Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.

In 1937, after approximately fifty years in India, hotelier and memoirist Harry Hobbs took stock of his life on the subcontinent: 'Looking back, it hasn't been so bad. I have enjoyed more responsibility than I might ever have hoped for at home; better food and whisky than is generally obtainable in my native land; cheap tobacco and servants'. 1 Hobbs' terms of reference are characteristic of his view of Anglo-Indian society as inherently hedonistic, and he states that no history of India is possible without recognition of the amount of drinking done, especially, he argues, in the late nineteenth century. 2 Hobbs writes that in India '(d)rink was cheap and drinking fashionable', occupying a 'prominent place' in British society there, in relation to leisure but also to general health and well-being. 3 By the time that Hobbs arrived in India in the 1880s, the consumption of alcohol had already become less pronounced than in previous generations. A culture of prodigious drinking had been established in India from the beginning of the British presence there, beginning with the trade in alcoholic beverages such as arrack in the seventeenth century and further embedded by the alcohol ration and social habits of the predominantly male East India Company and Crown forces throughout the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that followed.
Whilst the volume of drink consumed had decreased after the advent of the Raj in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the shift in social attitudes that it produced, drinking was still very much part of the Anglo-Indian social fabric, common to both genders, and further complicated by the continued debate over the efficacy of alcohol in medicine and health. For instance, if not recommended directly as a necessity against the dangers of the tropical climate, alcohol was also suggested as a prophylactic against various conditions, or as part of various treatments, until after the turn of the twentieth century. 4 Hobbs, along with many other lay and professional authors, saw something acutely necessary about drinking in India, both socially but also on account of the place itself, stating in a later self-published history of Anglo-Indian social life entitled John Barleycorn Badahur: Old Time Taverns in India (1943): 'How many difficulties have been smoothed over a friendly drink will never be known, nor can it be estimated how much comfort it has given to those depressed by loneliness and over-work in a bad climate'. 5 Medical opinion of alcohol was by no means unanimous, and, as work by Ian Miller, James H. Mills and others has shown, broader debates over diet in India were subject to many of the same moral, social and spiritual arguments applied to other beverages and foodstuffs in Europe. 6 However, even those commentators and medical professionals who could not condone the consumption of alcohol as part of everyday routine often still valued in its use in tropical climates and for certain conditions, and saw fit to prescribe beer, brandy, and other alcohols for ailments as diverse as cholera, snakebites, and dyspepsia. 7 Similarly, though as in Britain the issue of drinking was the subject of various measures related to curbing public disorder and the attention of an active Anglo-Indian Temperance Movement, the narrative of brewing and distilling in colonial India is also one of growing professionalization, industrialisation and growth, with tax revenues from alcohol supply and sale remaining particularly lucrative throughout the period in question. 8 Alcohol was thus embedded in British society in India in multiple ways with, as Hobbs attests to, a wide spectrum of society drinking on a regular basis. Erica Wald asserts that the drinking habits of serving military men were largely divided into two groups dictated by rank and, by extension, pay, with officers able to afford bottled beers and claret whilst lower ranks drank mainly spirits such as arrack, however, as the brewing industry in India grew, domestically-brewed beer became much more affordable and consumption widespread across classes. 9 Drinking habits elsewhere in colonial society appear much less divided, with multiple sources stating that civilian residents, male and female, availed themselves of a wide range of drinks, including beer, port, sherry, brandy, whisky and others, with little difference in consumption habits between genders. 10 However, rather than acknowledging only what and why these individuals drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of three key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly, namely the ship, the barracks, and the home. These locations represent the significant living spaces of British colonial experience in India, and those in which alcohol would be regularly consumed; on the one hand, they are quotidian, in that they were common to all British experiences of service or travel to India, as well as shared and communal, however, they are just as often also intimate, individual and exclusive spaces, involving understandings of domesticity, stratified social interaction, and personal belonging.
These spaces are also vital to understanding the attempts at control and regulation of alcohol consumption that existed within British India throughout the late-nineteenth century. Previous work on the subject of colonial drinking has illustrated that the interdiction of the body through restriction of access to space, surveillance, or regulation and inspection of 'problem' spaces were recurrent means by which various authorities in India sought to curb excessive drinking. 11 Numerous scholars within the field have called attention to the significance of public space in relation to the availability, policing, and restriction of alcohol consumption alongside other 'vices' of colonial India, with the work of Harald Fischer-Tiné exploring the lower echelons of the Anglo-Indian class system in particular. 12 Indeed, spatiality has always been inherent to historical analyses of drinking, visible in older sources such as the work of Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, who acknowledged the influence 'boisterous settings' had on drinking as a 'public act', through to more recently published works such as Edward Armston-Sheret's analysis of polar exploration and alcohol in the late nineteenth century. 13 However, whilst these existing approaches to the subject have engaged with examples of how space was considered as a means of remedy to exceptional or illicit behaviour, they have only partially considered the effects and influence of spatiality itself on facilitating drinking and enabling instances of intemperance, or how understandings of space impact upon the colonial subject and the drinking cultures of colonial India more generally.
Whereas individual spaces such as the Club, or the bungalow have received considerable attention either as a result of their place within informal social and racial hierarchies, or as a quintessential representation of Anglo-Indian domesticity respectively, the specificity of their intersection with drinking remains underexplored. Likewise, whilst Fischer-Tiné's identification that 'who drank what and where' is important to his consideration of the drink question in relation to colonial India, the white subaltern, and the 'loafer', his more recent work in which he stresses the importance of this question does not consider its implications or the importance of spatiality in detail beyond this initial identification. 14 As such, this article will emphasise the significance of spatiality to assessments of colonial drinking by arguing that the space of the ship, barracks and home repeatedly influence the quotidian drinking habits of Britons in India. It suggests that excessive drinking itself was not necessarily viewed as a problematic activity within colonial society, but rather that the nature of its acceptability or otherwise was determined by the location in which drinking took place. As the article will illustrate, in many cases of problematic drinking, the severity of the offence committed was not measured merely by the amount of alcohol consumed by the individual nor the action that the drunkard may have engaged in whilst inebriated, but rather the place or space in which it occurred. In such instances, drinking thus breached not only the social conventions inherent to colonial society but also tacitly agreed upon codes of behaviour that were spatially emplaced, and which intersected with contemporary understandings of class, rank, masculinity and personal responsibility to the ideals of Empire.
