Raj

by Lawrence, James

  It was intoxicating stuff, and widely read by boys from all backgrounds; at the turn of the century the annual print-run of Henty’s yarns was between 150,000 and 200,000.16 The Henty genre flourished well into the next century, when fresh generations of schoolboys were transported to an India where adventure and fame waited for the stout-hearted. In content and style, D. H. Parry’s Listed as a Lancer, which appeared in Chums during 1913, may stand for many others. It recounts the picaresque career of Jack Robinson, who joins the cavalry after being expelled from school. On the North-West Frontier he wins the friendship of the regimental riding-master by saving his daughter from a fire, and the enmity of Lieutenant Foxwell Crawley, the son of a millionaire gin distiller who had ‘none of the instincts of a gentleman’. Jack has, although a ranker; and he vainly attempts to save the life of an Indian barber who is being kicked to death by a British soldier. Aware of scandals caused by such brutality during Curzon’s viceroyalty, the author comments: ‘Now as everyone who has been to India knows, it is a most dangerous thing to hit a native in the stomach. It is very liable to rupture the liver.’ The murdered man’s brother turns out to be a Pathan spy who, bound by a debt of honour, assists Jack when he is taken prisoner by a fanatic mullah. During his captivity the hero meets some Russian officers, making mischief on the frontier, and, adding a modern touch, invokes the help of two Royal Flying Corps officers who bomb the mullah’s headquarters – anticipating the type of warfare that would be introduced to India within the next three years. The climax comes when the Russians invade Afghanistan and the hero manages to capture their entire high command.

  Less ambitious boys’ stories exploited the ‘mysterious’ and invariably sinister aspects of India. The Demons of the Pit, serialised in Chums in 1920, concerns priests ‘in remote districts . . . offering human sacrifices to their hideous gods’, which was not as far-fetched as might have first appeared, for such practices were still occurring among tribes on the Burmese frontier. A tea plantation is the setting for The Sacred Tiger, in which the young hero becomes bored with his routine duties as manager: ‘One soon tires of watching native pickers to see that they don’t slack – as natives surely will if they are left to their own sweet inclinations.’17

  Like other crude stereotypes, that of the idle native was part of the stock-in-trade of adult popular fiction with an Indian setting. And yet, many standard characters were rooted in reality, even if they were flatly rendered. The seventeen-year-old raja in Alice Perrin’s The Anglo-Indians (1912) is bent on sybaritic self-indulgence despite the efforts of his tutor, Captain Somerton, to ‘inculcate notions of manliness’. Later, he and his young wife are keen to travel to Europe, she mesmerised by London’s shopping opportunities. Such creatures did exist and were a constant problem for the Raj. All this would have been understood by the authoress, who was the daughter of a Bengal cavalry general and the wife of an Indian official. Her theme is the aspirations of the three daughters of the Fleetwoods, one of those families with a long history of service in India. Their father is a district officer and their mother a memsahib of the old school who, like so many of her kind, was finding it very hard to come to terms with change of any sort. She regrets Indians adopting Western ways. ‘To her it was “not suitable” that Orientals should dance with English girls considering their present attitude towards the Feminine, just as she would have deemed it unsuitable for an Englishwoman to sit on the floor and eat with her fingers.’ Captain Somerton concurs: ‘No Englishman would be happy if his wife became friendly with an Indian and vice-versa.’ Just why is explained when Fay Fleetwood flirts with the raja, laying her hand on his as she tries to persuade him to govern justly, and mercifully unaware of ‘the fierce flame of passion that surged through his being at her tender touch’.

