Review

Reviewed Work(s): Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary, a Colonial Subject’s Narrative
of Imperial India by Susanne Hoeber  Rudolph, Lloyd I.  Rudolph and Mohan Singh 
Kanota
Review by: Mridu Rai
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (December 2006), pp. 949-951
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511217
Accessed: 03-01-2018 07:47 UTC

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 Book Reviews 949

quently bordered on the homoerotic, a fact reflected in the slum literature of the period,
in which female social workers and feisty poor women frequently develop the most pas-
sionate of friendships.
Male settlement workers also developed similar networks of benevolence and intimacy
in the process of relieving poverty. Many of these functioned as alternative family-like
structures in which cross- and interclass fraternity could be explored. Not only femininity
but also masculinity was remade in the slum. Many of the “New Men,” who developed
intimate spiritual bonds among themselves and seemed to embody the best qualities of
male and female, were similar to those men of “intermediate sex” to be found in the pages
of Edward Carpenter. In fact, the 1890s saw some of the first efforts to argue that an active,
caring, and reforming role in the world was a natural consequence of homosexuality. In
that reading, the social was a substitute for the bonds of family. The erotic content of
social work, it seemed, had at last been declared, not least in the work of men such as
C. R. Ashbee, who sought to emphasize its comradely side. In spite of their reforming
ambitions, Koven shows, men like Ashbee were, however, still unable to think outside the
hierarchical social categories that formed a constitutive part of both their philanthropy and
their slumming.
This book is subtle and erudite, but it occludes the ways of slumming that were nakedly
sexual before men like Ashbee sought to remake philanthropy in the 1890s. What about
the many “men of fortune” who were actually arrested in parks and streets for homosexual
offenses throughout the nineteenth century? Although Koven traces the association be-
tween vagrancy and homosexuality, there is definitely more to be said on that shifting
population of young men who inhabited the sexual cultures of the capital, who appeared
frequently in magistrates’ courts, and whose customers were frequently among the well-
to-do. Their allure was more obvious and more dissident. Have they, the “slummed,” as
well as the slumming, left a record?

H. G. COCKS
Birkbeck College, University of London

Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary, a Colonial Subject’s Narrative of

Imperial India. Edited with commentary by Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I.
Rudolph with Mohan Singh Kanota.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Pp. xiiiⳭ633. $40.00.

Until recently, scholars who wished to understand colonialism in India, its modes of dom-
inance, and the circumstances of its unraveling concentrated almost solely on directly
administered British territories. The 560-odd princes who occupied nearly half of India
were dismissed as puppets of the Raj and, as such, inconsequential to the grand narratives
of the empire and of anticolonial resistance.
Amar Singh’s extraordinary diary, aside from bringing alive a fascinating personality,
forces us to acknowledge the princes not as bit players but as skillful politicians who
required accommodation by British imperialists. As the diary’s editors, Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, put it, if the princes needed “British recognition and power
to legitimize and secure their rule,” the imperial government also “relied increasingly on
princely India as a source of legitimacy and political support” (15).
Although not a ruling chief, Amar Singh, son of a prominent nobleman of Jaipur, be-
longed in princely society. Between 1898 and his death in 1942, he kept a diary that ran
eighty-nine bound volumes (around seventy thousand pages). The book under review here
contains selections from the first seven years (1898–1905) of this phenomenal record,
covering Amar Singh’s twentieth to twenty-seventh years. In these formative years he is
drawn directly within the imperial sphere, first as a Jodhpur Lancer sent to China in 1900
in an expeditionary force to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and then from 1902 to 1905, as

