by Emily Hahn
The others, those lucky ones who captured girls from home, were theoretically free, after the honeymoon, to forget their courting pains and carry on with John Company’s business. Actually it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Marriage no doubt should have settled people, and at home in England it did. But out in India, somehow, it didn’t make all that difference.
Gentlemen continued to pursue married ladies, quite regardless. Even more remarkably, husbands continued to pursue their own wives. Everybody behaved in an extraordinary manner which would never have done in London.
It wasn’t only sex. People let go out East, in anger as in love. A man’s emotions seemed to mean much more to him, and his career meant less, in India than in any part of Europe. What impresses us above all when reading the non-colonial archives of French and British and German diplomacy just before the French Revolution is the cold calm balance of these gentlemen. A man like Macartney, one of Fox’s circle and a career diplomat, strikes ice to the soul as long as one reads the letters he wrote from Germany—or Russia—or Ireland. He was always correct, always deliberate, never impulsive. For the best of monetary reasons he made a loveless, boring marriage, and we gather that he never regretted it—in Europe. But as soon as he was sent to Madras he lost his temper.
Was it merely because they all felt themselves far from home, and thus could relax and be themselves? Or was it rather because they knew most of them would not survive more than a few years in that climate?
We don’t know. We must keep in mind, though, that there are forces in the world which defeat the most adventurous. History in faroff places like India or Africa isn’t carved out by conquerors. It isn’t made. It just happens.
1. PEARLS AND KITTENS
There was once a girl who went to a home for unmarried mothers and had a baby. A year later she returned, obviously again in need of temporary shelter. Although the authorities were somewhat taken aback, they let her in. On the third occasion of the sort, the matron felt it was time to make some kind of constructive criticism. Accordingly she said,
“Why don’t you marry this man?”
“I don’t like him,” said the girl.
This old yet very modern anecdote may seem to have little in common with eighteenth-century colonial life and loves, but it is not completely irrelevant. They had a similar common-sense attitude toward love-making in those days, behind their façades of stately rhetoric. At least they did in India, where human nature has a way of becoming even more human than usual. Do not be misled by the literary style of the period. The colonists may have talked like people constantly involved in a minuet, but they didn’t behave that way. The weather was hot in Madras and Calcutta, clothes were painfully stuffy, there were no ice cubes, no electric fans, and no air-conditioning. People grew passionate under the tropic moon, and when they were not being passionately sexy they were being passionately angry. Practically any epithet, if hurled in a tone offensive enough, was snatched at as fair provocation for a duel.
Into this electric atmosphere, in 1769, sailed Warren Hastings, who already knew India, and his new friends the Baron and Baroness Imhoff, who did not.
Like that unmarried mother of the twentieth century, the baroness, nee Chapuset, never liked the father of her children very much. Unlike the other girl, however, she married him, quite properly. Sixteen-year-old maidens in Germany were not encouraged to indulge their emotions, and when Anna Maria Appolonia was spoken for by Imhoff, it is doubtful if anyone, including herself, inquired as to whether she was madly attracted by her suitor. She was the barracks-born daughter of a sergeant, whereas Karl von Imhoff was a captain. To be sure, he was penniless, but sergeants’ daughters cannot expect to have everything, and Imhoff was of noble blood. Anna Maria’s father was of noble blood himself. He was descended, socially as well as genealogically speaking, from a Huguenot baron. The young Imhoffs may have been chronically broke, but they were wellborn, which has always counted for a good deal in Germany.
The title of baron is not rare on the Continent. There, every child of a baron inherits the right to use his handle, a custom which often leads to a plenitude of barons and not enough money to go round. Karl, younger son of a younger son, had no hopes of inheriting any family money, and his officer’s pay was never enough, especially as Anna Maria, or Marian as she was called, promptly began to produce children. However, Karl had a talent for painting portraits; he preferred such work to military exercise. He also had connections with important people, including, fortunately, a claim on the interest of one of Queen Charlotte of England’s attendants. That is why, after Marian had borne two sons and lost one, the Imhoffs went to London.
