question

SINGLE SPACED

MAKE IT RELEVANT AND WRITE 4-5 QUOTES FROM THE CHAPTER THAT ARE CONNECTED TO THE TOPIC AND INCLUDE THE AUTHORS NAME AND PAGE NUMBER

CHAPTER 3

Sex in the Contact Zone

They couldn’t associate on deck with that touch of the tar-brush, but it was a very different business down here, or soon would be.

E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’

E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Other Boat’ is set at the turn of the twentieth century, the apex of British colonial power around the world.1 Lionel is trying to return to India to continue his successful career in the British Army and to reunite with Isobel, whom he intends to marry. On board the SS Normannia, he finds himself sharing a berth with Cocoanut, a ‘Eurasian’ youth, so named for his ‘peculiar shaped head’2 (though perhaps also for his unstable racial position), whom he met on the ship from India to England when they were both children. Lionel had spent his early childhood in India, until his father’s sexual indiscretions provoked a split in the family, sending the children and mother back to the metropole. In the intervening decade between these two journeys, Lionel has become a decorated soldier. Cocoanut has had a rather more informal, though nonetheless effective, education in the nefarious workings of the shipping world, through which “he is able to secure Lionel’s passage and ensure, contra the usual scrupulous segregation of British officers from ‘dagoes’, that they are bunked together. As the ship travels east, the strict sexual and racial expectations of Lionel’s mother, and the England she represents, recede. When the ship enters the Mediterranean, Cocoanut’s attempts to seduce Lionel finally meet success and by the time they are sailing the Red Sea, ‘they slept together as a matter of course’.

At first, Lionel appears to be the embodiment of colonial masculinity: he is ‘clean cut, athletic, good-looking without being conspicuous’.4 Like his father (who, he informs his lover, was ‘a hundred per cent Aryan’), his ‘thick fairish hair, blue eyes, glowing cheeks and strong white teeth’ are the very picture of the manly European. His physical appearance is “matched by his temperament – ‘His voice was quiet, his demeanour assured, his temper equable’5 – and his success on the battlefield: ‘he had got into one of the little desert wars that were becoming too rare, had displayed dash and decision, been wounded, and had been mentioned in despatches and got his captaincy early’.6 He is quickly recognised as an insider by those aboard the ship who share his class position. This contingent of colonial elites ‘make up two Bridge tables every night besides hanging together at other times, and get called the Big Eight which [he supposes] must be regarded as a compliment’.7 He appears to embody the promise of sexual modernity, abounding in the qualities, of both appearance and character, essential to white bourgeois masculinity. Yet, he is shadowed by scandal. His father tarnished the family’s good name by ‘going native’, taking off with his Burmese mistress and leaving his wife with five children to raise alone. Despite his horror at his father’s dishonourable desires – and at the suggestion that he may have some unknown ‘half-caste’ siblings – his affair with Cocoanut is the source of deep pleasure, albeit crosshatched with shame and anxiety. Lionel’s fear that he might have inherited his father’s dubious proclivities precipitates the story’s violent conclusion – to which we will return at the end of this chapter.

“The two boats of the title – from India to England, England to India – are a metonym for the colonial project, a project that circumnavigated the world, creating and enforcing racial boundaries while also constantly producing the conditions for those boundaries to be crossed, fractured, or revealed as a fiction. In this chapter, I’ll consider the ways in which colonial authorities attempted to manage forms of cross-racial contact and cross-class contact, particularly sexual contact. I use the term ‘racial hygiene’ as a means to understand these processes. While this term has largely been associated with Nazi eugenics, here I use it in a broader sense to encompass the varied attempts to maintain the superiority of the ‘ruling race’, whether through state-regulated sex work, prohibitions on marriage for private soldiers, or various other means. Racial distinctions were fragile and needed to be consistently shored up by policies and practices premised on the assumption that sustained contact with the ‘lower races’ could contaminate British stock. As some contact was necessary and inevitable, practices of racial hygiene sought to choreograph and assign meaning to cross-racial intimacy, to ensure hierarchies could be carefully maintained.

