Revisiting Sir Robert Bristow's ‘India’: A post-colonial analysis of Cochin Saga

The Malabar coastline of Kerala, India, popularly referred to as the ‘pepper highway’, was a source of great interest to not one but three early modern European maritime superpowers: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. The local rulers understood the growing importance of port cities and the spice trade around the thirteenth century and gradually shifted their attention from terrestrial hegemony to gaining control over port cities. It was with Vasco da Gama's entry into spice politics in 1498 that the naval war to monopolize the spice trade and trade routes further intensified. Post-colonial scholarship is replete with histories and memories of the loot and plunder of lands, and the consequent impact on the subconsciousness of the colonized. However, as Isabel Hofmyer notes, ‘the ocean, by contrast, has been forgotten, first by the emerging settler colonial nation attempting to erase its origin and then by anti-colonial nationalism turning its back on ocean as the source of imperialism’. ¹ This turn to hydrocolonial thinking in recent decades has shattered the Eurocentric myth that ‘poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions’, known as ‘atopias’, which appeared to be ‘uncolonizable and empire-proof’, could be subjugated and colonized. ²

Until the emergence of modern capitalism and railways, waterways were the most important means of transport, thus making port cities centres of transoceanic cultural exchange and hubs of cosmopolitan living. Port cities functioned as sites of ‘amphibious living’, ³ and the borders that determined accessibility to these hydro-spaces were constantly reconfigured as a result of various geopolitical events and transactions from both the hinterlands and the ocean. The history of the building and reconstruction of ports is vital in maritime history as it indicates society's changing social fabric and power relations. Due to the highly demanding maritime trade in spices, Kerala had as many as seven fully operational ports. The port of Cochin gained prominence following the destruction of the famous port of Muziris in Malabar due to the flooding of the Periyar River in 1341. The name of the city, Cochin, which is also known as Kochi, derives from the word koch-azhi, where koch means ‘small’ and azhi means ‘river’. Trade monopolies along the Malabar coastline started with the Portuguese introduction of trade permits, known as cartaz. ⁴ The strong resistance from Zamorin, the ruler of Malabar, made the Portuguese leave the port in his dominion and drift towards the port of Cochin, which came under Portuguese control in 1500 without much effort. This was due to the vested interest of the local ruler of Perumpadappu to counter their common enemy, the Zamorin of Calicut. ⁵ After the exit of the Portuguese from the Malabar coast in 1663, the Dutch occupied Cochin. Unlike their European rivals, they maintained the policy of mare liberum or ‘open seas’, and were not involved in activities such as religious conversion. Although both the Portuguese and the Dutch amassed great fortunes from the pepper trade, their investment in and contribution to building ports and their maintenance was negligible.

Interestingly, the British East India Company took a very keen interest in port-building activities across the subcontinent to fortify and consolidate its position, and to ease the movement of men and materials for trade purposes. The port of Cochin came under the control of the East India Company in 1795 and, until the twentieth century, hardly witnessed any development or expansion, despite its glorious maritime history. The idea of establishing a modern port in Cochin was put forward by Lord Willingdon when he assumed the governorship of Madras Province in 1931. The fundamental challenge in building a port in Cochin was the presence of rock-like sand dunes or sandbars, which hindered the entry of large ships into the harbour. Several experts attempted to remove the sandbars. However, all their endeavours led to a backlash from the ecosystem, thereby thwarting their ambitions. The destruction of the Vypeen foreshore and Vembanad Lake made most maritime experts back out and scrap their projects. ⁶ However, it was the skills and strategies of the 39-year-old harbour engineer Robert Bristow that changed the destiny of Cochin. His careful study of the sea currents and winds led to him understanding and planning his activities meticulously and with the utmost precision. Bristow occupies a unique position in the hearts of the people of Kerala, not only due to his capacities as a structural and civil engineer, but also due to his capacity to strategize and engage with his staff while serving his tenure in colonial India. He shared an amicable relationship with the royal families of Kerala, as well as the chokras who served him and his family. ⁷ Bristow's image as a sahib, a genteel soul truly worthy of love and appreciation, became overtly registered in the public consciousness, especially in a decade when every colonial officer was regarded with derision and contempt. ⁸

