CHAPTER 1

Conjunctures of Mediations

The Historical Logics of Expatriate Nepal

WHETHER IN THE CRITIQUES of development policy or in the denigration of expatriatelives, today's elite international workers are often condemned as practitionersof colonialism in a contemporary form. Trailing spouses are castigatedas modern memsahibs and government programs for business and industrypromotion are compared to eighteenth-century European trade exploitation.What exactly are the terms upon which this comparative critique is made? Iscontemporary international business merely an extension or repetition of Europeancolonialism? Could such a denigration have more substance that a meread hominem attack? Furthermore, what do such comparisons obscure? Doesthis erase the particularities of a place such as Kathmandu in favor of typologizingthe Western interloper? Does it erase changes in practices in favor of acolonial-postcolonial dyad?

In this chapter I want to rethink the stakes of such comparisons of contemporaryinternational labor to earlier forms of global business and governanceand to explore the history behind the accusations that overseas laborpractices are just like some past injustice, in order to investigate if there aremore tangible historical and structural connections between expatriates andcolonists. In addition, I will bring in particular employers, rather than the generic"colonialism," and particular locations, in this case Nepal, into the story toobserve differences as well as similarities between colonialism and contemporaryoverseas employment. My focus will be on the technologies that underliethe analogized labor forms to shift the question from whether development isneocolonialism to an alternative query about the structural practices shared bythese two moments of international work. The question of whether contemporaryexpatriate spouses are memsahibs allows only a banal yes or no answerand often typologizes both ends of the comparison. In the critique of globalbusiness exploitation as colonialism, the question of which colonialism, whereand when, is irrelevant, because colonialism in this frame more or less standsfor "bad things the West did to the rest of the world," reducing the complexityof both sides of the equation. Exploring the history of the governance of eliteinternational employment permits a more complex narrative of how and whywork and families have been shaped by international career structures as well aslocal context. Simplistic historical analogies threaten only to highlight similaritieswhile obscuring the purpose behind comparison itself (Asad 1993; Scott2004). In this chapter, comparison will be put in the service of understandingthe world of contemporary Western expatriates in Nepal, their mediation byinternational institutions and the influence of changing political situations inNepal. What I offer is thus not a linear history of the events leading up to thearrival of expatriates in Nepal, nor a succession of international employmentpractices, but a series of analytic spaces, each of which suggests somethingabout how the structures that have come to define international elite labor inNepal have come into being.

There is a second function of this chapter: to introduce the particularitiesof Nepal and its unique relationship to the rest of the world for the purposeof understanding elite transnational labor. While throughout this book Iintend to avoid categorizations such as nation-state or culture, this should notimply that they do not matter. These frameworks are central to the culture-clashapproach that predominates in the global business community, often tothe exclusion of other important ideas like gender, race or class. As an emicterm of global business, culture often becomes a list of rules that essentializedifference in order to simplify the process of translation. Yet this is not to saythat national histories and cultural difference are unimportant. Thus I directattention not necessarily to those events that are significant to national textbooksbut to histories of exchange and assumptions that develop and shapethe experience of foreigners working in Nepal (cf. Pigg 1992; Onta 1996). Inwhat follows, I look at several key conjunctures: the manipulation of Britishemployment and families during India's colonization, the opening of Nepalto the world in 1950 that shaped the country's engagement with the West andled to its popularity as both a tourist and development site, and the rise ofglobalisms, initiated by countries and companies that changed what it meansto be an overseas worker. These elements set the tone for the production of anew form of global labor and life, Expatria, and its eventual instantiation inKathmandu.

Is Colonizer to Expatriate asEmpire Is to Transnational Corporation?

In the search for antecedents to contemporary actions of global middlemenand their everyday work and lives in Nepal, colonial India is an obvious site,especially when the subject is the intersection of work and domestic life amonginternational laborers from the Global North to South Asia. Perhaps because ofthe wealth of information about British domestic life in India during colonialism(Stoler 1989; Procida 2002; Buettner 2004; Blunt 2005) or because of theRaj nostalgia that continues to permeate Western dreams of South Asia (Ward2001; Bissell 2005; Buettner 2006), the world of expatriate Nepal can evoke imagesof elephant safaris and elegant tea on the lawn. For a Western audience,visions of white families waited on by South Asian servants echo what all know,or think they know, about colonial India. There is something to be learnedfrom the comparison of expatriate life in Nepal to British colonial life in India,but a different set of insights emerge from the very assumption that this is theappropriate comparison.

