Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From The Eighteenth Century To Monica Ali 1st Edition Noemí Pereira-Ares (Auth.)
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From The Eighteenth Century To Monica Ali 1st Edition Noemí Pereira-Ares (Auth.)
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From The Eighteenth Century To Monica Ali 1st Edition Noemí Pereira-Ares (Auth.)
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FASHION, DRESS AND
IDENTITY IN SOUTH ASIAN
DIASPORA NARRATIVES
FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO MONICA ALI
Noemí Pereira-Ares
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian
Diaspora Narratives
Noemí Pereira-Ares
My English grandmother
took a telescope
and gazed across continents.
Eventually
they wrapped and wrapped me in it
whispering Your body is your country.
(Alvi 2008: 39)
Acknowledgements
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Introduction
xi
Bibliography 203
Index 233
ix
Introduction
xi
xii Introduction
and Western clothes, and she even imagines her white boyfriend mak-
ing an ethnic contribution by dressing in ‘full khaadi, the hand-spun,
hand-woven cloth popularized by Gandhi’ (1999: 36). Srivastava’s novel
is set in the 1990s when, as Tania says in Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee
Hee, ‘brown was indeed the new black, in couture, in music, in design’
(2000a: 109). Alluding to the sporting of Asian dress by such personali-
ties as Princess Diana or Cherie Blair, the main character in Nirpal Singh
Dhaliwal’s Tourism astringently comments: ‘Cherie wore a blue and sil-
ver sari that hung awkwardly on her, and a matching bindhi […] The
Blairs, keen on rich Indians, were only too happy to dress up for them.
Money is the most cosmopolitan thing in the world’ (2006: 149–150).
The ‘Asian cool’ phenomenon depicted in the above-mentioned nov-
els also surfaces in a number of post-9/11 narratives, where it coexists
with the stigmas surrounding (South Asian) Muslim clothes. As a result,
post-9/11 British Asian fictions show characters that, out of fear, leave
‘their headscarves at home’ (Ali 2007: 376) and others that, in stark
contrast, defiantly ‘upgrade’ their hijabs ‘to burkhas’ (Ali 2007: 279).
Notwithstanding, in the twenty-first century the ‘desification’ of British
culture continues to increase, and we see how Jas, the white protagonist
of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, adopts desi aesthetics, roaming the
streets in his ‘designer desi garms’ (2007: 5).
Deftly woven into the fabric of the texts, dress in the above quota-
tions emerges as a conspicuous site of identity inscription, negotiation
and reinvention. Along this broad continuum of narratives, dress also
voices shared preoccupations that reveal both the currency that dress
has acquired in the Asian-British encounter and an underlying his-
tory of shifting attitudes towards the South Asian presence in Britain.
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the
Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali stemmed from the need to address the
recurrence and specific character of dress in the literature of the South
Asian diaspora. While much of the discussion in this book could be per-
tinent to sartorial readings of differently located South Asian diasporic
texts, this study centres on South Asian literary productions in Britain.
Because, as Avtar Brah has noted in her seminal work Cartographies of
Diaspora, the South Asian diaspora is made up of ‘multiple journeys’
that intersect at various points, but each of these journeys has ‘its own
history, its own particularities’ (1996: 183) and, consequently, each of
them requires taking into account certain contextual specificities that
could be de-emphasised if the corpus of analysis were geographically too
Introduction xiii
the less individually acted upon, dress is seen as a ‘situated bodily prac-
tice’ (2005: 34) through which individuals present their body/self to the
social world, but also through which received discourses might be repro-
duced or challenged.