“Ships are what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as a ‘contact zone’, a space of asymmetrical power relations in which different people and cultures ‘meet, clash and grapple with each other’.9 As Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s research into the revolutionary cultures of the Atlantic reveals, maritime life was ‘a multicultural, multiracial, multinational’ affair.10 Ships are both scrupulously hierarchical and threateningly anarchic; they are spaces in which manifold sumptuary codes attempt to prevent inevitable cross-class, cross-racial contact. As such, these two boats are an apt theatre for this drama of inheritance, in which institutions of racial hygiene (family, army, and patriarchy) are threatened by figures such as Cocoanut, one of the wayward children of the British Empire, and the product of precisely the kind of cross-racial union that preoccupied colonial administrations. While white bourgeois masculinity may be at the top of the hierarchy, Forster suggests this position might be more precarious than it seems – and that for those at the top of any hierarchy, there’s a long way to fall.

“Fit to Rule

The sun was a mighty power in those far-off days and hostile to the Ruling Race. Officers staggered at the touch of it, Tommies collapsed.

E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’

In the nineteenth century, as McClintock notes, ‘the English middle-class male was placed at the pinnacle of evolutionary hierarchy’.11 Indeed, his persistence as the paradigmatic figure of the human continues into the contemporary era, albeit subject to increasing scepticism. It is common these days to hear the ‘straight white man’ marked out as a problem. Yet, despite this apparent scrutiny, many fail to engage with the uncanny doubleness of this figure. As the paradigm for the human, he is dependent on all kinds of non-human or infrahuman others; as a norm, he is always on guard against deviance from within or without. His power is precarious precisely because it is dependent on the exclusion of those wayward or discarded figures of modernity – figures such as Cocoanut in ‘The Other Boat’. Colonial governance went to great lengths to conserve racial hygiene – to choreograph the ways in which people interacted across the boundaries of gender, race, and class. As Lisa Lowe puts it, “The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage and family among the colonised formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule’.12 I would add, however, that this kind of state intervention was not only addressed to the colonised, but to the colonial elite. Said observes:

When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj.

The fate of both ruler and ruled, then, is hopelessly intertwined.

Of course, the Hegelian account of subject formation is suggestive of this dialectical constitution. According to Hegel, the autonomy at the heart of the subject comes from its sublation of the Other, a kind of internalisation through which the contradiction of Self and Other, Master and Slave, is resolved through synthesis. In this process, all that is dangerous and threatening about the Other is neutralised by its role in the constitution of the Self. The Hegelian model, however, doesn’t account for the perpetual instability that shadows the subject – the way in which this process is always incomplete. In other words, Hegel’s is an ideal-type, not a historical account. As Lowe observes, the Hegelian dialectic ‘established intimacy as a property of the individual man within his family’:14 through the subordination of women and children to his will, they become constitutive of his autonomy. Yet, as Lowe’s work explores, in the colonies the patriarchal intimacy of the nuclear family, which turns on privacy, domesticity, and respectability, was intertwined with other, disavowed, spaces of intimacy. In colonial India, we might identify these disavowed intimacies as residing in the army barracks, the brothel, and the relationships between colonial elites and their concubines. These disavowed intimacies – those that constitute the underbelly of sexual modernity – threaten to undermine the stern boundaries of racial difference on which the imperial regime was staked.

The historical coordinates of the white, bourgeois, heterosexual man show the ways he is constituted through a particular vision of sexuality. This constitution, however, is highly unstable, as it both depends on and produces forms of sexuality it deems deviant or dangerous. According to Foucault, ‘the bourgeoisie’s “blood” was its sex’.15 The aristocracy believed that its claims to superiority lay in the purity of its blood, a metaphor for inheritance. But from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the bourgeoisie sought to assert its own fitness to rule. Its special character was assumed to reside in sexual restraint, marriage, and heterosexuality. These features measured its distinction from the unruly masses in both metropole and periphery, as well as from the decadent aristocracy. For Foucault, the emergence of this bourgeois self, whose fitness to rule was evidenced by the practice of a restrained heterosexuality, stemmed from a largely European process rooted in confession to a priest through which sexuality developed a clear narrative structure. As we saw in chapter 1, the kind of subjectivity produced by confession was developed and institutionalised through medicine, education, the nuclear family, and the wider organisation of life in Europe as it became increasingly industrialised.

