Abstract
While preceding chapters have focused on the attempts to control the bodies of Indian women in and around the military cantonments, it is important not to ignore the ways in which government and the military imposed discipline on and around the body of the European soldier himself. This chapter examines the methods and levels of control — both which existed and which were attempted in the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves, or, more commonly, the numerous others who occupied cantonment space. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering.
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Notes
See, most notably Foucault’s ‘Docile Bodies’ chapter in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Norman Chevers, ‘On the Means of Preserving the Health of European Soldiers in India’, Indian Annals of Medical Science 5 (1858), 748. In 1861, Chevers became the Secretary to the Bengal Medical Board and later served as the Principal of the Calcutta Medical College.
Marc Jason Gilbert, ‘Empire and Excise: Drugs and Drink Revenue and the Fate of States in South Asia’, Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500–1930, 116–41 eds. James Mills and Patricia Barton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 117.
Sir Monier Monier-Williams, A Few Remarks on the Use of Spirituous Liquors among the European Soldiers; and on the Punishment of Flogging in the Native Army of the Honourable the East India Company (London: DS Maurice, 1823), 6.
Henry Piddington, A Letter to the European Soldiers in India, on the Substitution of Co ffee for Spirituous Liquors (Calcutta: The Englishman Press, 1839).
Henry Havelock, Memoirs of Major General Sir Henry Havelock, ed. John Clark Marshman (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860), 109.
For a Foucaultian analysis of disciplinary measures in late colonial Delhi, see Stephen Legg, ‘Governing Prostitution in Colonial Delhi: From Cantonment Regulations to International Hygiene (1864–1939)’, 34, 4 (2009); Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Gvernmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 170.
For gender and the symbolic and emotive role of (albeit supposedly ’upright’) European women in India see Douglas Peers, “The more this foul case is stirred, the more offensive it becomes”: Imperial Authority, Victorian Sentimentality and the Court Martial of Colonel Crawley, 1862–1864’, Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places and Spaces in Colonial India, 207–35 eds. Sameeta Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the ‘domestication’ of empire, see Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal 5 (1978).
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© 2014 Erica Wald
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Wald, E. (2014). The Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment. In: Vice in the Barracks. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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