Over the course of its Anglo-Indian career, the hookah began as an archetype of colonial hybridity in eighteenth-century Bengal, before entering nineteenth-century London and its consumer sensorium as a seductive Oriental artefact, through travelogues, hookah clubs, Indian-styled diwans and a massive cataloguing of Eastern artefacts culminating in the Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886). Hookahs appeared simultaneously as smoking instruments, decorative artefacts and visual signs of surplus colonial enjoyment in memoirs, travelogues and paintings from the long nineteenth century. The hookah’s decline in nineteenth-century colonial culture was camouflaged by general alarm over its degenerative effects on moral and sexual codes, well after its imperiality ran its course. In its long colonial career, the hookah symbolized colonial hybridity and surplus imperial enjoyment that surpassed its materiality. Whether in Britain or India, colonial hybridity, as symbolized by the hookah, was virtualized in nonlocal and anachronistic Anglo-Indian spaces, thus marking a remarkable digression from histories of coercive militarist, economic and political control that are so closely intertwined with the East India Company and Empire.

在其英印职业生涯中，水烟最初是作为 18 世纪孟加拉殖民混合体的原型，然后通过游记、水烟俱乐部、印度风格进入 19 世纪伦敦及其消费者感官，成为一种诱人的东方人工制品diwans 和东方手工艺品的大量编目，最终在水晶宫展览（1851 年）和殖民地和印度展览（1886 年）中达到顶峰。在漫长的 19 世纪的回忆录、游记和绘画中，水烟筒同时作为吸烟器具、装饰品和殖民享受的视觉标志出现。水烟在 19 世纪殖民文化中的衰落被对其对道德和性规范的退化影响的普遍警告所掩盖，在其帝国主义结束后很久。在漫长的殖民生涯中，水烟象征着殖民地的混杂和超越其物质性的剩余帝国享受。无论是在英国还是在印度，以水烟为标志的殖民混杂性在非本地和不合时宜的英印空间中得到了虚拟化，从而标志着与东印度密切相关的强制性军国主义、经济和政治控制历史的明显偏离公司和帝国。