The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  Dimple sets about introducing spoon after spoon of white sugar to the pale gold depths of her teacup. We’ve gone for a high-quality Darjeeling, which, Raaja had promised, with the impromptu poetry of the educated Indian, would be ‘like the Himalayan sunlight at dawn’.

  ‘The Fishing Fleets are my favourites among the characters of old Shimla,’ he says, returning to our theme. ‘In the early days there were few takers for the rigours of the colonial lifestyle, so the East India Company, the trading company that preceded British crown governance of India, made it worth these girls’ while. They paid their passage out, gave them a set of clothing, and maintained them for a year.

  ‘But by the late nineteenth century the tables had turned. India, where there were four white women to every one white man, was seen as the last-ditch hunting ground for British women not sufficiently pretty or rich to make a good match at home. So the Company started charging a £200 bond – equivalent to £12,000 today – to girls who wanted to make the trip.’

  ‘God, it’s like a spinster tax,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not joking,’ adds Dimple, nodding into her steaming cup.

  ‘But there was no shortage of willing Fishing Fleet girls,’ says Raaja. ‘By this point they also had the Highway to India, which was what they called the Suez Canal back then. It opened to non-shipping traffic in 1869 and reduced the average journey time from England to India from six months to around six weeks. So the floodgates opened, if you will. The cargo of young damsels became an annual event.’

  ‘And these girls hot-footed it to Shimla to find husbands?’ I ask.

  ‘The more business-minded girls, those who wanted a good husband at any cost, might get themselves affianced on the boat trip. Others were snapped up at the port in Bombay by the desperate, undersexed men who awaited their arrival: for them it must have been like a cargo of exotic fruits and they wanted first pick of the produce.

  ‘But yes, many girls came directly to Shimla for the summer season, with their chaperones or “speculating mammas” and their trunks of evening dresses. By the early twentieth century, a trip here had become the British debutante’s rite of passage.’

  ‘And if they didn’t find a husband?’ asks Dimple.

  Raaja smiles as he smothers his scone with butter. ‘I’m afraid it would be social suicide: those who went back to England without a marriage band, or at least an engagement ring, were called “Returned Empties”.’

  I think of the mixture of excitement and desperation that must have drawn many of these girls across these turbulent seas – the much-feared waters of the Bay of Biscay and the ‘pirate alley’ of the Red Sea – to seek a mate.

  The nineteenth century was manifestly cruel to the unmarried middle-class woman. Without a husband, she’d suffer a lack of social status; and without a man’s or her own independent income, she’d be thrown on the mercy of her relatives. Or she might suffer an icier fate still as a governess: a lonely figure with no rightful place, or companionship, above or below stairs.

  It was the emphasis on keeping up with the Joneses that was partly to blame for this glut of unmarried girls, or what became known as the ‘spinster issue’. For a middle-class Victorian man, marriage came not only with the expense of keeping a large family property and a wife, but also that of maintaining their numerous offspring and the retinue of servants expected of a polite home. Understandably, many men eyed this fate warily and decided against marriage, preferring to live a bachelor life in cheaper lodgings while relying on prostitutes to cater to their earthier needs. The number of working girls on the streets of Victorian London – one for every 12 adult males – indicates the popularity of this life choice.

  ‘High stakes for these Fishing Fleet girls, then?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Raaja. ‘There was a lot riding on their hooking a man. And apart from their competition with the Grass Widows, other factors were working against them at Shimla. Their potential haul was severely reduced by the army’s disapproval of early marriage. An unmarried soldiery was believed to be more efficient, so the Indian Army rule of thumb was ‘subalterns cannot marry; captains may marry; majors should marry; colonels must marry’. Trouble was, men were usually in their early to mid-30s before they were promoted to the status of officer, so most of the younger men were selected out of the marriage market by circumstance.

