<h1 class="left">In physics, as temperatures rise in conductors of electricity, so too does resistance. During the British Raj, heat performed the same function. History books and enduring memories of Empire will tell you that for far too long, Indians accepted the invasion of white men with hospitality and incomprehension rather than outrage or organised violence.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">There were indeed few rebellions even after devastating famines, exploitation, and cruelty at the hands of the Empire. But colonising India was neither straightforward nor did it go unquestioned. Some resistance looked like princely wars or civilian non-cooperation. Yet there was another form of resistance that cracked through the skies and the soil of the subcontinent - there was summer. </h1>
<h1 class="right">Right from the 1600s until the departure of the British, the tropical Indian climate reliably and consistently drove the British mad with disease, discomfort, and derangement. Anglo-Indians tried a variety of mostly ludicrous mechanisms to cope with summer. These strategies did not work because they were often racist, stupid, or untested quick fixes. They multiplied as the Raj grew in size and stature, and increasingly refused to incorporate centuries-old Indian solutions. The British were trying to project superiority, science, and racial difference. It is no wonder so many of them lost their heads. This is a story soaked in ice baths, mosquitoes, gin, and casual sex. This is a story of summer in the colony.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">18th Century India. The dawn of the Enlightenment has aged into a long shadow cast in the afternoon sun. Underneath it, the East India Company scorches in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. All of Europe believes in environmental determinism - that is, Hippocrates’ theory that climate controls health and behaviour. In an unfavourable climate, the rational man - if properly enlightened and cultured - should be able to adapt. Most settlers are thus open to cultural fusion, or ‘going native.’ So, physicians prescribe loose cotton garments and light Indian diets. In a few generations, the merchants think, we will acquire immunity to tropical diseases and grow skins that can withstand this heat.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">19th Century India. The British have melted over the subcontinent, but its officials are beginning to “droop.” Men complain of eczema, cholera, impetigo, dysentery, fever, and ‘prickly heat.’ Anglo-Indian Raymond Vernede feels summer is diluting his blood. He describes the new, tropical illness ‘prickly heat’ settling over his body in a carpet of itchy boils, so numerous that he cannot “put a pin between a pimple.” In the Times of India, a panoply of remedies are floated to prevent men from scratching their skin off: rub gin on your boils! It wastes gin, but alleviates the heat! Use germicide! Or, spread a blend of hydrochloric acid, iodine, and cologne! Buy Listerine’s new prickly heat medicine! Give up mangoes - it is sugar that stokes the illness! </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Vernede, fed up with these so-called medicines, publishes a poem with these lines:</h1>
<h5 class="centre">But each day I’m getting worse </h5>
<h5 class="centre">(which explains the scratchy verse) </h5>
<h5 class="centre">So my own advice I’ll sell you for a song— </h5>
<h5 class="centre">Every nincompoop you meet, has a cure for prickly heat, </h5>
<h5 class="centre">And every single one of them is wrong. </h5>
<h1 class="full">Over a century, no genetic immunity has come. Psychically and mentally, Englishmen are devising new rationales for why heat enfeebles them so. In Races of Men, Robert Knox bows down to the sun: “The European . . . cannot colonise a tropical country . . . hold it he may, with the sword, as we hold India, . . . but inhabitants in the strict sense of the term they cannot be.”</h1>
<h1 class="right">But what does it mean to be Hot? How do faces bleed and crisp, and how do heads spin and fall? To colonise a country is to be inside it – a foreign body – fighting its hosts’ culture. It is a constant battle to establish the self in the other. Will an Anglican spirit emerge in the Tropics? Can bodies acquire powers, or only guns?</h1>
<h1 class="left">Koels trill in the mornings. Abdars cool citric drinks at noon. At sundown, the British are sleeping in drenched pyjamas. They spend thousands and thousands of rupees to bring down slush from northern riverbanks. They are draping khas over their houses like sickly straw garlands. They are making their servants stand on verandahs to douse the rabid evening air with sprinkles of water. They are erecting new country clubs in Byculla and Colaba to play at tennis and tyranny, and they are constructing racial hierarchies over imported brandy-pani.</h1>
