Saturday 1 February 2014
The lingering stench of an imperial era
The English banker and “relationship manager” Anton Casey - who stirred a storm of indignation among Singaporeans earlier this month with his intemperate comments - is the latest in a long line of Westerners to have disparaged Asians in language laden with barbs about their race and class.
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The lingering stench of an imperial era
Harish Mehta
31 January 2014
The English banker and “relationship manager” Anton Casey - who stirred a storm of indignation among Singaporeans earlier this month with his intemperate comments - is the latest in a long line of Westerners to have disparaged Asians in language laden with barbs about their race and class.
Although he made several derogatory remarks, one of his comments stands out as an example of what historians call the “language of imperial power”. After travelling on an MRT train, Casey declared that he needed to “wash the stench of public transport” off his body. His remark on stench carries an implicit criticism of class, and implies that the lower classes smell bad.
The Casey episode provides an opportunity to examine how smell became a part of imperial ideology. Western imperial colonies in Asia in the 18th to 20th centuries were not only constructed on the basis of military and financial power exercised by Western nations. Empire was also constructed by the senses: the colonisers tasted, smelt, heard, touched and gazed at the people they had colonised, and in each case they criticised the race and class of the Asians under colonial rule.
The so-called History of the Senses is a recent avenue for exploration that uses archival records of the colonial powers, as well as novels, films, travelogues and newspaper articles produced by those that governed the Empire.
American historian Andrew Rotter has argued that at the core of imperial power was the encounter between authorities and subjects: an encounter in which the imperial power imposed control, and the colonised persons sometimes resisted control. Scholar Mark M Smith has explained that an entire range of the human senses were engaged in the creation and resistance of Empire.
The stratification of colonial society into upper, middle and lower economic classes was associated with the senses. British novelist George Orwell has explained that British children were taught that “the lower classes smell”. Dr Rotter argues that in the heyday of Empire, the very poorest “were sometimes described by fearful people, as ‘savages’, ‘brutes’ or ‘animals’ - traditional terms describing those beyond the boundaries of society, the untouchables, the impure”.
In Spring 2012, I taught a course on global history at McMaster University, in which I asked the 65 students in my class to read George Orwell’s novel, Burmese Days.
Orwell wrote this book after having lived and worked in Burma as a British police officer when he observed the worst excesses of British authorities. My students, the majority of whom are white Canadians, were appalled at the tactics used by the British officials and colonial timber traders resident in Burma: they regularly whipped Burmese workers with their leather belts, and constantly complained about the terrible way they smelt of garlic, which seemed to ooze out of their bodies.
At the time that Orwell wrote his novel in 1934, many Englishmen were deeply disappointed because they felt he had let them down. But Orwell had told the truth about British imperial power, and his novel remains so relevant today because it helps us understand how the imperial senses were involved in the construction of Empire.
Dr Rotter argues that even if Westerners occasionally admitted that Asian body odours were not altogether unpleasant because Indians bathed far more often than Britons in the 19th century, they suspected that the sweet scent of a native body suggested concealment and duplicity. Clearly, this meant that body odour was itself racialised, and that a colonised person smelt bad because he could not be trusted.
Deborah Dring, an Englishwoman who grew up in India at the height of the British Empire (1857-1947), made this imperial recollection: “Our parents always thought we’d catch something if we went down to the bazaar. But my brothers and I always looked upon the bazaar as being too exciting. I’ll never forget the smell - partly a very strong spice, an incensey smell - and all that heat and the movements and the people and the colour . . . But the bazaar was a forbidden land when I was a child.” Bazaars in Burma and India were out of bounds to women and children, as Orwell has shown.
Not only did Asians smell bad, their food was too odorous as well. British officials found the garlic in Burmese food too much to bear, and they were offended - even alarmed - by the smell of Indian curries, which is the reason why the kitchens in colonial India were located at a “safe” distance from the residence.
When viewed against the background of imperial-era criticisms of the smell of Asian bodies and food, and the more recent development of the field of the History of the Senses, Casey’s remark on the “stench” of the MRT train in Singapore is not only about the economic class of the public transport user, a class to which he does not seem to belong; his remark is also more generally about members of the Asian race, whom he is so quick to disparage.
The writer, a former BT senior Indochina correspondent, is a historian who has taught at Canadian universities, and has written books on Indochina
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