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950 Book Reviews

a member of the Imperial Cadet Corps, a partially successful British experiment to In-
dianize the officer corps of the Indian army. His “liminal” position, living in the two
symbiotic worlds of Rajput princely society and British colonial society, enables Amar
Singh to accomplish a counterhegemonic tour de force: reversing the colonial gaze, he is
not only an Indian viewing colonial society but, more potently, an Indian viewing colonial
society viewing his own. As a result, his insights into both worlds, each mediated via the
other, are arresting.
As he is uniquely placed to see it, British and Indian societies each have something
valuable to offer and neither is “naturally” superior. “Well cooked English food is just as
much to my taste as the Indian”; it is in consuming them inappropriately—Indian food
with knives and forks and English without—that one “loses the enjoyment” of both (298).
Amar Singh’s “liminality” makes available a range of cultural alternatives from which he
makes deliberate choices. He is perturbed by some of his native society’s practices, such
as female infanticide and the poor treatment of women in Rajput homes. Yet Amar Singh
declares firmly that he prefers his “own country’s customs” (327). Indeed, he disapproves
heartily of Indians who, unmoored from their native culture, blindly imitate the West, like
his fellow cadet the Maharaj Kanwar of Cooch Behar, whose upbringing in England led
him to look “upon Indians as mere animals” (300). If Amar Singh is a “traditional” Rajput,
it is partly by choice and not just because he was born one or because the empire coded
princely India as the domain of unchanging custom.
Nor is his loyalty to the Raj unthinking or unconditional. While he admires colonial
ideals of governance, he is far from wide-eyed about the practice. Reflecting on Queen
Victoria’s promises to derive the strength and security of her government from the hap-
piness and prosperity of her Indian subjects, he writes: “They are carried out to some
degree, but even if they are not actually carried out, they are noble sentiments and such
as no other people in India has ever expressed” (276). This is a discerning appraisement
that does not prevent him from wishing that “God would show a day . . . when . . . Indians
would be a free nation moving at [their] own free will and ranked as a nationality on the
same footing as England, France or Russia” (485).
Amar Singh’s testimony restores vitality to princely India. This is not a world of political
neuters dazzled into obedience by tinsel crowns and meaningless pageantry. Amar Singh,
we are told, “does not care much about these empty honours and medals of the British
government” (449–50). To be sure, Indian princes were contained by British paramountcy,
but their incorporation within the “imperial cosmology” was not always or entirely on
colonial terms. The British could be equally manipulated to score points in internal contests
within courtly society. As the diarist candidly admits at one point, a disputed case of
family property resumed by the Jaipur ruler led his family to try “so hard to win the good
opinion of these Britishers” (349). Amar Singh’s account reinforces a growing historiog-
raphy that highlights the part of indigenous actors not only in the unmaking but also in
the making of colonial rule. As such, it compels us to integrate princely India firmly within
the ambit of imperial and nationalist histories.
The diary’s editors have done a meticulous job in making it accessible to nonspecialist
readers. Besides a valuable general introduction, the arrangement of the daily entries into
six thematic parts, each preceded by a dramatis personae and introductory passages with
historical background and context, heightens their meaning. Clarifications are also pro-
vided throughout the text, and two glossaries (of the names of persons and places and of
unfamiliar terms) are invaluable guides through Amar Singh’s complex world. Quite as
riveting as the diarist’s narrative are the many illustrations from his photo albums.
If I have a criticism, it is of the particular years selected for inclusion in the book. As
the editors say, these are “the days of his youth, when life was still full of surprises” (3).
Readers are thus left wondering what happens later, when the racial divide that already
disappoints the young diarist becomes less a “surprise” and more a frustrating reality. It
would be equally interesting to hear his reaction to the increasingly vocal nationalist criti-
cism of both the worlds he inhabits—colonial and princely India. But perhaps this is not

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 Book Reviews 951

so much a criticism as a hope that another volume will follow to take us further into Amar
Singh’s captivating life.

MRIDU RAI
Yale University

Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. By Elizabeth Buettner.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xivⳭ310. $45.00.

Among the many oddities of Britain’s long dominion in India is surely the fact that this
crucial territory was not considered appropriate for permanent British settlement. However
long the British intended to govern India, at least from the early nineteenth century they
did not expect to replace Indian landlords and entrepreneurs with a permanent European
farming and business class. Yet neither did they govern India with that “thin white line”
of British administrators and designated chiefs characteristic of “indirect rule.” Instead,
for more than two centuries India was administered by a substantial establishment of long-
serving British civil servants and army officers who were nevertheless expected never to
consider the territory their home.
The past decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship explicating the practices and
ideologies crafted to sustain this singular system of rule. What has been less studied—
although it is visible in every memoir and novel of the Raj—is the odd family form that
underpinned it. India’s European population was always sexually imbalanced (in 1921
there were 45,000 women and 112,000 men [5]), but that significant female population is
evidence that many of India’s male administrators did in fact marry and that their like-
minded wives stayed with them. Yet the children of those unions were routinely dispatched
off to Britain for school, to be reunited with their parents only during infrequent visits, on
the father’s retirement, or when they themselves returned to India to pursue imperial careers
or marriages. In the families of some “old India hands,” these patterns of separation and
migration were repeated across many generations.
It is the practical, political, and emotional impact of this pattern of family life that
Elizabeth Buettner explores in this excellent and innovative book. Status and cultural
anxieties lay at its heart. However long their service, the standing of “British-Indians” (a
term Buettner uses in preference to “Anglo-Indian,” which initially denoted long-serving
British families in India but was later appropriated to describe persons of mixed race)
depended heavily on such demonstrable marks of “Englishness” as accent and frequent
sojourns “home.” Parents thus tried hard to prevent their offspring from acquiring a racially
ambiguous “chi-chi” accent and from developing too pronounced an attachment to Indian
customs, sights, and people—a complicated business, given that children were cared for
through early childhood largely by Indian servants. For modestly paid administrators out-
side the elite Indian Civil Service (a group given welcome attention in this book), often
the most that could be done to limit perceived contamination was to sequester children in
purportedly elite boarding schools in India itself. Whenever possible, however, parents
sought to safeguard both their children’s health and their cultural status by sending them
to England at a young age.
Buettner is particularly good at teasing out the very different consequences for the two
sexes of seemingly uniform practices. Although both boys and girls were sent to England
for school, in the case of boys British-Indian families were simply conforming to educa-
tional norms common to their class. Long periods at boarding school were, however, far
less usual for girls, and socially conservative British-Indian families did not harbor the
kinds of intellectual and career ambitions for their daughters that they did for their sons.
Thus, while families scrimped and saved to send their sons to Haileybury or other elite
public schools with strong imperial ties, daughters were usually dispatched to small, less
expensive, intellectually undistinguished, and usually ephemeral establishments located in

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