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Empires of the Senses
Bodily Encounters in Imperial India
and the Philippines
A N D R E W J. R O T T E R
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rotter, Andrew Jon, author.
Title: Empires of the senses : bodily encounters in imperial India
and the Philippines /Andrew J. Rotter.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019002163 (print) | LCCN 2019005111 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190924713 (updf) | ISBN 9780190924720 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190924706 (hardcover :alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: India—Civilization—1765–1947. |
Philippines—Civilization—20th century. | Senses and
sensation—India—History. | Senses and sensation—Philippines—History.
Classification: LCC DS428 (ebook) | LCC DS428. R68 2019 (print) |
DDC 954.03/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002163
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

to Sam David Rotter Stevenson
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Embodied Empires  1
1. The Senses and Civilization  14
2. Fighting: War and Empire’s Onset  47
3. Governing: Subjects and States Envisioned  86
4. Educating: New Soundscapes  131
5. Sanitizing: The Campaigns Against Odor  160
6. Touching, Feeling, and Healing: Hapticity and the Hazards

of Contact  187
7. Nourishing: Imperial Foodways  233
Conclusion: The Senses at Empire’s End  264
Notes  289
Bibliography  335
Index  357
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve been at this for a while, and in the course of reading and writing about two
empires and five senses and more about sewers and leprosy than is healthy for
most people, I have accumulated a great number of debts. I acknowledge too few
of them here.
I was in the audience at Colgate University some years ago when Mark Smith
gave a guest lecture about race and the senses in the American South. His talk
was so arresting and provocative that it got me thinking about material I had
run across even more years ago on how India smelled to the British when they
arrived there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mark became a corre-
spondent, and he has inspired and encouraged my work. Lizzie Collingham fed
us in Duxbury and talked with me about Indian food. She writes like a dream
about everything interesting. Chris Capozzola and Josh Gedacht gave me excel-
lent advice about working in Manila, and Chris offered gentle and helpful crit-
icism of a talk I gave at MIT. Trading notes with Mary Lui at the Rizal Library
at Ataneo de Manila University was great fun. Paul Kramer has over the years
read my work with a penetrating eye and commented on it with extraordinary
grace. I’ve been encouraged in the project, through its ups and downs, by Jyoti
Balachandran, Brooke Blower, Mark Philip Bradley, Susan Carruthers, Jay Cook,
Nick Cullather, David Engerman, Lloyd Gardner, Kristin Hoganson, Aftab
Jassal, Terri Keeley, Melanie Kiechle, Menachem Kogman, Prakash Kumar,
Yanek Mieckowski, Michael Peletz, Andrew Preston, and Kelly Shannon, by
Colgate and Cambridge University students at a joint seminar generously
hosted by Andrew Preston at Cambridge in 2014, and by the stellar participants
in the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Summer Institute
in 2013. Audiences at Colgate, Ben-Gurion University (with thanks to Katrin
Kogman-Appel and Ruth Ginio), the London School of Economics (Matthew
Jones, twice), MIT ( Jeff Ravel), and, by teleconference, the University of Texas-
Austin (Mark Lawrence), were good enough to listen to me talk about latrines,
ix
x Acknowledgments
cholera, and William Howard Taft’s underwear, and to offer sharp questions and
comments.
Colgate, my home institution, has treated me with great generosity for many
years. My colleagues in the history department have made it a joy to climb the
hill to the office each day (though perhaps not so much in December); my
thanks to Antonio Barrera, Dan Bouk, Alan Cooper, Ray Douglas, Faye Dudden,
Xan Karn, Rob Nemes, David Robinson, and Heather Roller for their stimu-
lating and supportive presence. Other Colgate faculty members have been won-
derful interlocutors, especially Tim Byrnes and Georgia Frank. I am grateful
to the Research Council, and its chairs Lynn Staley, Judith Oliver, and Rick
Braaten, for a senior faculty leave, research support, and a book subvention. My
dean-provosts, most recently Doug Hicks and Tracey Hucks, have always been
enormously encouraging. And many thanks to my Colgate-supported student
assistants: Hannah Fuchs, Max Johnson, Annie Morrow, Jack Schnettler, and
Julia Smaldone.
Thanks, too, to the archivists and librarians who endured with the patience
of Job my questions about their collections and my requests for material.
Archives and libraries are not organized for the benefit of someone researching
the senses, so helping me required even more than the usual degree of imagina-
tion. Much gratitude to the professionals at the Library of Congress Manuscript
Division, National Archives II in College Park, Maryland; libraries at Harvard,
Syracuse, Princeton, and Colgate Universities; the American Philosophical
Society in Philadelphia; the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton (whose
crack librarians treated a trailing spouse with great kindness); the Bancroft
Library at the University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University and the
University of Michigan Libraries (which generously loaned me microfilm from
their collections); the US Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania;
the Center for South Asia at Cambridge University; the British Library; the
National Archives of India in Delhi; and the American History Collection at the
Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University.
Lesley Chapman, Visual Resources Curator at Colgate, worked brilliantly and
patiently through my many questions concerning images for the book, tracking
down high resolution versions of pictures I had found, finding other and better
pictures, and tracing them all to their sources. When I started this project, I knew
that I wanted to publish it with Oxford University Press. I got lucky. As so many
historians know, one shouldn’t miss an opportunity to work with Susan Ferber.
Susan still line edits (with a blue pencil, I think), and her care of the manuscript
and its author have left me in awe. And her advice was always exactly right; for
instance: “You don’t need this example—this paragraph is already revolting
enough.” It has been a pleasure to work with her.
Acknowledgments xi
When I was starting out in the academy, I heard lots of talk about “intellectual
community.” It took some time for me to realize what it was, and to understand
that I had one. I learned that an intellectual community, or mine anyway, was
not just about mutual advice and support for scholarly projects but also friend-
ship that existed beyond arguments made in articles and books and, in some
cases, in spite of disagreements with them. So my intellectual community—also
known as “my friends”—includes Naoko Shibusawa, Petra Goedde, Andrew
Preston, Rob Nemes, Liz Marlowe, Jerry and Kathy Eisman, Valerie Weller, Faye
Dudden, and Marshall Blake, and four men who have for many years inspired
me with their work: Frank Costigliola, Carl Guarneri, Richard Immerman, and
Walt LaFeber.
As always, my greatest debt is to my family. My father, Roy, died before the
book was finished, but I think he would have liked it, especially the parts about
medicine and food. My mother, Muriel, is unlikely to read it, but if there is a
bit of playfulness in it, that’s her bit. Lorraine and Chandran Kaimal, my in-
laws, continue to astonish and inspire me with their energy; my son-in-law, Dan
Stevenson, is a humane and intellectually curious mathematician and a delight
to be around. Daughters Sophie and Phoebe . . . well. They are loving, hilarious,
smart, accomplished, and warm young women who are deeply committed to so-
cial justice. Then there is Padma. Always. The book is dedicated to the youngest
family member: Sam Stevenson, born in August 2017, charismatic minifauna
and a pure joy.
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Introduction
Embodied Empires
The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the
world down to the present.
—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932)
The senses, under the aegis and direction of the mind, give us a world.
—Yi-Fan Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful (1993)
Empire was many things. It involved economics, geopolitics, a desire for order
and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also meant an en-
counter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interac-
tion, political negotiation, policing and schooling and healing. It meant violence,
the imposition of control, and accommodation or resistance to it. All of these
interactions were on some level intellectual, having to do with what people
thought about each other. But they were also in significant ways mediated by
the senses, by perceptions of others formed through seeing, hearing, touching,
smelling, and tasting.
This book argues that all human relationships, including imperial ones, are
shaped by all five senses; how we understand others, even more how we feel
about them and thus how we act toward them, have a good deal to do with how
we apprehend them through every sense. We have long assumed that how we
see others, literally, and how we read the texts we generate about them, tell us
all we need to know about our relations with them. Yet “the project of imperi-
alism . . . could not be effected by sight alone,” as historian Mark M. Smith has
written. The entire human sensorium was engaged in the acts of making and ac-
commodating and resisting empire.1
This study—the sensory history of the British in India from the formal impo-
sition of their rule to its end (1857–1947) and the Americans in the Philippines
from annexation to independence (1898–1946)—is unapologetically inter-
ested in life on empire’s quotidian ground. It explores how the senses created
1
2 Empires of the Senses
mutual impressions of the agents of imperialism and their subjects, and in so

doing illuminates connections between apparently disparate items, including
the otherwise unremarkable comments (and complaints) found in memoirs and
reports, the appearance of lepers, the sound of bells, the odor of excrement, the
feel of cloth against skin, the first taste of meat spiced with cumin or of a mango.
Men and women in imperial India and the Philippines apprehended each other
through their sense organs and their skins. Anglo-Americans and Asians did not
necessarily agree on the relative importance of their senses. They had different
ideas from the start about what looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted good
or bad.
Both the British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what
they judged to be backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the
civilizing process was to put the senses in the right order of priority and to pro-
tect them against offense or affront. Those lacking respect for the senses lacked
self-control; they were uncivilized and thus unfit for self-government. Societies
that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed un-
wholesome food in unmannerly ways were not prepared to form independent
polities and stand on their own. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily ad-
vanced westerners to put the senses right before withdrawing the most obvious
manifestations of their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what
constituted sensory civilization, and to some extent they resisted British and
American efforts to impose their versions on them. In the end, a synthesis of
sorts would emerge that involved compromises between these nations’ sensory
regimes.
Empire was an embodied experience, for both its agents and subjects. People
in imperial spaces not only think about each other; they meet each other hand to
hand, face to face, body to body; they form through their senses impressions of
others and have feelings about them. Their reactions are not always considered
but may be instinctive, visceral, and above all emotional. People feel wonder at
the seemingly different, mixed with fear—of bodily penetration, violation, pol-
lution, or infection. Bodies are membranes, as scholar Laura Otis has argued,
permitting osmosis that may be pleasurable or enlightening but also potentially
distressing or threatening.2 In their encounter with what they perceive as new
and strange, people feel delight and alarm, hope and danger, arousal and dis-
gust, exhilaration and terror. Imperial policy was shaped by laws approved in
metropoles, but it was enacted on the ground, and the relationship between
policy and practice was at all times reciprocal. Men and women—Britons and
Indians, Americans and Filipinos—encountered each other every day, through
their senses. They watched each other warily, glanced at each other, or averted
their eyes out of deference, revulsion, or defiance. Britons and Americans fixed
their gaze on their subjects and cataloged them by counting them and taking their
Int roduc tion 3
pictures, while Indians and Filipinos might hope to fool or confound western
eyes, hiding or deceiving with looks of feigned obedience or innocence. In India
and the Philippines the Anglo-Americans heard what they regarded as discord,
the jarring sounds of brass bands, shouting and spitting in the marketplace, the
keening of mourners, and a babble of languages they could not understand. They
hoped to impose new sonic regimes on their imperial outposts, trying first to
get their subjects to quiet down, especially to lower the volume of the urban
street, then to teach the most promising of them English, so they could be un-
derstood and thus better managed. Some Indians and Filipinos were willing to
learn English and to make the language their own through a style of oratory
they knew well, either to improve their positions or to confront the imperialists
and demand their rights. Pungent smells entered western nostrils and signi-
fied to them Indians and Filipinos’ lack of refinement, for who but an unciv-
ilized people would tolerate the acrid odors of lanes and waterways, the reek
of garbage, domestic animals, and human excrement? Yet who but a westerner,
thought Indians and Filipinos, would go for days without bathing or spurn the
olfactory delights of rose attar or coconut oil? The touched or felt environment
of the tropics seemed to demand revision by the agents of empire. The skins of
their subjects were rough—how else to explain the coarseness of their clothing
and their apparent imperviousness to discomfort or lack of feeling?—while
their land was rutted and broken, and the air they breathed heavy with heat and
moisture and alive with insects. Worse, they conveyed by their touch or through
contact with their bodily discharges contagious diseases, making proximity to
them a frightening risk. Indians and Filipinos resisted the skin-to-skin demands
of the interlopers, refusing, for example, to handle their dead as efficiently as the
westerners liked, or spurning the intrusive touch of British or American doctors
who wished to examine or inoculate them. What foods their subjects/masters
ate, appalling in their appearance and taste, and how disgustingly they ate them!
And yet not every new sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste offended its recipient.
The westerners’ most determined efforts to discipline Asian others by teaching
them manners encountered not just resistance from those who preferred their
own practices, but from Britons and Americans themselves, who found, often to
their surprise, that there were delights to be had in opening their senses to their
new environments and their people.
Empire was never a single project. It was instead an unwieldy cultural for-
mation that included governance, and of which the senses constituted the most
fundamental elements. To historian Jon Wilson, the British empire looks to
have been “chaos”—there was, he says flatly, no “civilizing mission” in British
India—but that is because he insists that such a mission could only have been
characterized by consistency, unity, and single- mindedness by its rulers.3
Both the Indian and Philippines empires looked chaotic because they were
governed as federal structures, meaning that provincial or local control was by

