Of racist mosquitoes and vengeful dhobis
MJ Akbar, who has written books on Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, jihad and Pakistan, turns his attention to race relations between Indians and their British colonisers, in his new book
The release of MJ Akbar’s new book Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar: Racism and Revenge in the British Raj has stirred up old questions. Does the publication of such a book constitute a whitewashing of the author’s alleged crimes, even if he has not been found guilty by the law of the land? Some would say that these questions are easy to answer if one has a clear stance in solidarity with the #MeToo movement. Others would argue that there is a case to be made for separating the art and the artist.
Akbar was scheduled to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2022 but his session was cancelled after the organisers were called out on Twitter for giving him a platform. While the de-platforming was celebrated by some, there is still the fact that there are readers who wish to know what the book is about. This review is for them.
Akbar, who has written books on Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Kashmir, jihad and Pakistan, turns his attention to “racial relations” between Indians and their British colonisers in this new volume. He draws upon memoirs, journals and letters to discuss the pompous attitude of “white superiority” that was ingrained in the British mind, and goes on to explore just how unjustified that sense of superiority was.
The author chronicles the debauchery of the British, who wanted to regulate the passions of the natives. “Some over-optimistic Victorian army commanders thought that they could ‘sweat the sex out’ of the soldier with rigorous drill and endless football games. Neither the football nor the morals improved,” Akbar writes. Brothels sprang up close to the cantonment areas in major Indian cities like Calcutta, Delhi, Agra and Bombay.
Who was Doolally Sahib? The author explains that “Doolally” is derived from “Deolali, a transit camp situated in Nashik about a 100 miles from Bombay and referred to the feverish eccentricity of the English soldier waiting to go home.”
Many such soldiers had Indian lovers but few chose to marry “an Indian paramour.” These men “wanted the comforts of betrothal” but “with- out the ‘plague’ of marriage” to the Indian women they consorted with.
Before the soldiers returned home, there was a departure parade held in their honour. There was beer, whisky and music. It was a rambunctious affair, complete with a band that played Rolling Home to Dear Old Blighty as the soldiers marched in the direction of the railway station. The book skilfully recreates the mood at some of these drunken escapades.
Akbar writes, “From the Indian side of the pageantry, a wail would be heard, the cry of abandoned girlfriends and their parents.” One girlfriend’s father uses the term “Doolally Sahib” for a departing soldier. Cursing the solider, he says, “Oh doolally sahib, fifteen years you’ve had my daughter, / and now you go to Blighty, sahib; / May the boat that takes you over sink to the bottom of / the pani, sahib!” Akbar finds this reference from Charles Allen’s book Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (1975). The vengefulness of the verse came from a place of deep anguish. The British did not spare the children they had with Indians. They believed that “halfBritish children would over time ‘infect’ and ‘debase’ pure British blood.” The presence of Indian blood was seen as polluting. People who were half-British and half-Indian were called “half-caste”, “half-and-half” or “eight annas”, because a full rupee was equivalent to 16 annas at the time. Mixed marriages became even more taboo because of these prejudices.
And then there was the term “black zamindar”, used for an Indian whose official duty was to collect revenue on behalf of the British. The first person known to hold this designation was a Bengali man, Gobindaram Mitra. Akbar writes, “His cudgelwielding goons called paiks, naibs and naiks, were let loose upon the citizenry. This triptych became the template of the future Calcutta police, the equivalent of constables, head constables and investigating officers.” Mitra’s job description behoved him to take care of British interests but he also used his position to fill his own coffers. Akbar calls him “Calcutta’s first godfather of white-collar crime”. So there were Indians who collaborated with the British, and Indians who fought them publicly and in private. Edward Aitken, a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society, hated his dhobi because the washerman “wreaked his rage upon short and trouser and coat” as if “he
were wringing the necks of poultry.” An English hostess, a memsahib, found her cook using his mundu to strain the clear soup. As you might have guessed, the cook was fired.
Akbar compares the British with the Mughals. He recalls his namesake, the Mughal emperor, who married Rajput women, had temples built for his Hindu wives, funded the translation of religious texts from Sanskrit to Persian, turned vegetarian “and famously wondered why men should turn their stomachs into a graveyard for animals”.
The author does not romanticise the Mughals. He spends a few pages lambasting Aurangzeb for alienating his Hindu subjects as well as women in his own palace, who felt that the ban on drinking alcohol and wearing tight trousers was excessive, even laughable. In the course of his research for this book, Akbar also found that Sir Mir Turab Ali Khan, or Salar Jung I, prime minister to the Nizam of Hyderabad, once told Richard Temple, the British Resident, that Indians have been ruled by despots worse than the British but the Mughals survived “because they had amalgamated with the people” unlike the British, who were “utterly foreign.”
Even Indian mosquitoes railed against them. Akbar writes, “Pests were the great English bugbear. There was a strong view that Indian mosquitoes had colour prejudice, feasting on a white man’s blood with gluttonous intensity.” In order to protect themselves from being bitten, some wore breeches up to the toes, and mufflers on their hands and faces. I had not considered the unsung contribution of mosquitoes to our freedom struggle. Reading Akbar’s book changed that.