1

The Vicissitudes of Colonial Discourse: An Analysis of the

Diary of Amar Singh
Edward Ray
December 15, 2010
Colloquium in History
 2

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Discursive Power
2. Private Gaze/Public Resistance
3. Critique of Bhabha: Gender in the Imperial Structure
4. Race, Class, and Gender: the Debate
5. Orientalism or Ornamentalism?
6. The “Disturbing” Power of Mimicry
7. The Uncertainty of the Colonial Hybrid
8. Singh Trapped in the Bind
9. Escaping the “Double Bind”

Conclusion
 3

Introduction

Amar Singh was a Rajput nobleman who served in the Jodphur Lancers—a subset of the

Indian Army solely made up of Indians—and wrote a diary describing his experiences as a

colonial subject under the British Raj. His diary served as a means for self-realization and of

understanding his position in the British Imperial structure. A close reading of Singh’s story

reveals his attempts to navigate the imperial structure and become one of the “natural leaders” of

India. Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon and Queen Victoria were among the proponents of this

imperial policy to establish an Indian hierarchy as a response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857,

whereby British power was threatened because of Indian unrest with a system that did not

include their input. Singh benefited from this shift in imperial strategy, but he soon became

aware that the system was predicated on the establishment of a ceiling to his (and other Indians’)

social improvement. He thought he could rise above this barrier by employing the analytical

categories of empire (race, class and gender) to construct a distinct identity in order to prove his

exceptionality sui generis of the other Indian aristocrats and nobles. Singh’ s inability to do so,

which is proven by his abrupt and unexplained abandonment to his diary, explains the

predisposition of the imperial structure to marginalize its subjects through whichever category of

analysis that affirmed British superiority. Singh was forced into a state of paralysis through his

attempts to build a British identity that utilized the qualities promulgated by the British model of

civility and modernity. His narrative holds relevance in historiographic debate surrounding

which category of analysis was paramount in driving the engine of empire because the bind he

experienced originated from a confluence of race, class, and gender.

Singh professed his class status and nobility as a means of conveying a sense of
 4

Britishness. He was a product of the educational policies promulgated by Anglicists in England

in the 1830’s who operated on enlightenment principles of universalism, and permanently

reshaped the imperial structure when the devalued Indian customs, culture, and education were

replaced with western ones through an adoption of the English language and curriculum. His

high social status within the Indian community was demonstrated by the fact that he went to

school with Mahraj Kumar Sardar Singh, the heir to the throne in Jodhpur.1 Singh’s hobbies and

activities exemplified his desire to appear modern in the gaze of the British. Apart from his diary

—which will inform the central arguments and themes of this paper—Singh kept an organized

record of “best-selling authors of the English book trade,” which included Lord Curzon’s book

Problems of the Far East: Japan, China and Korea, which he found to be “quite dry reading.”2

Singh mimicked the British model of masculinity and high-class culture through his participation

in competitive sports, which included Polo, tiger hunting, horse riding competitions, lawn tennis,

and badminton. Singh’s declaration, “I would not like to be treated like a coolie,” demonstrates

his insecurity with his social standing in an imperial structure that insisted on the otherness of its

subjects.3 Singh was troubled by the unequal treatment that Indian soldiers experienced in the

British Indian Army, which led him to the conviction: “I for myself will never serve in the army

except in imperial service”—the princely state forces that were commanded solely by Indian

officers.4 Singh was dismissive of the British Imperial system, but he also exuded many of the

qualities it was purporting. The following analysis of Singh’s diary is not meant to find the

“authentic Indian” or “make the native speak,” but rather gather a deeper understanding of how

1
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, eds., Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary,
A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002), 62.
2
Rudolph, 119.
3
Rudolph, 159.
4
Rudolph, 159.
 5

the empire pushed Singh into a state of paralysis.5

Discursive Power

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph titled their edited and annotated version

of Amar Singh’s diary, Reversing the Gaze, which assumes a Foucaultian deduction whereby

power resides with the person issuing the gaze. While this paper focuses on a singular figure in

the colonial structure, an examination of other colonial encounters reveals the discursiveness of

power in the colonial discourse. Michel Foucault’s theories on power and the colonial discourse

help demonstrate a central argument of this paper, which is that the power in the empire was

discursive and not solely emanating from a “central or hierarchical structure but flowing through

society in a sort of capillary action.”6 Michael H. Fisher similarly argues in Counterflows to

Colonialism, “there were multiple sites of contestation and cooperation” amongst Britons and

Indians, which leads to the conclusion that “colonialism was not hegemonic or dichotomous

between colonizer and colonized.”7 Ania Loomba remarks on how post-structuralist historians

insist on a “multiplicity of histories” with respect to a study of the “lives of oppressed peoples.”8

In an essay, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Nancy Hartsock criticizes Foucault’s

position by arguing “power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere,” but Foucualt’s theory is

still useful for its conclusion on the vicissitudes of power relations in the context of the colonial

encounter.9

The purpose of this paper is to explore the sources of imperial power and to argue that the

structure of empire (and all those included in that structure, colonized, colonizer, etc.) cannot be
5
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-
Victorian Britain, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 16.
6
Ania Loomba Colonialism/Postcolonialism, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 41.
7
Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain
1600-1857, (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 3.
8
Loomba, 13.
9
Loomba, 42.
 6

defined to a single category. Homi K. Bhabha, in his collection of essays, The Location of

