Married to the empire: Gender, politics and imperialism in India, 1883–1947 9781526119728

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STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

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Married to the empire Gender, politics and imperialism in India, 1883–1947

MARY A. PROCIDA

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general editor John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. Studies in Imperialism is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Married to the empire

AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES Britain in China Community, culture and colonialism, 1900–1949 Robert Bickers New frontiers Imperialism’s new communities in East Asia 1842–1952 ed. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot Western medicine as contested knowledge ed. Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews

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The Arctic in the British imagination 1818–1914 Robert G. David Imperial cities Landscape, display and identity ed. Felix Driver and David Gilbert Science and society in southern Africa Saul Dubow Unfit for heroes R econstruction and soldier settlement in the Empire between the wars Kent Fedorowich Emigration from Scotland between the wars Opportunity or exile? Marjory Harper Empire and sexuality The British experience Ronald Hyam ‘An Irish Empire?’ Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire ed. Keith Jeffery Empire’s reach Law, history, colonialism ed. Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne The South African War reappraised Donal Lowry The empire of nature Hunting, conservation and British imperialism John M. MacKenzie Propaganda and empire The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960 John M. MacKenzie Imperialism and popular culture ed. John M. MacKenzie Gender and imperialism ed. Clare Midgley Guardians of empire The armed forces of the colonial powers, c. 1700–1964 ed. David Omissi and David Killingray Imperialism and music Britain 1876–1953 Jeffrey Richards Colonial frontiers Indigenous-European encounters in settler societies’ Lynette Russell Colonial masculinity The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ Mrinalini Sinha Jute and empire The Calcutta jute wallahs and the landscapes of empire Gordon T. Stewart The imperial game Cricket, culture and society ed. Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandiford The French Empire at war, 1940–45 Martin Thomas British culture and the end of Empire Stuart Ward Travellers in Africa British travelogues, 1850–1900 Tim Youngs

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Gender, politics and imperialism in India, 1883–1947

Mary A. Procida

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester

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Copyright © Mary A. Procida 2002 The right of Mary A. Procida to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester, M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978 0 7190 9133 9 paperback First published by Manchester University Press in hardback 2002 This paperback edition first published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Glenn – who’s been married to the book for much too long a time

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CONTENTS General editor’s introduction — page viii Acknowledgements — ix

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Introduction: we are in the empire

1

Part I Domesticity 1

Married to the empire

29

2

Home is where the empire is

56

3

Servants of empire

81

Part II Violence 4

Re-writing the Mutiny

111

5

Good sports?

136

Part III Race 6

Imperial femininity and the uplift of Indian women

165

7

Women, men and political power

193

Conclusion

217 Bibliography — 221 Index — 242

[ vii ]

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GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The notion of the gendered ‘separation of the spheres’ has become increasingly fragile of late. Several scholars have questioned its applicability in the nineteenth century where it formerly seemed to be most securely based. But if this concept of functional and occupational separation has been called in question in the domestic setting in Britain, it surely seemed to be the case that it remained valid in the British empire. Imperialism in non-settler territories appeared to create a distinctively masculine space for the dominant people. White women, usually in the minority among the expatriates, were separated and protected, maintained in a cultural cocoon (expressed in spatial and architectural terms) from which they were seldom permitted to fly free. This seemed to be particularly the case in the Indian Empire. In this book, Mary Procida convincingly destroys this orthodoxy. She uses a remarkably wide and rich range of sources to demonstrate that women themselves saw their roles very differently and that these self-perceptions were invariably accepted within the masculine world. It is true that records, whether memoirs, autobiographies or interviews, were left by a distinctive sample, but such ideas seem to have been widespread in imperial society. Although the male authors of imperial literature may have given a different impression, it is, perhaps, possible to identify a set of counter-canonical attitudes in the fictional and non-fictional writings of the many women who wrote about India. In any case, empire may also have offered opportunities for professional women, particularly in the educational and medical aspects of missionary activity, which might not have been open to them at home. Given my own background in studying hunting and the exploitation of animal resources in the empire, the sections of this book which demonstrate the extensive involvement of women in sports, including hunting and shooting, were of particular fascination to me. I had constructed hunting, with all its symbolic resonances of the domination of the environment and its creatures, as an essentially masculine activity. Of course, I had encountered female hunters, but they seemed to be those relatively rare members of the imperial upper classes who took on masculine characteristics as part of their social dominance. Mary Procida has demonstrated that we require a more nuanced approach to such activities. Women who in Britain participated in fox hunting and shooting (but seldom, if ever, stalking) seized the opportunities available to them in the empire. Their roles in the iconic domination of an exotic environment were also highly significant. It may be that Procida’s analytical conclusions can be extended to other parts of the so-called ‘dependent’ territories of the British empire and possibly to other European empires as well. What is clear is that no future scholar of the female participation in imperialism can ignore this book, replete as it is with highly original and stimulating insights.

John M. MacKenzie [ viii ]

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For a historian, it’s important to start at the beginning, and Married to the empire had its beginnings as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. The history department at Penn was a wonderful place to undertake graduate studies, providing the researcher with both intellectual stimulation and material support. I am especially grateful to David Ludden, who enthusiastically encouraged my interest in South Asian history; to Lynn Hunt, who introduced me to cultural history; to Tom Childers, who encouraged me to think about writing history and teaching history; and to the late Jack Reece, who helped me to put politics back into my history. My advisor Lynn Hollen Lees has unfailingly provided excellent advice on matters intellectual, professional and personal. It was she who first encouraged my interest in the British empire and thus opened up for me the burgeoning field of imperial history in which I have become so engrossed. Lynn read this work in its first incarnation as a dissertation, as well as in its present form. Her comments have been invaluable in shaping this book, and her encouragement has been invaluable in shaping me as a historian. Married to the empire could not have been written without the assistance and support of numerous institutions and individuals. Various parts of the research for and the writing of this book were supported by a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania, a Bernadotte Schmitt Grant from the American Historical Association, and a Summer Fellowship and a Research and Study Grant from Temple University. Librarians at the University of Pennsylvania, especially Van Pelt Library’s interlibrary-loan staff, and those at the Paley Library at Temple University, the Oriental and India Office collections of the British Library, the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and the Imperial War Museum have cheerfully and efficiently helped this project along. Morris Vogel, acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, and Richard Immerman, chair of the history department there, have gone out of their way to support the writing of this book, and I am extremely grateful to them. Frank de Caro and Rosan Jordan generously shared with me their research on the British in South Asia. For their comments on various parts of this book, and their encouragement in other ways, I am grateful also to Howard Spodek, Barbara Day, Harriet Freidenreich, Frances Gouda, Seth Koven, Angela Woollacott, Margot Finn, the members of my dissertation writing group at the University of Pennsylvania, especially Savita Nair, Bob Nichols, and Tamara Hudek, and the members of the British studies group of the Delaware Valley. Writing a book is a solitary enterprise, though an author is often dependent on the kindness of others in assisting with competing responsibilities. My teaching assistants at Temple University, Laura Murphy, Susan Morse, Mary Zambrana and Bob Wintermute, helped me negotiate my first years as a professor. My sons Joey and Danny are a constant source of joy, but I am grateful

[ ix ]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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to my parents, Imelda and Vincent Procida, and to my in-laws, Rose and Frank Moramarco, for undertaking child care duties, as well as to a small army of babysitters who freed me to research and write this book. My husband Glenn Moramarco has cheerfully endured my transformation from tax lawyer to historian, managed the domestic front while I was abroad, and helped me navigate the shoals of academia. Married to the empire is dedicated to him.

[x]

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Introduction: we are in the empire

‘We are in the Forest Service, at least William is.’1 With this deceptively simple statement, Mrs F. Meiklejohn introduced her brief recollections of life under the British Raj as the wife of an imperial official. Her assessment of her position in the British empire could have been echoed (with the substitution, as appropriate, of the Indian Army or Indian Civil Service or Political Service, or any other branch of government, for Meiklejohn’s Forest Service) by almost any one of the many thousands of women who lived in India as the wives of imperial officials. In just a few words, Meiklejohn encapsulated the complex, often contradictory, nature of the experiences of these women. As she makes clear, Meiklejohn is a wife, not an independent career woman. It is her husband, William, not she, who is actually an official in the Forest Service and her experiences of the work of empire are vicarious, mediated through her spouse. However, her intimate personal identification with the Forest Service and, by extension, with the British imperial presence in India is also apparent. Meiklejohn situates herself initially as being ‘in’ the Forest Service, although her position within the hierarchy of the Raj is outside both the formal administrative structures of British rule and the official recognition of the government. Her role in the empire is one that Meiklejohn herself defined and actualized. Nonetheless, by acknowledging that it is a man, her husband William, who is the official representative of the Raj, Meiklejohn tacitly acquiesces in the gendered division of imperial society, which excludes women from such public political tasks as administering the Forest Service in India. Simultaneously, however, through her initial claim of a joint role with her husband in the work of empire, Meiklejohn also undermines this gendered dichotomy of society. It is out of this welter of tantalizing contradictions situated at the nexus of gender and imperialism that this work arises. My aim is to explore how and why women became a part of imperialism in India and, [1]

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INTRODUCTION

in particular, to analyse British women’s involvement on both an ideological and a pragmatic level in the politics of empire from the late nineteenth century onward. Although the historical experiences of British women in the empire form the foundations of this analysis, this work is not primarily a study only of women’s history; rather, it is a work premised on the idea of gender as both a relational construct and a societal construct, implicating the intertwined histories of men and women and, in this instance, of Indians and Europeans. This imbrication of gender and the politics of imperialism is brought into sharpest relief through a focus on the ‘official’ community in India. The personal and professional fortunes of ‘official’ Anglo-India – composed of the male officers and their families employed in the military forces in India, as well as the various branches of the civil services, including Mrs Meiklejohn’s Forest Service – were linked inextricably with the fate of the empire. Unlike other Anglo-Indians, whose connections with the empire were more attenuated, the official community had an acknowledged material, psychological, and ideological 2 stake in the continuing success of British imperialism. By the late nineteenth century, the tactics of Indian nationalists to gain a greater measure of self-government, whether through terrorism, civil disobedience or political accommodation, as well as Britain’s own domestic political and social evolution and changing position in global politics, compelled Britain to reassess its position as a liberal democracy ruling an autocratic empire.3 This ‘profound threat to the British government and to British life in India’, represented by the nationalist movement, ‘produced ... an intensified articulation on the part of the British of their role in India’.4 Once the questions and contradictions inherent in imperialism surfaced on the political agenda, the terms of Britain’s governmental, social and economic involvement in India were opened to debate. In India during this critical period of reassessment and realignment for the British empire, British women of the official community, as well as the male officials of the empire itself, were actively engaged in structuring, sustaining, and administering the Raj, and in reconceptualizing imperial ideology and practice. Thus, gender relations shaped imperial politics, both across the racial divide separating Indians and Europeans and within the Anglo-Indian community itself.

Gender and imperialism As Joan Scott has pointed out, gender is a relational construct that defines the distributions of power among people.5 In the imperial environment, the gendering of power is complicated by the simultaneous social construction of racial identities. Questions of gender and the [2]

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INTRODUCTION

issues surrounding the roles played by women in modern European empires have only recently become important to the rapidly growing body of work on imperialism, and scholars have yet to explore fully issues arising from the imbrications of gender and politics within the imperial community. This omission stems in part from the apparent reluctance of professional historians to accept the memsahib as a focus of serious academic inquiry.6 Historians of different ideological stripes have found it difficult to integrate the idea of the active female subject with their schema of European imperialism. As Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel note in the Introduction to their path-breaking collection of essays, Western Women and Imperialism, most scholars have ‘consciously or unconsciously accept[ed] the “masculine” attributes of colonialism ... [and have] simply excluded or marginalized Western 7 women from the focus of their studies’. Scholars have traditionally defined the modern European empires in masculine terms. They present European women as either literally absent from the imperial environment or as so effectively divorced from the public realm of imperialism that they are symbolically erased from the empire.8 Ronald Hyam’s witticism that ‘[t]he empire was not acquired in a fit of absence of mind, so much as in a fit of absence of wives’ succinctly sums up much of the existing imperial historiography.9 Empire is thus often perceived as an arena that was not only male-dominated but one that was crucial to the construction of British masculine identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 For public school boys reared on the homosocial imperial adventure tales of Haggard and Henty, the empire was the arena in which they could put their training in leadership and sport to use and ‘play up and play the game’ without any troublesome female interference.11 The outposts of empire also provided havens from the heartless world of Britain where, according to Ronald Hyam, men could freely engage in homosexual relationships and sexual escapades forbidden in the metropole.12 Less controversially, other historians have argued that for the many men who found the middle-class model of connubial domesticity stifling, the empire provided an environment in which bachelorhood remained a viable and acceptable alternative.13 Finally, the British empire allowed men not only to imagine but to enact various scenarios of masculinity predicated both on the absence of women, and on the presence of a feminized population of colonized men.14 Because historians so often conceptualize gender in oppositional terms, the hyper-masculinity of the British empire inevitably implicates a corresponding hyper-domesticity for the few women who were able to breach its masculine precincts. Thomas Metcalf, for example, describes the gender division of the Raj as segregating ‘women secluded ... in [3]

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INTRODUCTION

darkened bungalows’ from men who were ‘engaged in the work of the empire in court and camp’.15 Scholars working on other European empires, where questions of gender and imperialism are only beginning to be explored, have reached similar conclusions.16 Those who have broken with this historiographical tradition have most often approached the history of women in the empire from a feminist perspective. While acknowledging the general empirical value of recovering women’s historical experiences in the empire, many feminist authors have been reluctant to engage in scholarly analysis that might be misconstrued as glamorization of imperialism and validation of ‘neo-colonial nostalgia for an era when European women in brisk white shirts and safari green supposedly found freedom in empire’.17 The feminine influence on imperialism has been most fully analysed in the context of the transient encounter between Europeans and ‘the other’ in the ‘contact zone’ in which Western women are more observers of empire than full-fledged participants in the creation of imperialism itself.18 However, travel writing is ‘a form which implies only fleeting kinds of existential contact with the cultures being traversed’, and thus differs from the texts produced by those with ‘lived experience’ in the empire.19 Although they often referred to themselves as ‘birds of passage’, wives of officials in India were not imperial transients, but residents whose lives were intimately connected with the practices and ideologies of imperialism. The gendering of the modern European empires and the nature of women’s involvement in imperialism must, therefore, be addressed in the context of this intimate longterm lived experience. The official policy of the Raj towards the wives of its civil servants and military officers seems to have been to ignore them unless forced to do otherwise.20 For the historian, this means that wives are an oblique presence in the official archives of the Raj. Recovering the lived experiences of women in the empire, therefore, necessitates the investigation of alternative sources such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews. Historians have shied away from these sources, as tainted by a triumphalist imperialism. Indeed, many of the sources used in this study would not have existed without the ‘Raj revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s that not only fostered interest in Britain’s lost empire, but even legitimized – and glamorized – the role of the imperialists themselves. Without condoning imperialism itself, it is nonetheless necessary to understand how and why the women and men of the British empire sustained and supported Britain’s imperial endeavours in India. Anglo-Indians’ subjective understanding of their roles in the empire, as revealed through these personal documents and reminiscences, were bound up with the course of imperial politics. [4]

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The rise in popularity of the Anglo-Indian romance novel coincided with Anglo-Indian women’s growing involvement in imperial politics, and these texts also provide insight into women’s political perspectives. Starting in the late nineteenth century, novels by Anglo-Indian women, who were also often wives of officials, such as Flora Annie Steel (18471927; married to an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer), Sara Jeannette Duncan (1862-1922; married to a curator of the Indian Museum in Calcutta), Maud Diver (1867-1945; born in India, married to an army officer), Alice Perrin (1867-1934; born in India, married to an ICS Medical Service officer), Ethel Savi (1865-1954; born in India, married to a planter), Bithia Mary Croker (died 1920; married to an army officer), 21 and Ethel Dell (died 1920) attracted a wide readership. While many of these novels are formulaic romances that incorporate India only as an ‘exotic’ background to a hackneyed love story, others, particularly the works of Diver and Steel, explicitly engage with the pressing political issues of the day. Fiction writing provided a forum for Anglo-Indian women to publicize their opinions on imperial politics to a wider audience. As Anglo-Indians’ political opinions increasingly diverged from the official stance of the British and Indian governments, particularly after the First World War, novels, along with women’s letters to relatives and their published memoirs, became important in conveying to the British public Anglo-Indian views on the empire. These varied records of Anglo-Indian women’s lived experiences in the Raj reveal them as active agents in imperial politics, a facet of the imperial story generally ignored in the existing historiography. Much recent imperial scholarship, the work of the subaltern studies collective being the most prominent, has focused on destabilizing accepted interpretations of power relations in the empire. Despite this trend, Anglo-Indian women, and, more broadly, European women in the general imperial environment, remain essentialized as sexual and domestic creatures rather than active political subjects. This omission stems in large measure from the failure to analyse the empire as a historical context distinct from metropolitan society. Although viewing imperial and metropolitan history as a single field for analysis may have helped broaden the scope of British domestic history, the same manoeuvre is not necessarily valid for understanding Britain’s imperial history. The theories that have shaped our understanding of gender in Britain, for example, are not necessarily useful in analysing the workings of gender in imperial India. Even as the construct of separate spheres is being dismantled in metropolitan British women’s history, few challenges have been levelled at the depiction of an imperial community neatly divided between the masculine public arena and the feminine 22 private realm. This increasingly outmoded construct of women’s [5]

