject of discussion in the next chapter.

120
Chapter Four

Servants of Empire: The Role and Representation of Domestic

Servants in the Colonial Household
‘A lady was inveighing to a friend against the whole race of Indian cooks as dirty,
disorderly, and dishonest. She had managed to secure the services of a Chinese
cook, and was much pleased with the contrast. Her friend did not altogether agree
with her, and was sceptical about the immaculate Chinaman. “Put it to the test,”
said the lady; “just let us pay a visit to your kitchen, and then come and see mine.”
So they went together. What need to describe the Bobberjee-Khana? They
glanced round, and hurried out, for it was too horrible to be endured long. When
they went to the Chinaman’s kitchen, the contrast was indeed striking. The pots
and pans shone like silver; the table was positively sweet; everything was in its
proper place, and Chang himself, sitting on his box, was washing his feet in the
soup tureen!’1

Edward Hamilton Aitken’s account of life in India in the late nineteenth century is a
typical representation by colonizers of domestic servants, Indian, in particular, in the
British colonies as being filthy, dishonest, undisciplined and unintelligent. Colonizers’
narratives on domestic servants frequently disparaged their characters and called into
question their honesty, loyalty and hygiene; tales of inept and unintelligent behaviour
were legendary. And yet for all their questionable standards of hygiene and supposedly
low level intelligence the service provided by the diverse range of servants, ranging
from cook, butler, waiter, sweeper, dog boy, water carrier, laundry washer and so on,
held together the imperial household. In his study of European ruling elites and their
patterns of food consumption, Marc Jason Gilbert observes ‘the bitter racist diatribes
directed against and also heartfelt tributes offered in recognition of the performance of
the colonial kitchen staff. Nowhere else can one find the complexities of the
relationship between Prospero and Caliban than in the kitchen’.2 This chapter will
analyse the contradiction between widely held colonial stereotypes that cast servants as
dirty and untrustworthy and the fact that they were entrusted with food preparation, a
service that is intimate, vital and essential to health and wellbeing.

The study of work performed by domestic servants for the colonists is an area that has
long been neglected. This chapter shows that domestic chores, in food purchasing,
preparation and serving were relegated to the local people. The memsahib as head of

1
Edward Hamilton Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, London, W. Thacker & Co., 1907, p52.
2
Marc Jason Gilbert, ‘Eating Colonialism,’, p14, a paper presented at the Center for South Asian Studies,
the University of Hawaii, Manoa, October 30, 2006, cited with permission of the author. Gilbert’s citation
of Prospero and Caliban refers to Octave Mannoni’s work, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of
Colonization, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1991.

121
the household held a supervisory role, to impose the rituals and tasks that defined the
colonial home as a bastion of white imperialism. It can be argued in contrast that it was
the servants’ local knowledge that procured food. Most kitchens were fashioned
according to the requirements of the servants and the cooks did all the cooking, usually
preparing local dishes. I will employ cookbooks and household manuals of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries from both Britain and the three colonies to
investigate the representation of the memsahib-servant relationship. These publications
not only typecast native servants as unworthy but attempted to teach colonizers how not
to behave in ways that can be seen as inappropriate.

The physical nurturing of colonizers by the colonized underpins the most personal and
intimate of colonial relations. European colonial society deployed specific female
rituals (encouraging colonial wives to ensure her home was comfortable for both her
husband and for his colleagues) to mark boundaries between the rulers and the ruled.
Fae Dussart, in her study on servant/employer relationship in nineteenth-century
England and India, argues that this relationship in colonial India ‘was essential to the
development of colonial domesticity’.3 Dussart stresses that the management of the
colonial home was pivotal to the imperial civilizing project. The domestic sphere in
colonial India, Dussart argues, was where memsahibs and servants together worked
towards ‘displaying the values of British civilization to servants and visitors, insisting
on cleanliness, order and respect for the ruling race and/or class’.4 The numbers of
Britons in the colonies increased after 1918 due to several reasons: the Colonial Office
had started encouraging its officers in the colonies to marry, and improvements in
tropical medicine, refrigeration and transport all contributed to a more comfortable
lifestyle in the colonies.5 The memsahib in the colonial home became an omnipresent
arbiter of manners. There was an understanding that the security of the white middle-
class home derived from it being an oasis of civilized behaviour amidst alien
surroundings and barbaric people. However, the memsahib could not single-handedly
transform the colonial home into the symbol of British prestige without her domestic
servants.

3
Fae C. Dussart, The Servant/Employer Relationship in 19th-Century England and India, London,
University College London, 2005, p30.
4
Dussart, The Servant/Employer Relationship, p84.
5
Barbara Bush, ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and
Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Bush notes that marriage was a financial strain for 70
percent of men aged thirty-five to thirty-nine in Malaya however, p91.

122
Just as the army of domestic servants were responsible for the smooth running of the
upper class home in the Victorian era, the native servants were largely accountable for
the purchasing, preparation and cooking of food as well as the cleaning and maintaining
of the colonial household. In Britain, the kitchen was seen as the province of the
servants and not the mistress.6 This ideal was replicated in the colonies. As early as
1795, cookery books were written for servants working for the upper classes. An
illustration in a household manual showed a mistress presenting her servant with a
cookery book, with the caption, ‘A Lady presenting her Servant with the Universal
Family Cook who diffident of her own knowledge has recourse to that Work for
Information’.7 Although colonial cookbooks were written principally for the colonial
housewife there were also a handful published with translation into local languages
within the books for the use of local servants.8 Gilly Lehmann’s work on the British
housewife reinforces ‘the image of the lady of leisure, a consumer of others’ services’.9
The employment and management of servants in the Victorian middle classes was not
only about making home-life comfortable but it also meant ‘creating the kind of
disciplined, deferential workforce which Britain needed if it was to maintain its position
as the world’s premier nation’.10 In the colonial context, this was extended to ideas of
promoting the white household as a prestigious enclave, that domestic menial work was
the domain of the colonized while the memsahib ruled from within her domestic space.

The memsahib-servant relationship was fraught with tension – on the one hand the
memsahib had to create a ‘Britain in the home’,11 and a model of bourgeois white
domesticity12 – and on the other all this could only be achieved through the efforts of
her servants who were frequently denigrated as useless, filthy and dishonest. R.C.H.
McKie summed up how utterly dependent the European was on domestic service in
Malaya and Singapore when he wrote,
‘the European has made himself so completely dependent on Asiatic service if all
the boys in Malaya went on strike to-morrow he would be helpless … No food
would be cooked, no clothes washed, beds made, or floors cleaned, and most

6
Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Britain, Devon, Prospect Books, 2003, p132.
7
Lehmann, The British Housewife, p149.
8
See Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, A Friend in Need English-Tamil Cookery Book, Madras,
Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, 1950; Friend-in-Need Women’s Workshop, Friend-in-Need
Women, Hindustani Cookery Book, Madras, 1939.
9
Lehmann, The British Housewife, p132.
10
Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, London, Fourth Estate, 2005, p249.
11
Bush, ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century’, p91.
12
See Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, pp50-51 and 57-59.

123
 catastrophic, there would be no drinks served. … It is a truism in Singapore that
the European, however insignificant in education and background, does only
those things for himself, like bathing, dressing, eating, which cannot throw across
to his staff. … I have even seen a man call the boy a second time to lift a glass
two feet across a table to save him the trouble of moving an inch in his chair.’13

‘The servant problem’

Servants are inextricably linked to the preparation of food in the colonial kitchen. They
procured, prepared and served food. As Mary Procida, in her book on Anglo-Indian
women, points out, ‘the crucial mechanisms for running both home and empire were
entrusted to Indians, with the British relegated to the role of symbolic, if authoritative,
presence’.14 She goes on to say that in India, the burden was borne by Indian domestic
servants and not Anglo-Indian wives. Indeed, this arrangement of presenting a
symbolic, supervisory role over servants by Anglo-Indian wives was repeated in the
colonies of Malaya and Singapore.

It is indisputable that the good relationship between servants and mistress was
conducive to successful home management and the maintenance of health and well-
being for the colonizers. Janice Brownfoot, in her study on memsahibs in colonial
Malaya claims that servants were usually considered essential as, if a European woman
were to do her own housework she would quickly become ‘physically exhausted and
dripping with sweat’.15 Moreover, due to custom and circumstances (she cites the use
of wood fires and kerosene-tin stoves), mems were dependent on their servants’
assistance for cooking and budgeting.16

Beverley Gartrell’s reconnaissance paper on colonial wives was based on experiences in

Uganda but deals with generic cultural patterns of colonial structures and therefore
could be applicable to other colonies. Gartrell argues that wives were not necessary for
the physical care and feeding of officials as, after all, these tasks could be carried out by
well-trained native servants. Instead, she argues that wives functioned as
representatives of European culture and its moral standards.17 While not all British

13
R.C.H. McKie, This Was Singapore, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1942, pp19-20.
14
Procida, Married to the Empire, p82.
15
Janice Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony
and Protectorate, 1900-1940’, in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife, London,
Croom Helm, 1984, p196.
16
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p196.
17
Beverley Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’, in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds),
The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984, pp166-169.

124
wives in the colonies enjoyed the ‘leisured life with many servants’, it was a situation
that was becoming increasingly rare for households to have several domestic servants in
Britain. Gartrell’s own personal experience as a wife in Uganda for six years exposed
her to the ‘never-ending topic of conversation in the tropics’: the ‘servant problem’.
She contends that ‘some women needed inefficient service, and acted to ensure it, thus
filling their time with the necessity of close supervision’.18 Similarly, Charles van
Onselen, in his study on domestic service in the Wittwatersrand in South Africa,
mentions that masters and mistresses in the colonies ‘spent an endless amount of time
talking about their servants’ and many of these discussions were communicated to the
press concerning the ‘servant problem’.19 However, the ‘servant problem’ was more
than middle-class complaints about lower-class servants. In the second half of the
nineteenth century the British middle-classes were faced with bourgeois anxieties as
they took domestic servants from the working classes.20 Kathryn Hughes reasons that,
as the female servants were trained in the ways and customs of the middle classes and
adopted these fine points of behaviour themselves, they would marry well and thus
‘spreading the civilizing mission of the middle classes even further down the social
scale’.21 The latter were seen as expanding rapidly in numbers while middle-class
families became smaller. In the colonies there were anxieties regarding servants too,
but for different reasons, mainly about the disease-ridden servants and their dishonesty.

Servants in colonial cookbooks and household manuals

Nineteenth and early twentieth century cookbooks, household management manuals and
newspaper and magazine articles for the colonies bristle with instructions on how to run
a household, manage servants and prepare and serve food. These publications can be
seen as instruments for perpetuating the values and representations of Empire. The
number of cookery and household guides gained momentum between the 1880s and
1920s aimed at the second generation of middle-class British women who resided in
India after the uprising of 1857.22 As Alison Blunt sees it, it was a time of ‘the
consolidation of imperial domesticity’ and ‘British confidence in imperial rule and its
reproduction on a household scale’.23

18
Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’, p176.
19
Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914,
New York, Longman, 1982, pp39-40.
20
Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, p299.
21
Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, pp299-300.
22
Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.24, no.4, 1999, p422.
23
Blunt, ‘Imperial Geographies of Home’, p422.

125
Written by both men and women, these guides emphasised that it was the duty of
British women to maintain imperial domestic relations. Among the recipes and
household hints were deliberate attempts at positioning native servants as ‘Other’
through race and class. The authors took it upon themselves to educate colonial
householders on the unsavoury character of the native person and suggest appropriate
behaviour to foil their dishonesty and unhygienic habits. Through the medium of these
manuals, appropriate behaviour was also prescribed to memsahibs to uphold the highest
standards. ‘An Anglo-Indian’ in his or her cookery book aimed at ‘young house-
keepers’ in India declared that the mistress of her household would be admired by her
servants if she could direct her home to run smoothly.24 The author suggested the
mistress should have ‘the ability to govern and rule as well as train her domestics to
greater perfection, by teaching them more improved methods’.25 Thus, readers of these
publications were expected to aspire to the ideals published. As Steel and Gardiner
state in the preface of their manual, ‘the very possession of the book may be held to
presuppose some desire on the part of the possessor to emulate the wife who does her
husband good, and not evil, all the days of her life, by looking well to the ways of her
household’.26 If messages were repeated often enough they became accepted as truth.
Invariably the general household books of the nineteenth century included recipes.27
Prescriptive in nature, the household manuals recommended treating native servants as
childlike, unworthy and needing discipline. Ostensibly strict moral and social values
were replicated from Victorian Britain and elaborate shows of material wealth and
entertainment were on display.28 As well, the notion of sisterhood is promoted in these
manuals, of helping the newly arrived or young memsahibs to manage servants in the
colonies. Mrs John Gilpin wrote her ‘little manual’ to help others as she had ‘suffered
myself from being planted in this country with no knowledge of the language or the
customs, and recalling vividly how utterly forlorn I felt’.29 A ‘press notice’ advertising
the publication of a new manual stated that the ‘memsahib who has just attained wedded

24
An Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery: ‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Bombay, Imperial Press, 1883,
Preface.
25
Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery: ‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Preface.
26
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress
and Servants the General Management of the House and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its
Branches, London, William Heinemann, 1898, ppix-x.
27
Margaret Beetham, Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs
Beeton and Her Cultural Consequences, Hants, Ashgate, 2003.
28
John Burnett, Plenty & Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day
London, Scolar Press, 1979, pp76-85.
29
(Mrs) John Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, Bombay, A.J. Combridge & Co., 1914, p1.

126
bliss, and realises that after the honeymoon is over mundane matters and the cook have
to be faced, has half the battle won if she is armed with a copy of Constance Eve
Gordon’s manual.30 To a large extent, British social behaviour in the colonies was
modelled on the fashion and fads of Britain. The cookbooks and household manuals for
the colonies were themselves styled after the cookbooks and household handbooks of
Britain, the most well-known of which is Isabella Beeton’s.31

The supervisory nature of housekeeping in the colonies, like other aspects of everyday
routines, had its origins from Britain. In Victorian Britain, housekeeping in affluent
households involved the mistress ‘giving instructions, perhaps unlocking store
cupboards (the Victorian mistress rarely trusted her servants) and measuring out the
provisions of the day, ordering the meals’.32 As Alison Light puts it, for the British
mistress in the metropole ‘devising menus, ordering food, checking the state of the linen
and gently breathing down the necks of her servants to make sure they were doing their
jobs properly were all part of her supervisory role’.33 Steel and Gardiner devote the first
chapter of their comprehensive household manual to the housekeeper and cook for
Anglo-Indians, with the main object of achieving three things: ‘smooth working, quick
ordering and subsequent peace and leisure to the mistress’.34 While they lay down
detailed instructions on every aspect of running a household in India, it is evident that
the memsahib’s role was largely supervisory. For example, ‘half-an-hour after
breakfast should be sufficient for the whole arrangements for the day’.35 In this half
hour the housekeeper should check the cook’s ingredients for the day, order luncheon
and dinner, and check the pantry, scullery and kitchen for cleanliness. In an article on
Indian household management published in a guide in 1898 Agatha Florence James
wrote,
‘The usual daily round of duty for ladies who have housekeeping cares on their
shoulders, is much the same in India as in England and elsewhere. The
khansamah has to be interviewed after the second breakfast (the first meal, a light
one, being taken before going for the early morning ride or drive), his bill checked
off and paid, and his orders given. Then follows the visit to the store cupboards,
known as “godowns” (warehouses), which are generally in the verandah, and the

30
Constance E. Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine and Domestic Economy, Calcutta and Simla, Thacker,
Spink & Co., 1913, ‘press notice’ in manual.
31
Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management; Also, Sanitary, Medical, & Legal
Memoranda; with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of All Things Connected with Home Life
and Comfort, London, Jonathan Cape, 1861.
32
Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home, London, B.T.Batfsford Ltd, 1977, p20.
33
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, London, Penguin Books, 2008, p25.
34
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp5-8.
35
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p5.

127
 articles required by cook, bearer, khitmutgar (a servant who waits at table) and the
syces (grooms, horse-keepers or chauffeurs) given out. It is necessary to keep all
groceries, grain [corn] for the horses, goats and cows, under lock and key, and
give them out daily as needed, otherwise they will disappear with alarming
rapidity. Many people have their horses brought round to the verandah and there
fed, for grain has a most extraordinary faculty for melting away in a syce’s hands
and to see your horses eat their food is a simple but very effectual method of
being certain that they really have it.’36

Ordering meals could be made even less onerous according to a publication whose
object was ‘not only to assist Native Cooks in preparing good dishes, but to save house-
keepers the trouble of describing the modus operandi. The headings are in English, so a
lady ordering a dinner has simply to mention the names of the various dishes and the
Cook reads for himself in Tamil what is required’.37 The manual lists soups, main
dishes and desserts for ‘Family Dinners for a Month’.38 Another cookbook, written by
an ‘Anonymous’ Anglo-Indian, which provided a range of European and Asian recipes
for ‘Indian tables’; was also published in Urdu.39 It can be deduced here that time saved
from speaking to servants about recipes or meals for the day could be spent on other
activities.

Steel and Gardiner also advised, ‘never do work which an ordinarily good servant ought
to be able to do. If the one you have will not or cannot do it, get another who can’.40
They further stated that ‘we do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an
Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige,
than an Indian Empire’.41 Similarly, J.K. Stanford wrote that
‘no lady ever demeaned herself to visit the bazaar and buy her own food. She left
that entirely to her native cook, for to enter and bargain in the meat or fish stall,
quite apart from the smell, was “bad for prestige”. Nor did they ever enter their
back premises, the “cookhouses” in which their viands were prepared. … people
were satisfied if the cook produced, unwatched, edible food on a tiny charcoal fire
and with a minimum of fuss. He could be relied on to cater, with an almost
Biblical magic, for a host of unexpected guests at short notice.’42

36
Agatha Florence James, ‘Indian Household Management’, in The Lady at Home and Abroad: Her
Guide and Friend Consisting of Articles Contributed by the Pens of Expert Lady Writers on All Subjects
of Interest and Fact in the Daily Life and Duties of Matron Wife and Maid, London, Abbott, Jones & Co.
Ltd, 1898, pp379-380.
37
What to Tell the Cook; or the Native Cook’s Assistant, Being a Choice Collection of Receipts for Indian
Cookery, Pastry, Etc. Etc, Madras, Higginbothams Ld., 1910, Publisher’s note.
38
What to Tell the Cook, Publisher’s note.
39
Anonymous, Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables, Calcutta, W. Newman & Co., 1879.
40
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp5-6.
41
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p9.
42
J.K. Stanford, Ladies in the Sun: The Memsahib’s India, 1790-1860; London, The Gallery Press, 1962,
p69.

128
The rationale for employing large numbers of servants – namely, ethnic and caste
considerations, labour costs – is discussed in Chapter One. One memsahib, Majorie
Cashmore, justified employing several servants saying, ‘in India of course the
memsahib never did anything that the servants did, that really they would look down on
you, if you attempted to dust or just sweep that was just too much’.43 War
correspondent for The Times of London, William Howard Russell, in his diary of 1858
to 1859 observed that while in Simla he and ‘Alison’44 had six servants in attendance at
dinner and there were in total thirty servants for their household of two.45 In a chapter
written specifically as ‘Advice to the cook’, Steel and Gardiner point out that,
‘Now as half the illness in the world comes from the stomach, for which it is your
business to provide it, it stands to reason that a cook ought to do his best to do
everything in the best possible way. And it lends to the comfort of the whole
house; for if the dinner is badly cooked, your mistress will be angry, the master
will have an indigestion, and be cross; everything will go wrong, and whose fault
will it be? Yours.’46

While the authors of the household manuals were not reticent in advertising the faults
and evils of native servants they were coy about punitive actions. There are references
to both physical and verbal abuse as well as withholding salaries due to servants.
R. Riddell stated that often servants left their employment in the colonial household
suddenly as ‘the slightest fault of a native servant being often visited with blows and
such abuse as no respectable man will bear, very often too for no other fault than that of
not understanding what the master has said’.47 Colesworthy Grant also alluded to unfair
treatment of servants when he described them as ‘patient, forbearing, generally speaking
grave and quiet in their demeanour’ and employers could well gain their ‘respect,
attention, and even attachment’, provided they were not subject to ‘personal violence, –
regular payment of wages’.48 Steel and Gardiner advised monetary ‘rewards and
punishment’ and administering castor oil as punishment ‘for inability to learn or to

43
Majorie Cashmore, (Wife of Missionary). Thomas Herbert Cashmore (Bishop), The Raj, 16 Oct 1973
1015-1245 – H58X: SOAS: OA1/14/1-2, 1919-1933.
44
The entrance for Russell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol .48, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2004, does not mention Alison as a spouse or companion but dates his first marriage to
Mary in 1846. It mentions his ‘secret mistress’ in the 1870s with whom he had three children and in 1884
married Countess Antoinette Mathilda Pia Alexandra Malvezzi.
45
William Howard Russell, My Diary in India: In the Year 1858-9, London, Routledge, Warne, and
Routledge, 1860, p101.
46
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p227.
47
R. Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book; Comprising Numerous Directions for Plain
Wholesome Cookery, Both Oriental and English; with Much Miscellaneous Matter Answering for All
General Purposes of Reference Connected with Household Affairs, Likely to Be Immediately Required by
Families, Messes, and Private Individuals, Residing at the Presidencies or Outstations Bombay, printed
at the “Gentleman’s Gazette” Press, 1849, p2.
48
Colesworthy Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life. A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in
England, Calcutta, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1862, p63.

129
remember’.49 They claimed that an easy method was ‘to engage servants at the lowest
rate and declare extra money as buksheesh, (payment as a tip or bribe conditional on
good service) – for instance, a khitmutgar (a servant who waits at table) is engaged
permanently on Rs.9 a month, but the additional rupee which makes the wage up to that
usually demanded by good servants is a fluctuating assessment!’50 The authors claim
that fines could be levied on forgetfulness, lying and so on.51 Fining servants was
another way of punishing them for ‘bad’ conduct – C. Lang in her manual on hints on
Indian housekeeping, advised that ‘the only way of punishing them is to fine them.
Also it is a good plan to withhold one rupee of the month’s wages and restore it at the
end of the month, if conduct has improved’.52

Unlike India, where labour was cheap, servants were in limited supply in British North
Borneo. Agnes Keith (who made famous the description of North Borneo as ‘land
below the wind’) advised that ‘native servants will only work for the masters they are
fond of, and if displeased with their employees they “resign” and return to their villages
to live on their relatives’.53 The average colonial household in this colony employed a
cook, one or two ‘boys’, a water carrier, a gardener and a syce, a relatively smaller
number compared to the numerous servants in the employ of each family in India.54
The British were either pragmatic, sensitive to the indigenous culture or simply being
realistic. Owen Rutter, who worked in North Borneo as a government officer and in
later years as a planter, classified domestic servants according to racial and ethnic
groups. He noted that the majority of the cooks and houseboys were Chinese
Hainanese, from the island of Hainan. The best cooks in domestic service and
restaurants were, in Rutter’s view, Hainanese men. Hainanese authorities forbade the
emigration of their women until 1924.55 In Rutter’s opinion, ‘the Hylams [Hainanese]
make excellent servants; they are clean, hardworking and (within the limits of an
Oriental) honest. Most of them are what is known as “good plain cooks”.’56

49
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p4.
50
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p3.
51
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p3.
52
(Mrs) C. Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, the English Bride in India: Being Hints on Indian Housekeeping,
Madras, Higginbotham & Co., 1909, p55.
53
Agnes Keith, Land Below the Wind, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1939, p34.
54
Owen Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, Resources and Native Tribes, London,
Constable & Company, 1922, p379.
55
Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East, Singapore, Oxford
University Press, 1991, p70. Gaw notes that in 1910 a Hainanese woman had allegedly arrived in
Singapore and 2000 Hailam houseboys and shopkeepers stormed the house where she was thought to be
but hiding but no such woman was found.
56
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p379.

130
Nevertheless, he also wrote that at first the ways of native servants may appall the
memsahib, notably, ‘the morning skirmish with the Chinese cook’57 (the cook’s wages
ranged from £2 10s to £3 15sh a month) and added that ‘a Chinese cannot make a curry
as an Indian or Malay but he comes a very good third’.58 The Hainanese houseboy
earned between £2 to £3 a month, and according to Rutter,
‘is usually clean and well mannered, and makes a good servant, particularly when
he has the vigilant eye of a Mem upon him, but few Chinese can stand jungle
work, and the outstation man as a rule keeps native boys who soon learn a little
cooking, sufficient for their lord’s needs when he is on tour. If caught young,
both Dusuns and Muruts59 make good house-boys; they are seldom as clean as
Chinese but they are far more resourceful, and are often invaluable when
travelling, the real test of a native servant.’60

‘Native’ in British North Borneo was a respected term; native chiefs were the highest
authority among the indigenous people. A.C. Brackman notes that ‘Borneo is one of
the few places in the nonwhite world where the word “native” is honourable and is used
in its original meaning and not as a reflection of the white man’s burden; indeed, the
Natives of Borneo are not only proud of the term, but go to the other extreme and
consider such words as aboriginal and indigenous insulting’.61

The Chinese were also employed as water carriers, wood choppers, sweepers, dish
washers, and ‘performers of any odd jobs outside the sphere of the “boy”’.62 In the
hierarchy of the colonial household domestic service the water carrier stood at the lower
end of the pecking order. He was at the beck and call of the other servants and blamed
for any mishaps. To improve his prospects he could learn to cook in the kitchen and
graduate to being a ‘good plain’ cook, earning £3, instead of £2 per month.

57
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p377.
58
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p380.
59
The Dusuns, an indigenous people, lived mostly on the west coast and in the interior of British North
Borneo during the colonial era. They were a prosperous agricultural people and the chief rice producers
in the colony. The Muruts then were mostly hunters and inhabited the southwestern areas of the colony,
towards the borders of Sarawak and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) – Colony of North Borneo Annual
Report, 1960, Government Printing Department, Jesselton,1961, pp20-21. See also Cecilia Leong,
Sabah: The First 100 Years, Kuala Lumpur, Percetakan Nan Yang Muda Sdn. Bhd., 1982, pp100-106.
60
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p380.
61
A.C. Brackman, Southeast Asia’s Second Front: The Power Struggle in the Malay Archipelago, Pall
Mall Press, London, 1966, p45. See also Margaret Clark Roff, The Politics of Belonging, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1974, p77.
62
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p380.

131
Further, Rutter claims that European children usually learnt Malay from their Javanese
babu63 (nanny) or Chinese amah before they could speak English.64 The Chinese amahs
were generally mature women as younger women tended to have love affairs with other
staff members and ‘are liable to upset the calm of an otherwise unruffled ménage’.65
Besides looking after the children, the babu or amah sewed, washed and ironed and
were paid about £4 per month.66 The ‘black and white amahs’ (after their traditional
attire of black trousers and white blouse) of Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states
were famed for their professionalism as cooks and child carers. These women travelled
to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Borneo from Guangzhou and were well known
for their independence.67 Julian Davison who, as a child, was looked after by a black
and white amah, claims that these women servants can be compared to the renowned
class in domestic service in Britain, the English butler.68 They arrived from China to
the Straits Settlements and Malay states from the 1930s and were popular among the
British and other European families.69

As in other European colonies, colonizers feared that their children being brought up ‘in
the East’ were at risk of picking up customs and faults of the colonized people and thus
becoming lesser Europeans. R.J.H. Sidney, a naval officer, wrote that in Malaya
‘European children are apt to get the idea, partly because the servants will go out of
their way to please them, that they really are little lords’.70 The gardeners and syces
were paid £2 a month as well and were usually Javanese but the Bajau (an indigenous
group of Sabah) ‘if carefully trained, looks after ponies well’.71 Another servant
category peculiar to Borneo was the ‘jungle boy’, whom Charles Bruce described as
‘an ever-continuing miracle’, he was the ‘composite cook, butler and valet who
attends on the peripatetic European in his trips through the wild lands of the East.
He is always a native, because practically no Chinese have a jungle “sense,”

63
The immigration of Indonesians, particularly the Javanese into North Borneo was as estate labourers
between 1921-1931. As for the Chinese, unlike the influx of this group into Malaya, their importation
was state-assisted as there were no attractions in North Borneo similar to the tin and rubber industries in
Malaya. See Lee Yong Leng, North Borneo (Sabah): A Study in Settlement Geography, Singapore,
Eastern Universities Press Ltd., 1965, pp47-49.
64
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p378.
65
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, pp378-379.
66
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, pp378-379.
67
Julian Davison, One for the Road and Other Stories, Singapore, Topographica, 2001, p12.
68
Davison, One for the Road, p11.
69
Keat Gin Ooi, ‘The Black and White Amahs of Malaya’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society, vol.65, no.Part 2, No. 263, 1992, p69. See also Norman Edwards, The Singapore House
and Residential Life: 1819-1939, Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp181-182.
70
R.J.H. Sidney, Malay Land ‘Tanah Malayu’: Some Phases of Life in Modern British Malaya, London,
Cecil Palmer, 1926, p89.
71
Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, p380.

132
 though on one long trip, when there were four Europeans, we did have a Chinese
cook. He was an exception, and stuck the seventy days in the wilderness well.’72

The government official travelled frequently to visit outlying districts on administrative

matters as well as on reconnaissance tours for opening up agricultural land. The role of
the resident and district officer involved spending two-thirds of his time travelling
through his ‘kingdom’. The jungle boy’s rural upbringing with his knowledge of cattle
and ponies, ability to speak the native dialects and his simple diet made him an asset to
the European traveller.73 The jungle boy’s tasks were arduous on a jungle trip, rising at
four in the morning to start the fire over a tripod of stones and prepare breakfast. By
five-thirty he had served breakfast to his employer and others, stripped and packed the
bed, clothing and kitchen equipment and was ready for the day’s march. At about two
the party would have reached camp and he had to serve tea immediately to the European
and then to set up the bed and lay out clean clothing for him. The day’s clothes had to
be washed and dinner had to be prepared. Outside his jungle duties and back ‘home’ he
returned to his role as ‘houseboy’ but with support from the rest of the domestic staff.74

Native affairs and sleeping dictionaries

From the earliest years of British settlement in British North Borneo, (now the
Malaysian state of Sabah), European men outnumbered European women. When Ada
Pryer arrived in the 1880s, there was only one other Englishwoman.75 In the 1891
census there were 122 British males and 38 British females; other European males
totalled 70 while the number of females was 15. Accounts of relationships between
British men and local women in Malaysia and Singapore are few in history books, a
notable exception being John Butcher’s study on the social history of the British in
Malaya.76 However, there are several fictionalised works, the most well-known ones by
Somerset Maugham.77 It was not an uncommon practice for the European man to have
a local woman living with him, the man could either be single or married with his
European wife in Europe. Many mems chose to live in Europe for part of, or the
duration of their children’s education there. So standard was this arrangement in North
Borneo the local people had a term, nyai, for the local women who became mistresses

72
Charles Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo, London, Cassell and Company Ltd, 1924, p129.
73
Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo, p129.
74
Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo, p130-131.
75
Ada Pryer, A Decade in Borneo London, Leicester University Press, 2001, first published in 1893.
76
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in
Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979.
77
Two of these titles are The Force of Circumstance and The Letter. The Letter was based on a shooting
death in 1911 in Kuala Lumpur.

