Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T07:59:35.934Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE SARACEN'S HEAD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Sharmila Sen
Sharmila Sen*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1529, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, descendant of the Timurid dynasty and founder of the Mughal empire, wept at the sight of melons. A mere fruit had reminded Babur of the homeland he had left behind in central Asia. In a letter to Khwaja Kalan, the emperor writes of the drudgeries of a ruler in a foreign land, who is forced to do without the tastes of home: “How can one forget the pleasures of that country? . . . Recently a melon was brought, and as I cut it and ate it I was oddly affected. I wept the whole time I was eating it” (423). The Baburnama, a personal record of the establishment of a new empire in the subcontinent, might seem like an unusual place to begin an essay on Victorian India. But Babur's nostalgia for the home left behind in Samarkand poignantly anticipates some of the hidden longings of the British as Company Raj gave way to Crown Raj in India. While the East India Company attempted to oust the Mughal rulers between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, after India was incorporated into the Empire, the British would also attempt to don the mantle of the Mughals. On 1 November 1858, when India officially became part of Queen Victoria's Empire, the British inherited the Mughal's melons. Whether it was roast beef or mulligatawny, a pint of pale ale or a chhota peg, the British discovered their own versions of Babur's melons over time – an idea of homeland contained in a mouthful.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , September 2008 , pp. 407 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Aberigh-Mackay, George. Twenty-One Days in India, Being the Tour of Sir Ali Baba, K. C. B. 1896. Bangkok: Orchid, 1998.Google Scholar
Allen, Charles. A Glimpse of the Burning Plain: Leaves from the Indian Journals of Charlotte Canning. London: Michael Joseph, 1986.Google Scholar
Arnold, Walter. The Life and Death of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. London: Bradbury, Evans, 1871.Google Scholar
Atkinson, George Francklin. An Anglo-Indian Domestic Sketch: A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in England. Calcutta: Thacker, 1849.Google Scholar
Atkinson, George Francklin. The Campaign in India, 1857–1858. London: Day & Son, 1859.Google Scholar
Atkinson, George Francklin. Curry & Rice (on Forty Plates); or The Ingredients of Social Life at “Our” Station in India. London: Day & Son, 1859.Google Scholar
Atkinson, George Francklin. Indian Spices for English Tables; or, A Rare Relish of Fun from the Far East. London: Day & Son, 1860.Google Scholar
Atkinson, George Francklin. Pictures from the North, in Pen and Pencil; Sketched during a Summer Ramble. London: John Ollivier, 1848.Google Scholar
Babur, Zehir-Ed-Din Muhammed. The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor. Trans. Thackston, Wheeler M.. Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.Google Scholar
Banerji, Chitrita. Bengali Cooking: Seasons and Festivals. London: Serif, 1997.Google Scholar
Beeton, Isabella Mary. Mrs. Beeton's Dictionary of Every-day Cookery. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1865.Google Scholar
Bellew, Francis John. Memoirs of a Griffin; or, A Cadet's First Year in India. 2 vols. London: William H. Allen, 1843.Google Scholar
Belnos, S. C.Twenty Four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal. London: Smith and Elder, 1832.Google Scholar
Bernier, François. The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol. 1671. Trans. Oldenburg, Henry. Bombay: Summachar, 1830.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-nineteenth Century.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. 198–211.Google Scholar
Bhadra, Gautam. “Four Rebels of Eighteen Fifty-Seven.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Ed. Guha, Ranajit and Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Bhatt, Ritu and Bafna, Sonit. “Post–Colonial Narratives of Indian Architecture.” Architecture and Design 12.6 (Nov–Dec 1995): 85–94.Google Scholar
Brennan, Jennifer. Curries and Bugles. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, Judith. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India. New Delhi: Rupa, 1995.Google Scholar
Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Allen Lane, 2001.Google Scholar
Clarke, Charlotte. The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie. London: Constable, 1909.Google Scholar
Coatts, Margot. Edible Architecture. Marlborough: Libanus, 1987.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. “Representing Authority in Victorian India.” The Invention of Tradition. Ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 165–209.Google Scholar
Davies, Jennifer. The Victorian Kitchen. London: BBC Books, 1989.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976.Google Scholar
D'Oyly, Charles. Tom Raw, The Griffin: A Burlesque Poem in Twelve Cantos. London: R. Ackermann, 1828.Google Scholar
Ellis, George. Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, Chiefly Written during the Early Part of the Fourteenth Century. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811. 186–290.Google Scholar