The article explores a broad range of sources in order to consider how space and drinking intersected throughout the culture of British India of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, with a particular focus on the period between 1857 and 1920, that which Fischer-Tiné considers the 'Imperial Heyday' of the British Raj. 15 It surveys archival and documentary material from the India Office Archives relating to the British colonial presence, as well as accounts of Anglo-Indian life as expressed in diaries and journals written and published between 1860 to just after the First World War. In considering these published texts, the article will address the multiple functions of space and place within their narratives; it will argue that they are sensitive to the metaphorical and textual effects of space, as well as existing as textual spaces of representation in their own right, with effects on the portrayal of drinking and associated actions as a result. The article is structured in a deliberate thematic progression, echoing that of the colonial journey through space by beginning with the ship, before moving on to living spaces in the form of barracks and cantonments in a military context, and bungalows in a civilian one. Such a structure reflects the fact that the experiences of these spaces, and the behaviour of individuals within them, begins with the precedent set by the space of the ship. As the article illustrates, ships are sites of spatial hybridity, of order and disorder, of public and private, and are both intimate and shared; that hybridity and liminality then becomes the manner in which colonial Britons of all classes and occupations understand and experience India, becoming replicated and reinforced through the barracks and the bungalow. By examining these sources and these various spaces in turn, I will argue that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which drinkers have access to alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny, both at large in the world and on the page, makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.

Part One: Ships
To approach the history of colonialism through the critical analysis of spatiality seems fitting, especially since so much of modern European history, and indeed the essence of colonialism itself, has revolved around the acquisition, defence and political capital of place. Marcus Rediker has argued that there has always existed an assumed primacy of the world's 'landed spaces', a world-view he calls 'terracentricism' that was strengthened by the rise of the nation state in the eighteenth century 'after which power and sovereignty would be linked to specific ethnic, civic, and national definitions of 'the people' and their land, their soil'. 16 However, alongside the critical attention paid to landed spaces, there is also an extensive, and growing, body of work on the seas that linked them. Charlotte Mathieson notes that the significance of sea voyages, and the ships in which British colonists would travel, to understandings of colonial space has grown steadily over the past decade, with a range of works seeking to re-centre the sea 'as a site of history, geography and cultural activity'. 17 In the context of colonial India, the significance of the sea narrative is apparent. Until the advent of commercial air travel towards the very end of the British Raj, nearly every journey to India would have involved, at least in part, a sea voyage. As this principal mode of travel to India barely altered for so long, the experiences of soldiers and civilians also remained remarkably consistent. Consequently, sea voyages are essential components of memoirs and journals of travels to India, not only as a result of their significant duration and that for many this would have been their first experience of prolonged time at sea, but also for the narrative and associative function of such voyages on a textual level; sea voyages and ships offer the associations of excitement and anticipation at departure and arrival, the trepidation felt at the commencement of an adventure, or the pleasure and relief of a safe homecoming. 18 Whilst many historical approaches to ships approach them in terms of their utility, either as physical or narrative vehicles, they have rarely considered the importance of engaging with their spatiality and the lasting effect it has on the British soldiers and civilians proceeding to India. Travel by ship was a formative experience, and was recognised as such by civil and military authorities across the duration of the British colonial period. Indeed, the Right Reverend F.P. Gramigna, Roman Catholic Bishop of Allahabad, wrote to the Government of India in 1911 out of concern for the moral health of recruits travelling to India, stating that the 'period on boardship (sic) on the outward journey is a very critical time in the career of a young soldier' and that every effort must be made to inculcate wholesome patterns of behaviour from the journey's beginning. 19 Part of this concern was prompted by the fact that for much of colonial history the journey to India was a particularly lengthy one, and could thus lead to the adoption of bad habits. Troops bound for India would travel either aboard one of the East India Company (EIC) ships, or just as often on commercial liners run by P&O. 20 Even with many travelling partially overland from Egypt to Suez as a means of avoiding rounding Africa, the journey to assume a posting in India could last for anything up to 60-160 days; however, the opening of the Suez Canal in in late 1869 reduced this to a comparatively brief 35-45 days. 21 Though longer voyages would have been punctuated by stops for fresh supplies at key points, the ship nonetheless becomes a settled space for the duration of the journey, and thus a site of domestic routine and belonging, despite its temporariness. 22 Until the early nineteenth-century, officers and civilian passengers were often required to take lodging on land if a ship stopped in port and cabins were reserved only for the wealthiest passengers, however, berths for 2-3 passengers and for families became the norm later in the century as steamers grew larger and more capacious. 23 Other ranks, however, would have a much more intimate and closely shared experience of ship space than their officers; John Pearman, who departed Gravesend for India as a private soldier on June 4th 1845 stated that he and his troop were shortly after departure 'told off into messessix each mess. The we got our hammocks down and were shown how to tie them up and get into them. We were as close together as fingers on our hands'. 24 Pearman's voyage would last four months, and his ship, the Thetis (an EIC 'sailing brig of war') docked finally at Calcutta on October 3rd 1845. 25 Pearman's remarks on his voyage, though brief, offer further insight into the soldier's experience of sea travel and ship space. Along with the close proximity to others, his account suggests a common experience of alternating between occupation and boredom throughout the voyage. Pearman writes that there was little to do on board ship but play cards and sing in fine weather; parade twice a day, once for health, clean feet and body, and once for muster. Food was very good, and I got very stout. A comrade named Hamilton, a tailor, learnt me the use of the needle, which I found afterwards to be very useful to me. 26 Though Pearman's account of his experience is somewhat chaste, other sources dating from across the century suggest more indulgent experiences of sea travel. James Wallace, surgeon on the Lonach, sailed to Madras in 1821. In his account of the voyage included in his general guide to health in India, Wallace writes of the hardships of work at sea, the perils of the weather, and the sameness of the view, and as such sees good reason for those at sea to grow accustomed to drink, especially when prevented from eating full meals by bad weather. 