Underlying Entwistle’s formulation is the idea that body and dress
are inextricable from one another. Human bodies, as she says, are gener-
ally ‘dressed bodies’ (2005: 32), nakedness being often repressed within
social interaction. Therefore, dress should not be discussed without ref-
erence to the body. Dress is so intimately connected to the body that,
as Anne Hollander suggests (1993), artistic representations of the naked
body have often been modelled following sartorial conventions. If the
body is evidently dressed even in the absence of any garment, dress is
produced and consumed in relation to the body. The ‘empty garment,
without head and limbs […] is death, not the neutral absence of the
body, but the body mutilated, decapitated’ (Barthes 1972: 26). Clothes
in costume museums, Elizabeth Wilson argues, ‘hint at something only
half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the
evanescence of life’ (2010: 1). Joanne Entwistle has been one of the
most salient advocates of the need to study body and dress conjointly—
and my recurrent use of the term ‘dressed body’ shows the indebtedness
of this book to her work (2001, 2007). As she claims, the dressed body
is so closely linked to ‘identity that these three—dress, the body and the
self—are not perceived separately but simultaneously as a totality’ (2005:
10). This triple linkage becomes extremely pertinent when analysing
the narratives under scrutiny in this book. In them, dress is not simply
a static cultural object, but also a ‘bodily practice’ lived and experienced
by the characters. It is ingrained in multiple discourses that affect the
characters’ sartorial choices, which they often voice and explain to the
reader. Dress adds new layers of meaning to the body, as does the body
in relation to dress. As we shall see, in many texts the body of the wearer
attaches a stigma to the garment, as does the garment to the body that
wears it. For, as Denise Noble has noted, not only is racialisation consti-
tuted through skin, but also ‘embodied a second time over through hair
styles, clothing […] hijabs and salwaar-kameez’ (2005: 133). Whether in
a symbiotic or paradoxical way, body and dress often converge in the nar-
ratives under scrutiny, to such an extent that, in many respects, this study
is as much concerned with the body as it is with dress—and this duality
only finds resolution through the notion of the ‘dressed body’.
Introduction xix
‘Dress’ and ‘fashion’ are terms that recur throughout the pages of
this book, and consequently they necessitate some brief discussion
at this point. Transposing the terminology of fashion theory, the term
‘dress’—and, by extension, ‘dressed body’—is used here to refer to all
forms of clothing, adornments and bodily modifications, from garments
to shoes, from headgear to jewellery, from scents to hairstyles, make-up,
piercings and tattoos (Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1997). In this sense,
the conceptual implications of ‘dress’ are much broader than those of the
term ‘clothes’, which is generally assumed to allude simply to garments.
Usually defined in relation to ‘dress’, ‘fashion’ has been conceived of as
the ‘different forms’ that dress has adopted over the course of history
(Hollander 1993: 11), or as a ‘specific system of dress’ (Entwistle 2005:
48). Fashion, as the process whereby different forms of dress come into
vogue at different points in time, has frequently been considered and
addressed as a Western phenomenon,16 leading to the wrong assump-
tion that fashion, in the sense outlined above, does not exist outside the
Western world. In recent years, a number of scholars have denounced
the Western-centrism present in much theorisation about fashion. Sandra
Niessen states that ‘[f]ashion’s definition has long been in need of review
and revision’, observing that fashion has been constructed as a Western
phenomenon and as the purview of Western ‘civilization’ (2007: 105);
and Jennifer Craik suggests that ‘[b]y displacing the European-dictator
(ethnocentric or cultural superiority) model of fashion’, it is possible to
see how ‘other fashion systems co-exist, compete and interact with it’
(1994: x–xi). Adding to these voices, this book endorses a definition
of ‘fashion’ as any of the multiple systems of dress that exist across the
globe; systems that are ruled by social, cultural, religious and sometimes
even political and ideological conventions; and systems that are all sub-
ject to constant change.