As scholars of postcoloniality observe, however, the emergence of this self was intimately linked to racial science and colonial governance. Stoler, for example, observes the ‘categorical effacement of colonialism’ from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which turns empire into ‘a backdrop of Victorian ideology, and contemporary stories about it, easily dismissed and not further discussed’.16 Foucault’s approach obscures the coproduction of the categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The search for what Foucault calls ‘the truth about sex’ was intimately tied to the search for ‘the truth about race’, as we saw in the previous chapter. The hallmarks of sexual modernity’s initial promise (restraint, heterosexuality, choice, and marriage) must be read as forms of racial hygiene as well as sexual respectability. Sexual respectability is dependent, however, on sexual violence. While British elites emphasised that it was their restraint, heterosexuality and marriage that differentiated them from the reckless lower classes in Europe and deviant racial Others in the colonies, the conduct of British soldiers, merchants, and bureaucrats tells a rather different story. Though there are many cases of individual sexual violence (such as the rape of native women by British soldiers) carried out with impunity, these acts were not the full extent of colonial sexual violence. Sexual violence and racial hierarchy were institutionalised together. The light side of sexual modernity – the ways in which it promised bourgeois men a life of respectability at the top of the racial hierarchy – depended upon a vast and complex underbelly which included a system of racially ordered and state-regulated sex work. In other words, respectability was an important fiction but rarely a reality: marriage took place alongside concubinage, romantic love never displaced its ‘mercenary’ counterpart, and while sexual restraint was lauded, rape was commonplace.

“The Management of Men

Here was the worst thing in the world, the thing for which Tommies got given the maximum, and here he was bottled up with it for a fortnight.

E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’

British colonial control over India offers a particularly acute angle from which to observe the development of sexual modernity through the management of populations. While Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish-Norwegian powers competed for control over parts of the region, by the mid-eighteenth century, through what Mytheli Sreenivas describes as ‘a combination of military victories, political negotiations with local rulers, and alliances with merchant groups’,17 the East India Company was established as the dominant force in the region. As the company expanded its mechanisms to extract resources, exploit labour, and subdue competitors to its authority (whether through building alliances, brokering deals, or dominating militarily), it began to function as a state. As such, it was the company that attempted to determine how soldiers, merchants, and missionaries would engage with natives according to gender, caste, class, and age. Attempts to choreograph these relationships were essential to responding to ‘the native question’ which, as Mamdani observes, described ‘the problem of stabilising alien rule … a dilemma that confronted every colonial power and a riddle that preoccupied the best of its minds’.

“In 1773, the company was brought under parliamentary surveillance, with further regulation enacted by Pitt’s India Act in 1784. These interventions laid the groundwork for India to be brought under the direct rule of the British Crown in 1858, following the first cross-country armed rebellion against British rule the previous year, referred to by the British as the ‘Mutiny’. In the shift from Company to Crown rule, new methods of statecraft – new ways to manage populations – were finessed, with a renewed emphasis on culture and consent. In this shift to Crown rule, the ethnographic state came into its own, as it was assumed that the uprising had been the result of slights to sensitive native cultural sensibilities. In particular, the story took hold that the uprising had been the result of bullets smeared with either cow or pig fat given to native soldiers to be used in the newly issued Enfield rifle, which required one to literally ‘bite the bullet’ before firing. As pigs are viewed as unclean by Muslims and cows as sacred by Hindus, it was assumed that this had offended native sensibilities. A more sober analysis points to the uprising as the inevitable political opposition to being ruled by an extractive foreign power. Though there were significant changes to the methods of statecraft employed in the different stages of colonial rule, they all met the problems of racial hygiene, sexual desire, and the messy and unpredictable ways in which people navigate the intervention of new power structures into their lives. “Colonial administrators – whether under the auspices of Company or Crown – sat in London (like their counterparts in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Lisbon) trying to determine who, many thousands of miles away, should have sex with whom and under what conditions. European men in India were there as company employees, soldiers, private mercenaries, missionaries, and independent traders looking to make their fortune. Though much of the everyday administration of colonial India was done by natives, the presence of European men was essential to the colonial project. They were needed to secure the extraction of resources – of tea, cotton, rice, minerals, and labour. While European domination was secured by force where necessary, for the relatively small numbers of European men to rule over the huge native population, the fiction of racial superiority was paramount. As such, the health, wellbeing, and appearance of European men was freighted with significance. In the colonial imaginary, women were needed to perform the work of managing the needs of these men, to reproduce the colonial workforce. Prior to the 1857 uprising, native women seemed to be the obvious choice. They were already there, after all. In a guide for East India Company soldiers published in 1810 Thomas Williamson explained that “whether married or not, each soldier is generally provided with a companion, who takes care of his linen, aids in cleaning his accoutrements, dresses his hair … These doxies do, certainly, now and then kick up a famous row in the barracks; but on the whole, may be considered highly serviceable; especially during illness, at which time their attendance is invaluable.”