27 Such opinions and habits became the norm, and for much of the nineteenth century drinking on board ship was mandatory. Although Pearman does not mention it until he reaches India, there was a ration for EIC or Crown troops for much of the first half of the nineteenth century initially consisting of spirits before being later changed to more 'wholesome' drinks such as beer, and then phased out in the 1880s. 28 Thirty years after its abolition, however, George Raschen, commissioned as an emergency officer in the First World War, noted with enthusiasm how on his troopship from Karachi to Marseilles '[b]eer parties started before breakfast' just after inspection, suggesting that whilst no longer mandatory by this point, drinking was still tacitly condoned and facilitated by the military. 29 This apparent abundance of leisure time and availability of alcohol (as supported by Raschen's experience) was, in part, the prompt for the concern from Bishop Gramigna and other observers, as the belief was that men insufficiently occupied would be given to excess and intemperance by the time they reached their destination. Such beliefs were not unfounded, and there are numerous records of disciplinary action taken after altercations on board ship, either as a result of drunken conflict, or, occasionally, the prolonged close proximity of ship travel. 30 Such temptations towards over-indulgence were increased when military personnel travelled alongside civilians on commercial liners. In comparison to troops in transit to India like Pearman and Raschen, who both spent small portions of their voyage on active duty engaged in drill, civilian passengers aboard ship or soldiers returning from leave had no such responsibilities. As a consequence, their accounts draw even closer focus on quotidian practices, especially the consumption of food and drink. In the preface to his account of his journey to India in 1857, Times journalist William Russell apologises for the fact that his account is overtly preoccupied with diet and routine, noting that due to the restricted space of the ship, passengers have little else in the way of entertainment or distraction apart from the pleasures of eating and drinking and the social interaction they enable. Alcohol was readily available to purchase on commercial routes and occasionally included as part of the cost of travel, meaning that drinking became part of daily routine, beginning, for many colonial memoirists, immediately on departure. A far more garrulous memoirist than others such as Pearman, Russell's opening chapter describes the typical daily routine in detail. After breakfast and much smoking on the decks: 'At twelve, another bell, and with unflagging energy the world rushes below again and proceeds to attack cheese, biscuit, and butter, pale ale, porter, spirits and water, according to its taste'. 31 Then: At four or five, the bell again, and the great event of the daydinner … Heat, clatter, and voracity, the latter produced by sea air it is said, distinguish the banquet till it is closed by the fiery enjoyments of the port and sherry … .then the company mount the deck again … and at thirty minutes past eight the last bell rings for the day, and all hands make a final charge at the table and establish themselves before decanters of wine and spirits, whiskey, gin, brandy, and rum, wherefrom they proceed to various brews, and thence work onwards to a rubber of whist. 32 Such behaviour, as Russell suggests, is influenced or exacerbated by space of the ship. As host to all these differing actions, the space of the ship can be seen as heterogeneous and singular in simultaneity, and as such can be read in light of Michel Foucault's formulation of the heterotopia, as outlined in Of Other Spaces (1968). Foucault writes of the ship as 'the heterotopia par excellence', a site of spatial paradox in which rigid order and discipline are needed to ensure the smooth operation of the vessel, but in which excesses of behaviour in consumption, passion or even criminality are also enabled. 33 In Russell's account, he gives a sense of how these extremes of discipline and excess come into contact; the behaviour of the passengers is evidently excessive, as indicated by the alacrity with which most appear to consume alcohol. However, the occasions at which they are able to do so, and the spaces in which such behaviour is permissible, are strictly controlled by the ship's bells, suggesting a further dimension as space intersects with temporality. Though, like in Pearman's memoir, there are periods of inactivity present in the description, these are contrasted with moments of intense activity around the consumption of food and drink characterised in terms of its 'heat', 'clatter', and the manner in which passengers are deemed to 'charge' at the opportunity to indulge. Though in the consumption of some beverages, such as porter, these passengers conform to contemporary understandings of how alcohol might benefit health during such voyages, the wide variety of drink consumed and the 'voracity' with which they do so is indicative more of excess than the safeguarding of their health. 34 Further, Foucault's analysis of the composition of heterotopic space in the form of a vessel or carriage, namely as a series of linked spaces that permit the travel through space, applies directly to the ship. The description of space in these accounts suggests a conglomeration of the public, such as dining halls and decks, and also the private, in the form of cabins and more exclusive rooms for first class passengers, spaces accessible only to crew, or even the mess-space of the common soldier that Pearman experiences. The space of the ship can be viewed, as Doreen Massey states, as the 'product of interrelations … as the sphere in which distinct trajectories co-exist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity'. 35 Such a combination of spaces results in a state of hybridity and liminality in which actions permissible in both spheres intermingle, a process consistently visible in the accounts of Pearman, Russell, and Raschen. Pearman's description of his berth aboard the Thetis, and Raschen's long periods on troopships and hospital ships illustrate how the confined space of the ship conflates the active duty and private life of the soldier by playing host to what E.M. Collingham refers to as a range of quotidian bodily practices such as washing, eating, and drinking, as well as their professional duties. 36 The space of the ship is a liminal site for all of these memoirists in terms of how it hosts their repeated shifts between roles, yet permits the performance of both in simultaneity. Moreover, the physical position of the ship similarly affirms this heterotopic and liminal character in so much as it is literally a transitional site. Despite Rediker and Sugata Bose's suggestions that we must view the sea as a place in its own right, and that many diarists do call attention to the particular seas through which they travel, at the same time, the fact of being at sea engaged on a voyage means that the ship also occupies a space between two places; the ship exists in literally and figuratively fluid space in juxtaposition against the fixity of shore and its stricter social conventions and class distinctions. Jonathan Stafford further argues that it is the stability, as well as the reliability, of the space of the ship that act as insulators against the disorientation of the featureless sea, the alien and barren coastlines encountered during the journey, and the shock of arrival in the East itself, again emphasising the competing codes of fixity and impermanence encountered aboard. 