If the human body is mainly a dressed body, as fashion theory tells us,
those ‘fictional’ bodies that stand for human subjects are also likely to
become, through the process of mimesis, dressed bodies. Indeed, more
than in the real world, in the literary text the characters are almost always
imagined as being dressed. For even when they are verbally naked—in
other words, when there is a complete absence of sartorial description—
the reader is likely to perceive or imagine them as being dressed. In
other artistic manifestations—painting, sculpture, theatre or cinema,
among others—artists, creators or designers have to decide whether their
xx Introduction
metaphor’ (Kuhn and Carlson 2007: 1). Literary dress might rely on the
meanings that particular clothes have in the real world and/or ‘operate
as the author’s personal sign-system’ (Hughes 2006: 3), thus acquiring
a significance that only makes sense within the diegesis. Dress might be
endowed with symbolism in literature, and it might also acquire a sort
of narrative function. Sartorial allusions might represent particular exer-
cises in description, but they might also build a narrative strand when
viewed in relation to one another. Dress in literature offers ‘one of the
different pleasures of reading a text—different, that is, from simply fol-
lowing the plot’ (Hughes 2006: 3). Dress contains multiple layers of
meaning that might pass unnoticed to a sartorially unobservant eye. But
dress is also ‘a visible aspect of history’ or, as Hughes adds, quoting John
Harvey (1996: 17), ‘values made visible’ (2006: 2). This book is about
what an analysis of dress can add to the interpretation of the literary text
and its context, where historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural
and fashion studies are used to support the reading. However, it is also
about what literature might add, or has been adding, to discussions on
the South Asian dressed body in Britain. For, as Yasmin Hussain has
said, South Asian diaspora texts offer a ‘compelling body of sociologi-
cal evidence about the South Asian diaspora’ (2005: 4) and, as this work
attempts to demonstrate, they also provide an important source of sarto-
rial evidence. They dramatise the different ways in which South Asians
in Britain have imagined themselves sartorially and have been imagined
by the dominant gaze, yielding insights into many of the controversies
surrounding the South Asian dressed body in Britain, most notably now-
adays debates on the practice of hijab within the South Asian Muslim
community.
Particularly in recent decades, the South Asian dressed body in gen-
eral, and the Muslim dressed body in particular, has come under the
critical gaze of many scholars, including those whose studies are geo-
graphically circumscribed to Britain.18 Framed within anthropologi-
cal, sociological and cultural approaches, these studies have contributed
towards bringing the South Asian dressed body into the centre of schol-
arly discussions. However, to the best of my knowledge, none of them
has engaged with, or drawn insights from, literature. Likewise, in recent
decades, the study of dress in literature has experienced an exponen-
tial growth. Yet this critical oeuvre has tended to focus on some of the
most, let us say, ‘canonical’ authors and texts.19 It is the aim of this book
to build a bridge between these two bodies of scholarship, or rather to
xxii Introduction
explore the South Asian dressed body within and from within literary
criticism. ‘Costume historians,’ as Hughes notes, ‘have frequently drawn
on literature for evidence and information’, and yet ‘[l]iterary critics have
been puzzlingly slow to return the compliment’ (2006: 2). Literary crit-
ics engaging with South Asian diaspora writing in Britain have occasion-
ally made passing references to fashion and dress, but without turning
sartorial concerns into a main issue of analysis. Arguably, the contribu-
tions that come closest to the analytical purposes of this book are those
included in the 36th issue of the journal New Literatures Review, entitled
(Un)fabricating the Empire (2000) and, in particular, Susanne Reichl’s
‘Of Lappas and Levis: (Dress-)code-switching and the Construction of
Cultural Identities in the British Novel of Immigration’. In it, Reichl
approaches dress as yet another code of communication in three nov-
els—Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996), Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Ravinder Randhawa’s Hari-jan (1992)—
drawing correspondences between the language and sartorial choices of
the characters in these texts. Reichl argues that linguistic and sartorial
strategies overlap in these novels, becoming crucial factors ‘in the posi-
tioning and constructing of the individual character’s identity’ (2000:
74). Her article outlines the dress–identity nexus with which this book
is concerned. However, her contribution is narrower in scope—being
reduced to three texts—and its emphasis on the parallelisms between lin-
guistic and sartorial choices, despite being extremely compelling, runs
athwart the specific focus on the dressed body that I propose here.