In addition to providing sexual and emotional relief, native women could offer forms of reproductive labour tailored to the challenges of life in the colonies; that is to say, they could cook, keep a clean house, and launder clothes in a context that would have been unfamiliar, even threatening, to European women. In other words, they could do the work – sexual, domestic, emotional – of wives. Thus, British men in India were encouraged to take concubines. Unsurprisingly, however, while solving the initial problem of the sexual, emotional, and reproductive lives of British men, this arrangement created a new problem: children. The children that issued from relationships with concubines had claims to British as well as native status. ‘Eurasian’ children – such as Cocoanut in Forster’s short story – threatened the fiction of racial superiority, all the more when they issued from longstanding, quasi-marital relationships rather than from fleeting affairs or visits to sex workers. Emotional and social issues also sprung from these long-term unions – men became emotionally attached to their concubines, and some sought to include them in their inheritance, send their children to school or university in England, or to remain in India after the end of their contracts. The initial stabilising function of concubinage produced the seeds of its own unravelling. As such, in the transition to Crown rule, when racial divisions needed to be fortified, concubinage was phased out as official policy and bourgeois white women were increasingly relied upon to do the work of maintaining colonial elites.

After the uprising of 1857, short-service army contracts were brought in, with personnel drawn from among working-class populations in England – the ‘Tommies’ of this section’s epigraph. These soldiers were an expensive resource in and of themselves, so their health and wellbeing were of financial and geopolitical importance. Marriage would have been the obvious solution to meeting the sexual and emotional ‘needs’ of these young men, as the ideal of gender complementarity discussed in the previous chapter gained moral traction. But marriage for soldiers, rather than only bourgeois colonials, was deemed too costly, both financially and in terms of the risk to racial hierarchy. European wives, even drawn from among the working classes, would need to be able to afford lifestyles that reflected the strict hierarchies of the colonial order. As Stoler notes regarding the Dutch East Indies, ‘Company authorities argued that new employees with families in tow would be a financial burden, risking the emergence of a “European proletariat” and thus a major threat to white prestige’.

“Similarly, administrators viewed British soldiers as uniquely vulnerable – to the heat of the sun, to the deceptive wiles of the natives, to the sexual possibilities denied to them in Europe but endlessly available in the imperial peripheries. Working-class men were viewed as a distinct group – lacking in the qualities of manliness and restraint assumed to reside in bourgeois masculinity. As the acting district magistrate of Ahmadabad put it:

Private soldiers are young men taken from the classes least habituated to exercise self-control – classes who in their natural state marry very early in life. You take such men, you do not allow them to marry, you feed them well – better in most cases than they have been accustomed to be fed, and you give them a sufficient amount of physical work to put them into good condition and no more. It is asking too much to expect that a large majority of such men will exhibit the continence of the cloister.

“It was feared that, in the absence of women, soldiers would turn to each other to meet their sexual needs. As homosexuality was also associated with racial degeneration – with the dangerous sexual excess and feminisation of the licentious East – it was vital to mitigate this threat. As Chitty observes, ‘cultures of sex between men were politicized amid much wider forms of dispossession during periods of geopolitical instability and political-economic transition’.22 Though Chitty’s research does not consider colonial India, the concern with sex between British soldiers is illuminated by his framing. Concerns over sex between men viewed it as a key means by which venereal disease, already high among soldiers and assumed to originate with sex workers, could be further spread among the troops. This possibility threatened both the fiction of racial superiority and the viability of this ‘costly import’. Concerns over homosexuality then, were also concerns over the economic efficiency of the empire. Hyam notes that ‘Britain spread venereal diseases around the globe along with its race-courses and botanical gardens, steam engines and law-books’.23 To stave off the threat of homosexuality and its attendant implications of degeneracy, women had to be found to meet men’s sexual needs.

“The Registered Prostitute

Sex had entirely receded – only to come charging back like a bull.

E. M. Forster, ‘The Other Boat’

The registered prostitute system in India was borne of the articulation of two propositions: the first, that men need sex; the second, that both the ‘white race’ and its claims to dominance must be protected. The sexual urges of young, unmarried, working-class men were thought to be uncontrollable in the licentious East. While interracial relationships threatened the fiction of racial superiority, prostitution – or ‘mercenary love’ – came to be regarded as a ‘necessary evil’. Though the risk of creating a class

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