Civil modernity: The management of manners and polite imperial relations in India, 1880—1930

Abstract

This essay argues that etiquette books produced during the period 1880-1930 sought to contain the increasingly Westernised and cosmopolitan colonial subject by creating a regime of respectability and civility. These books formulated norms of social interaction, imparting advice on rational, hierarchic behaviour and cultural literacy. This discourse of civility was a mode of ameliorating the threat of the hybridised colonial subject by framing his cultural and social interactions within very particular modes of conduct while retaining the hierarchies necessary for imperial dominance.