the twentieth century often conceded by central governments. India was too
large and variegated for a small island to hold in its totality, and the Philippines
was governed by Americans roughly as the United States was governed, with
considerable local and state power. Still, there were in both places laws and
requirements and sanctions laid down by central governments, in London and
Calcutta then Delhi, in Washington and Manila. These concerned strategy, law
and order, public works, public health, the creation of an education system, and
other matters. And the empires were held together by everyday patterns: how
rulers and subjects interacted, how they saw, heard, smelled, felt, and fed each
other. The name of the cultural formation of empire was civilization.
The senses have been studied extensively by anthropologists and scholars of
religion, but examinations of their history are vigorous and growing. Historians
have adopted sense perception as a category of analysis, useful for the ways in
which it allows us to apprehend differently (for example) the history of the
body; social relations including understandings of race, class, and gender; and
the history of the emotions. It enables the writing of history with more dimen-
sion and texture, giving it an instantiated, near-physical quality. Historians of the
French Annales School have long argued that attention must be paid to senses
other than vision, particularly in the study of European history prior to the eight-
eenth century. During the 1980s and 1990s, Alain Corbin published books on
the social history of smell and sound. Constance Classen and David Howes,
anthropologists by training, nevertheless ground their extensive scholarship on
the senses in historical evidence. More than anyone else, Mark Smith has re-
cast our understanding of the past in sensory terms, revealing how all the senses
helped constitute US race relations, shaped the experience of the Civil War, and
contributed broadly to the lived history of Europeans and Americans down the
centuries. While sensory history has thus far touched only lightly on relations
between people and nations, including the history of empire, the field seems a
natural target for this kind of analysis.4
Several elements of sensory history seem especially worth noting. First, while
the senses of course have a biological basis, they must be historicized. Take odor.
Smells have chemical form: odor-producing molecules arrive and are recorded
on the nerve endings inside the nostrils and produce reactions in all human
brains. Yet smells have complicated meanings, which have shifted over time and
depend on place. Humans have long distinguished between the civilized and
the primitive on the basis of smell, the aesthetic and moral evaluation of which
is learned through acculturation. None of the senses are stable or static. Because
they cannot be fully explained by biology, the understanding of them varies
from place to place.5 As Norbert Elias argued, the European judgment of what
(for example) stank changed with the Enlightenment, with its new definition of
Int roduc tion 5
what was mannerly and therefore what it meant to be civilized.6 Second, those
who have thought about the senses have tended to rank them in order of impor-
tance. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan claimed that with the inven-
tion of moveable type and the advent of the Enlightenment, vision emerged as
the sense without peer, the sole “authenticator of truth,” as hearing and espe-
cially the other three senses lost importance in text-based societies. Thus sight,
McLuhan contends, carries a higher value than the other senses, and acuity of
vision confers on those who have it civilization in its highest form.7
McLuhan’s binary distinction between sight and the four other senses, known
as “the Great Divide” theory, has been challenged for various reasons. Far from
abandoning hearing and the others in favor exclusively of sight, humans eve-
rywhere have in fact continued to rely on all their senses, working together, to
understand their surroundings. Taste without smell is unimaginable; touch is
often triggered vicariously by the sight of an object that is sharp or rough. There
is no evidence, according to historian Mark S. R. Jenner, “that if one sense grows
in significance others must decline correspondingly”—sensory history is not
a “zero sum game.”8 In addition, to rank seeing over all other senses is implic-
itly to demean other ways of evaluating the world. It may be true that humans
rely more fully on the proximate or so-called lower senses—smell, touch, and
taste—than on sight and hearing, senses that work at a distance, when social
boundaries become blurred, as they do in imperial settings. Where sight and
sound are unreliable markers of difference, other senses appear to become more
acute.9 In the end, it is better to attend to context, culture, and the balance of the
senses through time and space.10
This book takes a comparative approach to the sensory experiences of the
British Empire in India and those of the United States in the Philippines in
order to de-provincialize exceptionalist national narratives. For many years,
Americans regarded their experience with imperialism, in the Philippines and
elsewhere, as a departure, an aberration, or not really imperial at all. Empire was
something others did; if Americans expanded their territory it was the result of
natural growth or a magnanimous desire to help others achieve similar freedom
and virtues. Yet the British also told themselves throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury that they were not imperialists, if the term was meant as a pejorative.11 And,
as the scholar Julian Go has observed, Americans were “well aware of the larger
imperial field,” especially the British presence in it, in which they undertook
their efforts in the Philippines.12 These were empires with interesting differences
but crucial similarities, and considering them together offers insights into each
in turn. There was also a transimperial exchange of information between the
British in India and Americans in the Philippines. These empires were parallel
undertakings with lateral connections. By the early twentieth century imperial
agents were visiting each other’s possessions and sharing ideas about how to
address common problems, among them how to combat diseases such as ma-
laria, cholera, and tuberculosis, what to do about lepers, how to manage sewage,
how best to educate Indians and Filipinos, and more generally what to do with
their puzzling and refractory Asian subjects.13 European and American scientists,
doctors, and sanitarians contributed to and read the same academic journals. In
pursuit of their own comfort and welfare, Americans in the Philippines followed
the British practice by creating a hill station to which to repair during the hottest
season. Even critics of the US occupation found comparisons useful: in 1931,
the anti-imperialist Senator Harry Hawes derided American officials in the is-
lands as “imitators and champions of English satraps in India.”14
Finally, Britons and Americans imagined themselves as part of a combined
effort to civilize, in their own terms, others whom they regarded as backward in
nearly every way. The British and Americans were linked by their shared under-
standing of a racialized Anglo-Saxonism; its self-proclaimed virtues, according
to historian Paul Kramer, included “extraordinary purity and continuity, raging
outward movement, and transformative power over land and people.”15 Both
read avidly the work of Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of empire praised by
American critics “as the greatest living English writer of fiction” at the end of the
nineteenth century.16 Soon after Admiral George Dewey defeated the Spanish
fleet in Manila Bay in May 1898, Cecil Spring-Rice of the British Foreign Office
wrote Theodore Roosevelt that the news of US annexation of the Philippines
made him feel “as if a nightmare was over. It means possibly that our race and civ-
ilization is [sic] safe.”17 Roosevelt reciprocated the sentiment: the British, he said,
had done “such marvelous things in India” that they could “gradually, as century
succeeds century . . . transform the Indian population, not in blood, probably
not in speech, but in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as
Rome did hers on Western Europe.”18 A quarter century later, Lord Willingdon,
formerly governor of the Madras and Bombay states, told the US Governor-
General in the Philippines Leonard Wood that he hoped the Americans would
stay on in the islands: “He is strongly of the opinion,” Wood recorded, “that
nothing could be more unfortunate for the English situation in India than for us
to withdraw from here.” Wood reassured his guest “that we had no intention of
withdrawing.”19 In myriad ways, the British and Americans shared experiences of
life in the tropics. They met with similar resistance, saw what they called beauty
and monstrosity, heard sublime music and shrill cacophony, ate new foods that
delighted or disgusted them, endured the same illnesses, felt the prickle of heat
and humidity on their skins. Their noses wrinkled with pleasure and revulsion as
they took in strong smells. In the heat and the wet their watches stopped; even
time stood still.20
There was one other important similarity between the British and American
empires, especially during the first decades of the twentieth century. In both
Int roduc tion 7
cases, imperial policy was influenced by domestic changes, particularly the rise
of social reform movements originating in Victorian Britain and emerging in the
United States as Progressivism. Efforts to improve life in the metropoles—to
change the habits of the poor and immigrants, to cleanse and beautify cities with
parks, garbage collection, and the construction of modern sanitation systems, to
reduce noise, to fight disease—were reflected in a variety of ways in India and
the Philippines, and of course elsewhere in these empires. Even the reluctance
to allow self-government by Asians was partly conditioned by fear of official cor-
ruption, of the kind progressives criticized in their own countries.21 The pro-
cess of reform also worked in reverse: solutions to problems tried first overseas
might be applied to the metropoles too. And the racism of these empires was
homegrown too: while Britons encountered far fewer people of color at home
than Americans did, Indians who came to the United Kingdom experienced
the kind of mistreatment that would have been familiar to African Americans.22
These were empires formed from the inside out, and they were thus, for better
or worse, sites of social experiment and innovation. The sensory stereotypes,
preferences, and practices Britons and Americans brought with them to India
and the Philippines had for years been rehearsed and refined at home; they were
portable and powerful, well-sharpened instruments carried at times unthink-
ingly but always resolutely to imperial spaces.
The book—an extended essay really, but with a good number of footnotes—
that follows is organized into chapters sense by sense, but also thematically and
to some extent chronologically. It begins with a meditation on the senses and
civilization, the concept that more than any other shaped thinking in imperial
capitals about what empire meant and what it required. Self-government by their
subjects was not the first thing on the minds of those who shaped empire. Yet the
British eventually, and the Americans more quickly, came to understand that
they could not formally control their colonies forever. Despairing of teaching
the masses to behave properly, to learn English, to behave respectfully, and to
lead clean lives, they focused on “civilizing” elite groups of Indians and Filipinos
in order to prepare them for the responsibilities of eventual independence.
Civilization meant rejecting the savage, the primitive, and the animal. It had gen-
dered and class and religious meanings. It had emotional content. Above all, it
was a racial concept, one that placed Anglo-Americans at the top of a naturalized
hierarchy and men and women of color below. A crucial distinguishing feature
of allegedly civilized whites was their respect for the five senses, something they
claimed “uncivilized” people of color sadly lacked.
The next six chapters each take up a theme of empire in India and the
Philippines by conveying an activity in process or an ongoing effort to achieve
change. Chapter 2 concerns fighting. Both of these empires began with war.
While the British East India Company had been in India since the late eighteenth
century, only after a revolt by Indians beginning in 1857 did the British gov-
ernment establish formal rule over India as a colony, inserting its own officials
into positions of authority and increasing the size of its army. The Americans
came to the Philippines as part of their war against Spain in 1898, and while
the Philippine front in that conflict at first cost little American blood, President
William McKinley’s announcement that the United States would annex the ar-
chipelago triggered three years of hard fighting with Filipinos determined to
gain their independence. Britons and Americans tried to minimize the scope
of these conflicts. To the British, the rising was the Sepoy Mutiny, a label that
represented the struggle as undertaken only by a group of disgruntled Indian
soldiers engaged in a convulsive but minor act. The Americans called the
Philippines War an “insurrection,” suggesting that it was a revolt against an es-
tablished (American) government, though there existed in the islands no such
thing when the fighting began in February 1899. Both of these conflicts estab-
lished patterns of rule and instruments of colonial control that carried on for
decades following their conclusions. And, as wars do, both provoked the direct
engagement of Anglo-American and Asian bodies in ways that awakened and
heightened the senses on all sides, initiating British and American campaigns to
put Indian and Filipino senses right—in short, to bring civilization to people the
westerners judged belligerent, primitive, and unmannerly.
Chapters 3 through 7 treat in turn each one of the five senses. Considering the
senses separately prevents the jumbling together of perceptions that functioned
in some measure independently of each other: each sense had its own value and
valence in the pursuit of empire and its part in the quest to “civilize” Others. As
chapter 3 shows, by the early twentieth century Britons and Americans insisted
that sight was pre-eminent among the senses, and thus made it their first priority
to reveal their subjects and make legible their social, political, and economic
organization. As James Scott has argued, the state must “see” its constituents
before it can rule them effectively. British and American governance relied on
finding, counting, photographing, and making visually respectable their Indian
and Filipino subjects—or at least the ones who might someday assume the
responsibilities of governance themselves. The British and the Americans thus
initially created in these colonies administrative units that were visible to them
as rulers.23
Chapter 4 explores hearing, specifically efforts by the Anglo-Americans to re-
make the sonic environments of their possessions. Unnerved by the noise of the
street and the indecipherability of Indian and Filipino speech, imperial officials
sought first to get their subjects to quiet down—to cease their bell-ringing, cart-
clattering, their high-pitched singing or discordant playing of instruments, the
shouting of shopkeepers on market days—just as reformers back home were
attempting to do with unruly lower classes and ethnic and racial minorities. If
Int roduc tion 9
silence was seldom attainable, noise might be replaced by sound—that is, noise
tamed and civilized. The ultimate goal of the British and Americans, elusive as it
often seemed, was to educate some number of their elite subjects, training them
in job skills and manners, but most pointedly teaching them to speak English.
One could not know what an Indian soldier or a Filipino farmer was up to if
one could not understand his language. Even if it was too much to hope that
all Indians and Filipinos would learn English, if there were enough around who
could understand and converse with their rulers and translate for the rest of their
fellow citizens, it would make far easier the task of managing them all. Subjects
must be made audible as they were legible.
Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters concerned with the pursuit of public
health in India and the Philippines. Its concern is smell, perceptions of the odors
of others’ environments and bodies. When Britons and Americans arrived in
India and the Philippines, they described themselves as under assault by odor.
Some of the smells were pleasant, including flowers and the odors of the land at
sunset in the Rajasthan desert or Manila’s Luneta Park. Many more were nox-
ious, and westerners at first ascribed to them directly some of the illnesses they
suffered in the tropics. The land, they said, released miasmas, some of which were
foul-smelling, others insidiously odorless, all borne on breezes into undefended
noses. Westerners regarded bad smells as pathogenic. The perils were every-
where: marsh gases and the odors of hemp production, the smell of garbage or
human bodies burning, the stink of rotting food or dead animals. Most prevalent
and dangerous was human urine and especially excrement, left exposed and un-
treated in the open air or flowing in uncovered ditches and deposited in fields,
rivers, or cisterns. Even as European and American cities were initiating their
own sewage projects that carried human wastes underground and away from
civilized noses, the builders of empire undertook similar sanitation programs in
their imperial possessions. They attributed resistance to these plans to the stub-
born primitivism of the “natives.”
Touch—or rather, hapticity, the combination of touch (active) and feel
(passive), through the fingertips and the skin—is the subject of chapter 6. The
environments of the tropics felt wrong to the whites who entered them: the air
was heavy on their skins, the land uneven underfoot, the allegedly coarse skins
of the people who lived there rasped or oozed against their own on contact.
“Native” bodies, claimed the foreigners, seethed with disease. The advent of the
germ theory in the late nineteenth century came slowly. Yet over time, Britons
and Americans who had been sure that the environments they had entered in
Asia were pathological learned that mere inhalation of foul-smelling air would
not kill them, though it likely indicated the presence of deadly substances. The
pathogen itself was often a bacterium, and it could be absorbed only by direct
contact, through an orifice or the open skin of an infected person or by ingestion
of polluted food or water. Disease resided less in the land than in the people who
inhabited it. This led the British after 1857 and the Americans immediately on
their arrival in the Philippines to separate themselves as much as possible from
their subjects. They created cantonments, tried to isolate themselves in their
homes and offices, and went to hill stations when the weather turned uncom-
fortable. But they could never achieve full haptic isolation. They needed servants
and soldiers. They would not resist sexual contact with Indians and Filipinos.
Americans, and eventually the British too, realized that if they were in time to
remove the formal trappings of their power from their possessions they would
need to know their Asian counterparts haptically. To heal their illnesses they
must touch them. The British would shake the hands of Indian politicians. The
Americans would dance with Filipina women at the frequent bailes held in the
Americans’ honor. Again, revulsion and attraction characterized the sensory re-
lationship between Anglo-Americans and their subjects.
The final chapter concerns taste, more broadly the act of consuming food and
drink or the placing of substances in the mouth. Taste resides in the acculturated
tongue of the taster. Confronted in their Asian colonies with unfamiliar foods
and beverages, the British and Americans responded somewhat differently. The
British in early nineteenth-century India opened themselves to the tastes of
their new environment, often admitting that a diet of pulses and vegetables well
cooked and spiced was desirable. Only after the Great Rebellion did the British
grow suspicious of curry and rice. Like the treacherous sepoys, these foods
seemed to threaten their bodies, causing them to lose control of their bowels and
perhaps even poisoning them. They reverted to their own foods, imported from
home or other colonies—though in the end, despite themselves, they could not
fully jettison the flavors conjured by their Indian cooks. The first Americans,
soldiers who came by the thousands to the Philippines, brought with them a
suspicion of local practices, including foodways, and their rations were in any
case prescribed for them by the army. Over time, as necessity required and the
conflict abated, the Americans moved cautiously to consume Filipino food and
drink, finding, for instance, that mangoes were irresistible. In the end, it was the
sense of taste that proved most susceptible to synthesis, as Britons especially
but Americans increasingly conceded that local foods were fresher and carried
greater savor than imports from home.
The book concludes by contemplating the fate of these two imperia and the
role of the senses in their formal end. The British and Americans did not dis-
appear from India and the Philippines following independence but retained
influence in their former colonies. India (and Pakistan) became members of
the British Commonwealth, an association of Britain and most of its former
colonies that recognize the monarch and consult together on a range of affairs.
The United States kept large military bases in the Philippines and continued to
Int roduc tion 11
dominate trade with the islands. But power devolved unquestionably to Indians
and Filipinos. That it did was in part the result of a (reluctant) British and (some-
what less troubled) American recognition that elites in both nations had in some
measure accomplished the sensory tasks their rulers had set for them. Leading
Filipino men wore western clothes, and while this was not always the case in
India, where the nationalists donned homespun khadi (cotton cloth woven by
hand), at least most officials abjured Mohandas Gandhi’s costume of a dhoti
and a shirtless torso.24 Paving roads and building railroads made travel quieter
and smoother. Leaders in both nations spoke English, however accented, and
so could be comprehended and negotiated with. Smells had been suppressed if
not eliminated. Sewers were not ubiquitous, but the major cities had them, or
parts of the cities did, and closed latrines existed even in some of the villages.
Epidemic diseases such as cholera, smallpox, and malaria had declined in fre-
quency and lethality. And, if the Americans accepted rather than delighted in
Filipino cooking, the British embraced Indian food so much so that when they
left India, a number of them brought their cooks back to Britain or became fre-
quent diners at Indian restaurants there. In short, key Indians and Filipinos had
adapted to the sensory regimes brought to them by their imperial rulers and had
convinced their rulers to adapt to some extent to theirs. They no longer offended
so grievously the standards of respectable behavior on which westerners, with
no little hypocrisy, had insisted. They had become “civilized.”
This book represents a new way to think about sensory, imperial, compara-
tive, and international history. Its organization is something of a compromise
between competing interests. Dividing the book into chapters dedicated to
one sense at a time, for example, threatens the concept of intersensoriality,
or the notion that no one sense does its work alone. As any attempt to con-
sider the senses all at once, chapter by chapter, would have muddied the narra-
tive, the book considers the senses collectively at its beginning and end, and,
when relevant, includes the other senses in the intervening chapters that cover
principally only one. Related to this challenge is that of analyzing change over
time. It is hard to impose on empire’s halting history a taxonomy of phases that
explains in a linear fashion how matters evolved through time. A third chal-
lenge is the need to include in the analysis the sense perceptions not just those
of the imperial powers but of Indians and Filipinos, and to treat all sides of
their encounters with the balance they deserve. As often as possible, the book
gives sensory presence to Indians and Filipinos, despite the limitations of
the archival sources, and even if too often their words come through western
interlocutors. While acknowledging this challenge is hardly the same as
surmounting it, its recognition highlights how much work remains to be done
on the subaltern sensorium. Finally, analysis on this scale—trying to represent
the views of millions of Indians, Filipinos, Britons, and Americans—makes
it impossible to speak of single cultures. While the book generalizes, it nev-

