Fwd: Smelling British sahibs learnt to bath in India

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>"Shaasa A. Ruzicka" <amritasyaputra

>amritasyaputra

>amritasyaputra

>Smelling British sahibs learnt to bath in India

>Sun, 19 Oct 2003 16:11:39 -0400 (EDT)

>

>

>Smelling British sahibs learnt to bath in India

>

>The first Englishmen who came to India as servants of the East India

>Company were bewildered by many of our customs. Many of them commented on,

>in their letters home, the habit, among certain classes of the Hindus, of

>taking a daily bath.

>

>The early factory-hands of John Company in India may have been somewhat

>scandalized by the fact that Hindu men and women of good families should

>not mind taking their baths in full view of others, what they found even

>more strange was that they should be washing their bodies at all.

>

>For the British, the process of washing the body entailed lying prone in a

>tub half full of hot water. And how many houses in pre-Industrial England

>could have had metal containers large enough to accommodate grown men and

>women, and, even more, the facilities to heat up enough water? The

>conclusion was inescapable. For most Englishmen of the 17th and 18th

>centuries, a bath must have been a rare experience indeed, affordable to

>the very rich, who perhaps took baths when they felt particularly

>obnoxious, what with their zest for vigorous exercise, such as workouts in

>the boxing ring or rowing or riding at the gallop over the countryside.

>What a sensual pleasure it must have been to lie soaking in a tub full of

>scalding hot water? But such indulgences were possible only during the few

>weeks of what the English call their summer. For the rest of the year, the

>water in the tub could not have remained hot for more than a couple of

>minutes, and from November through February must have gone icy cold as soon

>as it was poured in. Brrrrr!

>

>Then again, even those who thus bathed their bodies a few times every

>summer seem to have been careful to, as it were, keep their heads above

>water. In other words, a bath did not also involve a hair-wash. Otherwise

>there doesn't seem to be any reason why they should have found it necessary

>to coin-or adopt-a special word to describe the process of bathing hair:

>shampoo, which, 'Hobson Jobson' tells us is derived from the Hindi word,

>champi, for 'massage'. Why a word which normally described the process of

>muscle-kneading should have been picked on to explain a head-wash, is not

>at all convincing. It seems that the Company's servants used to send for

>their barbers every now and then to massage their heads with oil and then

>rinse off the hair with soap and water. So the head-champi, became

>'shampoo'.

>

>Which may explain why G M Trevelyans's English Social History does not so

>much as mention the word 'bath'. In the pre-industrial age it was, at best,

>an eccentricity indulged in by exercise-freaks in the summer months, and a

>head-bath was even rarer. English royal court felt compelled to post in

>1589: "Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at or after meals, early or

>late, foul the staircase, corridors, or closets with urine or other filth."

>

>But, out in the tropics they must have gone about smelling quite a bit. In

>fact, the Chinese, when they first encountered the White man described him

>as "the smelly one".

>

>According to William Dalrymple, in his book White Mughals: Love and

>Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India: "Indian women, for example,

>introduced British men in the delights of regular bathing." And again:

>

>"Those who had returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves

>on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at as 'effeminate'."

>

>(source: Smelling sahibs learnt to bathe in India - by Manohar Malgonkar -

>tribuneindia.com).

>

>**

>

>Early Christians took a dim view of bathing. St. Benedict in the 6th

>century declared that "to those who are well, and especially the young,

>bathing shall seldom be permitted." In the early 1200s, St. Francis of

>Assisi declared personal uncleanliness a sign of piety. Europeans have an

>interesting history of bathing. Long before they turned Christian,

>Scandinavians and Germans bathed naked in lakes and rivers during the

>summer months, and in public baths during the winter. With the advent of

>Christianity nakedness came to be associated with vulgarity, lascivious

>thoughts and, therefore, sinful. St Agnes (d. 1077) never took a bath; St

>Margaret never washed herself; Pope Clement III issued an edict forbidding

>bathing or even wetting one's face on Sundays. Between the 16th and 18th

>centuries, the practice of bathing in rivers was frowned upon. In 1736 in

>Baden (Germany), the authorities issued a warning to students against "the

>vulgar, dangerous and shocking practice of bathing."

>

>(source: The importance of bathing - by Khuswant Singh - tribuneindia.com).

>

>

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