133
of white men. The term nyai originated in Indonesia to describe Indonesian women
who became concubines of Dutch colonials.78 In North Borneo these liaisons
frequently started off with the local women being employed as servants in the European
household. As the relationship became more than master/servant, the mutually accepted
arrangement was made ‘official’ by the European paying a sogit (compensation) of one
buffalo to her village to remove the shame. The nyai continued to work as a servant in
the household but was not paid as a servant. Officially and publicly she still assumed
the role of a servant, particularly at official functions.79 She was not allowed to meet
guests as the official partner of the host. Children born of these relationships were
educated in the English language mission schools; many of the daughters were brought
up in the Catholic convents.80 R.C.H. McKie noted that Eurasians, people of mixed
parentage were called stengahs, ‘a Malay word which means half and is also used to
name a small or half whisky’.81 American Agnes Keith, wife of a British civil servant
in North Borneo who lived with her husband there for many years, observed,
‘private interracial relations were more often determined in bed than in court in a
back-door relationship which so long as it stayed at the back door was accepted by
both races. This relationship, although supposedly initiated by the white man,
was encouraged and cultivated by brown women.’82

In 1909 a sexual directive, to members of the Colonial Service, known as the Crewe
Circular (1909), discouraged the taking of concubines, warning of severe penalties for
transgressions.83 However, the circular banning interracial relationships was not sent to
North Borneo and Sarawak until the 1950s.84 Although these two states were under
British control they only became formal colonies in 1946.85 As in Indonesia, local
women in North Borneo who became mistresses of white men were derogatorily known
as sleeping dictionaries or ‘bedbooks’ – to denote the woman’s provision of free tuition

78
See Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the
Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2000, p121.
79
Leong, Sabah: The First 100 Years, pp97-98.
80
Leong, Sabah: The First 100 Years, p98.
81
McKie, This Was Singapore, p64.
82
Agnes Keith, White Man Returns, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1951, p77.
83
Ronald Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: the Crewe Circular (1909)’ Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, vol.XIV, 1986, pp170-186.
84
See Wendy Suart, The Lingering Eye: Recollections of North Borneo, Edinburgh, The Pentland Press
Limited, 1993, p271.
85
Although concubinage was no longer practised in India by the early 1900s, it was still the custom in
Malaya, the Borneo states and several African colonies. Sir Hugh Clifford and Hugh Low were among
the Malayan officials who encouraged concubinage and in Sarawak the Brooke rulers not only
encouraged concubinage but also discouraged their officers from marrying white women. See Ronald
Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990,
p158.

134
of the language and customs of local community to her European partner.86 On some
agricultural estates, a local woman was allocated to a newly-arrived planter whether he
was agreeable to the arrangement or not.87 The handing down of a mistress or
concubine, like a commodity, was similar to the passing down of a cook to a newly-
arrived family. Norman Edwards’ study of the design of the house and British colonial
life in Singapore between 1819 to 1939, states,
‘European families often had to settle for the cook who had been passed on to
them by their predecessors or choose from amongst those who happened to be
available. For civil servants, there was often no choice at all; the cook came with
the house.’88

It seems as though a concubine, a cook or other servants were part and parcel of the
colonial household inventory and could be conveniently handed over. Perhaps
European employers believed the servant now trained in the ways of the European
household, particularly in areas of hygiene, should be employed with another European
family.

In introductory remarks on a cookbook for memsahibs published in 1894, A.C.S.,

remarks, ‘a dirty kitchen is a disgrace, so let every mem-sahib have this part of her
establishment well under her surveillance, and though her too frequent presence in the
kitchen is unnecessary, yet she should make a point of visiting it periodically to see that
it is kept clean and orderly’.89 Expressing similar sentiments eleven years earlier, ‘An
Anglo-Indian’, stated,
‘Servants are necessary to comfort everywhere, but in India they are a necessity, a
cook especially in the heat of the climate, and the position of the kitchen, make it
impossible for a housewife to visit it often. But it requires to be visited at short
intervals, just to see that the place is swept and clean, the table and cooking
utensils well scoured, and the water chatties and their contents clean and
wholesome.’90

The constant advice on the need to keep the dirt and slovenliness of the servants at bay
emphasised that British wives should not be passive agents of Empire. As Procida
points out, metropolitan visitors to India often were concerned that Anglo-Indian
women were not more involved in household management. She questions, ‘if the
Anglo-Indian woman was not a paragon of domesticity, then what exactly was her role

86
See Locher-Scholten, Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the
Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942, p121; and Suart, The Lingering Eye, p271.
87
Suart, The Lingering Eye, p271.
88
Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life, p192.
89
Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, 1894, Introductory remarks.
90
Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery: ‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Introduction.

135
in the home and, by extension, in the empire?’91 Manuals helped memsahibs to define a
role for themselves by repeatedly exhorting them to constantly guard against the filthy
and deceitful ways of the servants. Gilpin asks, ‘if you never go near your kitchen, how
can you expect it to be kept approximately clean and in a state for the sanitary and
seemly preparation of our food? A good deal of the reason why so many cooks are so
unspeakably filthy in her habits is directly due to the mistresses taking no pains to keep
them up to the mark’.92

While most of the household manuals (as well as novels, memoirs and biographies) for
the British colonies decry the poor quality of the local domestic service, a few authors
take householders to task for not taking more care with training their servants and not
providing better facilities. Most notable of these was A.R. Kenney-Herbert, writing
under the pseudonym, ‘Wyvern’.93 His treatise on cookery and household management
for the Anglo-Indian women of Madras emerged from years of service in the Indian
Army. Kenny-Herbert questioned why in India, ‘the chamber set apart for the
preparation of our food is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the foulest in our
premises – and [we] are not ashamed?’94 He lambasted his readers for complaining
about ‘native filthiness’ when the carelessly constructed and smoke-filled kitchen was
built far from the house, sparsely furnished with a small table and a shelf. He
continued,
‘Is it the cook’s fault that in the absence of proper appliances he is forced to
practise his native ingenuity, “curry-stone” for a mortar, his cloth for a sieve, and
his fingers for a spoon or fork? Is it the cook’s fault that, since no plates and
dishes are included in his cook-room equipment, he has no alternative but to place
meat, vegetables, &c., on his table; and that being without a mincing machine, or
chopping board, he uses its surface in lieu of the latter?’95

He went on to say that at a time when even men of modest means expected a higher
standard of food than twenty years previously there had been no corresponding
improvement in kitchen practices and equipment in India. Kenny-Herbert described
‘[d]inners of sixteen or twenty, thoughtfully composed, are de rigueur; our tables are
prettily decorated; and our menu cards discourse of dainty fare in its native French’. In

91
Procida, Married to the Empire, p81.
92
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, p2.
93
A.R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras, or a Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed
Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles, Devon, Prospect Books, 1994.
94
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p496.
95
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p499.

136
fact Kenny-Herbert’s book set out in detail thirty menus for dinner parties, all of the
dishes being in French.96

Another Anglo-Indian who blamed poor supervision was W.H. Dawe:

‘The faults and shortcomings of Indian servants – the Naukar-Chakar Log –
appear to be a general source of complaint amongst all, both with the new-comer
on his arrival and the long resident – the complaint is universal: laziness,
falsehood, dishonesty, and innumerable other vices seem to be innate in them.
The Fault, however, is not wholly on their side; the master and mistress – the
Sahib and Mem-Sahib – are often much to blame.’97

Dawe went on to say that

‘[E]very native servant (being more or less naturally indolent and careless)
requires strict supervision to have your work satisfactorily performed. It is better
to have as few servants as possible; the more you have the less work will be done,
and the more will you be cheated and robbed. Never let servants see that you are
too partial to them; they immediately jump to the conclusion that they are
necessary to you, and that you cannot do without them, and, native like, they will
at once show their ingratitude by robbing you and becoming careless and lazy,
under the impression that they will not be suspected of dishonesty, and that their
negligence will be viewed leniently.’98

‘Laziness, dishonesty and falsehood’ are the three most commonly cited failings of
native servants in cookbooks and household manuals written for the British colonies.
R. Riddell’s handbook for ‘the families, messes and private individuals’ in the
‘presidencies and outstations’ of the Raj provides recipes, advice on domestic life and
how to handle native servants.99 He was contemptuous of the latter:
‘The misdeeds of Indian servants appear to be a general and unfailing source of
complaint amongst all, whether we take the new comer on his arrival, or the long
resident, without reference to any particular place; the complaint of them is
universal – laziness, dishonesty, falsehood, with a host of other vices, seem to be
inherent in them.’100

Syed Alatas argues that the negative image of people subjugated by Western colonizers
was not based on Orientalist scholarship. He asserts that observations of native people
as ‘indolent, dull, treacherous, and childish were made by monks, civil servants,

96
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, pp453-494.
97
W.H. Dawe, The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery: Being a Practical Manual for Housekeepers, London,
Elliot Stock, 1888, p4.
98
Dawe, The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery, p4.
99
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, p1.
100
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, p1.

137
planters, sailors, soldiers, popular travel writers and tourists’.101 The ‘infantilising’ of,
and rendering colonized people by not attributing to them decent human qualities was
an integral part of imperial race ideologies. Although Charles van Onselen’s study of
colonial masters and mistresses’ attitudes towards servants focuses on South Africa, he
helps the historian to understand racial and colonial attitudes to the colonized. Van
Onselen characterizes colonial employers’ attitudes when he stated, ‘[T]he best way of
dealing with a black servant was as with a “child” – firmly and fairly’. This remark is
similar to sentiments expressed by authors of cookbooks and household manuals written
for the colonies.102 C. Lang’s manual to ‘young inexperienced English girls starting
housekeeping in India’ suggested that Indian servants ‘must be treated like children,
kindly but very firmly. Their brains are not properly developed and they cannot always
see things in the same light as we do’.103 Another colonial who compared the colonized
people to children and emphasised the innate differences between the two races was
Mabel Hunter, who maintained, ‘it is best to treat them all like children who know no
better, but … they are proud of their lies and the innate goodness of the European is not
understood by them’.104 As Kincaid noted in his observation of 329 years of the social
life of the British in India, ‘the native population was submissive and devoted to their
masters. Their ways were not, of course, Western ways’.105

Bruce, a District Officer in British North Borneo in the early 1900s, in discussing the
Christianizing of natives there noted, ‘The mind of the average native is equivalent to
that of a child of four … So long as one remembers that the native is still essentially a
child and treats him accordingly he is really tractable’.106 Jacklyn Cock’s history of
domestic service in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, argues that even in the best
servant-employer relationships, the African was viewed as a child. The child analogy
was a component of race, sex and class ideologies that denied equality.107 As Stoler
observes, ‘racialized Others have invariably been compared and equated with children,
a representation that conveniently provided a moral justification for imperial policies of

101
Syed Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese
from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, London, Frank
Cass, 1977, p112.
102
Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, p40.
103
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, p55.
104
Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608-1937, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974,
p226.
105
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p226.
106
Charles Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo, London, Cassell and Company Ltd, 1924, pp243-245.
107
Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation, Johannesburg, Ravan Press
1980, pp221-222.

138
tutelage, discipline and specific paternalistic and materialistic strategies of custodial
control’.108

Riddell, while criticising harshly the innate faults of servants, like his contemporaries,
grudgingly concedes that certain factors would have contributed to their failings.
Riddell states that native servants’ vices could be attributed to the way they were
brought up and to the fault of employers who took them on based only on written
testimonials. A few pages further, Riddell attacks the native servants, saying that their
‘principal vice, besides what I have already given, is an intolerable habit of lying’.109
At the same time he states, ‘in the way of tea, sugar, bread, milk, paper and such like
articles, they will frequently, like European servants, appropriate a little for
themselves’.110 On the next page Riddell declares that ‘you have only to treat natives
well and kindly, and they will generally prove good servants to you’.111 Writing in
1935, Roland Braddell disagreed with the majority of other Europeans who reckoned
the Hainanese among the best cooks and servants. He found that ‘the Hailam [that is,
Hainanese] servant, a most exasperating person … has only one way of doing things,
his own; he only cleans what he sees; he is very communistic, very stupid, and, as a
cook, can be guaranteed to take all the taste out of anything, unless carefully supervised
and trained. There are, doubtless, brilliant exceptions but through and by I have never
found worse servants than the present-day Hailams’.112

Another writer who contradicts herself on the virtues of Indian servants is ‘Eleanor’.
She dispels the prevalent idea in England at the time that servants in India were cheap to
employ and claims that it required a larger number in the colony to do the work than ‘at
home’.113 On the next page she asserts that it was possible to have a good cook who
‘should be able to send up a thoroughly well dressed dinner for any number of
guests, including made dishes, jellies and confectionary. A native cook will often
put to shame the performance of an English one, soups, cutlets and made dishes in
particular, their abilities vary greatly.’114

So even as native servants proved their worth as skilled service providers, they were

108
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 1995, p150.
109
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, p6.
110
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, p6.
111
Riddell, Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, p6.
112
Roland Braddell, The Lights of Singapore, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1934, p25.
113
Eleanor, Gems from the Culinary Art and a Ready Help to Every Wife in India, Madras, Premier Press,
1916, p7.
114
Eleanor, Gems from the Culinary Art, p8.

139
viewed with contempt and disrespect. Scholars like Kenneth Ballhatchet and Simon
Dagut attribute this disrespect to the notion of ‘social distance’.115 In the context of
domestic service in the colonial household, when servants were engaged in the most
intimate of chores such as food preparation, child care, laundering of clothes and house
cleaning, colonizers attempted to put social distance between themselves and the
colonized. Ballhatchet writes that the official elite in India regarded themselves as an
aristocracy. As they were mainly recruited from a middle class who admired the
lifestyle of the landed aristocracy in England they liked to imagine themselves
implanted as the top echelon of Indian society, in which social distance was essential to
establishing and perpetuating their authority.116

Steel and Gardiner berated those memsahibs who did not exert their authority on their
servants: ‘they never go into their kitchens, for the simple reason that their appetite for
breakfast might be marred by seeing the khitmutgâr using his toes as an efficient toast-
rack; or their desire for dinner weakened by seeing the soup strained through a greasy
pugri (cloth)’.117 They added that the Indian cook ‘often stands confounded before his
own failures, unable to tell where he has gone wrong, or how; and if his mistress is a
practical cook, he will give a smile of wonder and relief when she points out what he
must have done to have caused that specific result’.118 Moving to the stereotype of the
khitmutgar, Steel and Gardiner describe this servant as a ‘a curious mixture of virtues
and vices’. Although generally a ‘quick, quiet waiter and well up in all dining-room
duties … in the pantry and scullery his dirt and slovenliness are simply inconceivable to
the new-comer in India’.119 They go on to say that the best of the khitmugars will use
their personal clothing to wipe crockery or place new mustard on top of the old instead
of cleaning out the pot. They attribute this slovenliness to heredity as ‘all Mahomedans
of the lower classes being apparently blind to dirt’.120 Lang advised making random
inspections of the ‘cook-house’ and cautioned that ‘I am afraid you will get some
shocks, but it may make him have cleaner ways. It is their nature to be very dirty, and

115
See Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and
Their Critics, 1793-1905, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980; Simon Dagut, ‘“Paternalism and
Social Distance: British Settlers” Racial Attitudes, 1850s-1890s’, South African Historical Journal,
vol.37, 1997 and Simon Dagut,‘Gender, Colonial “Women’s History” and the Construction of Social
Distance: Middle-Class British Women in Late Nineteenth-Century South Africa’, Journal of Southern
African Studies, vol.26, no.3, 2000.
116
Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, p164.
117
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp1-2.
118
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p71.
119
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p73.
120
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p73.

140
Europeans will never make them clean’.121

A recurring theme among authors of the cookbooks and household manuals is the
dishonesty of servants. Colonial wife, Mrs John Gilpin, cautioned her readers that food
safes:
‘should have locks and keys so that only the servant whose business it is to go to
the safe will be able to get at the food. Even if the food is not actually made away
with, an idle lower servant or a cook’s matey is very fond of picking over the food
with dirty hands. There should be a separate cupboard or godown for all dry
goods, which the mistress herself should give out every morning. It is not wise to
leave these in charge of the best servant that you can imagine, for even if he does
not let others steal it he will himself take a very large toll from it, which will
increase almost imperceptibly until you suddenly awake to the fact that the bills
are mounting up in an alarming manner.’122

Eleanor declared that native servants of all classes often cheat and pilfer their masters’
rice, sugar, coffee and oil. She laments that the mistress of a house needed to constantly
supervise ‘the most trifling details’ lest more quantities of oil, wood or eggs would be
needed.123 Writing in a similar vein, E.S.P., in her ‘hints’ section on food stores,
commented,
‘[I]f the housekeeper will take the trouble to keep all the stores, and give
everything out daily, even to spices, and the smallest detail, including eggs,
potatoes, and onions, she will find her bills considerably reduced, the things will
be fresh and good, and she will be spared the constant differences with the cook
over the accounts as to amounts used’.124

Gilpin also advised against allowing a servant to handle the milk for the household and
suggests bringing the cow to ‘where you can see it milked and constantly inspect the
utensil into which the man is to milk,’ so that dirty water is not added to the milk.125
Another manual presented the house-keeper’s golden rule of always keeping the
monthly purchase of consumables under lock and key and to ensure that what is taken
out for daily use is done so in the memsahib’s presence.126 It instructed its readers that
if it had been their practice ‘to put to put money into the hands of your servants to

121
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, p76.
122
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, p2.
123
Eleanor, Gems from the Culinary Art, p10.
124
E.S.P., ‘What’ and ‘How’ or What Shall We Have? And How Shall We Have It?, Calcutta and Simla,
Thacker, Spink & Co.,1904, pvii.
125
Gilpin, Memsahib’s Guide to Cookery in India, p3. Gilpin gives an account where the ghowli (In Steel
& Gardiner, ghowli is the ‘cow man’, the lowest in the hierarchy of servants, below the gardener and the
lowest paid, p55) had a flat bottle and rubber tubing up his arm by which he let water into the container at
the same time he was milking the cow.
126
Anonymous, The Indian House-Keeper: Being a Complete Set of Accounts of Domestic Expenditure
for the Year, Allahabad, The Pioneer Press, 1894, p6.

141
purchase your requirements, discontinue it at once, follow the above Golden Rule, and
you will be surprised to find the difference in your Cash Balance at the end of a
month’[emphasis in the original].127 Yet another manual opines that ‘with most cooks,
lining their own pockets is to them a matter of far greater importance than the
excellence of the dishes they are called on to make. One means of doing this, which
find special favour in their eyes, is to use half the ingredients named in the recipes, and
to write down the full amount in the bill’.128 The representation of the native people as
inherently dishonest was also an expression of Orientalism. The memsahib’s task of
checking against cheating was one way of demonstrating difference. The provision
cupboard had to be inspected daily, staples, spices and ingredients had to be weighed,
even the level of alcohol bottles had to be marked.129

What stands out in accounts such as these is the notion that colonial racism was
constructed between master/mistress (colonizer) versus native servant (colonized). Ann
Stoler links colonial racism to reaction to ‘class tensions in the metrople’, and cites
Benedict Anderson’s characterization of a ‘tropical gothic’, a ‘middle-class aristocracy’
cultivating the colonials’ differences from the colonized.130 Stoler further states that in
the colonies of India, New Guinea, the Netherlands Indies, Cuba, Mexico and South
Africa, ‘increasing knowledge, contact and familiarity led not to a diminution of racial
discrimination but to an intensification of it over time, and to a rigidifying of
boundaries’. Stoler claims that colonial racism provided a way ‘of creating the sense of
colonial community and context that allows for colonial authority and for a set of
relations of production and power’. Stoler refers to the obsession of colonizers
protecting European women against assault by Asian and black men with racist
ideology, fear of the other and preoccupation with white prestige.131 However, the
stereotypical casting of native servants as lazy, filthy and dishonest can be seen as
components of colonial racism. Other scholars have argued that colonising women
were ‘more rigid and hostile’ towards colonised people than colonial men.132 It was felt

127
Anonymous, The Indian House-Keeper, p6.
128
Anonymous, Dainty Dishes, Preface.
129
Michael Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus: The British in India, London, Constable, 1988, pp109-
110.
130
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of
Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.31, no.1, 1989, p137.
131
Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories,’ p138.
132
Dagut, ‘Gender, Colonial “Women’s History”’, p559. Dagut also cites references to S. Bailey, Women
and the British Empire. An Annotated Guide to Sources, New York, Garland,1983, p40; Helen Callaway,
Gender, Culture and Empire, Macmillan, Oxford, 1987, p27; Gatrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or
Victims?’, pp180-181.

142
that these hardened attitudes by colonial women arose from the pressures of patriarchal
imperialism. Dagut refers to both Gartrell and Strobel’s work when he suggests that
this external force imposed on women in their domesticity led them to ‘buttress their
fragile and dependent self-images by obsessive demands for deference from servants
and other subordinated people’.133

The social life of the colonizer, with its busy entertainment schedule, could only have
been sustained by the armies of servants. As Maud Diver wrote in 1909,
‘India is the land of dinners, as England is the land of five o’clock teas. From the
Colonels’ and Commissioners’ wives, who conscientiously “dine the station”
every cold weather, the wives of subalterns and junior civilians – whose cheery
informal little parties of six or eight are by no means to be despised by lovers of
good company and simple fare – all Anglo-India is in a chronic state of giving and
receiving this – the most delightful or the most excruciating form of hospitality.
And who but the hostess is responsible for the destined adjective?’134

Picnics were another form of recreation and these required ‘arranging’ as servants were
sent ahead with tents and provisions. In his description of British social life in India,
Dennis Kincaid observed that ‘romantic tastes required winding avenues between palms
or mango-trees round whose trunks convolvulus, morning-glory, moon-flower and
passion-flower were encouraged to creep. …Seats of chunam (ground mortar of sand
and lime) were set at the end of these avenues and having on either side beds of jasmine
and tuberose and shrubs of oleander, whose crumpled flowers give a deliciously spicy
perfume. The paths were covered with small sea-shells which not only dried quickly
after the drenching rain of the monsoon but were supposed to afford an uncomfortable
passage to snakes’.135

In her significant work on domestic service in colonial Bengal, Swapna Banerjee

contends that the British together with other Europeans, perceived Indians to be so
different socially, culturally and morally, that they viewed Indian servants as a
‘crouching, sneaking, lazy homogeneous mass’.136 Banerjee asserts that the British
description of native servants reinforced the European notion of Indians as the ‘distant’
and the ‘other’ – the ‘other’ being primitive, dirty, lazy, physically and mentally

133
Dagut, ‘Gender, Colonial “Women’s History”’, p559.
134
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p272, citing Maud Diver’s The Englishwoman in India,
Edinburgh, W. Blackwood, 1909.
135
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p155.
136
Swapna M. Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial
Bengal, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004, p94.

143
inferior.137 Banerjee also discusses writings by Indian writers on the Bengali domestic
service in which ‘dishonesty and unfaithfulness were inscribed as naturalized attributes
of servants’.138 However, she points out that while British authors of memoirs,
domestic guides and travelogues portrayed Indian servants with tones of distrust and
disgust, indigenous writers’ complaints; although scathing and harsh, were ‘most of the
time tempered with good humour and tolerance’.139 E.M. Collingham states that
Britons saw Indians as potential carriers of disease and states that there was anxiety
about ‘Indian dirt’ being ‘particularized onto individual servants as potential carriers of
deadly germs into the household on their bodies’.140 She explains that this fear of
infection, particularly with the bubonic plague in Bombay in 1896, had encouraged the
building of servants’ quarters away from the bungalow.

It may be tempting to suggest that separating the kitchen (a space largely the workplace
of native servants) away from the living quarters of the colonial family was a deliberate
act of segregation. Catherine Hall, in her work on gender and empire, also attributed to
this separation of European and Indian quarters to fears of pollution and contagion.141
However, the location of servants’ accommodation distant from the employer’s main
house has its origins in Britain. For example, both the manor houses of eighteenth-
century England and the Victorian suburban houses of the nineteenth century, the
kitchen and servant rooms were separate from the house proper.142 Light, in her work
on Virginia Woolf’s domestic servants when the latter was part of the Bloomsbury
Group143 explains that ‘in nineteenth-century urban culture, the topography of the house
lent itself as an inevitable metaphor for bourgeois identity, with the lower orders
curtained off, relegated to the bottom of the house or to its extremities, like a symbolic
ordering of the body’.144 Edwards contends though that the kitchen and servants’
quarters being located in a separate building at the rear of the house and connected by a
sheltered passage in colonial India and Singapore was not only to avoid the smell and

137
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p94.
138
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, p166.
139
Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, pp166-167.
140
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, p171.
141
Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’, in Philippa Levine
(ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
142
Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life, p191. See also M. Girouard’s Life in
the English Country House. A Social and Architectural History, London, Penguin, 1978.
143
The group of English intellectuals and artists who met or lived in Bloomsbury, London in the early
twentieth century.
144
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, p75.

144
sight of food being prepared but also to stress that servants occupy the low end of the
household hierarchy.145

In the average colonial household, the kitchen as a place of food preparation for the
family has frequently been depicted as a site of dirt and pollution. There, the main
actors there were the colonised: the cooks and his or her helpers. It was the place
banished to the back, separate from the living quarters of the family and where the
servants congregated. Often the floors were dirty and damp as they were built low but
for some servants the kitchen was a workplace by day and by night it was the place for
sleep. Swati Chattopadhyay asserts that servants’ spaces were an afterthought and that
the kitchen and other service spaces were ‘never an integral part of colonial houses in
India because of the differing perception of servants’ needs’.146 Chattopadhyay adds
that there was little interest, on the part of the colonist, to spend any more than the bare
minimum for accommodation of servants.147 To avoid the dampness and dirt of the
kitchen floors the servants in India would sleep on boxes or on the kitchen table and
sometimes on a mat thrown on the floor.148 The implication of permitting such
degrading accommodation for the family’s domestic servants could be seen as
dehumanising the colonized people who were not worthy of being housed decently.
This attitude was reflected in a letter dated 18 March 1838, written by Emily Eden,
upon her arrival at the hill station of Mussoorie in the Himalayan foothills (‘with a nice
sharp wind blowing’) where there were ‘good fires burning’ at Colonel G’s
bungalow.149 Eden’s party found their Bengali servants, who had arrived the day
before, ‘very miserable’ as they had slept in the open air ‘and were starved with the
cold, and were so afraid of the precipices that they could not even go to the bazaar to
buy food’.150 The most widely-read household manual for British India in its advice for
what to permit servants to bring with them in the annual migration to the hill stations
instructed that they should not bring ‘mill-stones and bedstead’. It offered that servants
‘will perch on carts, camels, and mules, much as birds of the air do’.151 In her diary
entry of 23 January 1878, Mrs Robert Moss King, in describing their simple camp life,

145
Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life, p191.
146
Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny,
London, Routledge, 2006, p127.
147
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p127.
148
J. Bartley, Indian Cookery, ‘General’ for Young House-Keepers, Containing Numerous Recipes, Both
Useful and Original, Bombay, 1903, Bombay, Thacker & Co.,1903, pv.
149
Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India,
London, Curzon Press, 1978, p115.
150
Eden, Up the Country, p115.
151
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p196.

145
revealed that while the kitchen servants had a small tent to sleep in, the other servants
slept where they could in the cold but no one dreamt of complaining as it was ‘part of
the natural order of things’.152 This description implies a hierarchy of sorts among the
domestic service, the fact that the kitchen staff was allocated a tent could mean that they
were seen as more important. The rationale, ‘part of the natural order of things’ was
also used to justify journalist G.L. Peet’s accommodation for his servants. The family
ayah’s (maid or nursemaid) middle room was surrounded on either side by rooms for
the Chinese cook-boy and on the other by the Indian gardener. According to Peet, ‘a
Malay woman coming into such close proximity with persons of different races and of
the opposite sex might be embarrassed, but this was far from the case’.153

Kitchen facilities
Colonial kitchens in Malaysia and Singapore in both clubs and homes were, as in India,
by no means lavishly furnished but servants were expected to present dinners and
banquets of a high standard. In the colony of British North Borneo, servants prepared
meals in less than ideal conditions for British society on important days. Christmas
dinner in 1886 for the British community was celebrated at the Sandakan Club and as
the club had no kitchen, W.R. Flint, the Acting Chief Inspector of the Constabulary,
‘kindly placed his establishment at “Sunningdale” at the disposal of the steward, with
the present of a couple of turkeys’.154 Kitchens in the smallest clubs in the far flung
outposts of empire were venues for preparing grand dinners. Festive dinners and
banquets in British North Borneo were elaborate affairs, with toasts to the Queen and
the Governor, and singing and dancing into the hours of the next morning. For
example, description of a banquet for Governor E.W. Birch reported in 1904 that it was
‘a brilliant gathering of 68 ladies and gentlemen, the largest number of Europeans that
have ever been mustered in one place in the history of British North Borneo’.155 Held in
the Reading Room of the Sandakan Club, the menu below illustrates that even in the
outpost of Borneo, the local cook working in a club kitchen was able to help maintain
empire’s prestige through foodways:
Caviare
Turtle Soup

152
(Mrs) Robert Moss King, The Diary of a Civilian’s Wife in India, 1877-1882, London, Richard
Bentley & Son, 1884, p38.
153
G.L. Peet, Malayan Exile, Singapore, The Straits Times Press Ltd., 1934, p34.
154
The British North Borneo Herald and Official Gazette, 1 January 1887, p4.
155
The British North Borneo Herald, 2 January 1904.

146
 Fish Mayonnaise
Salmi of Pigeon
Stuffed Duck
Asparagus
Roast Turkey and Ham
Singaleila Cake
Meringues
Anchovy Toast
Dessert
Coffee

Cooks in isolated stations too worked in primitive kitchens to produce nourishing

meals. In her first week in a Malayan rubber estate Alice Berry Hart had no running
water, sink or ‘ice-box’ in her bungalow.156 Berry Hart describes her kitchen as a shed
with a brick altar in the middle where a pile of coconut shells was lit for cooking. An
iron grill was placed over the flames to cook meals. She goes on to say that, after
preparing a meal, the cook squatted over the gutter with a bucket of canal water and
some coconut fibre for cleaning the insides of the cooking pans.157 Lang, who claimed
to be ‘a help to many young inexperienced English girls starting housekeeping in India’
wrote, ‘as a rule, Indian cooks are excellent, and you will be surprised what nice dishes
they make out of a little, and my first cook, although expensive, cooked beautifully, and
it was extraordinary the few kitchen utensils he managed with’.158 She went on to say
that her cook used a bottle for an egg whisk, bought spoons made out of coconut shells,
a crude chopper and advised that ‘it is no use providing them with the good things you
would give an English cook, so it is best to let them cook in their own way, provided
they are clean’.159 Evelyn Beeton, in her ‘memoir’ of a year’s visit to India in 1912,
wrote that:
‘One of the greatest marvels is the way the natives cook. Not only does every
native servant seem born with a remarkable talent for cooking, but they can serve
you up a six-course dinner in the wilds of the wilderness, or up 14, 000 feet (4360
metres) in the snow. Wood and stones were carried by coolies, and eggs and
chickens procured at the various villages passed lower down and the bearer
requires only two large stones wherein the wood is placed and made to light if wet
by fanning, and in this primitive way the most wonderful dinner is cooked and

156
Alice Berry Hart, ‘Housekeeping and life in the Malayan Rubber’, Blackwood’s Magazine, London,
1927, pp598-599.
157
Berry Hart, ‘Housekeeping and life in the Malayan Rubber’, p599.
158
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, p72.
159
Lang, ‘Chota Mem’, p72.