37 This hybrid spatiality is further significant in its effect on identity. In her work on eighteenth-century diaries, A. Lynn Martin outlines how the domestic sphere is considered the 'first space' of social existence, constitutive of individual being, of the true self away from the second space of the workplace, in which the individual performs a social role expected of them. Meanwhile, the third space, according to Martin, is that of the tavern or pub (in which some of these conventions are mixed as colleagues or professional acquaintances effect displays of friendship around drinking). 38 As a consequence of the space itself as well as the duration of the voyage, the ship explicitly collapses such distinctions of defined spatial practice, and instead acts as a mixture of all three spaces; it is at once domestic (home for an extended period of time); a space of work (for the crew, soldiers required to muster, or, in Russell's case, the journalist composing their account); and also a space of recreation and leisure, where individuals thrown together by their shared passage to India develop convivial bonds over shared consumption of alcohol, and other pursuits. This blend of roles through shared space can be seen in an entry in which Russell shares port and cigars with a group of men one night after dinner, and records with notable distaste a conversation in which a drunken Major lectures him on the 'true' nature of Indians and the role this quality played in provoking the violence of the Rebellion. 39 Aside from Russell's personal disagreement, such views are professionally valuable to him and his account of the Rebellion and the British reaction to it; the hybrid nature of the ship space and the performative level of drinking that goes on between the men he encounters blurs Russell's own identity in this instance also, conflating his personal and professional roles.

Part Two: Barracks
Given the extent of its duration and apparent intensity, the experience of hybridity that characterises a voyage to India leaves a lasting impression and sets a precedent for continued patterns of behaviour amongst British colonists. As Michel de Certeau argues, an individual's 'ways of operating' in a given place and context stem from a process in which personal understandings of space are identifiable and built up through routine and repetition; in this instance, the effect of living in this hybrid state is that Britons arrive in India accustomed to it, and go on to act in a similarly contradictory publicly private way once back within the boundaries of landed space. 40 In addition to the effects of the voyage, however, it is important to note that a posting to colonial space is itself an experience replete with complications and contradictions related to its spatiality. Of course, the natural disposition for any soldier or civilian would be to understand their presence in India with a greater degree of fixity and permanence than that of their voyage out; along with the inherent inclination towards landed spaces that Rediker describes, military and civil duty in India typically lasted at least 5-7 years, or was often understood as permanent by many due to the high mortality rate amongst Europeans. 41 Until the twentieth century, the majority of civilians or soldiers on furlough would rarely return to Britain on account of the effort and duration of the voyage, or the expense, unless there was a need to convalesce. 42 Similarly, officers in particular were encouraged to settle in India in support of the 'civilising mission' and its emphasis on the creation of model domesticity. 43 However, within this over-arching understanding of long-term residency in India, military and civil postings would likely be more itinerant in nature, with regiments, civil servants, or administrators moved between different stations depending on requirement, or when engaged in active deployment. 44 Also significant to any understanding of the transience of colonial space is the growth in the seasonal culture of Anglo-Indian society throughout the nineteenth century, and the tendency for British residents to travel to hill stations such as Simla, Murree or Ootacamund to escape the summer heat. 45 Such contradictions of fixity and fluidity are also visible in the significant spaces of military occupation in India, namely barracks and cantonments. For soldiers in barracks, their experience of spatial hybridity and the coalescence of public and private space is further embedded by the preservation of routine and the continuity of habits established on the ship; though augmented by increased duties once installed in service, the contrast between ordered time and leisure is maintained and consolidated by the nature of their posting. As numerous sources testify, barracks-life too was subject to the swing between intense activity and long periods of idleness, partly enforced by the considerations of climate and the intense heat of much of the daytime hours. 46 Those patterns of regular drinking, and drinking to excess, established as part of the voyage out, also remained in place once individuals reached India, with various commentators remarking on the predilection for drinking evident across Anglo-Indian society. 47 As with the voyage out, a significant aspect of barracks life and routine was the administering of the soldier's ration. Records vary as to how much alcohol was issued in differing presidencies of Madras, Bombay, and Bengal and amounts fluctuate further in relation to availability of supply, type of beverage, and the kind of service engaged in, but it appears that between 1800 and the late 1840s a standard issue of between 1/3rd -2/3rds of a pint of raw spirits per man per day was common, and typically provided at two points in the course of a day under the instructions that it was diluted with 'two waters' and consumed immediately. 48 Later records indicate that 1-2 pints of beer was still a common ration until its abolition in 1889, and, in exceptional circumstances, until after the First World War. 49 When viewed in context of daily routine, it can be understood how the temporality of the ration, as aboard the ship, provides the individual with a sense of structure embedded in space, making drinking an intrinsic part of quotidian practice; the daily ration, interwoven with the general belief in alcohol's remedial or health-related effects, as well as its social function, serves to add fixity to the temporary, hybrid space of the barracks and build up an increased sense of belonging on the part of the individual. It is evident that spaces of day to day activity come to exert particular influence on an individual's sense of belonging within a particular place; the creation of domestic space and the understanding of it as such relies on routine, repetition and on establishing rhythms of behaviour over time. 50 However, beyond the building up and layering of such patterns, space in addition to drinking must also be understood as defining factors in the creation of social and professional identity, and to an extent far greater than that also glimpsed aboard ship. The spaces that individuals are able to access, those in which they can perceive a sense of their own belonging, are intrinsic to understandings of their own being; space thus becomes constitutive of that being, and so do the actions associated with that space, further collapsing the distinction between the personal and the social. 51 Alcohol, as a result of its social function and the professional context in which it is provided here, stands at this intersection, its consumption enabled by, but also facilitating, this hybridity.