This article attempts to look critically at Sir Robert Bristow's memoir Cochin Saga, published in London in 1959, and the Herculean efforts he made to tackle professional hostilities and appease the agencies wielding power during the process of building the port. Memoirs like Cochin Saga should be considered very important research documents, alongside the maritime narratives that were written earlier on the port cities. However, it has hardly received the attention it deserves. Furthermore, what has remained largely overlooked in both the historical consciousness and academic circles is the literary richness of the memoir, exhibiting Bristow's acumen as an analytical philosopher and a writer par excellence. Through the memoir, we have attempted to interrogate his relationships with the natives and his peers, and his attempts to mitigate conflicts through intelligence and amicable transactions, in a post-colonial framework. A close look at Cochin Saga inclines us towards an ontological inference, where, despite the benevolence in Bristow’s approach towards the Indian subcontinent and its natives, a universalizing tendency and hegemonic colonial presence also seem to percolate his world view and ideology. By placing a colonial memoir within the wide scope offered by the colonial era in Indian history, this article primarily deals with questions concerning the influence of colonial ideologies of domination and intricate power dynamics. Our analysis also addresses the memoir's representation of India, its cuisine and its spiritual philosophies, and the narrative’s attempts to appropriate an English language that is rife with judgments fuelled by the cultural codes of the Pax Britannica. Although the narration of the challenges encountered by Bristow as part of his professional life and the cultural anxieties of the colony may enthuse the reader, a close examination of the text brings out the intricacies of Bristow's attitudes towards the natives and regional languages, and his efforts to trace linkages and differences between oriental and western philosophical traditions.

Cruising hostile terrains: anxieties and amusements during the construction of Cochin port

Cochin Saga is a literary exponent of the arduous journey undertaken by the historical figure of Robert Bristow. The memoir reflects his exceptional perseverance in wrestling with hostile situations, and in learning essential tactics from the local populace to alter the professional and social backdrops, and make them more conducive. The narrative style of the memoir writing adopted by Bristow turns out to be a distinct effort at debunking the objective way of chronologically portraying 21 years of history. He brings forth a personal touch in depicting historical facts within the framework of a period in his life. Robert Bristow, a highly efficient British engineer, was sent from Madras to Cochin in the 1920s by the British High Commission to take care of the port-building activities in Cochin. At this time, the European countries were bracing themselves and recovering from the shock, trauma and losses of the First World War. Bristow's posting to an unknown oriental land at this juncture was perhaps the most dreaded fear of every British officer in the East India Company. The following lines from Bristow's memoir convey the colonial anxiety of charting unknown terrains: ‘Newly recovered from a fierce attack of influenza, I sat in my office adjoining the Admiralty Archway … I was wholly concerned with my future; to go or not to go’. ⁹ This thought process highlights the typical shock and emotions experienced by many colonial officers when assigned a post in India.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a lot of information on the life and culture of oriental subjects became available to British readers through fictional and non-fictional forms. In the medieval era, Europeans appropriated the writings of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Niccolò dei Conti to justify their imperialist tendencies. Fictional works by popular twentieth-century writers like E. M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad accentuated the dark underside of Asia and Africa. They construed these regions as backward and full of diseases, and their cultures as unscientific and potentially dangerous. Furthermore, events and situations were plagued by their own real and imagined anxieties, which were eventually transmitted to curious readers through various diary entries, official reports, travelogues, memoirs and letters (both personal and official). These accounts shaped the consciousness and attitudes of fresh recruits posted in the colonies. The glorification of imperial masculinity, the self-righteousness of the Empire in these representations, and emotional restraint assumed an untenable imperial phantasmagoria. Robert Needham Cust rightly points out in his essay titled ‘The Indian District’ that the colonialist evoked a troubling and uncomfortable realization that British colonial power was fundamentally dependent on the illusion of its strength. ¹⁰

