Subversive figures like these were, of course, hugely outnumbered by the conventional memsahibs, exerting what they considered a civilizing influence in the military cantonments, towns, cities and hill stations. How many younger officers wanted to cohabit with an Indian woman when the colonel’s wife so clearly disapproved? Indian sexual gymnastics were no match for raised British eyebrows.
The presence of hostesses meant different sorts of social gatherings – elaborate picnics and dinner parties, tennis and badminton tournaments, amateur theatricals and Sunday attendance at mock-Gothic churches with corrugated-iron roofs. The memsahibs endured the sweltering heat in stays and bonnets rather than saris and sandals. Though some of them did valuable work on their own account in schools, clinics and colleges, much of the time they must have been bored senseless. The men at least had a clear mission and in their spare time could retreat to the clubs they had founded, where they smoked cigars and drank too much. In these refuges, the maleness of colonization survived for generations. (Even in the 1920s when an incompetent rickshaw-driver delivered a woman visitor to the United Service Club in the hill station at Simla, a horrified porter barred her way by snatching a notice from the wall and holding it up between them. It read ‘Dogs and other noxious animals are not allowed in the Club’.) The expatriate men and women lived together in communities of bungalows (the name comes from ‘Bengal’) behind self-important gates and gravel drives, with scratchy lawns in homage to Camberley and Godalming, filling their gardens with English flowers, fighting a never-ending war to keep the termites from eating the piano and placing wicker chairs on the verandah so they could meet Indian tradesmen without letting them intrude on the holy of holies within. In the world’s biggest spice-garden they lived on over-boiled vegetables, tinned fruit and suet puddings.
The memsahibs have become the lightning-conductor for much that was wrong with imperial India. But they can hardly be blamed for all of it. In truth, they can hardly be blamed for it at all, unless they can also be taxed with engineering the religious revival which swept Victorian Britain, plotting the Mutiny, inventing the telegraph, building the Indian railways and then digging the Suez Canal which made their access to India so much easier. Once the British had decided that their overseas possessions were something more than a trading arrangement, separation of the races was inevitable. Among the expat community it became an ideological conviction that, to be treated as rulers, the British had to behave like rulers. ‘Decent’ behaviour in front of the natives mattered. It was not merely that the natives must see you doing the right thing, but that the rest of the white community must do so too: failure to strike the right attitude risked undermining the whole imperial edifice. To a free spirit, the social conventions – receiving visitors, tiffin, dressing for dinner every night – must have seemed as suffocating as the climate. Yet from the moment she stepped on to Indian soil, the young wife was taking part in an exhibition in a heated glass case.
The challenge of maintaining an English way of life in the tropics was enormous. Admittedly, women who in England might have had to manage with few or no domestic staff might have several servants in India. On the other hand, the conditions of life – notably the suffocating heat – added an unwanted challenge to the most mundane tasks. A soldier’s wife who arrived in mid-nineteenth-century India was told by a fellow memsahib with experience of ‘hot-weather housekeeping’ that the challenge in cooking meat was ‘to grasp the fleeting moment between toughness and putrefaction when the joint may possibly prove eatable’. As the century wore on, the memsahibs were helped by improvements in imperial food technology – tinning, bottling and preserving. But still, the sort of meal which might be conjured out of the available ingredients was not necessarily guaranteed to be a treat. It was memorably depicted by E. M. Forster’s description of a Raj dinner party in A Passage to India: ‘The menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-India … the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it.’
Fortunately, guidance was available to the imperial hostess in the form of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (published in 1888), a sort of Mrs Beeton for young memsahibs, ‘giving the duties of mistress and servants, the general management of the house and practical recipes for cooking in all its branches’. Largely written by Flora Annie Steel, the wife of a civil servant stationed in the Punjab, it contains brisk, practical advice on just about everything from cooking food to treating dog bites. There was nothing aristocratic about Mrs Steel (her father had been a political agent, brought low by the collapse of a colonial bank), but in India she was still a member of the ruling class and her wry weariness shines through on every page. It would be unfair to describe her as hostile to Indians, but she remained part of the Raj, and the manual’s object was not to assist wives to become Indian but to help them create as closely as possible a replica of life in Britain. Her recipes run from the prosaic (braised cutlets) to the exotic (kidneys with champagne or Ferozepur cake). But the advice on how to run the kitchen might stand for the whole British presence in India: ‘Dirt, illimitable, inconceivable dirt must be expected, until a generation of mistresses has rooted out the habits of immemorial years.’ The newly arrived wife should learn the local language as soon as possible, if only to be able to order the staff better, because ‘the Indian servant is a child in everything save age and should be treated as a child; that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness’. There was, needless to say, no shortage of menials of one sort or other, from butlers, through cooks and khitmutgars who served the food and musolchis who did the washing up, to bheesties to look after supplies of water, an ayah to tend the children, a syce or groom for the horses, a dirzie to do the sewing and a dhobi for the laundry, not to mention the sweepers who emptied bedpans and the gardeners tending the sweet peas. They were to be controlled by rigorous routine, rewards and punishments, enforced by constant vigilance. The primary responsibility was to set an example, because an untidy mistress would soon find herself with untidy servants and a lax one with lazy servants. Succumbing to the idea that if you want a job doing properly you should do it yourself was disastrous. The manual asserted in italics: ‘Never do work which an ordinarily good servant ought to be able to do. If the one you have will not or cannot do it, get another who can.’