The present monograph constitutes, therefore, the first attempt at
providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis of sartorial identities
in the narratives of the South Asian diaspora in Britain, without losing
sight of how complex, problematic and even intrusive such an exercise
might be deemed considering my position as a white Western woman.
The book is divided into five main chapters, plus this introduction and
an afterward. All five chapters begin with an introductory section map-
ping the historical, sartorial and literary presence of South Asians in
Britain, simultaneously uncovering the points of intersection among
these dimensions. Each chapter then segues into the analysis of particu-
lar narratives. Chapter 1 engages with a series of travelogues written
by a number of South Asian authors who travelled—and in some cases
settled—in Britain during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Having been subjected to much scrutiny as a result of
Introduction xxiii
their seemingly ‘exotic’ dressed bodies, these writers made dress into an
important issue in their narratives, timidly adumbrating and prefigur-
ing sartorial tropes and concerns that were to reappear in later fictions.
Chapter 2 focuses on texts produced in the post-Second World War
period, roughly from the 1950s to the 1970s, and depicting the experi-
ences of first-generation migrants. The chapter charts the points of sar-
torial continuity and discontinuity that exist between fiction written by
pioneering Indo-Caribbean writers and narratives dealing with the South
Asian diaspora from the Indian subcontinent. It then offers an in-depth
sartorial reading of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), a
narrative in which dress connects past and present, colonialism and
diaspora, India and Britain. Moving from migrant narratives to fictions
revolving around second-generation characters, Chapter 3 examines sar-
torial representations in a series of works that, albeit published in the
1980s and early 1990s, look back to previous decades as they explore the
process of growing up in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. The fet-
ishisation of Eastern paraphernalia in the period is portrayed in a number
of these narratives, including Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
(1990), on which Chapter 3 concentrates. Drawing strength from the
irreverent world of British pop and youth subcultures, Kureishi’s novel
recreates a sartorial ‘carnival’ where dress affords the characters a site of
identity construction and reconstruction in subversive ways. Far removed
from carnivalesque endeavours, the narratives examined in Chapter 4,
all of them set and produced in the 1990s, introduce us to the ‘Asian
cool’ phenomenon, a phenomenon ambivalently treated in Meera Syal’s
Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), whose sartorial analysis centres
the remainder of this chapter. Besides tracing shifts in the protagonists’
development, dress in Syal’s novel is also endowed with a plethora of fig-
urative resonances which often coalesce around the novel’s exploration
of patriarchal structures, encumbering gender roles and the entwinement
between gender and ethnicity in the diaspora. Chapter 5 finally walks the
reader to the new millennium, initiating a sartorial journey across vari-
ous post-9/11 narratives. Focusing on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003),
the chapter examines, inter alia, how this novel openly problematises the
question of hijab, linking it to a broad spectrum of identity positionali-
ties and dissociating it from much Western rhetoric that merely sees it as
an oppressive element.
xxiv Introduction
Notes
1. Moniza Alvi’s ‘The Sari’ first appeared in the collection The Country at
My Shoulder (1993), published by Oxford University Press. The version
reproduced here is from Moniza Alvi’s Split World: Poems 1990–2005
(2008), published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd, p. 39.
2. The implementation of these two parameters has excluded a number of
texts that, albeit fulfilling one criterion, do not comply with the other.
Thus, writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, G. V.
Desani or Attia Hosain, who have not centred their work on the diasporic
condition, are not considered in the present work. Likewise, the study
also excludes literary texts that touch on the South Asian experience in
Britain, but are not written by authors of South Asian origin—Zadie
Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Colin MacInnes’ City of Spades (1957),
Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992), William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach
(1990), Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002) or Neil Gaiman’s Anansi
Boys (2005), among others.