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history persists in the imperial historiography in part because the major endeavours in which metropolitan historians have traced female participation in the public sphere in Britain – such as work, philanthropy, feminism and democratic political activism – were either absent from or muted in the experiences of Anglo-Indian women.23 Despite the absence in India of these alternatives to the feminized private sphere, however, the separate spheres’ paradigm appears equally inapplicable to women’s experiences in the empire, albeit for very different reasons. In India, it was a growing approximation of femininity to masculinity that allowed Anglo-Indian women a broader scope for public activity in the empire. By adopting more masculinized personae and embracing masculine activities, rather than by creating new public arenas for feminine activity in employment, political agitation or philanthropy, as metropolitan British women had done, Anglo-Indian women integrated themselves with the public world of the empire. The schema that best describes gender relationships in the Raj, therefore, is that of a partnership between men and women as imperialists in the masculine mould, rather than one of an antagonistic polarity between adventuresome men and ultra-domestic women. While this partnership was defined almost exclusively in masculine terms, it did not exclude women per se. The point, therefore, is not that women, in general, had no place in the empire, but rather that feminine women, 24 like effeminate men, were not suited to imperial endeavours. Just as the imperial experience proved critical in the construction of British masculinity, so too was the empire pivotal in reconfiguring ideas about femininity for British women. Thus, the equation of a domesticated imperial femininity with a hyper-masculinist view of imperialism falters on several counts. First, this notion fails to account for the difference between biological notions of sex and mutable social constructions of gender, a difference which lies at the heart of gender history.25 While the imperatives of empire may have created a new vision of British masculinity, it does not inexorably follow that women were precluded from adopting these masculine traits.26 Indeed, there are many instances of British women in the outposts of empire taking on ‘masculine’ characteristics, such as being addressed as ‘Sir’, wearing men’s attire, participating in male sports such as polo, or taking up arms in defence of the empire.27 This ‘assumption of masculine-associated powers or activities’ allowed ‘a white woman to overcome the constraints of gender and to signify masculine authority in her person’.28 The empire may have been masculine, but it certainly was not exclusively male. Second, characterizations of the empire as a world without women [6]

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(or an environment in which women were relegated to the sidelines) ignore the historical facts of British women’s lives in the Raj.29 British women not only formed a substantial numerical presence in the AngloIndian community from the late nineteenth century onwards but, more importantly, constituted a vital part of the fabric of imperial social circles. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the development of hill stations as a salubrious alternative to the hot weather in the plains, and the 1857 ‘Mutiny’, which distanced the Anglo-Indian community from the colonized peoples, all fostered British women’s integration with the Raj. Through their marriages to imperial officials in the civil or military services of the Raj, many Anglo-Indian women’s lives were intimately intertwined with the fortunes of the empire. Thus, the consistent omission of women from the history of the Raj, particularly in the twentieth century, must be ascribed not to their actual absence from the empire, but to the fact that ‘[p]articularly when women’s activities are considered ... a wide range of activities ... have been glossed by dominant 30 discourses as fairly trivial’. Taking both women’s apparently trivial activities and men’s purportedly more significant actions and analysing them jointly in the context of empire thus reveals that the binary categories of public and private, masculine and feminine, the world and the home, must be rethought in the context of the Raj. Within the Raj, ideas of gender, public and private space, and official actions, took on new meanings and modes of implementation to serve the needs of British imperialism in India.

Gender and the ‘official community’ of the Raj Imperialism is inherently an elitist and exclusive form of government, with its clear theoretical distinctions between the privileged minority of the ruling elite and the vast majority of disempowered imperial subjects. In practice, however, the categories of colonizer and colonized proved unstable, eliciting fierce legal, political and cultural contests.31 Those included within and those excluded from the ranks of the imperialist population changed over time according to such variables as race, economic status and legislative fiat. Historians have structured this ongoing contest for imperial power in a variety of ways. Until recently, historians presented imperialism as a struggle among European men played out in several different arenas. This contest took place, first, on the global political level among different nations engaged in the ‘Great Game’ for imperial territory and influence, second, within the domestic political arenas of individual European powers pitting diehard imperialists against reformers, and, third, within the imperial structure itself, among those differently [7]

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positioned in its hierarchy, such as the man on the spot in the empire and the politician in the metropole. Historians’ acknowledgment of the crucial role played by nationalist movements recast the imperial struggle as a battle not just among Western men but between Europeans and colonized elites. Subsequently, the interventions of post-colonial scholars, in particular those affiliated with the subaltern studies group, have illumined the power of resistance and the agency of colonized peoples at all levels of colonial society. Although there is still much debate over the relative influence of elites and subalterns, metropole and periphery, what has become clear is that the contest for imperial power played out at different levels of society and among diverse groups of actors. Focusing on the gendered politics of the Raj adds yet another facet to this kaleidoscopic mix of military struggle, political and diplomatic manoeuvring, and competing cultural discourses. In India, the official community was an important, although not unchallenged, locus of imperial power and status. The contest to define and redefine the official community of the Raj and to allocate imperial power within it thus engaged both Anglo-Indian men and women, as well as other aspirants to imperial influence. What was this ‘official’ community of the British Raj? The British government never viewed India as a colony for white settlement and deliberately maintained a small European population in the subcontinent. The European community in India was always tiny, and the subset comprising the official British community naturally smaller still. Nonetheless, official Anglo-India is crucial to the imperial story because of both the grossly disproportionate power and influence it wielded during the Raj and its prominence in current scholarship on the 32 British empire. In 1881, the ‘born-in-Britain’ population in India was less than 90,000 (77,178 males and 12,610 females).33 The British thus represented less than 1 per cent of the nearly 254 million total population of India. The number of Europeans present in India expanded over time, but never constituted a major numerical presence. In 1931, when the British undertook their last full-scale Census of India, the total number of ‘Europeans and Allied Races and Anglo-Indians’ (here, ‘AngloIndians’ refers to persons of mixed European and Asian heritage) was 306,529 out of a total population of almost 353 million. Of that number, 155, 555 (110,137 males and 45,418 females), or approximately half, were British citizens, again representing less than 1 per cent of the population 34 of India. Throughout the period of the Raj, ‘Tommy Atkins’ and his commanding officers constituted the largest single occupational group among the British in India.35 This disproportionate representation of the military created peculiar demographics in the British population. The [8]

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numerical preponderance of the military undoubtedly contributed to the masculine nature of the Raj. However, women were not excluded from this military culture by virtue of their sex; indeed, most officers’ wives felt a deep allegiance to ‘their’ regiment and ‘their’ men. The dominance of the armed forces among the British community also skewed the statistics on marriage, as the 1881 Census reporters noted.36 Because it was financially difficult for ordinary soldiers in the British Army to marry, most remained single. Thus, in India in 1881 four out of five men were unmarried, but bachelors were over-represented in the transient population of the British Army, especially among the lower-class ‘other ranks’. Among women in India, conversely, most were married. Although the 1881 Census reported 3,972 single ‘born-in-Britain’ females (about one-third of India’s female British population), approximately 2,600 of these were under the age of 14. The European population was also demographically unusual in its disproportionately low number of young and middle-aged adults: Anglo-Indian children were frequently schooled in Britain and most officials retired to Britain by their early fifties, when they became eligible for their pensions. ‘Official’ Anglo-India, the men (and their wives) responsible for determining and implementing imperial policy, constituted only a minority of the European population in India, but they exercised a power and influence disproportionate to their numbers. At the top of the pyramid were the ‘civilians’ of the ICS, jocularly called the ‘heaven born’. Their responsibilities included overseeing British rule in India and administering justice throughout the Raj. Their number hovered around 37 1,000 men. Less prestigious (and less well-paid) branches of the civil service (the so-called ‘uncovenanted services’) bore responsibility for other administrative areas such as policing, education, forestry, railroads and public works. Some of these civil service jobs were low in status, poorly remunerated and dominated by Indians, or, as in the case of the railroads, Eurasians. Such positions were insufficiently prestigious to allow their holders entrée to the exclusive world of official India. Although the civil service of the Raj supported many less well-remunerated positions, it was only at a salary level of Rs 200 ‘that European or Anglo-Indian [i. e. Eurasian] competition begins to make itself felt’.38 Thus, although the civil services were staffed primarily by Indians, the British all but monopolized the best-paid and most prestigious positions. Thus, in 1913, while Indians and Burmese occupied 42 per cent of the positions paying more than Rs 200 per month, they held only 19 per cent of appointments with a monthly salary of more than Rs 500 and only 10 per cent of those paying in excess of Rs 800. Of the 772 highest-paying positions in the prestigious ICS in 1913, Europeans held 741 positions, Eurasians 2 and [9]

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Indians and Burmese 29.39 Economics and social status thus worked together to ensure that not all civil servants were part of the official community and, therefore, that Anglo-Indian officialdom remained primarily white. In the interwar period, more Indians infiltrated the upper echelons of the civil services as the result of a conscious, if at times halfhearted, attempt to incorporate more Indians into responsible governmental positions. The cultural dimensions of Anglo-India altered in response to this process of Indianization, both to accommodate these newcomers and to stake out a new domain of privilege based more strictly on race and less on status within the imperial hierarchy. Thus, for example, many of the station clubs, which served as important loci for socializing among the official community, tried to exclude Indian imperial officials on the basis of race alone when their positions within the imperial services would have otherwise guaranteed them membership.40 Official Anglo-India was divided also geographically. Certain areas of the country were deemed more prestigious, although the hierarchy shifted over time. Bengal, for instance, had enjoyed a degree of preeminence through the nineteenth century, but as it developed into a centre for anti-imperial terrorist activities – including the assassination of imperial officials– it became difficult to attract recruits there. In general, however, Anglo-Indians perceived northern provinces as more hard-driving, competitive and prestigious than the easy-going south. Another division separated those in the major cities of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and, after it became the imperial capital, New Delhi, from the mofussil, or up-country regions. Most recruits spent time early in their careers in the mofussil, often described as the ‘real’ India. Seniority and promotion frequently brought transfers to the city, which meant a more westernized and physically more comfortable lifestyle, if also a less exciting existence. Finally, those who moved in the exalted social circles of the viceroy and the provincial governors often lived in a world apart. Their glamorous lives in the imperial capital and the hill stations, such as Simla, were far removed from the more prosaic existence of most Anglo-Indians. Officers and men of the British Army stationed in India and those of the Indian Army, constituted the armed forces in service to the Raj. The British Army, the more prestigious service, was made up of regular army units, whose officers and men were Europeans temporarily stationed in India. The Indian Army, by contrast, was manned by Indian soldiers but officered until the Second World War almost exclusively by the British. Indian Army units saw action outside India during both world wars and also served elsewhere in the empire, but their primary responsibility was the defence of the Raj. As with the civil services, disparities in pay and [ 10 ]

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status in the armed forces served automatically to exclude most Indians from the privileges of official Anglo-India. Indians could not hold a commission in the British Army and, even within the Indian Army, held primarily the lower-paying, less-prestigious, Viceroy’s Commission, rather than the King’s Commission held by all British officers in both armies. However, membership in the official community of Anglo-India was defined by many less tangible qualities than pay and rank. Any definition of official Anglo-India predicated solely on employment by the Raj would have excluded almost all women. Except for appointing women to a limited number of positions as school inspectors, the government of India formally barred them from all civilian employment and, until the creation of special women’s corps during the Second World War, from military employ as well. Women’s participation in imperial activities, therefore, was most often mediated through their marital relationships. It was not as independent individuals, but rather as the spouses of officials, that wives became incorporated into the official community of the Raj and thus into the service of imperialism in India. Scholars generally have 41 assessed this role of ‘incorporated wife’ as vacuous and superficial. Yet, Anglo-Indian women, their husbands and the official community as a whole perceived officials’ wives as a crucial part both of the social and cultural aspects of official Anglo-India and of its political-imperial functions. Rather than circumscribing women’s experiences, marriage gave women access to the sources of imperial power and allowed them to accumulate the knowledge and experience to participate in imperial politics and practices. Because status as an Anglo-Indian was signified by more subtle markers than simply an official title, women claimed an affiliation with the empire and an expertise in imperial politics based on their knowledge of India, their longevity in the subcontinent, and their personal sacrifices for the empire. Thus, women were an integral and acknowledged part of the official community of the Raj. Class was also an important determinant of status as an AngloIndian. Official Anglo-India drew its recruits primarily from the British professional and upper-middle classes, which supported its meritocratic, 42 hierarchical structure. The aim of competition in the ICS, as in the Civil Service in Britain, was to attract the most able administrators. Up to the First World War, this goal seems to have been achieved – at least according to official opinion.43 The Islington Commission determined that ‘India has been obtaining men who are keeping up the high level and the best traditions of the service.’44 After the First World War, however, as professional opportunities in Britain opened up and nationalist agitation in India made imperial careers less attractive and [ 11 ]

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less secure, the various Indian services found it more difficult to attract and retain high-calibre recruits. In 1936, as recruitment of candidates became more difficult, the ICS abandoned its competitive examination process and simply accepted candidates with a good honours degree.45 After the outbreak of the Second World War, the Indian services dramatically curtailed recruitment, and after 1943 no new officers joined the ICS. Although less information is available about the social backgrounds of women married to ICS officers (and about the wives of imperial officials generally), it appears from anecdotal evidence that most came from middle-class professional backgrounds similar to their husbands’, although their level of education was generally lower, with few university graduates among the wives. Not until after the First World War, when the ICS itself began accepting recruits from more varied backgrounds, were ICS wives drawn from a wider social spectrum. Services that were less prestigious, less well-remunerated and less competitive, such as the police, undoubtedly drew both officials and their wives from more varied social backgrounds. However, although the metropolitan class background of Anglo-Indians was not completely irrelevant in the social and professional milieu of the Raj, other factors were at least as important in determining status within the official community of the empire. Finally, many ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ Anglo-Indians of both sexes were themselves the children of Anglo-Indians and effectively constituted a class apart from newcomers to the subcontinent. Many of these men and women boasted a long lineage of service in India. They had been born in India, many spoke Hindustani as a first language (some even managed to retain this linguistic capability despite the best efforts of British school masters and mistresses), and they viewed India as their true home. The genealogy of imperial service was very important to many Anglo-Indians in defining and locating their own identities. Sons and daughters of Anglo-Indian officials preserved their familial, professional and emotional links with India by following their fathers into the civil services or the military, or by marrying, like their mothers, into the official community. Although the ‘High Noon’ of the Raj in the late nineteenth century represented in many ways the fullest flowering of British imperial rule, it was also the beginning of a long winter of discontent for many AngloIndian officials. Subtle changes in Anglo-Indian lifestyle and in imperial administration, which began innocuously enough in the 1880s, had brought the heaven-born civilians and their lesser colleagues in the civil services and the military abruptly back to earth by the early interwar years. During the twentieth century, official Anglo-India was [ 12 ]

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increasingly disgruntled about pay scales and conditions of work. It was often at loggerheads with the British and Indian governments over the political future of the Raj and officials’ roles in the empire. Finally, Anglo-Indian officials saw their work, their way of life and their beliefs come under attack by opponents of empire in Britain and India. These dissatisfactions affected the Anglo-Indian community and its attitudes towards the colonized population and the British in ways that influenced both imperial politics and the social construction of gender in the empire. Conditions of service for Anglo-Indian officials changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Because the personal and professional lives of imperial officials were so closely intertwined, developments in the imperial services intimately affected wives and families as well. The mythic ideal of the ICS officer, for example, was the lone man on horseback, traversing his vast district, dispensing justice from his saddle, and employing his encyclopaedic knowledge of India and an almost intuitive understanding of its ‘natives’ to serve as the mabap (mother and father) of the people within his jurisdiction. However, as the bureaucracy of the Raj developed, the paperwork grew also, distancing high-ranking officials ever farther from the Indian population they ostensibly served. In the twentieth century, most ICS officers no longer spent hours in the saddle touring their districts and receiving the homage of the colonized peoples; rather, they passed their days in desk chairs writing reports and dealing with the contents of their dispatch boxes. Some, undoubtedly, found such a sedentary life congenial. Most, however, must have been seriously disappointed. The ICS promoted itself as a vigorous and active out-of-doors service – a riding test was mandatory – and officers chafed against the restrictions and monotony of office work. Other officers, such as those in the Forest Service, continued to work mainly outdoors, away from the European stations, but they too had reports to write and files to review. Those men who entered imperial service in pursuit of an imaginary imperial ideal no doubt felt wounded in their masculine pride as the monotonous rhythms of the dispatch boxes usurped the cadences of hoofbeats and songs of praise from grateful natives. For most official wives, increasing bureaucratization of their husbands’ work was probably equally dispiriting. Many women were, like their spouses, attracted to India because of its promise of a sporting life close to nature and undoubtedly bemoaned curtailment of lengthy district-wide touring and the substitution of automobiles for horses (or elephants). Many wives also complained of their husbands’ increasingly heavy workloads and the long hours spent drafting seemingly endless memoranda, minutes and reports. [ 13 ]