  ‘Shimla society could be quite cruel towards these girls, too,’ he went on. ‘Wits had a lot of fun with the phenomenon. One contemporary snidely described the arrival of the Fishing Fleets as a “matrimonial armada hoving into view”. They were also given cruel nicknames. Three unattractive sisters who came to Shimla were known as “The World, the Flesh and the Devil”, and another three became “Wriggles, Giggles and Goggles”.’

  Perhaps the modern-day equivalent of these breathless matrimonial armadas can be seen in Western cities such as New York. In 2005, Columbia University economist Lena Edlund ran a study into the single male to single female ratios across major world cities and came up with some startling results. In 44 of the 47 cities she studied, women outnumbered men (in the remaining three cities there was parity). The shortage of available males was particularly acute in New York (and increased substantially in the 1990s), as picked up in pithy monologue by that notorious New York single girl, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw (although Carrie’s numbers are slightly off, including, as they do, New York octogenarians): ‘There are 1.3 million single men in New York, 1.8 million single women, and of these more than 3 million people, about 12 think they’re having enough sex.’

  Edlund’s paper, also called ‘Sex and the City’, proposes ‘that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas; the presence of males with high incomes attracting not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a surplus of women in urban areas may result from a combination of better labor and marriage markets.’ In short, when big-city rents rise in the West, lower-earning males leave for smaller towns while their lower-earning female counterparts cling on – in a tactic not dissimilar to that of the Fleet girls, the potential of a rich mate as their prize.

  In an analysis of Edlund‘s findings, Tim Harford, in his book The Logic of Life, speculates that rather than causing women a modest inconvenience, ‘this tiny imbalance ends up being very bad news for the women, and very good news for the remaining men. Scarcity is power; and more power than you might have thought.’ With a surplus of available women, men have little or no incentive to marry, leading to fractious and neurotic competition for male attention. As one single 39-year-old New York woman once summed it up to me: ‘It’s a candy store for these guys. Men are like taxi cabs: women get in, women get out. When the light goes on they’re ready to marry, when the lights are off – no chance.’

  There are, of course, two main key differences between the tough marital economy faced by today’s New York singletons and that of the unmarried girls of Victorian Britain: economic independence, and sexual freedom.

  ‘I bet Giggles was expected to be innocent to the ways of the flesh until her wedding night,’ I suggest.

  ‘She’d have to be very careful to preserve her reputation, yes,’ says Raaja.

  ‘Good Indian Girls, Good English Girls … It’s the same old story for young women in conservative times,’ says Dimple.

  ‘Yes,’ I agree with a smile, draining my cup of Himalayan sunlight as we pack up for the walk back through the still buzzing bazaar. ‘But what if you get to be a Grass Widow when you grow up?’

  3 | BLACK ON WHITE, Shimla

  The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

  —E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

  If sex was titillation, or a career move, for the well-heeled British of Shimla society, it was something very different for Rajeev Kuthiala’s relatives. Now in his late 80s, Kuthiala remembers the Raj caravan through his eyes as a young boy in the 1920s and 1930s.

 
Raaja, Dimple and I have arranged to meet him the next morning at Scandal Point. A smooth sweep of concrete where the Mall broadens across the Ridge, Scandal Point is today what it was then: the natural spot for Shimlaites to meet friends and lovers, promenade in their finery and exchange gossip. As so frequently in Shimla, the air smells impossibly fresh, the sky’s as blue as lapis lazuli and the flora is putting on its best show: everywhere at the roadside the Rhododendron varietal the Shimlaites call buransh is in full mid-red bloom, its cluster of buds gaping like the serried mouths of trumpets.

  Kuthiala arrives with his patient great-niece Geeta, who’s walked him up the hill to meet us. As she coaxes him to lean on her arm for support, the old man bashes his stick on the concrete underfoot in noisy irritation.