William Russell's account of his experience corroborates this sense of spatial hybridity, and the collapse of distinctions between personal and shared space. Once Russell reaches India and joins the British campaign, the dialectic of public and private drinking continues to present itself in his writing, particularly in the spaces of the officers' and other ranks' messes. Russell recounts his travels as part of General Colin Campbell's campaign, where he notes that beer is the preferred choice of beverage, writing: 'A bottle of beer! Why, it is nothing. I know men who take three at tiffin. I know men who declare they know men who take a dozen bottles of beer in the day and that theythe takersare the better for it'. 52 Again, Russell's writing illustrates how the space in which alcohol is consumed influences both the type of drink chosen, and also the identity or social perception of the drinker, in either military or civil hierarchies. Russell's satirical tone indicates that he recognises a performative nature to drinking done in this context, again a mixture of spheres in which men who serve together also socialise with one another, attempting to prove their worth and masculinity not just in the context of their professional activity as soldiers, but by also drinking to excess. 53 Russell's description of the officers' mess is not far removed from the same practices of display, albeit with added layers of class and military hierarchies influencing behaviour. Russell writes that '(E)ach member (of the table) called for what he pleased, and if it was in store it was brought to himclaret, port, sherry, champagne, ale, soda-water, brandy, ginger-pop, gin, or rum'. 54 The act of calling for a particular drink in such an open space confers a sense of identity as well as authority on the drinker, and Russell goes on to note what some individual members of the table drink in particular, suggesting that the personal choices of these men give insight into their character; in an organisation and situation where decisiveness and command are desirable qualities, the means of illustrating such traits is done so publicly through drinking in leisure time, as well as in action or their duties during the day. In an example of how the influence of spatial hybridity continues, the mess too is a mixture of first, second and third spaces, with behaviour around drinking constitutive of personal, professional and social identity. Further, like the ship from Pearman and Russell's voyages out, the heterotopic qualities of the soldiers' messes are again readily apparent; these are open, shared, and public spaces in which groups of people interact, but they are also exclusive, and only accessible to those with a right or a reason to be there, namely as servants, or as soldiers serving as part of the campaign. A key difference in the context of the campaign, however, is that again the mess occupies a liminal position, existing in a lawless space between other places; the campaign and indeed the army are rigidly ordered and hierarchical, however, also commit excesses or acts not permitted within fixed social places, such as their bodily practices of drinking or in accounts of their treatment of captured Indian prisoners. 55 As Russell's account suggests, it is perhaps inevitable that with alcohol so readily available in Anglo-Indian society there would inevitably be problems of both a health-related and disciplinary nature as a result of drinking. Such problems were of course widely recognised across the history of British India, as well as long standing; an 1824 report stated that It may be useful to add that the crime and evil consequences of drunkenness is not particular to India but it prevails in every station more or less where a British Soldier is quartered … it clings to him in a Garrison and follows him into the Field, and is the great and only drawback to his numerous merits. 56 Given the potential deleterious effect on manpower, social disorder, and relations with Indians, the manner in which to monitor, regulate and restrict alcohol consumption was thus a cause for concern amongst the civil and military hierarchy in India throughout the century. Moreover, as Erica Wald has noted, drinking was continually assessed in terms of the potential with which it could effect a decline in moral health, under the logic that drinking (and especially Indian spirits, which were cheap and thus typically consumed by private soldiers) was the beginning of a slippery slope into gambling, vice, miscegenation, venereal disease, dishonour and eventual death, as a memorandum by General O'Moore Creagh and Lord Kitchener, Commander in Chief of India, relayed in 1909. 57 To combat such activities, the authorities in India undertook various courses of action. Wald has argued that these took the form of restrictions or privations focused on regulating the body of the soldier, however, they as much rely on the control and manipulation of space as they do the bodies within it. 58 For instance, a report authored in 1884 by A. D. Home, Surgeon General of India, acknowledges that there were two unofficial policies in existence that sought to influence soldier's behaviour and curtail their consumption of alcohol. 59 The first was a deliberate, yet undeclared, policy of under-rationing. Food rations were purposefully limited or of low quality so that men would be forced to spend their pay on supplementary items in garrison, and therefore not on alcohol or other indulgences. Although the cost of living in India was cheap in comparison to Britain, this method of restriction was still very unpopular. The second policy was the deliberate lack of attention paid to the state of 'wet' canteens, those within the cantonment where soldiers could obtain alcohol; these were left shabby and unappealing, and funds for refurbishment, games and other supplies were instead given to those canteens and messes that did not serve alcohol in an effort to entice men to spend their leisure time there instead. Wald calls attention to the longer history of using space to shape behaviour in the form of Regulation XX passed in 1810 in Calcutta; this act was an extension of the Articles of War that enabled on-the-spot inspection of any shop or premises within the limits of the cantonment, and which was aided by the later Regulation VII (1832) in Madras that emplaced strict controls of any alcohol or drug sales around cantonments. 60 Whilst such measures are directed at achieving control over the soldier's body, they are enacted through and entirely reliant on the governance of space. These various approaches, coupled with the eventual abolition of the alcohol ration in 1889, were effective, and medical and Sanitation Committees reports from the different presidencies illustrate consistently falling death rates from alcohol-related illnesses from the latter decades of the nineteenth century onwards. 61 Of course, these measures were not able to eradicate problem drinking altogether, and invariably there were numerous instances of officers and men indicted for drunkenness or over-indulgence. 62 A repeated charge that appears in accounts of Anglo-Indian courts martial or cases of misconduct is that of 'habitual drunkenness', a condition Peter Stanley argues becomes an offence, and no longer an excuse, after the introduction of the beer ration in the 1850s; men found guilty of having been drunk on five separate occasions within a 12 month period were classed officially as habitual drunkards, though it is not clear whether this total figure refers to times drunk on duty or in general, again suggesting elision between professional and personal space. 