From the Table to the Trenches: The Chapati in The Wife and the Ward

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and British narratives represent the Indian Revolt of 1857 as an event with a rich gustatory grammar—a problem of greased cartridges, adulterated flour and salt, and mysterious chapatis. Contemporary colonial sources report the circulation of chapatis across North Indian villages on the eve of the revolt. To this day, these chapatis remain inscrutable. This essay traces the chapati from the Anglo-Indian table to the Kanpur trenches in the first English-language novel of the revolt, Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward (1859). The chapati, as a domestic edible, functions as an index of assimilation. It adulterates its Anglo-Indian eater bodily and morally. It weaves together adulteration and adultery, to demonstrate the gendered colonial politics of bodily purity. As a food of revolt, the chapati is portrayed as a text of Indian fears of bodily contamination. I argue that The Wife and the Ward displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration onto Indian rebels. I examine how the novel reworks Anglo-Indian panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

From thannah [police station] after thannah there arrived little chupattees about two inches in diameter. They were accompanied by all kinds of reports from puzzled thannahdars [policemen], and set the European world in a fever of speculation. . . .

What does it mean? . . . In India . . . conspiracies are possible, secret societies are not; and speculation is again at fault. Are all the chowkeydars [constables] about to strike for wages? or is anybody trying a new scheme for a parcel-dawk [mail]? Is it treason, or a jest? Is there to be an “explosion of feeling?” or only of laughter? Is the chupattee a fiery cross, or only an indigestible edible? a cause of revolt, or only of the cholic? Is the act that of an influential malcontent, or only of a fool?

Edward Money, The Wife and the Ward; or, A Life's Error, 248–49

Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward; or, A Life's Error (1859) is the first English-language novel to treat the Indian Revolt of 1857 directly.¹ Critics believe that Money's novel sets the template for later “Mutiny” novels, particularly with regard to how this genre grapples with the tendentious history of the event itself.² The narrator of The Wife and the Ward frequently notes the distinction between fact and fiction, history and narrative: “we are not writing a treatise on the Indian mutiny, or even its history, but only one act in the drama.”³ The only instance where the thin (but pronounced) line between fact and fiction, “history” and “act,” is blurred is when the itinerant chapati finds its way into the narrative. One such occasion is the passage above. Its setting is one of those “early tea-gatherings so usual in India” on the veranda of Captain Edgington's “roomy bungalow” in Kanpur (247). Here, the drinking of the most “excellent” tea and the smoking of “first chop” manillas are accompanied by the reading of an actual newspaper report published in the popular Anglo-Indian weekly, The Friend of India (247). Edgington, one of the protagonists, reads aloud the case of the peregrinating chapatis to his wife, his ward, and his other regimental friends. The appearance of the chapati enacts a narrative disruption: it reproduces a real-life newspaper article verbatim in its entirety in the midst of a fictional breakfast-table conversation.

The Revolt of 1857 presents a challenge for historiography in more ways than one—is it an army mutiny or a civil rebellion? Who participated in it and for what reasons? Was there a structure and plan to the uprisings? Priti Joshi concludes that the Indian “Mutiny” can indeed never be “fixed”:

[W]e need to acknowledge both the many and varied experiences of uprising—the many “mutinies” . . . —as well as the loosely unified, nascent or ‘feotal’ [sic] community the events spawned. 1857 was one thing and multiple; it was an “event,” yet it lacked a center; it was a birth and stillborn.⁴

As the Revolt of 1857 continues to challenge attempts to “fix” its historical truth, previous readings of its representations in fiction have dealt with this genre's treatment of history.⁵ I look at the first fictional response to it in Money's novel to examine the slippery, ungraspable intervention of the giant, nebulous category of “history” on a much smaller scale—the radius of the unleavened bread made of coarse wheat or flour, the chapati. In The Wife and the Ward, the chapati (also spelled here as “chupattee”) is eaten by bachelor soldiers at breakfast, consumed with “dall” (i.e., daal or lentil soup) as meager Indian food in the Kanpur entrenchment (324), and circulated as the “totemic food” of the rebellion.⁶ Following the trajectory of the chapati's consumption in this novel—from the breakfast table to the hastily prepared war entrenchment—allows me to understand the anxieties of consumption and contamination that dominated nineteenth-century perceptions of the Revolt (141).

Representing and focusing on the consumption and circulation of food items is in keeping with the peculiar importance of food to the history of the Revolt. British and Anglo-Indian⁷ histories of 1857 describe the rumor that cartridges of the new Enfield rifle were coated with cow and pig fat.⁸ Biting them off was thus sacrilegious to the caste of the Hindu as well as the religion of the Muslim sepoy. Even before the introduction of the cartridges, there were numerous rumors of the contamination of flour and salt sold in bazaars with cow and pig bone dust.⁹ In contemporary British and Anglo-Indian narratives, food, food panics, and contamination rumors form the proximate causes of the Revolt.¹⁰ Reports of the mysterious circulation of chapatis in North Indian villages threw the Anglo-Indian world into a state of panic. As colonial authorities struggled to articulate its meaning, the chapati nonetheless figured in all accounts of 1857.¹¹ From biting (cartridges) through ingesting (flour, salt) to interpreting (chapatis), contemporary British and Anglo-Indian narratives imagine the Revolt orificially. Parama Roy notes the centrality of “chapatis and cartridges” to “every tale of the Mutiny.”¹² Roy suggests that “the British or Anglo-Indian historian or writer's focus on the Mutiny as a peculiar problem of cartridges and chapatis—and therefore of caste embodiment and caste anxiety—exists in a complex, productive relationship with Anglo-Indian experiences of bodily purity and bodily violation during the Mutiny.” Given the persistent presence of different food items and edibles in nineteenth-century narratives of 1857, this article examines the rich gustatory grammar that sutures the novelistic narration of the Revolt.