Culture, argues that the binary opposition between the colonized and the colonizer no longer

stands as a classifying agent of the colonial discourse because it assumes that there was a clear

divide between the “noisy command of colonialist authority” and the “silent repression of native

traditions.” Bhabha’s “colonial hybrid” and the product of “hybridization” represent the

forgotten narrative of those operating within the imperial structure that functioned on multiple

sites of complicity and contestation in opposition to Edward W. Said’s vision of the categorical

divide between “us” and “them” that the West created in their portrayal of the “Orient.” Amar

Singh operated within this “ambivalent space” and cannot be adequately identified singularly as

a complacent or defiant colonial subject. However, as Bhabha argues, “hybridity” is not the third

category of analysis operating between the colonizers and colonized.10 The complexity of the

colonial discourse demands a more nuanced and inclusive conversation than the historiographic

debate between David Cannadine and Antoinette Burton over whether empire was driven by a

racial or social hierarchy. This debate ignores the narratives of figures like Singh, who was often

pulled, swayed and influenced by racial, social and gendered categories.

Private Gaze/Public Resistance

The difference between Amar Singh and Behramji Malabari, an Indian traveler to Britain,

is the fact that Malabari published his work, thereby facilitating the Foucaultian theory that

surveillance is power. Singh’s diary did not function in the same way because he meant it for

private use. Therefore, his critique of Lord Curzon’s book, Problems of the Far East: Japan,

China and Korea, went unnoticed. The final passage in his diary was profound but it could not

perform as an act of resistance:

I wish God would show a day to me when Indians would be a free nation moving
10
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112-113.
 7

about at our own free will and ranked as a nationality on the same footing as
England, France or Russia. I fear I shall never see it.11

The central motifs of Singh’s narrative seem to follow a pattern, whereby he attempted to move

up the social ladder by mimicking the British model of civility, but the imperial structure pushed

back and asserted that there was a glass ceiling to his progress. Homi Bhabha elucidates how

“the effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse [was] profound and disturbing”

because sameness was both a validation of colonial power that came from the colonized subject

and disruptive because of the colonial structure’s insistence on difference.12 The prescriptive

system reinforced its hegemony by insisting, as Bhabha does, that “to be Anglicized is

emphatically not to be English” (his emphasis), which is a demonstration of the bind that Singh

encountered.13

Singh and Mohatma Gandhi differ in their responses to the paralyzing effects that the

colonial system produced because of its ambiguous pledge to Indian progress. Singh and other

colonial subjects were caught in a state of paralysis because their attempts to build his British

identity through a single category were thwarted by the imperial structure’s constant utilization

of race, class, and gender to insist on the otherness of its subjects. Gandhi was not immobilized

by the imperial structure because he transcended these categories of analysis by first; recognizing

the structure’s capacity to immobilize, and second; initiating a public resistance that stepped

outside the imperial reach by identifying non-violence as a courageous and civil act rather than

one of weakness and cowardice.14 Gandhi and other Indians who turned their eye on the imperial

metropole—such as Behramji Malabari and Dean Mahomed—were initiating a form of

11
Rudolph, 485.
12
Bhabha, 86.
13
Bhabha, 87.
14
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays,
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19.
 8

resistance through the publication of their works, thereby demonstrating their familiarity with the

Foucaultian principle of surveillance as a means of opposition. Singh probably would not have

understood Foucault, evidenced by his inability to transcend the debilitating imperial structure

through a public act of resistance.

A critical analysis of Homi K. Bhabha elucidated by Ania Loomba in

Colonialism/Postcolonialism reveals the shortcomings of his collection of essays in considering

“the specific nature of the diverse hybridities” in “each of the cultures that come together or

clash during the colonial encounter.”15 Furthermore, Bhabha’s focus on the power resting largely

with the colonizer does not consider the possibility of a hybrid within the identity of the

supposed master, whose power may have been relinquished because of dislocation. Richard

Maurice Tinkler—as described by Robert Bickers in his work Empire Made Me: An Englishman

Adrift in Shanghai—sought to achieve a social and class improvement through empire by joining

the Shanghai Municipal Police. He soon discovered that his arrival at improved ranking within

the imperial structure did not necessarily translate into a higher class in Britain. Tinkler’s

struggle within the empire to assert his masculine authority—which eventually led to his

downfall—revealed the misgivings of a violent and overly assertive mode of colonial authority,

but also the fact that, like Singh, Tinkler experienced paralysis whereby the classifying

categories systematically inhibited his ability to achieve an improved class status.