Bristow's memoir testifies to the fact that he suffered from multiple ailments that were typical for colonial officers stationed in tropical lands. Several historical records depict how a medical topography was constituted to facilitate colonial movement, dividing the world into morbid lands and healthy lands. ¹¹ The circulation of this intensified the fear that the tropics were a place of disease. However, the plight of the native populations of Australia, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, who were ravaged by the arrival of new diseases through colonial interventions, barely found a space or voice in these colonial documents. In the late nineteenth century, the East India Company tried to regulate the forays of British sailors and soldiers into bazaars and kothas to prevent the spread of epidemic and venereal diseases. ¹² Eventually, the tropics were relegated as the ‘diseased other’. European colonial authorities introduced several measures to curb the social and racial proximity, such as providing alcohol within military camps, the forceful confinement of Indian sex workers, regular inspections of the millitary barracks. Additionally, orders were given to facilitate drainage of excess rain water to prevent the breeding of malarial parasites. ¹³ Bristow records his vexation with tropical climate through the following expression ‘physically and temperamentally, India for me proved trying and the hills alone brought normality’. ¹⁴

Hill stations remain one of the most important monuments to the British colonial presence in India. Hill stations as an ideal space for recuperation emerged as a result of the British desire ‘to establish sanatoria within the sub-continent where European invalids could recover from heat and disease of the tropics’. ¹⁵ By the late 1830s, hill stations had assumed the mantle of curing those who were ridden with debilities caused by the tropical heat and fatigue. Bristow recalls in his memoir that his happiest time ‘was the restful day on high hills with a friend, a pipe and a sketching book’. ¹⁶ His visits and activities in hill stations like Ootacamund (Ooty, Tamil Nadu) and Conoor (Tamil Nadu) are recorded in his memoir with great vibrancy and gusto. A senior medical officer in Ooty opined:

the invalids who derive most benefit from a change to the hills are those who labour under no organic disease, but suffer from general debility, the result of a residence in the low country; these cases rally wonderfully and rapidly. ¹⁷

Very often, maritime scholarship, while exploring and celebrating the success of eminent harbour engineers and designers, focuses exclusively on their technical expertise and tends to neglect the sociocultural life that shaped their mindsets and attitudes. One of the fundamental reasons for Bristow’s professional growth was his astounding capacity to network with people belonging to both his fraternity and the native population. A quintessential maritime mindset is characterized by creativity, innovation and resilience. Bristow possessed and displayed each of these qualities in abundance, in both his professional and personal lives. Bristow engaged with leisure and recreation activities with the same zeal and passion as when he was monitoring the building of granite groynes or scaling the depth of a wharf. Cochin Saga also highlights Bristow's wholehearted dedication as an actor in plays like Dragon King, which was performed alongside school students. The memoir reveals his composure when Sir Arthur Knapp (an Indian civil servant) laboriously applied make-up for the performance. His success with Dragon King prompted him to further experiment with his skills as a scriptwriter for a cabaret performance called The Mixed Pickle, which was organized by the wards of the British Resident of Ootacamund. Without hesitation, Bristow engaged in several minor tasks, such as curtain management, publicity, lighting and costumes, while involved with the Ooty Dramatic Club. Thus, just like his meticulous planning when installing groynes, which created a method of automatic reclamation that protected the shore from monsoons, Bristow appropriated these creative forms to reclaim a home for himself in an alien land, making his tenure pleasant and satisfying.