ertheless distinguishes broadly among different constituencies in these four
countries on the basis of class, caste, race, gender, religion, and maturity. For
the most part, it focuses on the sensory culture of political elites. Britons
and Americans concentrated their civilizing efforts on those Indians and
Filipinos—the “enlightened” bhadralok and the ilustrados—for whom, what-
ever the westerners’ doubts concerning their potential, there seemed at least
some hope of achieving success.
The effort to “civilize” Indians and Filipinos by altering their sensory cultures
was unquestionably about the exertion of power, by states and their agents, and
about accommodation and resistance to it. The alleged dichotomy between cau-
sation and representation, and between culture and power, has been debated
for years by foreign relations historians and others. The discussion, in my view,
has gone the way of all attempts to posit binary oppositions in complex histor-
ical situations—that is, toward a reconciliation of perceived opposites, or the
idea, in this case, that culture inheres in power and cannot be abstracted from it.
Power was asserted, resisted, and transacted in thousands of encounters every
day in India and the Philippines. Agency was contested. Overhanging all of
these encounters stretched institutions of formal imperial authority: schools,
prisons, hospitals, military compounds; the office of the Bombay Municipal
Corporation; the leper colony established by the Americans on Culion Island
in the Philippines. These were sites of power, wherein women and men were to
be disciplined, altered, civilized. In all of them, the five senses of the parties were
engaged.
Some of the key concepts deployed here require clarification. First, the terms
“Selves” and “Others” are used to denote the perception that there were fun-
damental differences between Britons and Americans, on the one hand, and
Indians and Filipinos, on the other. Although it traffics in binary oppositions
without addressing complex historical circumstances, the descriptions of Selves
and Others remain useful, if only because they—the descriptions, not the
words—were frequently emphasized by men and women during the heyday of
empire. Whatever the differences Anglo-Americans were willing to acknowl-
edge among themselves, they were still (they claimed) more alike than different.
They were civilized. Real difference was Otherness, characterized by alleged ra-
cial inferiority, tropic-induced indolence, a dangerous sexuality (despite male
effeminacy), a penchant for violence, indifference to hygiene, and overall prim-
itiveness. Others lacked respect for bodies, their own and those of others, and
their manifest willingness to abuse and insult the senses made them uncivilized.
Selves project onto Others their own most shameful traits and fantasies residing
in the fraught categories of race, illness, and sexuality. When Selves made impe-
rial subjects of Others, seeking to control their bodies and behaviors, they were
Int roduc tion 13
in fact seeking self-control, a relief from their own anxiety.25 The historian Francis
Hutchins has written of “the Victorian predilection for ascribing to Indians pre-
cisely those traits which Victorians were taught to consider most reprehensible
in their own lives,” including savagery, lasciviousness, and childishness, and the
Americans to whom Rudyard Kipling addressed his poem “The White Man’s
Burden” in 1899 might have recognized themselves as “Half devil and half child,”
and felt themselves challenged “To search your manhood /Through all the
thankless years.”26
Another binary concept that is imprecise yet unavoidable is the use of the
words “West” (or “westerners”) and “East” to characterize Europeans and
Americans on one side and Asians on the other. These terms cannot actually
represent the actual positions of east and west on a spherical globe, and they are
also insidious in their assumption of Selfhood (the West) and Otherness (eve-
rywhere else). And yet these terms were used by these historical subjects fre-
quently enough that it would seem forced to avoid them altogether. So while
I do not accept their accuracy, they are occasionally a convenient shorthand.
Even worse is the term “native,” the use of which has become synonymous with
profound condescension. When used in the writings of agents of empire, and
quoted here, it therefore is placed it in quotation marks to highlight the period
in which it appeared.
In the end, this book finds its footing in the interstices of what many foreign
relations and imperial historians have long regarded as solid evidence. It concerns
perception, feeling, bodies in contact, that elusive concept called culture, and of
course the five senses. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it: “No matter
how much one trains one’s attention on the supposedly hard facts of social exist-
ence, who owns the means of production, who has the guns, the dossiers, or the
newspapers, the supposedly soft facts of that existence, what do people imagine
human life to be all about, how do they think one ought to live, what grounds
belief, legitimizes punishment, sustains hope, or accounts for loss, crowd in to
disturb simple pictures of might, desire, calculation, and interest. Everyone, eve-
rywhere and at all times, seems to live in a sense-suffused world. . . . One can
ignore such facts, obscure them, or pronounce them forceless. But they do not
thereby go away. Whatever the infirmities of the concept of ‘culture’ . . . there is
nothing for it but to persist in spite of them.”27 Above all, it was in the effort to
“civilize” the subjects of empire, and the subjects’ response to this effort, that we
find most fully on display what “people imagine human life to be all about.” The
various meanings of the civilization concept in the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries captured the full range of the human sensorium, and its discus-
sion will illustrate how the five senses shaped two empires over many decades.
Let us open our eyes, ears, noses, hands, and mouths to a new apprehension of
empire.
1
The Senses and Civilization

If to be white and respectable meant to acquire behaviors that
demanded restraint and civility, they also proscribed something else;
racial and class “lower orders” did not share the prescribed attributes.
Becoming adult and bourgeois meant distinguishing oneself from what
was uncivilized, lower-class, and non-European.
—Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire (2006)
Colonialism minus a civilizational mission is no colonialism at all.
—Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (1983)
When Britons came to India and Americans to the Philippines, they found all
of their senses engaged, or “assaulted,” as many of them said. The Britons’ ar-
rival, usually by ship into Bombay, was especially memorable. Even “before any
land could be seen,” recalled the British traveler Anne Bremner, “the hot air was
filled with the smell of spices, until we eventually arrived in Bombay, where the
thick aroma became part of the cacophony of noise from hordes of people, all
shouting, pushing, and spitting red betel nut.”1 Margery Hall, a self-described
“working girl from Birmingham” who arrived in 1938, wrote: “Bombay I re-
member well. It was the East’s first assault upon my senses, and my memories are
of heat, flies, noise, people, and horror of horrors the quayside, scarlet with blood
so I thought. This turned out only to be millions of spits, mingled with betel
nut.”2 “There is nothing in life that ever quite compares with the first discovery
of the East, the genuine, flamboyant, garish East,” concluded Major G. Horne.
“Thus in wonder we had feasted our eyes on the new sights and harkened to
the new sounds of that swirling colourful city half beautiful, half tawdry with
its crowded streets and green gardens with thousands of crows wheeling and
croaking above the trees and a railway station built very much like a cathedral
in the grand Victorian style. . . . Here was gathered a kaleidoscope of colourful
humanity . . . ; here also, amid the scents and sounds of browning chapattis and
bubbling ghi, were the charwalas, the vendors of pan and dealers of rice and
curries served on plates of banana leaves, the sellers of fruit and, as always, the
wailing procession of beggars and the scurrying, scavenging ‘pi’ or pariah dogs.”3
14
The Sens e s and Civ ili z ati on 15
Then out of Bombay most of them went: to outposts in the Rajasthan de-
sert, the mountains of the northwest, steamy Calcutta, the scrublands of Madras
State in the south. Anne Bremner visited the coast near Portuguese Goa, where
she encountered terrible roads that rattled her teeth, the distressing sight of men
wearing only loincloths and “women in grubby cotton saris,” and the “dreadful”
smells of fermenting coconut and “filleted fish . . . nailed or hung from the trees,
being dried for ‘Bombay duck,’ ” a local delicacy.4 Margery Hall followed her
husband throughout north India, and while she delighted in the hill station at
Simla—“the smell was of wood warmed by sun, pine and fir trees, spices, and
light hilly air, so still and quiet that sound was almost an intrusion”—she recalled
most vividly “the overwhelming heat of the plains in the hot weather; the strange
smells, the strange people, causing the odd panic in me, and worms for breakfast!
It was semolina porridge, and as I looked at it to add my sugar, I saw myriads
of little cooked worms. It could almost be called worm porridge.”5 There were
places in which the senses seemed to be intensified. For Mary Chenevix Trench,
it was the train north toward a posting in Gilgit, in the Himalayas: “It was hot
and dusty and every stop, night and day, rang with the yells of tea-boys and
food vendors on the platform, while people shouted and struggled to get onto
the train. By day I loved watching the people and the scenery and was suitably
shocked by the way the train stopped at intervals in the country side in order
that everyone (tho’ not of course us in the first class carriage which included
our own loo) might squat down in full view of us all. Meals were in a well ap-
pointed dining car but there is no doubt about it that English food in Indian
trains and hotels is, or was, very nasty indeed. Greasy fried or watery scrambled
eggs, stringy meat or chicken, bad vegetables and potatoes and no salads or raw
fruit.”6 Viola Bayley visited Hindu women in purdah, away from the presence of
men. There she found a baby “swaddled unbearably tightly [with] flies crawling
round its eyes. I was told later that it was against custom to wash a baby during
the first weeks. My nose could have apprised me of that fact! As I always found,
the women were very friendly and one had to submit to having one’s clothes fin-
gered and commented on. Perhaps it was just as well that one didn’t understand
the language as the comments were obviously very frank.”7 Erica Farquharson
and her husband attended a feast in their honor. “We were all garlanded and the
smell of marigolds and tuberose, and the scratchy tinsel round my neck had to
be endured and it was very hot,” she recalled. “My eyes grew heavy with the heat,
scent of flowers and glitter but we sat through it all and were polite until we could
go home without offending our kindly, noisy, excitable hosts.”8
The Indian bazaar was a particularly stimulating place, involving dazzling
visual shifts in “an unplanned bricolage of structures,” noise amounting to an
ever-changing “symphony of diverse pitches, volumes, and tones,” powerful
aromas, attractive and far less so, constant physical contact with others’ bodies,
and confrontation with an array of foodstuffs, at once enticing and repulsive.9

Deborah Dring found all her senses engaged in the market place: “Our parents
always thought we’d catch something if we went down to the bazaar. But my
brothers and I always looked upon the bazaar as being too exciting. All those
lovely stalls covered with sticky sweets and silver paper and piles of fruit and
those little flares they lit, the old boys sitting stitching clothes or boiling things
in huge dekshis. I’ll never forget the smell—partly a very strong spice, an incensy
smell—and all that heat and the movements and the people and the colour.
There was a little temple which had rows and rows of little brass bells all round.
If you were a good Hindu you jingled all the bells as you passed, and I remember
thinking, ‘Now that’s marvelous! If only I could go past and jingle a few bells.’
But . . . the bazaar was a forbidden land when I was a child.”10
There were fewer of these kinds of observations made by Americans in the
Philippines, of whom there were never as many as there were Britons in India,
and there were far fewer women, who were, as these accounts suggest, on the
whole more eloquent in their sensory reminiscences than were men.11 Yet the
Philippines was nevertheless a shock to Americans’ senses. Mary Fee came to
the islands to teach in the first decade of the twentieth century. She arrived
on the waterfront at Manila and took a horse-drawn cart, a carromato, into the
city: “The carromato wheels were iron-tired, and jolted . . . . We rattled up [the]
street.” They pulled up at a church, just at noon: “Instantly there burst out such
a clamor of bells as we had never before heard—big bells and little bells, brass
bells and broken bells—and brass bands lurking in unknown spots seemed to
be assisting. I do not know whether the Filipinos were originally fond of noise
or whether the Spaniards taught them to be so. At any rate, they both love it
equally well now.” Then, to lunch: “We entered a stone-flagged lower hall where
several shrouded carriages would have betrayed the use to which it was put had
not a stable odor first betrayed it . . . It was a bare, cheerless apartment, hot in the
unshaded light of a tropical noonday. The tables were not alluring. The waiters
were American negroes. A Filipino youth, dressed in a white suit, and wearing
his black hair in a pompadour, was beating out ‘rag time’ at a cracked piano.”
As for the food, “the vegetables were canned, the milk was canned, the butter
was canned.” Only the dessert was locally sourced—an “acid, flavorless banana
and . . . gummy, sticky [guava] jelly.”12
Like Deborah Dring, Grace Paulding found her senses fully engaged in the
market, in her case in Mindanao. It was, she wrote, “by far the most barbaric and
picturesque scene one could ever hope to look at. The dirt and smells were inde-
scribable but, once you got used to that, it was a sight worth seeing and probably
couldn’t be duplicated anywhere else on earth.”13 When they believed they had
effectively suppressed the movement for Philippine independence, American
officers undertook to improve the health of their soldiers and the Filipinos
whose bodies bore contagious diseases. They ordered a thorough examination

