Many of us have an idea of the memsahib, the white, middle-class British wife who lived in India during the years of the Raj, and it’s not a very complimentary one. A life of cocktail parties, bullying the servants and boredom springs to mind. It’s this easy stereotype that Katie Hickman seeks to challenge in this fascinating survey of British women who made a home, temporarily or permanently, in India before the twentieth century. If you’re remotely interested in this subject, I really can’t recommend this book enough – Hickman has a novelist’s eye for character and story, as well as a historian’s talent for analysis and research, and it’s a lively as well as informative read.
The recorded history of British women in India begins in 1617, with a Mrs Towerson, wife of an East India Company captain, voyaging to India with two female companions, Mrs Hudson and Frances Webb. Even before they reached Gujarat there was scandal, for Frances Webb secretly married a fellow-traveller, Richard Steele, and became pregnant by him. Horrors! When they arrived in the English community at Surat, it was to an unappetising all-male drinking and gaming club where they were not made welcome. The very act of embarking on a perilous eight-month journey to a land they could hardly have imagined in their wildest dreams surely marks out these women as unusually intrepid. Mrs Hudson, at least, proved also to be an astute businesswoman and left two years later with a rich cargo to sell on in Europe.
(Jan Van Ryne, A Perspective View of Fort William in the Kingdom of Bengal, belonging to the East India Company of England, 1754; found here)
In the eighteenth century, British women began travelling to India in larger numbers and recorded their experiences in diaries and letters. However, an adventurous spirit was still required of them. Eliza Fay, wife of an Irish advocate, arrived in Calicut just as a war was breaking out. Not only were she and her husband kept captive for a month in very unpleasant and frightening circumstances, but another Englishwoman nicked her teapot and tea caddy. Once freed, Mrs Fay went on to enjoy a fine life in Calcutta and write sharp-eyed letters home: little escaped her notice. (My liking for her, however, took a blow when I later read that she had a slave, Kitty Johnson, whom she abandoned on the island of St Helena.) Expatriate society was somewhat less rigid about morality than the mother country. Elizabeth Marsh was captured on a merchant ship sailing from Gibraltar to be given as a present to the Sultan of Morocco; for protection she pretended to be married to another prisoner, James Crisp. Some twenty years later she left Crisp, now in fact her husband, to travel around southern India with an unmarried man who was almost certainly her lover.
By the nineteenth century, enormous fortunes were being made in India (think of Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair). On the whole, British and Indian women did not mix and Hickman suggests that this was due to restrictive social codes on both sides, as well as of course a lack of cultural curiosity among the British and their habit of recreating Surrey in India rather than adapting to local lifestyles. Still, there were exceptions, Fanny Parkes being perhaps the most notable and the most ready to ‘see life from the Indian perspective’. She travelled all around India, made Indian friends, learnt Indian languages, learnt to play the sitar and ate opium as well as Indian food:
How much there is to delight the eye in this bright and beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab, one might be happy for ever... Oh the pleasure of vagabondizing through India!
(She also most entertainingly drove the grand and not-vagabondizing Eden sisters round the bend by popping up wherever they went on their own grand tour.)
The aristocratic Henrietta Clive was quite taken aback by the vulgarity of many of the British in India. Abjuring most of them, she learnt Persian and Hindi and interested herself in botany. She took her daughters to festivals and to visit temples and later on a seven-month tour of India, which required fourteen elephants to carry their tents and a hundred bullocks pulling carts for all their luggage (including a harp). The lands through which they travelled had just been taken by the East India Company after the Second Mysore War. Henrietta Clive marvelled unquestioningly at the plunder from Tipu Sultan’s palace: ‘What a wonderful people we are really...’
(Joshua Reynolds, Lady Henrietta Herbert [later Clive], ca. 1777; found here)
Gradually, the British became less and less open to India, and then we reach the uprising of 1857 and that’s it for tolerance. This section is very hard to read and what happened must have traumatised both the British, who could never forget the sheer horror of incidents like the massacre at Cawnpore and thus never feel secure again, and of course the Indians, who endured a terrible collective retribution.
Yet British women continued to go out to India and if they were not sympathetic to Indian culture they were undoubtedly industrious housekeepers, many of them in isolated outposts with husbands who proved less than satisfactory. Flora Annie Steel, author of the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, was a fine example of this. Housekeeping did not satisfy her, however. Owner of squirrels and arranger of reading parties, she soon turned her attentions to education and was appointed Inspectress of Schools in the Punjab.
(Cropped photograph of Flora Annie Steel, 1904; found here)
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This fascinating social history has only one drawback: inevitably you want to know more about the individual women whom Hickman discusses than she has place for, and about the land they could not or would not understand. And of course, it would be nice to have more of a perspective on them from the Indians alongside whom they lived, if there were any such record. Nevertheless, it is a lively starting point and I heartily recommend it, as does Nala the cat, who tried to eat it.