  As well as the lecherous prince there is another familiar figure, the sulking memsahib. Marion Fleetwood vents her discontent on her sister, Fay. India, she complains, is ‘petty, and narrow, and second rate; people are too simple and commonplace out here. There’s no life, only existence.’ Like so many exiles who felt themselves circumscribed by the society and conventions of India, Marion yearns for England. Such women existed. In her memoirs, Phyllis Lawrence, the wife of a senior civil servant, recalled the young wife of a junior official ‘eating her heart out for an English suburban villa with H and C laid on’. Lonely and distressed, she dies from dysentery while her husband is away on duty.18

  Like Alice Perrin, Maud Diver was born in India, a soldier’s daughter and the wife of an officer. In 1896 she returned to England and a busy literary career in which she wrote romances set against an Indian background; sixteen are listed in her entry in Who’s Who for 1930. They included historical adventures set on the North-West Frontier and novels which dealt with the problems of contemporary India. Her Far to Seek: A Romance of England and India (1921) engages the awkward subject of the Anglo-Indian, but in a manner which would cause no unease or blushes. The hero, Roy Sinclair, is the son of an English baronet and a high-born Rajput lady, whose marriage has set her permanently apart from her kin. Her son learns of his ancient Indian inheritance from Rajput chivalric tales heard at his mother’s knee, and encounters racial prejudice at his prep school, where he is befriended by Desmond, the son of an Indian army officer whose family record of service stretches back 100 years. So, two honourable traditions meet. Less fortunate is an Indian boy, Siri Chandranath, who suffers at the hands of ‘Scab Major’, the school bully.

  Sinclair proceeds to Oxford where racial, caste and culinary taboos are suspended and he mixes freely with Indian men and women of his own age. He meets Dyan Singh, who voices the grievances of the educated Indian: ‘We are all British subjects – oh yes – when convenient! But the door is opened only – so far. If we make bold to ask for the best, it is slammed in our faces.’ Seeking his roots, Sinclair goes to India, now plunged into political turmoil. His maternal grandfather, a minister in a Rajasthan state, is a conservative who hopes that the princes can check sedition, but is also aware of the need for greater contacts between the races, particularly among their upper classes. Sinclair also attends a nationalist meeting in Delhi where he hears ‘Swami’, a thinly disguised Gandhi figure, preach the doctrines of ‘yoga by action’, randomly quoting Christian and Hindu scriptures to support his appeals to the youth of India. Another speaker is Siri Chandranath who, not surprisingly after his treatment at prep school, has become an anti-British firebrand, unlike Dyan Singh whose nationalism has not blinded him to the virtues of British government. Sinclair also confronts the ugly face of the Raj; sensing that a future baronet might be an ideal match for her daughter, a memsahib freezes with horror the moment she hears that he has an Indian mother.

  The story concludes dramatically in Lahore at the height of the 1919 disturbances. Here, Mrs Diver is completely in sympathy with her countrymen and women embattled in the midst of the ‘formidable depths of alien humanity hemming them in, outnumbering them by thousands to one’. ‘Up against organised rebellion’, the Europeans are terrified by rioters shouting, ‘Kill the white pigs, brothers!’ Order is restored and a good word is said for the ‘strong action’ taken at Amritsar, which was to be expected from an authoress who had contributed £7 to the General Dyer fund.19 The moral is clear: for all its faults and those of its servants, the Raj is infinitely preferable to any alternative proposed by the nationalists, whose rhetoric leads to anarchy and bloodshed.

  A fictional Dyer is the hero of ‘The Bone of Contention’ (1932), a short-story-cum-political-polemic by another prolific source of Indian fiction, Ethel Savi. Born in India, she spent some time during the 1880s in rural Bengal, an experience, she claimed, which earned her recognition as an expert on ‘the inner life of the natives of India, their proclivities, castes and psychology’. Afterwards she mastered the equally arcane mysteries of life and manners in the European civil lines.20 According to her Who’s Who entry, these accomplishments qualified her to write over twenty novels on India. To judge fr
om ‘The Bone of Contention’, her uncompromising views were frozen in a past inhabited by aggressive, no-nonsense sahibs and passive, deferential Indians.