3. Since the 1970s, within the British context, the term ‘South Asian’—
sometimes abbreviated to ‘Asian’—has been used to refer to people origi-
nally from South Asia. The potential artificiality underlying this category
is perfectly articulated by Robert C. Young: ‘This word Asian—which
means something else in the US […] [bands together] different groups
[that] share a geographical and cultural link only by contrast with the
English among whom they reside […] they are only “Asians” because
they are British Asians’ (1999: 22).
4. See Susheila Nasta (2002), Yasmin Hussain (2005) and Ruvani Ranasinha
(2007).
5. For more information, see Khachig Tölölyan (1991), William Safran
(1991), James Clifford (1994), Robin Cohen (1997), Steven Vertovec
(1999), Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003) or Virinder S.
Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (2005), among others.
6. Especially within recent scholarship, transculturalism is said to oppose the
emphasis of postcolonialism on ‘nation and narration’ (Bhabha 1990),
insisting instead on addressing border-crossing and boundary-less cul-
tural identifications in a current era dominated by ‘global diaspora and
interconnection’ (Mirzoeff 1999, 154). Often traced back to the work
of Fernando Ortiz ([1940] 1995), transculturalism—and its multi-
ple cognates ‘transculturation’, ‘transculturality’, ‘transculture’—has
been developed subsequently in the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1992),
Wolfgang Welsch (1999, 2009), Mikhail Epstein (1995, 2009), and more
recently by Donald Cuccioletta (2001/2002), Sissy Helff (2009), Frank
Introduction xxv
of the embodied identity’ and for the study of ‘the intersections of dress,
body, and culture’ (Steele 1997: 1–2).
16. Conceptualisations of fashion as an entirely Western occurrence can be
found in many fashion histories (Breward 2002; Laver 1995), texts read-
ing fashion under the lens of economy and class theory (Simmel 1971;
Veblen 1953), semiotic works (Barnard 2002; Barthes 1985) and even in
some of the most seminal works within the field (Hollander 1993; Wilson
2010).
17. Qaisra Shahraz’s ‘A Pair of Jeans’ ([1988] 2005), Pauline Melville’s ‘The
Truth Is in the Clothes’ (1990), Moniza Alvi’s ‘The Sari’ ([1993] 2008),
Carol Shields’ ‘Dressing up for the Carnival’ (2000), Lauren Weisberger’s
The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and Steven Millhauser’s ‘A Change of
Fashion’ (2006) are all texts that, albeit in different ways and to various
degrees, use dress as a central motif.
18. See Dulali Nag (1991), Naseem Khan (1992), Jennifer Craik (1994),
Emma Tarlo (1996, Nirmal Puwar (2002), Parminder Bhachu (2004,
2005a, 2005b), Parvati Raghuram (2003), and Sandra Niessen, Ann
Marie Leshkowich and Carla Jones (2005), among other scholars.
19. See, for example, Rosie Aindow (2010), Jennie Batchelor (2005), Clair
Hughes (2001, 2006), Cynthia Kuhn (2005), Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy
Carlson (2007), Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas and Catherine Cole