147
 served beyond civilization, often beyond snow level’.160

Another memsahib who praised the resourcefulness of the Asian cook was Katherine
Sim. Among her recollections of her years in Malaya in the 1940s; she remembers that
‘if the cook-boy finds there is no oven in his new kitchen he will not be perturbed but
will calmly roast a perfectly good joint in a kerosene tin thrust among the blazing logs
of the fire’.161 The Viceroy’s residence in the hill station of Simla did not lack in
manpower nor facilities though. A French chef and an Italian confectioner were
recruited from Calcutta by the Lyttons and there were three hundred servants to cater
for the cuisine and other services.162

Equipment and ingredients aside, there is also the question of how servants drawn from
a vastly different culture to the colonizer’s learned to please their masters’ every whim.
Aitken found ‘the entire phenomenon of an Indian Butler’ puzzling. The butler was:
‘a man whose food by nature is curry and rice, before a hillock of which he sits
cross-legged, and putting his five fingers into it, makes a large bolus which he
pushes into his mouth. He repeats this till all is gone, and then he sleeps like a
boa-constrictor until he recovers his activity; or else he feeds on great flat cakes of
wheat flour, off which he rends jagged pieces and lubricates them with some
spicy and unctuous gravy.’163

Aitken wondered how the Indian butler acquired ‘a sound practical knowledge of all our
viands, their substance, and the mode of their preparation, their qualities, relationships
and harmonies… [H]e knows all liquors also by name, with their places and times of
appearing’.164

Aitken provides a striking description of the Indian cook’s workplace thus:

‘[H]is studio is fitted with half a dozen small fireplaces, and furnished with an
assortment of copper pots, a chopper, two tin spoons – but he can do without
these, -- a ladle made of half a cocoanut shell at the end of a stick, and a slab of
stone with a stone roller on it; also a rickety table, a very gloomy and ominous
looking table, whose undulating surface is chopped and hacked and scarred,
begrimed, besmeared, smoked, oiled, stained with juices of many substances. On
this table he minces meat, chops onions, rolls pastry and sleeps; a very useful
table.’165

160
Evelyn Beeton, A Memoir of a Year’s Visit to India by a Woman of Liberal Views Travelling
Extensively in Northern India, 1912, Beeton Paper, pp33-34.
161
Katherine Sim, Malayan Landscape, London, Michael Joseph Ltd, 1957, p15.
162
Pat Barr and Ray Desmond, Simla: A Hill Station in British India, London, The Scolar Press, 1978,
p28.
163
Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, p44.
164
Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, pp44-45.
165
Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, p48.

148
Aitken also claims that the cook uses his fingers as a strainer for eggs.166 However he
acknowledges that the Indian cook often worked under difficult conditions. For
example, he praises his bearer, saying that ‘he gets up in the morning an hour before
me, and eats his dinner after I have retired for the night. He gets no Saturday half-
holiday, and my Sabbath is to him as the other days of the week’.167

Just as the many rituals and patterns of behaviour among European colonizers were
about prestige, having a certain type of servant was seen as enhancing one’s status. The
Goanese servants who worked as cooks or butlers in India were seen as the cream of
domestic service. They spoke English and other languages and wore ‘short-jacketed
highly-starched white suits and more often than not blancoed plimsoles’ and had names
such as de Souza or de Mello.168 They were renowned for their culinary skills and
turned out home-made ice-cream (there were few fridges but everyone had an icebox)
and fresh fruit set in meringue, decorated with a candyfloss of burnt sugar woven into a
fairy beehive’.169

Language and nicknames

To emphasise the poor quality of servants in their employ, colonizers often gave their
servants nicknames. The objective was to depersonalise them so that the servant was
only identified by their function.170 This practice originated from master-servant
relationships in Britain171 where Thomas and Susan were the standardised names given
to servants regardless of what their real names might be.172 Other servant names
popular in mid to late nineteenth-century Britain in the grand houses were Abigail,
Betty and Mary Jane and others were simply called Cook or Boots according to the
work they performed.173 As well, if a servant had a name being the same as a family
member, the servant’s name was changed.174 The standard names and the uniforms
servants were made to wear were to minimise their individuality and discourage them

166
Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, p48.
167
Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, p141.
168
Evelyn Battye, Costumes and Characters of the British Raj, Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1982, p44.
169
Battye, Costumes and Characters of the British Raj, p44.
170
See Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, Cambridge, Polity
Press, 1995, p67; and Lucy Delap, Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain: Culture, Memory,
Emotions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, (forthcoming) 2010, under chapter on ‘Mistresses and
Authority’.
171
Delap, Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain, under chapter on ‘Mistresses and Authority’.
172
Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season, London, Croom Helm 1973,
p88.
173
Light, Mrs Woolf, p1.
174
Delap, Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain.

149
from ‘putting themselves forward’. Light comments that employers at the time viewed
‘the best servant was a kind of absent presence’.175 In the colonies servants were
omnipresent however, mainly due to the design of bungalows and large numbers of
them employed. The openness of the colonial home was a double-edge sword. While
the memsahib felt a lack of privacy in her own home, it was open to the gaze of her
servants and Indian visitors, ensuring the bungalow as another site for the display of
British superiority.176 Lady Lucy Marguerite Thomas, wife of Sir Shenton Thomas,
who served as the Governor of the Straits Settlements between 1934 and 1942 and 1945
to 1946, wrote that among her large domestic staff at Government House, were ‘the
Indians who waited at table and wore a very smart uniform scarlet and gold coats, and
flat red and gold hats which came from the old East India Company’.177

In the colonies proper names were rarely used. In Africa, servants under European
employ were given derogatory names such as ‘whiskey’, ‘monkey’, ‘sardine’, ‘two-
pence’ and ‘damn-fool’ and the nicknames were also intended to provide amusement
for Europeans.178 Although they were responsible for the smooth running of the
household the domestic servants were kept in the background and the cook in India was
generally nicknamed Ramasamy and in Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states he or
she was known as cookie.179 Alice Berry Hart, writing on her life in a rubber estate in
Malaya in the 1920s, complained about the water-carrier: ‘because Balready was so
slow and stupid, we called him, between ourselves, Ethelred the Unready,… [T]he truth
is, that Balready is a savage, and dislikes civilisation’.180 Ada Pryer, wife of the
founder of Sandakan, William Pryer, in her diary in 1893, even as she describes
positively the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her Chinese cook, Lam Chong, finds it
necessary to give him the nickname ‘Lamb Chops’.181 In colonial Malaysia cooks were
all universally called ‘Cookie’; almost all respondents to my questionnaire state that

175
Light, Mrs Woolf, p1.
176
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p167.
177
Lucy Marguerite (Lady) Thomas, ‘Reminiscences of life as wife of Sir Shenton Thomas, in the East
Africa Protectorate, Uganda, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland and Singapore:1909-46’, MSS. Brit.
Emp. S. 492, p24. Thomas was born in Simla but went to boarding school in Britain when a few years
old. She returned to India to join parents, later meeting husband in Nairobi.
178
Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-
1939, Durham, Duke University Press, 1987, pp154-155.
179
In the Dutch colonies, the cook was known as ‘kokki’, see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses
and Canned Food, European Women and Western Lifestyles in the Indies, 1900-1942’, in Henk Schulte
Nordholt (ed.), Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, Leiden, KITLV Press,
1997, p171.
180
Berry Hart, ‘Housekeeping and life in the Malayan Rubber’, p601.
181
Pryer, A Decade in Borneo, p138.

150
their cooks were known as ‘Cookie’.182 The practice was not restricted to British
colonizers as in the Dutch Indies, cooks were generically known as kokki.183 Writing
about her years spent in Malaya, Jean Falconer recalled having to make a sauce for
prawn cocktails for a dinner party as ‘Cookie (bone-head) didn’t know how’.184 In
colonial India, cooks all generally went by the name of Ramasamy, a corruption of Ra-
maswa-mi. Other colonial employers simply called their cooks bawarchi, meaning
‘cook’. This is illustrated in a dialogue between a husband and his newly arrived wife
that Sara Jeannette Duncan created in her novel, set in India: ‘Kali Bagh, cook – that’s
his name apparently, but you needn’t remember it, he’ll always answer to “bawarchi” –
has been in my service eighteen months, and has generally given satisfaction’.185
L.W.W. Gudgeon states, ‘every domestic servant that fetches and carries within the
house is in Borneo called a “boy”’.186 R.R. Tewson, a tea planter who moved into his
new home in South India, on meeting his new ‘boy’ for the first time, thought: ‘some
boy I thought, perhaps 50 years old?’187 Edward Hamilton Aitken, naturalist and
essayist, writing in 1889, offered two suggestions on the origin of ‘boy’:
‘I have heard it traced to the Hindoostanee word bhai, a brother, but the usual
attitude of the Anglo-Indian’s mind towards his domestics does not give sufficient
support to this. I incline to the belief that the word is of a hybrid origin, having its
roots in bhoee, a bearer, and drawing the tenderer shades of its meaning from the
English word which it resembles.’188

While some colonials learnt a smattering of the local language, mainly to instruct their
servants, one colonial in letters home to his mother, expressed disappointment that
many of the servants of ‘opulent’ households spoke English. He claimed that the
colonial employees then found it unnecessary to learn the local language and were
‘open to the most fertile source of deception and roguery, by being placed entirely at the
mercy of their accomplished servants in all domestic monetary transactions’.189 It
appears that the aim of learning the local language was either to avoid being cheated by
the servants or to bark out commands to them. Often, the language used between
mistress and servant reflected their ambivalent relationship and this is succinctly

182
Most respondents to my questionnaire mentioned their ‘Cookie’.
183
Locher-Scholten, ‘Summer Dresses and Canned Food’, pp143.
184
Jean Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers: Memories of Malaya, Edinburgh, The Pentland Press
Ltd, 1992, p6.
185
Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, London, Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1909, p94.
186
L.W.W. Gudgeon, Peeps at Many Lands: British North Borneo London, Adam and Charles Black,
1912, p42.
187
R.R. Tewson, Memoir, The Carefree Days of Planting, Tewson Papers, Cambridge South Asian
Centre. Tewson was a tea planter in South India between 1937 and 1967.
188
Edward Hamilton Aitken, Behind the Bungalow, London, W. Thacker & Co., 1907, p2.
189
Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, p93.

151
portrayed in Jean Falconer’s book of her years in Malaya as a memsahib in the early
twentieth century in the following dialogue:
“…at 7.00 the Boy brings tea to our bedroom – tea and fruit.”
“We get up at about 7.45.”
“At about 8.30 he (John Falconer, husband) calls ‘Boy!’ who answers ‘Tuan!
(Master)’ John says ‘Makan!’ (food), Boy replies ‘Baik, Tuan’ (Right, Master).
He announces when breakfast is ready, with ‘Makan siap’, and down we go.”190

Thus the servant entered the private space of the bedroom and gave the first sustenance
of the day and waited for more orders. Falconer, in her memoir, even with the benefit
of hindsight of later years, still used language steeped in colonial mistress/servant tone
and style when she recalled that after breakfast, ‘the cook presents himself to be given
instructions for the day’s lunch and dinner, and to submit his little cash book with an
account for the previous day’s purchases’.191

Even those who had some knowledge of the local language or whose servants spoke
English resorted to ‘mongrel’ dialects when communicating with him or her. ‘Mongrel
dialects’ incorporated a range of linguistic elements that were used between whites and
blacks in Africa.192 A European settler in advising communication with servants
suggested, ‘you master the names of as many common objects as possible, and a few
useful words, such as kwenda (go), kuja (come) … and string them together’.
‘Mongrel’ language was also employed in India, British Malaysia and Singapore.
Following is a dialogue reproduced in a book with contributions by different authors
and illustrates mangled language and a childlike tone.
‘Mrs Tracey, says: “Now, Khansama, for Hazree, we must have a nice Hosenai
Kabob, do you understand?”
“Ah, Memsahib! You mean Countree Koptan.”
“Well, well, Country Captain or Hoosenai Kabob, mind we have a good one, and
bring some good Mutchee (fish) -- nice Hilsa Mutchee, you know -- and tell
Bobertchy to “khoob bager kero” (fry it well).”
“Oure kootch? (anything else)” says Emem Khan.
“Yes, we must have a chigree (prawn) curry,” and then continues “for Tiffin let
there be a Mulgo-tanee, some veal cotelettes with tomatoes; and as it is now cool
weather we can have the tunda Buddock (cold duck) left from today's Khanna”.
“Shall I go and order from Spence's a Saklee Mutton?” (His and the ordinary
native way of saying “Saddle of Mutton”).’193

190
Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers, pp2-3
191
Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers, p3.
192
Kennedy, Islands of White, pp156-157
193
Laura Sykes, Calcutta through British Eyes, 1690-1990, Madras, Oxford University Press, 1992, p46.

152
Even where servants were conversant in English it was not unknown for British
colonists to use ‘mongrel’ language.194 The colonizers’ sense of superiority and the
view that the colonised were childlike meant that they had to ‘talk down’ in ‘mongrel’
language – a combination of almost baby-talk and pidgin. The poem below was
published in a Singapore newspaper, the objective of which was unclear, perhaps to
titillate, to show cleverness?

Malay, A Poem
Amah, give anak his makan Amah, feed the child
Get the dhobi all sudah by three Make sure the dhobi finishes by three
Tell Tuan I’ve pergi’d to Tanglin Tell Tuan I’ve gone to Tanglin
And I’ll probably pulang for tea And I’ll probably be back for tea
Sapu lantai the rumah this morning Sweep the floor this morning
Don’t siap the meja ‘til eight Don’t set the table until eight
Ask the saises to chuchi the kreta Ask the drivers to wash the car
And be sure the kebun isn’t late. And be sure the gardener isn’t late.
Tid’apa the tiffin for anjing Don’t worry about feeding the dog
I’ll give him his tulang tonight I’ll give him his bone tonight
Make sure that the pintu’s are tutup’d Make sure that the windows are shut
And see the kuching’s all right. And see the cat’s alright.
So, Amah, I’m pergi-ing scarang So, Amah, I’m going now
You nanti until I return You wait until I return
Now I’m certain I’ve made myself clear Now I’m certain I’ve made myself clear
For Malay is so easy to learn.195 For Malay is so easy to learn.

The colonial community in the Malay and Borneo states and Singapore were
encouraged to learn ‘kitchen’ Malay with the publication of Malay for Mems.196 Author
Maye Wood declares that the ‘object of this little book is to place before newcomers,
especially women, the most ordinary and necessary words and phrases required in
household management’. Using her own personal experience, Wood included
vocabulary and phrases that she deems are ‘the most useful’ and ‘the most generally
required’.197 The contents of this ‘phrase book’ are illuminating, the section which
Wood entitles ‘Easy sentences on ordinary themes’ comprise mainly commands and
imperatives. Here are some examples:

194
Kennedy, Islands of White, pp156-157. Kennedy cites Edna Boddington in The Call of Rhodesia,
Salisbury, Art Printing Works,1937, in which the Rhodesian writer who ‘only discovered that her
gardener could speak and even read English when he was drafted in a pinch to cook for her family, and
prepared an excellent meal with the help of one of her cookbooks’, p238.
195
The Beam, vol.2, no.1, April/May 1958.
196
Maye Wood, Malay for Mems, Singapore, Kelly & Walsh, 1949.
197
Wood, Malay for Mems, Introduction

153
On cleaning198:
Wash that Chuchi itu
Make that clean Bikin beriseh itu
This is dirty Ini kotur
This is not clean Ini tidah beriseh
Wash these plates Chuchi ini pingan
Wash them again Chuchi lagi satu kali
Wash it properly Chuchi betul
Is this really clean? Ini b’tul beriseh?

On cooking199:
Call the cook Panggil kuki
Not cooked Tidah masak
Not enough cooked Belu(n) chukup masak
Too much cooked Tilalu banyak masak
Tuan wants dinner Tuan mau maka
Make some sandwiches Bikin s’dikit “sandwich”
Put them on the dining-table Taroh meja makan
Cover them up properly Tutup betul

Conversation with the cook200:

I want to inspect the kitchen to-day Ini hari, sahya mau pereksa dapur
Tell the cook to come here Kasi tau kuki k’mari
Choose the best fruit Pileh buah bagus
Give us rice to-day Ini hari kasi nasi
Cut up the meat in thick pieces Potong daging t’bal
Fry it Goreng
Use a hot oven Pakai tempat-panggang panas s’kali
Throw that away Buang itu
Is the meat good? Daging ada baik?
This meat is tainted Daging bagus s’kali

In a memsahib’s guide for learning Hindi, A.K.D-H gave encouraging advice on

memsahibs in trying out their Hindi on their servants, saying that it ‘is rather wonderful
how Indian servants do understand memsahib’s Hindustani sometimes, and keep their
countenances over the most laughable mistakes’.201 The guide provides a list of orders
to servants, a list that is both imperious and critical in tone:
‘If you do not carry out orders you will be dismissed at once.
I want “chota hazri” at 6 o’clock.
Breakfast at ten o’clock sharp

198
Wood, Malay for Mems, p9.
199
Wood, Malay for Mems, p12.
200
Wood, Malay for Mems, pp18-19.
201
A.K. D-H, The Memsahib’s Manual: Being an Easy Guide to Learning Hindustani, with Some Advice
on Health and the Household, Calcutta & Simla, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1914, piiv.

154
 Lunch at half past one.
Tea at four and dinner at eight o’clock.
This tea is too weak.
Take it away, and make fresh quickly.
Tell the cook there will be four more people to dinner.
Take care that there will be enough dinner.
Find out if you can get fresh fish, also some pigeons.
Yesterday’s meat was very tough.
It ought to be more tender.
This vegetable is quite raw.
How badly you have washed this tray cloth, it is still all stained, clean it
properly.
Brush my hair...’202

There was hardly any significant mention of food and even more conspicuously absent
were references to the servants who prepared the food on the numerous journeys of
exploration in the early days of British settlement in British North Borneo. Several
expeditions into the jungles of Borneo were carried out on behalf of the British North
Borneo Chartered Company for mineral exploration and also to look at agricultural
potential.203 A Captain Beeston, in his diary of his journey up the Segama River in 22
September 1887, made mention that ‘stores beginning to diminish as far as tinned soups
and meats are concerned’. On 3 October his entry read, ‘[O]pened the last tin of
flour’.204 D.D. Daly, the assistant resident of Dent Province, noted in his diary while
traveling in the Tenom area that he ‘bought 4 gantangs of red rice for 2 fathoms of
cloth, worth 32 cents. …10 fresh eggs for cloth worth 5 cents, 100 cobs Indian corn for
1 fathom cloth worth 16 cents. Fowls for cloth from 5 to 10 cents each’.205 In a diary
entry of a group travelling in early January 1885 with the British Consul-General in
headhunting country in Murut country, reference to food was even more cursory: ‘after
dinner I went ashore to the long house, armed with three big bottles of gin and some
Putatan Tobacco, to a head feast’.206

The necessity of having servants as assistants for the travelling colonizer was
highlighted by Evelyn Battye when she claimed that ‘because there were some chores

202
D-H, The Memsahib's Manual, pp25-30.
203
K.G. Tregonning, Under Chartered Company Rule (North Borneo 1881-1946), Singapore, University
of Malaya Press, 1959, p129. William Pryer, W. Pretyman, L.B.Von Donop, F.W. Burbidge and F. Witti
were some of these who journeyed into the interior of North Borneo.
204
‘Mineral Exploration in British North Borneo’, The British North Borneo Herald, and Official
Gazette, Sandakan, 1 May 1890, p129.
205
‘Extracts from the Diary of Mr D.D. Daly, the Assistant Resident of Dent Province’, The British North
Borneo Herald, and Official Gazette, 1 December 1885, p2.
206
‘Diary of a Cruise with the British Consul-General up the Tamburong and Labu Rivers in Brunei Bay,
on a Visit to the Head-Hunting Muruts, Now in Rebellion against the Brunei Government’, The British
North Borneo Herald, and Official Gazette, Sandakan, 1 March 1885, p3.

155
neither sahibs, nor mem-sahibs, nor miss-sahibs could do for themselves in India,
travellers of any standing took a personal servant with them’.207 Among the tasks that
her personal servant, a Pathan called Yakub Khan, did for her was to bring Battye food
and drink or ‘conducted’ her to the restaurant car at station stops. At night Yakub Khan
undid Battye’s bedding roll on the bunk, made it up with sheets and pillow case, and ‘all
but tucked me in’.208 Auriol Gurner, who grew up in India, admitted that there was a
servant for every purpose.209 Her ayah laid out clean clothes each morning for her and,
while Gurner was still asleep, she ran the bath with a rag wound round the taps so that
the sound of running water would not wake her.210 Her other tasks included squeezing
out toothpaste on to the toothbrush in readiness and bringing orange juice to the
bedside.211 This was echoed by another colonial woman who remembered from her
childhood her ayah coming into her bedroom each morning ‘with freshly squeezed
orange juice, which she put by my bed. I slept on. She went into the bathroom, fixed
strips of sheeting to both taps to silently run my bath’.212 The servants also carried out
other intimate chores, from bringing their employers’ breakfast to the bedroom first
thing in the morning to feeding and looking after their children.

It can thus be argued that had it not been for the servants’ input, the memsahibs would
have had to work harder. As it was, their work not only saved white labour, it helped
shape colonial culture, despite the Britons’ best efforts to keep themselves socially
distant. A pertinent question would be whether a colonial cuisine would have
developed with such distinctive features without the benefit of the intimate aspect of
native (though not necessarily indigenous) servants in British India, Malaya and
Singapore. Cookbooks and other prescriptive manuals and writings on reminiscences
became tools in articulating the identity of the good colonial wife and perpetuated racial
prejudices against servants. The dominant pattern that emerged from these publications
portrayed servants in the colonies as inherently dirty, unreliable and dishonest. This
pejorative image of servants in the colonial home and the utter dependence of
Europeans on their services was characteristic of the contradictions of colonial life. The
dichotomy between image and reality of colonial attitude towards their servants

207
Battye, Costumes and Characters of the British Raj, p19.
208
Battye, Costumes and Characters of the British Raj, p19.
209
Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1939-1950, vol.II, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, p48.
210
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.II, p48.
211
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.II, p48.
212
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.II, pp56-57.

156
extended beyond the home. Outside the home, the colonial institutions of clubs, dak
bungalows and hill stations would also take on completely different dimensions without
the work of domestic servants, an aspect that will be discussed in the next chapter. Just
as the venues for rest and recreation were extensions of the colonial home, the vital
domestic services of Asian workers were replicated in clubs, rest-houses and hill
stations.

157
Chapter Five

Leisure and Segregation: Clubs, Hill stations and Rest-houses

‘So it is with life on the Nielgherries – a perfect anomaly. You dress like an
Englishman, and lead a quiet gentlemanly life – doing nothing. Not being a
determined health-hunter, you lie in bed because it passes the hours
rationally and agreeably, and you really can enjoy a midday doze on the
mountain-tops. ... your monthly bills for pale ale and hot curries, heavy
tiffins, and numerous cheroots, tell you, as plainly as such mute inanimate
things can, that you have not quite cast the slough of Anglo-Indian life.’1

This chapter looks at the hill stations, clubs and rest-houses2 or dak bungalows that
became the exclusive leisure and recuperation centres for British colonists in India,
Malaya and Singapore. These three institutions with their customs and codes of
conduct reinforced and replicated those of the carefully guarded colonial home against
the encroachment of the colonized environment and its people. As in the home, the
European in the hill stations, clubs and rest-houses depended entirely on domestic
servants to provide food and comfort. Colonial life on the hill stations, by dint of their
isolation and the constructed surroundings to resemble the idyllic English countryside,
was entirely dependent on the local indigenous servants. It was ironical that by
segregating themselves in the hill station, in a deliberate attempt to get away from the
local people, the British in reality depended on their services for day-to-day existence.
The services provided by the local inhabitants ranged from administrative support to
maintenance of homes and infrastructure. Similarly, the club, a veritable colonial
institution was an extension of the imperial home and was the venue where Europeans
spent their leisure hours. Rest-houses or dak bungalows were simple accommodation
dotted around the countryside for travelling government officials. Both the club and the
rest-house could also be situated in the hill station. Evidence for this chapter is gathered
from works written by the British from travelogues, biographies, autobiographies,
diaries and cookbooks.

All over the colonies, the Europeans’ dependence on the local people for sustenance

1
Richard F. Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains; or, Six Months of Sick Leave, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1991, p289. Burton was in India between 1842-1849. ‘The Nielgherries’ refer to the
Nilgiris in South India.
2
Rest-houses were colonial government-owned dwellings maintained in every town for the accommodation of
travelling government personnel in Malaya and the Borneo colonies. Fully-furnished, these brick-built buildings
were smaller than hotels and meals were prepared by the rest-house cook; see Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, An
Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, London, The Malay States Information Agency, 1911, pp 117-
118.

158
was entrenched. At home, every meal was prepared by domestic servants and almost
every drink was fetched by the ‘boy’. This dependence also extended to the times when
the colonial was on the move, particularly in areas where there were no European
homes or hotels or where there were no wayside taverns or inns that provided meals.3
This thesis argues that the influence that domestic servants in the colonies wielded over
the food practices of their colonial masters was of paramount significance. In the
colonial home the memsahib presided over a home that was run by servants; while she
might have issued the orders for the meals of the day, it was the cook, the cook’s
assistant and other servants who purchased, prepared and served the food. The vagaries
of the food markets meant that it was not always possible that ingredients required for
each dish could be guaranteed nor could the reliability or honesty (perceived or
otherwise) of the cook be assured. The quality of the food that appeared on the colonial
dining table would certainly be dependent on the cook and his assistants.

Hill Stations
Europeans’ ideas for devising places for rest and recreation in the tropical colonies were
largely derived from nineteenth century notions of race, of the need to isolate
themselves as rulers from the colonized, the home leave policy of the colonial
administration and a nostalgic longing for the home country. European thinking at the
time perceived India as a land of poverty, disease and famine and those domiciled there
and in other colonies took the opportunity to flee from the unbearably hot plains to the
cool hills and mountains ‘where nature reigned’.4

Rule and leisure from above

Hill stations were established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as sites for
sanatoria and military posts in the tropics by European colonizers. Although European
colonization and mercantile empire building began in the sixteenth century, hill stations
were created only in the nineteenth century because Europeans did not expand into
interiors until then.5 Though the hill station has become most strongly associated with
the British, they were not the first to use them, nor were they first developed in India.

3
As discussed elsewhere, food preparation was done by local cooks and other servants in colonial homes
and hotels. See Frank F. Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, in Carol Breckenbridge (ed.), Consuming
Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, p94.
4
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856, Delhi,
Permanent Black, 2005, p136.
5
Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, Boulder, Westview Press, 1998, p7. The majority of
the hill stations were established between 1820 to 1885; the French made Dalat in Vietnam popular in the
1890s while the Americans used Baguio as a hill resort in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

159
Nora Mitchell, in her detailed geographical study of hill stations in India, states that the
hill stations in the Netherlands Indies were developed earlier than the British ones in
India.6 Penang Hill in Malaya became the first hill station in 1786 in the British
colonies as the hill stations of India were established from 1819.7 Mitchell states that
the first house erected for a hill station in India was in 1819 in the Himalayas and that
two years later another hill station was developed in the Nilgiris in South India, 2414km
(1500 miles) away.8 The three major hill stations, Ootacamund, Darjeeling and Simla,
were established by the middle of the 1830s. Initially, the hill stations were mainly
used by British troops as convalescent retreats for the military. In 1865, Simla became
the summer capital of British India.9 By the end of the century, hill stations were
established all over India, the majority of which were in the Himalayas. Hill stations
were developed in other regions, in India too, chief among the requirements were an
elevated environment with a cool climate and an isolated area remote from the Indian
population.

Hill stations were also known as ‘change-of-air-stations’ or ‘sanatoria’ for civil

servants, planters and miners and they also served as strategic bases and cantonments.10
S. Robert Aiken, in his study of Malaya hill stations, terms the hill resorts as generally
small and isolated, ‘always defiantly out of place, they were insular little worlds that
symbolized European power and exclusiveness’.11 Aiken uses the term ‘belvedere’ – a
lofty place with a commanding view – to describe the hill station. He states that hill
stations were perched invariably ‘on the ridges and flanks of mountain ranges,’ and that
they were ‘the belvederes of empire. Simla was considered the British belvedere par
excellence’.12 Interestingly, James Heitzman notes that Simla remained a seat of
government after independence, and, when Himachal Pradesh became a separate state,
it became its capital.13 Other hill stations in India also became administrative centres,
leisure resorts for the upper and middle classes or educational institutes. Jan Morris
also describes the hill station as a belvedere; specifically, ‘the belvedere of a ruling race,
obedient to no precedent, subject to no qualm, from whose terraces as from some divine

6
Nora Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1972, p3.
7
S. Robert Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, Geographical Review, vol.77, no.4, 1987, p425.
8
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p56.
9
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p182.
10
S. Robert Aiken, Imperial Belvederes: The Hill Stations of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University
Press, 1994, pvii.
11
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, pvii.
12
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, pvii.
13
James Heitzman, The City in South Asia, London, Routledge, 2008, p136.

160
gazebo the British could look down from the cool heights to the expanses of their
unimaginable empire below’.14 Morris goes further to describe the hill station as
‘gloriously out of place – a figure of despotic privilege’.15

Ruling or relaxing from the elevated height of a hill station, British colonists were
served by a community of local people transported from the plains. Mitchell observes:
‘Merchants and traders came up the hill with produce from the plains. Coolies
came up to offer personal services. Cows were led up for a milk supply.
Washermen came to collect laundry. Some of the servants were brought up by the
elite, often sent in advance to prepare vegetable gardens and firewood on the
compound. They lived in servants’ quarters tucked out of sight behind the main
residence on the compound. Others set up a bazaar area away from the elite
compounds, where they sold their goods and set up shacks. Local hill villagers
often carried garden produce into the bazaar or sold it directly in the
compounds.’16

Dane Kennedy’s study of hill stations in India looks at the symbolic and socio-political
functions served by those resorts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
argues that these resorts were much more than centres of recreation. Kennedy surmises
that hill stations served as both sites of refuge and as sites for surveillance; after 1857
hill stations served as political and military headquarters and cantonments for colonial
troops.17 Known today as The First War of Indian Independence, Indians revolted in
1857 against East India Company ‘reforms’ that had interfered with many areas of their
lives.18 Kennedy also points out that the 1857 revolt heightened British insecurities
about life on the plains and the hill stations became preferred sanctuaries.19 He
observes that one of the paradoxes of the hill stations is that ‘their success as places
where the British imagined it possible to get away from Indians depended on the
contributions of Indians’.20 A significant portion of these contributions was the
procurement, preparation and serving of food. Hill stations, according to Kennedy, were
‘the heart of British effort to define and defend the boundaries that set them apart from
Indians and that sustained their identity as agents of a superior culture’.21 Writing along
the same lines, Philippa Levine asserts that hill stations, serving as ‘havens of safety for
14
Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980,
p271.
15
Morris, Heaven’s Command, p269.
16
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal, p7.
17
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1996, p1.
18
The revolt of 1857 that divided the history of British India is also known variously as: the Indian
Rebellion of 1857, the Revolt of 1857, the Sepoy Mutiny and the Uprising of 1857.
19
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p14.
20
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p175.
21
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p226.

