'Invalided home'
Making sense of 'home' and 'away' in the learned societies of 19th-century Asia
Where is home? The place we live, the place we’re from, the place that always welcomes us or always seems familiar? It is a question that has generated poetry, music and novels…
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, through, in the context of the British Empire, ‘home’ could have a very specific and at times, quite perverse meaning: home was Britain, and specifically for a group of people who spent much of their lives very far away from it.
This week, inspired by a class about the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (which I first talked about in a previous Coffee with Clio), I found myself reading with avid interest the short but very rich obituary of Dr Sir Nicholas Dennys Belfield (1839-1900), in the journal of said Straits Branch.
The short notice of death was drawn mainly from another obituary in the North Borneo Herald. Fittingly, though, it also added details of Belfield Dennys’s association with the Straits Branch and remembered him as an especially energetic early member of the Society.
You may remember that this was the man who published the story about the irritation of a cobra unto death as a short instalment of ‘Natural History Notes’ in the Straits Branch journal in 1882 (also discussed in that earlier Coffee). Now it was time to research a bit further.
The results were both surprising and not so surprising, given what has drawn me back again and again to the early learned societies of South and Southeast Asia over many years.
In brief, Dennys’s life, as sketched in the Straits Branch obituary, looked like this:
Joined the navy (at age 16) and saw active combat in the Baltic, for which he received a medal
1863 became a Student Interpreter in what was then Peking (now Beijing). [From what I can tell, from outside the obituary, he did not have Chinese at this point but learned on the job.
1866-1876 edited the China Mail of Hong Kong, as well as serving as secretary of the city hall and curator of the Hong Kong Museum.
1877 appointed Assistant Protector of Chinese at Singapore [more on this another time!] and librarian and curator of the Singapore Museum.
1879-1888 worked as a magistrate in Singapore and Gopeng (now in Malaysia)
‘Invalided home’ in 1889 (officially reigning from his post in 1890)
1894 appointed Protector of Chinese and magistrate in North Borneo and became editor of the British North Borneo Herald. In 1899 he also became Acting Judge and Member of Council [also more for another time.]
Died on 10th December 1900 in Hong Kong.
Various things stood out to me in this obituary, which are all issues that I want to explore in more detail in Straits Branch! An Adventurers’ Journal and the Knowledge of the British Empire.
The first thing I noticed was that, although all of my encounters with Dennys’s work were related to Southeast Asia, he was, in terms of his primary experience and expertise, a specialist in China and Chinese. He’s actually probably most widely known as an early and important European writer about Chinese folklore.
He did produce a phrasebook of Malay, and multilingualism in Asian languages was quite common among 19th-century colonial functionaries, but it was a valuable reminder to me that seeing somebody from the perspective of my own research can be a bit like gripping the tail of an elephant in a dark room and thinking it is just a weirdly hairy snake.
Second, his career, as a journalist, translator and magistrate, also included museum curation. Take this alongside the ‘Natural History Notes’ that he so often contributed to the Straits Branch journal, and he exemplifies the polymath intellectuals who thrived in and generated the unique dynamic of the learned societies of empire.
Third, that phrase ‘invalided home’ leapt off the page as I read it. Home? Would Dennys have thought of Britain as home? Probably, in the specific technical sense that the author of the obituary meant, because he was, after all, a man of his times. But what about in all of the other senses that we mean the word home?
It seems pretty clear to me from the life story above (and I recognise that some of this is an intuition that will need careful checking) that Dennys couldn’t wait to leave Britain. From the navy at 16 to North Borneo, he seems to have spent less than a decade (another thing I will need to check - perhaps even less, more like 4-5 years) of his adult life back in Blighty.
Would 1890s Britain, therefore, have seemed familiar, homely or enjoyable to him?
At an emotional level, it may be hard to know and I certainly don’t yet. What the phrase opens up, though, is a window into the way the British Empire constructed the idea of the centre and its colonies, which was vital to how it controlled those territories.
‘Home’ was less a self-determined sense of place, and more a concept that did political work, defining the men, and more rarely women, from Britain who made their lives in the territories of the empire as migrants not immigrants, as transients not settlers, and as tied, in the imagination of imperial society, always more closely to the land of their birth than the lands they lived in, learned about and shared with others throughout their professional lives and via their intellectual networks.
This, along with the conventions of sending children ‘home’ for schooling and retiring ‘home’, was central to imagining the British Empire as a network of colonisers, who could be neatly and simply separated out from the colonised. The process of imagining was frequently rooted in ideas, fashionable at the time, about the supposedly inherent link between biology, culture and geographical origin.
The imagining was enforced in other ways too, such as the insistence, which grew during the 19th century, upon Britishers in the colonies performing the fashions of Britain, up to and beyond the point of the absurd: afternoon tea, heavy, unspiced, boiled meat dinners, multi-layered tweed in the tropical heat.
The learned societies played their part in this process. On one hand, they were some of the most significant gatherings for knowledge about Asia. On the other, they were also a context, like the colonial museum, in which the ever-imperfect distinction between colonisers and colonised was policed and made visible.
In these societies, local, indigenous scholars could sometimes be included but were rarely invited to speak and were never, as far as I can tell so far in my research, invited to be Society officers. Their assistance in translating a text or locating a ruin might be acknowledged, sometimes in terms which clearly evoke a warm and respectful relationship, but more often in terms which reduced this local knowledge to something inferior: helpful; as a starting point but not much more, sometimes downright misleading.
The ways in which these British Society members tried to make sense of the worlds they found sometimes made as little sense as wearing a crinoline in 90% humidity. Trying to impose a concept of ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ periods onto South Asian history, for example, using different religions (Hinduism, Islam and Christianity) as the markers of these three phases. Likewise, comparing British attempts to write laws for the major religious communities in South Asia to the law-making of the sixth-century Roman emperor, Justinian I.
Usually, these practices of the learned societies reinforced the everyday differentiations built up by food, dress, housing, habits, manners and that persistent bungee chord tugging people back ‘home’ to stop them getting too comfortable wherever they were.
Local ‘traditions’ about places were contrasted with ‘historical knowledge’. That is not to say that those two categories can’t be useful, and don’t have meaning - there is nothing wrong with egg and chips or idli saambaar either - but the idea that one is inherently and always more useful or interesting than the other mapped directly onto colonial ideas about hierarchy and power.
Yet, despite all of this, there are so many people in the pages of the learned society journals of Asia who do not quite fit, or at least who seem to have found the fit of these ideas a bit tight.
Dennys, for example, did not actually spend most of his career in colonial service, though he was most definitely a product of empire. He actually quit colonial service to own and run the China Mail. That did not mean that he could retire where he was, though, when ill health struck in 1889.
The patterns of colonial life meant there simply wasn’t a place for a retired British man in East or Southeast Asia, or at least, it meant that such a man had to choose between staying where he was and living anything like a familiar life, because that familiar life, its routines and habits and markers of identity were all tied up with being part of the enormous, global project of ‘being away from home’.
Perhaps the central contradiction which draws me back to Straits Branch(!) and which sucked me in in the first place was these peculiar, displaced figures who knew more about the places they were not allowed to call home than the places they had to call home.
They were people who tried to use the tools they had to understand places for which those tools were not designed, and achieved remarkable and destructive things in the process. And most of all, they often look to me like people who knew, deep in themselves, that ‘home’ no longer meant many of the things it was meant to for them.
In Dennys’s case, I wonder if perhaps he might have been a little relieved to die at last in Hong Kong, from the after effects of surgery for a tumour that he maybe might have chosen to ‘go home’ to have treated, but didn’t. I don’t know, but I wonder.