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Adding injury to insult, the financial compensation for such uncongenial work was generally worsening. In the nineteenth century, the ICS seemingly had promised a relatively secure route to a comfortable lifestyle. A junior civilian serving as an assistant commissioner would earn about £300 a year, approximately twice the stipend of the average English clergyman.46 Promotion was generally assured and followed a predictable pattern, although both connections and ability could influence how far an officer advanced. Thus, by the time a civilian reached his late thirties and headed up a district, he would earn from £1,600 to £2,400 per annum, and as he approached his late fifties and retirement his salary would be about £3,600, more than a senior judge earned in England.47 If he survived his tenure in India, an ICS officer could retire after a minimum of twenty-five years on an annual pension of £1,000. Although these pay levels continued to allow a comfortable lifestyle during the twentieth century, Anglo-Indian officials believed, justifiably, that they were losing ground economically to their opposite numbers in private British businesses in India.48 Furthermore, in addition to this relative diminution of economic clout, their absolute purchasing power was reduced by inflation and the deteriorating value of the rupee in relation to the pound.49 While salaries remained substantially the same from 1858 to 1947, the value of the rupee fluctuated dramatically. A rupee was worth about £0.10 in 1870, plummeted to half that in the 1890s and then recovered to stabilize at about £0.15, where it remained until 1947. The depreciation of the rupee in relation to sterling affected not only the cost of small luxuries imported from Europe but such important expenditures as school fees for children being educated in Britain and living expenses during home leave. Meanwhile, inflation gnawed away at the purchasing power of the rupee. The Islington Commission examined the prices of thirteen groups of principal commodities and found that, measuring from a base figure of 100 in 189094, the general price index had risen to 132 in 1910 and 141 in 1912.50 Although the government instituted remedial measures to mitigate financial hardship, essentially paying European officers an allowance as partial compensation for devaluation of the rupee, it was nonetheless the government’s avowed policy to ‘pay so much and so much only to their employees as is necessary to obtain recruits of the right stamp, and to maintain them in such a degree of comfort and dignity as will shield them from temptation and keep them efficient for the term of their service’.51 Postwar inflation wreaked further havoc on Anglo-Indians’ finances, as many items doubled or tripled in price. An ICS officer petitioning the Secretary of State for India supplied a comparison of prices in 1914 and 1920 for articles that were ‘the cheapest sold’ by ‘one of the cheapest shops in Rangoon’. The price of items, from iron bedsteads to [ 14 ]

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cheese plates, had risen substantially.52 The Lee Commission, which issued its findings on the condition of the civil services in India in 1924, made recommendations to ameliorate some of these financial problems, but complaints from imperial officials and their wives continued. The uncovenanted services paid substantially less and also offered less in the way of retirement and death benefits. For example, in 1913, the average salary in the imperial police was less than half that in the ICS.53 By the 1930s, when the worldwide depression necessitated pay cuts for imperial officials of 5-10 per cent, many men in the ‘lesser’ services found it difficult to live on their incomes and some even petitioned the government for relief from their financial difficulty.54 One petitioner in the Engineering Service presented a detailed budget of his expenses. He maintained three daughters at boarding school in England (the most expensive item in his budget), supported an establishment for his wife and fourth child at day-school in England and, of course, had a home for himself in India (serviced, it might be noted, by a staff of five). He found himself in the Micawberish situation of incurring annual expenses that exceeded his income by £104, and hoped the government would save him from the resulting misery.55 The death of the breadwinner (or retired breadwinner) could have disastrous financial consequences for his widow and children because not all services provided survivors’ benefits, and those that did often could not match the amounts an officer would have received by way of pension, or salary had he survived. The government’s refusal to officially acknowledge a wife’s contributions to the Raj created, for many families, a situation of complete economic dependence on the husband and father. ‘There was one background noise which seemed to run like a kind of theme song through our childhood “What will happen to us if anything happens to daddy?”’56 The various imperial services instituted differing arrangements to provide for their officials’ survivors. The ICS provided the most generous survivors’ benefits. Officers’ contributions to the ICS Family Pension Fund were compulsory and calculated according to marital status and number of children. The Fund paid pensions to widows, unmarried daughters, and sons up to the age of 21. In 1884, at its inception, the Fund paid a maximum of £300 per year to the widow and from £25 to £100 per child, depending on age.57 The government periodically increased this amount, so that by 1925 a widow could receive as much as £450 annually.58 In the army, on the other hand, survivors suffered greater financial hardships: widows’ pensions in 1873 ranged from £40 to £160 per year, while children received £10 to £45.59 These amounts remained unchanged until 1933! A man who died young left his family less well off, since benefits were correlated to rank and years of [ 15 ]

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service. However, even a small amount was better than the complete absence of survivors’ benefits as was the case in the Forest Service, the Police and Engineering Services until 1928.60 As one of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s fictional characters noted, ‘marriage under those conditions [is] an improvidence’.61 While Anglo-Indians bemoaned their apparently worsening financial plight, however, observers at home and in India proved less than sympathetic to this purported economic distress. Indeed, Anglo-Indians came under increasing attack for leading an unduly lavish lifestyle. Criticism of the Anglo-Indian way of life revealed misperceptions about gender in the empire. Anglo-Indian women had long been a target for both critics and defenders of the empire. Kipling’s Mrs Hauksbee and her fictional descendants in the works of E.M. Forster, George Orwell and Paul Scott, epitomized the characterization of Anglo-Indian women as frivolous, lazy, pampered and useless. After the First World War, when the servant shortage in Britain forced many metropolitan women reluctantly to shoulder vacuum-cleaner and saucepan, the picture of an Anglo-Indian household and its idle mistress served by multiple Indian servants only intensified these resentments. These accusations highlight disjunctions of both class and gender between metropolitan Britain and imperial India. Although Anglo-Indians were drawn mainly from middleclass backgrounds in Britain, their lifestyle in India – from their large domestic staffs to their enthusiasm for big-game hunting – in many ways resembled that of the British aristocracy. Criticisms of the idle AngloIndian woman relate a fear that middle-class women living above their appropriate station (i. e. living like upper-class women in Britain) had disrupted the social hierarchy. For men, of course, the opportunities for social and professional advancement in the empire were construed as neither disruptive nor inappropriate. The empire had long been seen as an arena in which talented men could reap benefits denied to them at home because of the constraints of class. Thus, charges of social disruption were levelled primarily at women, who served no readily apparent function in the empire and, hence, were not seen as having ‘earned’ their more privileged status. Critics depicted the Anglo-Indian woman as lazy and frivolous because they could not imagine a woman as anything other than idle if her children were absent and her household responsibilities successfully delegated, as was true for many British women in India. Those outside the Anglo-Indian community could neither imagine nor comprehend an ostensibly British society in which roles for middle-class women beyond those of mother and housewife could be the norm. This assumption, that the private domestic role is the only viable one for women, ignored the [ 16 ]

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potential, indeed the necessity, for women to participate in the public political activities and discourses of the empire. While the women of metropolitan Britain may have been redirecting their energies away from the public sphere of politics and towards a modernized maternal and domestic idyll, the same expectations did not necessarily define the lives of their counterparts in imperial India. Metropolitan Britain was not imperial India, and femininity and masculinity thus acquired different meanings in the Anglo-Indian community of the Raj.

Gender and the politics of empire While changes in the nature of imperial employment and increasing financial pressures shadowed the daily lives of many Anglo-Indian families, a more ominous cloud loomed on the horizon, threatening radically to alter or even eradicate the official community in India. Political events in India and Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards placed the official community at the centre of growing tensions arising both from Indians’ resistance to colonial domination and from Britain’s reassessment of its role as an imperial power. Anglo-Indians’ responses to this challenge to their society and to the ideas and practices of imperialism reveal the gendered nature of politics in the empire. The first serious check to British hegemony in India had occurred in 1857. In an uprising later dubbed ‘The Mutiny’ by Anglo-Indians, a loose affiliation of Indian soldiers in the employ of the British East India Company, disgruntled indigenous rulers and oppressed peasants rebelled violently against British rule. Although the British swiftly and brutally reaffirmed their control, the Mutiny had ramifications for imperial policy and served as a trope for future challenges to imperial governance until well into the twentieth century. In 1858, as a direct result of the Mutiny, the British government itself assumed control in India. The fears and mistrust arising from the Mutiny led to a greater social distancing between Anglo-Indians and Indians. The prominence given to gendered and racialized discourses of sexual violence in the aftermath of the rebellion ensured that gender would be an important factor in 62 subsequent debates about the Raj. However, post-Mutiny India also witnessed the first tentative steps towards the integration of Indians into the imperial government. While tentative nineteenth-century reforms removed some (but not all) of the most blatant instances of racial discrimination blocking Indians’ integration into the existing system of imperial governance, they also served as precursors to the more radical initiatives of the twentieth century which set quotas for the integration of Indians within the [ 17 ]

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imperial services and, through the several Acts reforming the governance of India, allowed for the eventual devolution of power to Indians and prepared the way for independence in 1947. Simultaneously, antiimperial factions in British politics became more vocal and all but the most committed diehards began to rethink the structure of Britain’s relationship with India. The imperial services, the most visible incarnation of British imperial rule in India, bore the brunt of nationalist dissatisfactions of all stripes. From the late nineteenth century onwards, Indians had been agitating for a greater role in governing their country. Although this agitation did not mature into a concerted thrust against British imperial rule until after the First World War, both Britons and Indians perceived in the 1880s the beginnings of a slow move towards self-government of some sort for India.63 To secure the continued acquiescence to British imperialism of educated Indians, the home and imperial governments attempted to enlist more Indians in government service, without compromising the need for ultimate control of the imperial government by Britain. The Aitchison Commission of 1887 recommended various changes to increase the number of Indians in the civil service, leading Anglo-Indians to fear that their chances for promotion would be diminished. Although recruitment of Indians into the ICS on an equal basis with Europeans did not proceed as rapidly or as effectively as planned, resentment among the official community towards Indians and towards the government’s nascent policy of Indianization appears to have continued unabated nonetheless. The government anticipated that by 1939 the imperial administration would be divided equally between Indians and 64 Anglo-Indian officials and their wives, who found Europeans. themselves increasingly cut off from the spiritual and emotional rewards of their work, now also feared the loss of material compensation such as guaranteed promotions, high pay and generous pensions. Indianization created much resentment in the Anglo-Indian community. Many civilian officials (and their wives) believed that the introduction of highlevel Indian officials would erode the very foundations of their imperial careers. Both subtly and directly, Anglo-Indians attacked Indians’ ability to serve the government of the Raj. These attacks were levelled not only against Indian men’s purported incapacity to fulfil the administrative functions of the government: Indian conceptions of gender came under attack to demonstrate Indians’ purported unsuitability for governmental responsibilities. Anglo-Indian men and women invoked ideas about the roles of women and men serving the Raj in order to counteract Indianization of the imperial services. Questions about Indian and British constructions of marriage, family life and the home, as well as [ 18 ]

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about both men and women’s participation in the public sphere, were thus implicated in debates about the political future of India. Officers of the Indian Army were less threatened by the integration of Indians within the armed services than were their civilian colleagues. Indians did not receive commissions in the army until the First World War and were not fully integrated into the officer corps of the armed forces until the Second World War. The stated reasons for the failure to advance Indians in the military while Indianization proceeded – albeit slowly – in the civil services were, first, that it would hamper recruitment of British officers and, second, that British officers might baulk at accepting orders from Indian superiors, thus undermining military discipline. The subtext, however, was a lingering fear of a second Mutiny, which dominated Anglo-Indians’ imaginations, if not the reality of their daily lives. Thus gender – in the form of an imagined threat of sexual violence to British womanhood – also constituted an important theme in the discourses surrounding the Indianization of the imperial military services, albeit in a fashion different from the debate regarding the civil services. The escalating demands of Indian nationalists also challenged the stability of the official community. The Indian National Congress represented only a tiny section of the Indian population at its inception in 1885,and its political aims were initially quite modest. However, it formed a nucleus of anti-imperial sentiments that would ramify during the next half-century. Indians began to frame their challenge to British rule in terms that the Raj and the British government could understand, adopting the discourses of liberal democracy and political inclusion 65 preached, if not consistently practised, by their British rulers. The partition of Bengal in 1905, which provoked violent protests, indicated that Indians would not inevitably acquiesce complacently in British imperial policy. The important contributions of Indian soldiers and Indian money to Britain’s eventual victory in the First World War, encouraged many Indians to believe that their efforts would be rewarded with significant movement towards self-government. When these hopes were dashed after the First World War, the struggle for independence became a mass movement in India. Gandhian nonviolence attracted millions of ordinary Indians to the cause, but terrorist organizations, which relied on violence and intimidation, also threatened the stability of British rule, in particular through attacks aimed at Anglo-Indian civil and military authorities. It was not just from within India itself that the imperial services came under attack. More rapid communication between metropole and empire made Whitehall and Westminster a factor in quotidian political and administrative affairs in India that previously had been left to the [ 19 ]

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discretion of the man on the spot. However, metropolitan British politics did not always offer encouragement and reassurance about the future of the Raj to nervous Anglo-Indians. Government began to consider and debate the possibility that British rule in India might undergo fundamental changes. Although a significant contingent of die hards insisted on the centrality of the Raj to Britain and to the empire right up to 1947, the general trend was towards greater, if gradual, selfgovernment for India. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 expanded the powers of the Indian legislature within the context of a stable British supreme authority. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 created the system known as ‘dyarchy’ in which British and Indian officials shared governmental powers. The Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s were yet another attempt to resolve the issue of imperial rule versus self-governance. Ultimately, the constitutional reforms of 1935 eliminated dyarchy at the provincial level, transferring all governmental portfolios to Indian officials and, at the national level, transferred control of all portfolios, other than defence and foreign affairs, to the legislature. The Second World War forced an abrupt shift in British priorities, but the post-war Labour government, more concerned with domestic problems than with the empire, hastened independence for India. The official British community in India, therefore, found itself in an increasingly uneasy position. Although the empire was flourishing, the home government was not wholeheartedly committed to its indefinite perpetuation in the same manner. A growing number of MPs, government officials, journalists and other influential people in Britain took issue publicly with the goals, ideals and methods of the Raj. AngloIndians could not remain complacent in the face of these criticisms. Imperial officialdom could also no longer blindly assert that its rule was accepted unquestioningly by Indians themselves. Although most AngloIndian officials certainly disagreed with nationalist aspirations, or at least believed that self-government could come only in the distant future, they could no longer ignore the arguments framed by Indian activists. Anglo-Indians’ responses to these challenges both reflected and constructed ideas about gender in the empire. This book proceeds thematically, examining three separate modes by which gender and the imperial politics of British India were intertwined during this period of intense scrutiny and debate about the future of the Raj. Part I, ‘Domesticity’, examines marriage and the home in the political life of the Raj. The ideology and practice of marriage occupied a paradoxical position in the lives of Anglo-Indian men and women. While popular presentations of imperialism, as well as many governmental [ 20 ]

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policies and official pronouncements, ignored the role of marriage in the empire, the marital partnership of husband and wife in service to the empire was vital to both the ideological presentation of imperialism and the practical functioning of the British empire in India. Unlike metropolitan Britain, the division of society into separately gendered spheres of private domesticity and public political, intellectual and commercial activities was not applicable to imperial India. In India, although women and domesticity were still conjoined, the domestic space of the home was neither private nor exclusively feminine. Rather than providing a haven from the heartless world of business and politics, the Anglo-Indian bungalow served as a crucial locus for the creation and maintenance of British imperialism in India and for the integration of Anglo-Indian women into the politics of the British Raj. Furthermore, the Anglo-Indian construction of housekeeping as a symbolic practice, rather than a hands-on, time-consuming and labour-intensive task, had profound implications for Anglo-Indian women and their relationship to the empire. Part II analyses the discourses and practices of violence that came increasingly to the forefront of British imperial politics. Chapter four discusses how Anglo-Indian women situated themselves, both practically and ideologically, in relation to the discourses and the actuality of violence in the empire. Rather than passively acquiescing in Mutiny narratives situating women as helpless victims, Anglo-Indian women created a separate discourse of imperialism that allowed them to play an active, and even a violent part, in defence of the empire. Chapter five examines different manifestations of violence undergirding British rule in India, from hunting to anti-terrorist strategies, and women’s participation in these activities. The needs of empire contributed to a feminine ideal radically different from that of the metropole and also enabled women to participate actively in the defence of the Raj against nationalist terrorism. Part III examines ‘race’ and its interactions with ideas of gender and imperial politics. From the early nineteenth century, Western women had been expected to ‘uplift’ their Indian ‘sisters’ through the dissemination of Western religion, knowledge and culture. For many Anglo-Indian women, however, this strictly gendered approach to imperialism did not resonate with their own experiences in the empire, leading them to reject the ‘white woman’s burden’. Anglo-Indian women’s relations with Indian men were also problematic and coloured by imperial politics. With the Indianization of the imperial services, Anglo-Indian women foresaw the elimination of the marital partnership that underlay the administration of the Raj and the diminution of their [ 21 ]