Critique of Bhabha: Gender in the Imperial Structure

John McLeod’s critique of Bhabha’s work offers important insight into the role of gender

in empire. He asserts that Bhabha’s “concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘mimicry’ do not prove

useful in answering [the] question” of how “the colonial discourse interact[ed] with colonised

15
Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 180.
 9

men and women” in disparate ways.16 As Philippa Levine argues in Gender and Empire, the

study of the British Empire has traditionally focused on the assertion of masculinity by the

imperial structure, which saw the colonized peoples “as weak and unmasculine because they

were colonized” and, among other shortcomings, “failed to respect proper womanhood.”17

Levine asserts, “men too are gendered as are the public political arenas which some of them

dominate,” which is indicative that this category of analysis was not singular to the position of

the colonized or colonizer. Amar Singh encountered gender as a colonial subject attempting to

affirm his masculinity by mimicking the British and participating in imperial pastimes such as

hunting, polo, and horse riding competitions. A point of contention arises when, as McLeod

argues, “representations of subaltern insurgency tend to prioritise men,” which is a warranted

argument, but gender remains as a category not distinct to women. Gayatri Spivak attempted to

retrieve the voice of the subaltern female through a study of an Indian widow’s view of the

practice of sati—the traditional Hindu practice of widow sacrifice through burning on her

husbands’ funeral pyre—but concluded any attempt to represent her voice in a western discourse

would disfigure it. McLeod and Levine both argue that the first step in this process is an

investigation of the “representational systems” and choices of materials in the archives, which

“rendered her mute in the first place.”18

Spivak concedes that in the attempts to shift the discourse from a male dominated study,

historians must use the methods, which are problematic.19 The same could be said for a study of

Amar Singh because, as Bernard Cohn indicates in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, the

British transformed Indian culture, language and traditions into English objects, thereby claiming

16
John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, (Manchester University Press, 2000), 180.
17
Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
18
McLeod, 193-194.
19
McLeod, 194.
 10

ownership of it. Therefore, a modern study of the history of India almost invariably involves

going to London to the India Office at the National Archives, which asserts Cohn’s main point:

“a conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge,” which leads to his conclusion that

“knowledge is power.”20 Loomba similarly insists that Foucault’s theories are “Euro-centric”

because of their focus on the process by which physical torture was surmounted by an adoption

of the prison system—a more indirect conquering of the human body by the state power.

Additionally, Foucault has been criticized for ignoring the effect that colonial expansion had on

the European state and only focusing on European modes of modernity and understanding.21 In

order to move forward with this study of Singh we must “use ideas or tools which we know are

problematic” as well as acknowledge, as Levine does, that “gender does not stand alone or

somehow above other factors, such as class and race.”22

Race, Class, and Gender: the Debate

Levine’s contention that a confluence of factors was the driving force behind the imperial

structure merits a closer study and further emphasis. David Cannadine’s book Ornamenatlism:

How the British Saw Their Empire offers a critique of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism by arguing

that the British Empire “has been extensively studied as a complex racial hierarchy…but it has

received far less attention as an equally complex social hierarchy.”23 Antoinette Burton scathing

review of Cannadine’s work endeavors to defend the “new generation of scholars,” that has

devoted its work to establishing “race as a category of analysis” for the British Imperial

structure.24 These varying interpretations of British Imperialism as being distinctly influenced by

20
Cohn, 16; 45.
21
Loomba, 52.
22
McLeod, 194 and Levine, 2.
23
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 9.
24
Antoinette Burton, “Methods/Theory,” review of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their
Empire, by David Cannadine, The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002),
 11

race, class, and gender are flawed because the imperial structure cannot be attached to a single

category of classification.

Edward W. Said’s influential work Orientalism marked a shift in the British Imperial

historiography when it was published in 1978. Said’s central argument is that “Orientalism”—or

the study of the Orient—was an entity created by western intellectuals, which “promoted a

binary opposition between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (Orient, the East,

‘them’).”25 This oppositional divide prompted “representations” of the Orient rather than

“natural depictions,” which has provided recent historiography with the dilemma of producing

historical work that re-envisions the distorted image of the Orient.26 As previously noted, Homi

K. Bhabha’s essays on the colonial hybrid endeavors to dissolve the distinct divide between the

colonized and colonizer. His critique is useful in establishing the fact that the power dynamic in

the colonial structure was often mutable and not associated to a single categorization. Despite

these critiques of Said, his work is crucial for understanding Bernard S. Cohn’s argument that the

essence of empire was inherent in the British attempts to turn India into a “knowable reality”

thereby enabling conquest.27

Orientalism or Ornamentalism?

David Cannadine contends for a more considered emphasis on the social and class nature

of the imperial structure by demonstrating that the pageantry and “ornamentalism” of empire

employed overseas was “hierarchy made visible.”28 In other words, as Thomas Metcalf

proclaims, “the India of the Raj stood forth as a model, not only for the empire, but for Britain

www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.2/br_3.html
25
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 43.
26
Said, 21.
27
Cohn, 16.
28
Cannadine, 122.
 12

itself.”29 Cannadine also rejects the notion that “indirect rule of dark-skinned races was about

condescension,” and surmises that it was probably “admiration;” “a genuine wish to hold back

the corrupting forces of capitalism and exploitation.”30 Burton’s responds to this argument by

insisting that the British controlled hierarchy did not ask for or require input from the native

populations; therefore, the appropriation of their culture was a form of racism and essentialism.