of all schoolchildren, including “a study of the condition of sight, hearing, and
examination for evidence of nasal obstruction, diseased tonsils, seriously de-
fective teeth, disorders of nutrition . . . for enlarged glands, skin diseases”—all
problems which threatened to prevent Filipinos from fully sensing their environ-
ment and the wishes of the Americans who now sought to control it.14 Children
were advised by the authors of a school textbook: “We need all our senses to
examine things. . . . These senses are all controlled from the brain, and we can
often, by use and attention, develop them, just as we can develop habits and train
our muscles. We must therefore be careful (1) to take good physical care of our
organs of sense; (2) not to dull our senses by alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, and
injurious drugs; and (3) to train and develop the senses by using them correctly
and for definite purposes.”15
British and American senses told them many things about their hosts. Indians
and Filipinos were, they thought, different from themselves, fundamentally
Other. Opinion was divided over why that was so—the nature of Asians? The na-
ture of all people of color? Their tropical environment?—but westerners believed
that Indians and Filipinos were an exotic people, set apart by their habits and
customs, the way they used their bodies, how they regarded and provoked the
five senses. Westerners felt, for example, that their subjects loved “display,” which
meant the visual ostentation associated with bright colors and exaggerated per-
formance, and that they also had a penchant for revealing too much of them-
selves. They made noise; they were boisterous, clamorous, excitable. Their felt
environment was harsh, irritating to the skin or, because of their snakes, insects,
and razor grass, a danger to western bodies—and yet their bodies, despite their
apparent filthiness and coarseness, were alluring and might be touched, even
penetrated. They reeked of stables and excrement and rotting fish; they were
also fragrant and “incensy” and smelled bracingly of pine and “bubbling ghi.”
Like Mary Fee’s banana, their food was “acid,” “flavorless,” “gummy”—and yet
so often more tempting than the watery eggs on trains in India or the canned
butter eaten by Americans in the Philippines. Frightening and attractive, dan-
gerous and beguiling, appalling and charming, confounders of expectation and
the ways of propriety and decency, Indians and Filipinos were, without question,
regarded by their uninvited British and American guests as uncivilized.
Civilization was a concept with broad currency in nineteenth and twentieth
century Europe and the United States. The word was used frequently in polit-
ical discourse. Britons and Americans regarded civilization as having started
with the Greeks and Romans, and saw themselves as its rightful heirs. When
medieval Europeans embarked on “wars of colonization and expansion,” ac-
cording to Norbert Elias, they made contact with “lesser” Others, pagans and
heretics representing barbarism. Fearful that as a result of these campaigns the
Catholic Church and “chivalrous society” were under threat, western Europeans
embraced the concept of civilité, “an expression and a symbol of a social forma-
tion” that would distinguish themselves, the anxious guardians of “the West,”
from the soulless, fetid hordes they encountered on the frontier. Elias dates the
rise of civilité to the 1530 publication of the treatise De civilitate morum puerilium
(On civility in children) by Desiderius Erasmus. The treatise was popular—Elias
finds 130 editions in a variety of languages—and it concerned “outward bodily
propriety,” manners, and the refinement of the senses and the sense organs.
Civilized people had good manners, and knew to avoid offending the senses. It
was particularly important not to disgust others. Erasmus insisted, for example,
on proper care of the nose and its contents. There should be no mucous showing
in the nostrils. Only peasants and sausage makers wiped their noses on their
clothing or their caps; civilized people blew their noses into a cloth. It was ac-
ceptable to blow with one’s fingers, but if the discharge hit the ground, “it must
be immediately trodden away with the foot.” Erasmus inspired others, among
them the seventeenth-century diplomat Antoine de Courtin, who advised: “You
should avoid yawning, blowing your nose, and spitting. If you are obliged to do
so in places that are kept clean, do it in your handkerchief . . . and do not look
into your handkerchief afterward.” Advice on decorum in seeing and smelling
came from the Florentine Enlightenment writer Giovanni Della Casa: “It does
not befit a modest, honorable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence
of other people; nor to do up his clothes afterward in their presence. . . . For the
same reason, it is not a refined habit, when coming across something disgusting
in the street, as sometimes happens, to turn at once to one’s companion and
point it out to him. It is far less proper to hold out the stinking thing for the
other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the
foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, ‘I should like to know how much
that stinks,’ where it would be better to say, ‘Because it stinks do not smell it’ ”—
though Della Casa has not yet reached the point of refusing to touch “the thing.”
Scrupulousness came also to the consumption of food. Civilized people washed
their hands before eating. “It is not very decorous to offer something half-eaten
to another,” wrote Erasmus, and “it shows little elegance to remove chewed food
from the mouth and put it back on the [platter]. If you cannot swallow a piece
of food, turn round discreetly and throw it somewhere.” Much later, in 1859,
an anonymous author prescribed the use of a fork, since to eat with the fingers
was “cannibal.” These and other manners would be invoked by the British and
Americans in their empires, where they observed, with alarm and disgust, their
violation by their allegedly uncivilized subjects.16
While the definition of civilization evolved in the years following the
Enlightenment, it retained that part of its meaning concerning manners and
thus the senses. In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), Edmund
Burke wrote of “our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are
connected with manners, and with civilization,” presumed by him to be in jeop-
ardy in France. John Stuart Mill pondered the matter in an 1840 essay: “Take for
instance the question how far mankind has gained by civilization. One observer
is forcibly struck by the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement
and diffusion of knowledge; the decay of superstition; the facilities of mutual
intercourse; the softening of manners; the decline of war and personal conflict;
the progressive limitation of the tyranny of the strong over the weak; the great
works accomplished throughout the globe by the co-operation of multitudes.”
Manners remained explicitly part of Mill’s definition. The attainment of “phys-
ical comforts” and “the decay of superstition” also demanded the removal of sen-
sory offense: a civilized hapticity required the comfort of, say, a soft bed, while
the kind of practice a Briton like Mill might have associated with superstition—
ingesting a strong-smelling substance to cure illness, perhaps—would have
seemed an affront to sight, taste, and smell.17
In the United States, the nineteenth-century definition of civilization hewed
close to that of the British. Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language,
published in 1841, led its entry with “the act of civilizing, or the state of being
civilized; the state of being refined in manners, from the grossness of savage life,
and improved in arts and learning.”18 The 1900 edition defined civilization as
“national culture” and “refinement,” and included the quotation from Burke
associating civilization with manners. Its definition of “civilize” began, “To re-
claim from, or cause to come out of, a savage or barbarous state; to instruct in
the rules and customs of civilization.” A copy of this edition was sent to William
Howard Taft, the first US Governor-General of the Philippines, in 1904.19
Ethnologist W. J. McGee suggested that the difference between Anglo-Saxons
and the “barbarous or semi-barbarous peoples of the world” had to do with
whites’ “sensitiveness to temperature, delicacy of touch and taste, [and] acute-
ness of vision and hearing.”20
Civilization was defined against an uncivilized Other so as to reassure the
Self of its own tenuously felt superiority. It was a process; transactional, not
static. These features made it a concept well suited to the many purposes of em-
pire at its genesis. Sir William Jones, who served as judge of the Supreme Court
in Calcutta during the late eighteenth century and was the first Briton to learn
Sanskrit, claimed that India had once been a great civilization, and that its his-
tory and language were therefore worth studying.21 James Mill, a political econo-
mist who worked for the East India Company for seventeen years, disagreed with
Jones. In his 1817 three-volume study The History of British India, Mill argued
that India’s civilization had never matched England’s. “Our ancestors,” he wrote,
“however . . . rough, were sincere, but, under the glossing exterior of the Hindu
lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy.” Muslims exhibited “the same
insincerity and perfidy; the same indifference to the feeling of others, the pros-
titution and venality.” Chapter 7 of Mill’s first volume was titled “Manners.” Its
subheadings included “Proneness to Adulation, Perjury, Inhospitality, Cruelty
and Ferocity, Timidity, Litigiousness, Proneness to Foul Language, Love of
Repose, Avarice.” Overall, Mill concluded, India was a “rude” nation, a natural
target for the British civilizing mission. With the publication of History, Mill
became the most important figure in the Anglicist school of Indology, which
challenged Jones’s more favorable “Orientalist” account of India’s past. The
book became required reading at Haileybury College, training ground for civil
servants of the East India Company.22
Even those who adopted James Mill’s corrosive view of Indian civilization
refused to consider hopeless the cause of reforming Indian society, or some por-
tion of it, someday. What historian John Darwin has called “liberal imperialism”
emerged to counter the pessimists, especially those discouraged by Mill’s insist-
ence on India’s backwardness. Despite the spiritual and moral drag of Hindu and
Muslim superstition, it might be possible, and it would be desirable, to create a
class of English-speaking Indians. John Stuart Mill, who (like his father) worked
for the East India Company, was a liberal imperialist. He condemned “barba-
rous” Indian practices, among them female infanticide, sati (the immolation of
widows), and “witchcraft,” yet felt that with the proper institutions India could
move ahead on the scale of civilization. He rejected the claim that Indians were
inherently depraved, by reason of race or climate, and he felt that England might
train an Indian “lettered class.” In 1875 Oxford professor Henry Maine, who had
served as legal adviser to the Viceroy in India, declared that India belonged to
that “very family of mankind to which we belong.” But institutions had “been
arrested in India at an early stage of development,” leaving the country “a bar-
barism” that nevertheless “contains a great part of our own civilisation, with its
elements as yet inseparate and not yet unfolded.”23 Efforts persisted to bring civ-
ilization to India.
In the late nineteenth-century United States, civilization, as historian Gail
Bederman notes, “was protean in its applications.”24 US officials invoked with
fervor the imagined need to carry it to the Philippines, as if it were a gift. In
January 1899, just after President William McKinley declared his intention to
annex the Philippines through “benevolent assimilation,” he told members of
the First Philippines Commission, appointed by him to govern the islands, that
“we accepted the Philippines from high duty in the interest of their inhabitants
and for humanity and civilization.”25 The Commission agreed, in its initial re-
port to the president: “The aim and object of the American Government, apart
from the fulfillment of the solemn obligations it has assumed toward the family
of nations by the acceptance of sovereignty over the Philippine Islands, is the
well being, the prosperity, and the happiness of the Philippine people and their
elevation and advancement to a position among the most civilized peoples of

the world.”26 McKinley took this message to the Midwest during the fall of 1899,
as he repeatedly invoked the desire of the United States to civilize its new pos-
session. As he put it to one audience: “Our flag in the Philippines still waves
there, and it waves not as the banner of imperialism, it waves not as the symbol
of oppression, but it waves as it waves here and everywhere, the flag of freedom,
of hope, of home, of civilization.”27 Little changed when Theodore Roosevelt
became president following McKinley’s assassination. In his annual message
to Congress in December 1904, Roosevelt said that the islands were “at pre-
sent . . . utterly incapable of existing in independence at all or of building up a
civilization of their own. I firmly believe that we can help them to rise higher
and higher in the scale of civilization and of capacity for self-government. . . .
The justification for our stay in the Philippines must ultimately rest chiefly upon
the good we are able to do in the islands.”28 There was disagreement among
officials in Manila and Washington about how long it might take to civilize the
Philippines, or just what that entailed. Some doubted that it was possible at all.
But “civilization” was the word used repeatedly by those concerned with this
American mission. Like Britons, the Americans believed themselves capable of
refashioning Asians, and they would not countenance the possibility that they
could not or should not do so.
The Elements of Civilization

By the early twentieth century the British and American concept of civiliza-
tion contained a number of constituent elements, all of them related to the
senses. One of these was religion. In imperial Great Britain and the United
States, civilized people were Christians of a certain sort. The Church of England
had explicitly rejected Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and Anglicans
remained suspicious and fearful that Catholics might try to subvert their reli-
gious practices. The Islam and especially the Hinduism they encountered in
India seemed even worse, though perhaps not so different from Catholicism,
in their strangeness. Americans were overwhelmingly Protestant. Many had
long suspected Catholics of seeking the eclipse of New World liberties through
the extension of papal authority to the Americas. They linked Irish and Italian
Catholic immigrants to criminality and depravity, and they fought wars with
Catholic Mexico and with Spain, accused by the United States of having com-
mitted church-sanctioned atrocities in Cuba. Hindus and Catholics appeared to
Britons and Catholics to Americans as foreign and dangerous, perhaps less be-
cause of the substance of their doctrines than of the vivid forms taken by their
rituals. Hindu and Catholic practices seemed to threaten their senses and their
bodies. Such Anglo-American fears underpinned the domestic sources of sen-