161
the British’ were ‘a part of England and apart from India’ and that they were thought to
be safe places for the reproduction of the race’.22 Levine notes that the hill stations
reminded the British of England, with cool air, ‘children at home and at school, tennis
parties, village greens, English-style churches and cottages. Here the standards of home
could be maintained in what was experienced as a physically and morally corrupting
land’.23

There were two reasons for the hill stations. First, these resorts were designed to ensure
the physical well-being of the colonial in the tropics, and, secondly, relocating to the hill
stations can be seen as a deliberate act of creating social distance between the colonizer
and the colonized. Mitchell lists the contemporary medical reasons given for hill
stations as curing the ills of tropical living. They included perceptions of ailments
associated with ‘degeneracy’ – languor, irritability and depression;24 while the actual
health hazards listed were cholera, malaria, smallpox, nematode diseases, typhoid and
paratyphoid fevers and dysentery.25 By the late nineteenth century British hill stations
in India had changed from their original function as a high-altitude health resort for
military personnel and civil servants of the East India Company and became important
as an administrative and social centre.26 The types of hill stations in India and Malaya
varied and the most substantial ones seemed to be the multi-functional hill stations that
were seasonal recreational centres with permanent barracks, hospitals, schools,
agricultural estates and which also served as seats of government and military summer
headquarters.27

From 1864 the British in India decided to rule the country from two capitals. Calcutta
was the administrative centre for autumn and winter while Simla in the Himalayas,
1700km (1200 miles) away, became the spring and summer capital.28 Governors of
several Presidencies followed this precedent and the hill stations of Darjeeling,
Mahabaleshwar and Ootacamund became summer administrative centres.29

22
Philippa Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004., p74.
23
Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, p74.
24
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p182.
25
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, pp13-53.
26
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p58. See also Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, pp14-15.
27
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p59.
28
Vikram Bhatt, Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India, Ahmedabad, Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1998,
p18.
29
Bhatt, Resorts of the Raj, p18.

162
There are conflicting figures on the number of hill stations that existed in colonial India;
the main problem being the definition of what constituted a hill station. Mitchell’s
definition of the Indian hill station is broad, describing it as ‘a high-altitude settlement
originally established by the British in India to serve the needs of British civil servants
and soldiers of the East India Company’ and so lists about eighty hill stations during
British rule.30 She includes Poona, at 549m (1800ft), and Alwaye, at a mere 183m
(600ft).31 Each of the main centres of Anglo-Indian life had at least one hill station.32
Kennedy is stricter though and estimates there were only sixty-five bona fide hill
stations in the colonial era and discounts those that ‘never grew beyond a few
bungalows, modest retreats for the few Europeans stationed in the immediate vicinity’.33
However, hill stations in Malaya were indeed modest affairs and were mainly small
enclaves of bungalows situated in the highlands. Functioning as the four main Malayan
highlands were Penang Hill, Maxwell’s Hill, Fraser’s Hill and Cameron Highlands.34

Developed earlier than the British ones in India the hill stations in the Netherlands
Indies were created also as sites for military posts and sanatoria in the early nineteenth
century.35 Interestingly the British in Malaya and Singapore also took to the hills in the
Indies for their holidays. George L. Peet, a journalist in Singapore from 1923 to 1942,
mentioned in his memoir that Europeans visited the hill stations of Java or Brastagi in
Sumatra, at least once in their careers.36 Margaret Shennan, writing of her years in
Malaya, noted that while Fraser’s Hill was the leading resort for government officials,
executives of private companies and honeymooners, there were others who preferred a
trip to Brastagi.37 After a particularly hot year in Malaya, Katherine Sim, in her book
on her time spent in the colony, wrote that she and her husband were ‘hankering’ for a
break in Brastagi.38 No reasons were given why British colonials went to hill stations
run by the Dutch and not to those by the British in India. Shennan suggested that a
change of government official atmosphere at Fraser’s Hill and other towns was as

30
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, pp1 and 87.
31
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p87.
32
Michael Edwardes, Bound to Exile: The Victorians in India, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1969, p86.
33
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p9-10.
34
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, pvii.
35
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, p67.
36
George L. Peet, Rickshaw Reporter, Singapore, Eastern Universities Press Sdn Bhd, 1985, p168.
37
Margaret Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun: The British in Malaya 1880-1960, London, John Murray,
2000, p128.
38
Katherine Sim, Malayan Landscape, London, Michael Joseph Ltd, 1957, p148. Sim wrote that in the
1950s in Malaya, government servants were entitled to two weeks local leave each year, on top of all the
Chinese, Malay and Indian festivals and the British bank holidays.

163
important as a change of air in the hill stations. One could also speculate that the
Indonesian resorts were nearer to Malaya. The hill stations under Dutch administration
were similar establishments to their British counterparts administered in India and
Malaya; they were built in the cool highlands, recreated with ‘European-like’
environments and were seen as resorts for providing cultural refuge and physical
regeneration.39

Re-creating Britain in the tropics

Hill stations began to figure in ways other than combating the ills of day-to-day living
in the tropics in the British imagination. Thomas Metcalf, in his study of the ideologies
of the Raj, points out that the ideology of ‘difference’ can be read in the opposition of
‘plains’ and ‘hills’.40 In the colonial context, the plains represented the hot and
threatening, miasmic lowlands with their uncivilized inhabitants. The hills were created
as cool oases in which temperate flowers, fruit and vegetables grew, reminiscent of
places in Britain where the British could, unfettered by native people, rule and recreate
with their own kind. The British went to great lengths to create this idyllic and
‘picturesque sanctuary’. Metcalf notes that outside the ‘rolling hills of the Nilgiris’, this
was not an easy task, as the ‘Himalayas, soaring dramatically to the eternal snows, bore
no resemblance to British landscapes’.41 This did not deter the British, however, from
adopting different strategies ‘to fit these mountains into the descriptive conventions of
the picturesque’, as Metcalf points out. One strategy was to reduce the mountains in
size by referring to them as ‘hills’ and another, in writing and illustration, was to focus
on the more ‘tractable’ Nilgiris.42 A roaring fire in the hillside bungalow or clubhouse
completed the picture of being transported to the homeland. As Mollie Panter-Downes
in her book on Ootacamund hill station explains:
‘It was not India; it was the little patch of England that each exile discovered it to
be. Or, rather, it was an English dream made a shade delirious and out of the true
by the thin, high air, combined with all that many a heart loved with passion in
India -- the outdoor life, the horses, the wild animals, the early wakings in the
Indian mornings, with their matchless dazzling purity that makes each day seem
the first ever created. The lanes, the downs, the tumbling streams were all there,
to be tamed and enjoyed as much as possible in the likeness of home.’43

The efforts made to make Britons feel ‘at home’ in the hills was successful, gauging by

39
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, p67.
40
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p183.
41
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p183.
42
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p183.
43
Mollie Panter-Downes, Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill Station in India, London, Hamish Hamilton,
1967, p8.

164
the remarks made by Sim:
‘I experienced then that strange feeling, so strong up in all Malayan hill stations,
of being, temporarily, utterly aloof from the ordinary life below, in an unreal
world, not of the tropics nor of anywhere else. It was as cool as an English
summer, the flowers were English and one had almost an English energy. It was a
curious feeling as if one were caught between two worlds, snatched up out of the
tropics into a kind of No-Man's land.’44

Even houses and hotels in the Indian hill stations were named to ‘awaken early poetical
memories’ – such as ‘Moss Grange’, ‘Ivy Glen’; other names included ‘Eagle’s Nest’
and ‘The Crags’; ‘The Highlands’ made ‘our spirit soars’ while ‘Sunny Bank’ and ‘The
Dovecote’ paint ‘a vista of quiet restfulness’.45 On Fraser’s Hill in Malaya ‘the gardens
show what can be done with cultivated flowers and turf. The lawns round “The Lodge”
would rouse the envy of an English gardener’.46

The environment was transformed not just for aesthetic reasons but also for food
consumption for the itinerant European hill population. While entire household
furnishings and food supplies were carted up to the hills from the plains; fruit and
vegetables, particularly those that grew customarily in the cooler climate, were
cultivated for the colonial table. Strawberries, the fruit that seems to capture the
essence of the English summer,47 were grown and consumed in many hill stations. The
colonizers held strawberries in such high esteem that more than one location among the
hill resorts was named ‘Strawberry Hill’. The summit of Strawberry Hill in the Penang
Hill Station in Malaya was ‘graced by a shady and scented garden of roses and
strawberries’,48 while one of the finest houses in Simla was built on Strawberry Hill.49

The hill stations of Malaya did not feature as prominently in colonial life as in India and
were mainly visited for short term respite and as reminders of the English countryside.
There was no annual setting up home in the hills for months at a time and no
administration centre was ever established in the highlands. While there was talk of
turning the Cameron Highlands into an alternative seat of government from the late
1930s, similar to that of Simla, this did not materialize. Japan’s growing expansionist

44
Sim, Malayan Landscape, p136.
45
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress
and Servants the General Management of the House and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its
Branches, London, William Heinemann, 1898, p190.
46
J.B. Scrivenor, ‘Recollections of Cameron’s Highlands and Fraser’s Hill’, Journal of the Malayan
Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol.IX, Pt.I, 1931, p14.
47
http://www.icons.org.uk/, ‘Strawberries and Cream’, accessed on 12 May 2008.
48
Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, p429.
49
Edward J. Buck, Simla: Past and Present, Delhi, Sumit Publications, 1979, p112.

165
interests and the subsequent occupation between 1942 to 1945 ended long term plans
for transferring the administrative centre to the hill station. Simla became the object of
nationalist agitation in India and it could be that the British wanted to exercise caution
before establishing another administrative centre in a Malayan hill station. Mohandas
Gandhi referred to the expensive Simla colonial administrative centre as ruling from the
‘five hundredth storey’.50 Another conjecture could be that the heat in Malaya and
Singapore was not seen as debilitating as that in India; alternatively, perhaps the local
population was far fewer in number than the teeming masses of India, and, accordingly
colonizers felt less need to get away from the natives. The truth however could be the
special ‘charm’ of Malaya which under many Britons fell, with the ‘easy going’ local
people and natural beauty of the country. ‘Old Malay hands’ frequently wrote of the
‘magic of the country’; Margaret Shennan in her study of the British in Malaya, quotes
Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown (who was posted to the Negri Sembilan in Malaya in 1932)
as saying,
‘It was here [in Seremban] … that I first fell under the spell of Malaya that has
held me ever since. My time there was short … but it was enough for me to fall
for everything: for the mountains and plains and the streams, and the empty coasts
of sand so golden in the dusk; for the charm of the inhabitants …’51

Singapore in the 1920s also had its attractions for the European population; there were
public gardens, good hotels, European shops, swimming clubs and other social clubs.
Shennan points out that even within the confines of the island there were many
temptations and choices for recreation as
‘[t]here were always temptations and choices galore: champagne and oysters,
moonlight matinees or moonlight picnics, subscription concerts, and the
Swimming Club – with five shining cocktail bars, terraces resplendent with sunny
umbrellas, a perfect dance floor ….No week was complete without a little outing
or makan angin, east to the beaches beyond the Sea View Hotel or westward to
the Singapore Gap’.52

Still, British colonials in Malaya and Singapore went to the hill stations to ‘enjoy
looking at English flowers and eating strawberries with fresh cream’ at a hotel built like
an Elizabethan mansion in the Cameron Highlands in Malaya.53 Other hotels in the
Cameron Highlands were the Green Cow Tavern and the Smoke House Inn. The latter
was a 1930s mock Tudor mansion, ‘famous for its log fires and strawberry and cream

50
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p172, citing Gandhi, ‘Five Hundredth Storey,’ in Collected Works,
vol.20, Delhi, 1966, p117.
51
Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun, p109.
52
Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun, p113.
53
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in
Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979, p164.

166
teas’.54 Jean Falconer, a memsahib in Malaya, pointed out that it was delightful to have
a ‘cheery log fire burning in the sitting room’ in hill station lodgings and although she
conceded that a fire was not entirely necessary, ‘it is the kind of luxury people expect in
the hills’.55 At Fraser’s Hill, Europeans in the 1930s could also refresh themselves at
‘the only pub in Malaya, at Maxwell Arms, which served as the clubhouse for the nine-
hole golf course’.56 Fraser’s Hill, at 4100 ft (1250 metres above sea level) lies along the
Malayan central mountain range.

In her work on the imperial architecture of India, Jan Morris observes that the British
‘ruled in enclave, and their buildings almost always, even when ostentatiously
Indianified, spoke of an alien and exclusive presence’.57 In her other work on India,
Morris states that all over the trend was towards the ‘aloof and the grandiloquent, …
Government Houses, for example became very grand indeed’.58 However, in Malaya,
colonial architecture, like other aspects and institutions of colonialism, was scaled
down. This is best illustrated by the official residence of the district office in the then
new hill station at Cameron Highlands. Shennan wrote in 1937 that the residence,
serving also as home for the district officer, Sir John Peel, was ‘a wooden hut with a tin
roof and the office was attached … There were two rooms, no running water or
sanitation…’59

Regardless of the size of the hill station, the single most pertinent characteristic of the
exclusive resort was the armies of local workers who were responsible for maintaining
the hill station as a sanctuary for rest and recreation for the colonizers. All the rituals of
colonial life in the plains were replicated in the hills. Domestic servants were included
in the annual pilgrimage to the hill stations. As Aiken points out it was the ‘porters,
bearers, butlers, valets, tailors, cooks, ayahs, amahs, dhobis (washerman), water
carriers, lampmen, guards, footmen, gardeners, grass-cutters, and sweepers’ who
sustained the ‘hill-station clientele … drawn from a small but powerful dominant
elite’.60

54
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p129.
55
Jean Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers: Memories of Malaya, Edinburgh, The Pentland Press
Ltd, 1992, p45.
56
Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun, p127.
57
Jan Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj, London, Oxford University Press, 1983, p35.
58
Morris, Heaven’s Command, p271.
59
Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun, p196.
60
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, p8.

167
Escape from the unhealthy lowlands to the mountain air
In the Company era, Europeans doubted whether they could endure long periods in the
tropics without serious mental and physical deterioration.61 As medical doctor G.M.
Giles wrote in 1904, ‘a hundred years ago a prolonged residence in the Tropics was
regarded with well-founded horror. The best the white settler in the lands of the sun
dared hope for was “a short life and a merry one,” but too often the merriment was
sadly lacking’.62 It was then widely believed that European men should recuperate for
six to eight months in a temperate climate after every three or four years of living in the
tropics, and that women and children should spend an even shorter time in a tropical
climate.63 In a handbook to British Malaya it was suggested that children should be sent
back to Britain as soon as they reached the age of six as they tended to become anaemic
in the colony.64 Even within the medical profession, the prevailing view at the time was
that females faced a greater risk to their health when they had to endure the unrelenting
heat of summer and were strongly advised to retreat to the hills.65 Developed
specifically by European colonialists, hill stations were originally designed for colonials
to regain their health from the perceived ills contracted in the tropical lowlands.66 It is
unclear what precisely the ailments were as a result of living in the tropics for a number
of years but it was generally accepted that ‘after three or four years in the tropics white
men no longer displayed as much energy in their work and that many became nervous
and irritable and found it difficult to concentrate and to remember recent events or even
important appointments’.67 This malaise is attributed to two ideas of the time,
originating from Greek thinking: miasmas or swamp airs caused disease, and, climate as
affecting a person’s energy and personality.68 In Southeast Asia, the colonials called
this syndrome ‘tropical neurasthenia’ or ‘Malayan head’ and Butcher cites several

61
Robert R. Reed, ‘The Colonial Genesis of Hill Stations: The Genting Exception’, Geographical
Review, vol.69, no.4, 1979, p463.
62
G.M. Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology: A Popular
Treatise on Personal Hygiene in the Hotter Parts of the World, and on the Climates That Will Be Met
Within Them, London, John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd, 1904, piii.
63
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p160. For nineteenth century thinking on hill stations as restorative
respites for tropical ills, see Daniel Henry Cullimore, The Book of Climates – Acclimatization, Climatic
Diseases, Health Resorts and Mineral Springs, Sea Sickness, Sea Voyages, and Sea Bathing, Read Books,
2009: http://books.google.com/books?id=xsLFOwAACAAJ&dq=book+of+climates. (first published
1891).
64
R.L. German, Handbook to British Malaya, London, Waterlow & Sons Limited, publication year
unknown, p50.
65
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p120.
66
See J.E. Spencer and W.L. Thomas, ‘The Hill Stations and Summer Resorts of the Orient,
Geographical Review, vol.38, no.4, 1948, pp640-641.
67
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p158.
68
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p15.

168
sources which indicated that the suicide rate among Europeans was high.69 Six years
was considered too long a period to spend in the tropics but that was how long officials
in the Malay States had to wait for a year’s leave.70 Butcher observes that doctors and
laymen of the time claimed that apart from the heat and humidity, the monotony of the
climate was ‘one of its most harmful aspects’. However Butcher notes that it was
unclear ‘whether the nervous system was gradually damaged by a lack of stimulation
from changing temperatures or simply that men who were used to marked seasons
found the tropical climate boring’.71 Perhaps more importantly, Butcher notes that
‘beliefs about the long-term effects of the climate were often influenced by the attitudes
Europeans had towards the peoples who inhabited the tropics. Arising from these
attitudes was the fear that, over a period of several generations, if not sooner, Europeans
might lose their superior vigour and degenerate into the lazy ways of the natives’.72 A
less costly alternative to the long journey for home leave in Britain was the
establishment of the hill stations. Children could also be educated at hill schools that
were under European administration and were a segregated environment, that is, they
catered to only European children.73 In Simla, although the British could educate their
children at Bishop Cotton’s school (which was run on English lines), most of the
parents still preferred to have their children’s education completed in England.74
Colonial government policy on leave, and distance to Britain, meant that a short break
in the hill stations instead would restore their well-being with its cool climate.75 Aiken
states that the East India Company usually did not allow its employees to go home on
leave and this was the main reason for the popularity of local resorts.76 Later,
employees under the Crown Colony administration were able to return to England for
home leave after eight years in India. Staff of the Indian Civil Service were entitled to
different kinds of leave in the nineteenth century, ranging from privilege leave, special
leave, leave on medical certificate and furlough.77 In addition, fast steamship travel did

69
Butcher refers to letter to editor of British Medical Journal, vol.1, 1926, p503, by Bishop of Singapore
to editor; Kenneth Black, ‘Health and Climate with special Reference to Malaya’, Malayan Medical
Journal, vol.7, 1932, pp103-4.
70
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p72. Butcher cites annual reports by Residents in the Malay States
appealing to the Colonial Office to give government servants leave every three or four years. It was only
just before the First World War, that leave could be taken after every four years of service.
71
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p158.
72
Butcher, The British in Malaya, pp158-159.
73
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p160.
74
Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608-1937, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974,
p251.
75
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p72.
76
Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, p426.
77
For a discussion on furlough for staff of the Indian Civil Service, see David Gilmour, The Ruling
Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, p273-277.

169
not become a serious option until the second half of the nineteenth century. With the
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, technological impediments to frequent Europe-Asia
travel were lessened.

‘When are you going to the hills?’, according to Steel and Gardiner, was the typical
question when the month of April approached.78 While colonials viewed the sojourn to
the hills as an annual pilgrimage to restore health and general well-being, there was also
the perception that women and children were in far greater need of this respite from the
tropics. Women and children were seen as more likely to succumb to the tropical
climate and sending them to the hill stations was one way of ameliorating their stay in
India. Collingham cites an 1883 handbook for women in the tropics in which the
authors, S. Leigh Hunt and Alexander S. Kenny, criticised Anglo-Indian women who let
themselves:
‘sink into a state of debility, who gave in to the climate, breakfasted in bed, and
only moved from bed to sofa in a dressing-gown to read “literary trash”, who
stimulated their jaded appetites by snacking on “highly seasoned and harmful”
food, and who tried to energize themselves by taking nips of alcohol’.79

It was felt that the behaviour of these women set bad examples to young girls as the
British were anxious to promote the British ideals of womanly refinement and civilized
behaviour in order to counter the perceived threat of India.80 Anglo-Indians also saw
themselves as an aristocracy in India and they were keen to protect this reputation.
Steel and Gardiner stated that a change in the hills was necessary when:
‘a woman cannot sleep at night her nervous system suffers, and failure to obtain a
good night’s rest is one of the great drawbacks of a hot weather in the plains… the
house is not sufficiently cool at night to enable us to sleep with any comfort, and
sleepless nights in India predispose the system to disease, especially of a
malarious kind.’81

Steel and Gardiner advocated the preference of going to the hills instead of taking leave
to England. The yearly visit was viewed as ‘materially assisting in the maintenance of
good health’ and one of the authors noted that ‘her own experience of its benefits was
that, having brought up a large family during a residence of twenty years in India, she
was never once invalided, and only went to England twice during that period, and then
78
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p189.
79
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, p179.
80
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p181.
81
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p189. The authors also noted that
‘the constant talking about the heat is so depressing, that the mere thought of being able to get cool by a
trip to the hills makes us better able to endure it while it lasts, taking away, as it does, the feeling of
hopelessness which generally sets in about July or August’, p190.

170
in the company of her husband and children’.82 This decision was not made without
careful deliberation, however; the main consideration being weighing up the health
benefits for herself and her responsibilities as the dutiful wife. Steel and Gardiner
wrote:
‘Many wives, no doubt, cannot make up their minds to break up their homes and
separate from their husbands, but if the choice lies between a few months’
absence from home yearly and visits to England lasting several years, surely the
former is preferable. And a good wife can do much to keep her husband’s home
in the plains comfortable during her annual visit to the hills: she can make wise
arrangements before leaving, and can even send him weekly bills of fare, lists of
servants’ wages, &c.’83

Not all medical opinion of the time was in agreement that hill stations were a panacea
for the ills of the lowlands. Giles’ text on climate and health in the tropics disputed this
claim, stating that the health advantages of resorting to the hills were ‘overrated’ and
that the hills had ‘special dangers of their own’.84 Giles claimed that during the rainy
season hill stations could be particularly dangerous for children as typhoid fever was
endemic in almost all hill stations. He observed,
‘The amount of sickness, both of a serious and trifling character, on most hill
stations is perfectly alarming, and there cannot be the least doubt that there are a
great many stations in the plains that are far less unhealthy for Europeans the
whole year round, so what is gained by resorting to the hills is, in most cases, not
health, but personal comfort.’85

Giles noted that ‘hill diarrhoea’ was common in the Himalayas and advised prevention
of this by filtering all water for drinking and cooking. He said that although the hills
were free of malaria, the disease could be easily prevented in the lowlands by installing
‘metallic gauze’ to prevent entry of mosquitoes.86 He further stated that the climate of
the hills, ‘though pleasant enough, is during the rains even more treacherous than that of
the plains – damp cold, alternating with warmth’.87 Kennedy also described the
situation in the nineteenth century when, due to lack of toilet facilities for the thousands
of servants who lived in the hill stations, diseases like typhoid fever and cholera
frequently broke out. It was only when Indians posed a health threat to Europeans that
sanitation facilities were improved.88

82
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p189.
83
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p189.
84
Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries, part 1, p80.
85
Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries, part 1, p81.
86
Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries, part 1, p80.
87
Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries, part 1, p150.
88
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p191-192.

171
As fervent believers in the curative air of the hills, Steel and Gardiner devoted a whole
chapter, titled ‘On the hills’, to making preparations for the hills in their manual on
housekeeping and cookery in India.89 They praised the benefits of ‘going to the hills’ as
a preventative measure against mental and physical ills. Preparations for the annual trip
were formidable, and decisions had to be made on ‘what to take and what to leave
behind for the master of the house’.90 ‘Taking to the hills’ was a literal transplanting of
the household – Steel and Gardiner suggested transporting the sitting room carpets,
curtains, the piano, tables, chairs, ornaments, wall pictures, books, house linen, crockery
and other ‘kitchen and pantry gear’.91 Mrs Robert Moss King, a ‘civilian’s wife’,
writing in diary of her years in India in the late 1800s, remarked that for the sojourn to
Landour, ‘fortunately men are plentiful in India, and we had quite fifteen at work …
Stores had to be packed, and wine, crockery, glass, plate, house-linen, books, clothes, a
few pieces of furniture, and lastly the piano’.92 Lavender Jamieson, born in 1914,
described how, as a child, her family ‘went annually to Coonoor in the Nilgiri Hills for
the hot weather, traveling in great luxury in our own saloon – two carriages, one the day
and sleeping carriage and the second for the kitchen, luggage and servants’.93

Although hill stations were not permanent fixtures on the calendar for the British in
Malaya, mainly because the equatorial climate there is the same throughout the year,
live animals, servants and provisions were lugged up to the hill resorts. A Mrs Stratton-
Brown on an ‘expedition’ to Bukit Kutu (or Treacher’s Hill) in Selangor in the 1890s in
Malaya recounted that two sheep were driven up, crates of fowls, ducks and tinned
provisions in boxes were carried by coolies. Mrs Stratton-Brown stated that visitors
generally took their houseboy, and amahs or ayahs for the children. She noted that it
‘needed some 20 coolies for the baggage, so it became a minor mountaineering
proposition’.94

Re-creating the colonial cuisine in the hills

The degree to which Anglo-Indians tried to relocate their entire households to the hills
was indicative of their desire to maintain their imperial lifestyle in the hills. The white

89
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp189-198.
90
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p189.
91
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p194.
92
(Mrs) Robert Moss King, The Diary of a Civilian’s Wife in India, 1877-1882, London, Richard Bentley
& Son, 1884, p45.
93
Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1919-1939, vol.I, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, p30.
94
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, p34.

172
middle-class household that they had so carefully created in the plains was transplanted
to the hills, sometimes to hill stations that were inaccessible by roads. Writing in the
1890s, Steel and Gardiner observed that, while some hill stations had good roads, others
were approached only by tracks fit for camels and mules’.95

Just as the memsahib performed her wifely duties in maintaining prestige in the plains,
she continued to operate in her private sphere in the hill stations. As in many other
areas of colonial life, the annual trip to the hills was a major undertaking. The native
servants were responsible for the upheaval to the hills: first to pack the entire household,
then to accompany the goods en route, set up the household and finally to work in a
different setting. The whole exercise would have not been feasible without the part
played by the domestic servants; indeed, it is doubtful whether the administrative
centres of Simla, Ootacamund, Mahableshwar, Naini Tal and others could have existed
without domestic servants. It can perhaps be argued that hill stations in Malaya were
not as developed as those in India, and that a fully functional administrative centre did
not emerge in the Malayan hills owing to the significantly smaller number of servants
and other workers available.

The annual excursion extended even to the cow (kept for milk in the plains) that was led
up to the hills. In her diary King noted that on leaving Landour on 5 November, ‘after
having packed and sent off fifty coolie loads of heavy baggage on the previous day ...
On the way down, we overtook our cow, who was lying down and refused to get up.96
Gardiner and Steel suggested that for households who did not keep cows, ‘the next best
thing is to hire them: they will then be brought morning and evening to be milked
before you and into your own milk-can. Of course a good deal more has to be paid for
milk obtained in this way than for that bought in the bazaar, but it is the only safe
course to adopt.97 However, should the cow accompany the trek to the hills, Steel and
Gardiner suggested that the cow should be first be milked ‘the night before the family;
at the first halting-place the milk should be left ready for the family on arrival. The last
day of the march the morning’s milk should be taken on in bottles to be made into
butter on arrival, and the cows should reach their destination in time to be milked there
that evening’.98 Where good hill pastures existed, such as in Mussoorie (at 6500ft or

95
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p195.
96
King, The Diary of a Civilian’s Wife in India, 1877-1882, p94.
97
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp191-192.
98
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, pp196-197.

173
2000 metres above sea level and created in 1826 as a hill station) milk and butter were
available.99 Some households kept goats for their milk too. Colonials based in Bombay
first went to Poona but when it too got hot they made their way to Mahableshwar in
October. There was also distrust of food in the trains cooked by unfamiliar Indians.
Kincaid noted that the food in the restaurant car ‘seldom inspired confidence, so that it
was necessary to take all one's food with one, and if a child were travelling too, a goat
would be tied in the guard's van and an orderly would hurry off to milk it when the train
stopped at some station in the evening’.100

Colonists certainly took seriously the idea that a holiday in the hills brought health or
other benefits even though it was a costly and inconvenient exercise (although servants
did the work). On the annual trek to Mahableshwar, for example, Kincaid described
how servants were sent ahead to set up tent and to unpack. As bungalows for rent were
in short supply and expensive, it was not unusual for the British to pitch a tent in a
friend’s garden in Poona or to apply to the Superintendent for a plot in the jungle.101
Kincaid painted a Somerset Maugham picture of the colonial at leisure thus, ‘It was
delicious in the evenings to sit outside the tents ... Gentlemen lay back full length in
basket-chairs, lit cigars and called for chota pegs (whisky or brandy). Ladies sipped
lemonade and looked forward to a Strawberry Tea at the Club on Friday’.102

There is no reason to believe that the colonials ate any differently to the meals they
consumed in the plains, that is, a combination of local and European meals. It is
another point of contradiction in British imperial culture that on the one hand, there was
the desire for segregation, while on the other, there was the continuing reliance on local
domestic service and Asian food. The colonial cuisine with signature dishes such as
curries, mulligatawny, caramel custard was much in evidence. Barbara Crossette, in her
study of hill stations in Asia, cites the following dishes served in the home of a wealthy
planter on Penang Hill in the 1800s: ‘a choice of soups, fish, joints of sweet Bengal
mutton, Chinese capons, Keddah fowls, and Sangora ducks, Yorkshire hams, Java
potatoes and Malay ubis, followed by a rice and curry course, cheese and fruit’.103

99
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p63.
100
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, pp282-284.
101
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p285. Kincaid also stated that ‘hotels were in those days
regarded with horror by most Anglo-Indians … there were not many European travellers who could not
stay with friends or at clubs’, p285.
102
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p285.
103
Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, pp168-169, citing John Turnbull Thomson’s Glimpses into
Life in Malayan Lands, first published 1864.

174
Groceries included tinned food (from the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay for
instance), local mutton, chicken and beef and vegetables grown in the hills specifically
for the white population: cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips and peas.104

Food supplies in the hills were more difficult to source than in the plains but Steel and
Gardiner believed that it was possible to have plain but sufficient food. They preferred
buying vegetables from a garden two or three times a week to buying from the bazaar.
Athough the former was more expensive the authors believed that vegetables from the
bazaar were dangerous if washed in dirty or too little water.105 One of the authors had a
thriving garden, supplying her family and friends with potatoes and other vegetables
and flowers. In Mussoorie, the government encouraged the creation of hillside estates
for the cultivation of European-type fruits and vegetables to cater to the European
population.106 John Lang recalled from his travels in India in the mid-nineteenth
century having mulligatawny soup and rice, cold lamb and mint sauce with sherry and
beer for tiffin at Jack Apsey’s home in Mussorie.107 While camping in the Upper
Provinces, his party slept until ten in the morning and breakfasted on ‘grilled fowl,
curried fowl and eggs, with beer instead of tea’.108

Anglo-Indians were known for consuming large meals in India and they continued to do
so in the hills. Lang described an army major breakfasting at the Himalaya Club in
Mussoorie: after having just devoured two grilled thighs of turkey, was eating a pigeon
pie and was enquiring about the Irish pie.109 Two medical doctors at the time advised
moderation in the consumption of meat and advocated eating more of the Indian staples.
Edward John Tilt, in a medical text in 1875, wrote,
‘When I say that Englishmen and women should imitate the Hindoo diet, I only
mean that they should consume less meat and fat than in England, not that they
should eat the enormous quantities of rice, to which their stomachs have not been
gradually fitted. Greasy made dishes should be avoided, but curries commend
themselves, as the result of a highly judicious conservative instinct’.110

Echoing similar sentiments in 1904, G.M. Giles, from the Indian Medical Services,

104
Bhatt, Resorts of the Raj, p43.
105
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p191.
106
Mitchell, The Indian Hill-Station, p63.
107
John Lang, Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan, London, Routledge, Warne,
and Routledge, 1859, p19.
108
Lang, Wanderings in India, p150.
109
Lang, Wanderings in India, p4.
110
Edward John Tilt, Health in India for British Women, and on the Prevention of Disease in Tropical
Climates, London, J. & A. Churchill, 1875, p, 72.