Cannadine’s rejection of Said’s focus on empire as structurally racial is problematic because, as

Burton suggests, Said can “hardly be characterized as someone who championed subaltern

‘victims’ as the true subjects of colonial history.”31 Burton’s argument aligns with critiques of

Said that stipulate he did not focus on the “self-representations” of the colonial subject and their

resistances to colonial power.32

Despite some of Cannadines’s more contentious remarks, he does provide clear evidence

of how the empire was a socially and class-based hierarchy. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of

November 1858, which identified the nobles of India as the “natural leaders” of the society,

established an Indian aristocracy that “seemed just like the British aristocracy and gentry.”33

Levine similarly argues that the British agents of empire “bowed to the prescriptions of

metropolitan domestic conformity” and imported the same social structures to the imperial

periphery.34 The formation of a hierarchy that was represented by royal durbars and other

imperial displays of pageantry were designed to instill in colonial subjects (both British and

Indian) the desire to participate in the rewards based system. Indian nobles and ruling princes—

29
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
56.
30
Cannadine, 59.
31
Burton, 1-2.
32
Loomba, 49.
33
Cannadine, 44-45.
34
Levine, 8.
 13

Amar Singh among them—were often “fiercely competitive in any matters to do with status.”35

However, this public display of sameness from below was powerful because of its implication

that nothing affirms power more than having somebody mimic you. As Cannadine remarks, the

public display of hierarchy put colonial subjects “in a direct, and subordinate, relation to the

monarch.”36

The question of whether we should prescribe to Edward W. Said’s or David Cannadine’s

interpretation of the primary motivating force behind the imperial hierarchical structure is a

limiting one. Amar Singh, although not the paradigm of the colonial experience, was an active

and literal participant in the pageantry of empire. His personal photo album shows him and other

cadets of the Imperial Cadet Corps in their customary dress uniform, on horse back practicing for

the 1903 Delhi durbar, which celebrated Edward VII’s coronation. Singh and his compatriots

were assigned as the royal horse guard to Viceroy Curzon, which established a distinct imperial

hierarchy that was subordinate to the crown.37 This distinct hierarchy was further imposed

through legislation under Queen Victoria’s reign, which made Indian princes subject to lose their

land and possessions provided that they did not affirm her rulership. Cannadine’s attempts to

discount the racial structure of empire are implicit in his example of Curzon and the begum of

Bhopal wearing the same insignia demonstrating that that British considered the Indian elite to

be “social equals.”38 Bhabha’s conclusions on the power of mimicry demonstrate that more is at

play here. The begum of Bhopal was meant to understand this congruence as a symbolic

representation of equity, but the insignia is a British construction that affirms British power

through mimicry.

35
Cannadine, 89.
36
Cannadine, 100.
37
Rudolph and Rudolph, Reversing the Gaze, 259.
38
Cannadine, 94; 51.
 14

Bernard S. Cohn’s essay “Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism” comments on the how the

British implemented the Sikh turban in order to “objectify qualities they thought appropriate to

roles that various groups in India were to play.”39 Cohn’s definitive articulation that “clothes

literally are authority” demonstrates that the insignia, like the Star of India, were British

constructions designed to emphasize difference and separateness from their imperial subjects.40

The British did order their empire according to social and cultural hierarchy on the home island,

but Cohn notices that they were evocative of “British Victorian conceptions of a feudal past,”

which meant, “Indian present was the European past.” The Star of India and other rewards-

based systems were meant as a British commitment to Indian advancement, but through a British

ownership of the Indian past.41 Cohn’s arguments are persuasive because they do not attempt to

emphasize a single category of analysis. British knowledge of India, both historically and

culturally, provided the ammunition for the construction of racial, gendered, and social

hierarchies. Cannadine’s argument that “individual social ordering often took precedence over

collective racial ordering”42 is flawed because the imperial structure cannot be attached to a

single defining category.

Cannadine’s work also fails to examine how the martial race theory played into the

British imperial system’s social ordering. An excerpt from Singh’s diary reveals the

preeminence of this imperial process of racial and social subjugation. Singh took note of an

inspection report made by Lord Roberts, the commander in chief of the Indian Army, which

reveals the impact the martial race theory had on imperial ideology:

The gallant Rajpoot horsemen of Jodhpore had always been famous for their
39
Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 110.
40
Cohn, 114.
41
Cohn, 121.
42
Cannadine, 10.
 15

chivalrous bravery, unswerving fidelity, and fearless self-devotion in their wars

with the Marathas and the armies of the Moghul emperors…and that blood and
breeding must tell, and would if put to the test, achieve the same results now as of
old.43

Singh does not remark negatively on this comment, and the fact that he included it in his diary is

evocative of his agreement with and almost support of the statement. Singh was quick to accept

and was somewhat dependent on compliments and support from his British superiors, but saw

the clear inequity present within the system. One such episode occurred when a junior British

officer punished a senior Indian officer for “drinking on the line of march,” which Singh found

to be unfair because British officers always seemed to be a little drunk and Jasjee (the accused)

was not even visibly drunk.44 Singh’s inconsistency in opinion marked his complicity as well as

disdain for the imperial system that he saw his future depending on; an elucidation of the bind he

found himself in.

