Imperial Sleep: Race, Climate, and Health in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British India

Abstract This article argues that sleep is an understudied element of bodily experience in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British India. Using the notion of “imperial sleep,” the article explores the ways in which the bodies of colonized and colonizer were enmeshed through medical, material, and technological cultures of sleep and sleeping. Sleep practices reveal complex interactions of imperial hierarchies of race and class as the British in India struggled to obtain a good night’s rest in the tropical climate. Looking to medical journals, advice books, and cultural representations of Anglo-Indian life, this article will consider how sleep played a crucial role in protecting white bodies from the perils of the tropical environment. Doctors and surgeons weighed in on how a careful regimen of “tropical sleep hygiene” could mitigate the degenerating influences of heat, wind, and bothersome insects. In turn, these medicalized sleep regimens encountered the indigenous sleep practices of colonized peoples, who were often forced to mold their own bodily need for rest to support that of their rulers. While typically represented as “laziness” by colonial rulers, the flexible sleep practices of Indian servants observed by Europeans might be viewed as a means of embodied resistance against the temporal violence of colonialism.