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own role in the politics of empire. Chapter seven analyses how AngloIndian women resisted the devolution of political power to Indian men. Mrs Meiklejohn, whose words introduced this chapter, was the wife of a Forest Service officer and was herself a member of the official community in the twentieth-century Raj. Along with her husband, and the thousands of other Anglo-Indian married couples like them, Mrs Meiklejohn was not only a witness to the dramatic transformations of British imperialism during the half-century before independence: she was a participant in them. The engagement of Anglo-Indian women, as well as men, with the empire and its colonized peoples meant that the discourses and processes of British imperialism were neither exclusively male nor predominantly masculine but, rather, were constructed by ideologies of gender. Mrs Meiklejohn was, in her own words, ‘in the Forest Service’. This book examines how women as well as men were both in and of the British empire in India.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

7

Mrs F. Meiklejohn, ‘Forest Interlude’, Meiklejohn Papers. University of Cambridge. I use the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ as the British themselves did: to refer to the British in India, not to denote persons of mixed Asian and British ancestry. Some of the difficulties raised by modern deployment of imperial terminology are discussed in Mri-nalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995), 23–4. For an interesting discussion of the problems of reconciling republican ideology with imperialist aspirations, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA, 1997). The British experience is discussed in Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962), and in Uday S. Mehta, ‘Liberal Strategies of Exclusion’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997). Teresa Hubel, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (Durham, 1996), 2. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 29. As part of the ‘Raj revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s, however, several popular histories of women’s experiences in India appeared. See e. g. Pat Barr, The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 1905–1945 (London, 1989); Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London, 1976); Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York, 1988); Marian Fowler, Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj (New York, 1987). ‘Introduction’ to Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992), 3. For recent explorations of women’s varied roles in the European empires that try to rectify this omission see, e. g., Claire Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998); Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA, 1998); Ruth Roach Peirson and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington, IN, 1998); Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Margaret Strobel, ‘Gender, Sex, and Empire’, in Michael Adas (ed.), Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia, PA, 1993); James

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8

9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16

Boutilier, ‘European Women in the Solomon Islands, 1900–1942’, in Denise O’Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany (eds), Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 175–200; Chilla Bulbeck, ‘New Histories of the Memsahib and Missus: The Case of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Women’s History 3 (September 1991): 82–105; Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture, and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana, IL, 1987); Amirah Inglis, The White Woman’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London, 1975); Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930 (Sydney, 1986). The experiences of American women are analysed in Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines’, American Literature 67 (December 1995): 639–66. Overviews of recent work in this area are provided in Malia B. Formes, ‘Beyond Complicity Versus Resistance: Recent Work on Gender and European Imperialism’, Journal of Social History 28 (March 1995): 629–41; James Buzard, ‘Victorian Women and the Implications of Empire’, Victorian Studies 36 (June 1993): 443–53; Jane Haggis, ‘Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender? Recent Women’s Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism’, Women’s Studies International Forum 13 (1990): 105–15. Outside of the hill stations of India, ‘[t]he raj left little room for women, for families’. Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, CA, 1996), 226–7. ‘British women were not only excluded from these tales of heroes and adventure [set forth in ‘popular travel literature and fiction and in the journals of scientific explorations’], they also seemed to be physically excluded from West Africa’. Cheryl McEwan, ‘Encounters with West African Women: Textual Representations of Difference by White Women Abroad’, in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York, 1994), 74. Nancy L. Paxton argues that autobiographies of British women in India represent a limited attempt to introduce female voices into the public spaces of empire from which they had been excluded. Nancy L. Paxton, ‘Disembodied Subjects: English Women’s Autobiography Under the Raj’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), De/Colonizing the Subject: Gender and the Politics of Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN, 1992), 387–409. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London, 1976), 141. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Graham Dawson, ‘The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British Masculinity’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800 (London, 1991), 119. J. A. Mangan argues that the games ethic characteristic of nineteenth-century public schools instilled ‘the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control’. J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York, 1986), 18. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990). John Tosh, ‘Imperial Masculinity and the Flight from Domesticity in Britain 1880–1914’, in Timothy P. Foley et al. (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway, 1995), 72–85. See also Graham Dawson, ‘The Imperial Adventure Hero and British Masculinity: The Imagining of Sir Henry Havelock’, in ibid., 46–59; John Tosh, ‘Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson’, in Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions, 44–73. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. For nationalist reaction to this feminization, see Frances Gouda, ‘Gender and “Hyper-Masculinity” as Post-Colonial Modernity during Indonesia’s Struggle for Independence, 1945–1949’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Unfinished Business: Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London, 1999), 161–74. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994), 93–4. On the Dutch, see Frances Gouda, Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), 80. On the French, see Alice Conklin, ‘Redefining “Frenchness”: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa, 1914– 40’, in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, 76; Penny Edwards, ‘Womanizing Indochina: Fiction, Nation, and Cohabitation in Colonial Cambodia, 1890–

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17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25 26 27 28 29

1930’, in ibid., 113. For discussions of domesticity from the perspective of the colonized woman in India, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 233–53. Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post-colonialism”’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York, 1994), 299. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992); see also Billie Melman, Women’s Orients, English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), and Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, 1996), for examinations of gender and travel writing. On women’s travel and feminism, see T.J. Boisseau, ‘“They Called Me Bebe Bwana”: A Critical Cultural Study of an Imperial Feminist’, Signs 21 (autumn 1995): 116–46. Introduction to Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India (Manchester, 1996), 19. This governmental attitude is explored further in chapter one. For example, Ethel Dell’s The Way of an Eagle sold hundreds of thousands of copies, according to Allen Greenberger (The British Image of India (London, 1969), 206); while Alice Perrin’s The Anglo-Indians (London, 1912) went through at least eight editions, and Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters ‘sold like hot cakes’, according to its author (see Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity (London, 1929), 226). Little is known about most of these Anglo-Indian women authors, although Flora Annie Steel and Ethel Savi each wrote an autobiography – see Steel, ibid., and Ethel Savi, My Own Story (London, 1947). Steel has found at least one biographer: Violet Powell, Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India (London, 1981). Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Canadian origins have attracted attention in that country: see e. g. Marian Fowler, Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan (Toronto, 1983); Misao Dean, A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan (Montreal, 1991). Basic biographical information on some other Anglo-Indian women novelists is provided in Greenberger, British Image; Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930 (London, 1972); Saros Cowasjee, Women Writers of the Raj: Short Fiction from Kipling to Independence (London, 1990): Biographical Notes. The historical and conceptual difficulties of separate spheres’ analysis in British history are convincingly laid out by Amanda Vickery in ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414. Although Frances Gouda (Colonial Practice, 158) posits the existence of ‘a gendered, if permeable separation’ between public and private in Europe and the colonies, she also argues that ‘housewives in the Netherlands itself possessed more leeway in endowing their ordinary routines with a satisfying content. If they wanted to do so, middle-class wives in Holland could engage in charitable activities or take part in church circles or book clubs. Middle-class women could attend an array of concerts and visit museums and the theater or, if they lived in large cities and were bold enough, might participate in suffragist politics.’ Greenberger, British Image, 29. Mrinalini Sinha (Colonial Masculinity) argues that the construction of the effeminate Bengali and the manly Englishman similarly solidified British imperial power. Scott, ‘Gender’, 29. In his essay on Lawrence of Arabia, Graham Dawson (‘The Blond Bedouin’, 137) conversely notes that ‘Lawrence himself is often presented in a distinctly feminine light’. McEwan, ‘Encounters with West African Women’, 88. Boisseau, “‘They Called Me Bebe Bwana’”, 122. Tosh, ‘Imperial Masculinity’, 71. See also Chaudhuri and Strobel, Introduction, 3.

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33

34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York, 1991), 32. Ann L Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (January 1989): 134–61. ‘The greater part of British literature on India, reminiscences, commentaries and fiction, was written by Anglo-Indian officials and their wives.’ Parry, Delusions, 2. Census of India, 1881, vol. IV: Statistics of British-Born Subjects, Form I. The 1881 Census provided detailed information about the British community in India, including marital status, distribution by birthplace and distribution of males by occupation. None of the later Census reports include such detailed statistics about Anglo-Indians. Census of India, 1931, Tables II and XIX. The British changed their census methodology over the years; therefore, the categories relevant to Anglo-Indians in 1881 and 1931 are not directly comparable. Because of the demands of the war, the British undertook only an abbreviated Census of India in 1941. After the 1857 Mutiny, the British government determined that the ratio of Indian to British soldiers should never fall below three to one. The ‘Cardwell System’ paired battalions overseas with battalions stationed in Britain and constantly renewed the overseas battalions with fresh recruits from Britain, thus offering additional security. Johannes H. Voigt, India in the Second World War (New Delhi, 1987), 6. Census of India, 1881, vol. IV: 470. During the two world wars, the numerical strength of the ICS and other civilian services dropped as their officers and potential recruits joined in the war effort closer to home. Royal Commission on the Public Services, Report of the Commissioners (London, 1917), 24 (hereafter Islington Commission). Islington Commission, 25. Indicus, ‘Indian Reforms and the Station Club’, Contemporary Review 116 (1919): 321–6. On wives’ incorporation into their husbands’ work see Hillary Callan, ‘The Premiss of Dedication: Notes Towards an Ethnography of Diplomats’ Wives’, in Shirley Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (London, 1975); Hillary Callan and Shirley Ardener (eds), The Incorporated Wife: Wives’ Incorporation in Men’s Work (London, 1984); Janet Finch, Married to the Job (London, 1983). The Indian political service was the only service never to have introduced competitive selection; family connections mattered most in securing a position. See Terence Creagh Coen, The Indian Political Service (London, 1971), 35. Bradford Spangenberg argues that as British society in the metropole became increasingly meritocratic, the most competent young men opted to take advantage of greater professional opportunities at home, rather than casting their lot in distant India. It thus became increasingly difficult to rule India with civilians who were incompetent and inefficient. See Bradford Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy in India (Columbia, MO, 1976), 11–12. Islington Commission, 164–5. Edward Blunt, The ICS: The Indian Civil Service (London, 1937), 200. Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993), 5. Ibid., 5 Ann Ewing, ‘The Indian Civil Service 1919–1924: Service Discontent and the Response in London and in Delhi’, Modern Asian Studies 18 (1984): 36. Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 15. These India-wide economic disruptions affected the colonized peoples, in particular the Indian peasants, more dramatically than the AngloIndians, who experienced only a change in lifestyle, not a threat to their essential wellbeing. Islington Commission, 17. Ibid., 34. Mss Eur. F 173/15, Annexure III, British Library. Islington Commission, 42.

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59 60 61 62

63

64 65

The government of India decreased salaries by 10 per cent for 1931 and 1932 and by 5 per cent in 1933. The home Civil Service also cut pay: L/SG/7/11 Coll. 1/3, British Library. Petition from W. G. Dench, L/SG/7/11 Coll 1/3, British Library. Lady Vere Birdwood, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Indian Civil Service Family Pension Regulations, 1884, Mss Eur. F 173/15, 20, 27, British Library. Indian Civil Service Family Pension Regulations, 1925 Mss Eur. F 173/15, 20, 27, British Library. Regulations of the Indian Service Family Pension Fund, 1873, Mss Eur. F 173/15, 20, 27, British Library. Histories of the Bengal Civil Fund, Bombay Civil Fund and Madras Civil Fund (London, March 1927), 11. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (New York, 1893), 201–2. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN, 1993); Nancy Paxton, ‘Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857’, Victorian Studies 36 (Sept. 1992): 5–30. As Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose point out, anti-imperialist agitation was not limited to actions by the Western-educated elite. Peasants and others, whose economic situation had been negatively affected by imperialist intervention, also rebelled against the Raj. Furthermore, ideas of cultural nationalism and religious regeneration also flourished from the late nineteenth century. The extent to which the British perceived these as meaningful challenges to imperial rule is unclear, however. Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London, 1998), 113. L.S.S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service 1601–1930 (London, 1965), 241. The rhetoric of Indian nationalism, while borrowing some elements of Western liberal democrat discourses, was not, however, merely a restatement of those ideas in the colonial context. See Jalal and Bose, Modern South Asia, chapter 11.

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PART I

Domesticity

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CHAPTER ONE

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Married to the empire

‘English men and women in India are, as it were, members of one great family, aliens under one sky’, wrote Maud Diver, a best-selling AngloIndian novelist and wife of a military officer.1 Yet, this imperial family differed from the metropolitan British model in many respects. It was a family shaped by inter-generational continuity and dynastic pride, yet a family from which the heirs to that dynasty – the biological children of the Anglo-Indian rulers – were often physically absent. It was a family that focused not on the private domestic pleasures of hearth and home but on the very public business of ruling imperial India. Most significantly, the imperial family did not segregate husbands and wives in gendered spheres, but rather united men and women in an imperial marital partnership centered on governing the Raj. Although imperial marriage was very modern in its emphasis on companionship and partnership, it also incorporated more traditional ideas about husbands, wives and families. Anglo-Indian husbands and wives had much in common with their ideological ancestors in the great landed families of Britain, in which the marital relationship formed the centre of a web of familial, personal and economic ties. Jessica Gerard describes this relationship as built on an awareness of ancestral lineage rather than individuality, a tradition of deference rather than one of compelled obedience, paternalism rather than patriarchy, and a melding of personal and business affairs rather than an abrupt disjuncture 2 between public and private. Husband and wife, as a unit, embodied status and authority. Unlike these landed families, however, AngloIndian men and women were concerned not just with their immediate shire or county, but with the totality of British India; their occupation was not estate management, but the business of managing the Raj; their goal was not the accrual of personal fortune, but securing the fortunes of the British empire. Their family business, therefore, was literally the business of empire in all its practical and ideological manifestations. [ 29 ]

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DOMESTICITY

From the late nineteenth century, therefore, Anglo-Indians constructed an idea of family and marriage that was, both literally and metaphorically, the foundation for British imperialism in India. Reimagining the relationships among marriage, family and empire compelled Anglo-Indians to reconsider, as well, the operation of gender in those spheres. Additionally, marriage and family, as organizational structures of the Raj and as crucial metaphors for British imperialism in India, served to distance Indians from the business of empire and to disinherit them, at least until 1947, from their rightful national patrimony. Marriage formed the cornerstone of this imperial family. In many ways, imperial marriages represented the ultimate development of the idea of a companionate partnership between husband and wife. Although Anglo-Indian wives had long shown an interest in their husbands’ work for empire, by the interwar period the expanded educational opportunities for women, the greater acceptance of women’s ability to undertake professional work and the recognition of women as political actors allowed Anglo-Indian husbands and wives to work in tandem in a relationship of equality and respect. On the other hand, officially the Raj maintained an old-fashioned misogynistic attitude towards women, generally, and wives, in particular, refusing to acknowledge their work, or even their presence, in the empire. Men, of course, benefited from the efforts of a spouse who served not only as emotional helpmate and confidante but as professional partner and advocate. For wives, however, marriage was an even more central aspect of their lives and identities. Anglo-Indian women’s political power stemmed not from their position as citizens in a democratic polity (which the British empire obviously was not), but rather from their personal, social and marital connections with imperial officials. As the wives of imperial officials and as members of the ruling race themselves, Anglo-Indian women were privy to the quotidian details of imperial administration and actively participated in the ongoing discourses of imperial politics. Women regularly advised and assisted their husbands with a wide variety of work for empire such as undertaking revenue assessments, typing official reports, decoding secret communiqués in wartime, disposing of routine paperwork, touring the district to foster good relations with the inhabitants and hunting down dangerous animals. Anglo-Indian women used their marital connections to participate actively in the practices and discourses of imperialism. They were married not only to their husbands but to the Raj itself. Despite its centrality to British imperialism in India, however, marriage was a problematic institution for the Raj. For men, there were many strictures, formal and informal, against marriage – at least before the ‘appropriate’ time. The accepted wisdom in the army was that [ 30 ]

