Abstract
Robb’s Sentiment and Self discovers, mainly, the 73 volumes of diaries left behind by Robert Blechynden, an English surveyor, architect and builder in colonial Calcutta: the diaries span the period between 1791 and 1822. The book makes an important addition to the repertoire of texts that feed discourses on colonial Indian history and inter-race interactions in the early colonial era. Although one of Robb’s declared main intents is to present a ‘narrative of self through recorded experiences’ (p. xi), the book’s most significant contribution to scholarship would be to history rather than to the phenomenology of the self.
It is common knowledge that Indian customs and conditions were influenced significantly by India’s (here Calcutta’s) experience of the British. This book reveals that the British themselves were not immune to Indian (Bengali) influences. One example of this is when Blechynden chastised a young boy—his employee—for insulting and hurting an old destitute woman by making him touch the woman’s feet. The hiatus between ‘sentiment’ (an ‘opinion . . . coloured by . . . emotion’) and ‘self’ (the ‘real’ or the ‘inherent’ in a person) that emerges through Robb’s examination of these diaries sheds light on the process whereby two races/peoples constructed their respective self-image equally through real interpersonal experiences and perceived notions or ‘stereotypes’ both about the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.
We realise that colonial interactions were not characterised by one-way exploitation and domination. For instance, between the races there was professional rivalry (for example, between Blechynden and Indian builders), mutual dependence, strange bonds and personal liaisons—forms of interaction that would subvert the discourse of unilateral domination that has shaped the average modern perception of the colonial encounter. We are also reminded that if the British experience of the Indians gave India a sense of self, of cohesion as a nation and as a race, the converse is also true to a certain extent. On this point the Blechynden Diaries seem to reinforce the idea that the average colonial Briton used his perception of Indian ‘inferiority’ to bolster his sense of self as a more ‘civilised’ being. The existence of a pre-colonial self-perception of Indians is also indicated.
One interesting aspect of the complex interplay of categories that Robb’s exposition of Blechynden’s diaries brings out is the way class and race intersected in Indo-British interactions of the time. While those of the ruling classes mingled socially with ‘elite’ Indians, there were a multitude of ordinary Britons, including professionals and tradesmen, such as Blechynden, and the ‘Anglo-Indians’ who had to compete and coexist with Indians. Nevertheless, the bulk of Blechynden’s experience of Indians is the result of his interactions with his domestic workers and his Indian ‘concubines’ or ‘bibis’.
While Blechynden’s diaries project him as a reasonable employer who tried to act out of a sense of rectitude and racial pride that kept him from wanton tyranny, we do not get to know enough of the way he treated his women (or vice-versa). A fuller exposition of this aspect of Blechynden’s life would have shed light on a sort of interpersonal interaction that involved the categories of race, class and gender impinging simultaneously on each other. One assumes the reader would find such an account in the companion volume, Sex and Sensibility. Whatever little we are told on this subject in the present book does seem to bring out—both in Blechynden’s experience and in those of other men in his circle—the familiar patriarchal pattern of exploiting/ignoring the woman while assuming ownership of and granting legitimacy (and Anglican education) to the offspring of such liaisons. Also illustrated is the kind of male social praxis that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) termed ‘homosocial’. Male identifications—or sympathies, at the least—are seen to cut through race and class barriers, while women consorts are treated as disposable items of exchange whose faults and follies are overlooked because they are not even expected to measure up to adult human (male) standards of morality.
Robb presents his material exhaustively and uses an efficient framework based on two broad subdivisions (‘Blechynden’s Calcutta’ and his ‘children’) that in effect deal with the public and the private aspects of his Indian experience respectively. But the reader would have benefitted if the presentation was accompanied by more analytical theorising of the kind found in the chapter ‘Education and Empire’. As it is, the reader would need to have a certain level of awareness about (post)colonial theory and colonial history in order to understand the full import of the material presented. And a few excerpts from the Diaries themselves would have lessened the tedium that their absence at times produces in the reader. One final point: as a post-colonial Indian reading the book, one felt ill at ease with Robb’s mention of the great Indian reformer Rammohan Roy as ‘Rammohan’ (p. 46), while the English, even of the lower orders, are never mentioned by their first names. The colonial unconscious, is it?