(2009), Aileen Ribeiro (2005), Catherine Spooner (2004), and Joseph
H. Hancock II, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas (2013).
CHAPTER 1
The historical dynamics that have brought British and South Asian
people into contact span more than 400 years and, contrary to what is
commonly assumed, Britain became a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992) almost
at the same time as the Indian subcontinent itself.1 The history of this
cultural encounter is a history of multiple dimensions, or rather a his-
tory composed of multiple interrelated histories, whether they are social,
political, cultural, religious, linguistic or sartorial. While initially the sar-
torial history might seem to be the most trivial, the fact remains that, in
many ways and to different extents, it reflects all the others. For dress-
ing choices and attitudes to distinct forms of dress have been affected
by—and therefore can be said to bear testimony to—the social, politi-
cal and power synergies that historically have determined the interaction
between Britons and South Asians, either in the Indian subcontinent
or in Britain. As Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote with regard to the sartorial
reality of the Indian subcontinent—and it can certainly be extrapolated
to the South Asian sartorial reality in Britain—‘clothing and adorn-
ment were and continue to be as much an expression of the nature of
things Indian, rerum Indicarum natura as any other human activity,
say, politics, social and economic life, culture as embodied in literature
or art could be’ (2009: ix). Consequently, as Chaudhuri added, ‘an
excursion into the world of clothing’ allows the traveller to see ethnic,
social, political and even economic concerns ‘at work in a specific field of
culture’ (ibid.).
* * *
CHAPTER IV
PROTOZOA (CONTINUED): SPOROZOA[100]
II. Sporozoa.
Protozoa parasitic in Metazoa, usually intracellular for at least part of their
cycle, rarely possessing pseudopodia, or flagella (save in the sperms), never
cilia; reproduction by brood-formation, often of alternating types; syngamy
leading up to resting spores in which minute sickle-germs are formed, or
unknown (Myxosporidiaceae).
This group, of which seven years ago no single species was known
in its complete cycle, has recently become the subject of
concentrated and successful study, owing to the fact that it has been
recognised to contain the organisms which induce such scourges to
animals as malarial fevers, and various destructive murrains. Our
earliest accurate, if partial knowledge, was due to von Siebold,
Kölliker, and van Beneden. Thirty years ago Ray Lankester in
England commenced the study of species that dwell in the blood,
destined to be of such moment for the well-being of man and the
animals in his service; and since then our knowledge has increased
by the labours of Manson, Ross and Minchin at home, Laveran,
Blanchard, Thélohan, Léger, Cuénot, Mesnil, Aimé Schneider in
France, Grassi in Italy, Schaudinn, Siedlecki, L. and R. Pfeiffer,
Doflein in Central Europe, and many others.
Fig. 31.—Lankesteria ascidiae, showing life-cycle. a, b, c, Sporozoites in
digestive epithelium cells of host; d, e, growth stages; f, free gregarine; g,
association; h, encystment; i, j, brood-divisions in associated mates; k,
pairing-cells; l, syngamy; m, zygote; n, o, p, nuclear divisions in spores; q,
cyst with adult spores, each containing 8 sickle-germs. (After Luhe,
modified from Siedlecki.)
The merozoite is always amoeboid, and in this state enters the blood
corpuscle; herein it attains its full size, as a schizont, becoming filled
with granules of "melanin" or black pigment, probably a
decomposition product of the red colouring matter (haemoglobin).
Fig. 35.—Life-history of Malarial Parasites. A-G, Amoebula of quartan parasite to
sporulation; H, its gametocyte; I-M, amoebula of tertian parasite to
sporulation; N, its gametocyte; O, T, "crescents" or gametocytes of
Laverania; P-S, sperm-formation; U-W, maturation of oosphere; X,
fertilisation; Y, zygote. a, Zygote enlarging in gut of Mosquito; b-e, passing
into the coelom; f, the contents segmented into naked spores; g, the spores
forming sickle-germs or sporozoites; h, sporozoites passing into the salivary
glands. (From Calkins's Protozoa, after Ross and Fielding Ould.)