The “Disturbing” Power of Mimicry

Lord Curzon’s speeches on matters regarding Indian nobles and princes demonstrate his

willingness to make concessions by allowing the “natural aristocracy” to “buttress British rule in

India.”45 His creation of the Imperial Cadet Corps (ICC) was designed to exemplify this policy

shift. Amar Singh was selected for the ICC and on August 25, 1917 he became one of the first to

receive the title of a king’s commissioned officer (KCO), which was revoked four years later. In

those four years, he commanded British soldiers in the 16th Cavalry regiment and made note in

his diary of a particular incident of insubordination from a British Lieutenant Wilks.46 The

incident was representative of the tense political mood at the time as it occurred during Gandhi’s

first civil disobedience campaign in March 1919. According to Singh (the squadron
43
Rudolph, 124.
44
Rudolph, 158.
45
Rudolph, 199.
46
Rudolph, 197.
 16

commander), Wilks had not consulted him when he changed the route of their patrol and made

the troops fall in at a different location as ordered. Wilks responded with a remark of contempt

because he had been following the direct orders of the colonel and was not tolerant of an Indian

officer telling him that he had stepped outside the boundaries of his duties. This role reversal is

demonstrative of the British insecurity that occurred when an Indian mimicked the British but in

this case filled the role better. Wilks “turned quite red” and made exclamatory remarks to Singh,

while Singh kept his composure and maintained his position as the superior officer. As the

Rudolph’s assert class and race were factors in this episode of insubordination, which was

evident from Wilks’ feeling of superiority racially seemingly overshadowed by Singh’s class-

based advantage.47

Singh handled the situation in a calm and respectable way but portrayed his true feelings

privately: “I shall be pleased when…I get rid of Wilks who is really a dirty, low breed swine for

whom I do not care in the least though I keep up appearances.”48 Singh knew that he could not

express his true feelings to Wilks because of the probable negative repercussions that would have

ensued. However, Homi Bhabha’s argument that mimicry is both “profound” and “disturbing”

to imperial power elucidates how mimicking the calm and collected British officer validated the

power of the imperial authority.49 It appears from Singh’s account of the event that Wilks was

the one at a loss, but further analysis reveals the inhibiting elements of the imperial structure.

Singh could not speak his mind and by maintaining his “appearances” he affirmed the authority

of the colonial structure to utilize race as a mechanism for imperial oppression.

Singh had always been wary of Wilks’ “independence” as he considered himself a

“favourite of the Colonel,” and remarked on another incident whereby he got “roaring drunk”
47
Rudolph, 205.
48
Rudolph, 206.
49
Bhabha, 86.
 17

during dinner at a restaurant and left without paying. The next morning, he began drinking again

because it was St. Patrick’s Day, to which Singh remarked, “this is a fine way of celebrating the

memory of a saint.” Singh’s reticence in the face of Wilks’ insubordination and debauchery may

have seemed to Singh as a form of empowerment, but his private musings cannot, in a

Foucaultian sense, act as a form of resistance because the gaze remained static. Despite Singh’s

effort to act the part and work within the system, he was ultimately stripped of his ranking

following the resolution of the 1920 Escher Committee, which determined that “the grant of

king’s commissions to Indians would be pre-mature at this stage.”50 Indian officers would have

to wait until World War II twenty years later to achieve authority status over British ranks.51

Singh similarly mimicked the subjugating inclinations of British imperialist as a way of

asserting modernity and his right to be considered on equal leveling with the British. During

Singh’s campaign with the Jodhpur Lancers in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, he wrote subtly of

the eroticization and lowly character of the local villagers and conflated it by setting these

remarks against the grandeur of the Great Wall of China. In Shan Hai Kwan City, Singh

described how the city was dirty, filthy and very smelly, and took note of the stalls that

“swindle” foreigners “unless they take away a thing by force in which case they give anything

they like,” and of the “many obscene pictures” that were for sale. Perhaps this observation was

not meant to exhibit the inferiority of the city and its inhabitants, but when set against the remark

about the Great Wall—“I had walked continually on it and was wondering what sort of man he

must have been who started this enormous work”—a certain commentary of the cultural

hegemony of British Imperial India begins to emerge.52 This episode reveals the power of

mimicry, but also the fact that the British Imperial structure marginalized through race, class, and
50
Rudolph, 207.
51
Rudolph, 197.
52
Rudolph, 127.
 18

gender. Dislocation provided Singh with a glimpse of his identity because he was able to offset it

with the distinct surroundings and population in China. If Singh was indeed mimicking the

British Imperialist, he was affirming the categories of analysis by purporting his image as a

masculine, culturally and socially advanced, and racially superior British Imperial subject.

Singh’s previously mentioned line from his diary, “I would not like to be treated like a coolie,”

elucidates his utmost dedication to this image.53

The Uncertainty of the Colonial Hybrid

The pageantry of empire was a symbolic representation of progress and modernity that

provided its Indian subjects with a literal representation of what civil advancement should look

like. Thomas B. Macaulay’s observed in his 1835 “Minute On Indian Education” that Indians

could achieve a level of modernity that made them “English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and

in intellect” but “Indian in blood and colour.”54 Ania Loomba’s typifies Macaulay’s statement as

“one of the most striking contradictions about colonialism because of its need to “‘civilise’ its

‘others’ and to fix them into perpetual ‘otherness.’”55 The inhibiting power of this structure is

often illusory and invisible because of its insistence that the act is normative behavior. As