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MARRIED TO THE EMPIRE

‘subalterns must not marry; captains may marry; majors should marry; and colonels must marry’.3 Civilian officials, too, were not expected to marry until they had moved several rungs up the ladder of promotion. Officially, there was no place for wives in the Raj. For the subaltern who ‘must not marry’, life as a young officer could be extremely difficult – especially if he adhered to the Victorian idea that sexual fulfilment was merely a subset of marital bliss. Indeed, the relative scarcity of European women, particularly in upcountry districts, in conjunction with the continuing sequestration of upper-class Indian women, meant that imperial officials might interact with women only rarely. As one young ICS officer noted when debating whether to quit the service, ‘I live in a world populated by one sex. This is unnatural and abnormal.’4 Despite the ‘abnormality’ of such a male-dominated existence, antifemale sentiment was long-lived and well-established in the institutional structures and corporate culture of the imperial services. For men, a career in India generally represented a lifetime commitment. To secure their officers’ primary loyalty, both the army and the civil services instilled a sense of esprit de corps that vouchsafed no place to women. Army regiments prided themselves on their camaraderie and perpetuation of a unique regimental spirit. Popular regiments often ‘vetted’ their incoming subalterns to ensure that their colleagues-in-arms would not be ‘mugs’, but hard-drinking, hard-riding, polo-playing fellows. Social life for army officers centred around the regimental mess, to which ladies of the regiment were invited only on select occasions. The mess provided both dining facilities and, often, accommodations for unmarried officers, and also served as ‘a tangible focus for the loyalties 5 and esprit de corps of the officers’. A married subaltern, who could not fully participate in the life of the mess because of the competing call of wife and family was reduced ‘to the standing of a beastly day-boy’.6 In the Indian Army, a subaltern considered himself ‘wedded to his regiment’ until the age of 30, when he could request the permission of his commanding officer to marry.7 Those who committed ‘adultery’ against the regiment by wedding earlier were considered to be ‘living in sin’ and were also denied the marriage allowance granted to those who followed the accepted procedure by deferring matrimony.8 The ICS had no counterpart to the regimental mess; indeed, the stereotypical Civil Service officer was the lone administrator, riding through the countryside and stopping at remote villages to dispense British justice and administer British rule. Nevertheless, the individualistic culture of the Civil Service proved just as antithetical to wives as did the more convivial army mess. In deciding to lower the age [ 31 ]

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DOMESTICITY

limits for the Civil Service exam, the Islington Commission reasoned that an older officer ‘is more likely to be married or to get married, than if he comes out [to India], say, three years younger. The result, when this takes place, is sometimes a loss of efficiency to the administration.’9 A wife and family would impede the mobility of the civilian officer. Furthermore, the peripatetic life of the civilian, travelling across rough terrain with minimal equipment, could not provide the comforts deemed necessary for a wife.10 According to many an ICS officer, there was ‘no place for a lady in my camp’.11 Marriage could also distract a man from devoting all of his time, energy and attention to his work. Captain George Warborough, the hero of Fanny Penny’s Anglo-Indian romance Love in the Hills, reflects that ‘though he had time to play at making love on a holiday, he had always been too busy, too full of occupation to allow marriage to become an absorbing idea’.12 In a military career, where feats of derring-do were valued, many soldiers believed the married man was apt to be more prudent than were his reckless bachelor colleagues.13 In Sahib-Log, Mrs G.H. Bell’s laudatory novel about the Anglo-Indian community, the heroine’s husband (a general and thus ‘entitled’ to be married) is about to lead a dangerous expedition when his wife begins to cry. “‘Oh damn!” cried Dick helplessly. “Esmé dear, don’t. The fact of the matter is a soldier ought never to marry. Here am I, with God knows what responsibility on my shoulders, and here you are upsetting me just when 14 I need all my nerve.’” This attitude was apparent in the ‘real life’ of the Raj as well as in its fiction. The lonely wife of an officer in the Merchant Marine reported woefully that she was allowed to join her husband on board only when ‘there is no fear of the skipper risking his ship or deserting his post on account of his wife’.15 While intemperate early marriage could undermine the esprit de corps and dedication on which Anglo-Indian officials prided themselves, it might also chip away insidiously at the edifice of British rule in India. India’s imperial governors implicitly (and sometimes explicitly as well) claimed the right to rule and to garrison India because of their superior system of government, founded on a higher morality. British officials affected an air of impartiality and incorruptibility; they might be only ‘little tin gods’, but in India that was felt sufficient to propel them to Olympian heights, above the petty squabbles of the ‘natives’ over whom they ruled. Women, however, because they were weak or materialistic or naive about the treacherous workings of the Indian mind, were purportedly more susceptible to pleadings, insinuations or even outright bribery. The anonymous ‘Memsahib’ described the common first contact between the official’s wife and the ‘natives’ through the ‘apparently innocent gift’. [ 32 ]

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‘Some one has brought me a lamb,’ I said joyfully at breakfast. ‘Oh, has he?’ said the Sub-collector [her husband], brutally. ‘Well, he’ll just have to take it away again, d—n him.’ ‘It’s a sweet little lamb,’ I pleaded. But the creature was led, bleating pitifully back to its village. ‘Remember the blighter who brought you a lamb?’ said the Sub-collector a few weeks later. He has a quarrel on about a piece of land, and the other fellow is bringing suit against him. If you’d taken that lamb he’d have been able to frighten the plaintiff off, saying that I’d accepted a bribe and was bound to give judgment for him!’16

The Government Servants’ Conduct Rules of 1904 not only forbade an official from accepting ‘any gift, gratuity or reward’ from ‘any Native of India’ but specifically provided, in the illustrations, that the wife of a public servant who ‘receives a present as a motive for soliciting [her husband] to give an office to a particular person’, and is abetted in this act by her husband, would be liable to up to a year in prison and a fine. The husband’s dereliction of both his spousal and public duties was more heavily sanctioned, for he could receive up to three years’ imprisonment.17 Revisions to The Government Servants’ Conduct Rules in 1935 reaffirmed both wives’ status as unofficial representatives of the Raj as well as their potential to undermine its aura of impartiality set forth in the 1904 Rules. A new provision, drafted during the interwar period of nationalist agitation, forbade government servants from allowing wives and other dependants to engage in subversive political activities.18 The influence and status of government servants’ wives in India necessitated this unusual encroachment: [The Home Government] interfere[s] as little as possible with the private lives of Civil Servants, and in the ordinary way the political activities of their wives seem unlikely to affect adversely their official conduct. I should think, however, that in India the Civil Servant’s wife is a more prominent person than she is here, and it does not necessarily follow that the Government of India can safely copy our indifference.19

Perhaps the most important, if least exalted, reason to avoid or postpone marriage was the expense involved in maintaining a wife (and the children almost certain to follow after matrimony). A man who had lived in the regimental mess or shared a ‘chummery’ (bachelors’ quarters) with his single colleagues must, after marriage, support an independent establishment. Even if he had maintained his own home as a bachelor, a wife meant an additional mouth to feed, perhaps a few additional servants, and greater entertaining expenditures. With children, these domestic expenditures increased yet again, along with additional expenses for the [ 33 ]

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mandatory sojourn in the hills during the hot weather, school tuition, and passages home for the children and their mother. It was not until the Lee Commission in 1924 recognized that ‘in a large proportion of cases the married officer, especially, is confronted with the alternative of having either to incur a considerable burden of debt or to postpone taking leave to the detriment of the health of himself and his family’ that the government provided passages back to Britain for civilian officials and their wives (four each) and for their children (one passage each).20 The various serviceaffiliated family pension funds, which provided annuities to widows and children of deceased officials, not unnaturally placed a greater financial burden on married officers. Although all officials subscribed to these funds, married officers generally contributed a lump sum upon marriage and made larger monthly payments than did their bachelor counterparts. Similarly, the government’s denial that families had a place in the empire meant that, until the interwar period, certain services provided neither medical coverage for wives nor survivors’ benefits. Those who bucked convention and married young found that ‘it required a great deal of selfdenial on the part of us both in order to make both ends meet, and avoid running into debt’.21 Such financial self-denial was not necessarily appealing to men. Junior civilians and army subalterns received decent wages in relation to similar occupations in Britain, and relatively high salaries were one of the most important factors in luring young men to India. Most had no independent income and no prospects for a significant inheritance in the future. They were thus dependent on their salaries for living expenses and savings, if any. Although remuneration at the higher levels of the imperial services was generous compared to many other middle-class professions, the early years could often be difficult, even for an unencumbered bachelor. It was probably not unusual for a man to prefer to spend his surplus funds on a good polo pony rather than a new ball gown for his wife, or on a shooting expedition in the Himalayas rather than passage to England for his school-bound son. As the novelist Alice Perrin commented: ‘To a bachelor ... India could be a very Paradise; to a married man it might easily become the reverse, what with anxieties about health and money and children, and the everlasting self-sacrifice 22 that a family must needs entail’. If these many rational arguments against marriage did not appeal to a young man’s common sense and professional self-interest, there were even harsher inducements to postpone matrimony. In some services, such as the Forest Service, marriage before the end of the probationary period was forbidden.23 In the 1920s, officials considered proscribing marriage for European ICS probationers (as was the case with their Indian counterparts), but rejected the proposal as likely both to cause [ 34 ]

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discontent among the candidates and to evoke ridicule from the press.24 In some regiments, a subaltern might be denied permission to marry or else be asked to leave the regiment if he did so without the approval of his superiors. A junior civilian official who married would find himself ineligible for certain positions. In Maud Diver’s novel Ships of Youth (revealingly subtitled A Study of Marriage in Modern India), Lance Desmond’s marriage at the age of 26 jeopardizes his promising career as a political officer. ‘For the Foreign Office did not favour young aspirants who were already married or engaged and there had been few exceptions to the rule.’25 As recruitment to the imperial services became more difficult after the First World War, and as special provisions allowed older war veterans to join the civilian services, it appears that, informally at least, many senior officials were compelled to relax their disapprobation of married subordinates to comport with the changing realities of service to the Raj. Even if he suffered no official repercussions, a young married officer – and his spouse – could find life very unpleasant indeed. One army wife recalled that if an officer married without obtaining his colonel’s permission, ‘[t]he commanding officer of the man’s battalion would detail his wife to advise the regimental wives not to show any signs of friendliness to the bride who was considered to have caused her husband to disgrace his regiment. In some cases, the pressure caused the man to 26 exchange or even to resign his commission.’ The one concession the Raj made to the exigencies of family life was to designate (albeit unofficially) the more salubrious stations as family posts. While this benefited civilian officers and their families, in the army this apparent concern for the well-being of wives and children meant that families were simply banned from the most dangerous locations. Anglo-Indian society, including Anglo-Indian women, generally accepted and enforced these strictures against early marriage. Peer pressure undoubtedly swayed many young men contemplating marriage. Parents, anxious that their daughters make a good match, also sustained the custom of late marriage by steering their daughters away from impoverished lieutenants and junior civilians. When the heroine of Fanny Penny’s romantic novel Sacrifice receives a proposal from ‘an ineligible subaltern still in receipt of an allowance from his father’, her outraged ‘Mama’ voices the sentiments of mothers across India: “‘Impossible! Preposterous! Why the foolish creature will not get his captaincy for years, and he mustn’t dream of marriage before promotion! 27 What are the young men thinking of nowadays?”’ The resulting tendency among Anglo-Indian men to marry only after they were well-established in their official careers often created a [ 35 ]

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significant age disparity between husband and wife.28 In 1933, an actuarial report on the ICS Family Pension Scheme revealed that the youngest married officer was 25. It was not until they reached 29 years of age that the number of married officers exceeded unmarried ones.29 Because daughters in Anglo-Indian families often returned to India upon completion of their schooling at 16 or 17, wives were often much younger than their husbands. As social status hinged not on age but on the husband’s official position, very young women could leap over their elders in terms of prestige and authority simply by marrying a highranking official. One young memsahib, whose older husband held a very senior position, confessed that ‘it was embarrassing to sail first everywhere ahead of ladies old enough to be my grandmother, because of my husbands’ [sic] position as head of the district’.30 In the face of the opprobrium and disincentives associated with the married state, the question is, therefore, not why subalterns must not (and usually did not) marry, but rather why colonels must (and usually did) marry. While the Anglo-Indian community assumed that women would naturally desire to marry and have children, it is important to remember that most men, as well, saw the roles of husband and father as integral facets of their own masculinity. Certainly the emotional, intellectual and sexual companionship promised by a marital relationship played an important role in the decision to marry. Particularly in remote postings, a wife might provide the only available European companionship for an imperial official. Most Anglo-Indians were, however, quite reticent about the physical and emotional aspects of marriage, agreeing with civil servant John Beames that ‘such things [as the perfect happiness of married life] are too sacred to be written 31 about’. Leaving aside, therefore, such unspeakably sacred benefits of marriage, there remained many profane reasons for an officer of an appropriate age and in possession of an adequate income to marry, and for the British empire to sanction such nuptials. In the imperial context, marriage was more than a means by which to assuage personal loneliness and to forge a lasting emotional bond; it was more than a means of assuring financial security or social status; it was more than a partnership to cement the linked interests of two families – although even in British India a marriage could be all these things. Marriage became the vehicle through which both men – of appropriate standing – and women could best serve the empire. The more important his duties to the Raj and the higher up his position on the imperial ladder, the greater the necessity for a man to secure a wife as partner in his imperial responsibilities. Lord Sydenham, the governor of Bombay, speculated that one reason he was not tapped [ 36 ]

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for the viceroyalty on the retirement of Lord Minto was ‘my solitude’: he was a widower who had not yet remarried.32 Lady Minto herself argued to another contender for the viceroyalty, the inveterate bachelor Lord Kitchener, the absolute necessity of finding a wife of the appropriate age (‘about thirty-five’) and character (not ‘a cypher’) should he be appointed viceroy.33 Given that men at the lowest level of Anglo-Indian society – the ‘other ranks’ of the British Army – were generally unmarried, it appears that the more important the job, the more indispensable was a wife’s assistance. As Lady Minto’s interest in Lord Kitchener’s marital prospects indicates, marriage was a concern not just of the two individuals involved but of the imperial community generally. While the romantic and companionate aspects of marriage were not inconsequential – indeed, they were crucial to the construction of marriage as a partnership in service to the Raj – marriage was also an important undertaking for Anglo-Indian families and for the empire itself. Just as marriages among the great landed dynasties of Britain often forged political, social and/or economic alliances among families, their friends and allied institutions, so oftentimes marriage in the Raj was similarly a union of imperial lineages as well as of the man and woman concerned. The genealogy of imperial service, rather than simply of biological heritage, was very important to many Anglo-Indians in defining and locating their own identities within the family of the Raj. Memoirs of British life in India often begin with a recital of the names and official positions held by ancestors who had served in India. (Even some Indians whose forbears had served the Raj noted such imperial connections.) One of the most important attributes a woman could bring to an Anglo-Indian marriage was family connections. One author jested: ‘One of the things I have been waiting for is promotion, but it never comes, as I have no uncles or 34 fathers-in-law among the heads of my department.’ Marriage often brought together two imperial genealogies, with the expectation of reproducing this tradition of service to the Raj through their offspring. Lady Rosamund Lawrence thus prefaced her memoirs with a family tree illustrating that by her marriage were united the Napier family, which included Sir Charles Napier, the famed conqueror of Sind, and the Lawrence family, whose members included a martyred hero of the Indian ‘Mutiny’, as well as a viceroy.35 Upon learning of their engagement, she related, Anglo-Indians would often remark: ‘How suitable! The two famous Indian families.’36 The offspring of such unions were naturally expected to continue in the family business of empire, either by working in the Raj’s civil service or the military or by marrying a man who did. Even as marriage in Britain became more individualistic and less [ 37 ]

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concerned with cementing familial, communal and business alliances, Anglo-Indian marriages retained many of those broader connections.37 The greater Anglo-Indian community thus claimed a role in approving the unions of its sons and daughters. The goal was to ensure that husbands and wives would be suited, physically and mentally, to the tasks of governing the empire. In one of his stories, Kipling jocularly suggested that, as ‘marriage in India does not concern the individual but the Government he serves’, the Raj ‘should establish a Matrimonial Department, efficiently officered with a Jury of Matrons, a Judge of the Chief Court, a Senior Chaplain, and an Awful Warning, in the shape of a love-match that has gone wrong, chained to the trees in the courtyard’.38 While the Raj never took up Kipling’s suggestion, many women found themselves unofficially subjected to the critical scrutiny of their husbands’ senior officers and, of course, their wives. Indeed, an official government stamp of approval from a ‘Matrimonial Department’ might have made life easier for some brides. One woman, whose husband’s superior told her at their first encounter to go straight back to England, protested to her spouse: ‘I’m simply not his business at all. The India Office did not appoint me.’ Her husband, better versed in the ways of 39 empire, caustically replied: ‘That’s just the trouble, they didn’t.’ On the other hand, for those wives who survived this unofficial vetting, the ‘family’ of the Raj provided a warm welcome. Many couples were married in India with few or none of their close family and friends on hand to assist in planning and celebrating the nuptials. Couples might meet and court in Britain during the man’s leave. He would be called back to his duties in India and his fiancée would follow on her own, months or even years later. Ships to India often carried numbers of nervous brides-to-be and a standing joke of the Anglo-Indian community was that shipboard romances on the passage out often persuaded these young women to throw over their previous engagement for a better prospect. (One man recalled that of eleven affianced women on a single 40 ship, nine broke off their engagements upon reaching Bombay. ) The family of the Raj acted in the stead of the missing biological relations, with high-ranking officers giving away the bride, the senior lady in the station planning the post-wedding festivities and the Anglo-Indian community at large making up the wedding guests. One bride recalled that, at the wedding reception organized by her husband’s regiment, ‘I was surrounded by strangers but all so friendly and gay I forgot I had 41 none of my own friends or relations there.’ From the inception, therefore, many Anglo-Indians associated their marriages with India, the empire and its officers, rather than with their biological families back in Britain. Conversely, some imperial ceremonies reminded the participants of weddings. When Lord Irwin was sworn in as viceroy, his [ 38 ]