Their patron was Mrs. Schwellenberg, who had accompanied the dull, unhandsome Charlotte to England when the princess married George III. Mrs. Schwellenberg has been called various names by historians, none of them flattering. Fanny Burney’s references are the best known. But Fanny wasn’t to encounter her Cerbera for another two decades. Perhaps Mrs. Schwellenberg in younger days was not so formidable as she later became. At any rate she was very decent to the little Baroness Imhoff and her family. No doubt Mrs. S. felt gratified by the situation, and sentimentally moved; the pretty little wife of young Karl von Imhoff, who had married unwisely but so romantically, was a dependent who flattered the older woman’s sense of power.
Karl didn’t rise immediately to the top of his new profession in England, though Germans were presumably well liked at such a preponderantly German court. He might have done well enough, nevertheless. He probably moved on as soon as he did merely because he liked variety and adventure for their own sakes. Whatever the cause, instead of settling down, he used Mrs. Schwellenberg’s influence to obtain an appointment as military cadet with the East India Company. Many young men were aspiring to such positions. Indian nabobs, coming home with their money, were giving a lot of people ideas; it was believed that one had only to go to India, risking the perils of the unhealthy climate, to reap a vast fortune. It was not a completely wild belief. But Karl hadn’t the temperament that makes fortunes in such a manner. He was not a businessman, he was not a military man, he was an artist. His appointment was unusual, too, because he was not a bachelor, but a family man, and more than twenty-two years old, which was supposed to be the age limit for military cadets in the company.
Still, his hopes and Mrs. Schwellenberg’s influence conquered these obstacles, and the Imhoffs set off for India with their three-year-old son, leaving another younger baby at nurse in England. They set sail in the Indiaman Duke of Grafton, occupying an expensive portion of the “great cabin,” and taking with them two English maidservants. It was an impressive entourage for impecunious young people, but the Imhoffs always did things in the grand manner.
This may have been due to Marian’s influence. There was something grand about her, something which belied the facts that her father was a sergeant, that her husband had no money, and that they had dropped their German title now that Karl was employed by a British company. Marian liked importance and she behaved like a woman who had a right to it. She wasn’t unwisely haughty, but she had self-confidence, no doubt because of her beauty.
That beauty! A study of her portraits gives us no idea of it, but only makes us reflect on the mutability of taste. Yet Marian was generally considered pretty, and portraits are often misleading. She was tall, graceful, and slender. She was fair and blue-eyed, and had a long nose and a small pointed chin. Her great mass of hair was of a beautiful red-gold. European women go unbecomingly pale in hot climates, but Marian must have learned to use whatever cosmetic aids ladies permitted themselves in London’s fashionable circles.
She was intelligent, though no bluestocking. Her vivacity contrasted well with the more phlegmatic manners of English ladies, who may have permitted themselves to gush on occasion but who never bubbled naturally, as Marian did. She talked English with a strong accent, and that too was fascinating.
Someone was sure to fall in love with Marian a
board the Duke of Grafton. A passage of four months was considered very speedy and, as it happened, this voyage took much longer. Marian was one of the only two ladies aboard. Men always fell in love en route for India, if there was anyone to fall in love with. If Hastings hadn’t been an important man we would have heard no more about the voyage, perhaps: Marian would probably have ignored lesser admirers. But she did not ignore Hastings.
Had she indulged in extramarital flirtations before? It is possible, though her maternal duties must have kept her steady in London, and Marian never behaved like a cheap woman. She did not flirt even now. What happened was much more discreet, slow moving, and serious in its effects.