Michel Foucualt argues, one might feel empowered by the ability to make unimpeded decisions

but in actuality are participating in the colonial power structure. For example, Gandhi thought he

was empowered by a choice to go against Indian tradition and eat meat because of its ability to

produce courage, which he thought would enable him and his countrymen to “defeat the English

and make India free.”56 Gandhi was prescribing to this British construction of masculinity,

thereby affirming their conclusion that Indians were weak because they did not eat meat. The

53
Rudolph, 159.
54
Thomas B. Macaulay, Minute On Indian Education, (1835).
55
Loomba, 173.
56
Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi, 189.
 19

colonial hybrid complicates this model through an insistence on maintaining “cultural purity”

and “stabilising the status quo.” Loomba argues that Indian resistance often adopted theories

from western scholarship—Gandhi’s non-violence movement originated from his studies on

Tolstoy and Emerson, and Thoreau—but they developed distinct impressions by insisting on the

“unbridgeable difference between coloniser and colonized.”57

Homi Bhabha’s study of the Indian “discovery” of the English Bible in his essay, “Signs

Taken for Wonders” investigates the “ambivalent space” that was constructed when Indians were

free to interpret the text without British oversight. Without this oversight they were able to pick

and choose aspects of the bible they found the most appealing or disturbing; they were willing to

be baptized, but would never take the Sacrament.58 Bhabha believes that the ambivalent space

that the colonial hybrid created was a product of a failure of the colonial power to replicate itself

perfectly because “it unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but

reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated

back upon the eye of power.”59 This “failure of colonial discourse” is inherent because the

ambivalent space is omnipresent where there are contradictory messages from colonial authority;

the civilizing mission irrevocably combined with the insistence on difference. As Loomba

discusses, Bhabha’s term, hybridity, is valuable for modern historiography on colonialism

because it gets us out of an insistence on the binary opposition.60 However, Bhabha’s

generalizations about the colonial encounter create a colonial hybrid that is homogenous and

“curiously universal,” which does not take into account the many different ambivalent spaces

that could develop.61 Ella Shohat argues that the “diverse modalities of hybritity” are represented
57
Loomba, 174.
58
Bhabha, 104.
59
Bhabha, 112.
60
Loomba, 177.
61
Loomba, 178.
 20

multifariously as “forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political co-optation, social

conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence.”62 The same complexity and

ambiguity exists with respect to the imperial structure and the multiple factors (race, gender, and

class) that were responsible for moving the gears of imperialism, and the resulting ambivalent

space.

Bhabha’s conclusions insist on the agency of the colonizer because the only way colonial

authority could be resisted was through the imperial structure’s failure to effectively represent

itself. Gandhi understood that he could operate in this ambivalent space and so his maneuverings

were unaffected by colonial authority, which signified a rare moment whereby his agency was

left intact. Gandhi and Singh operated within relatively similar versions of hybridity, but their

resistances to colonial authority were separated by complicity and transcendence of the inhibiting

system. Bhabha considers the ambivalent space as a form of resistance, but in the case of Amar

Singh, a number of instances demonstrate that resistance involved maneuver in the public sphere

rather than working within the imperial structure.

Singh descriptions remarking on the characteristics, customs, and appearances of each of

the Allied Armies in China demonstrate a moment of hybridity for Singh on the subconscious

level—because as previously stated, Singh’s diary writing was a private act. To some degree,

Singh was mimicking the British tendency to order and establish hierarchy, but his negative

portrayal of the British in the Indian Army indicate that he was operating in an ambivalent space.

Singh liked the Russians the most because they were “true soldiers” with no pride in them, their

uniforms were simple, and everything they carried was useful. He considered the Germans to be

“very nice” but determined that their uniforms’ “gaudy breast plates and other nonsense” to be

useless things in war, and the “goose-step” marching technique looked “quite fine” but was a
62
Loomba, 178.
 21

“waste of energy.” He found the French to be very “quarrelsome” and “not too much of

horsemen,” and the Americans to have difficulties with discipline because the soldiers “[did] not

much respect their officers.”63

Singh’s commentary on the British soldiers in the Indian Army is similarly critical as he

was confident that they “[excelled] so far as dressing and wheeling [was] concerned but in the

actual heat of the fight they would not.” As Bhabha suggests, an ambivalent space was created

once the imperial authority failed to replicate itself, which is represented by Singh’s negative

portrayal of the British soldiers. In his description of Indian soldiers, Singh wrote of how the

Rajpoots could “stand much more hardship than others,” thus convinced of their superiority but

in the next description, which compares British and Indian soldiers, he acknowledged that the

Indians were “looked upon as inferiors in the scale of humanity.”64 These descriptions are

indicative of Singh’s effort to stress some of the weaknesses of the soldiers from Europe and

America, whilst crediting the Indian soldier with numerous strengths to prove that they were

modern and belonged in the conversation. Singh operated as a colonial hybrid but he was not

able to effectively transcend British categorizations because he did not implement a performative

and public resistance.