Under scrutiny, in the relationship between these two interactions as formsof social life, an unconsidered analogy becomes evident that threatens distortionin the service of finding Expatria's past. With this caution in mind, theinformation on British colonialism nonetheless provides a rich resource forwidening understanding of the intersection of work and domestic life of thoseliving abroad. "Household Guides," which have provided important material toscholars of New Imperial History (Wilson 2004; Levine 2004), show how suchdomestic texts might be read against the grain to illuminate aspects of powerand politics at the highest level. Furthermore, the literatures that exist under therubrics of postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies provide a theoretical groundworkfor understanding current mediations between metropolitan policy andlocal conditions, but one that demands attention to the historical and contextualdiscontinuities between the world of eighteenth-and nineteenth-centuryEuropean colonial traditions and the present.

In the 1980s, Subaltern Studies opened up new methods and, importantly,new materials for understanding the world of those whose lives did not appearin official archives or government records. Meanwhile, scholars of the archivesof colonial life were still buried in the papers and ephemera of the Empire,the regimented bureaucratic system of England having translated itself intoa recording impulse of the license-permit-quota Raj. By reading between thelines of formal archives and giving attention to materials not generally consideredarchival (Ghosh 1994; Burton 2003), scholars learned a great deal aboutdomestic life in the colonial outposts, using a vast number of diaries, housekeepingmanuals and serialized descriptions of English women's experiences oflife abroad. The many published and private advice manuals for women headedto the colonies provided much information about the worldview of colonistsas read through domestic concerns, via lists of clothing, health concerns andguidance on the hiring and management of servants abroad (Walsh 2004). Thepacking manuals and housekeeping guides (Steel and Gardiner 1890; Diver1909) that served as the manuals on life in the colonies parallel contemporary"newcomers' guides" and corporate packing lists. These documents, whencombined with research on British colonial policy in India, tell a compellingstory of how the work of Empire was carried out by and through the families ofthose who worked for the East India Company.

Assumptions about a universal and atemporal divide between public andprivate, as well as the divisions of intellectual labor that often parallel these categories,have kept much of the analysis of such domestic documents separatefrom examinations of Imperial policy and political practice. Without feelingcompelled to survey the history of European involvement in India, I proposethat suturing official colonial documents and materials about private lives togetherwill offer a new lens on the Raj, especially illuminating how policies onoverseas posting were a part of the official apparatus of political and economicpursuits similar to the way they are for contemporary business in Nepal. ThePortuguese officials and British traders who came to the Indian subcontinentin the sixteenth century were single men. The concerns of both the sendinggovernments and local superiors about the domestic lives of their employeescentered around Catholic-Protestant tensions (Malabari 1910: 128; Mickelson1978: xii), and liaisons with local women were often encouraged as a meansto avoid crossing this religious barrier or to propitiate local populations ofwidows created by battles with European powers, thus solving two problemsfor the foreign powers (Stark 2007: 3–8). As the size of the British populationin India increased, the self-contained forts that had served as miniature whitebachelor worlds could no longer contain the men sent to outposts of the EastIndia Company. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Company began formalrecognition of the large number of British soldiers setting up households withlocal women and facilitated these relationships with financial sponsorship andofficial, if unequal, status for their offspring (14–26). The children of the eliteEnglishmen and local women produced a population of use to the Company, ahybrid progeny that could operate in local contexts and in the world of Englishbureaucracy. Taking a British bride was unfeasible for most English workers inthe eighteenth century, mainly due to the cost of the upkeep of a proper Englishhousehold that such a liaison was expected to produce (Mickelson 1978: 41).Although it is difficult to ascertain the precise number of Englishwomen inIndia before 1815 (see Michaelson 1978: x), it was by most accounts quite low(Ghosh 1970: 70).