The emphasis on food and consumption also corresponds with the interests of the author of the first “Mutiny” novel. Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Money (1823–1889) was something of an expert in the purity/impurity of foods from the empire.¹³ A retired East India Company soldier in India and then a Crimean war veteran, Money later became a tea planter and tea expert in India. He authored several books on Indian tea and was only too aware of the debates surrounding food and drug adulteration in the metropole from the 1850s onward.¹⁴ In his award-winning book-length essay, The Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea,¹⁵ published in 1870, Money makes a case for the “purity” of Indian tea as opposed to the adulterated and impure tea from China.¹⁶ The Wife and the Ward was Money's second literary endeavor, the first being Twelve Months with the Bashi-Bazouks (1857)—a tale of his adventures during the fall of Sebastopol.¹⁷ Money's authorial career was entirely devoted to empire's moments of crisis and the purity of the body through the consumption of unadulterated food. The chapati, as that which registers anxieties about the long life of empire and the life of the British body in empire, makes legible both these concerns.

Money's attempt at fictionalizing the Revolt of 1857 in The Wife and the Ward met with little contemporary success, and it has almost completely disappeared from current scholarship on “Mutiny” novels. It has received limited but substantial critical attention in Gautam Chakravarty's work on “Mutiny” fictions, which is also the only sustained engagement with this novel. Chakravarty uses the “articulated structure” of The Wife and the Ward to foreground “structural tropes and elements” that will orient readings of later novels, and even histories, on this subject.¹⁸ He contends that Money's representation of the intersection of Anglo-India with the rebellion lays the groundwork for later representations of the insurgency, in both history and fiction.¹⁹ In Money's text, “history” through “rebel agency cuts short the progress of love, marriage, and domesticity too peremptorily.” This allows Chakravarty to examine the ways in which “history” is treated in subsequent “Mutiny” novels. However, Chakravarty's use of The Wife and the Ward as a generic template to read later novels does not allow for critical engagement with this first novel itself.

I take up Chakravarty's mandate of reading “history” in this novel as inimical to Anglo-Indian domesticity.²⁰ However, I focus my reading on the site that combines, confuses, and crosses history, domesticity, and the racialized boundaries between bodies and materials—the chapati or unleavened bread. Through its traditional association with Indian domesticity and the hearth, the chapati enters the Anglo-Indian world as an item of domestic consumption. If the Orient is a textual universe that is readable and knowable, then the chapati in figuring as “the text of India” through rebel agency materializes the textual as edible, and the edible as the semiotic of rebellion. The chapati brings the Indian world into the exclusive domain of the white world of Anglo-India through the servants who cook and serve it, and subsequently through the rebels who receive and circulate it. The difficulty of fixing the chapati's signification and thus, consequently, of fictionalizing it, pervades the genre of the “Mutiny” novel at large.²¹ Despite this generic problem, little critical attention has been paid to foods in novels of the Revolt. Roy, in her study of the centrality of food to narratives of 1857, has examined historical sources, diaries, autobiographies, and journalistic reportage. This article expands the gustatory archive of 1857 by examining novelistic representations of the foods of the Revolt.

As in narratives of 1857, so also in its scholarship, the indeterminacy of the chapati as a sign of the Revolt has made it rife for much critical speculation. Ranajit Guha reads the Anglo-Indian response to the peregrinating chapati as a “miscognition”: whereas the British saw it as “a fiery cross” and thus located it in terms of a convention pertinent to their own culture and history, Indian circulators of the chapati saw it as a “chalawa” or the carrier of pestilence.²² Guha thus locates the chapati in the colonial archive as an “omen”: “that which is predictive and anticipates the future so that no event is absolutely unexpected and independent.”²³ Building on Guha's theorization of the chapati, Homi K. Bhabha has argued that the panic resulting from the chapati's inscrutability “does not simply hold together the native people but binds them affectively, if antagonistically—through the process of projection—with their masters.”²⁴ Bhabha, therefore, views the chapati as a text of British affective projection. The lacuna between “cultural codes”—of popular mobilization in rural Scotland (treason, revolt, fiery cross) versus the ritual immunization against epidemics (jest, indigestible food, cholic) in rural India—becomes the “temporal caesura” where “panic . . . speaks.”²⁵ In considering the chapati as a readable/unreadable text of the Revolt, there is, however, no consideration of the chapati as an edible. Roy accounts for the edibility of the chapati, noting its “remarkable fluid properties, disaggregating into its component parts of flour, salt, water, ghee, and sugar.”²⁶ However, Roy does not examine contamination or adulteration of/through consumption. There is therefore no discussion of how the chapati as a food of the Revolt reflects the centrality of bodily contamination (and not just consumption) in Anglo-Indian narratives of 1857. I trace the chapati in the first English novel of the Revolt to add what is currently missing from this historical and literary scholarship: a discussion of anxieties not just about consumption but, more importantly, about contamination.