At thirty-six Warren Hastings was making his second assault on fortune. He was a quiet little man, a bit smaller than the tall Mrs. Imhoff, with a hairline which would have led Time Magazine to call him “balding.” He had first gone to India at seventeen, a poor, studious boy who harbored one ambition—to obtain the Manor of Daylesford in Worcestershire and restore his family there, because Daylesford had belonged to the Hastings before the Restoration. It was a romantic ambition. Hastings, though he seemed prosaic, was a tenaciously romantic man.
He did well in India, showing industry, a keen, unusual interest in local ethnology and excellent judgment. After exciting days in Bengal, after having been married and a widower, a father who lost his children, a rich man who gave away all his money, here he was, again on his way out East as a member of council for Madras.
He fell in love with Marian Imhoff, and he took it hard. The Englishmen of India tended to be solemn in their love affairs, especially when the objects were European women. Ordinary sex in India was cold-blooded and clinical; native women were plentiful, and accustomed to being treated casually, as conveniences, even by their own men. But the Westerner had been brought up to want more than undecorated sex in his love relationships. A man had his native mistress or he played the field, but he sighed nevertheless for the ideal white-skinned woman who might remind him of his mother.
Warren Hastings, having been in India before, of course had malaria in his system, and he got a bad attack of fever on the voyage out. Marian nursed him. He had already found her attractive; this accident settled matters. She was sweet, she was gentle, she had nursed him. Above all, she belonged to someone else. What romantic could resist the combination?
By the time the Duke of Grafton anchored off Madras, Hastings must have run the customary gamut of emotions. Round and round went his thoughts. First, no doubt, he resolved never to divulge his guilty secret, which seemed guilty indeed to a man of eighteenth-century England, still churchbound. He may have told himself that he must not disturb a happy marriage. Or had Marian allowed him to guess that it wasn’t such a happy marriage after all? Very likely she had. One can imagine his reflections:
“I am a miserable worm. That excellent fellow Imhoff considers himself my friend. Yet, on second thought, is he really an excellent fellow? Is he not selfish? Is he worthy of such a peerless woman? Not that anyone could be, of course—but is he aware of his unworthiness, as I should be in his place? There goes a woman in a thousand. Yet he treats her as if she were quite an ordinary creature. God, if only I—— She needs someone who understands her nature. After all, a difference of fourteen years isn’t so very much.… But it is impossible and I am a fool for hoping. What was it she told me yesterday about the divorce laws in Germany? Did she mean anything by it? What a miserable worm I am.”
So musing, he disembarked to take up his new duties, as did Imhoff and his wife.
That is simply and quickly said. Actually, the din and excitement of landing at Madras must have vastly excited Marian and Karl, to whom it was all new. They had to go a dangerous long way from ship to shore, through the surf in a little boat; they were mobbed as soon as they stepped ashore by what are invariably called “India’s teeming millions.” Deafened, bewildered, half frightened by the clamoring natives, who were wild to get jobs with the glamorous Europeans, Marian must have clung to her admirer and observed with approval that he knew just what to do. The strong man, the great man, he ignored this Indian, pushed aside that one, made way for Marian wherever he walked, and strode purposefully toward the council members who had come to meet him. Karl could only trot humbly in his footsteps. Marian walked proudly with him, reflecting his glory, enjoying every minute of it.
Hastings was so kind to them! Without him they would have been quite helpless and ignorant, facing the enormous problem of acquiring a house and a full lot of servants, with all the necessary appurtenances. Hastings with one courteous action saved them all such headaches and financial responsibility: he simply took them in to live with him. Under his wing they quickly met everybody worth knowing. Otherwise they might have been ignored for months.
“A letter of introduction was the wedding garment of early Anglo-Indian society,” says Spear in The Nabobs, “a sine qua non of entry into the polite world; once presented, the adventurer had a warm and generous welcome, but if he possessed none, or had lost them on the voyage out,… or found the recipients departed up-country, as might easily happen, he had no entry into society, no invitations to public or private breakfasts or dinners for an indefinite period.… The Anglo-Madrasis were lavish but exclusive.”