Several subsequent events changed attitudes about appropriate forms of domesticlife and their intersection with political practice in India. British Parliament,through the East India Company Act and later the Charter Acts, made theconjunction between the Crown and the Company stronger and gave officialstatus to the Company monopoly. The Industrial Revolution and the AmericanRevolution brought dramatic change to the English economy and new class divisions.These governance shifts coincided with a greater public interest in overseasactivities, and more efficient communication available to those in the UKallowed a greater flow of information about sons and brothers in the subcontinent.The Company used this conjuncture to take on a new role of matchmaker,sending single Englishwomen to India in search of husbands among the Companyworkers (MacMillan 1988: 16). This small-scale and short-lived practicetransformed the social scene of the English in India, as officers hosted partiesthat were designed to facilitate staff marriage proposals to these imported bachelorettes,a practice which continued even though the "importation" of Englishwomen was banned as a part of the Company Charter renewal in 1833. Thesalaries of most Company officials did not permit the establishment of an appropriately"English" home by any but the most elite, especially given the highlysocial character of colonial life that developed in this period. The quest forhigher status was often a part of the motivation for employment in the colonies,and this, combined with an explicit Company charge to perform "civilized" lifefor an Indian audience, led to a lifestyle abroad that included elaborate—andatmospherically uncomfortable—attire and formal events. A shift was occurringthat moved from the laissez-faire approach to commercial activities thathad marked the eighteenth century to a more moralizing rhetoric associatedwith a rise in central government attention to the colony and a Whiggish approachto the social and political activities of English men and women in India.

Much attention has been focused on English women in India between the1833 Charter renewal and the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, especially as Englishwomen are often targeted as the instigation of the Rebellion. Their presence,some claim, was seen as a threat to the population of Anglo-Indians who hadserved as assistants to the colonists and whose very existence was emblematicof the shifting endorsement of sexual relations by the Company. Whitewomen were also claimed to be disruptive of a purported "racial harmony"which had developed between English men and Indian subjects/sexual partners(Furber 1948). Yet, what is most remembered is the invocation of thedeath of white innocents in the Rebellion as a reason for increased violenceand militarism by the British Government. Despite the lack of statistics on thenumber of Englishwomen present in India at a given time, their presence orabsence often played a role in arguments about how the Raj should be run. Atone moment they would be cited as a way to increase discipline and civilityamong the male British workers and at another denigrated as immoral creaturesrepresenting the worst of English society (Malabari 1910: 128). In thechanging attitudes towards gender relations in the colonies and the attendanttransformations in understanding racial relations, one can see the Company/Crown manipulation of British family arrangements as a means to other politicaland economic needs.

It was more than changing migration and employment policies that transformedthe project of British Imperialism; it was a change in domestic styleas well. The family life of Britons sent to the colonies was a frequent topicof concern for political theorists who worried about the Englishmen's loss of"Englishness" during times when single men were the dominant population.It was this fear and the new endorsement of an ongoing imperial presencein India that produced financial incentives for the establishment of Englishfamilies abroad (Hutchins 1967). British women were seen as part of a doublecivilizing mission: on the one hand to the local population they would act asexemplars of civilized life, but on the other, to their own house and Britishsociety they would contribute a veneer of normalcy by establishing a more"British" life in India (Strobel 1991; Burton 1994; Jayawardena 1995). Womenwere explicitly tasked with creating English homes and English recreationalactivities for the men living in India. There were subsidiary outcomes of thisproduction of "Little Britains," including a new gendered division of spaceand greater demands for local workers to labor in larger English homesteads.English women's constitutions were seen as incompatible with the crowdedworld of city life in India, and many British officers moved in the eighteenthcentury from communal forts in the city to the countryside and "hill stations,"thus generating a new suburban lifestyle, perhaps the first instantiation ofa familiar form of work-home spatial division that took many years to becomecommon in the Western idea of the suburb (Archer 1997; King 1997;Blunt 2005). This new style of colonial life had men setting out in carriagesin the morning while women kept the house running in the cleaner rural environment,creating a suburban style of movement as well as new forms ofalienation and affiliation for the British women left behind in the suburbs(Archer 1997: 52–53; Chambers 1997). The enclavic style of compound lifeproduced a call for each house to have individual gardeners, cooks, nanniesand a litany of other, largely domestic and feminized labor, work done by bothlocal women and men but which generated new class, caste and gender tensions,of which English employers were often ignorant. The isolation of thesenew compound-style residences produced a more egalitarian attitude amongthe British, but also a more hostile attitude towards Indians (Hutchins 1967:114). This new housing arrangement, encouraged by the British Crown, notonly changed the lives of English workers in India but also changed the socialhierarchy, the nature of the work day and ultimately the way the labor of colonialismwas performed.