The nucleus of the schizont now divides repeatedly, and then the
schizont segments into a flat brood of germs (merozoites), relatively
few in the parasite of quartan fever (Haemamoeba malariae, Fig. 35,
E-G), many in that of tertian (H. vivax, Fig. 35, M). These brood-cells
escape and behave for the most part as before. But after the disease
has persisted for some time we find that in the genus Haemamoeba,
which induces the common malarial fevers of temperate regions,
certain of the full-grown germs, instead of behaving as schizonts,
pass, as it were, to rest as round cells; while in the allied genus
Laverania, (Haemomenas, Ross) these resting-cells are crescentic,
with blunt horns, and are usually termed half-moons (Fig. 35, O, T),
characteristic of the bilious or pernicious remittent fevers of the
tropics and of the warmer temperate regions in summer. These
round or crescent-shaped cells are the gametocytes, which only
develop further in the drawn blood, whether under the microscope,
protected against evaporation, or in the stomach of the Anopheles:
the crescents become round, and then they, like the already round
ones of Haemamoeba, differentiate in exactly the same way as the
corresponding cells of Coccidium schubergi. The female cell only
exhibits certain changes in its nucleus to convert it into an oosphere:
the male emits a small number of sperms, long flagellum-like bodies,
each with a nucleus; and these, by their wriggling, detach
themselves from the central core, no longer nucleated. The male
gametogonium with its protruded sperms was termed the "Polymitus
form," and was by some regarded as a degeneration-form, until
MacCallum discovered that a "flagellum" regularly undergoes sexual
fusion with an oosphere in Halteridium, as has since been found in
the other genera. The oosperm (Y) so formed is at first motile
("ookinete"), as it is in Haemosporidae, and passes into the
epithelium of the stomach of the gnat and then through the wall,
acquiring a cyst-wall and finally projecting into the coelom (a-e).
Here it segments into a number of spheres ("zygotomeres" of Ross)
corresponding to the Coccidian spores, but which never acquire a
proper wall (f). These by segmentation produce at their surface an
immense quantity of elongated sporozoites (the "zygotoblasts" or
"blasts" of Ross, Fig. 35, g), these are ultimately freed by the
disappearance of the cyst-wall of the oosperm, pass through the
coelom into the salivary gland (h), and are discharged with its
secretion into the wound that the gnat inflicts in biting. In the blood
the blasts follow the ordinary development of merozoites in the blood
corpuscle, and the patient shows the corresponding signs of fever.
This has been completely proved by rearing the insect from the egg,
feeding it on the blood of a patient in whose blood there were
ascertained to be the germs of a definite species of Haemamoeba,
sending it to England, where it was made to bite Dr. Manson's son,
who had never had fever and whose blood on repeated examination
had proved free from any germs. In the usual time he had a well-
defined attack of the fever corresponding to that germ, and his blood
on examination revealed the Haemamoeba of the proper type. A few
doses of quinine relieved him of the consequences of his mild
martyrdom to science. Experiments of similar character but of less
rigorous nature had been previously made in Italy with analogous
results. Again, it has been shown that by mere precautions against
the bites of Anopheles, and these only, all residents who adopted
them during the malarious season in the most unhealthy districts of
Italy escaped fever during a whole season; while those who did not
adopt the precautions were badly attacked.[113]
So closely allied to this group in form, habit, and life-cycle are some
species of the Flagellate genus Trypanosoma, that in their less
active states they have been unhesitatingly placed here (see p. 119).
Schaudinn has seen Trypanosomic characters in the "blasts" of this
group, which apparently is the most primitive of the Sporozoa and a
direct offshoot of the Flagellates.
CHAPTER V
III. Flagellata.
Protozoa moving (and feeding in holozoic forms) by long flagella:
pseudopodia when developed usually transitory: nucleus single or if multiple
not biform: reproduction occurring in the active state and usually by
longitudinal fission, sometimes alternating with brood-formation in the cyst or
more rarely in the active state: form usually definite: a firm pellicle or distinct
cell-wall often present.
Classification.
A. Fission usually longitudinal
(transverse only in a cyst), or if
multiple, radial and complete:
pellicle absent, thin, or if armour-
like, with not more than two valves.
I. Food taken in at any part of the
body by pseudopodia 1. PANTOSTOMATA
Multicilia Cienk.; Mastigamoeba F. E. Sch. (Fig. 37, 4).
II. Food taken in at a definite point
or points, or by absorption, or
nutrition holophytic.