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wife ‘thought it was exactly like being married again (the [Convocation] Hall looking much like a church)’; as Lord Irwin recalled, the only difference from a regular wedding ceremony was ‘that she had to wait for me, instead of me waiting for her’.42 After the wedding, the surrogate family of the Raj continued to assist ‘family’ members through other intimate personal events such as pregnancy, childbirth, illness and death by providing advice and practical assistance, and emotional and financial support.43 Thus, newcomers were quickly and successfully integrated into the family of the Raj. Indians, too, recognized the imperial significance of an official’s marriage. Newlyweds returning to the husband’s bachelor posting were often fêted by the local residents. Welcoming banners and decorations festooned the streets, the band played, bride and groom were garlanded with flowers, and local notables made speeches. One bride even recalled that on the first night back at her husband’s station after their marriage, they had to sleep in a bungalow with ‘more doors and windows ... than would be thought possible’, none of which was covered by curtains or frosted glass. In addition, the bungalow compound was ‘blazing with light ... A glance outside showed that the audience, which had risen on our arrival, had now settled down again, only this time it was facing towards the bungalow. For it, apparently, the most interesting part of the 44 entertainment was yet to come.’ The newlyweds solved their dilemma by hanging towels and tablecloths over the bare windows. Anglo-Indians interpreted these welcoming celebrations as a sign of Indians’ natural politeness, as well as their affection and esteem for the imperial rulers. Such festivities may also have been, however, a shrewd calculation by the Indians to impress a newcomer – the bride – who had acquired, via her marriage, the ability to impact their lives, for better or worse. Nonetheless, particularly after the First World War, marital decisions for Anglo-Indians were still a matter of individual choice, albeit within the confines created by official and unofficial strictures, family preferences and professional pressures. Men and women assessed each other as romantic prospects, of course, but also as future companions and partners in the business of imperialism. A historian of the Colonial Office, which did not have jurisdiction over Indian affairs but oversaw similar situations in other colonies, wrote: The Appointments Departments of the Colonial Office have sometimes been heard to express the wish that they could select officers’ wives as well as the officers themselves. As it is, Providence no doubt arranges that the sort of chap who is the sort of chap they want in the Colonial Service chooses (or is chosen by) the sort of wife he ought to have. Certainly if the

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wife is not the right sort she is likely to be disheartened by many kinds of difficulties which she would not come across in ordinary life at home.45

The ‘right sort’ of wife could advance a husband’s career and ease the burden of his work, but just as easily the wrong sort could make his life miserable, delay promotions, or incite transfers to punishment posts. Thus, one ICS wife proudly appended to her own memoir an extract from her husband’s confidential file which read: ‘His qualifications have been enhanced because of his equally popular and gifted wife who would so far from being a handicap will [sic] be a considerable asset in his work.’46 However, as sociologist Hillary Callan notes in her study of diplomatic wives, whether or not spousal behaviour is actually a criterion in promoting and rewarding officers, ‘what seems most significant is that the belief exists among the wives and hence is likely to influence their behaviour’.47 Anglo-Indian wives and husbands strongly believed that spousal behaviour could make or break a man’s career. There was strong pressure on a chap contemplating matrimony to choose the ‘right sort’ and avoid a woman who might be ‘disheartened’ by the demands of imperialism. A woman, too, presumably knew whether she would flourish in the imperial environment. In Alice Perrin’s novel The Anglo-Indians, one young woman rejects the marriage proposal of the man she truly loves because she despises life in India. She explains to him: ‘A girl would have to be crazy about a man to do it. I like you very much, you know I have always liked you, but not well enough to lead that kind of life.’48 Thus, a man searched for a wife who was prepared for and could withstand the rough-and-ready existence of a junior official assigned to an isolated up-country station. Often, he found these qualities – and the right partner – in a woman who was already part of the Anglo-Indian community and, hence, already experienced in the intricacies of imperial rule. [A] colleague of mine ... married the daughter of the District Magistrate. In a case like that, the young wife, having been brought up in the environment, knew exactly what she was in for and had no illusions about the role she would have to play or the kind of life she might expect to lead. Obviously with girls straight out from home, with no previous experience of India, the effort needed to adjust to an alien climate and way of life was much greater.49

Although memsahibs (and their husbands) came in many varieties, Anglo-Indian writings reveal a broad consensus on the type of woman most likely to succeed as the wife of an ambitious civilian or army officer. Notions of femininity and wifely virtue that defined the AngloIndian wife were very different from those characterizing the ideal wife in Britain. First, it was imperative for her own and her husband’s per[ 40 ]

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sonal happiness, as well as for the good of the Raj, that the imperial wife enjoy the outdoorsy, sports-oriented life led by the typical Indian official. Riding skill was a necessity. A good wife should also share her husband’s passions, whether they be shikar (hunting), tennis, or even polo. Even among the more intellectually inclined, shared hobbies tended to be of the outdoor variety, such as lepidoptery or amateur archaeology. However, a woman also needed to be self-sufficient, to amuse herself in the long hours when her husband was at work, the station devoid of suitable (i.e. European) female companions, and the children at school in England. One ICS wife admiringly assessed a younger woman who was ‘made for [her] situation’ as the wife of an imperial official: ‘[s]he is a fearless rider, a good shot, an excellent housekeeper, and a skilled musician. She thoroughly enjoys her open-air life.’ It probably didn’t hurt that this paragon of imperial spousal virtues was also ‘a descendant of one of Napoleon’s sisters’.50 It was even better if a wife’s interests benefited the greater AngloIndian community. Thus a flair for music (to provide entertainment at parties), or a passion for gardening (to supply vegetables for the station, flowers for the ill and a lawn for croquet), were more suitable occupations than reading. One author, describing the prototypical wife of an ICS officer in the 1890s, noted: ‘I have never heard anybody discuss her brains. She occupies a position which an intellect no doubt adorns, but not indispensably.’51 While the ICS may have prided itself on the rigours of its entrance exam and the prevalence of ‘firsts’ among its recruits (although these standards slipped dramatically after the First World War), the other services made no such claims to intellectual preeminence. Wives who lacked a university education were thus not at a disadvantage in Anglo-Indian society. More important than her accomplishments, however, was a wife’s mental attitude towards the inconveniences of Anglo-Indian life. A spouse had to see herself more as her husband’s partner than his 52 dependant, a comrade and not just a companion. The wife who insisted on spending the entire ‘hot weather’ at a cool and comfortable hill station while her husband laboured alone in the plains was not doing her duty. The right sort of wife would willingly share this infernal exile with her husband. A wife was also at fault if she expended too much money on her dress or other feminine frivolities, perhaps driving her husband into debt and creating endless worries that distracted him from his work. The epitome of wifely virtue was not the woman ‘whose soul dwells in dress, lawn-tennis or the waltz’, but rather the ‘unrecorded heroine’ who will ‘stand by her husband through bitter and sweet, through fire and frost’.53 Allen Greenberger has commented that Anglo-Indian and British authors [ 41 ]

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aimed their criticisms of the memsahib at ‘only that part of female Anglo-Indian society which is overly sophisticated, overly feminine, and unproductive’.54 Those wives who, conversely, embodied masculine values of verbal discretion combined with physical strength and courage, represented the spouse most congenial to an Indian official and most successful in furthering his career. The marital selection, however, did not rest solely with the man. Women themselves looked for a future husband among those whose professional duties were compatible with their own interests. A husband’s career often gave his wife access to the quotidian workings of the Raj; women were well aware that their choice of a spouse shaped not only their daily lives, but their very role in the empire. Thus, as one woman confessed, she selected her future husband because ‘apart from the usual reasons for getting married, falling in love and so on, I was greatly attracted to cavalry life because I was very, very, very keen and interested in anything to do with horses’.55 Similarly, another woman, a crack shot and avid hunter, married a Forest Service officer whose duties, which she regularly shared and enjoyed, included hunting down man-eating tigers and crocodiles.56 Conversely, choosing a husband with incompatible interests could prove monotonous and bothersome or, at worst, even destroy the marriage. ‘It was a theory of mine’, wrote the wife of the director of land records in Assam, ‘that the woman who did not take an interest in her huband’s [sic] work was a fool, but I did have moments when I was bored by the dry bones of Land Records, Registration and Income-Tax that were served up to me for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, day after day’.57 Just as men chose careers that allowed them to exploit their talents, enjoy financial security, and serve the empire, so women saw marriage as a means for achieving these same ends. They looked at a prospective spouse not just as an individual, but also as their connection to the Raj. Sociologists have referred to this phenomenon as the ‘incorporation’ of wives into their husbands’ work, and have studied it in a variety of professions including academia, police work, the clergy and diplomacy. There are several factors that these seemingly disparate employments share and that contribute to the important role assigned to wives in the marriage and in the employing organization. The work of military and civilian officials in India clearly possessed these characteristics. The most important features, according to sociologists, in ‘incorporating’ a woman into her husband’s profession are: •

work ‘which entails being a “public figure’”: officials of the Raj were much more than mere public figures; in the ideology of British imperial rule, officials personified the empire and their every move was calculated to elicit the subservience of the colonized peoples;

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•

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•

•

work ‘where it is possible for a wife to accompany her husband for part of the time’: wives of civilian officials often visited their offices and regularly accompanied their husbands on tours of the district; and although military wives generally did not follow their husbands on active military campaigns, they lived with the soldiers in cantonments and participated in the daily life of the regiment; work ‘which involves a number of tasks which look like “women’s work”’: much of the work of the Raj was traditional women’s work such as ministering to the needs of the sick (both European and Indian), educating Indian women in Western hygiene, and spreading the message of European civilization among the Indian population; work ‘which is greatly facilitated if someone can always be contacted in the worker’s absence’: especially among civilian officials up-country, where staffing was often thin, wives not only represented imperial authority when their husbands were absent, but often acted in their stead when quick 58 decisions and rapid action were necessary.

In many ways, therefore, Anglo-Indian women were incorporated wives who supported their husbands’ careers by subsuming their own ambitions, ideas and identities to the demands of their spouses’ work. In India, however, many wives were able to go beyond the narrow constraints of an ‘incorporated’ existence to become junior partners with their husbands in their work and to exercise autonomy as imperial actors. The Raj had a set of well-defined expectations for the spouses of its officials – in effect, a job description for wives. Although the job description was not printed up, the parties never entered into any binding contract, and the mutual obligations and expectations existing between the British empire and the wives of its officials were rarely acknowledged explicitly, the parties involved generally understood what was expected of them. Thus, for example, successive vicereines ‘naturally’ headed up the Lady Dufferin Fund following the example of 59 their predecessor, the Fund’s founder. At less exalted levels, wives were similarly expected to undertake certain responsibilities commensurate with their husband’s rank. A regimental newsletter noted that upon a new colonel taking command, his wife had similarly taken charge of the two regimental welfare centres for women and children, ‘it having become the Regimental custom for the Commandant’s wife to preside over this important amenity’.60 The Raj acknowledged wifely efforts for the empire and tacitly recognized the joint nature of imperial work by according a spouse the same social status as her husband. The Warrant of Precedence in India, the official pronouncement determining everything, from where one sat [ 43 ]

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at dinner to the order of presentation at viceregal functions, confirmed that ‘[a]ll ladies ... take place according to the rank herein assigned to their respective husbands’.61 Although no official hierarchy existed on the distaff side, virtually everyone recognized and acknowledged that senior women, like their husbands, were social and community leaders simply by virtue of their rank. Some women apparently used their acknowledged standing in the community to regulate the lives of their female ‘subordinates’, interfering, in the words of one incensed memsahib, ‘in the private affairs of people not only better born and bred than themselves, but infinitely more capable of knowing what was the right thing to do’.62 Such interference could become especially troublesome in smaller stations, where there was no escape from the narrow society of the Anglo-Indian community. As late as the Second World War, some spouses of junior officers felt intimidated by these ‘burra mems’ (i.e. important wives) and were inhibited in their actions for fear of damaging their husband’s career. Iris Portal justified her failure as a young memsahib to take up good works, explaining: ‘I was always a “chota [little] memsahib” and as such could initiate nothing. Only “burra memsahibs” could raise money and if one happened to be beneath the sway of a burra memsahib who was not interested in social work, 63 there was nothing one could do about it.’ For the government, it was both cheaper and more efficient informally to ‘employ’ the wives of its officials for certain ‘feminine’ tasks rather than to recruit female professionals to perform this work. As an Indian official in Hyderabad noted to an Anglo-Indian wife: ‘We like our British officers for we pay for one and we get two.’64 Although women in Britain made great strides in civil service from the late nineteenth century onwards, British women generally were not employed by the government of India or by any other colonial government until the Second World War.65 Even then, although the government of India eventually did require European women to register for wartime service, they were never subject to conscription as women in Britain were. An interwar governmental committee studying the feasibility of women’s admission to the Consular and Diplomatic Services determined that among the many other compelling reasons to continue their exclusion from foreign service was the fact ‘[t]hat the contribution which women are particularly fitted to make is now adequately performed by wives and daughters of members of the Service 66 without any cost to the State’. The government of India did employ a few women, almost all unmarried, in positions for which men were manifestly unsuited, given prevailing British assumptions about gender and restrictions on interactions between women in purdah (i.e. sex-based seclusion) and men [ 44 ]

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to whom they were not related. In 1912, for instance, forty-eight women worked as inspectors of girls’ schools.67 Flora Annie Steel, one of the earliest of these female inspectors, recalled that she worked long hours for (what she considered) the paltry recompense of Rs 16 per day. Steel’s case indicates that even when married women were independently employed by the government, the authorities continued to view them as appendages of their husbands. When Steel displeased her superiors in the Education Department, they called upon her husband, an ICS officer, to discipline her – a task of which he confessed himself incapable – and transferred Mr Steel to a distant post in the unfulfilled hope, according to Mrs Steel, that she would abandon her position obediently to follow him.68 However, Anglo-Indian women’s engagement with imperialism went beyond women’s concerns and, indeed, their work with their husbands for the empire appears to have been more meaningful to them than were traditionally feminine philanthropic endeavours.69 Although some AngloIndian wives were, no doubt, ignorant of their husbands’ occupation and professional concerns, many others took an active and intelligent interest in the work of empire and served as their husbands’ primary advisors and assistants. This was particularly true in the ICS, which prided itself on being a corps of generalists who learned on the job. However, even in more specialized fields, such as engineering or forestry, wives often managed to participate in some way in their husbands’ work. Women who identified closely with their husbands’ employment were like the ‘Proper Army Wife’, ‘who talks of “Our subalterns”, “Our band”, “Our regiment”, is well informed in all the latest army shop, knowledgeable in all matters of army routine and etiquette and given to calling senior 70 officers by their nicknames’. Similarly, in the 1881 Census of India, significant numbers of married Englishwomen reported their occupation as being the same as their husbands’ profession.71 Census officials found such assertions ludicrous and useless for their purposes, but for many women a description in terms of the husband’s occupation accurately reflected their life’s work. Wives thus constructed an identity that was closely bound up both with their husbands’ work and, more generally, with British imperialism in India. One of the most emotionally fraught demonstrations of a wife’s identification with husband and empire was the decision to remain by her husband’s side for better or worse. In the European context this was the expected, indeed mandatory, behaviour for the good wife. In India, however, a woman chose among several competing claims for her presence. In the Raj, the roles of wife and mother were not complementary halves of a whole feminine identity, but instead represented opposing ideals of womanly duty and loyalty. ‘In India’, as Maud Diver noted, ‘it is hardest of all’ to ‘keep in perfect balance the [ 45 ]

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conflicting duties of wife and mother’.72 For the imperial wife the needs of husband and of empire were invariably the more compelling. The hot weather provided the first inducement for women to abandon their spouses, escaping to the cool of the hills while their husbands toiled and sweated in the plains. The memsahib who deserted her hardworking spouse for the social whirl of hill stations such as Simla was the butt of frequent jokes and nasty insinuations in Anglo-Indian literature.73 Although it was generally acknowledged that children might require the more congenial climate of the hills, authors urged the wife and mother to part from her children during the hot weather and ‘to stay down with her husband for as long as she can. His risks, his discomforts, are infinitely greater than those run by the chicks in a healthy climate.’74 Although some experts argued that women were less able to bear up under the strains of the Indian climate, many others, and the memsahibs themselves, asserted that women could endure the heat and humidity as well as, if not better than, men. During the Second World War, when the government of India was concerned about Anglo-Indian women’s less than enthusiastic response to the war effort, Lady Linlithgow argued that ‘for a normally healthy woman who has plenty to do, the hot weather in the plains should be bearable. Hundreds of women year after year spend the hot weather in the plains.’75 (Linlithgow was, of course, ignoring the experiences of literally millions of Indian women who spent their entire lives on the plains.) Duty to husband and duty to empire were thus easily conflated. A more serious dilemma arose, however, when wives had to choose between husband and child on a more permanent basis. It was an accepted part of British life in India that for physical, educational, and moral reasons Anglo-Indian children must be educated in Britain from the age of about 6 or 7 onwards. The decision to ‘return’ children to Britain was always framed in starkly contrasting, highly emotional terms. A woman could accompany her offspring to Britain to make a home for them there, thus satisfying her maternal instincts, but her husband would then be alone in India, slaving away in the service of empire with no one to attend to his physical and emotional needs or to assist him in his imperial duties. One author described the outcome of this dilemma in typically purple prose: ‘[T]he husband generally wins the day, and the cries of joy and woes of the little ones are no longer heard on the verandah, and night after night the mother goes to sleep with an aching, yearning heart, wondering if her children are crying for her. No page in life is sadder than this one in the story of Anglo-Indian 76 experience.’ By the interwar period, improvement in transportation meant that many mothers could spend the long summer vacation in Britain with their children – if they could afford the passage. Interestingly, many wives bemoaned the end of the Raj in 1947 because [ 46 ]