175
suggested that ‘the introduction of pulses into our dietary as a partial substitute for meat
would be advantageous, at any rate during the great heats’.111 In Malaya, Girl Guides
were instructed that ‘Green salads and vegetables should take a prominent place in our
daily diet’.112 The campaign for a reduced meat diet stemmed from the increasing
numbers of British literary figures in the second half of the nineteenth century who
converted to vegetarianism.113 The vegetarianism movement had originated in the age
of Romanticism when Hinduism and the vegetarian diet were admired as a philosophy
of universal sympathy and equality for all.114 Thus, up in the hill stations of the
colonies a tension existed between British discourses on the healthy mountain air versus
the leisurely lifestyle; and, health and frugality versus indulgence and hedonism.

By taking to the hill stations for several months of the year, with some memsahibs
staying the best part of the year in the hills, the colonials had the best of two worlds.
The British felt at home in the hills with cool temperatures, temperate flowers, fruit and
vegetables; they were housed in cozy cottages and at the same time a coterie of servants
was at hand to serve them. All the rituals of the colonial way of life in the lowlands
were replicated in the hills, including enjoying the colonial cuisine. Among the social
institutions established by the British in the colonies were clubs.

Clubs
The origins of clubs
Clubs were found in every nook and cranny of the British Empire. It has been said that
when two Englishmen meet they form a club, if there are three, they form a colony, and
if four, an empire.115 In 1775 the word ‘clubbable’ was coined by Samuel Johnson,
defining a club in his dictionary as ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain
conditions’.116 Clubs became popular in the eighteenth century in Britain when

111
Giles, Climate and Health in Hot Countries, p60, part 1.
112
Shennan, Out in the Midday Sun, p127, citing Captain’s notebook, Miscellaneous papers on the Girl
Guide movement, British Association of Malaya Papers, VI/2, Royal Commonwealth Society Records,
Cambridge University Library.
113
Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians the Discovery of India, London,
Harper Press, 2006, p423.
114
Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution, ppxxiv-xxv.
115
D.J.M. Tate, The Lake Club, 1890-1990: The Pursuit of Excellence, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University
Press, 1997, p1. The original saying that ‘If two Englishmen were to be cast aside on an uninhabited
island, their first consideration would be the formation of a club’ has been attributed to the Goncourt
brothers in the nineteenth century; see Donald McCormick, The Hell-Fire Club: The Story of the
Amorous Knights of Wycombe, London, Sphere Books Ltd, 1975, p11.
116
Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender: Homosociality and the Club’, in Roy Porter
and Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, New York, New York University
Press, 1996, p54.

176
members signed up as a group to seek a particular pleasure.

These early clubs proliferated according to every ‘pleasurable activity’ imaginable: for
example, the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks was founded in 1735; another meat-eating
club was the Rump-Steak Club.117 The eighteenth century saw the development of
gentlemen’s clubs as groups of men who met regularly, mostly in public places such as
coffee houses, taverns, or inns for a specific aim of recreation, socializing, education,
politics or a shared profession.118 The clubs had grown out of the coffee houses of the
seventeenth century which were popular places where men gathered ‘to discuss business
or politics or the latest poem or play, and to throw dice or play cards’.119 It was said
that clubs were seen as an integral part of the civilizing process in Britain.

Amy Milne-Smith, in her study on the popularity of gentlemen’s clubs between 1889
and 1914 cites several reasons for this.120 As the upper class home also functioned as a
venue for business, pleasure or politics with dinners, teas and ‘at home gatherings’; men
sought privacy or intimacy in clubs. Milne-Smith noted the irony that for the elite men,
the home might not have been able to provide intimacy or privacy.121 Men were also
said to flee to the gentlemen’s club from the feminized home because, as boys who
attended all-male public schools, they had become used to homosocial spaces and the
gentlemen’s club provided a form of domesticity.122 Apart from providing a private
space within London, the clubs usually had, on their premises, a dining hall, library,
entertainment centre, sleeping areas, bathhouse and study.123

By the middle of the nineteenth century, club culture had spread to the middle class.
Between 1851 and 1871, the middle class had tripled in size; with the increase in
employment in the business world and the increasing movement to the suburbs, many
men ate their midday and evening meals in clubs or the ‘chop-houses’.124 A further
erosion of the comforts of home was that of sustenance and nourishment and this was

117
Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender’, p48-49.
118
Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, London, Harper
Press, 2006, pp4-5.
119
Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender’, p49. In 1710 there were 2000 coffee houses in London
and Westminster that catered exclusively to men.
120
Amy Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London,
1880-1914’, Journal of British Studies, vol.45, no.4, 2006.
121
Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity?’ p797.
122
Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity?’ p798.
123
Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity?’ p798.
124
Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food, London,
Faber and Faber, 2005, pp13-14.

177
usurped by the club. As G.V. scathingly pointed out in 1862,
‘The dame of a man of independence should be proud of her position; she should
try and remedy the evil that drives her husband to his club. If she be unable to
give instructions, or be unable to read a cookery book, let her employ some one
above the woman she employs to clean her streetdoor steps -- a woman born in a
shed, or under the lee of a brick-kiln, who, most probably, never tasted meat in the
hole from whence she came. Common sense dictates that such a person ought not
to be entrusted to cook anything beyond what is fitted for the pigsty.’125

The notion of a club is based on exclusivity, and as Marie Mulvey Roberts points out,
‘while the exclusivity of a club invited privacy, it remained, at the same time, public’,
for it allowed the club member to dine away from home.126 The middle class clubs
were organised along the same structure and function and there was anxiety that clubs
were no longer exclusive. These clubs were open to men only as their membership
sought same-sex company, fellowship and a sense of camaraderie.127 Another
development of the clubs extended to those formed for men returning from the colonies,
the most famous one of which was the Oriental Club.128

Colonial clubs and women

The clubs in British India and other colonies were replicated along the same patterns,
the oldest of which was the Bengal Club, founded in Calcutta in 1827.129 The colonial
clubs were particularly important to those men whose families were in Britain or to
those who were bachelors, as the clubs served as places for socialization, dining venues
and a sense of belonging to an essentially British institution. Historian Mrinalini Sinha
discusses the notion of clubbability and Britishness in British India, contending that the
European social club in India was ‘a quintessentially imperial institution’.130 The
colonial club was the venue where Europeans met as members or guests of members of
the club. It represented a symbol of British culture; for the colonists, it reflected a
microcosm of British society in the colonies. Sinha also views the colonial club as ‘a
privileged site for mediating the contradictory logic of Eurocentrism in the creation of a
distinctive colonial public sphere that the European social club acquires its centrality as

125
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties or the Absurdities of Artificial Life, London, Chapman and Hall,
1862, p11.
126
Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender’, p54.
127
Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender’, p75.
128
Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity?’ p816. Formed in 1824, the Oriental Club and other similar
clubs helped ease the transition of returning Britons.
129
H.R. Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club, 1827-1927, Calcutta, The Bengal Club,1927, p1.
130
Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere’, in Tony Ballantyne and
Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, London,
Duke University Press, 2005, p184.

178
an imperial institution in colonial India’.131 George Orwell’s quote in his classic novel
Burmese Days, that ‘[I]n any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel,
the real seat of the British power’, is often cited in works on colonial India.132 Burmese
Days was set in colonial Burma in 1930 and the story is told through the daily life of the
Kyauktada Club where Burmese society was divided along racial lines. Butcher
observed that, in Malaya, ‘as soon as even a few Europeans settled in a district it
became possible to form a club’.133 In the early 1800s, when no social club in Kuala
Lumpur existed for Europeans, the British would meet at a Chinese-owned sundries
shop that sold ‘everything from champage to boot-laces’.134 In the aftermath of World
War II, when there was no clubhouse in Batu Gajah, a town in the state of Perak,
Malaya, the Europeans would gather at the officers’ mess to meet and have drinks.135
Following the success of the Selangor Club several others were formed, both in and
outside Kuala Lumpur.136

A significant difference between the clubs of Britain and those in the colonies was that
women were welcome in most of the colonial clubs. The likely rationale for this was to
help lessen the isolation of the memsahib in the colonies. As John Cotton, political
officer in the Indian Police Service in 1930-1946 explained:
‘I think the club was very important to the womenfolk, you see their husbands the
men spent long hours at the office and mightn’t get home until 6 and 7 at night
and then bring work home with them which might occupy them after dinner well
into early hours of the morning, and so the wife was either thrown to her own
resources, or she might go and gather with the other wives, of the club and have a
game of tennis, and it did fulfill, a very useful function.’137

Henry Berriff, born in 1927 in Simla, remembered that members of the Factory Club
met for tennis, billiard, dances and played at the nine-hole golf course. Berriff also
noted that women members played mahjong (a game of Chinese origin played by four
persons using tiles) in the mornings and that the club also had a shop for groceries, a
bar, a reading room and a library.138

131
Sinha,‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere’, p184.
132
George Orwell, Burmese Days: A Novel, London, Secker & Warburg, 1955, p17.
133
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p56.
134
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p59.
135
Falconer, Woodsmoke and Temple Flowers, p44.
136
For a description of the different British social clubs formed in British Malaya, see Butcher, The
British in Malaya, pp63-67.
137
Sir John Cotton, SOAS: OA1/18/1-6, 1930-1946, Political Officer, IPS, transcript 68 pp 5 Sept 1973 –
1015-1330 H58x.
138
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.I, pp230-231.

179
The club was just as ubiquitous in the colonial landscape in Malaya, Singapore and the
Borneo colonies. It was omnipresent in the smallest town in these colonies and even on
rubber and tobacco estates.139 L.W.W. Gudgeon observed that the tobacco plantation in
Borneo was ‘a little world of its own’ with its own telephone systems, sometimes its
own railway, its own hospital, its own district magistrate, its own post, its own police-
cell and its own club.140 K.R. Blackwell spent twenty-three years as a member of the
Malayan Civil Service and recalled how the European Club on the mine at Klian Intan
alleviated the loneliness of his time as an Assistant District Officer when he was posted
to Kroh.141 In his first eleven years in Malaya, Blackwell was a member of nineteen
clubs, many of them social clubs. He was the State Treasurer of Taiping for ten years.
The town at the time boasted five main clubs.142

While clubs in the small towns or estates of Malaya and Borneo were centres of social
activity for the Europeans, there was usually more than one club and members were
admitted through their profession or a common interest in the towns with large numbers
of Europeans. The three main clubs were the Selangor Club, the Lake Club and the
Selangor Golf Club.143 Victor Purcell, in his memoir stated that he belonged to the
Penang Club, the Swimming Club, the Golf Club, the Hunt Club and the Turf Club. He
remembered the Penang Club as having ‘lofty rooms, polished floors, ample armchairs,
servants moving about silently with trays full of drinks’.144 The Recreation Club of
Labuan, one of the British Empire’s smallest acquisitions off the coast of Northern
Borneo,145 was where colonial men played tennis, cricket and soccer. It stood on the
sea front, close to the wharf and European visitors were made welcome if they had an
introduction.146

In British North Borneo, Charles Bruce, Resident of the Interior, among his other
appointments in the colony, wrote about the club as the meeting place for the British
women: ‘the ladies are mostly invisible during the heat of the day but assemble after tea

139
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p147.
140
L.W.W. Gudgeon, Peeps at Many Lands: British North Borneo, London, Adam and Charles Black,
1912, p47.
141
K.R. Blackwell, Malay Curry, pp 81-88, MSS.Ind.Ocn.s.90, K.R. Blackwell.
142
Blackwell, Malay Curry, pp94-95.
143
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p147. Butcher describes in detail each of the three clubs: membership
criteria, facilities available in each club and the clubs’ role in European society, see pp147-157.
144
Victor Purcell, The Memoirs of a Malayan Official, London, Cassell, 1965, p248.
145
Maxwell Hall, Labuan Story: Memoirs of a Small Island near the Coast of North Borneo, Kuala
Lumpur, Synergy Media, 2007, p96.
146
Maxwell Hall, Labuan Story, p47.

180
at the club, where they watch or take part in the tennis, and when night falls, retire to
their own sanctum and, it is said, tell one another all the nutty bits they have heard
during the day’.147

Malaya, the first club formed in 1884 was the Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur.
Somewhat unusually, from its early years women were included. It was recorded that
for the ‘co-operative dinners’ at the club, each woman contributed a dish to the common
table, ‘a cold pie, … boiled fowls … salads … fruit tarts’.148 Another indication of
women’s presence in the Selangor Club was that its nickname of the ‘Spotted Dog’ was
supposedly named after a Mrs Syers’ dalmations which followed her as she rode in her
carriage to the club.149 However, women were excluded from the bar and were made to
sit in the reading room or on the verandah. Throughout the Malay states European
women were allowed to use club facilities.150

Presumably women frequented the clubs as spouses of members or as guests and were
not outright members.151 For example, John Butcher noted that in October 1892 the
Selangor Club had 140 members and there were 115 European males in the April 1891
census in Kuala Lumpur, suggesting that many European men from outside Kuala
Lumpur belonged to the club. So, outside the Anglo-Indian home, the club was the
place to be: a home away from home where women were somewhat included. The club
then was the place that integrated domestic and public life and demarcated the
boundaries between colonizer and colonized.152

Janice Brownfoot, in her work on memsahibs in colonial Malaya, offers the view that
the colonizer was in
‘an alien, seemingly decadent tropical world of heat, luxuriant vegetation,
diseases and “strange, heathen customs”, the community’s bungalows and clubs
were oases of European civilization to which wives and families brought
normality, giving their menfolk also a sense of stability and purpose …
Convinced that they were imperial rulers because it was their destiny as an

147
Charles Bruce, Twenty Years in Borneo, London, Cassell and Company Ltd, 1924, p235.
148
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p59.
149
Butcher, The British in Malaya, pp61-12. There are several versions to the origin of the ‘Spotted Dog’,
one of which was that non-Europeans (non-white) were members of the club.
150
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p62.
151
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p61.
152
Levine, ‘Sexuality, Gender, and Empire’, p74.

181
 inherently superior race, whites believed that they must maintain their prestige
and a privileged position amongst the subject races which they ruled.’153

Class division in clubs

However, not all clubs in the colonies existed specifically to pander to imperial designs.
There were practical reasons for colonials to frequent these establishments as
accommodation for travellers and restaurants were in short supply as discussed
elsewhere in Chapter Two. Hotels in India were described ‘as wretched places,
affording but little accommodation, and abounding with dirt, bad viands, and worse
wines’.154 The British in India were well-known for their hospitality in putting up with
travelling colleagues but where private homes were not available the club was the
solution. While each particular club had its rules and criteria for membership,
occupation usually defined the nature of each club, particularly in the early years of
colonial rule. Pierre Bourdieu, in his study on theories of social stratification, observes
that ‘Smart clubs preserve their homogeneity by subjecting aspirants to very strict
procedures – an act of candidature, a recommendation, sometimes presentation (in the
literal sense) by sponsors who have themselves been members for a certain number of
years, election by the membership or by a special committee, payment of sometimes
very high initial subscriptions’.155

In British India the rivalry in class divisions was imported from Britain and was played
out in the clubs. The class consciousness in club membership dated from the days of
the East India Company when all Europeans in India except those employed by the
company were seen as ‘interlopers’.156 Pat Chapman observes that the British upper
class had created a ‘caste’ system for themselves in India and ‘it was impervious to
change and was virtually impossible to infiltrate’.157 He outlines the hierarchy in
colonial India, noting that next to the royal family and aristocrats were the civil servants
headed by the viceroy and district commissioners. This top echelon of the most
privileged was joined by the senior police officials, the judiciary and cavalry officers

153
Janice Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony
and Protectorate, 1900-1940’, in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife, London,
Croom Helm, 1984, p189.
154
Michael Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus: The British in India, London, Constable, 1988, p81.
155
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London, Routledge, 1989,
p162.
156
W.O. Horne, Work and Sport in the Old I.C.S., London, William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1928, p19.
157
Pat Chapman, Pat Chapman’s Taste of the Raj: A Celebration of Anglo-Indian Cookery, London,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1997.

182
and other army officers and were members of exclusive clubs.158 The Indian Civil
Service jobs were so sought after by the late nineteenth century that the few who were
appointed were known as ‘competition wallahs’.159 Chapman continues to list the
different occupations held by the British in India and their hierarchy in the imperial
order and their club eligibility:
‘Merchants and traders, however, were dismissed as “box wallahs”, and no matter
how wealthy they were, the clubs were not open to them. Neither were they open
to upper-class Indians, not even to the maharajas. Shop owners were “counter
jumpers”, engineers “grease monkeys”. Surveyors were called “jungle wallahs”,
whilst tea or indigo planters were treated with indifference, and at best looked
down upon as self-made men (money, unless inherited, was nothing to be proud
of), though jute planters, often Scots, were thought to be even more inferior.
Missionaries and the clergy were tolerated, but not encouraged. Creative people
such as authors and artists were “brush wallahs” and, being normally
impoverished, were regarded as curiosities but with a status lower than “box
wallahs”. Almost without status came a huge mass of British men in minor
governmental positions, the “office wallahs”, and the lowest of the low were the
private soldiers in the Indian Army.’160

In the early days of the Madras Club in the early 1830s, membership was restricted to
the Indian Civil Service and the Army; British businessmen were not admitted. In time
this restriction was relaxed although never entirely abandoned. For example, while
partners of firms could become members their assistants could not and members who
were merchants were not permitted to vote. It was an unwritten law that shopkeepers
were not eligible for membership.161 The Madras Club was famed as an exclusive
institution and member W.O. Horne, stated that, in the 1880s, no Indian had ever been
admitted.162 The club was seen as the last bastion where the European could ‘get away’
from the Indians (and men of lower class). Horne wrote:
‘The retention of the Club as a purely British institution was easily defensible.
The life and work of the members required them daily, and in an increasing
degree, to mix with their Indian fellow-subjects, not only in work or business, but
also socially, from Government House downwards, and it was surely not asking
too much that a man might have, after his day’s work, a place where he could for
an hour or two take his ease in the society of men of his own race, and those
whose habits and customs were the same as his own.’163

Edwardes quotes J.H. Stocqueler that: ‘without insisting upon an aristocratic

exclusiveness, [the club] is nevertheless strictly an asylum for gentlemen. It is well and

158
Chapman, Pat Chapman’s Taste of the Raj, p14.
159
Chapman, Pat Chapman’s Taste of the Raj, p14.
160
Chapman, Pat Chapman’s Taste of the Raj, p14.
161
Horne, Work and Sport in the Old I.C.S., p20.
162
Horne, Work and Sport in the Old I.C.S., p22.
163
Horne, Work and Sport in the Old I.C.S., pp21-22.

183
liberally conducted, and the charges come within the means of most persons in the
upper circle of society’.164 Later the Adyar Club was started in 1890 so that its
members could get away ‘from the austerities’ of the Madras Club. In time, the Adyar
Club became known as the ‘dancing club’.165

The Bengal Club first opened in Calcutta in 1827, occupying several houses in the
middle of the city, later moving to other premises in 1845166 and 1911.167 Starting with
a membership of five hundred at its inception, The Bengal Club had a coffee room,
dining rooms, a reading room, a billiard room, card rooms and sleeping quarters for
members arriving from outside the city.168 Membership of the Bengal Club was aimed
at those in the commercial world and an army officer would not be able to become a
member.169 While the British colonials socialized in the racially exclusive clubs in the
major cities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, their counterparts in the mofussil (rural
areas or country stations) frequented ‘friendly little tennis clubs in small up-country
stations’.170 It was in the smaller centres that divisions in class or race were not as sharp
for membership eligibility. Collingham observes that towards the end of the nineteenth
century when clubs made their way to the smaller stations, the small number of
Europeans present meant that class lines became blurred and planters and officials
would be members of the same clubs.171 E.A. Midgley, who was in the United
Provinces between 1937 to 1947, described how he and the Superintendent of Police
and the European staff of the tobacco factory, the paper mill and the Remount Depot
would meet at the station club in Saharanpur, ‘together with those Indians who had
adopted English social habits, for tennis, the occasional game of billiards, and of course
the reviving chota peg. There is nothing like a long whisky and soda, thirst quenching,
restorative, easy on the liver and inducing a mild intoxication as the evening proceeds
for prompting social intercourse’.172 Similarly, E.F. Lydall who was in Assam from
1932 to 1935, stated that local government officials from the medical department

164
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p81; Edwardes cites J.H. Stocqueler, Handbook to India,
London, 1844, page number not listed.
165
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/10/09/stories/2002100900140300.htm, ‘Relaxing by the
Riverside’, sighted on 26 September 2008.
166
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p92.
167
Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club, p41.
168
Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club, p64.
169
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p225.
170
Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India: 1930-1947, London, Scolar Press, 1980,
p126.
171
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p162.
172
Hunt and Harrison, The District Officer in India: 1930-1947, p127.

184
socialized at the planter’s club.173 For the clubs that insisted on racial exclusivity and
discrimination on membership the main objection voiced was that ‘if Indians joined,
they would not bring their wives but hang around English ladies, for whom, it was well-
known, Indians held lascivious yearnings’.174 Kuala Lumpur’s Selangor Club included
a small number of non-European members from the outset. In fact, K. Tamboosamy
Pillay, a Tamil, was a founding member of the club, and was famous for the curry
tiffins he gave at his home on Batu Road.175

As former Secretary to the Governor of Bombay, David Symington said, ‘[C]lub life in
India was a very important part of our daily existence, especially in the districts’.
Symington noted that club members would go to the club at least five times a week in
the districts.176 British men and their families working in mines and estates, could with
the advent of the motor car and good roads, travel to their club where bridge, dancing
and billiards were provided, forming a prominent feature of life in Malaya.177 Harry L.
Foster in 1926 in his account of his time spent in Southeast Asia observed that the
English builder,
‘having built his empire, he settles down at his club and talks cricket. Wherever
he settles he builds a golf course; if there are two or more horses in the
neighborhood he builds a race track; if there is one other Englishman within ten
miles, he builds a club, and establishes a soda factory to supply the wherewithal
for his whiskey-stengah’ (a half measure of whisky, mixed with one half
soda).’178

The colonial cuisine in clubs

Just as the running of hill stations depended on the labour of the colonized people, so
the maintenance and provision of food and drink depended on the local people. The
Hainanese Chinese men who were famed as good cooks in colonial homes, hotels and
rest-houses were also responsible for turning out meals in the clubs in Malaya and
Singapore. For example they worked as chefs, waiters and maître d’hôtels at the
Cricket Club and the Tanglin Club in Singapore.179 Almost all the clubs had restaurants
and bars that catered for club members. At The Bengal Club high standards of culinary
skills and conduct were written into its club rules. Rule 8. – 7th states that

173
Hunt and Harrison, The District Officer in India: 1930-1947, p127.
174
See Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability’, p187 and Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p226.
175
Butcher, The British in Malaya, p61.
176
David Symington and Anne Allen Symington, OA1/64/1-5 SOAS.
177
R.L. German, Handbook to British Malaya, p49.
178
Harry L. Foster, A Beachcomber in the Orient, New York, Dodd, Mead and Compay,1926, p247.
179
Mui Teng Yap, ‘Hainanese in the Restaurant and Catering Business’, in Thomas T.W. Tan (ed.),
Chinese Dialect Groups: Traits and Trades, Singapore, Opinion Books, pp78-90, p82.

185
 ‘No provisions cooked in the Club House or Wines or other Liquors, are to be
sent out of the house on any pretence whatsoever. Any defect that may be found
with a Dinner, is to be written on the back of the bills, and signed by the Member
complaining, which bill and fault will be considered on settling the weekly
accounts; and any inattention, or improper conduct on the part of the servants, is
to be stated in writing, to be laid before the Committee at their usual Meeting.’180

While most formal banquets in India and the other colonies did not feature local dishes,
Colleen Taylor Sen offers a contradiction in her book on food culture in India, that
during the days of the Raj, a formal banquet at a club with a menu written in French,
consisted of ten or eleven courses, mainly Western dishes but also Indian ones such as
mulligatawny soup, kabobs or curry.181

As the colonial cuisine emerged it was the racially exclusive enclaves where colonials
and other Europeans congregated that the peculiarly colonial dishes were served and
made popular. Far from the myth that the British are not a people with a discerning
culinary taste, in the colonial era they debated and critiqued which cook made a finer
curry. Certain clubs or cooks acquired fame because of their culinary skills. As
discussed in Chapter Three, the Madras Club was well-known for its excellent curry,
and as Anna Chitty noted, the hottest.182 Chitty also described the recipe for nimbo pani
or lime and barley water at the Adyar Club as the best guarded secret of the khansama
and ‘no amount of wheedling by various memsahibs would get the recipe out of him’.183
It was apparent that the British frequented clubs not just for camaraderie or conviviality
but meal sharing, particularly the sharing of familiar dishes within the colonial
community. William Russell, writing in 1876, mentioned tiffin at two and prawn curry
and mutton curry for dinner (served with wine, champagne and sherry) at the Bengal
Club.184 Berriff, as one of the ‘last children of the Raj’, recounted bearers carried potato
chips with tomato sauce to each table when members played housie-housie (bingo) and
bridge at the Factory Club in Simla.185

In her memoir of her years spent in India, Roula Christou, married to an English officer
of the Indian army, described the Mahabaleshwar Club as ‘the British Raj in all its

180
Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club, p64.
181
Colleen Taylor Sen, Food Culture in India, Westport, Greenwood Press, 2004, p128.
182
Jean Chitty, Anna Chitty – Musings of a Memsahib: 1921-1933, Hants, Belhaven, 1988, p56.
183
Chitty, Anna Chitty, p56.
184
Calcutta through British Eyes, 1690-1990, Madras, Oxford University Press, 1972, p32.
185
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.I, p231.

186
pomp and glory’.186 She wrote:
‘The club building was in a magnificent example of colonial architecture,
surrounded by wide covered terraces with deep cane chairs and low tables, and by
magnificently maintained lawns and flower beds. It was built on a rise with steps
sweeping down to the carriageway, flanked by tall Victorian gas lamps. There
was married accommodation and servants’ quarters. Meals were served in the
grand manner. Waiters wore starched uniforms, pugris – elaborate turbans – and
white gloves. The tables were set with white crockery, immaculate cutlery and
glassware. The club had a reputation for the quality of the wines in its large
cellar. Its walls were hung with many pictures, and on the mantelpieces and
tables were displayed a wealth of silver trays and trophies among the
candelabra.’187

Collingham, in her work on the physical experience of the Raj, explains that the club
was the most important site which ‘daily reinforced collective identity’. She also notes
that it was the place where newcomers to a town or station were ‘initiated into the social
code, or those who had been observed to stray from the narrow Anglo-Indian social path
were chastised in a friendly manner for letting standards slip’.188 However this chapter
maintains that the club as a venue was more than about providing a sense of solidarity
between men of the same rank. It was also where men and women socialized, shared
and propagated the colonial cuisine.

Dak bungalows and rest-houses: accommodating the colonial traveller

As British India expanded under the first few decades of Queen Victoria’s reign from
the late 1830s,189 the colony was administrated by a cohort of mobile rulers, forever on
tour. Away from the major administrative and commercial centres were the remote
districts where a lone British official ruled over a large area. Public servants in the roles
(among others) of accountants, tax inspectors, judges and medical officers traversed the
colony, visiting the various administrative centres. In the years before the advent of
railways190 the traveller could horse ride, walk or be carried on palanquin191 and travel
was also done by river transport. The bulk of the travelling in hot weather was usually
done at night and travellers needed places for rest. In these areas dak bungalows and
rest-houses were places where cooks, waiters and other servants procured, prepared and

186
Roula Christou, The Last Memsahib: A Memoir, Durham, Pentland Books, 2001, p88.
187
Christou, The Last Memsahib: A Memoir, pp87-88.
188
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p162.
189
Gilmour, The Ruling Caste, pp7-8.
190
The first passenger trains in Indian began service in 1853. See http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/,
accessed on 3 June 2009.
191
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, p102.

187
cooked the colonials’ meals. Dak bungalows were peculiar to British India and were
also known as ‘rest-houses’. They were built every 15 or 20 miles (24km or 32km)
along main roads in the countryside, of about a day’s march.192 They were built and
maintained by the colonial government, usually under the direction of the local public
works department. The dak bungalow comprised basic accommodation, usually of a
single-storey building, a bed and table and a bathroom and a servant providing meals at
a moderate cost. The kitchen was situated a short distance away.193 While the
accommodation and food catering was necessarily basic, the standard was variable as
much depended on the person in charge.

Rest-houses in Malaya were run along the same lines and would almost definitely have
developed from the dak bungalows in India. However, in Malaya, they were always
known as ‘rest-houses’ and never as ‘dak bungalows’. The rest-houses in Malaya and
the two Borneo colonies were built soon after the British arrived. In the earliest years of
British administration they were the only accommodation in many of the rural areas.
Travelling from Simla on 15 October 1888, the Viceroy, the Marquess of Dufferin and
Ava and his wife, Harriot, the Vicereine, ‘to a little trip in the interior’. They stopped at
the dak bungalow at Fagu.194 As they
‘wanted to make the change from home as great as possible, we brought no
provisions with us, and resolved to leave everything to the man in charge of the
bungalow … It is a house kept up by the Government for travellers. The only
furniture in it consists of chairs, tables, and bedsteads, and the traveller pays one
rupee a day for the use of these. The food provided by the man in charge is paid
for separately, but it is not necessary to consider “the good of the house” and
people often bring their own provisions with them.’195

Due to the shortage of accommodation in the mofussil there were rules in place to
ensure that travellers did not abuse the facilities. Everyone had the right to spend
twenty-four hours in a dak bungalow and the corresponding obligation to vacate the
accommodation if there were new arrivals. If the bungalow was full, the rules were that
half the house should be given to women and the other travellers ‘who are absolute
strangers often have to double up together’. The Viceroy and Vicereine found the dak

192
See Yule, H., and Burnell, A.C., Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary: A Spice-
Box of Etymological Curiosities and Colourful Expressions, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd,
1996, under ‘bungalow, dawk’.
193
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.I, p234.
194
Harriot Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from My Journal 1884-1888, London, John
Murray, 1893, pp386-387.
195
Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India, p387.

188
bungalow at Fagu ‘most comfortable, such good fires, and such a nice dinner’.196 The
next day they walked and rode to Mattiana where they spent another night at the dak
bungalow. The couple who had occupied the bungalow for fifteen days (and had not
paid for the accommodation) had been turned out for the Viceroy and his wife and were
subsequently camping in a tent.197

The colonial kitchen on the move

Cooks at dak bungalows and rest-houses were known for whipping up meals for
travellers who turned up suddenly. As they had to rely on local ingredients, the dishes
were often omelettes, roast chicken and chicken curry.198 Curried chicken seemed to be
the dish that appeared most frequently in meals when colonials were travelling,
presumably because chicken was easier to procure than other meat. George Otto
Trevelyan, whose family members had been in India since the early nineteenth century
serving variously as civil servants, authors and travellers, wrote a satirical play in the
early 1860s titled The Dawk [i.e. Dak] Bungalow, or Is His Appointment Pucka?199
Trevelyan explained that the play took its name from ‘the comfortless hostelries of
India, in which the larder consists of a live fowl, and the accommodation of three rooms
on the ground floor, less than half furnished even according to Oriental notions of
furniture; the traveller being supposed to bring with him bread, beer, and bedding’.200
Conlon supports Trevelyan’s evidence that European travellers carried their own tea,
sugar, wine and bread on their journey to the mofussil.201 As Sir John Cotton, a
political officer, noted, ‘there was the Indian chicken which was very scraggy and
always dished up in restaurant cars, in dak bungalows, that is to say the travellers’
bungalows, or anywhere else where one happened to be on tour and one got sick to
death of chicken whether curried or done in some other way designed to make it
attractive’.202 In describing Anglo-Indians traveling up the country Edwardes stated
that in the dak bungalow, ‘the menu invariably dwindled down to the elementary and
universal “sudden death”, which meant a wretchedly thin chicken, caught, decapitated,
grilled, and served up within twenty minutes of the meal being ordered. At dinner, a

196
Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India, p387.
197
Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India, p388.
198
Taylor Sen, Food Culture in India, p128. Taylor Sen notes that some of the dak bungalows in India
still serve the same dishes today.
199
Raleigh Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole: Childhood, Family and Friends in India, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1988, p419.
200
Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole, p419.
201
Conlon, ‘Dining out in Bombay’, p94.
202
Cotton, SOAS: OA1/18/1-6 Sir John served in the IPS between 1930 to1946 and was in the sixth
generation who had served either in the East India Company or later in the Indian Civil Service.

