Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  Just in case the whole narrative becomes altogether too subversive, She-who-must-be-obeyed does not have the black skin of most Africans, being, by some freakish occurrence, a pale-skinned descendant of King Solomon – the 2,000 years she has spent living in a complex of caves has clearly not done much for her complexion. In the chapter at the heart of the book, ‘Ayesha Unveils’, our heroes get a closer look. ‘She lifted her white and rounded arms – never had I seen such arms before – and slowly, very slowly, withdrew some fastening beneath her hair. Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form.’ The men are dumbstruck until they catch sight of her face.

  This beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil … Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion … and it seemed to say: ‘Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand – evil have I done … and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.’

  It is enough to burst the buttons on a Victorian gentleman’s waistcoat.

  Before long, of course, the narrator succumbs. ‘I am but a man, and she was more than a woman … then and there I fell on my knees before her, and told her in a sad mixture of languages that I worshipped her as never woman was worshipped, and that I would give my immortal soul to marry her.’ Being an Englishman, of course, our hero soon snaps out of it, escapes the danger of sexual subjugation, and by the end of this tremendous adventure fantasy has returned to the sanity of Victoria’s England, where, whatever else may be said, women knew their place.

  Rider Haggard knew his market – She became one of the best-selling books of all time. He also knew the empire, having been dispatched to South Africa by a father who considered him ‘only fit to be a greengrocer’, and, at the age of twenty, raised the flag in Pretoria when Britain annexed the Transvaal. By the following year he was the youngest head of a government department in South Africa, running the Transvaal High Court: the empire could be very generous to those who seized the opportunity. Rider Haggard returned home with a deep appreciation of the very striking masculinity of Britain’s imperial culture. Allan Quatermain, the big-game hunter who narrates another of his tales, King Solomon’s Mines, reassures readers early on that ‘I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the entire history.’ King Solomon’s Mines is the grandfather of the Lost World genre of books about vanished kingdoms. But it also celebrated the fact that – with a very few exceptions like the archaeologist and colonial administrator Gertrude Bell – empire-building was a largely male thing.*

  The departure of young men from Britain to try their luck in the expanding empire had two obvious social consequences. Firstly, it drained the pool of available marriage prospects for the young women left behind. And secondly, it raised the challenge of where the young men were to find an outlet for their own sexual and romantic needs. In the early days in India, they seem to have made their own arrangements, often on a commercial or semi-commercial basis. ‘I now commenced a regular course of fucking with native women,’ writes Edward Sellon in one of the rare accounts of sexual relations in the early days of the Raj. In his memoirs he paints a picture of available young Indian women who ‘understood in perfection all the arts and wiles of love’. There is no reason to believe that Sellon, who had arrived as a young cadet of the East India Company in 1834, was being impeccably accurate: his entire career (including a work called The Romance of Lust) testifies more to commercial need than anything else. But nor is there any particular reason to disbelieve him, and none at all to assume that British soldiers in India were entirely celibate. Sellon reported that most important temples had troupes of dancing girls attached to them, whose job it was to sing and perform traditional ‘Nautch’ dances, and ‘to prostitute themselves in the courts to all comers, and thus raise funds for the enrichment of the place of worship to which they belong’. He knew of cases where ‘Nautch girls’ had been paid 200 rupees for a single night’s company, which was ‘not very much to be wondered at, as they comprise some of the loveliest women in the world’. Elsewhere, he claimed to recall two distinct classes of prostitutes: one charging two rupees for her services, the other, an infinitely superior creature, five. The ‘fivers’ were ‘the handsomest Mohammedan girls’, and in his long experience of ‘English, French, German and Polish women of all grades of society’ he had never found one to compare with these ‘salacious, succulent houris’. They did not drink, they were scrupulously clean, shaved their pudenda, dressed sumptuously, wore flowers in their hair, played musical instruments and sang sweetly. There was no suggestion from Sellon that women might have been driven to sell themselves by anything as odious as poverty or misfortune. They fulfilled the male fantasy of being happy hookers. India, he preached, was a place where more or less any sexual service was available, free of shame, if not free of charge.

  It is certainly true that in their imperial possessions the British encountered cultures with very different – and much more open – attitudes to sex than they were used to at home. In India, for example, young Britons gawped in astonishment at the decorations on the walls of some Hindu temples, with their depictions of intercourse in all sorts of positions not normally encountered in the rectories of Hampshire.* After being posted to India in 1842 the great orientalist Richard Burton set about investigating the sexual possibilities with the indefatigable dedication which would later characterize his attempts to find the source of the Nile. He became convinced that women in tropical countries were more passionate than men, reported the belief that if a man gave a woman seven large cloves to eat on the seventeenth of the month she became insatiable, noted the prevalence of lesbianism in Muslim harems, developed a connoisseur’s eye for Nautch girls, and recorded that British objections to the well-established custom of beheading unfaithful wives had merely created a glut of semi-professionals, so that ‘if a young officer sent to the bazaar for a girl, half a dozen would troop to his quarters’.