<h1 class="left">It is not enough. Governor-General Lord Minto writes in his diary: “The placid Lord William [Bentick] has been found sprawling on a table on his back; and Sir Henry Gwillin…was discovered by a visitor rolling on his own floor roaring like a baited bull.” Heat has created an unbroachable binary. It is making the threatening accusation that the British will always be alienated from this warm, stolen land.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Amidst all this sweltering, an enterprising American - as they do - sees a business opportunity. In 1833, for the first time in Indian history, Frederic Tudor imports ice to Calcutta. The Anglo-Indians hurrah, adding ice-houses to their country clubs, and firing their obsolete abdars. Meanwhile, the locals have no clue what ice is. One claims the ice he holds in his hands is burning him. Another asks, does ice grow on trees in America? A third asks for a refund after his newly purchased ice melts. Mostly, though, ice is unaffordable to locals. They begin to pay more taxes to construct their invaders’ ice houses. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">It is the middle of the 19th Century, and it has become impossible to separate India from its summers. To be hot now means to be British. It is a strictly racial affliction. The colonists pretend as if Indians do not wane, nor drip, as if Indians are never bent over on the ground, arching against the afternoon. When the first ray of revolt strikes as the 1857 uprising, the East India Company is racked by illness, taken by surprise, and sweating by the maund. Julius Jeffreys, a surgeon, supplies the du jour understanding of the insurrection: “That the rebellion was long meditated, and purposely timed to commence in the hot season, I cannot entertain a doubt.” If true, who could blame the Indians? Foreign heads are unravelling. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">The first British cantonment is established in 1867 at Deolali, a town in Maharashtra. The soldiers stationed here are going wild in the blazing heat, drinking and whoring around, dazed, diseased, and depressed. Many die before they are called into service. Others are discharged to asylums. This town gives the British a word to describe the madness wrought by Indian summers. They call it ‘doolali-tap,’ where ‘doolali’ refers to the cantonment, and ‘tap’ is the Hindustani word for fever, heat, or torment. Eventually, the slang is simplified to doolally - to be out of one’s mind, crazed by heat.</h1>
<h1 class="full">After the uprising, the shaken Crown takes over from the Company. Insecurity throbs in the sticky clime. The men are flocking to Landour, Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Nainital, and the new summer capital, Shimla. Yet, the temperate climate does not produce the civilised and moral comportment that the English claim as their culture. Instead, it produces sex, gossip, and racy parties. Liquor is free-flowing, the holidayers make mutual promises of discretion, and the enchanting ‘fishing fleet’ has arrived. </h1>
<h1 class="left">To solve the problem of loneliness and discomfort in the colony, since the 17th century, England has been sending over marriageable women for companionship. By 1890, women pay 200 pounds to be sent to India in search of a life with tiger hunting, crushed jasmine, and husbands in the civil services. They are called “the fishing fleet.” The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and Indian Outfits & Establishments: A Practical Guide for Persons About to Reside in India tell them what to carry on the marine voyage: wool; cashmere; cholera belts; linen; soft silk; calico; piqué; satins; tennis outfits; and riding habits. When the fishing fleet arrives in late summer, it is the event of the year. The hopeful women dance for crowds, drop cards with their lineage into mailboxes, and network their way into the Raj. The women who do not find husbands are shipped back North and called “Returned Empties.” </h1>
<h1 class="centre">As the epigraph of the historiography The Fishing Fleets winks, in Shimla, “every Jack [is] with somebody else’s Jill.” Parties boast decadent favours from Paris, husbands are drunk enough to let their bored wives flirt with whomever, and groups like ‘Black Hearts’ and the ‘Gloom Club’ are throwing themed parties with elaborate costumes and designated kala juggahs (dark areas) for couples to get frisky. Young officers who indulge in both sleeping with married women and social climbing are called ‘poodle fakers.’ It seems depravity may not be as climate-contingent as the British say. </h1>