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the advent of cheap and rapid air travel promised to make their position as wives and mothers more tenable. While still electing to remain with their husbands, they could also have enjoyed frequent short visits with children in Britain. Yet, while mothers and fathers often suffered at being parted from their children, the absence of children gave mothers, in particular, unprecedented freedom to participate in the work of empire. This freedom was one that upper-class women, who could afford baby nurses, nannies and boarding schools for their children, had long enjoyed – or suffered. Extension of this freedom to ostensibly middle-class AngloIndian wives challenged existing ideas about class and gender. Perpetuation of the emotional discourse surrounding Anglo-Indian women’s vital and conflicting responsibilities – even as developments in transportation mitigated those conflicts – served an important end. By emphasizing the tremendous hardships women endured to remain with their husbands, wives highlighted the importance of their imperial responsibilities. Thus, Anglo-Indian women made the ultimate sacrifice of parting with their children because the Raj, personified by their husbands, could not function without their undivided attention and fulltime participation. In return for this sacrifice, they gained unprecedented access to the workings of empire. Wives’ participation in their husbands’ work for empire not only upset traditional associations among femininity, motherhood and women’s family duties but confused established ideas about the gendering of professional roles, physical spaces and personal identities in the empire. One woman, for example, literally invested herself with her husband’s imperial identity and authority. Impatient with his heavy load of official responsibilities and his plodding method of working through official tasks, she had a rubber stamp made of his signature and ‘dealt 77 with the less important [matters] myself’. Women’s practical assistance to their husbands was by no means limited to such acceptably feminine tasks as distributing prizes to local schoolchildren or doling out medicine to sick villagers, although many willingly undertook such work.78 Norah Burke, whose father’s duties as a forestry officer included tracking wild animals that were harassing the local population, recalled that her mother regularly took these hunting duties upon herself. Since such shoots usually involved sitting for long hours at night in a machan (hunting blind) suspended from a tree, her mother not only freed her husband from the tiresome task of waiting for the hunted animal to appear, but also allowed him to get a good night’s sleep and perform his 79 many other duties refreshed and well-rested the following day. The dictates of imperial duty inevitably shaped the relationship of husband and wife, and the outlines of family life. ‘The hub of our [ 47 ]

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existence was my husband’s work’, said one woman.80 Wives performed every conceivable task pertaining to their husbands’ imperial employment, from the most mundane clerical chores to serving as confidantes and advisers on sensitive, high-level, matters. Among the official duties on which husbands and wives worked in tandem were revenue assessment, decoding and encoding confidential messages (often late at night under intense time pressure), dispensing medical aid to villagers, listening to petitions from Indians in their charge and learning the news of the district from them, answering correspondence and dealing with paper work, inspecting schools, hospitals, and other institutions (and, in at least one instance, designing and constructing a purdah hospital), hunting dangerous animals and arranging accommodations for refugees during the Second World War. Sometimes wives’ work was on an ad hoc basis, filling in as needed on a particularly burdensome or time-sensitive job. On other occasions it was regimented like paid employment, with wives assigned responsibility for certain tasks or required to work in the husband’s office during specified hours each day. Whatever their role, many wives recalled that involvement with their husband’s work, far from subordinating them, opened up avenues of power and knowledge unavailable to most British women. The opportunity to participate with their husbands in running the Raj by touring the countryside, meeting the Indian people and contributing to imperial decision-making, released many women from the tedium of a life that could otherwise revolve solely around home and club. Many husbands acknowledged the invaluable assistance and advice proffered by their wives. One husband, detailed to organize a regiment of Pathan ‘irregulars’ during the Second World War, bemoaned the absence of his wife: ‘What could I not have done with my Peggy!’ She had recently given birth and was recovering from the delivery in another station. Of course, for a wife to advise and participate in her husband’s work pragmatically and intelligently she needed to be informed of all the details of a situation, and many were. Edward Blunt, for example, a historian of the ICS, noted that his wife ‘knows as much about the ICS 81 as I do’. Because Anglo-Indian social life blended seamlessly into official business, many women naturally picked up ‘shoptalk’ in the course of ordinary entertaining and daily activities. A few lucky women were able to educate themselves about Indian imperial politics before heading East. Mildred Archer, who became engaged to an ICS officer before starting her university studies, joined the Indian Society at Oxford where she socialized with ICS probationers and learned about Indian 82 nationalist aspirations. However, it was apparently not uncommon for a husband willingly to initiate his spouse in the intricacies and secrets of his profession. Husbands encouraged their wives to observe the [ 48 ]

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proceedings in court over which they presided, and often invited them down to the office (which might be one wing of the couple’s home) if some interesting business were about to transpire. A wife could also read her husband’s dispatches and other official communications to educate herself about his work. Wives thus became quite knowledgeable about imperial administration. In remote stations, where an Anglo-Indian couple might be the only Europeans for miles around and communication with district headquarters was tortuous and time-consuming, it was not surprising that a husband took his wife into his confidence and actively sought her insight into governmental affairs. She, after all, was on the scene with him and had a first-hand appreciation of the unfolding situation denied to his superiors at headquarters. After the First World War, as mistrust corroded relations between British officials and their Indian subordinates, a wife might prove the only trustworthy confidante and assistant. Olive Crofton, for example, typed ‘really confidential letters’ for both her husband and his superior, the district commissioner, during the late 83 1920s, ‘as none of the native clerks could be trusted entirely’. Similarly, during the two world wars, wives often undertook highly sensitive cypher and censor work, their loyalty to the Raj being beyond question. Even when more ‘suitable’ advisors were available, husbands often preferred to seek the counsels of their spouses. Ethel Grimwood recalled that her husband revealed a delicate secret to her concerning the imminent arrest and deportation of a high-placed Indian figure and then made her promise not to discuss it with two civil service officers staying with them at the time.84 Confiding such sensitive information to a person who was not officially linked to the Raj and who was also a woman might seem unwise, and even constitute a dereliction of duty. One husband defended his decision to consult with his adored wife on all important official matters: There may be some who will think this a breach of confidence on my part since I was privy to the inner counsels of the Government and to impending developments. I did not and do not accept this view. No consideration whatsoever could have induced her [his wife] to betray a confidence ... Nothing, not even discussions with colleagues who were also concerned with the matters at issue, could clarify my ideas, give me new ones and cause me to jettison those which were unsound, as did my discussions with her. Time after time she raised points which I had overlooked and showed me aspects of a problem under discussion which I would not have seen myself.85

A husband whose wife understood the workings of the imperial machinery and their implications (practical, political and military, as well as professional), could trust her judgement more than he could the [ 49 ]

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advice of his fellows. Despite the emphasis on camaraderie in both the civil services and the military, officers competed with each other for plum assignments not distributed through the mundane system of promotion based on seniority. A wife, unlike a colleague, had no motivation to misadvise. In fact, because a wife’s status in the Raj, with all its attendant financial and social privileges, was inextricably linked to her husband’s professional position, it was to her benefit to ensure that he always acted with an eye to the best interests of his career, as well as those of the Raj. Indeed, a wife might be a more forceful advocate of her husband’s career than he was himself. Mrs Reynolds noted that when her husband was appointed to the Board of Revenue, ‘his ambition as to his Indian career is now fulfilled, but I should not be sorry to see him mount the ladder still higher’.86 A wife might bring useful talents to the imperial marriage partnership. Flora Annie Steel noted that, having been ‘born with a pictorial memory, my thoughts often run towards a pictorial exposition of facts, what is nowadays called a graph; then seldom used except in sciences’. She used her mental and artistic abilities to assist her husband on at least two occasions: to devise a graph demonstrating the falsity of imputations of financial irresponsibility levelled at her husband and to map out his pet project for the increase of wheat-growing areas, thus convincing the authorities of its viability.87 Even without such special skills, simply having an extra pair of hands and eyes could be helpful. One man visited a hospital apparently overflowing with patients, thus justifying the doctor’s request for additional funds. His wife, who had been detained, repeated the inspection tour on her own a few hours later. The hospital ‘was empty! Not a soul about. No doctor, no nurses. No patients. They had all been brought in to make an act to impress me [the official] and to support the doctor’s appeal for a more adequate budget.’88 Furthermore, as the paperwork associated with imperial bureaucracy grew more burdensome and as fewer male assistants were available, particularly in wartime, it was only the joint efforts of husband and wife that allowed the work to be completed. The professional partnership between husband and wife often blurred visible distinctions between the imperial official and his spouse, effectively erasing the line between a private femininity and a public masculinity. Anglo-Indian women who went on ‘tours’ of the district with their husbands frequently donned men’s clothing – jodhpurs, shirt, tie, coat and pith helmet – which was better suited to the rigours of hiking, riding and camping than traditional feminine garb. The result was that a woman looked ‘very like [her] husband’, and the Indians often 89 had to be convinced that the wife was really female. The subtle [ 50 ]

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message conveyed to the Indians, however, was that husband and wife were equal partners in the business of empire. Believing in such a partnership, many husbands attempted to secure from the colonized peoples public recognition of their wives’contributions to the Raj. One official, for example, was upset that at Indian ceremonial occasions, ‘he was received with immense honour ... while his wife was barely noticed’.90 He took steps, such as arriving slightly after his wife, to ensure that she received her requisite share of the plaudits. He explained that ‘[h]e did this on principle, with, in his mind, the Indian attitude towards all women and the necessity for altering that’.91 For Anglo-Indian officials, therefore, this public homage to their wives not only acknowledged white women’s pivotal role in imperial endeavours, but served to privilege Western conceptions of marriage and family over their Eastern counterparts. Indeed, an important facet of the ‘civilizing mission’ of British imperialism in India was the inculcation of British ideas of gender, marriage and the family, as expressed through the practices of 92 Anglo-Indians’ emphasis on the biological bases of imperialism. imperialism, implicit in both their genealogical understanding of imperial history and their literal reproduction of the empire through the partnership of imperial marriage, reified the presumptive racial distinctions by which they separated themselves from their Indian subjects. Indians could not marry into the imperial family because Anglo-Indians did not consider them racially appropriate marital partners. While marriages between Indians and Europeans were not unknown, the Raj did not condone them. Indeed, many officials believed that marriage to an Indian woman would compromise an Anglo-Indian’s supposed impartiality in indigenous disputes and, hence, impair his ability to rule. An Indian wife would not be a partner, but a partisan. The mixed-race Eurasian community, which literally embodied the familial relationship linking Europeans and Indians, was almost universally ostracized and disdained by Anglo-Indians interested in maintaining the fiction of racial purity in the imperial family. Indians thus stood outside the genealogy and reproductive biology of the imperial family constructed by Anglo-Indians. The cultural dimensions of imperial marriage were also significant. Anglo-Indians attached great significance to apparent differences, on both the actual and the symbolic levels, between their own marriages and families and those of their Indian subjects. During the interwar period, as more Indian officials were integrated into the imperial services pursuant to an official policy of Indianization, the marriages and family lives of these Indian men and their wives came under increasing scrutiny by the imperial government. The British encouraged these new Indian officials [ 51 ]

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of the Raj to adopt Anglo-Indian marriage and family patterns to prepare themselves for the responsibilities of imperial administration and, eventually, of self-government. From the Anglo-Indian perspective, however, these Indian husbands and wives invariably fell short of the high standards of conduct, knowledge and commitment expected of imperial officials and their spouses. Furthermore, while Anglo-Indian wives continued to work in tandem with their husbands right up to 1947, the Indianization of the imperial services threatened the tacit recognition hitherto accorded wives’ work for empire. If Indians did not accept AngloIndian ideas of marriage in their own lives, would they nonetheless respect these values in the lives of their Anglo-Indian colleagues? More significant, however, was the palpable unease Anglo-Indians expressed regarding Indian married life. Anglo-Indians saw the relationship between Indian husbands and wives as one of unnatural subjugation rather than partnership.93 An Anglo-Indian man commented disapprovingly: How does an Indian husband treat his wife? ... [A] wife must give way to her husband in everything ... an orthodox Hindu woman never mentions her husband’s name nor presumes to eat with him: and we notice that on the rare occasions when a Hindu woman goes out with her husband ... she always walks behind him and usually has more than her fair share of burdens.94

Indeed, one Anglo-Indian woman gleefully recalled her holiday in the Kulu Valley, where the inhabitants practised polyandry, for it provided ‘a contrast to India where the wives were treated as beasts of burden. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the wife walking alone and carrying nothing followed by the husbands carrying anything to be carried including the baby.’95 Anglo-Indians believed that the general inequality of education between Indian men and Indian women foreclosed the professionally and intellectually egalitarian marital partnership characteristic of AngloIndians’ own unions. In particular, they criticized Indian women’s apparent unwillingness to enter fully and freely into imperial society, an unwillingness they attributed primarily to the restrictions of purdah. In fact, although Anglo-Indians often excluded Indians from social functions on racial grounds, it was also true that Indian imperial officials and their wives had less need of the surrogate family of the Raj than did their Anglo-Indian counterparts and were often less interested in socializing with their colleagues. Unlike Britons in the empire, Indians almost always had their own biological families, including their own children, close at hand to turn to for comfort and support, celebration and consolation. The presence of Indian officials’ children in India (along with parents, in-laws and other relatives) also placed greater personal [ 52 ]

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demands on Indian women’s time. What Anglo-Indians interpreted as oppressive restrictions on Indian women’s sociability and political engagement often merely reflected different needs and notions of family life. But, if the imperial marital partnership was the cornerstone of the Raj, then the apparent inability of Indian men and women to mimic the marital and familial structures and values of the imperialists ‘proved’ their unsuitability to govern the Raj.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India (Edinburgh, 1909), 33. Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servant, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1994). Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj (New York, 1989), 102. W.H. Saumarez Smith to his parents, 28 March 1937, A Young Man’s Country: Letters of a Subdivisional Officer of the Indian Civil Service 1936–1937 (Salisbury, 1977), 66. T.A. Heathcote, The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922 (London, 1974), 147. Mrs G.H. Bell [pseud. John Travers], Sahib-Log (London, 1910), 76. John Prendergast, Prender’s Progress: A Soldier in India, 1931–47 (London, 1979), 2 Ibid., 2. Royal Commission on the Public Services in India, Report of the Commissioners [hereafter, Islington Commission] (London, 1917), 166. John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (Columbus, MO, 1984), 102. Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India (London, 1980), 19. Fanny Penny, Love in the Hills (London, 1913), 63. Farwell, Armies, 101–2. Bell, Sahib-Log, 291 (emphasis in original). Helen Campbell, An Eastern Diary (Tenby, Pembrokeshire, 1913), 13. ‘The Memsahib’s Point of View’, Cornhill Magazine XLVIII (May 1920): 596. The Government Servants’ Conduct Rules (1904), 1, 23, V/27/212/71, British Library. The Government Servants’ Conduct Rules (1935), 20(ii), L/SG/71/480 Coll. 17–8A, British Library. Drafters of the provision probably intended its application to Indian government servants and their (Indian) wives, believed to be more susceptible to nationalist rhetoric than were European officers and their spouses. Letter from E. Hale to F.W.H. Smith, 1938, L/SG/7/480 Coll. 17–8A, British Library. Report of the Royal Commission on the Superior Services in India (London, 1924), 35. Mrs. Herbert Reynolds, At Home in India (London, c. 1903), 10. Alice Perrin, The Anglo-Indians (London, 1912), 164. L/SG/7/58, 328 Coll. 5-1, British Library. Ibid. Maud Diver, Ships of Youth: A Study of Marriage in Modern India (London, 1931), 111. Veronica Bamfield, On the Strength: The Story of the British Army Wife (London, 1974), 20. Fanny Penny, Sacrifice (London, 1910), 89–90. The rules of the different family pension funds mandated a lump sum payment to compensate for age differences between husbands and wives, since wives of older husbands were more likely to be widowed and to draw their benefits for a longer time. Histories of the Bengal Civil Fund, Bombay Civil Fund and Madras Civil Fund, AG/23/19/3, British Library; India Military Widows’ & Orphans’ Fund Regulations (1915), L/AG/23/17/1, British Library.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