  Sexual relations were quite as exploitative, then, as the East India Company’s other relations with India. But significant numbers of early British visitors made more permanent arrangements and took Indian wives and mistresses, who seem to have occupied a recognized position in society. Although later politicians and officials claimed to be scandalized when missionaries reported that miscegenation was occurring, it would have been more astonishing if men possessed of the energy to leave Britain and seek their fortune overseas were not also keen to satisfy more immediate physical and emotional needs – soldiers and adventurers have behaved in much the same way since long before Julius Caesar picked up his sword. There is ample evidence of easy social relations in the early stages of the British presence in India. Johan Zoffany’s 1780s Lucknow painting Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match shows the notoriously louche nawab of Oudh* enjoying himself among English officers. Colonel James Skinner, founder of the Indian cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse, was the son of a Scottish officer and his Rajput mistress and, although it was denied by many of his family, eighty children claimed him as their father. One of the great spectacles of early nineteenth-century Delhi was said to be the sight of the East India Company Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, taking the evening air by riding an elephant around the walls of the Red Fort, followed by his thirteen Indian wives, each mounted on her own elephant. The wills of employees in the East India Company archive show that while Ochterlony may have been more energetic than most, his multicultural marital arrangements were not necessarily all that unusual. Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, who became acting governor general in the 1830s, had three Anglo-Sikh children, one of whom, James Metcalfe, commanded an army unit which fought at the siege of Lucknow during the Mutiny.

  The records show that in the 1780s about on
e in three East India Company men left all their worldly goods to an Indian woman. By 1800, the proportion had dropped to one in four, by 1810 to one in five, by 1820 to one in seven, and by 1840 there are no Indian women mentioned in any official Company wills. This is not, of course, to say that sexual relations between Indians and British stopped. Richard Burton’s service in the subcontinent did not begin until the 1840s, but, in an unerringly male way, he certainly noticed the benefits for a British officer when he took a local lover:

  She keeps house for him, never allowing him to save money, or if possible to waste it. She keeps the servants in order. She has an infallible recipe to prevent maternity, especially if her tenure of office depends on such compact. She looks after him in sickness, and is one of the best nurses, and, as it is not good for man to live alone, she makes him a manner of home.

  The language is revealing: ‘a manner of home’ points up the temporary nature of the relationship – the real home is in Britain, and the declining number of Indian women mentioned in wills coincides with the growing preoccupation with a British moral mission in India. In practice, the ‘recipe to prevent maternity’ was anything but ‘infallible’. The Anglo-Indian community which resulted came to occupy a convenient – if sometimes awkward – position as a sort of buffer between the Raj and the Indians. They spoke English as a first language, were usually Christian in belief, and often discharged the sort of role in officialdom (on lower pay) that white men might once have been expected to perform. By the time of independence there were reckoned to be 300,000 Anglo-Indians living in the subcontinent.*

  In 1804, the East India Company grudgingly decreed that Anglo-Indian wives of British soldiers should be entitled to a living allowance, but that because they had been ‘born in India and habituated to live chiefly on rice, the wants and wishes of the Half Caste are much more confined than those of a European woman’. As a consequence, they would be entitled to only one-twentieth of the allowance given to British wives. When their husbands returned home to Britain they were not to expect to accompany them, because when their menfolk later threw themselves upon poor relief, no parish could be reasonably expected to take responsibility for supporting foreign wives – better they remain in India. Yet did they really belong in India, either? In 1791, the Company had tried to ban mixed-race men from senior positions, on the grounds that they would never command the respect due to whites. And the ambiguity of the social position of mixed-race children could trouble their fathers. Anglo-Indians were often considered exceptionally good-looking, but Sir David Ochterlony’s letters record his worries about what might become of his Anglo-Indian daughters. Their ‘dark blood’ made them vulnerable to mockery from the white community. Yet could he really face the prospect of their adopting an Indian identity and possibly ending up in a Muslim prince’s harem?

  By 1820, the Company had decided it was better to try to forestall such worries altogether. A manual of that year warned new arrivals to be on their guard against the ‘insinuating manners and fascinating beauty’ of Eurasian girls, for fear of making ‘a matrimonial connexion which he might all his life-time regret’ as he languished in the social isolation into which a wife with a darker skin would plunge him. But, like almost all efforts at prohibition of pleasure, the decree was doomed to failure. The ‘bibi’, or mistress, was simply a fact of life. Even in 1859, Garnet Wolseley – one of the many Irishmen who, like the Scots, found the empire was the making of them – admitted in a letter that he had acquired an ‘eastern princess’ who performed ‘all the purposes of a wife without giving any of the bother’. He sorted himself out by establishing a more permanent arrangement nine years later, marrying Louisa Erskine and becoming a devoted father to the garden designer Frances Wolseley. Would he – could he – have achieved his subsequent eminence as commander in chief of the army if he had kept his eastern princess? For it is noticeable that the greater the British control over India, the more their tolerance of these cross-cultural relationships shrank.

