Tobacco by Iain Gately

Author:Iain Gately
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2001-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

‘As a rule,’ said Holmes, ‘the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it appears to be. It is your common, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify. But I must be prompt over this matter.’

‘What are you going to do, then?’ I asked.

‘To smoke,’ he answered. ‘It is quite a three pipe problem.’

The Victorians took their own peculiar notions of tobacco use overseas. They were moderns wandering into the medieval, or even biblical ages when they went abroad. At no other time in history was the discrepancy in technology between cultures so evident. The Victorians not only claimed to be God’s chosen ones, they knew it, and it was a matter few other nations would dare dispute. The growing empire held opportunities for every class of Victorian society. Criminals were transported to it, the poor emigrated there, the middle classes were employed in administration or civilizing, and the upper echelon accepted appointments of a regal nature.

Following the example of the seventeenth-century Dutch, tobacco growing was encouraged throughout the British Empire, and the weed was cultivated in nearly every territory under the protection of the British flag. India, the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas possessions, was the second largest producer of tobacco in the world by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, although almost all the weed it grew was for domestic use. From the Himalayas surrounding the newly named and measured Mount Everest to the subcontinent’s southern tip, tobacco was consumed and celebrated in a variety of manners as diverse as the Hindu pantheon. Indians, however, unlike their colonial rulers, did not consider tobacco and women to be mutually exclusive. According, for example, to a Gadaba myth: ‘there is no difference between tobacco and a wife; we love them both equally’.

The scale of Indian production was immense. For instance, in 1884, it harvested 340 million pounds of tobacco – four-fifths of the equivalent in the United States, then the world’s largest producer. Most tobacco grown in India was dark and either chewed or, more commonly, consumed in the form of small cigars named ‘bidis’. The water pipe, or hookah, was firmly established in the Mogul states, and had been adopted in a manner reminiscent of the Elizabethan ‘reeking gallants’ by members of the British administration, who employed special servants, termed ‘hookah-burdars’ to carry and tend the instrument of their pleasure. As Major General Keatings recalled in his memoirs: ‘In former days it was a dire offence to step over another person’s hooka-carpet or hooka-snake. Men who did so intentionally were called out.’ Indian passion for tobacco possibly exceeded that of their white masters – a popular saying in Bihar – ‘show me the man who can live without either chewing or smoking tobacco’ – is illustrative of the absorption of tobacco into India’s myriad cultures.

In addition to offering members of the British middle class employment in trade or administration, the Empire held the temptation of exploration.

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