While Singh was critical of the British soldiers, he also wanted to appear European,

which is demonstrated by his assertion that he was not an authority on Indian customs and

considered himself to be more acquainted with the “ways and habits” of European society. He

was careful to note that were he to go to England he would “not be an idol or ignorant in

conversation” about England or India.65 Singh’s association with European culture and customs

over his own demonstrates his association with the gentlemanly character that seemed to be
63
Rudolph, Reversing the Gaze, 155.
64
Rudolph, 155.
65
Rudolph, 154.
 22

inherent in European culture. Singh’s superior British officer, Major Turner taught Singh

“manners and customs,” although he was conflicted by how much he associated with him “for

fear of displeasing his Indian superior officer, Sarkar.66 Singh was caught between both sides of

the imperial structure and his identity was shifted to the colonial hybrid, which explains his

complicities and contestations in the colonial encounter.

Singh Trapped in the Bind

Singh’s regiment was posted to Delhi in March 1919, to support the suppression of public

disturbances precipitated by Gandhi’s first civil disobedience campaign protesting the Rowlett

Act, which extended the capacity to arrest nationalists without trial. Singh remarks in a diary

entry that British soldiers fired on a mob of people that refused to disperse “officially” killing

“about a dozen” and wounding “another two dozen.” Singh’s superior officer did not send him

into Delhi because of an incident whereby Singh expressed sympathy for the rioting group

during a meal at “the mess,” but it is clear from his account that Singh did not know what to

make of the situation: “besides this, though I had no sympathy with the rioters, I certainly am

against the passing of the Rowlatt Bill for which all these troubles had taken place.” The

Rudolph’s insinuate in the contributing commentary to the diary that Singh’s moment of

uncertainty was induced by fear of the possibility of firing on fellow Indians.67 This probably

had something to do with his disavowal, but more broadly, his uncertainty draws from the

violence and the paralyzing effects of the imperial structure. As Cohn argues, knowledge of

India and the reduction of India into knowable objects and realities allowed the British to

maintain authority in India without having to use bullets. Singh’s moment of uncertainty is

representative of Cohn’s supposition because it demonstrates that the paralysis he experienced

66
Rudolph, 155.
67
Rudolph, 206-207.
 23

was more powerful and lasting than the British suppression of the “mob” in Delhi. Bhabha

argues that the disturbing power of the imperial system was attributable to the “old wine, new

bottle” metaphor, which means imperial power used the civilizing mission to disguise its

violence.

Throughout Singh’s diary one notices his efforts to assert his modernity through the

categories of analysis that the British prescribed as a means of social and cultural uplift. Singh

asserted his masculinity through his military endeavors as well as an assortment of European

activities such as, Polo, tiger hunting, horse riding competitions, lawn tennis, and badminton. He

secured his class status through marriage and insistence on property ownership. His private

condemnation of British racism within the military ranks coupled with his complicity in the

British implemented martial race theory demonstrated his attempts to assert his position as a

“natural leader” of India. Singh’s moment of uncertainty was characteristic of the paralysis he

experienced from the imperial structure’s promise of modernity through the categories of race,

class, and gender. In the performance of empire, Singh’s attempted to choose a category of

analysis that emphasized his advancement up the levels of civilization to be on equal leveling

with the British. The violence of empire was apparent from Singh’s inability to choose the

correct category, which occurred because the imperial structure marginalized in whatever

capacity possible through the contradiction of colonial authority mentioned previously. Singh

existed within this space; therefore, to insist that there was a single category of analysis driving

the imperial structure is to deny that Singh was caught in a bind.

Escaping the “Double Bind”

Michel Foucault defines the “double bind” as “the simultaneous individualization and

totalization of modern power structures.”68 In the context of the imperial structure, this entailed
68
Michel Foucault, “Power,” The Subject and Power, 337.
 24

the contradictory emphasis on the individuality of the colonial subject inherent in their ability to

modernize themselves, as well as the assigning of the subject’s identity exclusively to cultural,

racial, and social difference. The imperial structure relied on difference in order to maintain a

distinct hierarchy and authority. Colonial subjects such as Oloudah Equiano, Behramji Malabari

and Mahatma Gandhi similarly assailed the colonial system of control by shifting aspects of their

race and gender identity to become, what Homi K. Bhabha termed, the “colonial hybrid.” Some

of the Indian travelers discovered that the way the British represented themselves to their

colonial subjects was often contradictory with what they observed in Britain.69

Oloudah Equiano effectively navigated out of the imperial insistence of difference

through the avowal of his identity as a freed slave rather than a black man. Equiano created an

“ambivalent space” for himself that transcended the subjugating categories of analysis of the

imperial structure by emphasizing his ability to choose his identity, which he had worked and

paid for. One such episode is outlined in Equiano’s autobiographical account, The Interesting

Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which describes his

sea faring travels and adventures throughout the world. In the account, Equiano describes how

the Captain of a ship bound for Montserrat would not allow him on board unless he advertised

himself as a slave and notified someone of his departure from the island. Equiano remarks on

the situation:

This reduced me to great perplexity, for if I should be compelled to submit to this

degrading necessity which every black freeman is under, of advertising himself
like a slave when he leaves an island, and which I thought a gross imposition
upon any freeman, I feared I should miss that opportunity of going to Montserrat,
and then I could not get to England that year.70

69
Fisher, 3.
70
Oloudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah
Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, ed. Paul Edwards, (Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.,
2006), 109.
 25

Equaino was able to board the ship when he elicited the assistance of men from the island that

could vouch for him and convince the captain of his freedom. The captain assumed that he was a

slave but, upon learning of his status as freed man, was compelled to allow him to board the ship.