189
variety was made by the chicken being curried, accompanied by an unlimited supply of
rice and chutney’.203 Henry Berriff, born in 1927 in Simla, related how once, when they
arrived late at a dak bungalow, the chowdidar (caretaker), who was also the cook, was
worried as he had only some eggs but with which he turned out an excellent curry.204
By all accounts the dak bungalow and rest-house was an informal and flexible kind of
accommodation; some travelers brought their own cooks and other servants. The
traveler could also cook his own meal. Berriff recalled ‘another memorable meal, at
Mandala dak bungalow, [of a] super stew that my father cooked from all the birds that
had been shot. Green pigeon, a couple of ducks, a peafowl and the dove that I had shot
myself with a pellet gun’.205 George Otto Trevelyan reported that a fellow traveler, one
sahib, ‘a fat civil servant … was travelling in most luxurious style, with a complete
batterie de cuisine, and at least a dozen servants. He turned out to be a capital fellow,
and provided me with a complete breakfast – tea, fish, steak and curry’.206

While some travellers had complained about the monotony of dak bungalow meals the
Marchioness’ description of them left no doubt that they were substantial. For breakfast
she and her husband had mutton chops, chicken cutlets, omelette, and ‘chupatties’ (flat
bread); for lunch there was lamb with mint-sauce, cold chicken and biscuits and ‘very
good butter’ to finish the meal. Dinner started with soup, followed by a joint of mutton,
curry, roast chickens or pheasants, and pudding. The author wrote, ‘we have tried hard
to see wherein lies the roughing it, and can only discover that we have to do without
champagne and without cheese, and that for three days out of the five we have had no
coffee after dinner. What destitution!’207

In Malaya, rest-houses were usually but not always bungalows and each hill station had
at least one. As in India, they served as lodgings for traveling government officers.
Sometimes travelers brought their own servants although most rest-houses had a cook, a
water-carrier and a boy.208 By the turn of the twentieth century there were modern
hotels in Kuala Lumpur and the major towns and every sizeable town had a rest-house
that was fully furnished with meals provided by the colonial government. These rest-

203
Edwardes, The Sahibs and the Lotus, pp103-104. Edwardes concedes however that in some dak
bungalows the khansamah provided excellent service.
204
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.I, p234.
205
Fleming, Last Children of the Raj, vol.I, p234.
206
George Otto Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, London, Macmillan and Co., 1907, p96.
207
Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India, p390.
208
Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, p53.

190
houses were noticeably different from the old dak bungalows of India in that they were
brick-built, clean and comfortable and run on hotel lines.209 The quality of the food
supplied varied, depending on who was running the rest-house; as in India, sometimes
‘surprisingly good and sometimes amazingly poor’.210

When L.S. von Donop embarked on his journey into British North Borneo between
1882 and 1883 to prospect for suitable agricultural land for cash crops, there were few
places to stop for meals or rest.211 There was anxiety about obtaining rice, presumably
both for himself and his local guides, according to his journal entries. Von Donop
stated, ‘I always like to have two if not three days’ rice in hand, as one is then
independent and can buy at a reasonable figure; but now, when we get to our next
halting-place, Mumus, we shall have to buy at any price’. At one stage, in crossing a
stream one of the buffaloes carrying the rice disappeared under the water but von
Donop remarked that luckily little damage was done. On 22 September 1882 Donop
reported that at their previous halting place they had to go to bed without any food.212
Donop noted though that there were now rest-houses in both Sandakan and Kudat and
they appeared to be always full.213 However outside the main towns of British North
Borneo and Sarawak there were few rest-houses. It was not just crown colony officials
who travelled vast distances but also those in the private sector who either worked in or
made trips to the remote regions. Philip Arthur Watson Howe, employed by the Steel
Brothers & Co. Ltd of Burma as a timber manager, travelled extensively in British
North Borneo on behalf of the British Borneo Timber Company in from 1948. Howe
reported sleeping at a Chinese logging camp in Bilit by the Kinabatangan River on the
east coast of the colony on 19 May 1940.214

Writing about life in British Malaya, R.J.H. Sidney noted that there were more than fifty
rest-houses in the Unfederated and Federated Malay states,
‘and they vary from a small six-roomed bungalow to a magnificent series of
houses which is fully the equal of any first-class hotel. In them all, however, will

209
Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, p119.
210
Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, p120.
211
L.S. von Donop, Diary of L.S. Von Donop, Travelling through North Borneo or 'New Ceylon', Ceylon
Observer, 1883.
212
von Donop, Diary of L.S. Von Donop, pp 6-9.
213
von Donop, Diary of L.S. Von Donop, p12.
214
Philip Arthur Watson Howe, Diaries, memoirs, photograph albums, and other papers of Philip Arthur
Watson Howe (1908) illustrating his career with Steel Brothers & Co. Ltd as a timber manager chiefly in
Burma 1929-48, also in North Borneo (Sabah), Brunei and Sarawak, and East Africa,1948-50, Mss Eur
D1223.

191
 be found similar characteristics. They are all managed by Chinese, and, as a rule,
the management is very efficient. No warning is needed as to when the traveller
is coming, nor is it necessary to say for how long the stay will be. … The writer
can never cease to remember the day when he first went into a small rest-house,
hot, thirsty and dust-ridden. He expected to be able to get a drink, but little else.
A drink, however, was provided within one moment, and before ten minutes an
excellent lunch had been put up, apparently conjured from nowhere; and this is
bound to strike one first when staying at a resthouse in Malaya – the promptness
of the service, and the way in which entirely unexpected demands can so easily be
met. A party may arrive at ten p.m. and be entirely unheralded, and yet within a
quarter of an hour be having dinner and rooms prepared for them. We ourselves
remember having informed the resthouse that we should be in for dinner at eight
p.m., and not arriving finally until after eleven p.m., and then having an excellent
meal, and going to bed as if this was quite the usual time.’215

Sidney noted that some travellers complained of the monotony of the rest-house meals
but he stated that the rest-house was not meant to be a place of permanent residence and
if a traveller intended to stay more than a few days he would be advised to employ his
own cook.216

Hospitality among the colonials

Much has been written about the hospitality of the colonial community – of the
generosity afforded to Europeans who had newly arrived to a colony or to those who
were travelling within the colony. As Trevelyan remarked, ‘there is something
stupendous in the hospitality of India. It appears to be the ordinary thing, five minutes
after a first introduction, for people to ask you to come and spend a month with
them’.217 However, this hospitality was only possible to a large extent because of the
services of the domestic servants and to a lesser extent the supervisory role played by
the memsahib in the colonial household. It was the servants who cooked and cleaned
and the memsahibs who planned and supervised meals. In her analysis of the colonial
wife’s role in the colonies, Beverley Gartrell observes that the ideal wife, in addition to
being a gracious hostess, was expected to provide hospitality for European travelers,
being ‘unpaid innkeepers’.218 This was one of the myriad roles that the memsahib was
unofficially expected to fulfill and, as Gartrell puts it, ‘British wives were custodians of
the health and psychological welfare of the officials. 219

215
R.J.H. Sidney, Malay Land ‘Tanah Malayu’: Some Phases of Life in Modern British Malaya, London,
Cecil Palmer, 1926, pp132-133.
216
Sidney, Malay Land, p133.
217
Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah, p21.
218
Beverley Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’ in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds),
The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984., pp170-172.
219
Gartrell, ‘Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?’ p170-172.

192
W.J. Wilkins, a missionary, in describing the daily life and work of missionaries in
India in the early 1880s, agreed that hospitality shown to visitors in India was unique to
the sub-continent and appreciated by the colonizers. He explained that when visitors
arrived in India they would find out who to call on; within a week the visit was returned
and within a month the visitor would be invited for dinner by those they called.220
Wilkins explained that Anglo-Indian hospitality originated from the ‘good old times’
when people kept almost open house, for an extra plate and knife and fork to be always
place on the dinner table for the unexpected visitor and that servants did this as a matter
of course.221 He stated that in country stations where there were no hotels a traveller
would be recommended by a mutual friend to stay with a resident although the host and
guest had never met before.222

Colonials were well-known for their generous hospitality towards each other. George
Barker in his memoir on life as a tea planter in India declared that ‘a more hospitable set
of men than Assam planters does not exist’.223 Barker went on to say that a visitor was
made to feel at home immediately on arrival, his host providing food and shelter. Here
too hospitality was seen as a necessity as the lack of European-style accommodation
had made colonials mutually dependent on each other. As well, in isolated locations the
newcomer brought news from the towns or other districts. Barker stated that:
‘It is considered a serious breach of etiquette to pass a man’s bungalow, even
though he be the veriest stranger, without calling in to exchange civilities. The
distance from everywhere and the paucity of bungalows makes it equally
agreeable to the dispenser of hospitality and the recipient, to meet and exchange
views on matters touching the tea world.’224

Arthur Campbell in his book on his experiences between 1950 to 1952, in the campaign
in Malaya against what he termed the Communist terrorists, wrote of how his friend,
Jameson, manager of the Saringgit Estate (a rubber estate) ‘put his bungalow at our
disposal. We squeezed fifty men into it, sleeping in rows on the stone and wooden
floors. We pitched tents on the lawn for the others’.225 He continued:
‘Often, when a patrol came in, he would ask the men up to his house to a meal
and beer. Whenever he did so, he and his wife would put themselves out to
entertain them … The food, prepared by his Madrassi cook, was a welcome

220
W.J. Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, London, T. Fisher Unwin,1883, p60.
221
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, p60.
222
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, pp60-61.
223
George M. Barker, A Tea Planter's Life in Assam, Bombay, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1884, p100.
224
Barker, A Tea Planter's Life in Assam, p102.
225
Arthur Campbell, Jungle Green, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1953, p138.

193
 change both from the canned meat and biscuits which they had to put up with in
the jungle, and from the large but tasteless dishes which they ate in camp’.226

The renowned hospitality displayed towards each other on their travels served to
provide access to a white imperial home to the British traveller wherever he might find
himself in a colony. Often, this hospitality was extended to other Europeans and
reinforced white colonial solidarity. By devising codes of behaviour and replicating
food practices from the colonial home, the British succeeded in establishing the
institutions of colonialism: the hill stations, clubs and rest-houses or dak bungalows.
Once again, Indian or Southeast Asian foods were served at these homes away from
home, and that in many cases, the work of Asian servants supported colonists’ itinerant
ways. This contradicts the sense of racial solidarity and exclusivity that some of these
venues were trying to create. These institutions were more than imperial symbolism.
Intertwined with the notions of social distance and protecting the image of the ruling
elite these institutions were bulwarks against the lingering fear and anxieties of dirt and
disease in the colonies. These concerns that indigenous people were inherently dirty
and carriers of diseases were manifested in the pages of cookbooks, household manuals,
memoirs and travel guides. A more detailed discussion on colonial anxieties about the
health and medical thinking of the time will be the subject of the next chapter.

226
Campbell, Jungle Green, p138.

194
Chapter Six

Dirt and Disease

‘A dirty kitchen is a disgrace, so let every mem-sahib have this part of her
establishment well under her surveillance, and though her too frequent
presence in the kitchen is unnecessary, yet she should make a point of
visiting it periodically to see that it is kept clean and orderly.’1

So wrote Angela C. Spry in her introductory remarks in an 1894 publication titled The
Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery. The part of the colonial household that is of most
concern to this thesis is the kitchen. While it was the heart of the colonial home,
providing nourishment to the family, it was not embraced by those who lived in it. In
fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that family members would rarely have stepped
inside the kitchen from one day to the next. As discussed in Chapter Four, the colonial
kitchen in Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states was situated well away from the
main house, usually about forty-five metres away.2 A covered gangway connected the
cookhouse and the bungalow to keep out the rain.3 In India, the cookhouse, as it was
more commonly called, was also situated at the back of the house, sometimes, in a
separate building, well away from the house, and, in some cases as part of the stables in
the compound.

Like other authors of the cookbook and household manual genre, Spry attempted to
convey several messages: that dirt was deplorable and shameful; that the memsahib was
duty-bound to ensure that the kitchen was kept clean and in good order; and that the
memsahib could keep a vigilant eye without expending too much time in the kitchen.
Implicit in these instructions was the understanding that the memsahib’s gendered role
included helping to create a barrier between the clean and pure colonizer against the
filthy and barbaric colonized. This chapter looks at European thinking on health and
disease in the tropical colonial environment from the nineteenth century and how it
influenced the daily domestic life of the European in the colonies. Household guides
and cookbooks reveal how colonials viewed dirt and how they attempted to eliminate
dirt within the household, particularly the kitchen. The mission of keeping the home
pristine fell to the memsahib but, as the kitchen was the focal point for food preparation
1
Angela C. Spry, The Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery, Calcutta, 1894.
2
See Colesworthy Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life. A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in
England, Calcutta, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1862, p33; and A.R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for
Madras, or a Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles, Devon, Prospect
Books, 1994, p497.
3
Charles Allen (ed.), Plain Tales from the Raj, London, Futura Publications, 1986, p86.

195
of which native servants were in charge, it was deemed to be a losing battle. Rather
than physically taking over the kitchen, the memsahib made her retreat and instead
relied on and yet mistrusted her servants to maintain cleanliness in the kitchen.
Household guides recommended the morning parade of inspecting the cleanliness of
kitchen premises and equipment stores and disbursing of supplies. It is clear that
supplies were measured out for the day’s requirements as the servants could not be
trusted to have access to the food stores but memsahibs did not venture into the
‘cookroom’ often.

Dirt and disease: segregation of space

Dirt took on new dimensions in the colonies as it was seen as something inherent in the
colonized people and that the dirt carried by the local people spread disease. Dirt was
found not just on the native person alone however. Many in the medical profession
situated India within the tropics and attributed every Indian disease to the effects of
tropical heat and humidity.4 The memsahib’s arrival to the colonies meant that she
could contribute to empire-building by ensuring a clean household for their families.
Both cookbooks and household manuals written for the colonies provided information
and tips on maintaining hygiene and how to instruct servants on the importance of
cleanliness. As maintained throughout this thesis, servants were the people who were
responsible for food preparation and they were the ordinary Indians that British
housewives were the most likely to come into daily contact with. British men, on the
other hand, worked outside the house and might meet Indians on the job, as subordinate
colleagues. This also helps explain the fact that the target market for the colonial
cookbooks and household manuals was for women.5

It was the prevailing beliefs about the debilitating effects of the tropical climate that led
to the annual ascension to the hill stations for respite. As discussed in Chapter Five, the
hill stations were created by the British and other colonizers for Europeans to rest and
recuperate from the heat of the lowlands. It was ironic that as the British fled to rest and
recreate in the hill stations that were cultivated to remind them of Britain and to escape

4
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856, Delhi,
Permanent Black, 2005
5
One of the exceptions to the cookbooks or manuals that were specifically written for women is: E.G.
Bradley, A Household Book for Tropical Colonies, London, Oxford University Press,1948. In the preface
it states that it was written ‘especialy to the Bachelor, be he district officer, missionary, farmer, mining
engineer, tinker, tailor, soldier – who finds himself alone “in the blue”, faced with the bewildering
problem of housekeeping’.

196
from the colonized people, a large number of native servants were required to maintain
the lifestyle of the European. In addition, the Indian population comprising those
engaged in commerce, service and administration swelled to large numbers.6 The
bazaars became overcrowded and, due to lack of toilets, typhoid fever, cholera and
other diseases were rampant in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There were no
toilet facilities in the servants’ quarters; the British left the Indians to their own devices
as they generally did in the lowlands. The colonizers initially ignored the sanitation
problems in the bazaars but eventually the problems spilled into the colonial enclaves.
It was only when the spread of these diseases threatened the British population in the
hill stations that authorities paid attention.7 From 1842 onwards, municipal councils
were established in hill stations that had the authority to build public toilets and other
sewerage systems as well as installing water supplies.8

In his study on the bubonic plague and urban native policy in South Africa in the early
1900s, Maynard W. Swanson refers to the ‘sanitation syndrome’ as a broad description
of the invidious process by which medical officials and other authorities associated the
imagery of infectious diseases as a ‘societal metaphor’.9 He states that disease was both
a biological fact and a social metaphor.10 This metaphor became so powerful that it
influenced British and South African racial attitudes and paved the way towards
segregation, culminating in the creation of urban apartheid.11 Disease and epidemiology
became widespread societal metaphors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century not only in South Africa but outside Africa as well.12

Nineteenth-century medical literature, travelogues and memoirs and other literature

reflect medical thinking of the time. Scholar Ann Laura Stoler asserts that in the
nineteenth-century Europeans began to impose ideas on ‘ethics of conduct’, instructing
people on ‘how to live’. Stoler writes:
‘these operated on European colonials in gendered forms that were class-specific
and racially coded. Management and knowledge of home environments,
childrearing practices, and sexual arrangements of European colonials were based

6
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1996, p191.
7
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p191.
8
Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p192.
9
Maynard W. Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape
Colony’, Journal of African History, vol.XVIII, no.3, 1977, p387.
10
Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome’, p408.
11
Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome’, p387.
12
Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome’, p389.

197
 on the notion that the domestic domain harboured potential threats both to the
“defense of society” and to the future “security” of the European population and
the colonial state.’13

Stoler also notes that colonial guides to European survival in the tropics, as prescriptive
texts, instructed readers on what colonial life was supposed to be like and did not
provide ‘affirmations or distillations of what colonial ventures had secured and already
become’.14 She explains that the texts were not derived from a commonly shared
knowledge but had been constructed to impose ideas linking personal behaviour to
‘racial survival, child neglect to racial degeneracy, the ill-management of servants to
disastrous consequences for the character of rule’.15 The texts, according to Stoler,
viewed how lack of discipline by the individual could impact on the colonial
community. Stoler notes that the prescribing of medical and moral instructions for both
adults and children, living in the comfort of a well-maintained home run by a ‘modern
white mother’ with well-supervised native servants, they [the texts] promised to connect
‘bourgeois domesticity to European identities and thus racial ordering to bourgeois
rule’.16 Furthermore, Stoler stresses that the cloistered Europeans in the colonies
existed in their white and middleclass world, secluded from the indigenous community.
Stoler asserts that this deliberately isolated world of whiteness also served to create its
own ‘domestic arrangements and class distinctions among Europeans that produce
cultural hybridities and sympathies that repeatedly transgressed these distinctions’.17
She suggests that nineteenth century household guides, medical manuals and pedagogic
journals published in the Indies and the Netherlands reinforced European anxieties of
dirt and disease in the colonies. Stoler notes that the dissemination of advice on
contamination increased as germ theory and biomedicine developed.18

Medical thinking from the eighteenth century understood epidemic disease transmission
to be a process of contamination and not contagion until the emergence of modern germ
theory in the 1870s. European medical thought was based on the humoral
understanding of disease, when imbalance occurred in the blood, bile and other bodily
fluids.19 The thinking then was that people became sick from the noxious air or

13
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 1995, p97.
14
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, pp109-110.
15
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, pp109-110.
16
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, pp109-110.
17
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p112.
18
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p112.
19
Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny,
London, Routledge, 2006, p62.

198
miasmas produced in the unhealthy places where they lived and the rationale was that it
was places rather than people that required treatment.20 In Western Europe for over
2000 years, miasma was thought to cause disease.21 Alan Bewell argues that colonizers
produced ‘a map of the world in which colonial spaces were largely perceived as dirty
or unclean and European civilization was expected to cleanse or sanitize people and
places’.22 This belief in miasma as the cause of disease was compounded by people’s
instinctive disgust with associating miasma with ‘putrid, fetid, damp environments’.23
The early nineteenth-century medical profession in India viewed tropical diseases as
affecting Europeans differently than the local people. They conducted studies on
diseases in the tropics in relation to temperature changes, wind direction and
topographical differences.24 The effects of the sun on decaying vegetation and other
substances resulting in noxious exhalations were thought to cause diseases. Swati
Chattopadhyay, in his historical study of colonial Calcutta, notes that by emphasizing
‘the effect of topography on disease, medical authorities made themselves indispensable
to the colonial project of surveying, mapping, exploring, and controlling space’.25
Chattopadhyay claims that to emphasise the economic advantage of disease prevention,
medical authorities advocated that hard physical labour had to be performed by the
natives. He also contends that
‘given the environmentalist paradigm of disease and the climatic difference of
India and Europe, disease became central in understanding the Indian
environment, and one of the most frequently used tropes for describing Indian
culture. Districts were mapped and relative health of sites determined.’26

Similarly, Alison Bashford states that the conflation of morality and physicality was
underpinned by miasmatic theories of health and ill-health. She states that disease was
understood to be a response to decomposing, putrefying matter in the environment, of
human waste, accumulation of dirt, stagnant water and foul air. Foul air was seen as a

20
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 1999,
p30.
21
Valerie A. Curtis, ‘Dirt, Disgust and Disease: A Natural History of Hygiene’, Journal of Epidemiology
and Community Health, vol.61, 2007, p662.
22
Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p42: The Greek word ‘miasma’ originated from religious
and moral origins and developed into a naturalistic theory of disease. According to Valerie Curtis, who
refers to Parker R. Miasma: Pollution and Purity in Early Greek Religion, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1983, miasma originally meant ‘stain’ or pollution of sin ‘which offended the gods, it came to be used as
a term for foul airs and atmospheres that were thought to cause disease.’ Curtis also notes that
‘Hippocrates (460-377 BC) exhorted that to stay healthy one needed to stay away from the airs, waters
and places that contained dangerous vapours or miasmas’, Hippocrates, Hippocratic writings,
Harmondsworth, Penguin,1983.
23
Curtis, ‘Dirt, Disgust and Disease: A Natural History of Hygiene’, p662.
24
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p62.
25
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p62.
26
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, pp62-63.

199
medium of transmission of disease.27 From their earliest days in India the British
considered the tropical heat as not only enervating but harmful to the health. Windows
and doors were shut at night in the belief that bad air induced fever before it was known
that mosquitoes spread malaria.28

The miasmatic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the tropical
medicine of the late nineteenth century were both shaped by colonial conditions. India
in the early nineteenth century was perceived by Europeans to be a place where disease
was part of the landscape and where sickness rapidly resulted in death.29 Colonial
spaces in the nineteenth century were seen as dirty and in a state of disorder, with
climate and dirt as distinctly important in colonial medicine and the mapping of
pathogenic environments.30 Interestingly, there were observations at the time of
miasmatic environments produced by the London poor as similar to those of the tropical
colonies. The medical profession saw that the disease experience of urban poverty was
as much caused by socioeconomic conditions as by climate.31 Between the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, European thinking on health and disease in the colonies
centred on established views of a hostile and untamed tropical environment.32 David
Arnold, in his work on disease, medicine and empire, states that Africa, Asia and the
Americas were all seen to be ridden with fatal and debilitating disease and that only
through the superior knowledge of European medicine it was possible to bring them
under control.33

However, in the nineteenth century, medical thinking on infectious diseases was still in
its infancy. Graeme D. Westlake, in his work on hill stations, wrote that medical
opinion of the day mistook ‘heavy consumption of wine, especially claret, was seen as a
cure for various diseases, such as cholera, plague, smallpox, enteric, malaria and
dysentery’.34 Malaria was one disease that was thought to have caused by miasma and
it was not until the 1880s that it became known that it was caused by a parasite carried

27
Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine, London,
MacMillan Press Ltd 1998, p5.
28
Graeme D. Westlake, An Introduction to the Hill Stations of India, New Delhi, Indus/Harper Collins,
1993, p14.
29
Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, p42.
30
Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p42.
31
Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, p50.
32
David Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire’, in David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine
and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, p3.
33
Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire’, p3.
34
Westlake, An Introduction to the Hill Stations of India, p15.

200
by mosquitoes. In 1894, Patrick Manson made the link between mosquitoes and
malaria and in 1898 Ronald Ross proved this theory.35 However, John D. Gimlette, in
his dictionary of Malayan medicine, noted that ‘in some mysterious way Malays
associated malaria with the mosquito long before the work inaugurated by Manson
(1894) and confirmed by Ross (1898) was credited. The Malay hypothesis was noted
by E.T. McCarthy in the early eighties and later (1894) by W.W. Skeat in Selangor
[Malayan state]’.36 Steel and Gardiner, among others, with an imperfect understanding
of malaria in the 1890s wrote confidently of the disease being
‘an earth-and-water-born poison produced in soils not fully occupied in healthy
work, and may be taken into the body through the skin, the lungs, and the
stomach. In the first case it generally enters by inoculation from the bite of some
insect which has been previously feeding on malarial poison.’37

Steel and Gardiner not only saw themselves as advisors on household hints and recipe
writers but as dispensers of medical advice. In their chapter on preservation of health
and simple remedies, they listed both home remedies and medicines for chronic
ailments, including asthma, convulsions, hysteria, sunstroke, dysentery and rheumatism.
The authors advised an acid treatment for cholera: one tablespoon of vinegar and one
teaspoon of Worcester sauce. Steel and Gardiner also suggested other cures for cholera:
diluted acetic acid and ‘sweet spirits of nitre’ as well as diluted sulphuric acid. These,
they added could also be supplemented with ‘hand-rubbing, hot bottles, mustard,
turpentine, everything should be tried’.38

In the Victorian era there was a concerted effort to study colonial or tropical medicine
as Anil Kumar points out, there was hardly anything tropical about it, except that it
operated in a tropical environment. He states that most of the so-called tropical diseases
such as cholera, plague and smallpox had been found in Europe for centuries. Kumar
cites the exception of scala ringworm as a disease that thrives in a tropical climate. The
difference with these diseases when they occurred in the tropics was their intensity and
ferocity.39 Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, heavy loss of life
among Europeans due to cholera, malaria and dysentery in India particularly among

35
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in
Colonial South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979, p69.
36
John D. Gimlette, A Dictionary of Malayan Medicine, London, Oxford University Press, 1939, p174.
37
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress
and Servants the General Management of the House and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its
Branches, London, William Heinemann, 1898, p173.
38
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p178.
39
Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911, New Delhi, Sage
Publications, 1998, p11.

201
British soldiers meant that colonizers saw themselves as being hounded by death.40 The
high rate of mortality meant huge economic losses to the colonial administration both in
terms of recruitment and replacement. A significant factor to take into account is that
British newcomers died in greater numbers than Indians. Historian Philip D. Curtin
observes that, while the fear of the native inhabitants was linked with hygienic
concerns, the British found it hard to blame them as a source of infection.41 Instead,
they claimed that the Indians had an inherent source of immunity.42 By the late
nineteenth century, scientific breakthroughs in bacteriology and parasitology meant that
huge gains were made in the improvement of European health. When the death rates of
Indian and European troops were nearly equal in the 1870s, it then became possible to
switch sides and to blame ‘native filth and disease’ for European illness.43 Curtin notes
that the bazaars were particularly viewed with suspicion as places that could spread
contaminated food and water and where prostitution and venereal disease was
rampant.44 He adds that by the early 1900s there was another fear that food might be
contaminated by native cooks.45

The old cities and native bazaars were seen as the areas most often linked with dirt and
disease. The cholera epidemic that swept across the subcontinent between 1817 and
1821, the bubonic plague of 1896 and periodic outbreaks of typhoid and malaria had left
the British population nervous.46 As the concept of disease vectors was (for example, in
the case of bubonic plague) still not fully understood, the colonial health authorities
embarked on public sanitary health measures, including the quarantining of those who
caught the diseases, washing of public buildings, house to house searches of plague
cases and the summary demolition of unsanitary structures.47 The British only
intervened with sanitary measures and public health infrastructure quite late and then
always started with the white districts first.

Segregation in the domestic and public spheres

If servants were the human resources responsible for feeding the colonizers, then the

40
Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, pp42-42.
41
Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p108.
42
Curtin, Death by Migration, p108.
43
Curtin, Death by Migration, p108.
44
Curtin, Death by Migration, p108.
45
Curtin, Death by Migration, pp108-109.
46
James Heitzman, The City in South Asia, London, Routledge, 2008, p131-132.
47
Heitzman, The City in South Asia, p132.

202
kitchen was the engine room where all the meals were created. Yet this domestic space
that fed empire builders was given little attention. Sometimes the kitchen was built
separately, together with the servants’ accommodation; and at other times, behind the
house but joined by a covered passageway. As in India, the kitchen was located at back
of the house in Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo states. Recalling her time in
Sandakan, Agnes Keith described the cookhouse as ‘standing slightly apart from our
bungalow.48 The majority of the responses to my questionnaire on the location of the
kitchen was that it was situated some distance at the back of the house and a sheltered
passage way connected it to the main house.49 Where refrigerators were in use they
were kerosene-run. There was always the mesh-covered wooden ‘meat safe’ that had
its four legs standing in kerosene to keep out ants and other insects from the cupboard.

Swati Chattopadhyay, in his work on the spatial history of colonial Calcutta asserts that
the kitchen and ancillary service spaces were never integrated as part of colonial houses
in India due to differing perceptions of servants’ needs.50 Chattopadhyay adds that the
colonizers showed little interest in their servants’ accommodation as they were only
prepared to spend the bare minimum on the servants.51 The missionary Cyril Alliston,
in his account of his nine years in Jesselton, British North Borneo, during the 1950s
described the rectory kitchen as ‘the funny little dapur (kitchen) that joined the house to
the kitchen and servants’ rooms’.52 In spite of the European predilection for keeping up
appearances in maintaining the pristine colonial household and the concern about dirt
and disease, the kitchen generally remained out of sight and out of mind. Kenny-
Herbert in condemning the grossly neglected (by the Anglo-Indian householder)
kitchen, complained, ‘dinners of sixteen or twenty, thoughtfully composed, are de
rigueur; our tables are prettily decorated; and our menu cards discourse of dainty fare in
its native French. But what “nerves” we all have to be sure! Could we but raise the
curtain, and examine our cookrooms, and all that in them is, just before we lead the way
to the banquet, should we not be actually dumb-founded at our own audacity?’53 In

48
See Agnes Keith, Land Below the Wind, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1939, p30. Keith’s
kitchen, in common with other colonial homes, was separated from the main house in the back and joined
by a covered passage way. The Sabah State Government, through the Sabah Museum has since
refurbished Agnes Keith’s home and is now a tourist attraction.
49
Questionnaire responses, questionnaire in Appendix A.
50
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p127.
51
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p127.
52
Cyril Alliston, In the Shadow of Kinabalu, London, Robert Hale Limited, 1961, p34. Jesselton was the
colonial name given to the capital of British North Borneo. Today it is known as Kota Kinabalu, capital
of Sabah.
53
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p507.