The clubs established during the Raj symbolized prestige and social status; membership was exclusively reserved for whites but at times extended to members of Indian royal families. The Lotus Club was founded on 15 July 1931 by Mrs Gertrude Bristow, the wife of Sir Robert Bristow, and became the first ever non-white club in the state of Kerala. Bristow Sahib shared the same passion and commitment as his wife, and got a piece of land sanctioned by the Maharadja of Cochin. This initiative played a significant role in shocking strictly orthodox Indians with the idea of bringing ‘people with age-long differences of habit and outlook’ together in such a free and easy way. ¹⁹ The Lotus Club strongly exemplifies the easy maintenance of social contact between people from two different cultural backgrounds. The games, debates and arguments characterizing its regular gatherings cultivated and sustained a ‘friendly informality’ among most of its members. Bristow recollects the arrival of the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, at the club in 1939. The sight of a tennis match involving the club's Indian members and Lord Linlithgow shocked the ‘diehards and sceptics’. ²⁰ This reflection reveals that the officials and families who had decided to side with the Indians (especially those from the elite aristocratic class), through institutions like the Lotus Club, aroused a brooding discontent amongst the agents of political power. This social contact, initiated by the construction of such clubs and the inclusion of natives, was evidenced by the united activities between the colonizer and the colonized, such as creating recipes for hybrid dishes and playing sports together. However, at times, these social contacts also hinted at the underlying ‘asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination’. ²¹

The penchant for fun and amusement, and Bristow’s attachment with the Lotus Club as delineated in his memoir, subverts the stereotype of the alienated sahibs and the memsahibs (officers’ spouses) and their inaccessible social circles. This fluidity of boundaries can also perhaps be attributed to several historical social and national events that rolled out during the period. The 1930s witnessed phenomenal social upheavals in Kerala in the form of various satyagrahas (non-violent political protest), such as the Vaikom Satyagraha, Salt Satyagraha and Guruvayur Satyagraha. ²² Gandhian thought – the idea of swarajya (self-government) – had spread like a wildfire. Sir Robert Bristow, who was undoubtedly a man of great insight and acumen, probably gauged the necessity of support from the native elites and locals for the completion of his projects. Thus, the subversion of the monolithic notions held by the tyrannical sahibs was definitely the need of the hour in order to traverse these hostile terrains.

Port politics and negotiations

Port cities, as Hofmyer notes, are ‘unstable spaces, perched on reclaimed land and propped up by submarine engineering’. ²³ These cities, along with being a conglomeration of cosmopolitan cultures, were also spaces that emphasized their sovereignty through convergence with the sea or ocean . Port-building was quite precarious in the early twentieth century, as it was fraught with uncertainties due to tides and floods. P. J. Grigg points out in the preface to Bristow's memoir that Bristow was ‘irked, almost beyond endurance’, at being forced to internalize that ‘the pace of India is the pace of the bullock cart’. ²⁴ On his arrival at Cochin, Bristow noticed the evident limitations in berthing the ships offshore, and loading and unloading cargo with the aid of lighters, and realized the priority for an intelligently constructed plan rather than extensive modification of the harbour. While the trading fraternity faced many challenges when they examined the prospect of extending the port of Cochin, Bristow circumscribed the various ideas into a single solution: the construction of an inner harbour by laying rubble granite groynes alongside the shore and thereby preventing the predicted erosion of the Vypeen foreshore. When Bristow retired from Cochin in 1941, Cochin’s strategic construction had made it the safest harbour in the peninsula. His architectural brilliance, the strategies employed and the transactions with his opponents stand in stark contrast to the activities of an array of Englishmen posted in colonial India, who merely enjoyed the luxuries of the office they held without contributing much in return. In the post-war years, when the mass export of cargo from Cochin port transcended from its former ‘million-tonne mark to almost the double two-million tonne mark’, ²⁵ the port was assigned the status of a seminal centre of maritime exchange, which aided greatly in the continuation and elevation of British trade capitalism.

Despite all the encumbrances, Bristow's success was due not only to his acumen in gauging and planning work, but also his amazing capacity to transact with a host of people belonging to different classes, castes and positions. To facilitate steering through roadblocks, he had to negotiate with the Government of Madras, the diwan of Cochin, the British Resident, the royal family of Cochin and Travancore, shipping agents, workers, members of the Planters’ Association and members of the Chamber of Commerce. With each stakeholder, he used different tones, registers and diction to convince them of his plans. Bristow's maritime mindset was skewed to find solutions to the problems associated with each class and cadre. For example, at an early juncture, Bristow realized the formula that was needed to succeed with labourers, and his observations closely governed his actions. In his memoir, he states that a ‘minimum of machinery and maximum of unskilled labour’ kept the work going and the labourers happy. ²⁶ Bristow's observation reinforces Partha Chatterjee's notion of the dichotomy created by the West in his acclaimed work The Nation and Its Fragments, which operates under the presumption that the West is superior in its science, technology and logical thinking, and the East in its culture and spirituality. ²⁷ In building the port, Bristow reclaimed around 3.2 kilometres of land during the dredging process. From a post-colonial perspective, this could be perceived as the white man's desire to appropriate and control both the land and its resources.