sory offense taken in their colonies.
British visitors to India were routinely horrified by the religious manifestations
they encountered there. They were suspicious of Sikh men, whose turbans
appeared to conceal something sinister; of Parsis, who exposed their dead to
carrion birds on Bombay’s Towers of Silence; and of Muslims’ alleged cruelty
and fanaticism—the Self ’s unsettling Other.29 Most disturbing were India’s
Hindus. In the seventeenth century, John Milton contrasted the “ ‘liberty’ and
civil life and worship of his countrymen with the abjectness of peoples who
were ‘stupified [sic] by the wicked arts of priests’ and ‘merely worship as gods
those demons they are unable to put to flight.’ ” Milton was describing Catholics,
but as historian Lawrence James observes, “he could have easily been referring
to Hindus as they were perceived by Britons” who later encountered them.30
William Carey, an itinerant preacher who arrived in Calcutta in 1793, was
appalled by what he witnessed there: “idols the very personification of sin . . . the
lecher Krishna and his concubine Radha . . . No Bibles, no sabbath, no God but a
log of wood, no saviour but the Ganges . . . no morality, for how should a people
be moral whose gods are monsters of vice, whose priests are their ringleaders
in crime . . . whose heaven is a brothel?”31 The “lecher Krishna,” “heaven is a
brothel”—Carey, and many other Britons, deplored the alleged licentiousness
of Hinduism. The nineteenth-century traveler Rosalie Roberts visited a Hindu
temple in South India. She found the outside “wonderful,” adorned with lights
that made it look like “a fairyland.” But the inside was “revolting. All the little
niches had idols where there had been sacrifices and the blood was spilt there.
There was the stench and the darkness, just the flickering light by the idols.” Her
senses affronted, she turned away in horror.32
As Britain confronted the implications of its formal control of India after
1858, a religious controversy arose at home that would come to intersect with
its imperial concerns. It involved the rise of Ritualism in the Church of England.
Ritualism represented for its adherents a corrective to the austerity of church
practices over the previous centuries. The color and excitement of the Christian
service had diminished, and the Ritualists hoped to restore them by energizing
once more “the six points of ritual observance: the eastward position at Holy
Communion, mixing water with wine in the chalice, the use of wafer bread,
lighted candles on the altar, vestments, and incense.” Ritualists defended the
restoration of these practices as consistent with Anglicanism. Their opponents
disagreed, claiming that Ritualism was Catholicism seeking to steal its way
back into the core of British religious life. Parishioners complained about the
re-emergence of ritual—“our light and beautiful highways are darkened and
to our English sense rendered loathsome and terrible by these associations of
the Inquisition,” said one—and were unhappy in particular with the return of
“incense much too profusely used, almost so as to render the procession at times
invisible.” Queen Victoria pronounced herself “shocked and grieved” that “the
higher classes and so many of the young clergy [were] tainted with this leaning
towards Rome!” The use of incense in Anglican churches was duly banned in
1868, and in 1874 Parliament passed the Public Worship Act, which forbade “any
alteration in or addition to the fabric, ornaments, or furniture” of a church and
deviations from the Book of Common Prayer. Ritualism nevertheless flourished
through the end of the nineteenth century. In 1874, 136 churches in England
and Wales had lighted candles and used vestments; eight years later, 581 used
candles and 336 vestments. By the 1890s, the rise of Ritualism had created a
crisis in the Church and led to the establishment of a Royal Commission on
Ecclesiastical Discipline.33
The Ritualist Controversy coincided with the establishment of the Raj and
thus increasing encounters by Britons with Hindu ritual. The “bells and smells”
of Catholicism corresponded closely to the sensory practices of Hindus. Men
called priests presided over both of these apostate faiths; both involved what
to Protestants was idol worship, the frequent tolling of bells, the bodily prox-
imity of worshippers to priests and to each other, and the heavy odor of incense.
At the height of the controversy, Lord Arthur Charles Hervey charged that the
ritualists “were as fanatical as the Indian mutineers,” a comparison that many
Anglicans would have found persuasive.34
The American Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent arrived in the
Philippines on August 24, 1902. Brent was to lead the newly established bish-
opric there; his mission was to proselytize for the true Christian faith and thus
assist American officials with their civilizing work. Days after his arrival, he re-
corded in his diary: “This is sure[:]‌the people who come to these islands must
do one of two things—be dragged down by the life here or elevate that life. If
they are not missionary they will deteriorate morally—Evil communications
corrupt good manners . . . or else good manners kill evil communications.”35 He
was outwardly confident in his own mission, certain that there was no tension
between secular and religious objectives, and convinced that his labors would
have wide ambit. As he put it, “never before in the history of colonization has
the avowed policy of the conquering country been so wholly unselfish. . . . We
have set an ideal before our nation and before the civilized world that will tend to
create a public conscience in every civilized nation which eventually will dom-
inate the colonial policy of other civilizations. We have taken a course that will
leave a deep impression on the life of man.”36 Brent traveled throughout the ar-
chipelago, often in the company of the US commissioners who governed the
islands, trying first to assess the religious life of Filipinos, then trying to alter
it as subtly yet surely as his position would allow. Brent believed he served two
populations: the first Catholics, who had been converted to the faith under
Spanish rule; the second the Muslim and “pagan” inhabitants of the mountains
and jungles, “savages” steeped in ignorance though not without redeeming char-
acteristics. Toward the Catholics Brent felt ambivalence. In a 1904 assessment,
he wrote: “Far be it from me to excuse, much less sympathize with, that encour-
agement of superstitious folly which Rome is guilty of. I am simply trying to say
that though it hinders it does not nullify her work for Christ.” Filipino Catholics
had renounced paganism and believed in the divinity of Christ. Yet there was
“grave moral laxity . . . under the shadow of the church and convents . . . in the
Philippines.” The Filipinos were by nature sensual and lazy, and the church had
done nothing to discourage their licentious behavior. Instead, it pandered to
their sensory excesses, which reflected its own. He despaired over the church-
sanctioned system of querida, whereby men would take multiple lovers, and it
was widely reported that Spanish priests had multiple mistresses too, and that
they raped Filipino women and men as they felt the urge. Most of all, Catholicism
encouraged Filipinos in their instinctive credulity. With the permission of the
priests, “they will kiss the hand of a tinsel-decked scamp who having smeared
himself with shoe-dressing announced himself as the ‘Black Christ’; they will
drink the foul bubblings of escaping sewage because someone has started the re-
port that it was a miraculous well; they will listen with reverence to the myth of
a wooden doll which, its priestly guardian affirms, takes periodical journeys of a
supernatural character—and so one could easily go on.” Along with the querida
system, these popular sensory superstitions had unhappy consequences. Brent’s
reference to “foul bubblings” concerned the “miracle of Antipolo,” in which
people became convinced that a broken sewer pipe was the fount of a miraculous
well with curative properties; instead, it contributed to the spread of cholera.
The man calling himself the “Black Christ” tricked residents by deceiving them
visually and demanded their loyalty by touch. In short, the church had betrayed
its parishioners by condoning the violation of their bodies.37
Brent felt happiest upcountry, among ethnic groups different from the
Spanish and Tagalog-speaking Catholics with whom Americans spent most of
their time. In early 1903, he spread the gospel among the Igorots in Bontoc.38
There were nearly two hundred thousand people in need of ministry, and as they
were devoid of “the vices of civilization,” the bishop had full scope to improve
them as human beings. They had already made a start. Local militia members had
“cut their hair” and donned “kahki [sic] clothing”; they were now “fine looking
fellows.” They were not ready to be baptized, but they asked Brent “to give them
new names, like Christians,” which would make it easier for the Americans to
identify them aurally.39 In June 1905 Brent sang the Eucharist and read scrip-
ture in Ilocano, then baptized dozens of evidently eager locals, altering at once
their auditory and tactile environments.40 Nearly twenty years later, Governor-
General Leonard Wood, eulogizing President Warren Harding, said he was
“confident” that the late president “felt that the two greatest blessings that have
ever come to the Philippine Islands are, first, Christianity, which was brought by
Spain, and with it came Western ideas of civilization, laws and methods of gov-
ernment. The second was the American flag.”41
Ideas about civilization and the senses were also gendered. Envisioning civ-
ilization and imagining how it was meant to sound were considered masculine
pursuits, requiring detachment, logic, and the ability to mobilize military and
civil resources on its behalf. Women had different sensory roles to play. To them
were reserved the still vital civilizing tasks linked to those senses regarded by
late nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans as lesser—smell, touch, and
taste—and then in the domestic sphere alone.42 Men would make empires and
plan how they should look and sound, in accordance with their definition of
civilization. Women were charged with softening imperial subjects and their
environments, teaching manners of the sitting room, the dining room, the
kitchen, and the toilet. These tasks were in fact not always so easy to catego-
rize and distinguish from each other, just as the senses worked in concert. And
they were complicated and challenged by subjects who defied the clumsy binary
thinking about gender that westerners brought from home.
The officials who launched empires were male. They made war in India and
the Philippines in order to eliminate the alleged enemies of progress. Thereafter,
the first requirement of governance was seeing—making legible—the state’s
subjects and their lands. Its second requirement was quieting noise and the
babble of languages and educating subjects in the importance of well spoken,
reasoned discourse, preferably in English. Women had a role to play in this task as
teachers, though it was too much to expect them to impose discipline on unruly
boys and men. There were roles for women in the home, in the realms of smell,
touch, and taste, reputed to be keener senses in women. Detection of odors and
interpretation of their meanings, the feel through delicate skin of the humid or
smooth or harsh, the ability to cook and taste or manage a kitchen—in these
ways women were to be particularly alert to the process of civilizing the empire.
It would not be easy. In India, historian Margaret Macmillan has written, “the
memsahibs struggled to keep Britain alive. . . . The struggle was absurd but there
was a sort of heroism in it. They planted English flowers in their gardens and the
heat withered them. They covered their furniture with chintz and the white ants
chewed their way through. They got patterns for their clothes from Home but
the native tailor somehow altered them subtly. They served English food even
though half of it had to come out of tins. In a supreme gesture of defiance they re-
served the hottest time of the day—between twelve and two—for receiving calls
from gentlemen.”43 As for the Philippines, “American women in Manila largely
set standards,” according to writer Stanley Karnow. “Like the British memsahibs
of India, they were determined to preserve their code of conduct in a foreign
land.” This proved difficult too, as it seemed to require them to avoid contact
with Filipinos altogether, even those of high social class.44 Empire’s men worked
outside the home. The offensive or dangerous odor of garbage or excrement re-
quired sanitary projects that only men could undertake. A rough road demanded
male engineering; treating illness was left finally to the sight, hearing, and touch
of male physicians. The job of imperial women was the olfactory, haptic, and
gustatory refinement of subjects in domestic spaces.
There were two problems with the expectation that Anglo-American
women would civilize the domestic and men the public spaces of empire.
First, the tropical environment was thought to wear especially hard on western
women, indoors or out. Discourse had it that white women were more sen-
sitive to heat and other extremes of weather, more fearful of contact with
the people and the animals found in Asia, and more inclined to have strong
emotional reactions to the unpredictability and hazards of life generally in an
Asian culture. The eighteenth-century author John Clark claimed that in the
tropics, women’s “lively bloom and ruddy complexions” were “soon converted
into a languid paleness; they become supine and enervated, and suffer many
circumstances, peculiar to the sex, from mere heat of climate and relaxation of
the system,” a view that endured well into the twentieth century.45 American
soldiers who had hoped their wives would join them in the Philippines nearly
always changed their minds because of the perceived dangers of life in the
islands.46 Civilization could not be effected by women compromised by the
harshness of life in the tropics, or by women who were because of it deterred
from coming out at all. The second problem with the sensory division of labor
in these empires was that Indian and Filipino subjects had different gender
preferences and identities than did their occupiers. Women resisted the gaze
and touch of a male doctor, especially if he was a foreigner. Indian and Filipino
men did not behave with the same masculine affect that heterosexual white
men demanded of themselves and others. British and American men fre-
quently derogated the masculinity of Indian (particularly Hindu) and Filipino
(mainly Tagalog) men. Hindus seemed to Britons soft, cowardly, and effemi-
nate in their movements and behaviors.47 In 1914 the cavalry subaltern Robert
Baden-Powell wrote to his mother: “I like my native servants, but as a rule
niggers seem to me cringing villains. As you ride or walk along the middle of
the road every cart or carriage has to get out of your way, and every native as
he passes you, gives a salute. . . . If you meet a man in the road and tell him to
dust your boots, he does it.”48 Americans regarded the Filipinos with whom
they worked as emotional rather than reasonable, inclined to crow in victory
and sulk in loss, given to sudden anger and off-putting giddiness, and bound
to others “less for their convictions than for their affections,” as historian
Theodore Friend observed.49 These were hardly suitable subjects for self-rule.
Another element of the Anglo-American sensory definition of civilization

concerned the maturity of cultures and peoples. Britons and Americans granted
that India and the Philippines had long histories, even if (they felt) not very dis-
tinguished ones. On one hand, the buildings, infrastructure, and the land itself in
these places were ancient, decrepit, rotted by age; on the other, the people who
inhabited the two countries were fundamentally immature—small of stature,
callow, gullible, and emotional. The lack of civilization in both countries had
left their people underdeveloped, unable either to fashion or cope with modern
societies. Indians and Filipinos, in short, resembled children and were thus un-
ready to govern themselves.
They exhibited their supposed immaturity in a variety of ways. Like children,
Asians lacked control of their sphincters, for how else could one explain the
profusion of public excreta that disgusted and alarmed the Anglo-Americans?
Indians and Filipinos seemed sanguine at the sight and smell of shit, much as
children were, they were boisterous and loud, and the pulses and porridges they
ate seemed to westerners better suited for toothless babies than civilized adults.
Like children, Indians and Filipinos (claimed their rulers) lacked a sense of time,
being always late for appointments and unable to stick to schedules. Indians and
Filipinos were alleged to be naïve, petulant, poor with numbers and deficient
in linear thinking overall, and quarrelsome among themselves and with their
imperial masters. In India, the British allowed themselves to believe for a time
that Indians would maintain for them the sort of fidelity that children gave their
parents. They took satisfaction in being called by their subalterns “ma-baap,” the
Urdu term meaning “mother” or “parent.”50 The Great Rebellion of 1857–1858
thus seemed to Britons a betrayal of the most basic sort of trust, but it reinforced
the idea that Indians were immature—indeed so much so that they were in-
capable of sustaining any sense of fidelity. The author of a manual for Britons
bound for India advised her readers that servants “must be treated like children,
kindly but very firmly.” This was because “their brains are not properly devel-
oped and they cannot always see things in the same light as we do.”51 The same,
the Americans thought, was true of Filipinos. Edith Moses’s servants would not
stay on task. “The Filipinos,” she concluded, “are like children and love to do
everything but the thing they are set to do.”52 Bishop Brent was taken aback by
the abiding immaturity of Filipinos—“perennial children,” he called them—and
Governor Taft regarded “the child-like character of the people” as disqualifying
them for self-rule anytime soon.53
The ascription of immaturity to subjects was an imperial construct. Clear au-
thority and a firm grip were necessary to govern an Indian—“as incapable as a
child of understanding what authority means,” wrote Kipling—and Filipinos,
“babies of the jungle,” as the New York Times put it in 1899.54 Civilization was
for adults; to imagine that children were civilized was absurd. Tutelage was a
necessary responsibility of civilized people attempting to guide and control the