The possibility of creating some tropical approximation of the English Home Counties made life more tolerable for the expats. But the permanent presence of white women in India raised some troubling sexual anxieties for the men of the Raj. The British saw the potential for depravity all around them – men who wore inadequate clothing, dancing girls, erotic temple carvings. Even in the 1920s a former editor of the Civil and Military Gazette wrote a book about India in which the first chapter was entitled ‘The Land of the Sex-Mad Millions’. The pure Englishwoman, symbol of English innocence, had to be zealously guarded. Inevitably, hanky-panky was much more likely to occur within the British community: a man who dispatched his wife to the comparative comfort of a hill station while he continued to work on the Plains during the hot season had to be utterly confident he could trust her. As the (female) author of The Englishwoman in India commented in 1909:
the grass widow in the Hills has pitfalls … to contend with; and perhaps the two most insidious are amateur theatricals and the military man on leave. It is hardly too much to say that one or other of these dominant factors in Hill station life is accountable for half the domestic tragedies of India … for a woman who is young, comely, and gifted with a taste for acting, Simla is assuredly not the most innocuous place on God’s earth.
As the verse about hill stations went:
Jack’s own Jill goes up the hill,
To Murree or Chakrata;
Jack remains, and dies in the plains,
And Jill remarries soon after.
But as the hill-stati
on graveyards testify, women and children were at enormous physical risk themselves. In 1875, the eminent gynaecologist Edward Tilt described how British women in India were not only prey to every passing disease but were also likely to suffer chronic inflammation of their wombs. Most would suffer from ‘deranged menstruation’, inducing ‘abdominal pains, nervousness, depression of spirits, and perhaps hysteria’. Women who endured this ‘morbid womb’ with its ‘hideous progeny’ would return to England unable to breed. Any women who gave birth in India risked all the hazards they would have faced at home, together with the added dangers of the climate, local diseases, inadequate nursing care and terrible sanitation. Those who survived and stayed too long in India merely postponed the fate of their line: the Pioneer warned in 1888 that European children settled permanently in India would ‘die out about the 4th generation, degenerating steadily up to that point’. Many families would send their children back to Britain to avoid this fate and to be educated at one of the new empire-minded boarding schools popping up across the country at the time. And it was the practice of sending children home for their schooling that created probably the greatest emotional hardship for British women in the empire – many would not see their children for years on end and, when they did, they might barely recognize each other. This unique colonial arrangement was not only enormously painful for the mother but would go on to haunt a generation of British children who would grow up in England with the memory of absent parents. Rudyard Kipling, sent from India to Southsea, England, in 1871 at the age of six referred, in his autobiography, to his adoptive childhood home as ‘The House of Desolation’. The writer Alan Ross, born more than fifty years later, describes a similar experience, having been sent to England from Calcutta at the age of seven: ‘When the time came, the prospect of seeing my parents again, and having to own emotional allegiance to people I could scarcely remember, became increasingly embarrassing. Before long it was my parents who appeared to be strangers.’
You can see why those women who were not naturally robust felt the need to act tough. And so the starchy manners, the close but not-quite-right replication of life at ‘home’, the slightly out-of-date mannerisms, the shabby gentility, delineated the imperial presence, and perhaps stopped the women from understandably falling apart. ‘What would India be without England, and what would the British Empire be without Englishwomen?’ commented an impressed German. Their arrival in numbers in India obliged the British to define who they were: if they were going to live in a self-sustaining community, they had to be confident about what was and what was not ‘British’. This was not, of course, something that was invented overseas. Like the English plants in their bungalow gardens, it had been taken with them from home. Sometimes, like some of the plants, it went a little odd in the unusual climate. But it was still identifiably the same genus, and was nurtured for being at risk and slightly unlikely. Transplanted from nineteenth-century Britain – a country increasingly sure of its purpose and in the grip of a religious revival – it rooted itself in the red soils of the empire and clung on.
It was not a role for shrinking violets. But then, a woman’s position in colonial India was not particularly easy. The heat, the humidity, monsoon rains and the swirling clouds of dust could destroy an English rose in the space of a year or two. The clothes she was expected to wear made matters worse. To the restrictions imposed by the role ascribed by the men of empire were added the daily chores of trying to keep clothes clean, stopping meat putrefying and seeing that there was enough water for a rudimentary bath at the end of the day, all of it in relentless heat, homesickness, often absent husbands, interminable railway journeys, the fear of tropical sickness striking a child (later often replaced by that numb, never cauterized wound, when they were sent off to boarding school at the age of seven), the temptations posed by single men and the menace of flirtatious other wives. And all to be endured in the foul smell that a capricious wind might waft around at any time from the thunderbox at the back of the bungalow.