Several creative works, like N. S. Madhavan's Litanies of Dutch Battery, have shown the commitment and spirit of Sir Robert Bristow in his work against adversities. ²⁸ Unlike a tyrannical colonial sahib who held the terrain and climate of the colonized spaces in contempt, Bristow nonchalantly admits his love for the land and its inhabitants. He generously showers praise on Kerala as a fertile place of waving palms and green valleys, wild hills and flowing waters, and not without an early history and culture of its own. ²⁹ He also shares the credit for his success with his team members and their immense cooperation. Cochin Saga shows Bristow's admiration of and gratitude to his staff in the following lines:

As to qualifications and aptitude, I found my indoor and outdoor staffs quite efficient and loyal, the indoor superior staff, mostly Hindu, the ship's crew mostly Moslem, the labour mostly Christian. So far as my personal staff were concerned, I regarded them collaborators rather than subordinates, and I was richly rewarded. I learned from them and I think they would be the first to acknowledge that the debt was reciprocal. It was a partnership in ideal proportion of self-discipline, mutual respect, and mutual assistance, and if from time to time, we had our differences, they too, were signs of life and kinship, not of cold-blooded indifference. ³⁰

Ambiguities in the appropriation of language and culture

The British sought to promote English as an official language of the subcontinent in order to facilitate their administration. English was not designed to be a ‘universal language’, but conceived as a powerful tool that rested only with the Indian elite. The privileged Indians who received an education in English deemed themselves ‘superior’, and gradually this elite consciousness trickled down to the people employed in the lower rungs of the British administration. They developed a world view whereby they saw the appropriation of the English language as empowering and fulfilling many of their aspirations with respect to upward social mobility. This appropriation often became the butt of ridicule and entertainment during high tea in English clubs and circles. David Graddol believes that, historically, English as a language played a key role in ‘the mechanism of exclusion’. ³² Critics like Mark Tully observe that the elitist nature of the language alienated a large section of the uneducated natives, purportedly promoting ‘the snobbery of the English-speaking elite’. ³³

The manner in which the colonizer and the natives approached English as a language during colonial times was completely different. With English being the colonizer's first language, aspects like the pronunciation of words, and the usage of appropriate phrases, mannerisms and etiquette, assumed the utmost importance for the British. There was an over-reliance on Standard British English as a plausible model. For the indigenous natives, English, as the lingua franca, operated mainly as a means to earn money, get employment and be relevant when the country was sliding into a dire economic crisis. Although the natives could pick up the nuances of English, the narration of specific situations and expression of contexts by chokras to Robert Bristow sometimes bordered on the eccentric. The memoir highlights how impediments to the comprehension of a topic or event increased manifoldly when natives employed the method of indigenous narration in broken English. In fact, on several occasions, an unassuming faux pas could make chokras the laughing stock in English circles.

Yet another cultural hurdle that Bristow encountered was the managing of his domestic staff. During the construction of the Cochin harbour, Bristow took his domestic staff along with him to a ‘spacious house in one of the suburbs of Madras’. ³⁴ Bristow succinctly draws the reader's attention to his servant Murugesan's idea of placing crackers inside meat to frighten a stray dog. Bristow mentions how he has to smother ‘an inclination to burst into laughter … at Murugesan’. ³⁵ Here, Bristow's thoughts reveal a subtle serendipity in being able to expose a kind of innocent intelligence possessed by his native servant. The manner in which Bristow narrates this episode, by analysing the colonized native's ‘childlike behaviour’ with a dominant self's fascination, resonates with the Eurocentric ethnographic mode of understanding primitivism, which was deemed one of the inherent characteristics of the native. This mode of exposition reflects the anxiety and difficulty of the sahib in containing the radical otherness of his chokras.