Examining the chapati allows for a reading that nuances the dominant contemporary narrative of the Revolt as the rape of white women by brown men.²⁷ Jenny Sharpe has argued that the rape narrative displaces attention from the bodies of British men dying at the hands of Indian insurgents.²⁸ The chapati, on the other hand, refocuses narrative attention on the body of the Anglo-Indian man who is vulnerable in his propensity to consume. My argument here has two parts. In the first section, I examine the chapati as an index of assimilation in The Wife and the Ward. I show how as Anglo-Indian men eat the chapati, their bodies are not just assimilated in India but also adulterated. Assimilated white men appear in the middle of a spectrum that extends from “white” to “dark,” where they not only oppose but also mirror the Indian “savage” (217, 271). The white woman's purity and whiteness are instrumental in policing the racialization that occurs through bodily adulteration. Examining the novel's alimentary order thus reveals the split and confusion in its racial politics.

In the second section, the chapati is not just a domestic food article but one of the key foods of the Revolt. As discussed earlier, British and Anglo-Indian histories position Indian anxieties of bodily contamination through adulterated foods as the proximate cause for the Revolt. I thus frame my reading of the chapati in The Wife and the Ward in the context of contemporaneous food adulteration debates. Adulteration in the nineteenth century was more than a “health issue”—it was a “moral failing” and a “crime” where the criminal adulterator was racially coded as foreign.²⁹ While scholars place the emergence of the “scientific anxiety” of food adulteration in India in the 1890s,³⁰ The Wife and the Ward, by routing concerns of bodily adulteration through consumption, anticipates these later concerns. Anglo-Indian characters in the novel read and interpret the chapati as a register of Indian anxieties of bodily contamination through foods adulterated by the British colonizer. Such a reading is well aligned with contemporary colonial discussions of adulteration that similarly map Anglo-Indian anxieties of adulterated foods onto Indian servants. The Wife and the Ward, therefore, displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily contamination onto the Indian rebels. I examine how the novel registers and reworks this panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while also upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination in the colony. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

On the Table: Eating Chapatis and White Women

Before I make my argument about how the chapati racializes the body of its eater in this novel, I will briefly summarize the plot of this relatively obscure text here. The hero of The Wife and the Ward, Captain Arthur Edgington of the 99th Native Infantry, is stationed at the civil station at Dinapore (Dinapur/Danapur). This leads to lengthy descriptions of Anglo-Indian society in the cantonment. Edgington's marriage to the cold, unaffectionate, and calculating Beatrice Plane forms the climax of the first part of the book. Unhappy in his marriage, Edgington writes home to recall his ward, eighteen-year-old Marion Paris, to console him with her company. Sweet, affectionate, and naïve, Marion, on her return to India, becomes popular in the cantonment and has many suitors, including Edgington's close friend, Ensign Hoby. Edgington is drawn to Marion and no longer sexually attracted to Beatrice: the narrative repeatedly hints at Edgington's adulterous feelings toward his ward. Rather conveniently, a few chapters following Marion's return, the titular “wife,” Beatrice, exits the plot to take care of her ailing mother in Patna.

It is only in chapters 20–25 of the twenty-five-chapter-long novel that the Revolt enters the plot. Edgington, Marion, Hoby, and the rest of the regiment march to Kanpur (spelled here as “Cawnpore”) where they meet Nana Sahib, the Raja of Bithoor (spelled here as “Bhitoor”). Marion sees the Nana as predatory and becomes uncomfortable in his presence. The Revolt breaks out in Kanpur, and the Christian population takes refuge in the poorly constructed “intrenchment” (292). They remain here some twenty days, fending off rebel fire, extreme heat, dirt, cholera, and smallpox—all of which claim a fair number of Anglo-Indian lives. Nana Sahib, now the leader of the Kanpur rebels, negotiates the surrender of the garrison and promises the survivors safe passage. Marion has an ominous feeling and persuades Edgington to kill her in case the Nana takes her captive. As they get on the boats to go to Allahabad, the rebels open fire. Nana Sahib sees Marion and asks his men to cease firing at her boat. Edgington, as per his promise, kills her and plunges into the fray, only to be slain by the rebels. The novel thus ends with the death of all its Anglo-Indian characters. It is worth noting here that The Wife and the Ward would later be reprinted as Woman's Fortitude.³¹

In The Wife and the Ward, the chapati serves as an index of assimilation that marks its Anglo-Indian eater as assimilated to a certain degree. Anglo-Indian men eat chapatis in domestic settings. At breakfast with his roommate, Ensign Earnest, Hoby says: “Pass me one of those chupatties Earnest, that early parade this morning has made me peckish” (88). As Earnest and Hoby sit in their bachelors’ bungalow at the “light, free, intellectual repast” of breakfast in their “pajamahs and shirt-sleeves,” the narrator provides a footnote explaining what the chapati is: “Unleavened cakes of coarse flour, much eaten by Europeans in India.” The narrator similarly justifies the peculiarity of Hoby and Earnest's attire to “English ears,” noting that though it sounds “very horrible . . . the reader, possibly, knows not what India is in the month of May.” While military men, like Hoby, eat chapatis because they are “peckish,” the bread as well as the behavior of the eaters must be explained to British audiences. As a part of the novelty of the Indian landscape, the chapati is a way in which Anglo-Indian men assimilate through ingestion. This allows them to sustain their Britishness while also adapting to survive in the colony. Thus, the chapati locates its Anglo-Indian male consumers as assimilated to some degree. The Anglo-Indian chapati eater is simultaneously both, epidermally “Anglo” and gustatorily “Indian.”