63 However, it is clear that what constitutes this state, or drives the decision to punish, is not simply related to quantity of alcohol consumed, but rather the spaces in which the offence was committed. One such example is found in the report on the conduct and resignation of Captain Alfred Ambrose Lane. Lane was apparently 'an officer of promise' who had served in the Kabul War and the Jowaki Campaign, having amassed 14 years' service. 64 The documentation surrounding his case states that Lane's intemperance had been known and he himself had been made aware of the gravity of his situation, however, he was placed under arrest on January 27th 1888 'for appearing drunk in the regimental orderly room'. The nature of Lane's offence is, however, somewhat unclear, and it is not stated explicitly in the case documentation whether Lane's 'appearing' drunk refers to the fact of him reporting for duty whilst inebriated, or merely refers to it was that he seemed visibly intoxicated and had transgressed the boundary between his quarters and the orderly room when off duty, an action made possible by the fact that the orderly room is typically located within the regimental barracks. The latter supposition corresponds to Wald's assertion that the military chose to punish public displays of drunkenness more severely than those cases of intemperance conducted in private. 65 Indeed, there is evidence that individuals able to keep their alcoholic debility essentially hidden from public knowledge, or at least kept only tacitly known, were dealt with much more leniently than those who committed public displays of drunkenness, even though the cost to the military in terms of administration, loss of manpower and expenses related to treatment (including sea-passage to Britain on furlough) was greater than that of Lane's case. 66 Part Three: Bungalows The tendency towards performative drinking and spatial hybridity also existed outside of a military context, and is likewise visible in civilian accounts of domestic space. Akin to that of the military posting, David Gilmour asserts that '(f)ew Anglo-Indians in the Victorian age regarded India as home … ', instead regarding it as a place of work and movement rather than one in which to settle and 'put down roots'. 67 Nevertheless, the environs of home, even those of a temporary nature, are among the most significant in shaping an individual's sense of belonging, both in a personal and social sense, as well as their actions, with Gaston Bachelard asserting that the house, as first space, is constitutive of a person's being, a site in which 'body and soul' are formed. 68 Moreover, the house, both as structure and how it is perceived by the individual, again shares the heterogeneous qualities of the ship; Bachelard goes on to argue that the house must be understood in terms of its 'unity and complexity', alluding again to a duality of spatial composition that assesses the house as a single entity composed of multiple component spaces. 69 Its spatiality may, therefore, be considered in its entirety (the space of the house, or as domestic space), or in terms of the subdivisions that exist within it (the differences between the nature of the bedroom as opposed to say the kitchen, dining room or cellar).
When assessing the spatial composition of the home, it is necessary to consider how spaces are culturally and historically gendered. In her work on colonial domestic space, Sara Mills argues that whilst the traditional understanding is that domestic space in both British India and Africa is feminised, and thus stands in opposition to the male-dominated social sphere, the reality of colonial society meant that on further examination such distinction is untenable and that women played active roles in society and outside of the home either by necessity or by design. 70 Indeed, colonial guides marketed directly at women, such as Alexander Kenny and Major Shelley Leigh Hunt's Tropical Trials: A Handbook for Women in the Tropics (1883), recognised as much, placing considerable emphasis on the importance of social interactions outside of the home as well as offering advice on the smooth-running of domestic affairs. Kenny and Hunt are explicit in describing the fate that might befall young women in the tropics if they choose a life of inactivity confined to the domestic sphere, stating that 'the sickly hued woman' who can 'just find strength sufficient to don dressing gown and slippers' would spend her time in India complaining of the effects of the 'horrid country' on her constitution and subsisting on 'a few mouthfuls of highly-spiced food and a glass of XXX stout' each day; an existence that would deprive her of both 'her good looks and her spirits'. 71 The corollary to Mills' argument is that just as women played important and prominent roles in the social sphere, men too brought considerable influence to bear on the domestic, either as provider and putative head of the household if married, or as sole managers of the house if they were unmarried. 72 The popular image of the colonial home organised and maintained by the redoubtable Memsahib was largely an idealised one, with many soldiers and civilians not marrying until rank, pay and position were able to support it. 73 Instead, domestic space in colonial India would quite often be shared, especially in the case of young men. In Indian Dust Devils (1937), Harry Hobbs writes of his early days in Calcutta whereupon he lodged as part of a 'Chummery', essentially a rented property shared by a group of unmarried men who split the costs of living. 74 Again, these spaces echo the actions of the soldiers observed by Russell and Pearman in their memoirs, with a strong predilection towards drinking fostered by the homosociality of the Chummery and its shared, masculine nature. Hobbs writes that his Chummery was characterised by drinking, either in the house or at a local hotel bar, and that the opinions and habits of the men he shared with were 'crudenever candied' with the various occupants acting in what they perceived as in accordance with the masculine character of the space. 75 As well as examples of housemates like Hobbs and his chums, the smoothrunning of Anglo-Indian domestic space and, for those residents towards the top of the social hierarchy, the scale of many homes, meant that these houses would also be shared with servants rather than others of the same social standing. Servants are both a continual presence within domestic space and a continual concern regarding its maintenance throughout the duration of colonial India, and there are many texts dedicated either in whole or in part on how to go about their recruitment, management, and dismissal. 76 Servants were not only the preserve of the wealthy either; though differing slightly to residential staff, Pearman recounts how he and the other enlisted men paid Indian servants for a range of daily services, from laundry to the provision of coffee. 77 Even when describing the impoverished environs of his Chummery, Hobbs makes mention of how any man who stayed in rather than go drinking with the others would likely just 'overwork the underpaid poor devil of a punkawallah'. 78 As Mills and others recognise, this constant and variegated mingling of coloniser and colonised means that the domestic becomes an example of what Marie Louise Pratt calls 'contact zones', in which representatives of separate cultures meet and interact, on often unequal footing. 79 However, rather than taking place in the more formal and social environs that Pratt envisions, the home becomes a constant and quotidian contact zone, private and also shared, and thus possessed of the unity and complexity that Bachelard ascribes to it.