<h1 class="left">Back in the plains, an invention is seeping into every household – the punkah. It provides some relief, but not enough. At night, the British are known to kick the punkhahwallas when they have fallen asleep, call them slurs, and throw pitchers of water at them. The punkhawallas exact their revenge during the daytime. When the sahibs are distracted, they pull at the punkah so hard that all their employer’s papers fly and scatter onto the ground. When the sahibs cry out for them to stop, they either cannot or pretend not to hear. The sahibs fume over how they are being tortured. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">It is the 20th century and revolutions are unrobing the world. The Raj is wearing stiff robes of silk and lace. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Judges and lawyers suffer for hours in ringlet-wigs and layered cloaks at courthouses. Evening wear at the clubs involves far too much taffeta. Soldiers are entreated to wear the same sartorial get-ups in Madras as they might in Manchester. Spike Milligan sees “regiments go by starting a route march and I thought they were wearing a different colour uniform at the back because they were just soaked with sweat.” A Solaro suit is created by a doctor who is convinced that tropical light ruins white skins. It weaves red, army green, and khaki threads into a fabric that supposedly reflects UVs away according to the sun’s angle. It does not work.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">The Anglo-Americans have found ‘scientific’ evidence that any rays south of the Tropic of Cancer scramble British minds, and can induce doolally. In response to both the concerns of light and lunacy, every soldier must wear a sola topee from sunrise to sunset. He is sentenced to fourteen days in the barracks if found without it. Yet, the sola topee, a cream and cork pith helmet, is a weak Imperial substitute for a more suitable millinery offering - the turban. For roughly 200 years of the East India Company, the British wore turbans and cummerbands, they ate millets and mangos. But as the Raj becomes more self-important in their rule, performing racial difference through the imagery of fashion and diet is needed to uphold the colonial myth.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Now, sex, psychosis, and delusions are fuelling late-stage colonial behaviour. Radclyffe Sidebottom recounts of sultry Calcutta, when, “the weather was hot and passions were high and you behaved in quite a different way. The girls that you couldn’t be seen with during the cold weather who were absolutely riddled with sex and very beautiful, were comparatively fair game. You hadn’t got to marry them and they courted you.” Venereal diseases run rampant. Wives, not allowed to leave their houses during summer days, are going stir-crazy.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">As the sun begins to set on the British Empire, heat is still rising in mercury and dirt. Indian wealth has been drained, but the Anglican spirit too lies dehydrated on the side of the road to the future. Charles Wright describes the fragility of body and mind during the dying summers of the Raj: “I remember one sergent, he got his riddle and put a bullet through his head in his bunk.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">The Raj’s makeshift mechanisms were borne of bad science and anxiety. They were desperate, and they show how the Anglican self could not be sustained in this weather. Being open to syncretism and fusion with Indian culture could’ve saved them. But any such seepages or acculturation with traditional practices would defeat their imperial mythology. So, instead, the British went doolally.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Read the full poem here: </h1>
<h5 class="right">In the symptomatic stage, savage warfare did I wage </h5>
<h5 class="right">’Gainst a trifling erubescence on the arm, </h5>
<h5 class="right">I scratched it night and day till I heard some idiot say </h5>
<h5 class="right">That a little iodine would do no harm. </h5>
<h5 class="right">When it spread to hip and shoulder, </h5>
<h5 class="right">then I grew a little bolder </h5>
<h5 class="right">And agreed with all the experts at the club </h5>
<h5 class="right">That germicidal soap was the only certain hope, </h5>
<h5 class="right">Used gently in the matutinal tub. </h5>
<h5 class="right">But each little feverish pore became a flaming sore </h5>
<h5 class="right">So I cursed and bathed three hours a day instead, </h5>
<h5 class="right">And I used up quite a crowd o’ tins of </h5>
<h5 class="right">different coloured powder, </h5>
<h5 class="right">And I oiled myself before I went to bed. </h5>
<h5 class="right">But each day I’m getting worse </h5>
<h5 class="right">(which explains the scratchy verse) </h5>
<h5 class="right">So my own advice I’ll sell you for a song— </h5>