Women and food appear concomitantly in this narrative. The first title (The Wife and the Ward) and its later reworking (Woman's Fortitude) squarely place the book's women—the wife and the ward, Beatrice and Marion—at the center of the narrative.³² The first mention of the titular wife, Beatrice Plane, as well as of the chapati are both voiced by Hoby at meal settings. Remarkably, in these parallel occurrences, the chapati appears as a substitute for women. Where Hoby was talking about women in the first chapter, he is now calling for and eating chapatis. Whereas women are the managers of the hearth and by association the bread, here the chapati is eaten in a household devoid of any women and thus prepared by a khansamah (Indian cook) and served by a khitmutgar (Indian table-attendant). Consuming the chapati in a domestic setting thus eliminates women from the Anglo-Indian home. Later, on their way to “tiffin,” Hoby and Edgington discuss Edgington's choice to court Beatrice (97). Hoby euphemistically refers to the choice of an appropriate wife as eating a “good tiffin” (99). He warns Edgington: “The tiffin you allude to may disagree with you; and remember, ere it's too late, that it is not alone what we put into our stomachs that we find hard to digest.” Selecting a wife to ensure conjugal happiness is the equivalent of eating a digestible Indian meal. In this novel, then, he who eats the chapati can also expertly trope women as edible.

The chapati, deployed to represent women as food, also shows how assimilated male bodies risk becoming contaminated through their consumption in the empire. Edgington's tiffin table conversation with Beatrice sets the tone for their future relationship. While Edgington is nervous, clumsy, and obviously infatuated with Beatrice, Beatrice is unaffectionate, restrained, and aware of her effect on Edgington. Beatrice is frequently described as “frigid” (15, 16, 75) and “cold” (2, 17, 24, 89, 106). Anjali Arondekar, in her study of the prevalent theme of failed marriages in Anglo-Indian novels, has argued that “sexual abstinence” is the predominant cause of “the misery of married life” in this genre.³³ Marital dissatisfaction leads Edgington to recall Marion from Britain so that she can distract him with her presence. As the narrative progresses, he grows increasingly attracted to her. Indian edibles contaminate their Anglo-Indian eaters bodily as well as morally. As Edgington's eating practices adulterate his bodily integrity, they also make him prone to committing adultery. Adultery forms a prevalent, if an underlying, theme in The Wife and the Ward, as is evident in the title itself. The adulterous possibilities of Edgington's future marriage are understood and predicted by Hoby when he tries to warn Edgington against courting Beatrice. To this end, Hoby declares that a woman named Beatrice will have a “frigid and self-wrapping nature” (15). Assimilated and therefore adulterated men foreground the anxieties surrounding the integrity of the British body through consumption in Anglo-India. Assimilation through food can result in the eater's moral adulteration through adultery.

Assimilation and adulteration anxieties reveal how eating is related to the novel's racial politics. The novel's characters appear on a spectrum from “dark” to “white” (217). The Wife and the Ward uses such racial framing to locate the purity of its emphatically white heroine, Marion Paris. The narrator establishes Marion's pure “ivory whiteness” in contrast to the “dark visage” of her beautiful and young Indian ayah (217). Marion's youth, sexual innocence, and affectionate nature are similarly contrasted with the unaffectionate and “frigid” Beatrice (15). While Marion is “charity itself” and “child-like” in her subservience to her guardian, Edgington, Beatrice “believes woman to be superior to man” and does not understand “why obedience in marriage should be demanded” (220, 221, 15). Though both Beatrice and Marion are born in India and sent to England as children, Marion is an orphan who lives with Edgington's widowed mother whereas Beatrice's Anglo-Indian parents have a marriage that the narrator and Edgington disparage. Beatrice's mother dominates her submissive father in their daily lives, and because “girls look naturally to their mother,” Beatrice tries to re-create their marital dynamics in her own marriage as well (62). This causes much domestic strife between her and Edgington. On the other hand, Marion, free of even partial Indian influence in her upbringing, grows up in the English countryside and is a more complete example of English femininity and innocence than Beatrice. Thus, on this spectrum from “dark” to “white,” Marion's Indian ayah falls on one end, with innocent and pure Marion on the other, and the assertive and self-aware Beatrice somewhere in the middle.

This mapping from “dark” to “white” is further complicated when the racial hierarchization of male characters is based on their desire to consume (217). Since the popular response to the Revolt coded interracial desire as rape through the creation of the “brown-skinned rapist,”³⁴ Marion's racial purity is emphasized to frame the severity of potential sexual violence against her. She attracts sexual attention from Anglo-Indian and Indian men alike. Thus, Nana Sahib desires her. When the Nana is first introduced in the narrative, his mouth is particularly emphasized: “a moustache shaded his lips, which were peculiarly thick and African in their character, and a large bushy black beard descended to the jewelled hilts of the dagger” (271). Marion's first sight of him repels her, for even though she “can scarcely see him for his jewels,” she does not like “the expression of his face at all . . . such great ugly thick lips, and such a savage face altogether.” Marion later dreams that the Nana has laid siege to her bungalow and his men have dug a tunnel through the basement to enter it. As Marion, Edgington, and their Anglo-Indian friends take their tea in the house under siege, they feel the tremors from the Nana's digging. The Nana, in Marion's dream, wishes to take her captive. Repulsed by the Nana's mouth, Marion unconsciously locates herself as an ingestible. The narrative positions the Nana as a sexual predator who wishes to devour the pure English woman. He is the transgressive eater of inappropriate food: the body of the woman as a part of military conflict (as it will become in the Kanpur entrenchment) and the brown, almost black, body that desires to ingest the white body. Even though Marion turns from Nana Sahib to Edgington in the end, both men transgress by desiring her. The Nana defies racial boundaries by desiring the pure white woman, whereas Edgington violates his marriage vows through adultery. Eating the chapati and other Indian foods, then, makes Anglo-Indian men disturbingly similar to “savage” men (271).