uncivilized.55
So too did self-declared civilized people in the late nineteenth century un-
derstand that the refinement of the senses was a necessary predicate for elevated
class standing. Men and women of culture, of the better classes, respected their
bodies and those of others. They were well dressed and smelled clean (which
often meant the use of overpowering perfumes and colognes), spoke in well-
modulated voices and avoided raucousness and noise, had smooth, light skins
and wore refined garments, and ate carefully prepared foods in a mannerly way.
The lower classes did none of these things, or did none of them well.56 The
higher orders avoided bodily trespass and thus sensory violation or the spread
of disease. American public health nurse Ellen La Motte claimed that “the mil-
lionaire, the professional man, and the bank clerk’ might . . . learn . . . what they
needed to know to protect others from consumption,” while “the day laborer,
the shop girl, the drunken negro belong to a class which, by reason of the very
conditions which constitute it a class, is unable to make use of what it learns.”57
“That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell,” wrote George Orwell.58
By the nineteenth century, according to western elites, “disease, minimal
amounts of dry grooming, and unwashed rags and underlinen meant that the
bodies of the poorest smelled intensely, with strong animal odors, compared
to the washed or scented population. The very poorest,” writes author Virginia
Smith, “were sometimes described by fearful people as ‘savages,’ ‘brutes,’ or ‘ani-
mals’—traditional terms describing those beyond the boundaries of society, the
untouchables, the impure.”59
These were terms assigned to the lower classes by way of categories that were
also racial, and conferred as well on imperial subjects by the representatives of
empire. What described the poor in Britain and the United States also described
the vast majority of Indians and Filipinos; here again, note the domestic then for-
eign application of sensory stereotyping. All had failed to achieve the sort of sen-
sory refinement necessary for their inclusion among the ranks of the civilized.
“So long it took me,” recalled Iris Macfarlane, an Englishwoman in India, “to
shake off my . . . assumptions that the lower classes and the coloured races didn’t
‘feel’ things the same way, having simple nervous systems, like lobsters.”60 The
language used by social reformers to describe the residents of urban slums in
London and New York was the same as that used by those who encountered
lower-class or -caste subjects in the colonies. It was exoticizing language, useful
to those who spoke it as a way of classifying their subjects and making them
legible, or of simplifying that which challenged or bewildered or frightened
them. The British and the Americans regarded especially the poorest of their
imperial charges, including beggars, for instance, as lesser men and women, and
consigned them to the lowest places in the sensorium. They smelled bad. They
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Zátonyiban sem hiányzanak a jól eltalált vonások. Nem új typus a
magyar színpadon, de érdekesen megújított. Zátonyi egy nemes
család gyermeke, a kinek már atyja adósságokból élt s a ki nem
örökölt tőle mást, mint a kényelem megszokását, úri vágyakat és
munkátlanságot. Szegény, de élvezni született frivol és cynikus s
mindenre kész, a miből élvet vagy hasznot huzhat, csak attól
őrizkedik, hogy ne jöjjön a büntetőtörvénynyel összeütközésbe s a
világ előtt megóvja külső becsületét. Néha a jobb érzés felszólal
benne, de sophismákkal altatja el. Szeme mindent meglát, agya
termékeny tervekben, ajka mindent kigunyol. Eszes, emberismerő és
humoros hajlamu, a mi enyhiti romlottságát. Azonban úgy hiszszük,
hogy Irénnel szemben sokkal több cynismust mutat, mint a mennyi
czéljával összhangzik. Az sem igen bizonyít átható esze mellett,
hogy Timót hajlama Irén iránt oly nyaktörő vállalatra ragadja, holott
együgyü barátját más uton talán biztosabban kifoszthatná. Hogy a
vállalatra hajdani nejével szövetkezik, a kit erkölcsileg és anyagilag
megcsalt, nem épen nagy emberismeretre mutat. Eben is különös
teremtmény, hogy minden biztosíték nélkül oly könnyen hisz annak,
a ki őt oly rútul megcsalta Általában Elza jellemrajza nem sikerült.
Szövetsége és árulása, ármánya és megtérése egyaránt erőltetett.
Nincs semmi benne a mi aesthetikailag érdeket kelthetne. Bágyadt,
élettelen alak, a ki csak színpadi csinyekre alkalmas. De ha mind
elhiszszük is azt, a mit Zátonyi három felvonásban tervez és tesz,
mert egy s más, ha nem erősen is, de mégis támogatja, utolsó
felvonásbeli jelenetein lehetetlen meg nem ütköznünk, mert nem
folynak se körülményekből, se jelleméből s minden alap nélküliek. A
mű a harmadik felvonásban, mint dráma bevégződött. Mihelyt Irén
megtudta, hogy Kamilla nem anyja s oda hagyta férjét, mihelyt a per
megindult, a tanuk vallottak. Zátonyi ármánya megbukott s a csomó
meg van oldva. Az utolsó felvonásban többé nincs valódi drámai
élet, csak mesterkélt, melyet a szerző holmi képtelenségekkel
igyekszik előidézni. El akarja hitetni velünk a következőket: először,
hogy Irén semmit sem tud erről, hogy nevében válópert indítottak,
másodszor, hogy Zátonyi semmit sem tud arról, hogy a tanúk,
különösen Kamilla ellene vallottak s ezért föllép kényszeríteni Irént a
Timóttal kötendő házasságra, mert csak ez esetben válik el tőle, s
nem juttatja anyját börtönbe. Irén megtörve ingadozni kezd. De
hogyan hihessük el mindezt? Hiszen Zátonyinak tudnia kell a per
folyamáról, ha mint alperes már megidéztetett, Irént pedig még azon
esetben is, ha tudta nélkül indították meg a válópert, a mi
képtelenség, tíz nap alatt Mosolygó és Darvas csak
megnyugtathatták és felvilágosíthatták arról, hogy Zátonyi már
semmit sem tehet ellene s házasságát, mint erőszakoltat az ő
beleegyezése nélkül is megsemmisítik. Azt nem tagadhatni, hogy az
utolsó felvonás is sok ügyességgel van irva. Tartunk tőle, hogy
Csikyt mind inkább erősbülő technikai készsége inkább a színpadi,
mint a drámai hatás felé ragadja, bár ez a tömeget is csak ideig-
óráig elégíti ki, a gondolkozót pedig soha. Mind két fél tapsa nyujtja a
drámairónak az örökzöld koszorút.
Mosolygó és Timót az életből szerencsésen kikapott alakok.
Mosolygó rajza legjobb az egész műben. A silentiumra itélt ügyvéd
nehány biztos vonással oly elevenen emelkedik ki, hogy egy perczig
sem kétkedhetünk benne. Nincs rajta semmi nyoma a fáradságnak,
mesterkélésnek, a mi a többi személyeken többé-kevésbbé
észrevehető. A becstelenség és becsület, a lágy érzés és durva
gúny, a megnyugvás és elégületlenség, a gyöngédség és komiszság
művészien olvadnak össze benne egész sajátságos
beszédmodoráig. Ily biztosan és önmérséklőn még nem rajzolt
Csiky, épen azért kár, hogy az utolsó felvonásban egy kis szinpadi
hatásra számított ötlet kedvéért megzavarja rajzának összhangját.
Ugyan miért növeli Mosolygó tiz éves inaskáját, Gáspárt, nemcsak
asszonygyülölőnek, hanem szemtelennek is. Ez az egész izetlen
tréfa nem foly Mosolygó jelleméből, s magában sem mulatságos. A
mi Timót jellemrajzát illeti, abban inkább az elemek jók, mint
összeolvasztásuk, inkább az alapvonások sikerültek, mint az
árnyalat. A meggazdagodott s kissé már éltes falusi gazda jó hazafi,
de korlátolt eszü, becsületes, de a nagy világban járatlan, jó szivű,
de egy kissé hiú a nélkül, hogy maga is tudná. A fővárosba jó elverni
vagyonát s képmutatók és csalók kezébe kerül. Parlagi
hazafiságának inkább ki kellett volna emelkedni még pedig oly
módon, hogy ez ébreszsze föl áldozatkészségét az özvegy és
szerelmét Irén iránt. Az, hogy egy vértanu özvegyének tesz jót s egy
vértanu leányát veszi nőül, egyaránt táplálta volna hiúságát, hazafias
és szerelmi érzelmeit s több jellemzetességet és komikai színezetet
adott volna az egész alaknak. Egyűgyűségét a világ dolgaiban talán
azzal lehetett volna enyhíteni, hogy itt-ott több észt tanusítson
abban, a mihez ért.
Bankó s a többi mellékszemélyek obligát színpadi álorczák. A két
szerelmes főbb személyről, Darvasról és Irénről sem sok jót
mondhatunk. Nemes szívű erényes személyek, de unalmasak és
gyámoltalanok. Nagy baj, a mikor a költő meg akarja szerettetni az
erényt és megunatja. Irénben nagyon sok a jóság, de igen kevés az
aesthetikai báj. Darvasnak bár lenne valami hibája csak ne volna oly
gyámoltalan, ne emlegetné oly keservesen, hogy nem tud megélni s
tenne egyebet is, mint azt, hogy Irén válóperében allegál, a mit,
ügyvéd lévén, bizonyára idegennek is megtenne. Úgy látszik, hogy
nemes szivök nemcsak tetterejöket bénítja meg, hanem megfigyelő
tehetségöket is. Irén az álözvegy házában úgy nő föl mint valami
kolostorban, semmit sem tud a világról s nem ismeri környezetét.
Darvas jár a házhoz, de nem tudja, kikkel van dolga. Ármánykodik
ellenök az egész világ, ők csak szenvednek és sirnak. Jó volna az
erény ártatlanul szenvedő és tétlen hőseit és hősnőit Iflandnak és
Kotzebuenak hagynunk, habár az ujabb franczia drámairók néha
elkölcsönzik is tőlök. A németektől és francziáktól valami jobbat is
tanulhatni.
A dráma czimére nézve sem nyomhatunk el egy megjegyzést. A
proletár a nép oly osztályát jelenti, a melynek nincs vagyona, biztos
keresete, csak gyermekei. Szerző nem ilyeket rajzol, hanem
szédelgőket, csalókat, a kik nem vagyonosak ugyan, de azért elég
úri módon élnek. Ezeket legföljebb úri proletároknak lehetne
nevezni. Midőn a színlapot olvastuk, azt hittük, hogy a mű a
proletárság kérdését vette tárgyul s ime egy más nemü társadalmi
kép tárult elönkbe, egy oly kép, a melyben a gonosz emberek
eszesek és ügyesek, a jók pedig együgyűek vagy gyámoltalanok.
Vajon a magyar társadalom rajza-e ez? Bizonyára egy regény vagy
dráma ritkán rajzolhatja az egész társadalmat s legfeljebb egyik vagy
másik oldalát mutathatja be. De nekünk úgy tetszik, hogy Csiky e
szempontból is egy kissé egyoldalúan fogta föl a magyar
társadalmat s igen is rikitó szinekkel festett. Azonban nem egy hirlap
épen ezt szerette benne s mintegy kárörömmel kiáltott föl: Ime
corrumpált társadalmunk. Egész divat már állami és társadalmi
corruptiónkat diadallal hirdetni, ott is megtalálni, a hol nincs s a hol
van, oly nagynak festeni, hogy okos ember el nem hiheti. Hiu és nem
épen lelkiismeretes hirlapírók, a kik a tehetséget és tudományt
szenvedélylyel hiszik pótolhatni, ezzel akarják magokra vonni a
tömeg figyelmét s felizgatni szenvedélyeit. Őrizze meg drámairóinkat
jó szellemök attól, hogy ily vezérczikkekből merítsék lelkesülésöket.
Kövessék az élet és saját keblök sugallatát.
1881
A PHILOSOPHUS.
Irta Bessenyei György. Föleleveníttetett a Nemzeti Szinházban 1881 augusztus
11-én.
Ime egy száz évesnél régibb vigjáték, Bessenyei György műve, a