<h5 class="right">Every nincompoop you meet, has a cure for prickly heat, </h5>
<h5 class="right">And every single one of them is wrong. </h5>
<h1 class="full">In physics, as temperatures rise in conductors of electricity, so too does resistance. During the British Raj, heat performed the same function. History books and enduring memories of Empire will tell you that for far too long, Indians accepted the invasion of white men with hospitality and incomprehension rather than outrage or organised violence.</h1>
<h1 class="full">There were indeed few rebellions even after devastating famines, exploitation, and cruelty at the hands of the Empire. But colonising India was neither straightforward nor did it go unquestioned. Some resistance looked like princely wars or civilian non-cooperation. Yet there was another form of resistance that cracked through the skies and the soil of the subcontinent - there was summer. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Right from the 1600s until the departure of the British, the tropical Indian climate reliably and consistently drove the British mad with disease, discomfort, and derangement. Anglo-Indians tried a variety of mostly ludicrous mechanisms to cope with summer. These strategies did not work because they were often racist, stupid, or untested quick fixes. They multiplied as the Raj grew in size and stature, and increasingly refused to incorporate centuries-old Indian solutions. The British were trying to project superiority, science, and racial difference. It is no wonder so many of them lost their heads. This is a story soaked in ice baths, mosquitoes, gin, and casual sex. This is a story of summer in the colony.</h1>
<h1 class="full">18th Century India. The dawn of the Enlightenment has aged into a long shadow cast in the afternoon sun. Underneath it, the East India Company scorches in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. All of Europe believes in environmental determinism - that is, Hippocrates’ theory that climate controls health and behaviour. In an unfavourable climate, the rational man - if properly enlightened and cultured - should be able to adapt. Most settlers are thus open to cultural fusion, or ‘going native.’ So, physicians prescribe loose cotton garments and light Indian diets. In a few generations, the merchants think, we will acquire immunity to tropical diseases and grow skins that can withstand this heat.</h1>
<h1 class="full">19th Century India. The British have melted over the subcontinent, but its officials are beginning to “droop.” Men complain of eczema, cholera, impetigo, dysentery, fever, and ‘prickly heat.’ Anglo-Indian Raymond Vernede feels summer is diluting his blood. He describes the new, tropical illness ‘prickly heat’ settling over his body in a carpet of itchy boils, so numerous that he cannot “put a pin between a pimple.” In the Times of India, a panoply of remedies are floated to prevent men from scratching their skin off: rub gin on your boils! It wastes gin, but alleviates the heat! Use germicide! Or, spread a blend of hydrochloric acid, iodine, and cologne! Buy Listerine’s new prickly heat medicine! Give up mangoes - it is sugar that stokes the illness! </h1>
<h1 class="full">Vernede, fed up with these so-called medicines, publishes a poem with these lines:</h1>
<h5 class="full">But each day I’m getting worse </h5>
<h5 class="full">(which explains the scratchy verse) </h5>
<h5 class="full">So my own advice I’ll sell you for a song— </h5>
<h5 class="full">Every nincompoop you meet, has a cure for prickly heat, </h5>
<h5 class="full">And every single one of them is wrong. </h5>
<h1 class="full">Over a century, no genetic immunity has come. Psychically and mentally, Englishmen are devising new rationales for why heat enfeebles them so. In Races of Men, Robert Knox bows down to the sun: “The European . . . cannot colonise a tropical country . . . hold it he may, with the sword, as we hold India, . . . but inhabitants in the strict sense of the term they cannot be.”</h1>
<h1 class="centre">But what does it mean to be Hot? How do faces bleed and crisp, and how do heads spin and fall? To colonise a country is to be inside it – a foreign body – fighting its hosts’ culture. It is a constant battle to establish the self in the other. Will an Anglican spirit emerge in the Tropics? Can bodies acquire powers, or only guns?</h1>
<h1 class="full">Koels trill in the mornings. Abdars cool citric drinks at noon. At sundown, the British are sleeping in drenched pyjamas. They spend thousands and thousands of rupees to bring down slush from northern riverbanks. They are draping khas over their houses like sickly straw garlands. They are making their servants stand on verandahs to douse the rabid evening air with sprinkles of water. They are erecting new country clubs in Byculla and Colaba to play at tennis and tyranny, and they are constructing racial hierarchies over imported brandy-pani.</h1>
