The Fishing Fleet

by Anne de Courcy

  Florence was already five months pregnant; her son was born on 20 August 1893. But her married life was brief and unhappy. In spite of her adoption of her husband’s religion the nobility of Patiala took no notice of her; and she was spurned by European society. Worst of all, her son was poisoned. By 1896 a Foreign Office file refers to her as ‘the late’ – it is believed she died of pneumonia while accompanying her husband on a campaign in the Himalayas. Rajendar himself died a few years later, on 1 November 1900, following a riding accident.

  12

  ‘Us and them’

  Brits and Indians

  Much of the view of Anglo-Indians, as seen by the eyes of those at home, has been influenced by the differing attitudes of those two literary giants, Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster – in the case of Kipling, by a large body of work but with Forster by only one seminal book, A Passage to India.

  Of the two, Kipling’s approach is the more straightforward. He believed in the British Empire, the Pax Britannica, and in the almost mystical right of the British to rule; the Kipling view of Empire also held that there were grave responsibilities for those who ruled. Supremely fitted for this task, he thought, was the British public schoolboy, ably supported by the British soldier. The ideal English hero, in his stories, was brave, strong, imbued with the public school ethos, always fair, chivalrous towards women, and a leader.

  At the same time, only someone with admiration and respect for Indians could have written books like Kim or the Mowgli stories, let alone the poems ‘East is East’ and ‘Gunga Din’ (‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’). Yet, however close the relationship – the bonds of loyalty and affection between master and servant, or that linked fellow soldiers or brave men of whatever colour or creed – one line could never be crossed. There must be no mixing of blood. For Kipling, writing in the late nineteenth century, intermarriage was the unpardonable sin.

  A hundred-odd years earlier it had been perfectly acceptable; in the early days the East India Company had even offered a christening present of five rupees to the children of their soldiers and their Indian wives. At that time many Englishmen preferred an Indian wife or mistress. Major-General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart of the East India Company, who went to India in his teens, in the late 1780s, wrote enthusiastically of the charms of Indian women rather as if describing a Miss Wet-Tee-shirt contest: ‘the Hindoo female, modest as the rosebud, bathes completely dressed . . . and necessarily rises with wet drapery from the stream. Had I despotic power, our British fair ones should soon follow this example; being fully persuaded that it would eminently contribute to keep the bridal torch for ever in a blaze.’

  ‘Hindoo’ Stuart – so called because of his devotion to and knowledge of all things Hindu – was admittedly well known for his passion for women (‘He has the Itch beyond any man I ever knew,’ wrote a contemporary), but the fact that he considered Indian women more beautiful and desirable than their English counterparts would not have been considered particularly strange at the time he was writing. One eighteenth-century senior Resident of Calcutta even had himself circumcised* in order to improve his relations with Muslim women, and the experienced roué Captain Edward Sellon, writing of India in the years 1834–44, said enthusiastically of its women: ‘They understand in perfection all the arts and wiles of love, are capable of gratifying any taste, and in face and figure they are unsurpassed by any women in the world . . . it is impossible to describe the enjoyment I have had in the arms of these syrens.’

  Forster’s view, more complex and of a later date than Kipling’s, as expressed in A Passage to India (published in 1924), was contemporaneous with the rising power of Mahatma Gandhi and the first stirrings of the struggle for independence. He wrote enthusiastically and sympathetically of Indians, but created a searing portrait of those who ruled over them, charting an attitude the polar opposite of that of ‘Hindoo’ Stuart. Such was the book’s blazing success that for many people it has irrevocably coloured their view of the British in India. Forster’s tone towards them is notably hostile: they appear as the arrogant, bombastic sahibs of caricature, expecting all to bow down before them and with wives who do not scruple to treat all Indians like dirt:

  ‘You’re superior to them anyway. Don’t forget that. You’re superior to everyone in India except one or two of the Ranis, and they’re on an equality,’ says Mrs Turton, the Collector’s wife in the novel, who has already refused to shake hands with any of the Indians at the mixed party her husband has made her give, while the various British officials are constantly expressing loathing and disdain of ‘the natives’.