The importance of servants in relation to drinking in colonial India is twofold. Firstly, their ubiquity provides a further context of performativity to British behaviour in that drinking, both in the shared space of barracks and the 'private' confines of the home, is most often (if not nearly always) done in the presence of Indians and was thus the cause of anxieties over how British behaviour was perceived and what effect it might have on the national prestige in India more generally. Secondly, there existed subsidiary fears that witnessing such excesses alongside the access to alcohol offered within British domestic space would encourage similar behaviour on the part of Indians themselves, again undermining the notion that European colonialism was beneficial to the colonised country and subject. 80 The spatial composition of domestic routine is readily apparent from those texts that document or deal with the running of the home, and which offer observations on the configuration of Anglo-Indian domestic space. Dennis Kincaid's British Social Life in India 1608-1937 (1938) describes a largely unchanging domestic scene supported with illustrations in which the householder or sahib sits on their verandah, attended by their servants and visible to passers-by. 81 The verandah is suggestive of the concerns of visibility and invisibility that characterise the domestic spaces of India; again, as threshold between private and public, it is a hybrid space, partly personal as an element of a private residence, however, at the same time is both open to the outside world and elevated, with height offering increased visibility and prominence. It is a space on which to be seen, and on which to project a degree of authority within the domestic sphere. 82 This notion of visibility, and with it the connotations of oversight and surveillance, extends to the management of the domestic sphere also. Many domestic guides assert the difficulties encountered with servants and alcohol, essentially part of a general assumption expressed in a range of literature that servants are always cheating their employer in some fashion, not least through the draining of their liquor cabinet or by concocting tales of illness so that they may spend the day drinking instead. 83 However, this surveillance also worked in the opposite direction, with servants and subordinates occasionally offering testimony or eyewitness statements in support of disciplinary proceedings against British soldiers or civilians. Such instances again undermine the notion that the house and domestic space in general are private spaces, and rather illustrate how they are equally as subject to authority and intervention as the more overtly hybrid spaces of the barracks and cantonment. The circumstances surrounding the misconduct of Guy Athel Weston from 1919 is one such example. Weston was Superintendent of Police in the Punjab and had enjoyed a modestly successful 18-year career, however, he was required to take compulsory retirement as a result of his continual difficulties with alcohol and inebriation. His personal file records that Weston had been reprimanded for misconduct related to drinking or inebriation at various points in his career; in 1905 for the assault of an Indian officer, in 1912 as part of his personnel review, and in 1916 after the death of a suspect in his custody. 84 It was in 1916 too that he was alleged to have committed 'a serious social indiscretion' involving alcohol, in which he appeared under the influence of liquor during a visit by Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab Sir Michael O'Dwyer to Gurgaon, where Weston was then posted. 85 Sent on furlough in 1916 for two years, and then posted to Lyallpur for a 'fresh start' on his return, Weston remained, however, 'a hopeless slave to drink' and, on the first day of his new posting, caused 'great discomfort' to the ladies and gentlemen present at a Victory Dinner by drunkenly interrupting speeches and making offensive remarks. 86 Though these situations were of a public nature and evidently socially and professionally disadvantageous to Weston, they were apparently not, at this point, sufficient as grounds for his dismissal, having occurred when Weston was not acting in an official capacity. However, Weston's conduct culminated later that month in two incidents that would lead to his compulsory retirement. The first is recorded in the testimony of Deputy Inspector-General of Police of the Range H.L. Kemball who states that 'Herdon [A. R. O. Herdon, occupation not given] says that about a week ago, a Sikh orderly of his told him that he had seen Weston drunk in the city. He was shouting and abusing people. A Jat onlooker said to the orderly: 'Look at the Superintendent of Police drunk; if we did that we would be run in under section 34'. 87 Responding to the reports from the dinner, when Kemball and the Commissioner of the Multan Division, P. Thompson, visited Weston at home on the evening of Thursday November 6th at 6pm they found him lying on his sofa ' … in a disgustingly unclean and unkempt condition. No shoes onno collar or tie. He had a very strong peg by him and was undoubtedly drunk'. 88 The weight attached to this discovery of Weston intoxicated at home, essentially the intrusion of professional expectations into domestic space, is what serves to make this case of particular note. Rather than Weston being punished immediately following his earlier and more dramatic public displays of intoxication, in keeping with what Wald observes of Anglo-Indian responses to inebriation earlier in the century, it is instead his conduct in the domestic sphere that appears the most damning, and that which precipitates the enquiry resulting in his retirement. The tone in which Kemball and Thompson present their insights into Weston's domestic arrangements suggest they are to them proof of his unsuitability for his public role, despite the fact that he was not, in this instance, acting in a professional capacity, nor would he necessarily have been expected to be at 6pm. 89 To support their recommendations, Kemball and Thompson include further evidence of Weston's domestic affairs, quoting Ram Chander, Assistant Commissioner of Police, who states he has a bhisti (an Indian water carrier) who left Weston because he would drunkenly beat his servants. Further, Abdul Majid, Deputy Superintendent of Police, states that it is known that Weston ' … has no cook. When he eats anything he either gets it cooked in his orderly's house -Indian foodor from the bazaar'. 90 The significance placed on Weston's domestic arrangements and private conduct corresponds to the conflation of professional and personal being as suggested by Bachelard's assertion that the home is perceived to constitute body and soul. Whilst Weston's various public indiscretions are evidently damaging to his career prospects and social standing, resulting in his slow progress to a position of any real authority and various notes made in his personal file, they are often mitigated or balanced in his annual appraisals by emphasis on his positive qualities such as hard work, zeal, methodical nature, and even, in 1904, his proficiency in cricket. 91 This tendency to explain away misconduct corresponds to Hobbs' assertion that '(I)n those days it was every man's duty to shield drunkards', and there is evidence that allowances were made for Weston's behaviour based on his background, both as middle-class (his father was manager of the Upper India Bank in Meerut) and as an Anglo-Indian (i.e. born in India to white British parents), with a note stating: '(I)t must also be remembered that he belongs to the … Community in which mental stamina is much below British standards'. 92 However, once it is apparent that his private behaviour is as haphazard as his public conduct, such mitigation is no longer offered.