kitől a legujabb kori irodalmunkat számítjuk. Különös tüneménynek
látszik, hogy elhanyatlott irodalmunkat néhány dráma éleszti föl oly
korban, midőn szinészeink és szinházaink még nem voltak. De
mégis mi se volt természetesebb, mint az, hogy a huszonnyolcz
éves testőr, kinek szivét erös nemzeti érzés dobogtatta s lelkét
egészen elbájolta a franczia irodalom, irói pályáját drámákkal
kezdette meg.
Egy szabolcsmegyei faluból Bécsbe kerülve, csakhamar
fájdalmasan érezte maga ás hazája elmaradottságát. Mivelte magát
idegen nyelveken, de erős meggőződésévé vált, hogy az egész
nemzet csak anyanyelvében lehet mívelt. Mint akkor az egész világ,
ő is leginkább a franczia irodalmat kedvelte, melynek mindenha a
dráma volt egyik legfőbb dicsősége. Akkor már Coneille-t, Racine-t
és Molière-t Voltaire váltotta ugyan föl, de azért a franczia dráma
uralkodott egész Európán. Voltaire némi ujításaival s a kor szellemét
lehelő eszméivel uj életet öntött a hanyatló franczia drámába s mint
nagy drámairót ünnepelték. Bessenyei leginkább az ő hatása alatt
állott, általában ifju lelkére mély benyomást tett a franczia tragédia:
eltelt az eszmék és érzések fenköltségével, bámulta stilje szónoki
erejét, megkisérlette utánzását, vagy a mint maga mondja, meg
akarta mutatni, hogy magyar nyelven is lehet elég erővel,
mélységgel és méltósággal írni. Nem a szinpadnak írt, nem a néző,
hanem az olvasóközönség lebegett előtte. Azt hitte, hogy ha őt
elragadták példányai, mint olvasmányok, úgy fognak hatni utánzatai
is, Nem csalódott; a siker uj drámai kisérletekre buzdította, majd
megszólaltatta nyelvünkön a franczia tanköltészetet is: a költői
levelet, satirát, és tankölteményt; és különösen lelkesült tolmácsa
volt kisebb és nagyobb munkáiban a franczia szellem új philosophiai
eszméinek. Senki sem volt irodalmunkban, a ki a XVIII. század
franczia irodalmát oly hévvel oly sok oldalról fogta volna fel s oly
élénken tudta volna visszatükrözni. Hanem kénytelen oly korán
magányba temetkezve, mintegy elszakadni az irodalomtól; ha
tehetsége szabad fejlődését nem akadályozza a censura: nemcsak
azt teszi, a mit tett, tudniillik, hogy föléleszti irodalmunkat, hanem
maradandóbb művekkel is gazdagitja vagy legalább mérsékli
egyoldalúságát.
Első művével, Agis tragédiával, 1772-ben lépett föl, a melyet
követtek még ugyanazon évben Hunyadi László, a következőben
Buda tragédiái, majd 1777-ben A philosophus vígjátéka, 1779 ben A
hármas vitézek tragédiája Voltaire után, és végre Laisz vígjátéka,
mely azonban csak ezelőtt egy pár évvel adatott ki. Mind e művek
korukban nagy hatást tettek. A csekélyre olvadt közönséget, mely
anyanyelvén évek óta leginkább csak naptárt, imádságos könyvet és
egyházi beszédet olvashatott, meglepték ez egész uj nemű könyvek.
Bécsben nehány lelkes testőrtársa követte példáját, egy egész kis
társaság képződött körüle, benn a hazában pedig egy pár eddig
titkon dolgozó író kilépett magányából, kikhez ujabbak csalatkoztak s
irodalmunk kezdett fölzsendülni. De Bessenyei drámái csak uj
irodalmunk, de nem egyszersmind drámairodalmunk alapját vetették
meg. Ő tulajdonkép nem volt drámaírói tehetség s drámáival nem is
czélzott egyebet, mint hogy uj gondolatokat és érzéseket fejezzen ki
a köznapinál emelkedettebb nyelven. Minden, a mi drámában fő,
mellékes volt előtte. Keveset gondolt a drámai cselekvénynyel és
jellemfejlesztéssel, megelégedett bizonyos helyzetek- és
szenvedélyekkel, melyek alkalmat szolgáltatnak ömledezésre,
szónoklatra és elmélkedésre. Jól nevezi személyeit beszélő
személyeknek: valóban többet beszélnek, mint cselekesznek.
Azonban tévedés azt hinni, mint némelyek hiszik, hogy a franczia
klasszikai dráma iskolája nyomta el benne a drámaírót. Ez iskola
szükségtelen korlátokat is állít ugyan föl, de nem nyomja el a
drámaírót, példa reá Corneille, Racine és Molière. De különben is
Bessenyei nem volt föltétlen híve a franczia classzikai dráma
szabályainak. Az idő és hely egységét nem tartja meg minden
művében, s meri azt is, a mit a classikai drámaíró nem mert,
tudniillik, hogy nemzete történelméből vesz tárgyat. Tehetsége épen
oly kevéssé ösztönözte a valódi tragédiára, mint czélja. Ő csak
olvasmányt akar nyujtani nemzetének, mely fölemelje lelkét s
gondolathoz és illő kifejezéshez szoktassa. «Úgy hiszem – mondja
Agis előszavában, hogy egy tragédiában, mint minden egyéb
irásokban, legjobb törvény az igaz ságnak, emberi indulatoknak
természetes fölfedezések, továbbá minden mesterség abban áll,
hogy a beszélők illendőképen beszéljenek.» Ime a dráma neki épen
csak külső forma, egy neme a párbeszédnek, s czélja szerinte nem
más, mint minden irodalmi műnek, hogy igazat mondjon,
természetesen érezzen, s illőkép beszéljen. Bessenyei e czélját el is
érte. Drámáiban fölemelte olvasói lelkét, a szabadság- és igazságért
elvérzett hősök gondolataihoz és érzéseihez, kifejezte eszméit a
társadalom-, államról és emberről a ujkor szellemében és
egyszersmind példát adott, hogyan kell kiemelni lassanként
nyelvünket az idegenes tarkaság- és bőbeszédű laposságból.
Hirdette, hogy a gondolatnak kell szülni a szót és rímet s nem
megfordítva. Épen azért a négy sorú és rímű Sándorverset kettőre
szállította le, mert a négy rím áradozásra csábítja a költőt, még ha
Zrínyi is.
E tragédiák közül egyik sem került szinpadra. Midőn 1790-ben
megalakult az első szintársulat s mindent elkövetett, hogy a forditott
s átdolgozott művek mellett egy pár eredetit is játszhassék, a
Bessenyei tragédiáihoz nem mert nyulni, annyira nem volt bennök
szerep s oly kevés hatást lehetett remélni csekély bonyodalmuktól.
Azonban a A philosophus vígjátéka 1792 jun. 4-én Budán, – a mint a
színlap mondja – a hid mellett levő nyári játékszinben, előadatott és
hatással, 9-én ismételték s később Pontyi czím alatt Pesten is
többször.30) Bessenyei e vígjátékát 1777-ben írta s ugyanazon
évben adta ki Pesten. Laczka János, barátja, a ki, halála után, rövid
életrajzát írta meg, így ír a mű keletkezéséről: «Eddig többnyire
philosophusi darabokat és szomorújátékokat írt a mi Bessenyeink:
most már segédje és barátja is levén a háznál (tudniillik Laczka),
arról tanakodott, ha lehetne-e és mi módon a hazai nyelven eredeti
vígjátékot, komédiát dolgozni. Hamar meglett az elszánás, elkészült
a planum és a Philosophus czímű játékdarab, melyet közönségesen
egy abban nevezetes rollt játszó személyről Pontyinak is hivnak,
megszületett. Tegyen itéletet erről a darabról a ki olvassa: ennek a
biographiának írója, minthogy magának is benne nagy része volt,
abba nem avatkozik: elég szerencsésnek tartja magát, hogy azt
néhány esztendőkkel ezelőtt a pesti magyar játszó társaság által
ugyanott Pesten eljátszattatni láthatta.31)
E helyből kiindulva, Bessenyei egyik életrajzírója azt következteti,
hogy Laczka befolyt volna e vígjáték terve előleges megbeszélésébe
és megállapításába.32) De vajon Debreczenből épen 1777-ben följött
ifjú, a milyen Laczka volt, a kit Bessenyei akkor kezdett a német és
franczia nyelvre tanítani s a ki azért a dramaturgiában nem lehetett
igen jártas, adhatott-e tanácsot egy már gyakorlott írónak? Azt
hisszük, hogy nem, s ha Laczka mégis Bessenyei dolgozótársának
mondja magát, azt csak arra érthetni, hogy segített neki abban, a
miben jártasabb volt nála, tudniillik, hogy Pontyi falusias
beszédéhez, különösen Pontyi tiszttartója parlagi, s ügyvéde diákos
leveléhez szolgáltatott kifejezéseket. S ezt az a körülmény is
valószínűvé teszi, hogy Bessenyei akkor, a midőn e vígjátékot írta,
már húsz év óta Bécsben lakott s elhomályosodhattak emlékében az
ily jellemző kifejezések. Egy másik életrajzírója33) b. Orczy Lőrincz
sugalmazásának tulajdonítja Pontyi alakját, mert benne s az egész
vígjátékban az Orczyéhoz hasonló irányt vél fölfedezni, az arany
középszer magasztalását, a túlfinom és túldurva elem ellentétét,
hogy mindkettő helytelen oldala annál inkább kitünjék. Azonban ily
irányt bajos fölfedezni Orczy költeményeiben, melyek mindig a falusi
életet, a nép egyszerü erkölcseit dicsérik szemben a városi élettel s
a nagy urak szokásaival, sőt még magával a tudományos haladással
is. S ha Bessenyei Pontyiban kigúnyolja is a parlagi magyart, a
többiben épen nem teszi a finom életet nevetségessé.
Egy szóval se Laczka, se Orczy nem volt sugalmazója, hanem
volt Destouches L’homme singulier czímű vígjátéka, a mint azt Petz
Gedeon nem rég alaposan kimutatta.34) Az alapeszme, a
cselekvény és jellemzés néhány fővonása onnan van véve, bár némi
eltéréssel. De merített Bessenyei önmagából s a magyar társadalom
akkori viszonyaiból is. Ő maga Parmenio, a ki Rosseau hatása alatt
philosophál s legfeljebb csak abban különbözik tőle, hogy a mint
előszavában mondja – a házasságra nem tökélheti el magát. A többi
férfi személy: Titius, Lilisz, az ő barátjai, művelt lelkű, nemes szívű
férfiak, a kikben legfeljebb csak azt hibáztatja, hogy egy kissé
kapnak a divatos öltözeten. Szidalisz, Berenisz, Angyelika szép,
elmés, érzelmes nők, az ő barátnői, a kiket tisztel és szeret s a
kikben ifjúsága emlékei ujulnak meg. Pontyi rokonai csak
szomszédai egyike lehet, a kiknek körében töltötte Szabolcsban
gyermekségét, első ifjúságát, a kikre felférne egy kis műveltség, s a
kikhez ő is hasonló lesz, ha tovább is otthon marad. A Parmenio
szolgájában, Lidásban, a ki Markalfon é a Nyul-historián táplálkozik
és Kónyit tartja legnagyobb magyar költőnek, mintegy a nagy
közönséget akarta megszemélyesíteni, a ki még nem emelkedett az
uj irodalom színvonaláig. Íme a benyomások, a melyek alatt
keletkezett e mű, az elemek, melyeknek vegyüléke. Bessenyei egy
mívelt magyar társaságot akart a közönség elé varázsolni, s hirdetni,
hogy a műveltség nemesíti szivünket, emeli boldogságunkat, Pontyi
és Lidás ellentétes alakjait is szintén csak azért rajzolja, hogy ez
eszmét annál élénkebben kifejezze. Magában a mű előszavában is
czéloz ilyesmire, midőn azt mondja, hogy nincs dicsőségesebb
dolog, mintha az ifjú nemes erkölcscsel és arany elmével bír. Az
egész vígjátékon nemes ábránd és boldog optimismus ömlik el,
mintha a műveltség megszüntetné az ész és szív tévedéseit, s
kiegyenlítené a szenvedélyek és érdekek összeütközéseit. Itt
mindenki jó és nemes, legföljebb egy kis szeretetreméltó
gyöngesége van, mindenki küzdelem nélkül ér czélt és szenvedés
nélkül lesz boldog.
Ily fölfogással, ily hangulattal bajos a legegyszerűbb cselekvényt
is megalkotni. S valóban a Philosophusnak a szó szoros értelmében
nincs is cselekvénye. A bonyodalom oly csekély, hogy alig
mondhatni annak. Parmenio únja a hiú és léha mulatságot, szeret
magába vonulni; a nőket tiszteli ugyan, de nem igen kedveli vagy
hogy saját szavaival éljünk, okoskodásai miatt nem lelheti bennök
tárgyát. Tulajdonkép nem hiszi, hogy szívre és szellemre magához
hasonlót találjon. Huga, Angyelika, nógatja, hogy keressen és találni
fog, de Parmenio megmarad könyvei és magánya mellett. Szidalisz
hasonló lelki állapotban van. Ki nem állhatja a férfiak hizelkedéseit;
neki nem rab, hanem férj kell, férfiú, a ki őt inkább belső
tulajdonságaiért, mint külső tekintetböl szeresse. Anyja Eresztra,
hiába aggódik miatta, hiába inti őt: Szidalisz hű marad elveihez. A
két bölcselkedő rokonszellem találkozik egymással, megszereti
egymást, de egyik sem mer a másiknak nyilt vallomást tenni, végre
Angyelika észre veszi bátyja változását, szerelmes levelet irat vele
Szidalisznak, a ki azt viszonozza s csakhamar egybekelnek.
Ime a megoldás bonyodalom nélkül. A komikai alapeszme, mely
kölcsönzés Destouchestől, igen jó, két bölcselkedő elme, a kiken
erőt vesz a szív, két szeretni nem akaró szív, a kik mégis szeretni
kénytelenek. De hol a küzdelem, s az abból folyó bonyodalom, a
tulajdonképi drámai érdek? Sehol. Sem külső, sem belső akadály
nincs, a melyeket le kellene győzniök. Küzdelmük csak annyi, hogy
szégyenlik bevallani szerelmöket. De Angyelika, a ki összehozta
őket, könnyen segít rajtok. S valóban az egész műben ez az
egyetlen cselekvő személy. A többiek általában nem folynak be a
főcselekvénybe, sőt mellékcselekvényök sincs, mert Angyelika és
Lilisz rövid pörpatvarát nem lehet annak venni. Berenisz és Titius
pedig első jelenettől fogva utolsóig zavartalanul szeretik egymást.
Eresztra, az anya csak int, csillapít, és áldázkodik. Pontyi, a ki annyit
jár-kel és beszél, senki törekvésének nem vet gátot, senki czélját
nem mozdítja elő és saját magának más czélja nincs, mint ujságot
mondani, másoktól vett leveleit felolvasni s megjegyzéseket tenni
dolgokra és személyekre. A két cseléd, Lucinda és Lidás, a spanyol
graciosok módjára, köznapias józan eszökkell és csekély
míveltségökkel mintegy gúnyos ellentétei ugyan uraik
föllengzésének, mulatságos alakok is, de nem cselekvők.
Bizonyára atyáink nem a bonyodalmat tapsolták meg e műben,
hanem az irányt, a szellemet, a szabatos és élénk jellemrajzot s a
párbeszédek kellemét, a mely korán jóval túlemelkedik. Valóban
Bessenyei vígjátékában a jellemzés sokkal természetesebb és
élénkebb, mint tragédiáiban. Parmenio mintegy typusza a kor
legmíveltebb magyar embereinek, a kiket a XVIII-ik századi franczia
philosophia eszményi oldalai lelkesítenek, de kételyei is
háborgatnak. Ő csak ennyiben philosophus s épen nem szobatudós,
a ki rendszeren töri fejét és könyvet ír. Magasabb, philosophiai
szempontból fogja fel az életet; mélyebben gondolkozik és érez mint
mások, a mi komolylyá, s egy kissé szomorúvá teszi. Nemeslekű, de
a búskomorság némi árnyával, heves szenvedélyű, de önmérséklő,
félénk, a ki nem ismeri a női szivet s nem hisz a szerelmi
boldogságban. Komolysága visszariad a tréfás és gondtalan
beszédtől, még Pontyival sem igen gúnyolódik, de felderül, ha
Angyelika hugát látja s midőn ismerni tanulja Szidaliszt, szerelme
erőt vesz rajta, zavara, önuralma, csendes határozottsága s végre
boldogsága, mely nem annyira szenvedélyes kitörésben mint inkább
mély értelmű és érzelmű szavakban nyilatkozik. Mind találó vonások
és jól vegyített szinek. Szidalisz komolysága nem annyira
bölcselkedéséből foly, mint inkább női méltósága érzetéből; mert
büszke, megveti a hizelgést és bókot: mert szép és gazdag, azt
hiszi, hogy nem benső érdemeiért szeretik; elhagyatva érzi magát
segy nagy szív után sóvárog. Barátnői víg kedvét, boldog szerelmét
lenézi és mégis irigyelni látszik. De azért nem válik kesernyéssé, sőt
komolyságába sok gyöngédség vegyül, különösen anyja iránt.
Szerelme ébredésekor őszinteségét szemérme mérsékli s midőn
szeretve is érzi magát, heves fölindulása boldog enyelgéssé lágyul.
Mindez jellemző és sikerült rajz, de legsikerültebb a mű női
alakjai közt Angyelika, lehet talán azért is, hogy legcselekvőbb. E
beszédes és nyughatatlan leány épen ellentéte Szidalisznak, de
azért nem kevésbbé nemes szívű és eszes. Vidámságában némi
naiv kaczérság vegyül ugyan, de ez még kedvesebbé teszi. Hiven
szereti Liliszt, de óhajt az egész világtól szerettetni s mindenkihez
részvéttel fordul. Nemcsak földeríti környezetét, hanem okosságával
vezeti is. Mindent fölfog, mindent belát, de bölcseségét elmésségbe
és tréfába burkolja. Mint az ily természetek, mindenkivel szeret
ingerkedni, de mindig megtartja az illem korlátait. Kedvesét
szerelemből néha megkinozza, megbünteti, de úgy, hogy szerelmét
még inkább kimutassa iránta. A harmadik nő Berenisz, mintegy
közép helyet foglal el Szidalisz és Angyelika közt, épen mint
kedvese, Titius, Lilisz és Parmenio közt. Ez ifjú csoporthoz jól
sorakozik egy agg nő, Eresztra, a kinek házában foly le az egész
cselekvény s a ki türelmével és tapintatával uralkodik környezetén.
E személyek mindnyájan a fölsőbb komikum képviselői, míg
Pontyi, Lucinda és Lidás inkább az az alsóbbéi, a nélkül, hogy
kirínának a mű hangulatából. Pontyi gazdag nemes, de míveletlen,
bár szeret egy kis tudákosságot szenvelegni. Nem olvas hirlapot,
kocsisa s a vándor görög kereskedők látják el politikai hírekkel,
melyeket örömest mond el másoknak, megjegyzésekkel, kisérve. Jó
gazdának tartja magát, de inkább csak parancsolgatni szeret, mint
utána látni a dolognak. Szeret pörölni, ősiségi pöröket folytat, nyegle
és tudákos ügyvédeket kedvel, a kik megcsalják. Örömest beszél a
maga s más családja geneologiájáról s el-elérzékenyül, ha egy
megholt atyafiáról van szó, kiről azt hiszi, hogy valaha megsértette.
De nincs minden természetes ész és elmésség nélkül s néha
találóan gúnyolja ki a míveltség és divat ferdeségeit, épen mint a
peleskei nótárius. Ez alak, melyet nagy tetszéssel fogadott a
közönség, mint egy ősatyja a magyar vígjáték későbbi ifju és vén
nyers magyar nemeseinek, Kisfaludy Károly Mokánya, Gaal Baczur
más alakok ugyan, de az anyag, eszme ugyanaz: a nyers magyar,
az elmaradottság képviselője, szemben a mívelt társasággal s a
haladó korral. Ama két levélben, melyeket Pontyi tisztartója és
ügyvéde irnak, Bessenyei a kor csökönyös magyarságának stiljét
akarta kigúnyolni; a tisztartó levelében a parlagi magyarságot, az
ügyvédében a latinnal tarkázott beszédet, melyet értekezéseiben is
ostoroz. Később Kisfaludy Károly Perföldyében e latinos beszédet
egy egész jellemrajzzá dolgozta föl. Valóban Bessenyei inkább
Pontyi alakjával hatott a magyar vígjáték fejlődésére, míg
tragédiáinak semmi nyoma nem maradt drámai törekvéseinken.
Lidász utánozza urát, ő is philosophus akar lenni, csak hogy
Lucinda hamar kigyógyítja őt, hamarább mint Szidalisz Parmeniót.
Azonban a szolga olvasmányai nem a franczia philosophok, hanem
Markalf, A nyul historiája, Álmos könyv, Trója veszedelme stb. czímű
könyvek. Kónyi János verseiből tanul érzelegni és szerelmet vallani.
Bessenyei itt kora népszerű olvasmányára czéloz s ugyanazt a
gondolatot fejezi ki komikailag, a mit Magyar Néző-jében
komolyan.35) Ott is előszámlálja az említett könyveket, idéz is
belőlök, s így kiált fel: «Itéljétek meg már, hogy micsoda szép versek
lehetnek az előszámlált könyvekben, melyeket több olyakkal
hazánkban árulnak, vesznek és nyomtatnak. Tegyük hozzá ezekhez
a mai magyarságot, hadd tessék ki a különbség.»
Ha valakinek, bizonyára Bessenyeinek volt joga kikelni kora
népszerű olvasmányai ellen tartalom és forma tekintetében
egyaránt. Senkinek nem volt akkor több eszméje, mint neki, senki
sem írt több izléssel és tisztább magyarsággal, mint ő. Vígjátékának
párbeszédei is bizonyságot tehetnek erről. Épen úgy kerüi a köznapi
magyarságot, mind a latinos keveréket. Nyelvtanilag nem elég
szabatos ugyan, például az ik-telen igéket néha bihariasan ik-es
módon ragozza, de nem egy helytt könnyed, fordulatos s néha ki
tudja fejezni az újkori társalgás finomságait is. E tekintetben egész
Kisfaludy Károlyig egyetlen drámaírónk se közelítette meg, nemhogy
fölülmulta volna. Nem ok nélkül elevenítette föl színpad és irodalom
rég elfeledett vígjátékát. Nem tehet ugyan elég hatást már
cselekvényhiánya miatt is, de kegyeletet érdemel, mint első
figyelemreméltó kisérlet a magyar vígjáték terén. E mellett némi
tanulság is rejlik benne. Nem méltán kérdhetjük-e: vajon száz év
mulva a magyar vígjáték társalgási nyelve, párbeszéde csín,
fordulatosság és műgond tekintetében, haladott-e annyit, a mennyit
Bessenyei kezdeménye után várhattunk? Vajon nem ártana-e néha
a fensőbb komikum fölé törekednünk s a szenvedélyek és viszonyok
köznapiságából valamivel magasabb légkörbe emelkednünk, mint
azt Bessenyei tette a miénknél sokkal nyomasztóbb viszonyok
között.
MÁTYÁS KIRÁLY VAGY A NÉP
SZERETETE JÁMBOR FEJEDELMEK