Marion's whiteness does not just narratively hierarchize assimilated white men, it also polices their degeneration into savagery. The last meal in the entrenchment before embarking on the fateful safe passage is a breakfast of chapatis (395). Edgington and Mr. and Mrs. Merton eat them as Marion refuses this offer of bread. The chapati has been the staple food for the twenty days spent in the entrenchment. Among the many sufferings of the “delicate ladies” is this “coarse food improperly cooked” (342). The trope of female suffering in the Kanpur entrenchment recurs in other narratives of the siege, such as in George Trevelyan's Cawnpore (1865).³⁵ In The Wife and the Ward, the chapati eaten in the entrenchment becomes constitutive of such female suffering. Remarkably, white women in this novel are not shown eating chapatis, if eating at all. They order food to the table, drink wine and tea, discuss food preparation, but never bite, chew, swallow, or eat solid foods. Mrs. Merton, the only woman who eats chapatis, is a biracial Eurasian woman. Marion's refusal to take the chapati, even in the face of food scarcity and debilitating hunger, figures the pure white woman's bodily closure to any assimilation. Whereas everyone is killed by the rebels, Marion's resistance to Indian food not only preserves her purity but also determines her as too pure to become food for the “brown-skinned rapist,”³⁶ Nana Sahib. Instead, she turns to Edgington and chooses to die by (and in) his hands. Marion's whiteness alerts the reader to assimilated Anglo-Indian men's potential for savagery. She polices their possibility of any further degeneration by refusing to dilute her purity through the consumption of chapatis.

In The Wife and the Ward, the chapati eaten in domestic settings is thus an index for bodily assimilation in India. It also marks the assimilated eater as morally adulterated vis-à-vis his propensity to commit adultery. Such transgressive desires bring the assimilated Anglo-Indian body dangerously close to the “savage” Indian body, which also transgresses by desiring the pure white woman (271). Moreover, the chapati signifies other food: its constituent flour and salt, which were rumored to be adulterated, greased cartridges, edible women, the daughters of England who become food for carrion birds and rebels in the entrenchment, and Indian food that is only consumed by assimilated bodies. When seen as a food that introduces the trope of edibility, the chapati opens up a system of bodily signification and meaning-making in this novel. As it transforms from the staple of the Anglo-Indian home to the signifier of the event that disrupts such domesticity, it also registers fears and anxieties of bodily purity and contamination through food. The chapati exposes the vulnerability of the white male body—something that traditional responses to the Revolt, such as the construct of the brown-skinned rapist of white women, elide. In my next section, I will examine the chapati as it narrates the Revolt in this novel.

In the Trenches: Chapatis and “Mutinous Feeling”

As the chapati indicates Anglo-Indian bodily contamination through consumption, this section will discuss the implication of such representation for the novel's understanding of the Revolt of 1857. The Wife and the Ward presents bodily adulteration through consumption while later in the century, food adulteration becomes a scientific concern in India.³⁷ Since the novel demonstrates how bodies can be adulterated through food, it anticipates later food adulteration anxieties. British and Anglo-Indian narratives depict the Revolt “as a peculiar problem of cartridges and chapatis,”³⁸ that is, of Indian fears of bodily contamination through adulterated foods. I will examine contemporary food adulteration debates to argue that the “mutinous” chapati in The Wife and the Ward is a text of displaced Anglo-Indian anxieties (271). Metropolitan views of food adulteration frame it as a “moral failing.”³⁹ In colonial India, Anglo-Indians suspected their Indian servants of this grave moral failing. Anglo-Indian characters in the novel, terrifyingly anxious about their own “adulterated” bodies—adulterated by eating chapatis, adulterous in their sexual impulses—displace their panic onto Indian rebels. Such a displacement is ironical as it positions the assimilated Anglo-Indian man as a threat to his own tenuously constructed bodily fiction of racial purity.

Debates on food adulteration were becoming increasingly prominent both in England as well as in colonial India in the 1850s. Metropolitan discussions of food adulteration framed it not just as a “health issue” but also as a “moral failing” and a “crime” against British consumers.⁴⁰ The leading figure of this debate, Arthur Hill Hassall, proclaimed in his 1857 book that “adulteration is therefore a great national question.”⁴¹ As repeated attempts were made to fix the origin of adulterants outside Britain, the “moral failing” of adulteration took on an increasingly racialized tone—the Chinese poisoner was imagined as the adulterator par excellence of products such as tea.⁴² Similar fears in India identified the Indian servant as the adulterator who harmed the Anglo-Indian body.⁴³ Around this time, Mr. (later Sir) Barnes Peacock was working to codify the Indian Penal Code (IPC).⁴⁴ In his Indian efforts, Peacock imitated contemporary English attempts to make adulteration of food and drink into a penal offense.⁴⁵ Peacock's fear of adulteration was rooted in the deception that he believed his Indian servant to be capable of—his khitmutgar (table attendant) might serve him chalk and water instead of milk. His primary concern was that “adulteration by one's own servants, who afterwards place the adulterated article on the table, will go unpunished.” The white body of the paranoid Anglo-Indian is under constant threat in the colony, even in his own home, and the enemy is suggestively intimate: his “own servants.”⁴⁶