Whilst, as Robert Colvard notes, the Abkari police (Excise) had the authority to enter people's homes in the enforcement of regulations around alcohol licensing and contraband liquor, there is no suggestion of illegal activity in Weston's drinking habits. 93 Instead, the case revolves around an assessment of his suitability for professional responsibility through examination of his personal behaviours. The case thus illustrates a further conflation of private and public space; not only is Weston judged professionally within what is typically understood as private, domestic space, his inability to manage his home is viewed as indicative of his failings in a professional capacity. Here, the lack of servants present in Weston's home, and indeed the testimony from those he had mistreated, suggests to his superiors that he is unable to lead or inspire other Britons or Indians and thus is not fit to continue in his public role. Again, the house is revealed as a hybrid space, but one that works in reverse to that of the barracks; whereas barracks are first and foremost professional environments in which domestic activity is engaged in, Weston's case reveals that the house, whilst intimate and personal, is nonetheless subject to the expectations of performed control and professionalism found in society beyond it, as scrutinised a public space as Russell's campaign tent, or the orderly room.

Conclusion
This article joins a growing body of scholarship that explores the role that alcohol played across the spectrum of colonial British society. Responding to Harald Fischer-Tiné's proposal that it is not simply the drinking and its prevalence that matters when approaching the subject of drinking in colonial society, but rather a case of considering 'who drank what and where', it has explored the extent to which the last of these considerations, the where of spatiality, drove and enabled the who and the what when it came to drinking in British India. 94 It has sought to illustrate not just that colonial Britons drank and drank to excess, but rather that the manner, mode and shared social meaning of how and why they did so was innately linked to factors of space and place, and was subject to the influence that spatial experiences ubiquitous to colonial India played in shaping their behaviour.
The examples considered here illustrate how various drinking behaviours, both casual and habitual, are enabled, restricted or punished in relation to the various spaces of British India, and how the identities of Anglo-Indians are formed by access to or restriction from space. The spaces addressed in this article, whilst distinct and subject to particular demands and expectations of their own, are nonetheless interlinked and united by their common attributes of hybridity, and their mix of the domestic and social, the personal and the professional. Beginning with the transient space of the ship, Britons in India encounter space characterised by liminality. Setting a pattern for the colonial experience, the ship is at once a shared and a personal space, whether travelling alone or as part of a community such as the military, and combines the performance of an individual's professional social role with that of their intimate, private behaviour. The diary and memoir accounts of travellers such as Pearman, Russell, and Raschen taken from various points across the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries suggest the extent to which this blend of functions becomes ordinary, and normalised; the abundance of leisure time aboard ship, the close proximity to others, and the frequent drinking aided in part by the orderly temporal schedule of meal-times, grog rations or other ship-bound entertainments, is initially contrasted against the maintenance of professional identity engaged in through drill or other duties happening in the same space, but soon becomes routine. Moreover, such habituation also prepares the individual for the circumstances of their domestic arrangements once in India itself; the nature of the enlisted men's barracks that Pearman encounters, or the tents and palanquins of Russell's journey again replicating the same senses of openness, intimacy and transience, exacerbated by both men's experiences on their respective campaigns. In both contexts, alcohol bridges the professional and the personal, with drinking a social pursuit engaged in within a professional context, and consumption enabled by but also facilitating the creation of hybrid spaces.
A significant result of this blending of spaces was the recurrent concern with visibility, both in terms of performing correct or appropriate social behaviours within space, or in relation to the example that British and European residents were expected to project before Indians once embedded either socially or professionally within Anglo-Indian society. The importance of a sense of shared space that cuts across traditional understandings of public and private is visible in each of the contexts considered here. In a military setting, the dichotomy of private/ public space extends to an expectation to perform character and identity through drink-related behaviour within various situations, and is one that remains largely stable across the period. The qualities of decisiveness and selfdiscipline demonstrated in Russell's account of the campaign mess are similar to what is expected of officers such as Lane later in the century. In the case of domestic space in India though, as well as taverns or barrooms, these spaces operate almost in reverse to those of the ship and barracks; whereas ships and barrack spaces invite personal behaviours in professional contexts, the home and the tavern demand the maintenance of professional personas in social or personal spaces. When these behaviours are transgressed, as the examples here have shown, it is not so much the actions themselves that cause offence but rather the space in which they have taken place that present the issue. For example, that men like Lane or Weston drink excessively is not in itself problematic, as their cases and personal files demonstrate; it is only when those excessive behaviours are visible within an inappropriate spatial context that they are punished. Ultimately, what this article has shown is that colonial drinking cultures subjected the drinker and their behaviour to various kinds of scrutiny enacted through a multiplicity of spaces and places. The act of drinking, both at large in Anglo-Indian society and recorded in the pages of these various accounts, is as much to do with social performance as it is related to personal taste, with space in each instance a prominent factor in determining what individuals consume and why they do so, and, most significantly of all, how their drinking is perceived and judged by those around them.

Notes
Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Fischer-Tiné's work on the drinking habits of British sailors is similarly connected, however, does not look at soldiers aboard ships as much as it does sailors on land. 18. Mathieson  ORCID Sam Goodman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7601-2564