The colonial home: Managing objects and servants in British India

Abstract

Colonial domesticity in India was often a fraught exercise. Guidebooks such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner's The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook offered advice on how a household may be run. This essay examines the above work to argue that domesticity was in fact political. It involved the organization of material objects in the English home in the colony, and the organization of native servant bodies. These were two sites of imperial anxiety. Steel and Gardiner present a cosmopolitan Englishness in the choice of material objects, where the English home was to be a space where products from multiple cultural origins may be found. Then, even when representing the docile bodies of the native servants, Steel and Gardiner implied a dangerous agency. Both objects and bodies, given how they determined Englishness, demanded control - which is effectively the advice of Steel and Gardiner.