  The uprising in 1857 – and the answering brutality of the British – left a very long legacy of bitterness and mistrust between the two cultures. From now on, the races would maintain some distance. The decision that henceforth India would be run not by the East India Company but by the British government meant greater involvement by elected politicians, and required administration on a much more formal basis. The development of fast steam ships, the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 and then the laying of telegraph cables made it possible for London not merely to state its will but to intervene to make sure it was carried out. This was to bring about a big change in how the British saw India, and, in turn, how they saw themselves.

  The Company’s opening up of India had delighted some Europeans. In the 1780s Sir William Jones declared Sanskrit ‘more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’, and enthused Europeans with the notion that India lived and breathed ancient civilization. At much the same time a young East India Company officer, Charles Stuart, was enjoying daily walks along the banks of the Ganges where he took purifying bathes. As he rose through the officer class Stuart’s devotion to Hinduism deepened: he built a temple, ate according to Hindu ritual and published pamphlets telling European women they would be much better off – and more attractive – if they were to take up wearing the sari. ‘Hindoo’ Stuart was passionately opposed to the increasingly vocal demands being heard in Britain that missionaries be allowed to spread the gospel among the heathens of India. He did not prevail.* As British power grew, so too did the unshakeable conviction that They Knew Best. What William Jones and ‘Hindoo’ Stuart had seen as beauty and mystery increasingly looked like a freak show, with – as one visitor described it – Hindu holy men ‘standing for half a day on their heads, barking all the while for alms; some of their heads entirely covered with earth; some with their eyes filled with mud, and their mouths with straw; some lying in puddles of water; one man with his foot tied to his neck, and another with a pot of fire on his belly; and a third enveloped in a net made of rope’.

  The religious convictions which gripped Victorian Britain were altogether more understated. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the intensity of the religious enthusiasms – Methodism, evangelicalism, the Oxford Movement, schisms big and small – which swept the country in the nineteenth century. All, in different ways, contributed to a belief that it was the duty of those to whom truth had been revealed to communicate it to others. The East India Company had always recognized a limited role for the Christian Church, in supplying garrison chaplains or supervisors of military orphanages. But the Company had now been displaced by governments vulnerable to public opinion, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the missionary societies in Britain had hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend each year in saving souls. However much the different Christian denominations might squabble among themselves, all agreed on their ineffable superiority to the native religions of the colonies. Busybody missionaries became a fact of life.

  Once communications between Britain and India had improved, there was less and less excuse for men stationed in the subcontinent to adapt to local customs, least of all sexual customs. Soon there was no need for soldiers, officials and traders to keep a mistress in the bibi house. They could live, instead, a tropical replica of life in England, an existence which did not so much embrace India as defy it. The laying of railway tracks meant that European wives in India could be packed off to the hill stations in hot weather or, once the Suez Canal had opened, could perhaps be sent home to England for sickness or childbirth. Even those men who had arrived in the country as bachelors had only to wait for the start of the longed-for Cold Season and the arrival of what later became known as the Fishing Fleet – young women from the home country out to net themselves a husband from among the single men serving in India. As one twentieth-century official recalled, the racial discrimination was quite blatant. ‘In the hot weather you took out what was called t
he “B” class girl, usually Anglo-Indians, who were dears in every way and the greatest fun. But the moment the cold weather started they were taboo, because all the young girls from Roedean, Cheltenham and the great schools of Britain came out in the P&O liners and you were expected to toe the line.’ Throughout the Cold Season – of which Christmas was the high point – the young men and women circled each other at parties, dances and sports events, sizing up who might make a decent marriage partner. The women who failed to find anyone suitable went back to England, nicknamed ‘returned empties’.

  The presence in India of what came to be known as ‘memsahibs’ (a corruption of ‘ma’am’ and ‘sahib’) changed everything. In the 1830s a magistrate in India had written home that he had ‘observed that those who have lived with a native woman for any length of time never marry a European … so amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please, that a person after being accustomed to their society shrinks from the idea of encountering the whims or yielding to the fancies of an Englishwoman’. He would not have dared to write like that fifty years later: let the Englishwoman loose in India and she fought her corner. Later generations have endowed the memsahibs with an unappealing reputation, as superficial snobs and irredeemable racists who ended an era of happy coexistence. But, like any group of human beings, they must have been a varied bunch. There were plenty who never bothered to go beyond learning ‘Kitchen Hindustani’ in order to shout instructions at servants. But there were others who developed a genuine affection for the country, founded orphanages, taught in schools and sacrificed their own health to improve the health of Indians. Women confident enough to reject the role assigned to them by men could sometimes become forceful enemies of the very masculine business of imperialism. Like the Victorian socialist Annie Besant, they could find the colourful abundance of Indian spiritualism an intoxicating alternative: when she moved to India in 1893, Besant took to wearing Hindu mourning dress in grief at what the British had done to the country, and spent decades encouraging Indians to throw off colonial rule.