As Peacock argues to enhance the bodily (as opposed to the commercial) nature of this offense—from adulteration with the intent to sell the adulterated item (as it had existed in previous versions of the IPC) to adulteration without the knowledge and consent of the item's owner—he locates the possibilities of such adulteration in the person of his Indian servant.⁴⁷ It was a prevalent medical belief among Anglo-Indians that Indian servants adulterated edibles with drugs and intoxicants.⁴⁸ The dishonesty of Indian servants was much discussed by writers of Anglo-Indian domestic manuals and cookbooks.⁴⁹ Portrayals of dishonest Indian servants prone to drugging their Anglo-Indian employers also found their way into fiction.⁵⁰ In all such instances, there is particular emphasis not on the adulterated food itself but on how it implicates the purity of the body: the white body of the eater as well as the brown bodies that prepare and serve the food. Colonial narratives of food adulteration thus displace the white consumer's anxiety of bodily contamination onto the body of the imagined Indian adulterator. In contemporary Anglo-Indian prejudice, the tendency to adulterate food indicates a moral defect that is symptomatic of inherent racial inferiority. Peacock, therefore, reiterates that the impulse to adulterate food stems from “dishonesty,”⁵¹ and none but the most dishonest should fear the heightened criminality of this offense. Examining colonial food adulteration anxieties demonstrates the bifurcation inherent in Anglo-Indian identity: a foot in India and another in British racial politics, such that any assertion of similarity (by consuming chapatis) or difference (by identifying the Indian servant as the dishonest adulterator) must always expose Anglo-Indian vulnerability.

The gustatory narratives of the Revolt, in general, and The Wife and the Ward, in particular, anticipate food adulteration before its existence as a scientific field of inquiry in India. David Arnold, in his history of the development of food adulteration as a science in India, has argued that it was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that poisoning moved from the rural countryside to urban spaces. What was previously poisoning now “became subsumed into a new language of toxicity, adulteration, contamination and pollution, and entered a new era of public, state and scientific anxiety.”⁵² Even though the “language” of adulteration came into being only in the last decade of the nineteenth century in India, Arnold notes that before this transition “poison, pollution, adulteration, contamination all existed within the same broad spectrum of social concern and collective unease.”⁵³ While Arnold charts the colonial beginnings of food adulteration as a scientific branch of study, it is evident in Revolt narratives that colonial food adulteration had fictional and imaginative currency even before it existed as a science. Using the framework of food adulteration to read the “mutinous” chapati in The Wife and the Ward undoes the inconsistencies of the novel's racial and bodily politics (271).

In The Wife and the Ward, when the chapati that circulated on the eve of the Revolt enters the narrative, it is interpreted as a text of Indian anxieties about bodily contamination. Contemporary discussions of food adulteration framed the adulterated food as “fictional commodities or at least products that contained elements that added a fictional value.”⁵⁴ Thus, to identify them is to engage in practices of reading and interpretation (272). The alleged circulation of chapatis across North India caused widespread panic amongst Anglo-Indians. Contemporaneous journalistic reportage registers this confusion. As in the newspaper report that Money quotes verbatim: “Is it treason, or a jest? Is there to be an ‘explosion of feeling’? or only of laughter? Is the chupattee a fiery cross, or only an indigestible edible? a cause of revolt, or only of the cholic?” (248–49). At the breakfast gathering (with which this paper opens), where the chapati comes up for the first time, only Hoby associates it to a broader feeling of Indian discontent stemming from the new greased cartridges. He sees their circulation as connected to army uprisings elsewhere, such as “the mutiny at Berhampore [sic; Behrampore]” where “the 19th Native Infantry who got an idea into their heads that the new cartridges had pig and bullock fat in them” has rebelled (250). Hoby's association of the chapati circulation to disaffection in the army arising from greased cartridges and caste sympathies is met by general disbelief and laughter from other Anglo-Indians at the table. After all, Hoby's interpretation of the “chupattee mystery” mirrors and inverts Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration. Anglo-Indians, worried about their bodily purity, imagine their Indian subjects as similarly anxious.

To the Anglo-Indian men at the table, Hoby's reading, despite its apparent absurdity, has an immediately recognizable structural logic: the paranoia of bodily contamination. Hoby's colonel, the highest-ranking officer at the table, declares: the “chupattee business . . . is the sort of thing to frighten old women with, and it's never likely to happen with Jack Sepoy, as long as he gets his pay regularly” (252). However, the colonel also recalls an Indian subadar (Indian equivalent of a captain) asking him of the government conspiracy to convert “all sepoys to Christianity.” To this, the colonel laughed till “the subadar saw the absurdity of the idea, and laughed with [him].” Similarly, Hoby's reading of the chapati circulation as related to rebellion elsewhere is met with “a roar of laughter” (252). There is, however, general consensus that “the sepoys think something is going to happen” (251; emphasis in original). Hoby's interpretation of the “chupattee mystery” elicits laughter but also the suggestive partial agreement that “something” identifiable and yet inscrutable is indeed underway. Any Indian fear of bodily adulteration is recognizable because it is identical to Anglo-Indian fears of the same. This “something” cannot be articulated beyond its visible identification precisely because it is the terrifying reality of Anglo-Indian experience: eating chapatis in India adulterates the white male body. In this regard, the narrative makes a familiar move. It presents the chapati as a register of the Revolt by displacing Anglo-Indian fears of bodily contamination onto Indian rebels. That which terrifies Anglo-Indians—bodily contamination through adulterated food—is mapped on to Indians and read as one of the primary causes of their rebellion. Such mapping conveniently overshadows the extent of dissatisfaction with British colonial rule.