  Forster, who had fallen in love with an Indian in 1906, a passion that lasted for many years, was predisposed to dislike the sons and daughters of the Raj before even meeting them. To one old friend he made his attitude clear. ‘Over the Anglo-Indians I have to stretch and bust myself blue. I loathe them and should have been more honest to say so.’

  Among the letters of praise on this brilliant novel’s appearance were also letters of complaint, largely from those who had lived and worked in India themselves. One,* who congratulated Forster on his depiction of the Indians in the novel, said that when one turned to the Anglo-Indians one was ‘confronted by the strangest sense of unreality. Where have they come from? What planet do they inhabit? One rubs one’s eyes. They are not even good caricatures, for an artist must see his original clearly before he can caricature it . . .’.

  The book also caused a serious breach with one of his oldest friends, Rupert Barkeley-Smith, who had gone out to join the ICS in 1908 – they had met on a Greek cruise intended for serious classical students. Forster stayed with Smith in 1913 during his first, two-year visit to India, recording that ‘Smith seemed to dislike every class of Indian except the peasant’.

  Despite his reservations, on his second visit in 1921 Forster again went to stay with Smith, now a Collector, in Agra, with an Indian friend of Smith’s as a fellow house guest. When the book came out Smith was so enraged by what he saw as the unfair depiction of those who lived and worked in India (plus a jibe at Smith’s own bungalow as the most uncomfortable in the station) that he wrote a furious letter. The friendship was broken off, not to be resumed again until thirty years had passed.

  For some Fishing Fleet girls coloured skin came as a cultural shock. Others, who had been brought up in India as small children, with ayahs instead of nannies, servants to play with and chatter to (all Indian servants loved children), often camping, and always familiar with the sights, sound and smells of India, found acceptance easy.

  Iris Butler, daughter of liberal parents, had Indian friends who often came to stay all her life. When a small child she was woken every day by the calling of the sacred peacocks. She and her sister and brother were often taken for picnics by a huge lake full of crocodiles fed on camels’ stomachs that would crawl up out of the lake when called by the Rajput keeper. ‘This was by invitation of the ruler, whom we all called Andatta (bread-giver) as did his subjects. I owe the Andatta the inestimable gift of Indian friendship, for he and my parents were devoted to each other, and thus from the first it never entered my head that Indians were any different from anyone else.’

  Cecile Stanley Clarke spent many a happy hour in the zenana of the Nizam of Hyderahad. She would often go to tea there, sitting cross-legged among the zenana women on the floor to eat delicious sticky cakes. She was fascinated by the paraphernalia for making the delicacy paan (chopped areca nuts mixed with lime and various spices and wrapped in a betel leaf, chewed throughout India). ‘It corresponds, I suppose, to our smoking habit. Beautiful boxes were brought in by the ayahs containing all the ingredients, which were carefully mixed together and wrapped in a betel leaf secured with a clove. The first time I was given one I chewed and chewed with tears pouring down my face, swallowing the red hot juices instead of spitting them out, and the grand climax came when I could bear it no longer and swallowed the lot, clove and all. I nearly died. What I should have done, of cour
se, was to have delicately spat out the lot.’

  After tea they would play shuttlecock (badminton), ‘or something like it, though there were never any rules or tiresome things like scoring, and we were five or more a side’. Like exotic butterflies in their brilliant saris, the girls of the zenana would flutter about in the sunshine. When they were all tired they would sit round one of the fountains in the courtyard, sipping refreshing cool drinks. ‘Or we might wander in the garden, which was the most beautiful I had ever seen.’

  To generalise, the higher the official, the more open the approach. Many viceroys had found the business of ‘us and them’ distasteful. A long time earlier, the 8th Earl of Elgin, the second Viceroy of India (1862-3) had written: ‘it is a terrible business this living among inferior races’. In Government House, he disliked walking about among the salaaming servants ‘with perfect indifference, treating them, not as dogs, because in that case one would whistle to them and pat them, but as machines with which one can have no communion or sympathy’. When an English soldier was sentenced to death for killing an Indian while trying to rob him, Elgin refused to grant a reprieve despite public opinion.