JUTALMA
Nemzeti érzékenyjáték három felvonásban. Irta: Szentjóbi Szabó László, azon
alkalmatosságra, midőn Ferencz Buda várában 1792 junius 6-án magyar királylyá
koronáztatott. Föleleveníttetett a Nemzeti Színházban 1881 augusztus 12-én.
A magyar történelem drámai földolgozása egyidős

színészetünkkel, sőt már iskolai drámáinkban is megtaláljuk
előzményét. II. József németesítő iránya és ujításai anyanyelve
művelésére és ősi alkotmánya védelmére buzdítván a magyart,
élénkebb kegyelettel fordult dicső multja és nagy emlékei felé is.
Költőink epikai lelkesedésöket és hazafi vágyaikat öntötték drámai
formába, melyet idegen költőkből igyekeztek elsajátítani. Dugonics
András és Szentjóbi Szabó László, Katona József és Kisfaludy
Károly, Vörösmarty Mihály és Szigligeti Edvárd egymást váltották föl,
mint történelmi drámánk fejlődésének legkiválóbb képviselői.
Mindnyájan a hazafiság érzéséből s az ősi dicsőség kegyeletéből
merítették ugyan lelkesedésöket s nem egy pontban találkoznak is,
de mégis elválasztják őket nemcsak tehetségök külömbségei,
hanem azon hatások is, melyet a külföld drámairodalma tett reájok.
Eleinte a német lovagdrámák és Kotzebue történelmi és néem
történelmi színmővei hatása alatt írnak drámaíróink, sőt néha nem
tesznek egyebet, mint egy-egy magyar mondát vagy történelmi
eseményt alkalmaznak valamely német lovagdráma leleményéhez.
Előttök inkább a tárgy a fő, mint a tárgyalás, a hazafi erények
dicsőitése, mint a szenvedély festése, némi történelmi rajz, mint a
drámai cselekvény, a jelenre hatást, mint a kor hű képe. Első
drámáiban maga Katona is a német lovagregények és érzékeny
drámák hatása alatt állott, de csakhamar Shaksepeare kezdette
lelkesíteni; történelmi rajz helyett drámai szerkezetre törekszik,
érzékeny dráma helyett valódi tragédiát ír, kort és szenvedélyt
mesterin ecsetelve, de nem talál fogékonyságra s még kevésbbé
követőkre. Kisfaludy Károly folytatja a hagyományos irányt, de több
izlés-, tehetség- és eredetiséggel; drámaibb s művészibb és
szélesebb körü hatás látszik rajta: Schiller, a német romantikusok,
sőt Shaksepeare is. Utolsó történelmi drámájában, Csákban,
Shakespearenek az angol történelemből vett drámái, úgynevezett
históriái, lebegnek szeme előtt s a német romantikusok elméletét
látszik elfogadni, a mely szerint a történelmi dráma ikertestvére az
éposznak. Vörösmarty történelmi drámáiban egészen ez iránynak
hódol, mig Szigligeti a franczia romantika hatása alatt kezdi
feldolgozni a magyar történelmet.
Szentjóbi Mátyás királya mintegy tisztult typusa a magyar
kezdetleges történelmi drámának s annyival érdekesebb, mert e
korból kevés történelmi dráma maradt reánk nyomtatásban. Az
előadott színművek rikán nyomattak ki s maig is a színházak
könyvtárában lappanganak vagy nyom nélkül elvesztek, mint a
Vitkovicséi. Szentjóbi huszonöt éves volt, midőn ez első drámáját
megírta és huszonnyolcz éves korában már meghalt. Rövid életének
gyér adatait, Horvát István közlése szerint, Toldy jegyezte föl a
Magyar költészet kézikönyvé-ben.36)
Biharmegyében Ottományban született 1767-ben, helvét
hitvallásu szülőktől; Debreczenben folytatta tanulását s ott végezte a
hittudományt is, mert lelkész akart lenni.
Azonban megváltoztatta szándékát; II. József alatt szabadabb tér
nyilt a protestánsoknak s 1786-ban Szentjóbi is kineveztetett az
úgynevezett nemzeti iskolák egyik tanítójává Nagy-Váradra, majd
1790-ben a rhetorika tanárává a nagybányai gymnasiumhoz. A
lelkes ifju korán kezdett foglalkozni a költészettel s élénk részt vett
föléledt irodalmunk erősbülő mozgalmaiban. Hogy buzgó magyar író
létére hivatalt vállalt II-ik József alatt, azon oly kevéssé lehet
csodálkozni, mint azon, hogy Kazinczy is elvállalta a kassai
kerületben a nemzeti iskolák felügyelőségét. Akkor nem az volt a
kérdés, hogy magyar vagy német legyen a közoktatás és igazgatás
nyelve, hanem az, hogy latin-e vagy német. Ha már a kettő között
kellett választani, nem egy újkori szellemű magyar író inkább hajlott
a némethez, mint a latinhoz, mert azt hitte, hogy ez az európai
műveltséget inkább terjeszti, s az alatt a fejlődő magyar irodalom
kiművelvén a magyar nyelvet, az könnyebben elfoglalhatja a német,
mint a latin helyét.
Szentjóbi az irodalom terén is követte Kazinczy példáját. Előbb
ugyan (1787) a Magyar Musában lépett föl, de már a következő
évben a Kazinczy Magyar Museumát majd Orpheusát gazdagította
jeles költeményeivel és prózai dolgozataival. Ő, Kazinczy és Dayka
voltak az akkori új magyar lyra képviselői, a kik a német irodalom
befolyása alatt, kiemelkedve a leiró és elmélkedő költészet békóiból,
a tiszta lyra felé törtek utat. Dayka hévben, Kazinczy
formaszépségben felülmulják ugyan, de némi naiv érzés- és
szeszélyben nem vetekedhetnek vele. E mellett Szentjóbiban egy kis
komikai ér is lappangott. Az Együgyü paraszt czímű víg költői
beszélykéje maig is föntartotta magát irodalmunkban s korában
páratlan volt. Prózai dolgozatai: egy pár idyll, műfordítmány s Első
Mária magyar királyné czímű történelmi elbeszélése mindjárt a
Kazinczy, Kármán prózai művei után következnek. Költeményei
annyira tetszettek, hogy 1790-ben merhette összegyűjtésöket;
gyűjteménye összesen négy kiadást ért az utolsót Toldy eszközölte,
mely egyszersmind mgaában foglalja prózai munkáit is.37)
Az 1790-ik év más tekintetben is fordulópont volt életében. Alig
foglalta el nagybányai tanári állomását, már oda kellett azt hagynia,
mert II. József halála után a protestáns tanárok a katholikus állami
iskolákból elbocsáttattak. Szentjóbi törvénytudományra adta magát
és Pestre jött. Itt megismerkedett a nevezetesebb magyar írókkal.
Kazinczyt és Bacsányit már régebben ismerte, most ezekhez
Verseghy és Koppi járultak,38) sőt Hajnóczy és Szentmarjai is,
kiknek befolyása reá végzetessé vált. Úgy látszik, hogy az itt
megszületett magyar szinészet is hatással volt reá. A drámai pályán
még nem tett kisérletet, csak Gellertnek A pántlika czímű egy
felvonásos pásztori játékát fordította le, mely költeményei
gyűjteményében meg is jelent. Most egy történelmi drámára
lelkesítette őt részint az alkalom, I. Ferencz közelgő koronázása,
részint a vágy, hogy kifejezhesse hazafiúi eszméit és érzéseit. Így
írta 1792 tavaszán néhány hét alatt Mátyás királyát, melyet még
azon évben ki is nyomatott.39)
Fölléptekor Dugonics volt a magyar történelmi dráma képviselője.
Drámává átdolgozott regényei és eredetileg a színpad számára írt
drámái tetszésben részesültek; mert hazafiságra, nemzeti önérzetre
s az ősi hagyomány tiszteletére buzditották a közönséget. Szentjóbi
is ily hangulattal irta drámáját, de legalább egy fokkal feljebb
igyekezett emelni a magyar történelmi dráma szinvonalát. Dudonics
a drámai bonyodalmat a legtöbbször idegen költőből vette át s ritkán
érintette multunk valóban nagy emlékeit: Szentjóbi mindent a
történelemből merít s a Hunyadiak korát leplezi föl. Dugonics inkább
törekszik cselekvényre és szenvedélyfestésre, de nincs hozzá ereje:
Szentjóbi nem becsüli túl erejét s némi egyenletes szinvonalon
marad. Dugonics izlése műveletlen, nyelve nyers s majdnem a
pórias felé hajlik: Szentjóbi az újabb irodalom szülötte, a Kazinczy
tanitványa s ha nyelve nem drámai is, azért izléses, hangzatos és
szónokiasan emelkedett. E mellett a hazafi eszmék és érzések
tekintetében is van köztök különbség. Dugonics a nemzeti
visszahatás képviselője szemben József reformjaival, együtt érez a
papság és nemesség nagy többségével s épen azért nem hajlik a
szabadelvű eszmék felé: Szentjóbi is osztozik a visszahatásban, de
csak annyiban, a mennyiben nemzeti; különben épen nem
conservativ s hive a szabadelvű eszméknek. Dynastikus érzelmű, de
nem a régi módon, megérzik rajta a franczia forradalom fuvallata. II.
József halálára sírverset ír és szabadelvűségéért nagyobbnak
mondja századánál; Mirabeau halálát megénekli s a Mai világ czímű
költeményében pedig ostorozza azokat, a kiket önző magánérdek
vezet s a közérdek- és szabadságért lelkesedik.
I. Mátyás és I. Ferencz trónralépet között alig van hasonlatosság;
amaz választás, emez örökösödés útján jutott trónjához, amaz egy
dicső magyar család, emez egy európai dynastia sarjadéka.
Azonban Szentjóbi mégis talált, Mátyást atyja érdemei emelték
trónra; Ferencz atyja, II. Lipót, szintén nagy érdemű fejedelem, a ki
visszaállitotta a magyar alkotmányt, barátja volt a haladásnak, ezért
fiának épen oly örömest nyújtja a magyar nemzet koronáját, mint
Mátyásnak, de megvárja tőle törvényei tiszteletét s jóléte és
dicsősége emelését. Ez alapeszme sugalja a dráma alakjait.
Szentjóbi az ifjú Mátyásban a magyar király eszményét akarta
fölmutatni a szintén ifjú Ferencz királynak s környezetében a
dynastikus, de alkotmányához ragaszgodó magyar nemzet:
Szilágyiban és társaiban a hazafias aristocratiát, Vitézben az
alkotmányos papságot, Erzsébetben a fenkölt lelkű és erélyes
magyar nőt s a Hunyadi-házhoz ragaszkodó vitézekben a hű és
hálás magyar népet.
A párbeszédekben egyenes vonatkozások is találhatók minderre.
Midőn Vitéz Ujlakynak és Lindvaynak Mátyást ajánlva (I. f. 6. j.) így
szól: «Egy ilyen jól indult fából nem várhatunk-e méltán áldást, a ki
magát már most is oly gazdagon mutatja, életének tavaszában a
legszebb termést, nyárra és őszre a legjobb izű gyümölcsöket igéri…
Legyetek az ő bölcs baráti, és hamikor oztán valamely nemes
cselekedetet véghez viszen, a haza bajain könnyebbít, minden korba
és állapotba levőket boldog megelégedéssel eltölt, a haza javát
állandóul megerősítette, az országnak méltó fényességet szerzett,
akkor érezzétek azon kimondhatatlan édes örömöt, mely csak egy
nemes kevélységből származhatik: ezt a gondolatot én adtam neki
ebben az én tanácsomat követte, ezen dolognak véghez vitelében
én is vele együtt segítettem s azon háladatos örömkönnyei a
hazának, melyeket a maga tulajdon boldogságán, jó királyának
emberi szeretettel teljes uralkodásán hullat, én reám is szinte úgy
háramlanak»: mindezt maga a költő mondja bennök I. Ferenczben
és tanácsosaiban vetett reményét fejezi ki. Erzsébet e felkiátásai (I.
f. 5. j.): «Hevesek ugyan az én hazámfiai, de valósággal jószivűek, a
kik hazájokat igazán és szivesen szeretik. Csak szelid hangon, jó
kivánó lélekkel mondd meg nekik az igazságot: soha sem vetik
meg». Majd hátrább (III. felv. 1. j.): «Oh nem akkor vethetné le a
magyar igazán természetét, ha a kényszerítés és erőszakoskodás
többet tenne rajta mint a jóság és a bizodalommal való bánás.
Esmerem én az ő szíveket, örömest visznek annak végbe mindent, a
ki az ő kész akaratjokat szelid meggyőzés által tudja megnyerni,
csak a kényszerítést nem szenvedhetik»: czélzások II. József
korára, a kényuralom rendeleteire. Sőt a költő tudva nem átall
anachronismust is elkövetni, csak hogy kifejezhesse a nemzet
közérzületét. «Válaszd Buda várát lakóhelyedül» – szól Gara
Mátyáshoz (III. f. 5. j.) – «építsd meg ennek romladozott kőfalait és
ékesitsd meg hajlékait» stb. Vajon uralkodása kezdetén hol lakhatott
volna másutt Mátyás, mint Budán, midőn Bécset csak évtizedek
mulva foglalta el? Szentjóbi nem a XV-ik, hanem a XVIII-ik század
Budájára gondolt, mely rég óta nem látott már királyt s nem tudta
visszanyerni régi fényét.
A szónoklattal megelégedő hazafias irány nem kivánta meg, az
ünnepélyes alkalom pedig épen kizárta az erős drámai
összeütközést. De valamivel több cselekvényt nemcsak megtűr,
hanem megiván az alkalmi drámai mű is. Szentjóbi műve
cselekvényében az események nem annyira egymásból, egymásra
hatva folynak, mint inkább csak egymás után. Két összeütközés van
benne, de egyik sem alkot bonyodalmat s mindenik csak hamar
elsimul, kibékül. Mindjárt az első felvonásban Gara és Ujlaky
akadályozni akarják Mátyásnak királylyá választását, de Vitéz,
Szilágyi és Erzsébet igéretei, rábeszélései s a nép zajongása
kicsikarják tőlök a beleegyezést. Erzsébet ugyan felajánlja nekik fia
megpróbáltatását is, tudniillik, hogy puhatolják ki titkon: hogyan
dolgozik Mátyás testvére haláláról, boszut akar-e állani érte rajtok s
ha bosszuállónak találják, rekesszék ki örökre a királyi székből.
Ezzel akarja a költő fentartani a drámai érdeket, de csaknem
bizonyosan tudjuk már, hogy Mátyás anyja óhajtása szerint fogja
magát viselni, de ha máskép viselné is, lehetne-e már
megsemmisíteni a királyválasztást? Ebből hát nem fejlődik semmi,
hanem a helyett egy más: a második összeütközés áll elő.
Podiebrád nem akarja kiadni Mátyást, mert megigérte azt a magyar
koronára vágyó lengyel királynak s fél haragjától, de Erzsébet
szintén háborúval fenyegeti. Erre megijed, mert ha ily erélyesek a
magyar asszonyok, milyenek lehetnek a férfiak. Azonban megtudva,

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Empires of the Senses: Bodily

Encounters in Imperial India and the

(Dis)Connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan

Perceptual Learning: The Flexibility of the Senses

Publishing Romance Fiction in the Philippines (Elements

The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India,

Philanthropy and the Development of Modern India: In

Shopping and the Senses, 1800-1970 Serena Dyer

France, Britain And The United States In The Twentieth

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Introduction: Embodied Empires 1

1. The Senses and Civilization 14

2. Fighting: War and Empire’s Onset 47

3. Governing: Subjects and States Envisioned 86

4. Educating: New Soundscapes 131

5. Sanitizing: The Campaigns Against Odor 160

6. Touching, Feeling, and Healing: Hapticity and the Hazards

7. Nourishing: Imperial Foodways 233

Conclusion: The Senses at Empire’s End 264

Chota Nagpur B U R M A States

Poona HYDERABAD Y BURMA

mutual impressions of the agents of imperialism and their subjects, and in so

governed as federal structures, meaning that provincial or local control was by

it impossible to speak of single cultures. While the book generalizes, it nev-

The Senses and Civilization

and confrontation with an array of foodstuffs, at once enticing and repulsive.9

whose bodies bore contagious diseases. They ordered a thorough examination

elevation and advancement to a position among the most civilized peoples of

The Elements of Civilization

bodies. Such Anglo-​American fears underpinned the domestic sources of sen-

Another element of the Anglo-​American sensory definition of civilization

necessary responsibility of civilized people attempting to guide and control the

Ime egy száz évesnél régibb vigjáték, Bessenyei György műve, a

SZERETETE JÁMBOR FEJEDELMEK

A magyar történelem drámai földolgozása egyidős

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: Embodied Empires  1

1. The Senses and Civilization  14

2. Fighting: War and Empire’s Onset  47

3. Governing: Subjects and States Envisioned  86

4. Educating: New Soundscapes  131

5. Sanitizing: The Campaigns Against Odor  160

7. Nourishing: Imperial Foodways  233

Conclusion: The Senses at Empire’s End  264

bodies. Such Anglo-American fears underpinned the domestic sources of sen-

Another element of the Anglo-American sensory definition of civilization