Erica Wald's Vice in the Barracks is mainly a book about venereal disease and alcoholism in the British Indian Army between 1780 and 1868. As Wald herself admits in a footnote (p. 5n11), she is not the first person to write on these themes. As a result, much of the broad contours of the story she tells will be familiar to those who have read the works of Kenneth Ballhatchet, Philippa Levine, and Douglas Peers, among others. Yet, what Wald manages to add to these broad outlines is a wealth of new detail, rich texture, and, occasionally, dashes of colorful characters.
The book is made up of five key chapters, a useful introduction, and a breezy summary for a conclusion. There are also two short appendices. Each chapter ends with a brief conclusion summarizing the key points of the chapter. The overall argument is convincing and well backed up by primary sources.
The first chapter provides a potted history of the East India Company's armies in South Asia alongside an interesting synthetic history of the category of the “prostitute” in colonial South Asia. While the former history would be familiar to military historians and the latter to historians of gender, the dialogue between the two is novel and interesting.
The second chapter deals with the development of the “lock hospital” and lal bazaar system to cater to the alleged animalistic “needs” of the white subalterns.
Chapter 3 reimagines the “Age of Reform” through the work of medical men, medical societies, and their publications. This chapter also demonstrates the growing medicalization of what Partha Chatterjee calls the “rule of colonial difference,”Footnote 2 viz. the imperative to invent idioms to distinguish the colonizer from the colonized. Wald shows that medicine increasingly became the prime register upon which new idioms of distinction were articulated.
The next chapter explores how the military and medical authorities together sought to extend their jurisdiction over ever-larger spaces and ever-increasing groups of people. By playing on the anxieties over the health of the military, these authorities extended networks of surveillance and coercion beyond the strict boundaries of the cantonments and gradually brought within their ambit a host of nonmilitary personnel.
Finally, chapter 5 details the various strategies used by medical and military authorities to keep the lock hospital system going through the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, after Lord Bentinck's parsimonious regime had officially abolished them as a cost-cutting venture.
Wald's key argument is that the persistence of the lock hospital system was due to a combination of two crucial factors: first, the East India Company's persistent attempts at cutting financial corners, and second, the deep-seated stereotypes about “Indian prostitutes” and “lower-class” British men. It was stinginess rather than racial feelings in itself, she points out, that led to the Company's efforts to discourage interracial marriages. Men like Thomas Munro, the Governor of Madras, advocated the discontinuation of such marriages on the assumption that the wives and children of such marriages would likely claim financial support from the Company at some stage. That he did this despite having sired many mixed-race children proves Wald's point that it was penny-pinching rather than racism per se that inspired the Company's policy.
Having thus put an end to interracial marriages, the Company executives still believed that some provision for the sexual gratification of the white subalterns was essential, just as they also thought it worth their while to provide subsidized alcohol to these men. Yet no serious effort was made to either allow these men to bring their British families with them or provide any other distractions such as libraries and the like. What drove this policy was a deep-seated belief that the “lower classes” were brutish louts made up of brawn without brains. It was thus “but natural” that they would want to drink and have sex. The flipside of this stereotype was another stereotype about Indian “prostitutes” who were consistently seen to be the source of venereal “poison.” Even those like F. J. Mouat who tried to advance an economic argument for sex work still failed to ask “who infects these poor, newly initiated sex workers in the first place?”
Given Wald's commendable attention to how discursive stereotypes, medical theory, and the practicalities of governance blend into one another, I wish she had made the word “vice” do more. The Victorian repertoire of “vices” was of course not limited to whoring and drinking. Tantalizing hints of other peccadillos, from masturbation to homosexuality, occasionally arise in the book, but are quickly submerged in the larger discussion. Might not similarly detailed attention to the medical theories, financial motives, and discursive framings of these neglected “vices” have enriched the history of Vice in the Barracks?
I also wish Wald had given a little more space to the “characters” who occasionally make cameo appearances in the book. The six-times-married Mrs. Sergeant Gooderson, the mysterious Jane Margate, the perpetually drunk gunner William Carter, or Rahimuddin the mesmerizer all seem like characters who might have conveyed the humanity of “vice” equally, if not more convincingly, than the many tables of statistics that Wald has given us.
Vice in the Barracks is a welcome addition to the historiographies of imperial gender, colonial medicine, and white subalternity. It is rich and lucid, if at times a tad dry: not unlike the G-and-Ts that the armies of the Raj would have drunk in their barracks.