So we can visualize Marian plunged straightway into colonial society, queening it over a bewildering number of servants in a big house which glittered white in its lime wash. I say “queening it” because European ladies lived royally in Madras no matter how humble their husbands’ jobs might be. Marian duly paid calls in her carriage—or rather Hastings’s carriage—and received calls from other ladies. She told them of the fashions in England and asked their advice on housekeeping matters. Though too well bred to say so, she must have found these ladies strangely languid. The newcomer to India, full of vitality, does not realize how slowly but certainly the climate saps European strength.
Always distrustful of innovations, the Anglo-Indians in 1765 were only beginning to understand and accept those devices which make a great difference to one’s comfort in a hot climate. Take punkahs, for example. For centuries Indians had used large fans which, suspended free from the ceiling, could be swung back and forth over the entire room. But the British in India didn’t get around to using punkahs until the nineteenth century. Merely to think of those wretched souls at Madras gatherings, in church or at parties, dressed to the nines in European clothing without some kind of ventilation in the rooms is enough to make one’s brains boil in sympathy. In the worst of the hot season they would retire to bed, call periodically for changes of bedclothing, and keep wet cloths on their foreheads.
A few open-minded housekeepers did pick up hints here and there. They learned to hang wet mats in doorways and to leave doors open for drafts, while keeping windows closed to sunlight. They knew enough to keep their rooms rather bare, and certainly the houses themselves, covered with dazzling white lime plaster, were lovely. Many of them still stand in Madras, surrounded by their English-style gardens.
As a charmer Marian did not meet with much competition. By contemporary standards, Madras was a large city, but most of the population was Indian, Portuguese, or half-caste, and the English and other company Europeans did not mix with these people socially. They kept themselves to themselves, as they were to do for years afterward, for they were not primarily interested in society. John Company’s officials were there purely and simply to make fortunes as quickly as they could. The novices among them usually started out with great industry, though in time, through a combination of overeating, overdrinking and laziness, they lost their singleness of purpose.
Such women as had accompanied them from Europe must have stared when Marian established her family in the newly arrived council member’s house, but they knew better than to signify disapproval. There were in any case more than enough men to go around. India was the great marriage market of their world. Single girls who could not be disposed of advantageously in England were ship
ped East in a steady trickle. If Hastings was not available, well, there were others.
However, the fact that Karl lived on the Choutry Plain rather than in the fort may have given rise to a certain amount of jealous muttering. As a cadet, he should have been quartered in the fort, but it would have been awkward to put him into a mess complete with wife and baby, and no one seems to have insisted on the technicality. He was not overworked. A European in Madras began his day at eight, dined at two or three, and went to bed until five-o’clock tea. The serious social life of the day began after that, when everyone went for a drive on St. Thomas’s Road. As the sudden dark fell on the city, the ladies and gentlemen paid calls, and then the ladies went home to receive their own callers, and to sup at ten. The amount of wine they all drank daily, merely as a matter of routine, is incredible.
In this social round Marian quickly learned her way. She was no raw girl; she had served her apprenticeship in London on the fringes of the court. She knew the rules. To be safe, a woman must be liked by other women. Besides, she was well aware that the Imhoffs had to make themselves agreeable if Karl was to paint a lot of portraits, as was his avowed intention. Hastings does not seem to have been a stern taskmaster. Another company official might have frowned on Karl’s ambitions and reminded the younger man that he had accepted his appointment and his passage money as a military cadet, not a free-lance miniaturist, but Hastings, on the contrary, helped Imhoff to get commissions. This is not so strange as it might sound. India was a long way from England; communications, even reprimands, were slow, and many other men took their home commitments as lightly as did Imhoff. The smaller the group in a foreign country, the more tolerant it must be if it wishes to survive at all. Undoubtedly the other colonists talked and gossiped; equally undoubtedly they did not overtly condemn Karl for neglecting his duties.