  Eventually Lord Minto, Curzon’s successor as Viceroy, in his efforts to breach the social barriers between the British and the Indians, helped to found the Calcutta Club, which admitted both.

  As early as 1885, with the encouragement of the Viceroy and the support of several British officials, a group of Indian lawyers and other professionals, of all religions and from all parts of India, had founded the Indian National Congress as a forum for debate and to express Indian opinion to Britain. This was followed in 1906 by the All-India Muslim League and the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, which enlarged the Viceroy’s Council to include an Indian member and allowed Indians to elect representatives to the provincial legislative councils.

  The fledgling Indian independence movement was given wings by the terrible massacre of Amritsar in 1919, when British troops under the command of General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd of thousands, killing about four hundred. This was followed by more reforms – the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, which increased power at provincial levels – and the rise to power of Mahatma Gandhi, who changed the Indian National Congress from a small group of educated men to a mass party of millions. By the late 1920s and 1930s, most of those who joined the ICS realised that sooner or later Indian independence was inevitable.

  Gradually, barriers were breaking down. While all over India the clubs maintained their rigid rule of racial and sexual apartheid, Indian colleagues worked alongside British Government officials and, especially up country, in the smaller, more isolated stations, there was more mingling. Educated Indian colleagues would be asked to dinner or, in some cases, join the club. ‘The Club was basically a planter’s club,’ wrote E.F. Lydall, an ICS man based in a tea-growing district in the late 1930s. ‘There was no actual colour bar. An Indian medical officer who took over during my time automatically joined the club.’ Indian officers in the Indian Army, though on a level with their British brother officers in the Mess, could not be full members of the Peshawar Club, remembers Lydall, ‘though they could be members of the Cavalry Club in London’.

  Iris James, in a sign of the times – the late 1930s – was allowed to go out with maharajas. ‘There was something about their being very rich that overrode the colour thing.’

  Generally, though, for a youthful Fishing Fleet girl who had married a soldier or junior official it was little use trying to counteract loneliness by friendship with Indian families. So strong was the barrier between the ruler and the ruled and hence the unwritten law forbidding even social mixing, that most minds were set against it; and in a society where conformity to received protocols and attitudes was the accepted ethos, it required a young woman of extraordinarily strong character to run counter to this.

  There was also – and not least – the attitude of Indians themselves. Muslim women were kept in purdah, driven about in enclosed vehicles, and veiled. Hindu women, encouraged to consider their husbands as gods, were similarly treated; nor would the men of either religion have allowed their wives to attend dinner parties or dances where, as was normal British custom, men were present.

  Honor Penrose, who had been sent to India to find a husband and who married the brilliant ICS man Rupert Barkeley-Smith in 1914, was one of a large family accustomed to sociability and often spoke of the difficulty of making friends across the race barrier. ‘Purdah was very strictly enforced. English men got on with Indian men but couple entertaining was awkward as the fourth of the quartet was always missing and it was difficult to get going. Also, as a woman, you were conscious that the men were looking at you and thinking you were a bit of a hussy to be publicly about like this and that you ought to be behind purdah.

  ‘Occasionally I would go and see wives but it was very difficult as you could not see them when you talked, and sitting behind purdah, doing nothing, made them very lethargic. On one of our camping tours one man took his wife into camp, where she lived in two bell tents. When we moved the curtained bullock cart was drawn up beside the opening of one and she was decanted into the cart. She never saw the fresh air at all.’

  It was the same in palaces. ‘We dined with the Maharaja at a large banquet – men only, of course, except for me,’ wrote the newly married Violet Hanson; she and her Indian Army husband Podge Gregson had been invited to spend their honeymoon in the state of Dhranghadra (its maharaja was the uncle of one of Podge’s brother officers).