Bristow's memoir also reflects colonial stereotyping, a method employed to operationalize and reiterate the cultural ‘fixity’, ‘otherness’ or so-called ‘difference’ of the natives. According to Homi K. Bhabha:

the stereotype is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof can never really in discourse be proved. ³⁶

Bristow narrates yet another episode of the taming and training of Joseph by Murugesan, which resonates with Robinson Crusoe's organized efforts at civilizing Friday in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. ⁴⁰ In this instance, Murugesan brings out a light stick before Joseph, and delivers a brief monologue in broken English intending to discipline the savage-like man. Joseph is offered the choice of being hit three times or paying a fine of eight annas. Without expressing any hint of remorse, Joseph responds, ‘Master, please I having three hits’, but the cook's ‘courage failed’ as the ‘stick descended’. The ‘moderate whack’ applied by the master to the servant's knee obligates him to choose to pay the fine, rather than receive a beating. The ‘faint discoloration on his left knee … ruefully displayed’ the next morning depicts how Bristow remained a silent witness to the unjust treatment of Joseph. The narrative highlights how the legitimization and trivialization of the physical torture meted out to the powerless native is further stressed in Bristow's humorous comparison of the master's blows on the servant with an ayah's smacks on ‘too much naughty babies’. ⁴¹ Thus, Bristow conveys a strong message in the memoir that his servants occupy a luxurious domestic space, hitherto inaccessible to them and their like. The portrayal of these natives as impoverished, naive and foolish clearly reflects an oriental outlook. The colonial presence is often seen as paving the way for a utopian world. Bristow alerts the reader to juxtapose the luxuries offered to them by his affluent household with the implied murkiness of their miserable circumstances.

The creation of the native ‘other’ is fraught with paradoxes. Derek Hook argues that a double paradox could be discerned here: ‘firstly the imperative to exaggerate the differences of the other and yet also make them stable and “reliably knowable”’. ⁴² This fits perfectly with the imperative of furthering colonial discourse as posited by Bhabha in the Location of Culture: ‘to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’. ⁴³ An unexpected rejection of a catechism class, the very foundation of the Christian belief system, by a young chokra has to be read alongside the missionary zeal of the Empire. Although the statement ‘I not wanting to be a Klistian and telling lies’ shocks Bristow, he ensures that the consequent narrative in his memoir explicates the chokra's immaturity, thereby utilizing his agency as a narrator to sugar-coat and sideline the boy’s blasphemous comment. ⁴⁴

Cultural etiquettes and the politics behind culinary preferences

Colonial cuisine emerged in the seventeenth century with the establishment of the East India Company, during which time large numbers of British men settled in India. At the outset, Indian servants or the chokras or khansamas (servants) would have cooked milder versions of their local food for the British. However, in the early 1800s when the memsahibs arrived, they started collaborating with local servants to prepare meals for their husbands. Their wives’ presence in managing the home and kitchen, in particular, was a welcome relief for several British officers. Many found the Indian cuisine to be too spicy and ignoble. Bristow's memoir portrays how the memsahib–servant/chokra relationship was precarious, and fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities. On the one hand, the memsahib was expected to create a mini-Britain in her home, a model of bourgeois white domesticity. On the other, she was obliged to achieve all this through the efforts of her servants, those whom the family frequently denigrated as useless, filthy and dishonest.

