The First Strawberries in India
John Plotz Born, bred, and married in India, the octogenarian Harriet Tytler in 1903 still described herself and her fellow Anglo-Indians as “exiles in a foreign land” . That obdurate refusal of Indianness may help explain why one of her most vivid memories is of being taken, at age eight, to see “the first strawberry plants that ever grew in India. . . . Two of the plants had one ripe berry each. Of course, everyone was delighted at the novel sight. No one touched them, but all expressed the desire to be Lord Auckland to have the pleasure of eating the first Indian strawberries. . . . No sooner had my father and his friends gone on, chatting away, than I thought I really must taste the strawberries. Accordingly, I picked and ate them both.” Born in a land she cannot conceive of as her own and raised to idolize a country she knows only through words, pictures, and stories, Tytler cannot resist the chance to ingest England. Tytler’s strawberry theft exemplifies one of the cultural practices that allowed self-styled exiles to think of England as a tangible alma mater rather than a distant speck on the map. Such long-distance attachment allowed Anglo-Indians to overlook their Indian surroundings, and attests to the importance, in an imperial “contact zone,” of what I will call cultural portability. Tytler’s strawberries were sentimental objects in the service of a powerful national ideology not hindered but helped by the fact that the nation it served was thousands of miles away. Amartya Sen has recently proposed dividing European writing on and in India into three categories: “exoticist,” “magisterial,” and “curatorial”, but a fourth category, which might be labeled “willfully inattentive,” usefully describes some of the most memorable and widely circulated pieces of Anglo-Indian prose. These texts—among them Julia Maitland’s Letters from Madras During the Years 1836–1839 (1843); Overland, Inland, and Upland (1873) by A. U.; and Emily Eden’s Up the Country (1866)—helped to establish what might be described as a cordon of inattention, a boundary that allowed English readers to imagine India principally via the sufferings of Anglo-Indians. The writers of these texts feel connected to fellow exiles, and detached from Indians, precisely by their very sense of geographic and social dislocation—the sense that they, like the strawberries plucked by the eight-year-old Tytler, have been transplanted. It is fascinating to chart how certain objects and cultural practices became repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain and so worked to unify an otherwise disparate global community. In an era of iPods, Blackberries, and the omnipresent and endlessly personalizable internet, it may be difficult to think of portability as a Victorian phenomenon. Nonetheless, the vast Anglophone realm that Charles Dilke in 1868 labeled “Greater Britain” was the forcing bed from which portability emerged as a new way of imagining community, national identity, and even liberal selfhood on the move. It was in the Victorian era that William Shakespeare and Jane Austen became reassuring embodiments of “dear old England” for nostalgic expatriates, and that afternoon tea on a foreign verandah came to stand in for Britain herself—although the tea might be Indian and the willow-ware cups Chinese. In evoking the culture sustained by this portable property—at once mobile and durable—one would like to complicate Marx’s account of modernity: the nineteenth-century upsurge in worldwide commodity exchange engendered not only fluidity but a heightened commitment to durable, if moveable repositories of non-fiscal value. All that was solid did not melt into air. Culturally resonant objects and practices preserved—and even produced—a sense of self and community in situations of long-distance dislocation. Indeed, commodity exchanges that seemed to dissolve everything they touched in fact required the hypostatization of an alternative network through which protected objects, practices, and even beings, could move. Like Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds or the “portable property” that Wemmick tells Pip to “get hold of” in Great Expectations (1860–61), these protected, “inalienable commodities” possess the unsettling, often uncanny capacity to travel like any other commercial good, while remaining redolent of a distant place, person, or culture. A particularly powerful piece of culturally portable property might allow one to imaginatively reconstruct an entire absent realm, like the medieval illuminated books from which William Morris felt that all England could be reconstructed, should the world happen to be destroyed. How do such alternative networks develop? How do certain objects and cultural practices become repositories of such mobile memory? How are we to understand the passionate desire to share recollections, aesthetic experiences, sentiments, and even thoughts that drove lovers to make elaborately braided hair jewelry, parents to decorate photographs of far-off children with hairpieces woven from their actual hair, and letter-writers to enclose palpable tokens attesting to an enduring attachment? Recent scholarship on the British Empire has stressed—as Seeley does in The Expansion of England (1883)—how vast and lucrative were the settler colonies where a “virgin-land” myth prevailed and where, unlike India, the virtually uncontested expansion of British culture into a razed hinterland was the order of the day. Some scholars have posited that national identity in such settler colonies arose when settlers appropriated the imperial legacy and proclaimed it the basis for a new autochthony. Janet Myers, for example, has described the transplantation of English middle-class ideology to Australia as “portable domesticity.” The notion that national consciousness on imperial peripheries is principally formed by making smoothly portable an extant national consciousness also underlies a memorable argument by Benedict Anderson. Anderson asserts that the moment when settlers in the Massachusetts Bay colony articulated a distinctive sense of Englishness is retrospectively recognizable as the moment when they became Americans (“Exodus” 315). Such accounts conceive of settler nationalism as the product of a series of transformations that refashion an originally imperial English identity. They accordingly risk overlooking interaction with native culture, as well as the complicated interplay between Irish, Scottish, and English Britons that plays such a large role in Australian history. This theorization of national identity-formation in settler colonies also risks underestimating the role that settlers’ concerted ignorance about native cultures played in