  From the age of 14, Kuthiala was a hand rickshaw puller, as was his father before him and his father before that. First in line was his great-grandfather, who was press-ganged into service as a coolie from his hillside village in the 1860s. In those days the hill roads were impassable to wheeled vehicles, so all the gaudy brocade of the Raj was borne up here on Indian backs: chests of tea, boxes of files, houseplants and pets, even costumes for am-dram at the Gaiety.

  There was certainly no shortage of servants to supply British needs. In a typical Shimla Summer Census, that from 1921, the city was home to 43,333 souls, of whom 4803 were Europeans and 38,503 were their Indian servants or dependants: shopkeepers and ayahs (maids and coolies), with one rickshaw puller, such as Kuthiala, for every white head.

  But Shimla’s sexual permissiveness represented a complication, rather than a pleasure, for Kuthiala’s servant family. His second uncle was, he says, the fruit of his grandmother’s liaison with a white man; an incident that his grandmother claimed, on the rare occasions she could be prevailed upon to talk about her life, was rape. She was married at the time to Kuthiala’s grandfather and the family lived on the outskirts of town.

  ‘He says it was rarely talked about in his family,’ says Raaja, who’s carefully translating Kuthiala’s mixture of Hindi and Punjabi. ‘The child was brought up by his great-aunt in the village so as not to attract scandal. His grandfather grew to despise his wife and became a drunk on zutho, the local moonshine. There was no money from the father or acknowledgement of the child.’

  ‘So he remembers the wild ways of the British?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ says Raaja, after a pause to translate. ‘He says they feared for the young girls of their family. The Britisher men were notorious, and his sister was sent back to the family village so she wouldn’t be corrupted. He says that village girls could be ruined if they fell in with a Britisher man.’

  Even back in England at the height of Victorian repression, sex with servants was the norm. The great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was far from unusual in losing his virginity to a scullery maid. Household servants were easy to access for lusty boys, often literally – knickers only came into use for the British working classes in the 1850s. And in India, there was the added factor of the ‘Oriental’ attraction felt by many Victorian males.

  In the early days of the East India Company, it was tacitly accepted that white men in India would take Indian women for their wives, or bibis. Originally a Hindustani word denoting a high-class woman, in Anglo-Indian usage the term bibi came to connote a native mistress.

  Job Charnock (1630–92), the colourful East India Company administrator who founded Calcutta at the site of Sutanati, a small town beside the Hoogly river, sired three children by the Hindu bibi he saved from sati, the ritual self-immolation rite whereby widows throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres in tribute to that perfect mythological wife Sita. Meanwhile, Colonel James Skinner had a harem of 14 wives with whom he reputedly fathered 80 children. Further down the social scale, many of the British in India during the Company days married Hindu women, or preferably Anglo-Indians (those with mixed European/Indian parentage, then called Eurasians). Indeed, in the late eighteenth century the East India Company actively encouraged such liaisons, paying five rupees for every Eurasian child of a rank soldier who was baptised.

  Common as these interracial sexual set-ups may have been, they were also necessarily unequal. Bibis existed in a precarious position between spouse, companion and prostitute. They were recruited through servants and would draw a salary for their time with their ‘master’, which often spanned several years. Any children issuing from the relationship would be housed, fed and schooled. The luckier bibis inherited estates, although few were accorded the respect that white wives enjoyed. Bibis were routinely barred from attending functions as their master’s companion. And when their men wearied of them, many Indian mistresses would be left to destitution, separated from their children, who remained the legal property of their master. For Indian women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and for Kuthiala’s grandmother – mating with a European man, whether voluntarily or under coercion, could spell ruin.

  Yet it was also true that bibis could become adept at holding their masters in their emotional and sexual thrall. The diaries of Calcutta surveyor and architect Richard Blechynden, written between 1791 and 1822, portray how emotionally muddy these entanglements could become. In April 1800, the diaries report a month of sleepless misery after his bibi Mary left him for a Captain James:

  Not one minute’s sleep did I obtain… This woman will drive me mad I believe. Reason tells me that it is a happy riddance – but passion oversetts [sic] the whole of that and I return to my regret for having let her go.