  ‘There was a curtained-off part of the banqueting hall behind which gathered the Zenana ladies. One could hear muffled giggles and tinkling of bangles during dinner. We went out on shooting parties and sightseeing tours. One of the young princesses, who spoke a little English, insisted on taking me out into the city in her purdah car. It had dark blue glass windows so that no one could look inside. The young Princess drove at breakneck speed through the bazaar, regardless of what or whom she might knock over. However, everyone got out of the way, salaaming deeply as they scattered.’

  Today the barrier between the races has been knocked down and intermarriage is common and accepted. But in the days of the Raj it was, like the Berlin Wall, almost impossible to cross and dangerous to try to do so. ‘I was told who was within my marriage range and who wasn’t,’ said Iris James. ‘Anybody, however old and decrepit, bald or dull, was a possible husband, as long as he was white. But anybody with the slightest touch of colour wasn’t.’

  13

  ‘I thought my heart was going to jump out of my body’

  Grace Trotter

  ‘Understand clearly that there was not a breath of a word to be said against Miss Castries – not a shadow of a breath. She was good and very lovely . . . But – but – but – Well, she was a very sweet girl and very pious, but for many reasons she was “impossible”. Quite so. All good Mamas know what “impossible” means. It was obviously absurd that Peythroppe should marry her. The little opal-tinted onyx at the basis of her finger-nails said this as plainly as print . . . It would have been cheaper for Peythroppe to have assaulted a Commissioner with a dog whip,’ wrote Rudyard Kipling in Plain Tales from the Hills.

  By the 1880s ‘tainting’ the blood of pure-born Britons by mixed marriages had become something to be avoided at all costs, even by force if necessary: in Kipling’s story the hero is kidnapped to save him from a fate – marriage to a beautiful and charming girl whom he adores – considered worse than death because the fact that the girl has some Indian blood will ruin his promising career. As for the girl, she is expected to marry someone who, like herself, is Eurasian, and to lead her life in the Eurasian community, regarded as socially inferior by Europeans and as casteless by Indians.

  Indoctrination started young. In the 1870s one mother was writing to her thirteen-year-old daughter, at school in Simla, ‘I very much hope the other girls are ladies. As for those who are dark, ignore them. It is a sad fact that unions are made in India of the nices
t of men of the best families, and women of no breeding who have coloured forebears. The sad result we must simply accept as part of God’s plan, but there is no need either to speak or even have physical contact with these poor creatures. I know Mama can trust you not to have such a girl as a close friend or a friend of any kind.’

  Only a few of those with Indian blood managed to clamber out of this undesirable no-man’s land. One was Grace Trotter, a girl who must have been twenty when Kipling published his story.

  Grace Minna Trotter was born on 29 November 1868, in Calcutta, where she was baptised. Her family had lived and worked in India for several generations, beginning with her great-grandfather, Alexander Trotter.

  Alexander Trotter’s father, John, had been a man of substance, one of Scotland’s gentleman merchants. He died young in 1798 when Alexander was fourteen. A financial disaster had forced his executors to sell his charming Ibroxhill estate in 1800 and leave the residual funds to maintain Alexander’s mother and sister (who later suffered grievously in the inflation of the Napoleonic Wars). Alexander himself obtained a post with the East India Company as a cadet in the Bengal Army and, after training in England, arrived in India in 1801 and was promoted to Lieutenant of Infantry in 1803.

  So far so good. But three generations back, Grace had a secret. She had Indian blood – at least an eighth, and quite possibly more. In the British India of the Raj, this would not only have put paid to any hope of a ‘good’ marriage but also sent her crashing down to the bottom of the Raj’s rigid class structure. As a Eurasian, she would have moved in a parallel world, alongside the English but never of them, alongside but despised by Indians. She would have belonged to a community in which she could expect to marry a husband who would never have risen to the top in the ICS or been an officer in the regular HEIC regiments;* instead, he would have held one of the vital but less eminent ‘Anglo-Indian type’ jobs – as a pilot on the Hooghly, for instance, as a hospital steward, as non-commissioned personnel in the Army, in middle management, in the railways, telegraphs or other jobs connected with the infrastructure.