<h1 class="full">It is not enough. Governor-General Lord Minto writes in his diary: “The placid Lord William [Bentick] has been found sprawling on a table on his back; and Sir Henry Gwillin…was discovered by a visitor rolling on his own floor roaring like a baited bull.” Heat has created an unbroachable binary. It is making the threatening accusation that the British will always be alienated from this warm, stolen land.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Amidst all this sweltering, an enterprising American - as they do - sees a business opportunity. In 1833, for the first time in Indian history, Frederic Tudor imports ice to Calcutta. The Anglo-Indians hurrah, adding ice-houses to their country clubs, and firing their obsolete abdars. Meanwhile, the locals have no clue what ice is. One claims the ice he holds in his hands is burning him. Another asks, does ice grow on trees in America? A third asks for a refund after his newly purchased ice melts. Mostly, though, ice is unaffordable to locals. They begin to pay more taxes to construct their invaders’ ice houses. </h1>
<h1 class="full">It is the middle of the 19th Century, and it has become impossible to separate India from its summers. To be hot now means to be British. It is a strictly racial affliction. The colonists pretend as if Indians do not wane, nor drip, as if Indians are never bent over on the ground, arching against the afternoon. When the first ray of revolt strikes as the 1857 uprising, the East India Company is racked by illness, taken by surprise, and sweating by the maund. Julius Jeffreys, a surgeon, supplies the du jour understanding of the insurrection: “That the rebellion was long meditated, and purposely timed to commence in the hot season, I cannot entertain a doubt.” If true, who could blame the Indians? Foreign heads are unravelling. </h1>
<h1 class="full">The first British cantonment is established in 1867 at Deolali, a town in Maharashtra. The soldiers stationed here are going wild in the blazing heat, drinking and whoring around, dazed, diseased, and depressed. Many die before they are called into service. Others are discharged to asylums. This town gives the British a word to describe the madness wrought by Indian summers. They call it ‘doolali-tap,’ where ‘doolali’ refers to the cantonment, and ‘tap’ is the Hindustani word for fever, heat, or torment. Eventually, the slang is simplified to doolally - to be out of one’s mind, crazed by heat.</h1>
<h1 class="full">After the uprising, the shaken Crown takes over from the Company. Insecurity throbs in the sticky clime. The men are flocking to Landour, Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Nainital, and the new summer capital, Shimla. Yet, the temperate climate does not produce the civilised and moral comportment that the English claim as their culture. Instead, it produces sex, gossip, and racy parties. Liquor is free-flowing, the holidayers make mutual promises of discretion, and the enchanting ‘fishing fleet’ has arrived. </h1>
<h1 class="full">To solve the problem of loneliness and discomfort in the colony, since the 17th century, England has been sending over marriageable women for companionship. By 1890, women pay 200 pounds to be sent to India in search of a life with tiger hunting, crushed jasmine, and husbands in the civil services. They are called “the fishing fleet.” The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and Indian Outfits & Establishments: A Practical Guide for Persons About to Reside in India tell them what to carry on the marine voyage: wool; cashmere; cholera belts; linen; soft silk; calico; piqué; satins; tennis outfits; and riding habits. When the fishing fleet arrives in late summer, it is the event of the year. The hopeful women dance for crowds, drop cards with their lineage into mailboxes, and network their way into the Raj. The women who do not find husbands are shipped back North and called “Returned Empties.” </h1>
<h1 class="full">As the epigraph of the historiography The Fishing Fleets winks, in Shimla, “every Jack [is] with somebody else’s Jill.” Parties boast decadent favours from Paris, husbands are drunk enough to let their bored wives flirt with whomever, and groups like ‘Black Hearts’ and the ‘Gloom Club’ are throwing themed parties with elaborate costumes and designated kala juggahs (dark areas) for couples to get frisky. Young officers who indulge in both sleeping with married women and social climbing are called ‘poodle fakers.’ It seems depravity may not be as climate-contingent as the British say. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Back in the plains, an invention is seeping into every household – the punkah. It provides some relief, but not enough. At night, the British are known to kick the punkhahwallas when they have fallen asleep, call them slurs, and throw pitchers of water at them. The punkhawallas exact their revenge during the daytime. When the sahibs are distracted, they pull at the punkah so hard that all their employer’s papers fly and scatter onto the ground. When the sahibs cry out for them to stop, they either cannot or pretend not to hear. The sahibs fume over how they are being tortured. </h1>