Several colonial memoirs, diaries and travelogues have recorded the preparation of native cuisine as involving unhygienic practices and substandard ingredients. Sceptical of the foodways and culinary practices of the natives, the British developed their own culinary foodways and tried to remain largely faithful to their home practices. However, Bristow's culinary preferences deviated slightly from the tastes and flavours of the stereotypical colonial masters. Bristow finds the staple Indian dish – boiled rice, which is left unpolished and finely cooked – a ‘vastly more nourishing product than the artificially “purified” rice sold in England’. ⁴⁵ At the same time, the reader can observe an uncanny fetish for ‘purity’ and unadulterated food in Bristow's descriptions. Bristow showers abundant praise on the quality of the meat from the hills, the fish coming directly from the net, and the chicken fed on ‘sweepings’. Still, in the same vein, he mentions the tainting of ‘pure’ milk at its source, which compels the family to buy the branded ‘unsweetened Nestle's’. The act of procuring butter from New Zealand, and bread, macaroni and spaghetti from a nunnery at Cochin, makes the reader acutely aware of the colonial scepticism regarding certain native products. Thus, sporadically, Cochin Saga reinforces Bristow's aversion for Indian ‘curry and condiments’, and puts them down as one of the reasons for the high fecundity in India. ⁴⁶

These imperial entrenchments of India's food patterns in a series of categories and classifications perpetually labelled India as ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’, and promoted British culinary preferences as ‘modern’ and healthier. In this context, although we propose that the culinary culture of the colonial sahibs that emerged as a result of native interventions reflected imperial superiority, we partially agree with what Cecilia Leong-Salobir argues – that a completely new formation of culinary culture emerged as a result of the lack of European foods and the availability of local ingredients. ⁴⁷ With the appropriation of these healthy foods, a blend of colonial and local cuisine was set in motion, particularly through the efforts of indigenous servants. It is also interesting to note how the memsahibs’ supervisory role in the household asserted the lack of knowledge of the local servants. So, it became the memsahibs' burden and civilizing mission to supervise, improvise and inculcate proper culinary and household management skills in their servants. The memsahib–servant/cook relationship was fraught with a lack of trust. A 1904 Anglo-Indian cookbook suggested the following methods to memsahibs, in order to be vigilant and avoid unnecessary expenditure:

[If] the housekeeper will take the trouble to keep all the stores, and give everything out daily, even to spices, and the smallest detail, including eggs, potatoes, and onions, she will find her bills considerably reduced, the things will be fresh and good, and she will be spared the constant differences with the cook over the accounts as to amounts used. ⁴⁸

Bristow's perspectives on Aurobindo's philosophy

Indian philosophical tradition is characterized by its diversity and plurality, encompassing schools of thought ranging from the orthodox Samkhya to the unorthodox Charvaka philosophies. The same applies to Indian religious tradition, which is polytheistic in nature. However, when it comes to Bristow's discussion of the role of religion in pre-independence India, his urge to search for unifying features across philosophical treatises leads to a cultural tension. Bristow closely notes the binary between eastern and western religions when he writes: ‘Indeed, the Hindu conception of religion is wholly other than ours, and in none is there a common ethic and practice as provided in the religion of Jesus by the Lord's Prayer’. ⁵¹

Bristow's understanding was predominantly derived from the translations of Indian scriptures like the Atharva Veda, Rig Veda and Bhagavat Gita. If religious discourses were to be meaningful and acceptable, they had to be expressed not through languages and their inherent semantic systems alone, but through traditional practice-oriented approaches. However, echoing Bristow's thought, Carl Raschke argues that for religions to gain credibility, they had to be ‘translated’ into the language of science or other ‘objective’ registers of rationality. The ‘scientific’ study of religion rested on the cardinal premise that religion was incapable of speaking for itself, as was the case with the colonized. ⁵² Bristow offers an in-depth analytical detour of the Indian philosopher Aurobindo's body of literature, which addressed the aforementioned contradictions. Particularly, his views on the double influence of western philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita on Aurobindo's expositions reflect one among many instances when the hegemony of different imperial agendas unravels. At first, the grandeur and ‘supra-global’ character of Aurobindo's teaching is praised. Further, the dual process of establishing philosophical superiority and arguing in favour of the European influence on Indian value systems ensues. Bristow observes: ‘the fact remains that in absorbing the Gita, Sri Aurobindo seems to have absorbed much Christian teaching with it’. ⁵³