India, the jewel in the imperial crown, was one thing. But in many other corners of the empire the entire edifice rested on the shoulders of one young man in a pair of shorts. As the idea of themselves as rulers of the world took ever firmer hold, the British were obliged to grapple with how these imperial subalterns were to live in the absence of European women. The French, for example, had come to a policy in which young men serving in west Africa were advised that they could both serve their own interests and help to Gallicize the continent by contracting ‘temporary marriages’ for the duration of their tour of duty. The British considered this typically French, and officers of the Sudanese Political Service, who prided themselves on being an elite, rather gloried in celibacy. But elsewhere a number of men out in the bush made their own arrangements. Across much of the rest of Africa and in the Far East, informal relationships between lonely young men and local women became commonplace. In Sarawak and Malaya the practice was either recognized or encouraged: the ‘sleeping dictionary’ being an established way of learning the local language. But when power was distributed so unequally, it was dangerous: how could a magistrate dispense justice fairly when he might be sharing his bed with a relative of one of the aggrieved parties? In typically British fashion, these things were not noticed, as long as no one drew attention to them.
But in 1908 the case of Hubert Silberrad, an assistant district commissioner in the Nyeri district of Kenya, blew the arrangement open. Silberrad had bought two Kenyan girls (for forty goats apiece) from a colleague who had been promoted. They were troublingly young – one of them, aged twelve, was extremely reluctant to be passed on, the other agreed to the arrangement in exchange for a monthly wage. When, three years later, Silberrad attempted to acquire a third mistress (of similar age) and one of his own policemen objected, Silberrad locked him up for the night, on grounds of insubordination. Two white neighbours, a Mr and Mrs Scoresby Routledge, came to express their outrage and then Mr Routledge rode four days through the rain to complain to the Governor in Nairobi. The Governor ordered a private investigation, which concluded that Silberrad had brought the administration into disrepute by ‘poaching’. Silberrad lost a year’s seniority and the Governor issued a circular to his officials, warning that, ‘morals apart’, such practices were ‘in every way detrimental to the interests of good government’. The punishment testifies to the distinct priorities of colonial administrators. But what outraged the Routledges was less the rights of Kenyans than the well-being of the empire. Mr Routledge refused to let the matter rest and wrote a letter to The Times outlining the facts of the case and claiming that ‘the interests of this country [are] suffering from the demoralization of native women by British officials’. This was precisely the sort of incident guaranteed to set off a bout of hand-wringing in Britain. A debate in parliament followed, which in turn obliged the Colonial Secretary, Lord Crewe (one of the most buttoned-up men ever to grace British public life – a cabinet colleague claimed to have a constituent who had lost her mind while listening to one of his speeches), to issue what became known as the ‘Concubine Circular’ in January 1909.
Formally, the document had no name, although the file for comments and replies was entitled ‘Immoral Relations with Native Women’. Crewe recognized that, as far as some long-established members of the service were concerned, he was whistling in the wind, and the Circular was never even sent to various empire territories, such as the West Indies and the Seychelles where intermarriage between black and white was far from rare. Two versions were eventually produced – one warning old hands of the danger to the empire posed by scandal, and another addressed to junior men, threatening fire and brimstone. Taking native mistresses was ‘injurious and dangerous’ and ‘disgrace and ruin’ awaited those who made the mistake of entering into ‘arrangements of concubinage with girls or women belonging to the native populations’. To make sure the parents of recruits were not scandalized, the document was issued to them only on arrival in the colony. Some of
the colonial settlers found the celibacy now imposed upon officials a just reward for their exercise of an often resented authority. To the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ they showed their sympathy by singing:
Pity the poor Official
Whene’er he gets a stand,
He may not take a bibi
He has to use his hand.
And so he saves his money,
His character – his job,
And only has to answer for
His conduct to his God.
It was a small price to pay for the glory of the empire.
So what were girls to be told about their contribution to the empire? In September of the year of Lord Crewe’s circular, the organizers of the Boy Scout movement’s first large rally were slightly nonplussed by the arrival of small groups of young people claiming to be Scouts, but who were definitely not boys. What was to be done with them? Scouting was about toughening up boys and equipping them for life on the frontier, and if girls were to be considered for the same role, it would never succeed in instilling manly values.
Like many empire-builders, Robert Baden-Powell knew more about the natives of Matabeleland than he did about his fellow countrymen who happened to be devoid of the Y sex chromosome: he was fifty-two and would not marry for another three years (to a woman thirty-two years his junior). So he consulted his sister, Agnes, and invited her to take on the leadership of an organization to enable girls to do their bit. By the outbreak of the First World War the Girl Guides (they took their name from the famous regiment of Gurkha guides in India) had 40,000 members. ‘Guides! remember the future of our Empire lies in your hands,’ the B-Ps thundered. ‘It is in your power to make or spoil the British nation.’ This was, however, to be accomplished in a very different manner from the role assigned to boys. Their imperial destiny was to become healthy girls, loyal wives and moral mothers. ‘Britain has been made by her great men,’ wrote Agnes Baden-Powell and her brother in The Handbook for Girl Guides, or How Girls Can Help Build up the Empire, ‘and these great men were made great by their mothers.’
Empire Page 16