203
fact, the memsahib was urged to stay away from the kitchen as the unspeakable filth of
the kitchen and staff might alarm her. At the same time the European often marveled at
the wonderful meals that could be turned out from such dirty and primitive kitchens.
Anglo-Indian tea planter George M. Barker, in his 1884 book wrote:
‘At a distance of twenty to thirty yards stands the bawurchee-khana (cookhouse);
here the servants, when not at work, are generally to be found indulging in the
stupefying hubble-bubble. Perhaps the less said concerning the interior
arrangements of most Indian kitchen the better. An English woman on her arrival,
full of recollections of bright copper pans and well-scrubbed floors, at first puts
forth all her energies and try to establish order and cleanliness, but has finally to
give in, beaten by the natural affection for dirt inherent in all Easterns, and the
outlandish change in all things connected with the culinary department. It is
astonishing how a native with his limited supply of cooking utensils will contrive
to turn out five or six courses for dinner: given three bricks, a pot, and fire, and an
Indian will do wonders.’54

In the preface to her 1883 book for young housekeepers in British India, the author
known only as ‘An Anglo-Indian’ wrote that the hot climate and the position of the
kitchen made it impossible for the memsahib to visit it regularly. Nevertheless, ‘An
Anglo-Indian’ insisted that inspections should be frequent, ‘just to see that the place is
swept and clean, the table and cooking utensils well scoured, and the water chatties
(pots) and their contents clean and wholesome’.55 Of course, it was the European’s
choice that the kitchen was built away from the house as it was felt that the heat and
smell of the cookroom was too much for European sensibilities. As Wilkins reasoned,
‘a cook-room in a house where the doors leading to the different rooms are always open
would be an intolerable nuisance’.56

The design and layout of the colonial home served more than aesthetic effects.
Collingham suggests that the rebellion of 1857 ‘was an immensely traumatic bodily
experience for the British in India’. She points out that instead of tightening barriers in
the home the memsahib in fact sought to display the open nature of the bungalow ‘using
it as a site in which to display British prestige’.57 The Anglo-Indian home with its
multiple doorways between them meant that it was also visible to the gaze of the

54
George M. Barker, A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, Bombay, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1884, p100.
55
An Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery: ‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Bombay, Imperial Press, 1883,
preface.
56
W.J. Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, London, T. Fisher Unwin,1883, p72.
57
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, pp112-113.

204
multitude of household servants.58 This suited the official ideology of the time, as
another site where British racial superiority could be admired.59 Catherine Hall points
to the anger and bitterness that the British harboured against the Indians for the
rebellion manifested into an even stronger barrier that separated the colonizer and the
colonized.60 Hall notes that among other measures, more British women were brought
to the colony, their role as wives of the rulers, was to maintain the prestige of the British
home. The colonial home became a public place for the white community, offering
hospitality to European colleagues and visitors. Hall maintains that fears of pollution
and contagion became more entrenched, and that, ‘European and Indian quarters were
separated’.61

Bungalows as residences for the European population were built along wide streets in
large compounds.62 The servants’ accommodation was built at the furthest edge of the
compound, sometimes near store rooms or stables. The perceived view, according to
Chattopadhyay, was that the ‘inherently squalid, immoral and lazy’ natives were used to
the environment that was dirty and unhealthy. Chattopadhyay suggests that the
environmental determinism British equated such ‘equated architectural and spatial order
with morality’. This the British believed, would present their brand of ‘transparent
visual order’ necessary for instilling truthfulness among the Indian population.
Chattopadhyay asserts that the British thought ultimately it was this truthfulness that
was ‘necessary to British health and life’.63

Chattopadhyay refers to Steel and Gardiner, who instructed that the memsahib’s role
was to supervise the servants stringently and, for this reason, the servants should never
be allowed to live in outside the compound. Steel and Gardiner stated that the
memsahib
‘should insist upon her servants living in their quarters, and not in the bazaar… it
becomes the mistress’s duty to see that they are decently housed, and have proper
sanitary conveniences. The bearer should have strict orders to report any illness
of any kind amongst the servants or their belongings; indeed, it is advisable for

58
The openness of the houses were designed for cross-ventilation and were modelled after Indian town
houses. See Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘“Goods, Chattels and Sundry Items”: Constructing 19th-Century
Anglo-Indian Domestic Life’, Journal of Material Culture, vol.7, 2007, pp247-249.
59
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p167.
60
Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’, in Philippa Levine
(ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p73.
61
Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, p73.
62
For a study on the bungalow as a distinctive form of dwelling, see Anthony D. King, The Bungalow:
The Production of a Global Culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984
63
Chattopadhyay, ‘“Goods, Chattels and Sundry Items”’, p261.

205
 the mistress to inquire every day on this point, and as often as possible – once or
twice a week at least – she should go a regular inspection round the compound,
not forgetting the stables, fowl-houses, &c.’64

Collingham notes that new ideas about sanitation gave those in medical and government
circles the authority to influence the domestic sphere.65 These ideas were propagated,
among other means, through household manuals and even cookbooks, which argued
that sanitation in the home was of importance not only for health reasons but also to
maintain the prestige of empire.66

Measures were also taken to isolate the European community against crowded
conditions, that is, proximity to the native population. The colonial authorities opted for
racial segregation as a means of combating the spread of disease. From 1858, when
India became a Crown possession, the British army in India became the largest single
concentration of troops outside the United Kingdom. However, high mortality rates
from epidemic diseases like dysentery and cholera necessitated health measures.67 The
Royal Sanitary Commission of 1859, using criteria of soil, water, air and elevation,
developed district areas for European occupation and included the cantonment, ‘civil
lines’ and hill stations (although hill stations were established much earlier, as discussed
in the previous chapter).68 For example, Vijay Prashad notes that, in Delhi, ‘colonial
officials lived in an enclave of sanitation to the north of the city, in the Civil Lines; only
a few of their native allies of the “better class” reaped the harvest of municipal works’.69
Indian press reports criticized the Delhi Municipal Corporation for building ‘drains of
minor importance’ in White Town at great expense while ignoring sanitation
infrastructure in the walled city.70

Concerns about mental and physical health in the tropics

The tropical environment was seen as damaging to mental health as well as to physical
wellbeing. The colonial community in Singapore suggested a wide-ranging variety of
factors that could contribute to poor mental health. The Bishop of Singapore, in a letter

64
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p4.
65
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p166.
66
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp166-167.
67
Radhika Ramasubban, ‘Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900’, in Roy MacLeod and Milton
Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire - Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of
European Expansion, London, Routledge, 1988, p38.
68
Ramasubban, ‘Imperial Health in British India’, pp40-41.
69
Vijay Prashad, ‘The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.35, no.1,
2001, p124.
70
Prashad, ‘The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi’, p124.

206
to the British Medical Journal in 1926, wrote that there had been two cases of ‘insanity’
or suicide each year from 1915 among Government servants and other white people.71
This letter provoked much discussion and correspondents to the journal suggested the
following possible causes for ‘mental deterioration’ in too prolonged a residence in
tropics:
‘altitude, moisture, too much sunlight, heat, eye defects, monotony, lack of
seasons, hyperaemia of the brain, north wind, barometric pressure, electrical
content of the atmosphere, lack of essential vitamins, alcohol, smoking,
constipation, native servants, masturbation, venery, sexual starvation, too great or
too little secretion from the endocrine glands, loneliness and fear.’72

Three decades before, Steel and Gardiner wrote,

‘That India itself has little to do with the mortality that charged against it may be
seen from the fact that while the civilian European population has a death-rate of
only 20 per mille (or the same as London), soldiers in barracks have one of 69.
That is the result of crowding, errors of diet, intemperance, exposure, immorality,
and the imperfect ventilation and sanitation inseparable from large numbers,
joined to a want, during the hot weather, of rational exertion, mental and
bodily’.73

As late as the 1930s there were still some in the medical profession who attributed good
health and longevity to climatic conditions. The professor of surgery at a medical
college in Singapore, Kenneth Black, stated that ‘man can live in any region where he
can obtain food and water, but his physical and mental energy and his normal character
reach their highest development only in a few strictly limited areas’.74 Black claimed
that England’s climate came nearer the ideal than that of any other country in the world
and that when ‘people go from a country with a superior to one with an inferior climate,
their power of sustained work deteriorates sooner or later, although sometimes at first it
is stimulated by the change, especially if the change is to a “bracing” climate’.75 The
professor also asserted that Europeans were inclined to lose their efficiency towards the
end of their three year posting.76

Black was not the only member of the medical fraternity who believed that residence in
the tropics for the European had a debilitating effect on his health. On top of the

71
Kenneth Black, ‘Health and Climate with Special Reference to Malaya’, The Malayan Medical
Journal, vol.VII, December 1932, p104.
72
Black, ‘Health and Climate with Special Reference to Malaya’, p104.
73
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p171.
74
Black, ‘Health and Climate with Special Reference to Malaya’, p99. Kenneth Black was the professor
of surgery at the King Edward VII College of Medicine of Singapore in 1932.
75
Black, ‘Health and Climate with Special Reference to Malaya’, pp99-101.
76
Black, ‘Health and Climate with Special Reference to Malaya’, p101.

207
standard instructions that four to five years was the maximum number of years for
which Europeans should live in the tropics before returning to a cold climate, colonizers
were cautioned to have a prudent lifestyle – ‘plenty of rest, moderate exercise, sensible
dress (flannel vests and hats against the tropical sun) and bathing only at advised
times’.77 Although medical writing at the turn of the century acknowledged that illness
was not transmitted through the environment according to miasmatic theory, prolonged
residence in the tropics was nevertheless still thought harmful to health. Accordingly, it
was still believed that Europeans residing in tropical climate had lower resistance to
disease and infection.78

British Emigration Information Office sheet of 1900 listed cardinal rules for Europeans
to maintain good health in the tropics prefaced with the injunction that adult Europeans
should not go to the Federated States of Malaya before they were twenty years of age.
The following were the cardinal rules:
- Go to bed and get up early.
- Avoid all excesses in eating and drinking.
- Never go out between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. without wearing a sun
hat.
- When possible, always wear flannel next to the skin.
- Take exercise regularly and moderately, but not to excess, if avoidable.
- Change clothes as soon as possible after exercise.
- Avoid bathing in the middle of the day, or more than twice a day. In the evening,
and after exercise, a warm bath is better than a cold one.
- If doubtful about the purity of drinking water, always see for yourself that it is
boiled, and do not take the servant’s word for it. Filtering is often insufficient.
- When travelling, drink as little as possible during the heat of the day, and always
avoid roadside stalls.
- The water of a young coconut is best on these occasions, if obtainable.79

An eminent figure in tropical medicine weighed in on the debate of the dirty habits of
cooks in the colonies, a topic addressed in numerous cookbooks and household guides.
In advocating the consumption of more vegetables than meat, a surgeon from the East
India Company, James Ranald Martin, suggested that the mere sight of the cook:
‘…buttering our toast with the greasy wing of a fowl, or an old dirty piece of rag,
will have more effect in restraining the consumption of the article than any
didactic precept which can be laid down; and a picturesque sight of this kind may

77
Lenore Manderson, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health in Early Twentieth Century Malaya’,
in Peter J. Rimmer and Lisa M. Allen (eds), The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes,
Plantation Workers... Singapore, Singapore University Press, 1990, p196.
78
Manderson, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health’, p196.
79
Great Britain, Emigration Information Office (1900:5), cited in Manderson, ‘Race, Colonial Mentality
and Public Health’, p197.

208
 be procured any morning by taking a stroll into the purlieus of the kitchen.’80

Even as scientific breakthroughs on medical knowledge were made prescriptions on

how to lead wholesome lives in the tropics continued. Most of these were
commonsense rules and preached moderation in food and drink replete with moral
overtones.81 It was standard advice from many in the medical profession to advise
eating more fruit and vegetables and less meat and to drink in moderation. There was
little evidence to show that this advice was adhered to. In the days of the East India
Company era meals were gargantuan, they became lighter in later years but were still
substantial affairs. Meals in the 1880s were by no means ‘lighter’, W.J. Wilkins, a
missionary in his sketches of life in Calcutta wrote disapprovingly of the three heavy
meals consumed by Europeans in India:
‘In a climate where temperance in both these respects is called for, and where
there is an abundance of vegetables and fruit of many kinds, there is
intemperance. It is my firm conviction that a great many who fall victims, as they
think to the climate, really fall victims to their own foolishness. Many English
people have three heavy meals in the day. At breakfast there is fish, chops,
cutlets, omelets, eggs, toast, &c.; at tiffin (lunch) there are chops, steaks, curry
and rice, puddings, &c.; at dinner in the evening a long course concludes the day’s
work. As to drinking, there is even greater foolishness. Many in the hot season
take beer at breakfast and tiffin with pegs (i.e. brandy and soda-water) between,
and in the evening, spirits, wine.’82

In his travel diary to India, Malaya and other countries in the 1920s, Aldous Huxley
observed that ‘with the possible exception of the Americans, the English are, I am
afraid, the world’s heaviest eaters’. Huxley claimed that the Italians called the English
‘the Five Meal People’.83

A favourite subject at Anglo-Indian social gatherings was patent medicine. It is unclear

whether the interest was a bid for a healthier lifestyle or the rise of consumerism but
supplements like ‘Bemax’, ‘Energen’, ‘Vitalin’ were added to some Anglo-Indians’

80
James Ranald Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, Including
Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of Europeans on Their Return from
Tropical Climates, London, John Churchill, 1856, p128. See a biographical sketch of Martin in The
London Lancet: A Journal of British and Foreign Medical and Chemical Science, Criticism, Literature
and News, vol.2, London, Burgess, Stringer & Co, 1852, pp71-75. Martin was an authority on tropical
medicine and was a member of the Royal Commission on the health of the army in India: see Curtin,
Death by Migration, p48.
81
Curtin, Death by Migration, p42-43 and p107.
82
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, pp63-64.
83
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, London, Chatto and Windus, 1936, p186.

209
daily intake.84 In his book on British social life in India, Dennis Kincaid claimed that
Anglo-Indians would ask each other ‘Are you still on strychnine? I’ve gone on to
arsenic’, and ‘Dr. Hay’s famous slimming diet’ was also heard in conversation among
Anglo-Indians. Kincaid agreed with other observers that vast meals of nineteenth
century Anglo-India were no longer popular and that even ‘the more frugal, cold-
storage fare now provided proved too much, in Bombay’s climate, for twentieth-century
digestions’.85 Another topic of conversation was anxiety about food contamination and
other health issues.

Fear of food contamination

The anxiety about consuming contaminated food and drink extended to native people
beyond cooks and servants. The vegetable gardener was feared as a likely transmitter of
disease, through fertilizing his vegetables with human waste. This fear was indeed well
founded as the colonial authorities had not installed a public water supply system nor
were sanitation measures put in place in the nineteenth century. The historian James
Francis Warren wrote that, at the time, in Singapore, ‘excreta was traditionally collected
by Teochius [Chinese] for their market gardens’.86 Cuthbert Woodville Francis

Harrison, who lived in Malaya for a number of years, wrote,
‘most Europeans are extremely careful as to what vegetables they eat in the
Malayan tropics, as the ingenious Chinese, renowned for his vegetable growing
wherever he goes, owes that renown to his unpleasant practice of mulching his
crops with crude sewage collected from the towns ... Even if the crude sewage
does not affect the consumer he is liable to several water-borne diseases if he eats
raw salads and such things, for, in order to keep vegetables bright and fresh on the
way to market, the gardeners douche them with water from the ditches just
outside the town.’87

Thomas R. Metcalf argues that ideas of difference constructed by the British in India
continued to hold sway even with the advent of a better understood medical theory.88
Metcalf argues that at best there was a shift in emphasis from ‘to avoid not “miasmatic”
fluxes, but Indian bodies, the filthy carriers of contagious disease’.89 Metcalf asserts
that, between the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth

84
Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608-1937, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974,
p321.
85
Kincaid, British Social Life in India, p321.
86
James Francis Warren, A People’s History of Singapore (1880-1940), Singapore, Oxford University
Press, 1986, pp259-260.
87
Cuthbert Woodville Harrison, An Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, London, The Malay
States Information Agency, 1911, pp179-180.
88
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Ra,j, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p177.
89
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p177.

210
century, the British fully elaborated on what he calls an ideology of ‘distance’ based on
difference.90 However, this distancing was only superficial as the British had to
consume Indian water and food, breathe Indian air and had Indian servants in their
homes. Metcalf thinks this ‘distance’ can be imagined as a set of nested boxes, each
walled off from the larger Indian world outside and cites the bungalow residence, the
civil lines or cantonment and the hill station as typical examples.91 Within the
bungalow residence the memsahib’s domain was contained within the compound,
usually enclosed by a wall and garden.92

There was conjecture that the European in a tropical climate felt discomfort at every
turn, from living amidst a native people to the bothersome insect life and other noisome
living creatures. A.G. Price, in his study on the many types of white settlements in the
tropics in the 1930s, also pointed out the relentlessly annoying natural environment that
bothered the European.93 He quotes Dr H.S. Stannus on how living in tropics affected
the European,
‘Living amidst a native population causes him annoyance at every turn, because
he has never troubled to understand its language and its psychology. From early
morn till dewy eve he is in a state of unrest -- ants at breakfast, flies at lunch, and
termites for dinner, with a new species of moth every evening in his coffee. Beset
all day by a sodden heat, whence there is no escape, and the unceasing attentions
of the voracious insect world, he is driven to bed by his lamp being extinguished
by the hordes which fly by night, only to be kept awake by the reiterated cry of
the brain-fever bird or the local chorus of frogs. Never at rest! Always an on-
guardedness.’94

Price states: ‘Anyone who has traveled much in the tropics and who has seen the
constant need of “on-guardedness” – the precautions against disease, the boiling of all
water, the care of diet, and the tireless supervision of childish natives – must appreciate
the weight of these arguments’.95

The care that needed to be taken on living in the tropics extended to travel and
accommodation as discussed in the previous chapter on rest-houses and dak bungalows.
Ambrose Pratt, in his 1931 book on his time spent in Malaya as a tin miner, cautioned
that ‘European travellers are advised on no account to stay at any but European hotels

90
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p177.
91
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p177.
92
Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj, London, Century Publishing, 1975, p86.
93
A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers in the Tropics, New York, American Geographical Society, 1939,
p212.
94
Price, White Settlers, p212.
95
Price, White Settlers, p212.

211
and Government rest-houses’.96 He suggested The Europe Hotel in Singapore, The
Empire Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, The Grand Hotel in Ipoh and The Runnymede Hotel in
Penang. He added that that at all other towns in the Malay Peninsula government rest-
houses were preferable to hotels. Pratt also reinforced the utmost care for personal
hygiene, saying that ‘to walk about your bedroom or bathroom with bare feet is unsafe.
The germs of poisonous tropical diseases are lurking everywhere, ready to attack any
abrasion of the skin’.97 By 1898 it had already been established that malaria was spread
by mosquitoes and Pratt advised that the proper use of mosquito nets at night was an
important preventative measure against it.98

Civil servant J.F. McNair wrote in 1878 that Malaya on the whole was ‘salubrious’ and,
with ‘due precaution’, the European should not suffer many of the ‘native ailments’.99
McNair noted that several of the diseases which the ‘natives’ suffered from were
‘brought on by their own defiance of the simplest sanitary laws; while, from his
superior knowledge of such matters, the European may go comparatively scathless’.100
However, he conceded that the white man was disadvantaged with his fair skin, noting
that after vigorous exercise, ‘the white skin cools very rapidly, and causes the chills,
colds, rheumatic pains, and bowel complaints from which a European may suffer in the
East ; while, when in the same heated state, the black or brown skin cools slowly, and
the inflammation is averted’.101

Anxieties about food and health

It was thus a widely circulated notion among the colonial community that dirt and
disease were endemic in the tropics.102 This perception was frequently illustrated in
colonial cookbooks and household manuals. These publications were the conduit for
propagating a gendered role for the memsahib, as gatekeepers of British culture and as
supporting the ideals of empire. The unstated rule was that white women would exert
‘civilizing influences’ to the colonies amid ‘an alien, seemingly decadent tropical world

96
Ambrose Pratt, Magical Malaya, Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens Ltd, 1931, p268.
97
Pratt, Magical Malaya, p268.
98
Pratt, Magical Malaya, p270
99
J. F. McNair, Perak and the Malays, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1972, pp416-417. The
first edition was published in 1878.
100
McNair, Perak and the Malays, pp416-417.
101
McNair, Perak and the Malays, pp416-417.
102
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p261.

212
of heat, luxuriant vegetation, diseases’.103 Even outside the home, British women
continued to lend a helping hand in the imperial project by their mere presence in rest-
houses, dak bungalows and clubs.104

Similarly, Chattopadhyay states that ‘[t]he notion of the household as a barrier against
the dirt and disease of India required that the mistress become the commander as well as
medical officer’.105 Indeed, the job description for the British mistress was spelt out in
the various household manuals and cookbooks. A.R. Kenney-Herbert, who first wrote
his famous cookery book and other culinary practices under the Raj in 1878, included
an essay on kitchens in India, in an attempt to ‘reform’ the prevailing state of the Anglo-
Indian kitchen.106 This essay was originally published in the Madras Mail. It was
Kenney-Herbert’s opinion that the kitchen was the ‘foulest’ room in the Anglo-Indian
home, its equipment inadequate and primitive, and yet the Indian servants were
expected to turn out magnificent meals up to twenty-five guests. He outlined in great
detail the filthy conditions under which the servants worked and lambasted Anglo-
Indians for not improving the standard of hygiene and providing suitable equipment in
the kitchen but to joke of the barbarisms practised by the servants.107 The repetition of
stories of disasters in the kitchen however was not only about humour but reinforcing
the stereotype the natives’ inferior mind and low standards of cleanliness. The
following were not only told at dinner parties but made it into print in memoirs,
cookbooks and manuals on household management:
‘Boy, how are the master's socks so dirty?’
‘I take, I make e'strain coffee.’
‘What, you dirty wretch, for coffee?’
‘Yes, missis: but never take master's clean e'sock.
‘Master done use, then I take.’108

Procida suggests that frequent recounting of anecdotes of the strange ways of the
servants enabled the memsahib to stay well away from the kitchen so that she may not
be confronted with dirty practices. She cites one of these stories:

‘There was a popular story of a memsahib whose cook made a

103
Janice Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony
and Protectorate, 1900-1940’ , in Hilary Callan & Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife, London,
Croom Helm, 1984, p189.
104
Brownfoot, ‘Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya’, p189.
105
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p261.
106
A.R. Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, (facsimile of the 5th edition of 1885), pp496-513.
107
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p496.
108
David Burton, The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India, London, Faber & Faber,
1993, p65.

213
 particularly delicious pastry. The knew that he made it actually during
the course of the meal so that it was really fresh and one day she and her
guests decided to raid the kitchen and steal the secret. They discovered
the cook in action – the pastry dough spread across his chest, beating it
with his hands!’109

Kenney-Herbert criticized the situation of the kitchen away from the main house,
usually as part of the block of godowns (store rooms) and near the stables. Even the
kitchens at Government House in Calcutta were built near the stables that housed fifty-
five horses (as noted by the Vicereine of Calcutta, Harriot Dufferin, in her journal entry
of 26 December 1884). This meant that for the average memsahib close supervision of
distant kitchen cleanliness was out of the question. The kitchen was constructed with
little ventilation and light and, importantly, washing up facilities were non-existent.
Kenney-Herbert wrote,
‘as there is no scullery, or place for washing up, &c., the ground in the immediate
vicinity of the kitchen receives the foul liquid (as well as all refused matter) which
is carelessly thrown out upon it. The consequence is that hard by many a cook-
room in this Presidency, there is noisome cesspool containing an inky looking
fluid, the exhalations from which can scarcely improve the more delicate articles
of food which are sent from the house for preparation.’110

Kenney-Herbert blamed the location and design of the colonial kitchen as being too
inaccessible for the memsahib to supervise. It was built well away from the main house
and was usually part of a block of godowns with nearby stables. Kenney-Herbert stated
that apart from being difficult to maintain surveillance over the kitchen, it was difficult
to monitor the ‘promiscuous gatherings of outsiders, – the friends, relations, and
children (a fruitful source of dirtiness) of our servants’.111

Sara Jeannette Duncan, a memsahib in Calcutta in the 1890s, used her fictional work,
The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, to portray the filthy habits of the Indian cook.
In her novel, Duncan wrote of her protagonist, Helen Frances Browne, of braving into
the bawarchi khana (kitchen) located outside the main house.112 Browne observed that
when she lifted saucepan lids she:
‘discovered within remains of concoctions three days old; she found the day’s
milk in an erstwhile kerosene tin; she lifted a kettle, and intruded upon the privacy
of a large family of cockroaches, any one of them as big as a five-shilling piece.

109
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, pp93-94.
110
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p487.
111
Kenny-Herbert, Culinary Jottings, p497.
112
Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, London, Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1909, p106.

214
 Kali Bagh [the cook] would never have disturbed them. She found messes and
mixtures, and herbs and spices, and sauces which she did not understand and
could not approve. The day’s marketing lay in a flat basket under the table.
Helen drew it forth and discovered a live pigeon indiscriminately near the mutton,
with its wings twisted around one another at the joint.’113

In keeping with colonial thinking India was portrayed as a primitive land with its people
mired in native filth. While the colonist’s main task was to do the empire’s work of
acquisition, expansion and administration, it fell upon the colonial mistress to ensure
that the prestige and superiority of British rulers were upheld. What better way than to
start with the colonial home: the dutiful memsahib’s task was to provide a clean and
wholesome environment for the hardworking colonial to retire to at the end of the day.
It was a supervisory role she played, never having to physically engage in the many
household tasks. Still, it was no less onerous. As Joanna Trollope in her work on
women of the British Empire, states, that the memsahib would have found the Indian
environment oppressive, with its dirty, dampness and the omnipresent insects.114 In
addition, the numerous servants, by dint of the caste system ensured that there were
layer upon layer of servants with their strict social hierarchies.115

Servants were primed to follow rules of hygiene, ensuring that the colonial’s health was
not endangered and the daily rituals of European life were adhered to. Thus, British
homes dotted around the colonial landscape were bastions of cleanliness and civilized
behaviour and this too served as exemplary standards of housekeeping to the colonized.
The experienced memsahib was also expected to pass on her knowledge to newly-
arrived wives. In Annabel Venning’s book on the wives, daughters and mistresses of
the British army in British India, she recounts Rosemary Montgomery’s daily
experiences as a new bride to Cawnpore in 1931. When Montgomery first arrived,
another officer’s wife tutored her ‘in the art of housekeeping in India’.116 In a letter
home to her mother, Montgomery wrote:
‘you have to give out every single thing each morning, including dusters, etc, boil
all your milk and water and inspect every corner to see that it is clean. She has
been most kind and given me hours of advice and help and I think I’ll be able to
manage more or less though I foresee that it will be hard work at first. It takes her
two hours a morning and she’s had six years’ practice.’117

113
Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, p109.
114
Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire, London, Hutchinson, 1983,
p119.
115
Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters, p119.
116
Annabel Venning, Following the Drum: The Lives of Army Wives and Daughters Past and Present,
London, Headline, 2005, p69.
117
Venning, Following the Drum, p69.

215
Montgomery did manage and outlined her morning routine. Once her husband left for
the office after breakfast, she began the day
‘by visiting the kitchen and seeing a boiling “detchie” (an aluminium pan) of
water. I consider coal and look to see whether there is permanganate of potash
ready to soak the vegetables and whether the earthenware saucers on which the
larders stand have been filled with water and disinfectant.’118

Evelyn Battye relates a similar arrangement in her book on costumes and characters of
Anglo-Indians:
‘The barwachi-khana was a separate room standing some little distance away
from the back verandah of the main bungalow, a smoke-grimed, from time-to-
time whitewashed, building with one small window high up and a fly-proof door
that constantly crashed open and shut. Having handed out the daily stores – kept
under padlock in the house – the mem-sahib proceeded to inspect her kitchen,
empty except for the khansama (head servant). In one corner lay a pile of dirty
jharans – thick cotton cloths – for the dhobi to collect, the mem-sahib handing out
another twelve of these, the necessary daily quota for reasonable cleanliness. If,
sensibly, she had no wish to raise her blood pressure, she did not go again into the
kitchen until it was tidied up for her inspection next morning.’119

In anthropologist Mary Douglas’ premise that dirt equates disorder, she also maintains
that ritual pollution or danger-beliefs served to maintain social categories and
distinctions.120 Douglas gives examples of our notions of dirt: shoes are not dirty in
themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself,
but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom; or food bespattered on clothing;
or similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room.121 Thus, we can apply Douglas’
reasoning to British views that food and native servants as inherently dirty; and efforts
by the memsahibs to improve the standards of hygiene can be seen as attempts to bring
order to the colonial household. This anxiety about dirt and disease was portrayed in
cook books, household manuals and other publications aimed at the reader resident in
the colonies, establishing clear distinctions of colonial society and the colonized
community. The notion of the fear of dirt goes beyond the practical (as of dirt causing
illness) to the metaphorical. The colonial ruler saw it her duty to eliminate dirt in her
household, to bring order in a land of primitive cultures and of filth. Paradoxically, it

118
Venning, Following the Drum, p69.
119
Evelyn Battye, Costumes and Characters of the British Raj, Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1982, p46.
120
See Jo Beall, ‘Dealing with Dirt and the Disorder of Development: Managing Rubbish in Urban
Pakistan’, Oxford Development Studies, vol.34, no.1, p81. See also Mark Jenner’s unpublished thesis,
Early Modern English Conceptions of ‘Cleanliness’ and ‘Dirt’ as Reflected in the Environmental
Regulation of London c.1530-c.1700, Oxford University, 1995. Jenner argues that Douglas does not go
far enough in defining cleanliness and dirt and does not contextualize the situation.
121
Douglas, Purity and Danger, p48.

216
was a difficult task to keep India at a distance as the colonials depended on the Indian
domestic servants in the home. As historian Thomas Metcalf puts it, ‘the battle against
dirt, disease, and depravity had to be fought within the home as well as outside’.122

The home as private and personal space originated from Victorian ideals and writers of
popular literature have traditionally represented the colonial home as a feminized sphere
where the memsahib led a quiet existence while her husband dealt with affairs of
empire. Robin D. Jones, in his work on objects, space and identity in the colonies,
observes that the British in India tried to physically distance themselves from the
Indians by locating or choosing their homes away from local urban settlements or ‘black
towns’. 123 However, Jones suggests that this policy was negated in the colonial home
where domestic servants had unrestricted access to this domestic space.124

Mary Procida points out that the reality of the Anglo-Indian home was patently different
to the representation of the colonial home in Victorian writings. She stresses that ‘the
trope of two irreconcilably separate spheres “of the home” and “the world” is inapposite
to Anglo-India, where the public and the private merged seamlessly at the juncture of
the home’.125 Procida also asserts that the memsahib and her home were entrusted with
‘the private functions of domesticity to the public demands of imperialism’.126 The
home was the venue for official and social events, and, frequently the seat of imperial
power was also the home: as Government House or Residency. Furthermore, in running
her household with servants under her supervision, the colonial wife, like her husband
(in his tasks outside the home) aspired to perform this task by ‘instilling the habits of
discipline in a potentially unruly population, by commanding respect from the colonized
peoples and by setting an example of rational and “civilized” behaviour’.127

Metcalf’s analysis of the bungalow and its compound, adopted as the choice of abode
for the British colonial, served as a fortress ‘in keeping its inhabitants away at a safe
distance from the surrounding noise, dust, and disease of India’.128 Metcalf asserts that,
in creating the bungalow as ‘an island of Englishness, secure from a noxious India, the

122
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p179.
123
Robin D. Jones, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity Within the Indian Subcontinent,
c.1800-1947, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, p80.
124
Jones, Interiors of Empire, p80.
125
Procida, Married to the Empire, p57.
126
Procida, Married to the Empire, p59.
127
Procida, Married to the Empire, p87.
128
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p178.