  Back home, these Anglo-Indian arrangements were often viewed with distaste, even in the early years. Blechynden tells of a passionate letter written to a young Calcutta lieutenant of his acquaintance from the lieutenant’s father, the Reverend Hastings, against the immorality of keeping an Indian girl and siring two children by her. William was, his father arraigned, ‘living in a pagan country where this view of fornication is allowed, and encouraged, by the natives, and is eagerly copied and practiced by their European infidel masters’.

  In the late eighteenth century, compounded by the colonial uprisings of 1791 on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo where whites were rounded up and massacred, these relatively open attitudes towards Indian mistresses went into an abrupt reverse. In 1773, the Regulating Act had created the post of Governor General of Bengal with administrative powers over all of British India. In 1786, when Lord Cornwallis assumed the post, he brought in a programme of edicts that would result in an impassable barrier – social, sexual and economic – between British and Indians. The first banned the children of British men and Indian women from jobs within the Company. The second forbade such mixed-race children from being sent home to England to be educated, and determined that no one with an Indian parent could be employed in the civil, military or marine branches of the Company. These laws, in effect, made formal intermarriage untenable.

  Another form of interracial union – the white female and the Indian male – was also deeply problematic. Scandal Point, where we’re standing, is named for one of these supposed interracial liaisons: the elopement of the daughter of British India’s top official, the Viceroy, and a dashing Indian prince.

  ‘There were nubile Viceroy’s daughters around this period, of course,’ says Raaja, as he explains this story. ‘But there’s little historical evidence that the Scandal Point events actually happened, or that the individuals in question even existed.’

  The urban legend of Scandal Point hints at something that was indubitably true, though: a deep-seated fear, by the time of Raj-era India, of sexual relations between white females and non-white males. It was a fear that was lampooned in E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India, in which a young Indian Muslim physician, Aziz, is mistakenly arrested for sexually assaulting young British schoolmistress Adela Quested. The novel plays with the tensions between whites and Indians in the run-up to the Indian Independence movement, expressed in a societal neurosis around interracial coupling.

  The inflect
ion point had come after the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as ‘India’s First War of Independence’ to Indians and as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ to the British. While incidents of war rape committed by Indian rebels against English women and girls did occur, these were exaggerated to great effect by the British media in order to justify vicious reprisals and the continuance of colonialism.

  The propaganda reached fever pitch in the 1860s, when the British press in India argued that Indian judges were abusing their powers to fill their harems with white English females. In the wake of the Indian Rebellion, ‘sexual pollution’ and the degeneration of the white race via miscegenation came to be directly linked with social chaos and the fall of Empire. The Industrial Revolution, too, expanded the social chasm between black and white, encouraging the British belief in their mastery and superiority – their distinctness from the ‘black races’. Indeed, many British viewed their successes in heavy industry and engineering as indicative of their natural right to rule over their less technologically advanced subject peoples.

  The motif of the ‘dark-skinned rapist’ began to proliferate in nineteenth-century English literature. In the days leading up to the massacre at Amritsar on April 13, 1919, Indian men were required to crawl on their stomachs, hands and knees at the sight of a white woman, following an attack on an English missionary, Miss Marcella Sherwood, which obviously inspired Forster’s narrative. General Dyer, who issued the order, later explained to a British inspector:

  Some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu god and therefore they have to crawl in front of her, too.

  Despite this unbridled paranoia, there remained an attraction between Indian males and white women. The sisters of the unmarried Lord Auckland (Viceroy 1836–42), who were his hostesses, raised eyebrows at Shimla with the consistent good looks of their young, male (and Indian) aides-de-camp. And interracial love affairs between Indian men and white women did occur, Raaja tells us as we watch Kuthiala retreating slowly back down the hill, dyspeptically shooing away his great-niece’s arm.