The novel's self-contradictory nature is evident in its portrayal of the chapati's Indian interlocutors. Representing an event that has already (but also just) occurred, The Wife and the Ward sets out to textualize “the proficiency most Asiatics attain in the art of deception” (283). The leader of the Kanpur rebels, Nana Sahib, lies to trusting Anglo-Indians. At the ball where Marion encounters the Nana for the first time, Anglo-Indian officers and civilians ask him about the meaning of the “chupattee circular” (272). The Nana laughs at the English for trying to “unravel the mystery.” He reaffirms the Anglo-Indian belief that Indians are too ignorant to either hatch or keep a consequential “secret” (250): “What! an important secret in the hands of thousands of chowkeydars [constables]! The English are much wanting in wisdom if they give it any value. . . . I know it is nothing which can engage the attention of sensible men” (272; my ellipsis). The Nana, ironically, can lie with proficiency only by echoing Anglo-Indian characters in the novel. When asked about the veracity of rumors about Indian fears of conversion, the Nana's answer is evocative of the colonel's response to his Anglo-Indian regiment at the breakfast table. Where the colonel dismissed the rumors as “the sort of thing to frighten old women with” (252), the Nana calls them “foolish tales, fit only to amuse and astonish children” (273). Indian rebels can expertly deceive unsuspecting Anglo-Indians by ventriloquizing Anglo-Indian prejudices.

Paying attention to such depictions of Indian rebels unravels the tenuous logic of displacement at work in this narrative of the Revolt. After the Kanpur siege, Hoolas Sing, one of the rebels, mockingly asks Peters, his previous commanding officer, if he now understands the meaning of the “chupattee secret” (392). Before the siege, Sing had assured Peters that he was “as much in the dark” about the “circular,” which was probably “connected with the pay of the police . . . and at all events of no consequence” (247). This resonates with Anglo-Indian speculation about the chapati: “Are all the chowkeydars [constables] about to strike for wages?” (248). Sing's statement is also aligned with the colonel's widely accepted opinion that “nothing is likely to happen with Jack Sepoy, as long as he gets his pay regularly” (252). The chapati's deceptive Indian interlocutors outwit their honest colonial masters by telling lies that Anglo-Indians believe to be the truth. The novel does not just displace Anglo-Indian anxieties onto Indian rebels, it also makes its Indian characters ventriloquize Anglo-Indian biases. The narrative of Anglo-Indian heroism then contradicts itself by showing how these biases are untrue: Indians are capable of consequential rebellion, they can plan and strategize successfully, their discontents cannot be kept at bay with just timely wages. This is the strained and flimsy logic that binds this narrative of the Revolt: its presentation of Indian anxieties, absurdities, and deceptions all work to reflect Anglo-Indian fears, vacuous prejudices, and gross misrule and ineptitude.

The novel's volatile ending demonstrates how it negotiates the instabilities inherent in its narrative of the Revolt as an imagined battle between racialized bodies. The Wife and the Ward is exceptional as a “Mutiny” novel because it is the only one that does not follow the traditional narrative route from insurgency to counterinsurgency. Contemporary reviews expressed dissatisfaction with this ending, seeing it as a violation of the “historic truth” of British revenge.⁵⁵ The novel ends with the death of all its Anglo-Indian characters. Edgington kisses Marion and then kills her. Following this, he jumps into the rebel fray where he is slain as well. Hoby has died in rebel crossfire in the entrenchment (375). The narrative, having run the course of its frayed racial logic, can resolve its inconsistencies only by killing all its Anglo-Indian characters. The Revolt, either directly or indirectly (through disease, starvation, infection in the entrenchment), annihilates all assimilated Anglo-Indians. The pure white woman chooses death at the hands of a white man, who is not only adulterated through his assimilation but is also an adulterer in his extramarital desires for her. But even this is a better option for the heroine than being subsumed by “savage” interracial desire (271). The implication of the narrative displacement of Anglo-Indian anxieties onto Indian rebels is the moral culpability of the Anglo-Indian. The Anglo-Indian must self-identify as the criminal adulterator of Indian bodies. The narrative employs Marion's whiteness and its conservation through death to override this implication. The white woman, troped as edible, upholds the comparative moral superiority of the assimilated white man who saves her honor, as opposed to the “savage” Nana who apparently wishes to dishonor her.