  In this story, Faisal Ali, a Muslim businessman, plans to clear away the ruins of a Hindu temple to make way for a road, and is opposed by Babu Nobin Biswas, a Bengali entrepreneur. He is also a Congress activist who encourages students to ‘show signs of disloyalty to the flag and shout insults at Englishwomen’. Marius Brandon, a masterful young official, investigates the temple, overriding a Hindu who objects to his presence: ‘Go to blazes! . . . Who the devil are you to dictate to a sahib what is to be done . . . son of a pig!’ The upshot is that the Muslims demolish the temple and trigger a communal riot of the sort which were becoming commoner at this time. Brandon is more than up to the crisis and afterwards tells his superior: ‘We gave them no quarter . . . None of that rot with blank cartridge. We let ’em have it straight and hot, and my word! it did the trick like magic.’ Promotion beckons, ‘if I am not sacked for having opened fire on the oppressed natives’. Mrs Savi approved, but in 1932 the Indian government would have been embarrassed by Brandon, to say the least. Nevertheless, there were plenty in Britain who respected men of his stamp. The popular illustrated weekly, Picture Post, wrote warmly of the former governor of Bengal, Sir John Anderson (of the Anderson Shelter), as one of those ‘iron-fisted, steel-hearted men usually required, sooner or later, to serve the Empire in India’.21

  Mrs Savi’s short story also reflects a constant of Anglo-Indian life, the feeling that things were changing for the worst, and that there had once been a perfect age when everyone had known their place in the scheme of things and behaved accordingly. Of course, this is a theme which may be found in the literature of any generation, but in India it corresponded closely with reality. Civil servants’ and officers’ memoirs which appeared after 1914 lamented the deterioration and, the writers argued, the dilution of the Raj’s prestige. Describing his final Indian posting in 1897, C. E. Goulding, a police officer, regretted that it was in a ‘civilised’ district which was administered by a ‘Europeanised Babu’. ‘I wished,’ he wrote, ‘to take away with me the recollection of what India had been.’22 Similar sentiments run through the writings of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, William Horne and General Sir James Willcocks, all of whom regarded the political changes introduced after 1909 with trepidation. It was a reaction which transcended rank. Frank Richards, a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, recalled how, soon after his arrival in India in the early 1900s, he was rebuked by a veteran. ‘Sonny, the soldiers of the old John Company drank rum and not shark’s piss,’ he observed, adding, ‘the country is fast going to the dogs, by the way that some of the natives were strutting about.’23

  Inter-war travel literature emphasised the immutability of India as its greatest appeal. ‘Sudden glimpses of a world long lost’ were promised to tourists in a 1938 advertisement for the Indian Railway Bureau. The accompanying drawing of fair-skinned nautch girls in long diaphanous dresses and princely, robed figures standing beside an elephant indicates that visitors would encounter sights already familiar from scenes in the illustrated weeklies and newsreels.24 This was the timeless, picturesque country visited by an American travel writer, M. O. Williams, who exclaimed, ‘If only the East would remain unchanged.’ His piece appeared in the November 1921 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, which was largely devoted to India, no doubt in anticipation of the forthcoming royal visit. The ‘magic’ of the sub-continent was evoked by pictures of caparisoned elephants, mailed warriors and princely palaces, and there was praise for the work of the British. An article on Kashmir described the moral revolution accomplished at the Church Mission School at Srinagar by its muscular Christian headmaster, Edward Tyndale-Briscoe. He had invigorated the ‘physically lazy’ youth of Kashmir by a relentless programme of soccer, boxing and swimming. ‘Here,’ the author remarked, ‘were people who, with all their age-old philosophy, did not know that physical courage, reserve and self-restraint, bred in muscle and bone, would do more than fanaticism to make them strong.’25