<h1 class="full">It is the 20th century and revolutions are unrobing the world. The Raj is wearing stiff robes of silk and lace. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Judges and lawyers suffer for hours in ringlet-wigs and layered cloaks at courthouses. Evening wear at the clubs involves far too much taffeta. Soldiers are entreated to wear the same sartorial get-ups in Madras as they might in Manchester. Spike Milligan sees “regiments go by starting a route march and I thought they were wearing a different colour uniform at the back because they were just soaked with sweat.” A Solaro suit is created by a doctor who is convinced that tropical light ruins white skins. It weaves red, army green, and khaki threads into a fabric that supposedly reflects UVs away according to the sun’s angle. It does not work.</h1>
<h1 class="full">The Anglo-Americans have found ‘scientific’ evidence that any rays south of the Tropic of Cancer scramble British minds, and can induce doolally. In response to both the concerns of light and lunacy, every soldier must wear a sola topee from sunrise to sunset. He is sentenced to fourteen days in the barracks if found without it. Yet, the sola topee, a cream and cork pith helmet, is a weak Imperial substitute for a more suitable millinery offering - the turban. For roughly 200 years of the East India Company, the British wore turbans and cummerbands, they ate millets and mangos. But as the Raj becomes more self-important in their rule, performing racial difference through the imagery of fashion and diet is needed to uphold the colonial myth.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Now, sex, psychosis, and delusions are fuelling late-stage colonial behaviour. Radclyffe Sidebottom recounts of sultry Calcutta, when, “the weather was hot and passions were high and you behaved in quite a different way. The girls that you couldn’t be seen with during the cold weather who were absolutely riddled with sex and very beautiful, were comparatively fair game. You hadn’t got to marry them and they courted you.” Venereal diseases run rampant. Wives, not allowed to leave their houses during summer days, are going stir-crazy.</h1>
<h1 class="full">As the sun begins to set on the British Empire, heat is still rising in mercury and dirt. Indian wealth has been drained, but the Anglican spirit too lies dehydrated on the side of the road to the future. Charles Wright describes the fragility of body and mind during the dying summers of the Raj: “I remember one sergeant, he got his riddle and put a bullet through his head in his bunk.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">The Raj’s makeshift mechanisms were borne of bad science and anxiety. They were desperate, and they show how the Anglican self could not be sustained in this weather. Being open to syncretism and fusion with Indian culture could’ve saved them. But any such seepages or acculturation with traditional practices would defeat their imperial mythology. So, instead, the British went doolally.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Read the full poem here: </h1>
<h5 class="full">In the symptomatic stage, savage warfare did I wage </h5>
<h5 class="full">’Gainst a trifling erubescence on the arm, </h5>
<h5 class="full">I scratched it night and day till I heard some idiot say </h5>
<h5 class="full">That a little iodine would do no harm. </h5>
<h5 class="full">When it spread to hip and shoulder, </h5>
<h5 class="full">then I grew a little bolder </h5>
<h5 class="full">And agreed with all the experts at the club </h5>
<h5 class="full">That germicidal soap was the only certain hope, </h5>
<h5 class="full">Used gently in the matutinal tub. </h5>
<h5 class="full">But each little feverish pore became a flaming sore </h5>
<h5 class="full">So I cursed and bathed three hours a day instead, </h5>
<h5 class="full">And I used up quite a crowd o’ tins of </h5>
<h5 class="full">different coloured powder, </h5>
<h5 class="full">And I oiled myself before I went to bed. </h5>
<h5 class="full">But each day I’m getting worse </h5>
<h5 class="full">(which explains the scratchy verse) </h5>
<h5 class="full">So my own advice I’ll sell you for a song— </h5>
<h5 class="full">Every nincompoop you meet, has a cure for prickly heat, </h5>
<h5 class="full">And every single one of them is wrong. </h5>