Forster, E. M. 1924. A Passage to India. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952.Google Scholar
Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Foods. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989.Google Scholar
Geary, Patrick J.Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Calcutta Chromosome. Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996.Google Scholar
Gubbins, Martin Richard. An Account of the Mutinies of Oudh, and of The Siege of the Lucknow Residency; with Some Observations on the Condition of the Province of Oudh, and on the Causes of the Mutiny in the Bengal Army. London: Richard Bentley, 1858.Google Scholar
Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Hazlitt, William. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. London: E. Stock, 1886.Google Scholar
Heritage, Lizzie. Cassell's New Universal Cookery Book. London: Cassell, 1894.Google Scholar
Holman, Sheri. A Stolen Tongue. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1997.Google Scholar
Johnson, Grace. Anglo-Indian and Oriental Cookery. London: W. H. Allen, 1893.Google Scholar
Khare, Ravindra Sahai. The Hindu Hearth and Home. New Delhi: Vikas, 1976.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. 1901. Kim. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Roudiez, Leon S.. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Lupton, Ellen, and Miller, J. Abbott. The Bathroom and the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste. Cambridge: MIT Visual Arts Center, 1992.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Mitter, Partha. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Mitter, Partha. Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1977.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Rudrandshu. “‘Satan Let Loose upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857.” Past and Present 128 (Aug. 1990): 92–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nugent, Maria. A Journal from the Year 1811 till the Year 1815, Including a Voyage to, and Residence in, India, with a Tour to the North-Western Parts of the British Possessions in That Country, under the Bengal Government. Vol. 1. London, 1839.Google Scholar
Oxford, Arnold Whitaker. English Cookery Books, to the Year 1850. London: Oxford UP, 1913.Google Scholar
Parry, Benita. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930. London: Verso, 1998.Google Scholar
Peters, Laura. “‘Double-dyed Traitors and Infernal Villains’: Illustrated London News, Household Words, Charles Dickens and the Indian Rebellion.” Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-century Media. Ed. Finkelstein, David and Douglas, M. Peers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.Google Scholar
“Posh.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2007. National University of Singapore Lib. 24 Jan. 2008. <http://dictionary.oed.com>..>Google Scholar
Purchas, Samuel. “Purchas His Pilgrim.” Early Travels in India (16th and 17th Centuries): Reprints of Rare and Curious Narratives of Old Travellers in India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 1864. Ed. Wheeler, J. Talboys. Delhi: Deep Publications, 1974.Google Scholar
Quiz [William Combe?]. The Grand Master; or, Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan. London, 1816.Google Scholar
Ray, Romita, “The Painted Raj: The Art of the Picturesque in British India, 1757–1911.” Diss. Yale U, 1999.Google Scholar
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
Riddell, Robert. Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book. 5th ed.Madras: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1860.Google Scholar
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage, 1988.Google Scholar
Sainsbury, Alison. “Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel.” Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Ed. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 163–87.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. The Talisman. 1832. London: Oxford UP, 1926.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.Google Scholar
Singh, Shailendra Dhari. Novels on the Indian Mutiny. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1973.Google Scholar
Sleeman, W. H.Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. 2 vols. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844.Google Scholar
Solvyns, Balthazar. A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings Descriptive of the Manners, Customs, Character, Dress and Religious Ceremonies of the Hindoos. Calcutta, 1799.Google Scholar
Strobel, Margaret. European Women and the Second British Empire. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1991.Google Scholar
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tschumi, Gabriel. Royal Chef: Recollections of Life in Royal Households from Queen Victoria to Queen Mary. London: William Kimber, 1954.Google Scholar
Vishwanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welsh, James. Military Reminiscences; Extracted from a Journal of Nearly Forty Years' Active Service in the East Indies. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1830.Google Scholar
Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A. C.. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. 1886. Ed. Crooke, William. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1996.Google Scholar