1. No reticulate siliceous shell.
Diameter under 500 µ
(1⁄50").
* Contractile vacuole
simple (one or more).
(α) Colourless:
reserves usually
fat: holozoic,
saprophytic or
parasitic 2. Protomastigaceae
(β) Plastids yellow or
brown: reserves
fat or proteid:
nutrition variable:
body naked,
often amoeboid
in active state (C.
nudae), or with a
test, sometimes
containing
calcareous discs
("coccoliths,"
"rhabdoliths") of
peculiar form (C.
loricatae) 3. Chrysomonadaceae
Chromulina Cienk.; Chrysamoeba Klebs;
Hydrurus Ag. Dinobryon Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 11);
Syncrypta Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 12); Zooxanthella
Brandt; Pontosphaera Lohm.;
Coccolithophora Lohm.; Rhabdosphaera
Haeck.
(γ) Green, (more
rarely yellow or
brown) or
colourless:
reserves starch:
fission
longitudinal 4. Cryptomonadaceae
Cryptomonas Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 9); Paramoeba
Greeff.
(δ) Green (rarely
colourless):
fission multiple,
radial 5. Volvocaceae
** System of contractile
vacuoles complex,
with accessory
formative vacuoles or
reservoir, or both.
(ε) Pellicle delicate or
absent:
pseudopodia
often emitted:
excretory pore
distinct from
flagellar pit:
reserves fat 6. Chloromonadaceae
Chloramoeba Lagerheim; Thaumatomastix,
Lauterborn.
(ζ) Pellicle dense, 7. Euglenaceae
tough or hard,
often wrinkled or
striate: contractile
vacuole
discharging by
the flagellar pit.
Nutrition variable
Euglena Ehrb.; Astasia Duj. (Fig. 37, 3);
Anisonema Duj.; Eutreptia Perty (Fig. 42, p.
124); Trachelomonas Ehrb. (Fig. 37, 1);
Cryptoglena Ehrb.
2. Skeleton an open network of
hollow siliceous spicules.
Plastids yellow. Diameter
under 500 µ. 8. Silicoflagellata
Dictyocha Ehrb.
3. Diameter over 500 µ. Mouth
opening into a large
reticulate endoplasm:
flagella 1, or 2, very
unequal. 9. Cystoflagellata
Noctiluca Suriray (Fig. 48); Leptodiscus R. Hertw.
B. Fission oblique or transverse: flagella
two, dissimilar, the one coiled round
the base of the other or in a
traverse groove; pellicle often
dense, of numerous armour-like
plates 10. Dinoflagellata
Ceratium Schrank; Gymnodinium Stein; Peridinium Ehrb. (Fig.
46); Pouchetia Schütt; Pyrocystis Murray (Fig. 47); Polykrikos
Bütschli.
The Protomastigaceae and Volvocaceae are so extensive as to
require further subdivision.
Protomastigaceae
I. Oral spots 2. Flagella distant in pairs. Distomatidae
II. Oral spot 1 or 0.
A. Flagellum 1.
(a) No anterior process: often
parasitic Oikomonadidae
Oikomonas K. (Figs. 37, 2, 8); Trypanosoma Gruby
(Fig. 39, a-f); Treponema Vuill. (Fig. 39, g-i).
(b) Anterior process unilateral or
proboscidiform: cell often
thecate Bicoecidae
Bicoeca Clark; Poteriodendron St.
(c) Anterior process a funnel,
surrounding the base of the
flagellum: cells often
thecate.
(i.) Funnel free Craspedomonadidae
Codosiga Clark; Monosiga Cl.; Polyoeca Kent;
Proterospongia Kent; Salpingoeca Cl.
(ii.) Funnel not emerging
from the general
gelatinous investment Phalansteridae
B. Flagella 2, unequal or dissimilar in
function, the one sometimes
short and thick.
(a) Both flagella directed
forwards Monadidae