  III

  Indian incapacities were a persistent theme in books about India, whether factual or imaginary. ‘Half of them don’t believe in germs and the other half are too indolent to be enlightened,’ laments a memsahib in Mrs Savi’s The Passionate Problem (1935). Far better, thought Maud Diver, that Indians remained untaught. In her Desmond V.C. (1915), the hero presents a faithful Sikh NCO (a coloured portrait of the King Emperor is the sole decoration of his room) with a photograph of himself. ‘To the unsophisticated native – and there are happily many left in India – a photograph remains an abiding miracle; a fact to be accepted and reverenced without explanation, like the inconsistencies of the gods.’ In fact, Indians had been taking their own photographs for the past sixty years. Such an activity would have displeased Sir George Younghusband, for whom all educated Indians were an anathema, as he explained in his memoirs:

  The best Indians in the middle and lower-middle classes, and those who have the highest and best qualities, are the soldiers and servants who can perhaps neither read nor write, but who have lived all their lives within the honest atmosphere of Englishmen and Englishwomen. The worst are the so-called highly educated Indians, who get a smattering of algebra and John Stuart Mill.26

  Real and fictional Indians found themselves snared in a moral trap. If they embraced Western learning they were despised, and, simultaneously, they were condemned for resisting improvement. Their supposed immunity to progress was censured in Mother India, a tendentious survey written by an American, Katherine Mayo, and published in 1927. At the beginning, she gives a nightmarish account of the sacrifice of a goat she had witnessed in Calcutta:

  The blood gushes forth on the pavement, the drums and gongs burst out wildly. ‘Kali! Kali! Kali!’ shout all the priests and the supplicants together, some flinging themselves down on the temple floor.27

  This sets the tone for a book in which Indian backwardness is blamed upon Hinduism, which has ‘devitalised’ the Indian mind and filled it with meaningless abstractions which are summed up as ‘nothingness’. Hinduism has also legitimised the degradation of women, about which Miss Mayo has much to say. For all its inability to push through profound reforms in this area, she still praises the Raj: ‘Britain, by example and teaching, has been working for nearly three-quarters of a century to implant her own ideas of mercy on an alien soil.’ She has sympathy too for the princes, one of whom tells her that: ‘We made no treaty with the Government that included Bengali babus [i.e. Congressmen]. We shall never deal with this new lot of Jacks-in-office.’ The pretensions of what he calls ‘the babu’ class disturb the fictional raja in The Anglo-Indians: ‘Nowadays they tell me the tiger and the goat drink at the same stream.’28

  The raja’s forebodings are a reminder that Indian society, like that of the British in India, was hierarchical. During his voyage out in 1933, Pilot Officer David Lee was reprimanded for buying the wrong style of pith helmet. ‘You will be taken for a bloody box wallah [non-official European],’ he is warned, which would be unthinkable for an officer.29 In The Passionate Problem, Edith Savi (herself the wife of a box wallah) describes guests from that class drinking too much at a ball and helping themselves to cigars. Their misconduct was ‘holding British prestige up to contempt’, and a shocked sahib and Indian banker swiftly bring proceedings to a halt to forestall further excesses.30 Learning self-control and the correct forms of dress were part of a process of social and moral acclimatisation whose purpose was conformity and solidarity. Attitudes normal enough at home were unacceptable or even dangerous in India, where the prestige of the British race was still considered the mainstay of the Raj. ‘You’re superior to everyone in India except one or two of the ranis, and don’t forget that,’ Mrs Turton, the Collector’s wife, tells Mrs Moore, the naïve newcomer at the beginning of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).

  But the elevation of the ICS official was brief. ‘At Cha
ndrapore the Turtons were little gods; soon they would retire to some suburban villa, and die exiled from glory,’ Forster observes with some pleasure, for on the whole he disliked the values of the Indian official class. He was unconsciously echoing a snobbery which could be found inside the Anglo-Indian hierarchy. In 1923, when a group of officers were discussing whether to open fire on rioters, one suggested consulting a civilian official. A furious brigade commander interrupted: ‘Who do they think they are? Snivelling little intellectuals who, when they return from this God-forsaken country, try to pass themselves off as gentlemen. A lot of them settle in hideous little villas on the outskirts of my place in Surrey.’31