Aurobindo believed in the inversion of the classical derivation of scientific knowledge from metaphysical knowledge. His teachings align with modern western thought in exploring the relationship between modern science and the metaphysical aspect of philosophy. It can be noted here that Bristow follows a completely different trajectory, formulating a colonial point of view around Aurobindo's personality and precepts. Bristow sarcastically remarks that the reflective side of Aurobindo might have originated from ‘his excursion into Indian politics’ and ‘enforced leisure in an Indian jail’. ⁵⁴ In Sri Aurobindo and India's Rebirth, Michel Danino points out how Aurobindo made a very distinctive contribution to the nascent nationalist movement. ⁵⁵ He thwarted Mahatma Gandhi's methods of ahimsa and ways to attain freedom. ⁵⁶ Aurobindo's modern vision of India, a combination of politics and spirituality, was formulated during his ruminations in prison. Several significant instances in his life, such as his vehement criticism of the policies of the Indian National Congress (members of which were predominantly drawn from the Eurocentric upper class and had absolute faith in the providential character of the British Crown) published in New Lamps for Old, ⁵⁷ are completely ignored. Thus, Bristow begins the evaluation of one of the most eminent compilers of knowledge from across the world in terms of a partial reference to his life events and Eurocentric world view.

Subsequently, Bristow looks down on the supreme status accorded to Aurobindo as a spiritual icon by bringing out the western links found in his significant contribution, Life Divine. The foundation of Aurobindo's thoughts was an awareness of the similarities between western and eastern philosophical and religious traditions. He argued for the synthesis of matter and spirit. In what appears to be a constructive application of logic, Bristow attributes this argument to having originated from Christ's life and gospels. This claim could be seen as underlining the extant trend of highlighting such claims, which accentuated the western hegemonic discourse of white supremacy. Although Christianity had a considerable influence on Aurobindo's formative years, he is quite clear about the sharp demarcations that exist between the two systems. In the essay ‘A Defense of Indian Culture’, published in May 1919, he subtly posits his thoughts:

The inner principle of Hinduism, the most tolerant and receptive of religious systems, is not sharply exclusive like the religious spirit of Christianity or Islam; as far as that could be without loss of its own powerful idiosyncrasy and law of being, it has been synthetic, acquisitive, inclusive. ⁵⁸

Conclusion

Cochin Saga brings to light Robert Bristow's brilliance in negotiations – creating a solid network, building a conducive environment for his team to work in, and establishing a home for himself and his family in India – as well as his excellent engineering skills. Bristow's endeavours reveal a unique maritime mindset, which is innovative, celebratory in spirit, and resilient in the wake of tumultuous challenges. His contribution to the establishment of the Lotus Club and sharing of success with his team members subverts the stereotype of the master–slave power dynamics. Perhaps one of the reasons for this camaraderie might have also been the gradual decline of colonial power in India by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We have pointed out how, despite all of these factors, the memoir equally brings to light his fostering of certain imperial assumptions, such as the ‘white man's burden’, which is clearly discernible in certain parts of his memoir. Bristow was not significantly different from his peers, who upheld the ideology of civilizing missions with their nonchalant imperial claims that the British had come to India ‘for her good’.

A careful re-examination of the memoir from a post-colonial point of view is very much suggestive of the unequal power relations that existed during this period. In this way, the connotations of Bristow's words, ranging from reflective critiques of Indian philosophical thought to casual conversations with his servants, play a key role in understanding yet another illustration of the mixture of opposite traits characterizing a few revered British personalities in colonial India. Taking into account the hegemonic relationships underlying interracial clubs and culinary cultural practices, the abusive nature of the civilizing mission, and the biases around analyses of native intellectual contributions to the world, Cochin Saga, a hitherto underrated historical document, demands more comprehensive study. Thus, our analysis of the Cochin Saga explored the socio-cultural significance of the relationship between European settlers and the native individuals close to them. We hope this research will contribute a new perspective on a distinct contact zone in Cochin at a particular historical juncture.