217
English woman, or memsahib played a critical role’.129 Far from being just a decorative
figure symbolizing ‘purity and domesticity’, the memsahib’s prescribed role was to
create her home environment according to the ideals of ‘cleanliness, order, and
industry’.130 Further, Metcalf states that the memsahib in the British Indian household
had to:
‘take on the role her husband played outside: that of a masculine assertion of
ordering rationality in the face of a feminized India where disease and disorder
raged unchecked. The home might be, as in England, a female refuge, and a place
where the man could find emotional sustenance, but it was also the front line of a
battlefield whose commanding officer was its British mistress.’131

For example, in a ‘Hindustani’ language manual for memsahibs published in 1914, a

memsahib manual author, A.K. D-H, offered hints to housekeepers and newcomers to
India, declaring that
‘[I]n tropical countries such as India where there are large collections of natives,
one has to guard more against contagion than in European countries ... The lower
class of native in India does not seem to realize the danger of contagion, or if he
does, is too apathetic to take any precautions against it.’132

The author held exaggerated fears of dirt and the natives, stating that the three
preventable diseases, cholera, dysentery and enteric fever, were common in India and to
which newcomers were susceptible.133 Ignoring the conventional wisdom of not
venturing into the kitchen with the knowledge that the kitchen was a filthy place (a
cognitive dissonance known commonly as ‘out of sight, out of mind’), D-H instructed
his readers to inspect it at least once a day, ensuring that the cooking utensil were kept
clean and that the kitchen floor should be washed out with disinfectant. He also
suggested that window screens should be installed to keep out flies but allow
ventilation. He further suggested that clean dusters should be given out everyday, that
the cook should be given a gauze wire strainer for soup and another one for milk –
otherwise the cook would ‘use a dirty duster – or something worse’.134 In keeping with
the immortalizing of improbable tales of stupid and dirty servants, D-H recounted the
following in his manual:
‘You have no doubt heard the old story about the Sahib who went to the kitchen
with a stick in his hand to find out the reason for the long pause in dinner. On
seeing him the cook took fright and ran off, with the plum pudding tied up in the

129
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 178.
130
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 178.
131
Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp178-179.
132
A.K. D-H, The Memsahib’s Manual: Being an Easy Guide to Learning Hindustani, with Some Advice
on Health and the Household, Calcutta & Simla, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1914, p54.
133
D-H, The Memsahib's Manual, p54.
134
D-H, The Memsahib's Manual, p55.

218
 end of his “dhoti,” he had been boiling it in one end while he other end was
wrapped round himself!’135

The fear of disease was undoubtedly one of the most powerful reasons for creating
distance between the Anglo-Indians and the Indian population and so the employment
of the dhaye (wet nurse) seems a strange anomaly.136 Surely breastmilk from a people
of supposedly dirty habits would threaten the health of the European infant? As with
other contradictory and illogical colonial stances, the British went through the elaborate
motions of ensuring that the dhaye was spotlessly clean and in a healthy state before
breastfeeding the baby. The dhaye was thoroughly examined for signs of illness and
was told to bathe, put on clean clothes and often food was provided to her so that she
produced good milk.137 However the issue of caste made the sharing of food a problem.
Collingham cited the Stewart family of Cawnpore where they rejected the services of a
dhaye because she refused to eat out of any plates not from her caste and any food
cooked outside the kitchen of her caste.138

Grace Gardiner and Flora Annie Steel, in their 1898 treatise on housekeeping and
cookery in British India, stressed the importance of having a clean ‘cook-room’ but
asserted that even if the kitchen was kept clean, there was no guarantee that the ‘food
will be cooked cleanly, and the mistress must always be on her guard against the dirty
habits which are ingrained in the native cook’.139 Generally Muslims were engaged as
cooks and servants who waited at table. As Hindus were not allowed to handle beef or
most other foods consumed by Europeans, they were not engaged in food preparation.
Missionary Wilkins, who lived for many years in India, offered a contrary view to the
dirty Bengali: ‘as far as my observation goes, I do not know any people more cleanly in
their habits. As a rule, the Hindus bathe every day of the year … their cooking vessels
and brass plates and dishes are scrupulously clean’.140 Wilkins went on to detail the
scrupulous care Hindus took in preparing and consuming their food, according to strict
food purity rules. Wilkins stated that when a Hindu servant was called when eating his
food, he would send a message ‘I am eating my dinner’ and would not come at once. If
it was an urgent matter and he was ordered to come, he would obey but the uneaten

135
D-H, The Memsahib's Manual, p55.
136
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p95.
137
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p95.
138
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p96.
139
Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, p69.
140
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, pp83-84.

219
food was thrown away, in case someone of another caste could have come near the food
and defiled it. Thus Wilkins refuted the idea that Hindus were inherently dirty.141

The view by the British in India that domestic servants were essentially dirty was not
just a racial prejudice but had its origins from the British notion of class where the
lower classes were seen as having undesirable habits. The British upper class employer,
while articulating the incompetent and dirty servants of the lower class, depended on
them in the domestic chores. For example, V.G in 1862, declared that ‘servants were
‘wholly incompetent to prepare any food, even for a hog. How can it be otherwise?
They are taken from the very dregs of society out of hovels and rookeries, probably
from the workhouse. It is notorious that when these creatures enter your kitchen they
know not the purpose of the different utensils, which they always misuse. These are not
the class of women that are required; they are dirty in the extreme, and know not what
cleanliness means.’142 Just as the British in Britain could not have people from their
own class to work as servants for them, in India the colonizer could not always choose
their labour, they had to take what was available.

They could not avoid engaging the lower class or low caste Indians as domestic
servants. At the same time, the Hindus and Muslims believed the British to be
impure143 (as the British ate beef and pork). The Indians’ complex system of single task
for each caste was unwittingly reinforced by the British when they designated castes
and occupations in art and literature.144 Prior to this, the caste system and the
occupations for each caste category were more fluid. The decline of the Moghul upper
classes meant that as large numbers of servants were looking for employment it suited
the Indians to have the system of single-task employment for each task; this meant that
larger numbers of people would be deployed.145 The cook was one of the more
important servants and did not come from the Hindu Brahmin caste because handling of
European food would have been polluting for them. In fact, high caste Indian servants
who fell sick would not accept food, drink or medicines from the memsahib, an
untouchable European.146

141
Wilkins, Daily Life and Work in India, p86.
142
G.V., Dinners and Dinner-Parties or the Absurdities of Artificial Life, London, Chapman and Hall,
1862, p30.
143
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p19.
144
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p18.
145
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p18.
146
Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in
India, New York, Random House, 2007, pp166, 174.

220
The discovery of pathogens in the late nineteenth century only heightened the
memsahib’s pathological fear of disease. On the one hand, she must ensure that
servants scrupulously maintain cleanliness and on the other hand, she knew that they
could not be trusted and had to be constantly on the watch for deviation from
cleanliness. The colonials took great care in following established rules of hygiene
peculiar to the colonies. Boiling drinking water was mandatory, as was the washing of
fruit and vegetables with potassium permanganate, known in Anglo-Indian patois as
‘pinki’ or ‘pinki pani’.147 Similarly, responses from my questionnaires show that many
memsahibs in Malaya, Singapore and the Borneo also used a solution of potassium
permanganate to wash their fruit and vegetables.148 There were exceptions to this, as
Nicole Walby recalled her mother seeing the cook in the morning to plan the day’s
meals, ‘she was very firm that lettuce etc. should only be washed in water, not “pinky”,
and felt that a little local dirt immunised one! None of us were ever ill’.149

Arnold notes that towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Europeans developed
a scientific understanding of disease causation, they regarded the indigenous people of
the colonies as being backward in their fatalistic and superstitious response to
disease.150 He observes that disease became part of the condemnation of African and
Asian ‘backwardness’, while medicine was held up with racial pride, underpinning the
‘new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century. The medical fraternity’s attitude was
subjective, displaying its social and cultural prejudices while Christian missionaries in
Africa used disease as proof of a moral and social sickness and as justification of their
presence there.151

Similar concerns surfaced among the settler communities of Rhodesia and Kenya where
the fear of the spread of disease resulted in the removal of Africans from urban areas.152
Racial boundaries were erected to segregate Africans from Europeans particularly
where public and commercial facilities were earmarked for the exclusive use of

147
Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1919-1939, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, p220.
148
Questionnaire responses, questionnaire in Appendix A.
149
Laurence Fleming, Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India 1939-1950, vol. II, London,
Radcliffe Press, 2004, pp4-5.
150
Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire’, p7.
151
Arnold, ‘Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire’, p.7.
152
Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-
1939, Durham, Duke University Press, 1987, p150.

221
Europeans.153 Dane Kennedy notes that ‘contrived or capricious’ nature of European
phobia of the transmission of disease by Africans did not preclude the employment of
Africans as domestic servants in the colonial household.154 As domestic servants they
handled food, clothing and other personal items of their white masters. Kennedy states
that the settler household was the heart of the settlers’ presence in Africa and ironically
it was ‘literally overrun with African employees’. As in line with domestic servants in
other colonies, their duties included ‘waking their European masters with morning cups
of tea, cooking and serving their meals, washing their clothes, drawing their baths,
making their beds’.155

So in spite of all the intimate chores and tasks involved with food preparation that were
performed by their domestic servants the British colonizers still viewed them as
inherently dirty. Through an examination of cookbooks, household guides, journals and
autobiographies this chapter demonstrates that European concern for maintaining
standards of hygiene and good health was an unresolved tension. Colonists made
themselves dependent on their domestic servants, allegedly the very sources of disease.
Distancing themselves from the kitchen and food preparation itself only hid the fact that
Asians cooked European food. The kitchen as the focal point for food preparation was
given cursory attention. Often, household manual authors of the time wrote in despair
over how filthy kitchen premises and utensils were. Similarly, servants’
accommodation was built at the edge of the colonial compound; there was the need to
house servants near enough for their services (to be conveniently and expeditiously
provided) but also far enough for social distance. When local people migrated to the
hill stations to provide various services to the European community their overcrowded
homes and lack of sanitation were not a concern until the outbreaks of diseases like
cholera, dysentery and typhoid threatened to spread to the Europeans.

153
Kennedy, Islands of White, pp150-152.
154
Kennedy, Islands of White, p150.
155
Kennedy, Islands of White, pp152-153.

222
Conclusion

‘… in Malaya the servants were primarily for use and not, as in India, for
ostentation, so that their numbers were proportionate to the work to be done
and, unlike in India, they were expected not to be mere specialists, but,
within limits, interchangeable. The ingenuity of “Cookie” in improvising a
meal for an extra six or eight persons at a few minutes’ notice, was a
constant source of marvel.’1

The focus of this thesis has been two-fold: it has argued that the British constructed and
consumed a distinctly colonial cuisine in India, Malaysia and Singapore, and that the
emergence of this cuisine can be attributed largely to the local domestic servants and
their interaction with their colonial masters. In doing so, this thesis has established two
interdependent arguments. First, the British in the Asian colonies ate a combination of
European and indigenous foods as well as several peculiarly hybrid dishes that were not
found outside the colonial cuisine. Secondly, the indigenous servants in the colonial
home played a far more crucial role, particularly in food preparation, than the negative
image painted of them by the British as well as by many contemporary scholars.
Furthermore, the colonial cuisine extended beyond the dining table of the colonial
home, to the colonial institutions of hill stations, clubs and rest-houses. Individually,
and collectively, foodways at home and at the venues for social interaction served to
sustain and legitimise colonial cuisine. This thesis has argued that the British, despite
segregating themselves in these institutions, continued to eat Asian food and rely on
Asian labour, so the ideal colonial segregation was never realised, or was, at best, a
façade.

Indeed, segregation failed most notably in foodways, and this thesis has challenged the
assumption that Britons in India, Malaysia and Singapore used food as a means of
differentiating themselves, as rulers, from the ruled.2 While other social structures and
patterns of behaviour put in place in connection with the colonial enterprise clearly
demarcated the differences between colonizer and colonized, this study shows that food
remains one area where the British were less able to conform to rigid standards. E.M.
Collingham states that the ‘perverse adherence to British food was one of the clearest

1
Victor Purcell, The Memoirs of a Malayan Official, London, Cassell, 1965, p248.
2
See for example, Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, in Nupur
Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance,
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1992, pp231-232.

223
indications that Anglo-Indians gave that they were unwilling to adapt to India’.3
However, Anglo-Indian, Singaporean and Victorian cookery and household
management books, diaries and travelogues demonstrate otherwise.

While there is debate on the use of cookbooks and household guides as historical
documents, the main criticism being their prescriptive nature (and therefore barely
descriptive let alone analytical), colonial recipes and instructions were followed more
arduously in the colonies than in Europe, especially for the memsahibs who were posted
to the ‘outstations’ where a close circle of family or friends was not at hand for support
or consultation. Even if cookbooks were prescriptive they do demonstrate ideals and
values aspired to during the period. In fact the prescriptive nature of the publications
reinforced the gendered role bestowed on the memsahibs, that is, in helping to uphold
the prestige and image of empire. Both cookbooks and household guides of the era
contained instructions on how to run the colonial household, and more pertinently, how
to manage domestic servants. By reiterating the childlike nature of the colonized people,
their diseased nature and their dishonesty, the manuals advised the memsahib to
maintain the highest standards so that she could be admired by her servants.4 F.A. Steel
and G. Gardiner boldy stated that the Indian colonial home should be governed much
like Empire, with dignity and prestige.5 In reality, however, the British colonists’
complete reliance on their servants for food preparation and other aspects of domestic
life meant that the social distance they tried to impose between the colonizers and their
subjects was unsuccessful.

Chapter One has reviewed current scholarship on foodways, mistress-servant

relationships and cookbooks as historical documents. Analysis of literature on
foodways has established that the colonial cuisine was a legitimate cuisine; insofar as a
cuisine is one that meets the criteria required by a community. The criteria includes
consuming the meals frequently enough to be knowledgeable about them, to know how
they are cooked and to know how they should taste.6 In addition a legitimate cuisine is

3
E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947, Cambridge,
Polity, 2001, p159.
4
An Anglo-Indian, Indian Cookery ‘Local’ for Young House-Keepers, Bombay, Imperial Press, 1883,
Preface.
5
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress
and Servants the General Management of the House and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its
Branches, London, William Heinemann, 1898, p9.
6
Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1996, p96.

224
one which consist of dishes that are ‘articulated and formalized, and enter the public
domain’.7 While the historiography of the colonial mistress-servant relationship
indicates that it was an unequal relationship, this thesis has focused on the important
contribution domestic servants made towards the development of the colonial cuisine.

The hybrid dishes that became part of the colonial cuisine continued to be adjusted and
modified and were passed on to succeeding generations of colonial families, as
discussed in Chapter Two. Essentially, colonial foodways included hybrid dishes that
were neither European nor Asian but a combination that incorporated elements of both.
Just as the fusion-type dishes of the colonial cuisine, such as the ubiquitous curry,
mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain, chicken chop, pish pash and sago pudding
were consumed on a daily basis, they were similarly served in the clubs and restaurants
frequented by the British. Recipes were discussed and exchanged (although the cooking
of the dishes, in the majority of households, were by the local cooks) through
cookbooks, letters to editors of newspapers and magazines and at recreation enclaves
such as clubs and rest-houses.

The clearest example of a dish that has been appropriated by the British and became the
mainstay of the colonial cuisine is curry. Chapter Three has demonstrated that curry
was the single most important dish that defined the culinary history of British
imperialism. Spurious claims of ownership and the authenticity of curry were contested
and debated by the colonial community. This thesis argues against existing scholarship
that depicts ‘curry’ as a colonial fabrication, that is, that the British purposefully
appropriated curry in order to domesticate the environment8 and that Anglo-Indians did
not eat curry in India.9 As with other colonial dishes, curry was adopted and adapted by
the colonizers, courtesy of the local cooks.

Chapter Four has demonstrated the significant contribution local domestic servants
made towards this cuisine. While the discourse on Asian servants in cookbooks,
household guides, travelogues and diaries reflect British representations of them, it is
clear that it was the cook who purchased, prepared, cooked and served all the meals.

7
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press, 2006, p19.
8
Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies, vol.16, no.2-3, 1996, pp64-65.
9
Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice’, p238. See also Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures:
Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism, New York, Routledge, 1997, pp165-169.

225
Literature from servants themselves is negligible and it has therefore not been possible
to include their voice in this thesis. The instructions in these publications were directed
at the servants; some cookbooks had sections translated into the local language so that
the cook could follow the recipes with ease (assuming that if the cook was illiterate an
interpreter would be called). In delegating authority, the British were depending on
Asian subordinates. This is the core contradiction at the heart of the colonist-servant
relationship – the colonists’ discourse of dirt and disease and the need for separation
was at odds with their dependence on servants for the most intimate and important of
needs. The near total dependence on Asians in the colonial home spilt into the
institutions that provided rest and recreation in the hill stations, clubs and rest-houses.
Alison Light’s remark that ‘servants are everywhere and nowhere in history’10 of British
histories of domestic service is also true of servants in the colonies.

Ironically, the significant contribution of domestic servants in the employ of the British
colonizers did not match the negative image that the British had of them. Much of the
image that the British painted of the servants had its origins in Britain, mirroring the
attitudes of the upper and middle classes towards their servants in the nineteenth
century. In the colonies British depictions of servants highlighted servants’ perceived
dishonesty, their dirty habits, lack of diligence and low intelligence. Yet for all their
failings, local servants were entrusted with food preparation, a service that is essential
and personal. This supports Ann Laura Stoler’s observation that European anxieties
about servants in the East existed because domestic service permeated into both the
private and public spheres. She calls them ‘the subaltern gatekeepers of gender, class,
[and] racial distinctions’.11

British colonizers took into account local practices when employing domestic servants
in the colonies of India, Malaya and Singapore. In India, where labour was cheap and
where caste regulations stipulated single task employment, the British employed large
numbers of servants. In the Southeast Asian states too, the British categorized domestic
servants according to racial and ethnic groups, for example, the majority of cooks and
houseboys employed in Malaya and Singapore were Chinese Hainanese.12

10
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, London, Penguin Books, 2008, p2.
11
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, p133.
12
Owen Rutter, British North Borneo: An Account of Its History, Resources and Native Tribes, London,
Constable & Company, 1922, p379.

226
Chapter Four has thus confirmed Mary Procida’s view that Anglo-Indians relinquished
control over the domestic space to the Indian domestic servants.13 It is in this domestic
space, the colonial home, where the gendered role of the memsahib comes into
prominence. The memsahib’s role was largely supervisory and symbolic, and
interdependent with and reliant on domestic servants. As supervisor of the household
she relegated the physical work of cooking and cleaning to the retinue of servants while
she devoted her time to imposing the rituals and tasks that defined the colonial home as
a bastion of white imperialism. The prestigious white home was carefully guarded and
displayed – servants can be seen as the conduit for dissemination of this exemplary
household to the general populace – and only European guests were invited to enjoy the
comfort of the colonial home and partake of food and drink. The famed ‘open house’
hospitality of providing accommodation and meals to white travellers or colleagues
from other stations was possible only because of the availability of domestic help.
While servants were seen as potential carriers of disease, colonials preferred to adopt
the attitude ‘out of sight, out of mind’ towards food preparation and the kitchen.

The notion of social distance in the colonial context starting in the home was extended
to the other institutions of empire. Chapter Five examined the hill stations, clubs,
hotels and restaurants that identified colonizers in their unofficial and yet public lives.
These were the extensions of the colonial home, as the colonials felt that even in leisure
activities there was a need to preserve the dignity and prestige of the ruling class.
British patronage and membership of these institutions defined boundaries, setting
colonizers apart from the colonized. The hill station is one instrument and institution of
British imperialism that perhaps surpasses all others in its extravagance (large
ostentatious buildings for Government House for administrative offices) and excesses
(transplanting whole households, including pianos and milk cattle for annual leave to
the hill station); there the notion of isolation and segregation from the colonized people
was more pronounced. Ironically, the idea of segregating themselves from the native
people, that is, ‘to get away from the natives’ and to purify themselves in the cool high
altitude air and disease-free highlands, was opposed to the actual practices of the British
by entrusting their wellbeing and comfort to domestic servants that were transplanted
from the plains. This chapter emphasizes the point that enforcing social distance on a
large scale was always impossible. The fact that Europeans depended on Asians meant

13
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002.

227
that the concept of the hills as European spaces was always a fiction. Meals in the hills
were prepared by the same servants from the household in the plains. Accommodation
for the local population who provided service to the colonizers in the hill stations as
well as in the plains lacked proper sanitation. As the hill stations in India grew, the
bazaars that provisioned the white population became overcrowded. It was only when
the lack of proper toilet facilities began to spread infectious diseases and the threat came
closer to the white enclaves that colonial authorities decided to improve sanitation for
the Indian population.14

The fear of dirt and disease in the colonies, as discussed in Chapter Six, arose from two
fronts: the local people as potential carriers of disease and the tropical environment with
damp and unhealthy vapours, harbouring contagious disease.15 This thesis has explored
and supported Mary Douglas’ argument that dirt is disorder and that to eliminate dirt is
to organize the environment.16 Thus, complaints about dirty servants by memsahibs and
seemingly futile attempts to instil cleanliness among the household staff can be seen as
attempts to bring order to the colonial household. This thesis has also argued that the
memsahib’s fear of dirt and attempts to eliminate it stems from the desire to bring
European order to the colonized environment. From the eighteenth century until the
1870s, medical thinking subscribed to the humoral theory that diseases were transmitted
from noxious air or miasmas produced in unhealthy places. Many in the medical
profession situated India within the tropics – as much a sociological construct as a
geographical one – and attributed every Indian disease to the effects of tropical heat and
humidity.17 It was this belief that rationalized the regular trips to the hills, for the
healthy, bracing air of the highlands. Outside the kitchen of the home and hill stations,
the fear of disease and the need for segregation was taken more seriously and can be
seen with the situating of bungalows between wide streets in large compounds and
servants’ quarters built well away from the colonial home.18 While the British
attempted to enforce distance between colonizers and the colonized, the fact remains

14
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj; Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1996, p191.
15
See S. Robert Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill Station’, Geographical Review, 1987, vol.77 no.4 pp. 421-
439; and Ann Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-
Century Colonial Cultures, in Jan Breman (ed.), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social
Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice Amsterdam, VU University Press, 1990.
16
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Penguin,
1970, p12.
17
David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800-1856, Delhi,
Permanent Black, 2005.
18
Collingham, Imperial Bodies, p166.

228
that that distance was necessarily flexible. It was the domestic servants after all who
penetrated the private and prestigious spaces of empire to ensure the functioning of
colonial life.

Thus, through the negotiation and interaction between memsahib and the local servants,
in particular, the cooks, a colonial cuisine emerged, not by imperial design but
haphazardly within the complexity of the domestic domain. The culinary culture
developed was so fluid that food boundaries became blurred, and evolved into the
archetypical Anglo-Indian or colonial cuisine. At the same time, within this colonial
cuisine were food practices that were peculiar to each colony. The collaboration
between memsahib and cook indicates and acknowledges respect for Indian and
Southeast Asian foodways. This thesis has emphasised how crucial the mistress-servant
relationship was in colonial life and the contribution of domestic servants towards the
sustenance of British colonizers, a notion seldom acknowledged.

229
APPENDIX A
Questionnaire
Dear …….…………………….

I am currently undertaking doctoral research in history at the University of Western

Australia. My research concerns examining the types of food consumed by British
colonizers in India, Malaysia and Singapore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
and whether these foods continue to influence the cuisines of these countries today. The
study will also investigate the role played by domestic servants in the colonial
household, particularly in the preparation and serving of food. The tentative title for my
thesis is: A taste of Empire. Food, the colonial kitchen and the role of servants in India,
Malaysia and Singapore c. 1850 – 1960.

This questionnaire will seek opinion and ideas on people of British descent or those
who have lived in India, Malaysia and Singapore on their culinary experiences there and
how these experiences are still relevant today. Disclosure of your name is entirely
voluntary.

If you need additional space for answers please use the back of each page, numbering
each question. Long answers are very welcome! Please return the questionnaire in the
stamped and addressed envelope. Alternatively, if you prefer to fill the questionnaire
electronically please email me at [email protected]
Many thanks for your cooperation.
4 Castle Court, Kallaroo, Western Australia 6025
Phone & Fax 08-9401 4789, Mobile: 0411 112 885

1. Name: ___________________________________________ (optional)

2. Postal and Email Addresses

(optional)_____________________________________________________________

____________________________________________Phone____________________

2. Gender: ___________________

3. Age: ______________________

4. Period of time spent in any of the countries above

_____________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

5. What are names of dishes that come to mind when you hear ‘Anglo-Indian or
Eurasian’ food being mentioned?
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

6. What ingredients do you most associate with Anglo-Indian/Eurasian food?

_____________________________________________________________________

230
7. What do you associate with the word ‘curry’?
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

8. What is your idea of a good curry? That is, who do you think makes the best curry?
(e.g. Singaporeans, South Indians, etc.?)
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

8. Name the places (e.g. restaurants, clubs or homes) where you tasted Anglo-Indian or
Eurasian food in India, Malaysia or Singapore.
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

9. How often do you cook or eat Anglo-Indian/Eurasian food?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

10. How would you describe the circumstances for the eating and sharing of Anglo-
Indian food? (e.g. for nostalgic times, social gatherings of a shared past, etc.)
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

11. Why do you think that a ‘colonial’ type of food has emerged from colonization?

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

12. Were you ever in a household with Asian domestic servants? If so, how many were
there and what were their tasks and job titles (e.g. amah, dhobi, cookie, etc.)

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

231
13. How was your relationship with the domestic servant(s)? (e.g. cordial, distant, as
‘part of the family’?)
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

14. What proportion of food preparation was done by domestic servants? Were they
also responsible for the purchase of food?
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

14. If you were part of a colonial household, what were the meal times?
(e.g. 7am – breakfast, morning tea—10am, tiffin—1pm, dinner—6pm, supper – 9pm?)
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

15. How would you describe the notion of ‘Anglo-Indian’ or ‘Eurasian’ cuisine? (e.g.
positively, over-rated, a colonial hangover, etc)
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

16. To what extent do you think that British colonizers have influenced the
globalization of food?
_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

17. Comments or suggestions:

_____________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

232
APPENDIX B
Indian Domestic Troubles

‘Who, when I’ve found a friend to dine,

Declares we drank both flasks of wine,
Though half, I know, was left in mine?
My Khidmatgár.

Who evermore to fool me tries,

And tells my wife a pack of lies,
And charges twice for all he buys?
My Khidmatgár.

Who smokes my food and cribs my tea,

Or sends the second brew to me,
And cooks in fat instead of Ghee?
My Báwarchí.

Who takes good care no stranger tries

To cheat me of a single pice,
Yet steals himself before my eyes?
My Behrá.

Who sits and claims each joint of bone

That leaves my table as his own,
And fat and lazy now has grown?
My Méhtár.

Who beats my shirts to ribbons fine,

And changes (why, I can’t divine,)
Old Jones’s trashy things for mine?
My Dhobí.

Who with my horses’ Gram makes free,

Deducts one seer from every three,
And sells the balance back to me?
My Saís.

Who wakes me from my slumbers deep,

As bawling loud, the house he’ll creep,
To tell all thieves that Sáhib’s asleep?
My Chokídár.

Who bathes me every day, full well,

In soap obnoxious to the smell,
And marks me so, my chin can tell?
My Hajjám.

Who try me fifty times a day,

Till wrath and passion get their way,
And what I’d do – ‘tis hard to say?
My Servants.

– from W.H. Dawe, The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery: Being a Practical Manual for Housekeepers,
London, Elliot Stock, 1888, ppx-xi.

233
234
 APPENDIX C

‘Family Dinners for a Month’

Anonymous, What to tell the cook; or the native cook’s assistant, being a choice
collection of receipts for Indian cookery, pastry, etc., Madras, Higginbothams, 1910.

1st 7th 13th 19th 25th

Clear Soup Hare Soup Mutton Broth Partridge Soup Mulligatawny
Roast Leg Mutton Roast Kid and Roast Venison Spiced Beef Fowls a la
Harico Mint Sauce Maintenon Cutlets Friscasseed Fowl Carlsfors
Chicken Curry Mutton Pudding Sheep’s Head Vegetable Curry China Chilo
Bread and Butter Sardine Curry Curry George Pudding Crab Curry
Pudding Mango Fool Cheese Cakes Lemon Suet
20th Pudding
nd th th
2 8 14 Potato Soup
Mulligatawny Turnip Soup Tomato Soup Stewed Ducks and 26th
Beefsteak Pie Roast Fowls Jugged Hare Turnips Mock Turtle Soup
Cutlets a la Irish Stew Debris Pudding Beef Persillade Roast Mutton
Soubise Toast Curry Curry Puffs Kabob Curry Fowl and Pillau
Kabob Curry Arrowroot Jelly Rice Flummery Rice Pudding Castle Pudding
Pancakes
9th 15th 21st 27th
3rd Rice Soup Giblet Soup Green Pea Soup White Soup
Vegetable Soup Game Pie Roast Goose Stewed Shoulder Roast Fillet of
Boiled Fowls and Mutton Cutlets Boiled Mutton Veal Veal
Tongue Salt Fish and Egg Chops Sheep’s Tongues Boiled Mutton
Mutton and Curry Brain Curry Dry Curry Chops
Cucumber Stew Plantain Fritters Potato Pudding Imitation Apple Chicken Curry
Dry Curry and Rice Edge Chocolate Pudding
Custard Pudding 10th 16th
Carrot Soup Palestine Soup 22nd 28th
th
4 Roast Beef Breast of Veal and Cucumber Soup Clear Soup
Pea Soup Minced Mutton Peas Chicken Pie Boiled Ducks
A-la-mode Beef Cutlet Curry Wild Ducks Sheep’s Head Rissoles
Roast Teal Jam Roll Pudding Malay Curry Chartreuse Sheep’s Head
Prawn Curry Thorpe Pudding Mutton Curry Curry
Sweet Omelette 11th Tipsy Cake Cocoa-nut
Mock Turtle Soup 17th Pudding
th
5 Mutton rolled and Jullienne Soup 23rd
Oxtail Soup spiced Roast Pork Pot-au-Feu 29th
Boiled Mutton and Boiled Chickens Chicken Salad Rock Pigeons Game Soup
Onion Sauce Mutton Curry Egg Curry Prawn Curry Beefsteak Pudding
Chicken Cutlets Blancmange Arrowroot Snowden Pudding Mutton and
Vegetable Curry Pudding Tomato Cutlets
Plum Pudding 12th 24th Brain Curry
th
Gravy Soup 18 Gravy Soup Adelaide Pudding
6th Boiled Salt Beef Oyster Soup Roast Fore-quarter
White Soup Stewed Quails Braised Leg Mutton 30th
Roast Ducks Fish Curry Mutton Sweetbreads Ox-tail Soup
Beefsteak Batter Pudding Pigeons and Peas Chicken Curry Roast Fowls and
Ball Curry Gravy Curry Sago Jelly Sausages
Sago Pudding Fair Rosamond Breslau of Beef
Pudding Fish Curry
Bombay Pudding

31st
Julienne Soup
Pigeon Pie
Roast Lamb
Vegetable Curry
Tart and Custard

234
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241
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243
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