How a Victorian philosopher found common ground between Hindu philosophy and socialism

When Edward Carpenter arrived in Madras in 1891, he quickly discovered that being an Englishman in India came with a price. There were servants to employ, hotels to stay in and a standard of life to maintain.

Carpenter, a 46-year-old poet and philosopher, thought the whole arrangement was absurd. Using the term “John Bull”, a natural personification of England in political cartoons, he said his compatriots paid “through the nose” to maintain their privileges.

His own experience was hardly reassuring.

“As to the boatmen and drivers and guides and servants generally, they torment one like gadflies; not swindling one in a nice open riant way like the Italians of the same ilk, but with smothered dodges and obsequious craft,” Carpenter wrote in his 1892 book From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, an account of his travels in Ceylon and India.

He complained about his last hotel in Madras, calling it “odious” with a “lying Indian manager” and “cringing servants”, including “an idiotic old man” who acted as his “boy” and tormented him by fiddling around with his slippers and holding a towel in readiness while he was washing his face.

But Carpenter was not merely an irritable traveller complaining about service. He was a socialist who had come to India with a growing...

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