Even as the white woman is used to foreclose this messy tale of bodily purity, this conclusion only draws attention to the deep, indistinguishable entanglement of the “Anglo” with the “Indian.” Amid intense firing, Marion's beauty draws the Nana's attention to their boat. She is “still beautiful” after weeks of food scarcity and abject physical suffering, “with a wild light in her eyes, and her partly-untramelled golden hair” (403). Edgington, in the face of this unforeseen rebel attack, “envied those of his comrades who had no female charge to attend to” (402). It is only the “dark promise” made to Marion that keeps him from taking a more active role in the fight. This scene illustrates the contrast between “the courage, the devotion, of the Anglo-Saxon, and the base treachery of the Asiatic!” The only way that the “arch-fiend,” Nana Sahib, and his “treacherous and cowardly rebels” can defeat the leonine Englishman is by a protracted and sustained “plot” of deception (402). In this scene, fraught with desire and death, Marion calls Edgington by his Christian name, Arthur, for the first and last time. She then reminds him of his promise. As Edgington holds her close and kisses her, she closes her eyes “for she could not look on the instant death which she knew awaited her” (403). Such martyrizing narrative strategy eludes the fact that Marion “closes her eyes” not just to death but also to Edgington's consummation of his adulterous desire. Instead, the narrator suggestively notes that this is “the first and last kiss he ever gave her.” Edgington is promptly killed after this. Thus, even as the novel concludes, it foregrounds the dangerous similarity between the Nana and its assimilated and adulterous hero, Edgington. The white woman is to hierarchically order Edgington—who though untrue to his marriage vows, protects the Englishwoman's “ivory whiteness” (217)—in contrast to the Nana, “England's deadly foe” (403). However, she only demonstrates how similar the treacherous Nana is to the honorable Edgington: while she turns away from one's illicit desire, she does not consent, but only resigns herself, to the other's adulterous intimacy.

The anxieties of whiteness, maleness, and adulteration that undergird this Anglo-Indian novel also expose the messiness of Anglo-Indian writing and authorship. An 1859 review of The Wife and the Ward declares that “Most Indian novels are trash.”⁵⁶ “Indian” novels—novels about India—appeal neither to English readership nor to Anglo-Indian readership.⁵⁷ However, the reviewer is confident “that genius could overcome these defects, and do for English life in India what Thackeray and Anthony Trollope have done for the various phases of that in England in our own day.”⁵⁸ Decidedly, Edward Money is not that genius. While it is unclear if Money was present in India at the time of the Revolt of 1857, he did spend a substantial portion of his life in India: born in Calcutta, ten years of service in the East India Company's army before 1857, and a long career as a tea planter from at least 1859.⁵⁹ The Wife and the Ward, published in London for an English readership, is written as the Revolt is still underway in India. Even after the plot's conclusion, the postscript refers to further reports of Kanpur “lately received from India, which appeared in the London papers last December” (405). Money is writing about subjects that no Thackeray or Trollope would write about. He is, however, writing with Thackeray and Trollope and to an audience of their readers. The Wife and the Ward must channel the hyphenated identity of Anglo-India to binarize “Anglo” and “India.” It can only meet this challenge through infinite displacement and eventual self-annihilation. The challenge of Anglo-Indian authorship is therefore informed by the same simultaneity and contradiction that it seeks to narrate.

The inconsistencies inherent in The Wife and the Ward make this novel difficult to read and interpret. The novel eludes any neatly drawn conclusion that is the goal of literary criticism. To read this novel is to read the hyphen in “Anglo-India.” The narrative is messy—informed by the liminalities that bridge “Anglo-India.” The Anglo-Indian male body assimilates by eating the chapati. Even as the “Anglo” body is Indianized, it does not identify with “India.” Its bodily Indianization is partial and problematic, as it nullifies its Anglo agency. Consuming chapatis, dressing in loose “pajamahs,” and eating “tiffins” are necessary for the Anglo body's survival in India (88, 197). Thus, Anglo-Indian eating practices become a source of anxiety about bodily and moral purity. The chapati compromises, by Indianizing, the whiteness and the maleness of its Anglo eater. The Anglo body projects its Indian anxieties outward through its suspicion of Indian servants who might contaminate it through adulterated food. Similarly, the chapati, when read by Anglo-Indian men, threatens Anglo-Indian domesticity. It does so by reflecting the threat that the Anglo-Indian man himself poses to his carefully constructed, fragile domestic life. Anglo-Indian identity cannot narrate itself without tearing itself apart. No definitive critical reading of this identity is possible without overwriting the fundamental instabilities of such shifting categories as “colonizer” and “colonized.”⁶⁰

The breakfast-table gathering that this article opens with marks the moment when the chapati confounds domesticity and rebellion. Even before the rebel siege of Kanpur, the chapati destabilizes the Anglo-Indian narrative of domesticity by introducing a “mutinous feeling” in this racially exclusive gathering (272). It introduces the trope of edibility in The Wife and the Ward. As Anglo-Indians move from the table to the trenches, so does the meager chapati. As white eating bodies are threatened with becoming edible themselves, the chapati threatens to transcend its mere edibility. The edible, ephemeral, yet menacing chapati tenuously stitches together this narrative of contradictory racial and bodily politics. It exposes the fragility of the Anglo-Indian male body in India. The white male body's whiteness and maleness are particularly vulnerable in this colonial setting. It must constantly self-constitute the fiction of its impenetrable bodily purity. One way to do this is to create intimate enemies that threaten white purity—Indian domestic servants, rebels who were trusted sepoys, Indian rulers who were once received in Anglo-Indian drawing rooms. These enemies threaten the white woman's purity as well as the chapati's easy domesticity. However, as tracing the chapati from the household to the garrison demonstrates, the white woman's purity and the chapati's domesticity are both incontrovertibly threatened by the adulterous and adulterated Anglo-Indian man himself. The Wife and the Ward, in representing the Indian Revolt of 1857, makes a familiar colonial move: it reads Indian agency as a reflection of the fears of the Anglo-Indian, thus betraying the limitations of colonial power and knowledge.