The examination of company officials’ bathing and cleanliness practices allows us for an exploration into how far the British adoption of Indian practice was a result of the significant and lasting impact which India had on the British who lived here. [1/8]
In Britain, a daily splash of water on the face & hands was regarded as a quite sufficient cleanliness practice, even among the middle classes. Writing in 1801, a doctor commented that ‘most men resident and ladies in London neglect washing their bodies from year to year.’ [2/8]
Even the propriety of washing the whole surface of the body was often questioned, as one Richard Reece remarked in a journal called Medical Companion that washing hands and faces daily was sufficient enough to keep one’s body healthy. [⅜]
It is due to the influence of the orient that the British started integrating baths into their routine. The company surgeons even integrated bathing into the battery of treatments with which they attempted to stem the tide of tropical disease. [4/8]
In Madras in 1806, it was agreed that due to ‘great utility of Baths in many disorders of climate’ they should be installed in all European Hospitals in the Madras Presidency. Also, the first shower bath was installed in a Lunatic Hospital at Fort St. George. [⅝]
In fact, it was an Indian, Sheikh Mohammed of Patna, who took the vapor bath to Britain. He is credited with introducing the technique of shampooing to Britain, first in Basil Cochrane’s baths in London and then at his own establishment in Brighton, where he moved in 1814. [6/8]
The preventive measures of baths were of more interest to British surgeons as they started associating it with ‘prophylactic means of strengthening body's constitution. One surgeon James Johnson noted that ‘the British could learn much from the habits of the Indians’. [⅞]
By the 1830s, every company official's Bungalow in India was well-equipped with bathtubs, washstands, basins, soaps & commodes, while in Britain, it was not until the late 19th century that bathrooms became a normal part of middle-class homes. [8/8]
Hygiene practices in the West owe a great deal to the East (and India in particular).
Even in the early 20th century, the American medical fraternity was discussing whether one should bathe regularly or not.
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What if Indian academia is not producing knowledge but staging its simulation?
Vivek Dhareshwar calls it intellectual parasitism. A condition where concepts are consumed without being metabolized.
A thread on his radical vision for a new humanities. 🧵
Intellectual parasitism is not mimicry. It is dispossession.
It is when Foucault, Derrida, Butler are recited like mantras, their concepts floating free of the historical and social wounds that made them necessary.
Theory becomes a fetish. Thinking stops.
In this regime, the classroom is not a site of encounter. It is a theatre of citation.
Learning becomes procedural. Texts are mastered but not suffered. Concepts are deployed but never ruptured. Knowledge circulates without consequence.
How did the British and missionaries react to bare-chested women in South India? A story of colonial morality, caste, and cultural erasure that still shapes our thinking on dress and modesty today.
A thread 👇
A company painting of a basket maker and his wife, late 18th century.
In pre-colonial South India, women—across many castes—often went bare-chested. This was not seen as shameful. It was part of local aesthetics, climate, and caste codes. Modesty had a different meaning.
Enter the British and Christian missionaries with their Victorian morality, which equated nudity or partial nudity with "barbarism" or "backwardness".
The bare-chested woman became, to them, a symbol of India’s moral decay.
"The construction of a mosque on a spot regarded as sacred by the conquered population was meant as an insult… an insult to an ancient idea, the idea of Ram.”
"A convert’s deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins.”
In an interview published in Outlook magazine, Naipaul had said;
"You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so."
"So in India at the moment, you have a million mutinies - every man is a mutiny on his own - and I find that entirely creative. It's difficult to manage, it gets very messy, but it is the only way forward."
Ancient Indian texts (Upavana Vinoda, Kathasaritasagara etc.) talk about two types of gardens.
One attached to a royal place and one that was a public garden.
These gardens were spaciously laid out to include water tanks, flowers, orchard, etc.
Then our historians made Mughals synonymous with gardens in India.
Kautilya's Arthasastra confirms that an expertise in planting trees, shrubs and curating gardens was recognised.
Such plantings are also extolled in the Matsya Purana, in the form of dramas, epics, and poems that contain references to well laid out gardens.
Vatsyayana, in his Kamasutra, the 2nd century Sanskrit text, talks about creating a garden around a house with fruit trees, vegetables, flowering plants and herbs.
The 3rd-4th century Sanskrit text Vrikshaayurveda of Parasara classified plants in considerable detail.