Equaino escaped the bind by insisting on the previously undefined category of a freed slave in

order to occupy the ambivalent space that Bhabha insists was an effective mode of resistance

against colonial authority.

Encounters between Indians like Behramji Malabari and British females in London

produce a significant understanding of gender relations in late-Victorian England, and how they

were promulgated differently in the imperial structure. Singh and Malabari both attempted to

elicit the British version of masculinity. Malabari wrote the Indian Eye as a way addressing

these differences in localized versus imperial gender relations. His ultimate goal for his time in

London was to harbor the values of the British civilizing mission in order to raise the age of

consent for Hindu girls. He wanted to, as Burton describes, provide the “precursor to Indian

women’s uplift” and insist on his own “claims to be a petitioning subject of the imperial

nation.”71 He did so by speaking to the British courts as the effeminate victim, which

demonstrated the “kind of melodramatic innovations that could be produced by the challenges of

negotiating a subaltern identity in the patriarchal racism of empire.”72 Malabari’s grand

performance used the morals of the British civilizing mission based on patriarchy to achieve

reform in his home country. Malabari’s utilization of “mimicry,” as defined by Bhabha, against

the colonial structure was effective because he transcended the boundaries of the categories of

analysis of empire by generating an “ambivalent space.” In this space, he chose to prescribe to

the imperial structure’s inclination to civilize its effeminate subjects. Mahatma Gandhi similarly

71
Burton, 164
72
Burton, 164.
 26

embraced the traditional Indian garb as a way of eliciting the desired response from the colonial

system.

Mahatma Gandhi mimicked the western model of modernity and went to England to

study law only to discover that his class status was often mired by his race. In Gandhi’s

autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, he remarks on an encounter with the

ceiling to his progress, which occurred when he was forced to move from first class to the third

class compartment during his train journey in South Africa. His exasperation with the colonial

model of civility is apparent when he, upon being kicked off the train into the cold of “winter in

the higher regions of South Africa,” refused to ask for his over-coat in his confiscated luggage

for fear of being “insulted again.”73 This scene is explicative of Gandhi’s rejection of the racial

and social prejudices of the imperial structure, but it is also his realization that he was caught in

the imperial bind. Gandhi was not immobilized by the imperial structure because he transcended

these categories of analysis by first; recognizing the structure’s capacity to immobilize, and

second; initiating a public resistance that stepped outside the imperial reach by identifying non-

violence as a courageous and civil act rather than one of weakness and cowardice—an idea

purported by the Rudolph’s in Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays.74 As previously stated, the

colonial hybrid opened up the possibility of resistance through an insistence on maintaining

“cultural purity” and “stabilising the status quo,” while also stressing the “unbridgeable

difference between coloniser and colonized.”75

Conclusion

Singh’s diary reveals his motivation to move up the ranks of the imperial hierarchical

structure but also his indignation with a racist British rulership that concurrently insisted, as Lord
73
Gandhi, 57-58
74
Rudolph, 19.
75
Loomba, 174.
 27

Curzon did, that Singh was among the “natural leaders” of India. Historians who consider the

driving force behind empire must take into account figures like Singh who occupied a space

whereby a confluence of the categories of analysis contributed to his inability to surpass the glass

ceiling to progress. Homi Bhabha’s investigations into imperial theory were prompted by his

inability to identify with Stanley Wolpert’s stereotypical and romantic view of Indian history

elucidated in this passage from the preface of his book entitled India: “All of us, who wear

cotton cloth, use the decimal system, enjoy the taste of chicken, play chess or roll dice, and seek

peace of mind or tranquility through meditation, are indebted to India.”76 Bhabha found more

agency coming from the colonizer and insisted that a binary opposition was no longer viable in a

study of India because power was discursive, and hybridities were present. Singh was among

these colonial hybrids because his reversal of the gaze through his diary held complicities and

contestations. The resulting ambivalent space was a site of resistance and signified the imperial

structure’s failure to replicate itself. However, Loomba warns against “reducing the colonial

dynamics to a linguistic interchange” because doing so universalizes the colonial encounter and

does not explain how “subjectivities are shaped by questions of class, gender and context.”77

This analysis of Amar Singh and his diary has endeavored to provide a nuanced

interpretation of the colonial encounter that insists on a consideration of all categories of

analysis. It has not sought to retrieve the voice of Amar Singh, but rather understand how his

state of paralysis within the imperial structure was exemplary of his hybridity associated with the

denial of his wish to exist as a natural leader of India and a modern and masculine figure. The

imperial structure issued Singh a glimpse of hope when on August 25, 1917 he became one of

the first Indians to receive the title of a king’s commissioned officer (KCO), but it was revoked

76
Stanley Wolpert, India, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), ix.
77
Loomba, 179.
 28

four years later, signifying that mimicry could only get him so far. Singh’s disappointment with

having achieved the rank he wanted in the imperial system only to have it revoked, probably led

to his decline in commitment to the diary, which had served him, at times, as a self-gratifying

friend.