India Civil Service Family Pension Fund, Report by the Government Actuary on the Valuation as at 31 March 1933, Mss Eur. F173/15, 20, 27, British Library. Barbara Donaldson, ‘India Remembered’, 5, Donaldson Papers, University of Cambridge. Beames, Bengal Civilian, 112. Lord Syndeham of Combe, My Working Life (London, 1927), 245. Mary, Countess of Minto, India, Minto and Morley 1905–1910 (London, 1934), 323. Lovell [pseud.], On Public Service (Madras, 1907), 47. Lady Rosamond Lawrence, Indian Embers (Palo Alto, CA, 1991), 9. Ibid., 13. John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985). Rudyard Kipling, ‘Kidnapped’, in Plain Tales from the Hills (Oxford, 1987), 99, 97. Evelyn Bell, Memory Be Good (London, 1939), 42, 26. Captain Freddie Guest, Indian Cavalryman (London, 1959), 151. Viola Smith, ‘Merely a Memsahib’, 10, British Library. Earl of Halifax, The Fullness of Days (London, 1957), 112. For a discussion of community involvement in pregnancy and childbirth, see Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’, Victorian Studies 31 (June 1988): 517–35. Chaudhuri, however, attributes these efforts to racial exclusivity rather than familial sentiments among Anglo-Indians. Fairlie Shore, Shore Papers, British Library. Sir Charles Jeffries, Partners in Progress: The Men and Women of the Colonial Service (London, 1949), 156. Elinor Tollinton, ‘Memoir’, British Library. Hillary Callan, ‘The Premiss of Dedication: Notes Towards an Ethnography of Diplomats’ Wives’, in S. Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women (London, 1975), 103–4. Perrin, Anglo-Indians, 44–5. Martin Wynne (ed.), On Honourable Terms: The Memoirs of Some Indian Police Officers 1915–1948 (London, 1985), 238–9. Anne Campbell Wilson, Letters from India (Edinburgh, 1911), 256–7. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (New York, 1893), 134. See e.g. Bell, Sahib-Log, 192. ‘Those who affirmed that there must be a show [i.e. a battle with the Frontier tribe] this time never lowered their voices, nor hid their opinions, in the presence of anxious wives. On the Frontier the women’s nerves must be the nerves of comrades.’ J.E. Dawson, ‘The Englishwoman in India: Her Influence and Responsibilities’, Calcutta Review 83 (October 1886): 367; Diver, Englishwoman, 21. Allen J. Greenberger, The British Image of India (London, 1969), 29. Lady Vere Birdwood, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 19. Beatrix Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 234–5, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Janet Finch, Married to the Job: Wives’ Incorporation in Men’s Work (London, 1983), 88. The Lady Dufferin Fund was officially known as the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India. ‘The Baluch Regiment’, Regimental News Precis No. 16 (May 1946), Lord Papers, University of Cambridge. The Warrant of Precedence in India, xcviii, in The India List Civil and Military (January 1890). If a wife enjoyed a higher status than her husband, by virtue of an inherited title, for example, she was entitled to the benefits of her own rank. Florence Marryat, ‘Gup’, Sketches of Anglo-Indian Life and Character (London, 1868), 16– 17. Iris Butler [Portal], The Viceroy’s Wife, Letters of Alice, Countess of Reading, from India, 1921–25 (London, 1969), 16–17. Lady Olive Crofton, They Also Serve’, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge.

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65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

Some women were employed at the India Office in London during the First World War and after, but mainly in clerical or other low-level positions. Even when women were admitted to the British Civil Service, they were not permitted to compete for positions in the ICS. Quoted in Hilda Martindale, Women Servants of the State, 1871–1938 (London, 1938), 195. Islington Commission, 8. Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity (London, 1929), 127. See chapter six for further discussion of Anglo-Indian women’s philanthropic work. Leonora Starr, Colonel’s Lady (London, 1939), 5. The Census of India, vol. IV: Statistics of British-Born Subjects (1881), 470. Diver, Englishwoman, 34. See e.g. Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills; Lovell, Public Service. Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 7th edn (London, 1909), 204. Mary Curzon, the wife of the viceroy wrote: ‘I am going to send the babies to Simla the end of this month as the heat is very great [in Calcutta]. I cannot go with them as my duty is with George unless they need me and then I would fly at once.’, Lady Curzon’s India, Letters of a Vicereine, ed. John Bradley (London, 1985), 57. Text of broadcast by Marchioness of Linlithgow, 19 March 1942, L/I/l/1020, File 1/0, British Library. Adeline Kingscote, The English Baby in India (London, 1893), 2. Tollinton, ‘Memoir’. See e.g. Queenie Mansfield, Letter, 15 February 1924, Mansfield Papers, University of Cambridge. Norah Burke, Jungle Child (New York, 1955), 77–8. Mrs H.A. Barnes, ‘Memoir’, British Library. Dedication, in Edward Blunt, The ICS: The Indian Civil Service (London, 1937). Mildred Archer, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 68. Ethel Grimwood, My Three Years in Manipur and Escape from the Recent Mutiny (London, 1891), 175. John Coatman, Portrait of an Englishwoman (London, 1960), 96. Reynolds, At Home in India, 223. Steel, The Garden of Fidelity, 183–4. Jack Bazalgette, The Captains and the Kings Depart: Life in India 1928–46 (Oxford, 1984), 108. Mrs J.P. Mills, ‘Memoir’, 10, Mills Papers, University of Cambridge. Pamela Hinkson, Indian Harvest (London, 1941), 280. Ibid. For discussions of the deployment of discourses of domesticity, femininity and family in the Indian nationalist struggle, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990). Anglo-Indian attitudes towards Indian marriage are discussed further in chapters six and seven. R.C. Macleod, Impressions of an Indian Civil Servant (London, 1938), 167. Mary Lambert, Interview (transcript), 6, British Library.

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CHAPTER TWO

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Home is where the empire is

‘[A]n Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, [sic] without dignity and prestige, [sic] than an Indian Empire’, intoned Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, the doyennes of Anglo-Indian household management and authors of the popular housekeeping guide The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook.1 In thus revealing the secret of successful imperial domestic management, Steel and Gardiner also articulated the crucial symbolic and practical connections conjoining the Anglo-Indian home and British imperial India. They recognized that the home must serve two masters – its actual occupants, the Anglo-Indian residents, and its metaphorical ruler, the Raj. On the pragmatic level, the imperial household had to run peacefully, smoothly, and efficiently to serve the needs of both its resident family and the members of the ‘family’ of the greater Anglo-Indian community who might sleep, dine or play there. Not less important, however, was that these functions be carried out with ‘dignity and prestige’, in a manner that reiterated and reinforced the imperial authority of Anglo-Indians and the British empire. To fulfil these two needs – the practical and the symbolic – British domesticity was reconstructed in India in a manner that reinforced the practice and ideology of imperialism. The most private and intimate spaces of the colonizers were themselves colonized by the demands of empire. This politicized imperial home stood in sharp contrast to the ideal of middle-class British domesticity that had developed from the lateeighteenth century onwards in the metropole. With the progress of industrialization, work and home were severed, both literally and metaphorically. The suburban villa became a private refuge from the heartless world of business, industry and politics. The feminine world of attentive wives and merry children allowed men, in their roles as husbands and fathers, a respite from the demands of masculine capitalist competition. In a developing consumer society, the home also became [ 56 ]

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one of the prime canvases for the expression of individuality. The contents and arrangement of a home – whether a cheap trinket from a seaside holiday, proudly displayed on the mantel, or an elaborately orchestrated ensemble of William Morris textiles and furnishings – supposedly expressed the personal tastes (and economic status) of the mistress and master. Perhaps because it afforded such deeply personal insights, the home also served as a citadel against strangers and, indeed, against all the unpleasantness of the wider world. A man’s home was his castle, not merely because he reigned as king there, but because he (and his family) could lower the portcullis, raise the drawbridge and prevent the barbarian hordes from overrunning the inner sanctum of home and hearth. Thus, the function of the metropolitan British home was to exclude, not include. While the perception of the home as private, personal sanctuary is very Victorian in its origins, the ideal continued to resonate in Britain even after the First World War. The efforts to restore ‘normality’ after the disruptions of war led to a reassertion of the femininity of domestic space and its centrality to family life. As Alison Light has pointed out, this pervasive reaction against postwar modernity evidenced a conservatism shared by many British men and women.2 Thus, it was not until the postSecond World War creation of the modern welfare state, or perhaps even as late as the social upheavals of the 1960s, that this Victorian domestic ideal lost its hold over the metropolitan British home. To the extent that historians have considered the Anglo-Indian home and its implications for gender and politics in the empire it has been through the prism of this English domestic idyll.3 The imperial home has thus been construed as a feminized sphere that, like its metropolitan counterpart, was set apart from the public realm arrayed beyond its precincts. In this interpretation, women led a reclusive life in the bungalow while their husbands grappled with the problems of the ‘real’ India beyond the sheltered precincts of Anglo-Indian domesticity. The result of this heightened contrast between feminine ‘decorative seclusion’ and masculine ‘vigorous activity’ in the empire was, in Thomas Metcalf’s analysis, to ‘reinforc[e] the distinctions between home and the world, and between the private and the public, which lay at the 4 heart of the British domestic ideology’. The reality of the Anglo-Indian home, however, differed markedly in both its practical and symbolic manifestations from this segregated domestic space. The trope of two irreconcilably separate spheres of ‘the home’ and ‘the world’ is inapposite to Anglo-India, where the public and the private merged seamlessly at the juncture of the home. Indeed, in many respects, the essential idea of a private sphere had disappeared. In an imperial society where almost every facet of domestic life was [ 57 ]

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imbued with practical and/or symbolic import for the Raj, ‘private’ life was on permanent display, the home was an arena for political discussion and administrative action, and civil society itself was identified with that limited cadre of people who could appropriately be invited into the Anglo-Indian home. This reconceptualization of the home placed Anglo-Indian domestic space at the centre of imperial politics. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, the altered nature of the imperial household affected women’s place both within the home and beyond, in the realm of imperial politics. In the Raj, women and the feminine continued to be associated with the home; however, domestic space also – and, therefore, women – was part of the public world of empire. Occupations and concerns that in Britain often bound women to the home were less demanding and of less importance in India. For example, in late nineteenth-century Britain, childcare was becoming a science and childrearing a veritable career that could consume all the spare time of conscientious middle-class mothers. After the slaughter of the First World War, childcare experts urged women not only to replenish the population but also to devote their maternal efforts to raising a eugenically fit stock of healthy, intelligent youth. In India, however, the plenitude of servants reduced the amount of time women personally spent caring for their children and, hence, the time confined to the home.5 Anglo-Indian children generally attended school in Britain from around the age of 8, while their mothers remained in India. Thus, although paying lip-service to the sanctity of motherhood, most AngloIndian women were not tied to their homes by childcare responsibilities. In Britain, wives traditionally acted as social gatekeepers of the home, expending much energy in determining who would gain admittance to the domestic sanctum and who would be ostracized.6 In India, however, status as an Anglo-Indian official automatically conferred entrée to imperial society. The Raj had, to a great extent, taken on the burden of social vetting, thus decreasing the amount of time women devoted to social investigation and ingratiation. The government published the pay and precedential ranking of civil servants and army officers in The Civil and Military Gazette. Such matters were also freely discussed: ‘everybody apparently knows everybody else’s post and pay, and frank allusions are made to both upon all occasions’.7 Indeed, although the rigid system of precedence in the Anglo-Indian community was often ridiculed, British society in India was, in many ways, more open than it was ‘back home’ – or, at least, it was based on more transparent criteria of inclusion and exclusion. As David Potter has argued, the ICS and, to a lesser extent, the other imperial services [ 58 ]

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fostered a professional identity rooted in the gentlemanly ethic of service, to which even those of humble origins could aspire.8 Those who embraced this ethic and its attendant social rituals were included in the social life of the community. The simple act of leaving a calling card, for example, opened the homes of their fellow imperial officials to newlyarrived officers and their wives. The wife of the commissioner of police in Calcutta, for each season during the 1920s, received cards from 600 to 700 people, with most of whom she was unacquainted; yet, because of their official positions in the Raj, all of these warranted a dinner invitation.9 In India, therefore, the home was not primarily an instrument of social evaluation and exclusion but was rather a vehicle for the inclusion and integration of the official Anglo-Indian community. Access to the imperial home was based on imperial dictates rather than personal whim. A woman’s obligation, accordingly, was to open her home to those bearing the government’s imprimatur. The Raj drafted home and housewife into the professional service of empire and subordinated the private functions of domesticity to the public demands of imperialism. Because the home provided an important locus for both professional and social events, the line distinguishing those two types of activity was blurred. The seat of imperial power in a province was often called ‘Government House’, while in many of the princely states it was the ‘Residency’, and in military cantonments, the general’s home was known as ‘Flagstaff House’, thus conflating domesticity and imperial rule. Many houses had to be adaptable to both professional and personal needs because, for their inhabitants, home and 10 office occupied the same space. In India, a government official would receive petitioners on the bungalow’s verandah. Particularly in rural areas, his office might be in his home; and, even if it were in a separate location, he almost always worked close enough to return home for a leisurely luncheon with his wife. In the army, of course, the military family lived with officers and men of the regiment in cantonments at the heart of peacetime military activity. Many officials brought work home, reviewing files in the early morning and late into the evening. One couple even had a ‘letter box’ emptying directly into their bedroom, thus allowing the husband, an official of the Indian State Railways, to receive 11 emergency communications at night. The home provided no escape from constant reminders of imperial business. The home was, of course, also the setting for private entertaining, but even these ostensibly non-official uses of domestic space served to link domesticity with empire. Such functions were invariably connected with the business of empire rather than with purely personal socializing. For wives, in particular, who lacked an official forum to voice their opinions on pressing political issues, such social functions permitted [ 59 ]

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participation in imperial discourse. Anglo-Indians were notorious for ‘talking shop’ at social functions (persuading many visitors from Britain to label them unbearable bores), and women, of course, participated in such discussions. Because of the numeric imbalance between the sexes, women would often be vastly outnumbered by men at social functions (and, on occasion, a woman would find herself in otherwise all-male company), so that a good hostess would feel compelled to discuss with her male guests the important imperial questions of the day.12 AngloIndians thus viewed and used their homes not as bastions of privacy and domesticity but rather as branch offices in the business of empire. Houses – the physical structures that served as ‘home’ – played important symbolic roles for the empire. They provided a sense of the history and continuity of the Raj, especially important in a country where many prominent buildings and monuments dated from previous regimes.13 The ruins of the Residency in Lucknow, where Anglo-Indian men, women and children had withstood a siege for several months during the 1857 rebellion, ranked with Delhi and the Taj Mahal as a favorite Anglo-Indian tourist destination. Even ordinary homes, however, stood as witnesses to the critical linkage between domestic life and imperial fortunes. When her husband’s regiment was stationed in Meerut during the interwar years, Iris Portal recalled, they ‘occupied the lines which had housed the original mutineers and some of the officers’ bungalows had plaques on their gates stating that “here lived Captain and Mrs. So-and-so who were murdered with their three children, May 10th 1857”’. To Portal, generally sympathetic to Indian nationalist aspirations, the markers were ‘rather tactless’.14 For most Anglo-Indians, however, such memorials could only emphasize the intertwined fates of empire and domestic life. Domestic space also became an arena for contestation and confrontation between the colonized peoples and their rulers. Because of restrictions on purchasing real property in India and the impracticability of owning a residence when job transfers were frequent, many AngloIndians rented their homes from Indian landlords. In India, the normal minor annoyances of running a household could escalate to imperial dimensions. During the Second World War, for example, one woman ‘endure[d] a long tirade’ from her Indian landlord whenever he came to collect the rent, ‘about how bad we were at fighting wars and why did we not beat the Germans and the Japs. He thought it would be better if the Japs won “for then we could co-operate [sic]”. I said very probably but 15 they would not pay rent for his house but would take it.’ Cajoling, coercing or conniving to get a landlord to perform repairs was not simply a victory for the tenant, but a demonstration of the cleverness and [ 60 ]

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determination of the British imperial rulers. Indian landlords who resisted such tactics were labelled ‘nationalists’ (rather than savvy businessmen, as may well have been closer to the truth).16 Like other imperialists, Anglo-Indians attempted to establish clear, decisive and uncontested borders to set themselves apart from the colonized ‘others’ over whom they ruled. These attempts at demarcation were played out in many arenas – racial, legal, cultural, personal – and, despite the best efforts of the imperialists, were continually subject to renegotiation.17 One tacit assumption about this process of constructing and safeguarding an imperialist community has been that the British in the empire – and British women in particular – would naturally cling tenaciously to British customs and a narrow vision of ‘Britishness’. The much-retailed anecdotes of British imperialists wearing evening dress for dinner even in the ‘wilds’ of the colonial jungle and, conversely, the Europeans’ well-entrenched horror of ‘going native’, seem to confirm this vision of the empire as those parts of a foreign land that would be forever England. In India, however, the realities of Anglo-Indian life were much more complex than this model of an unyieldingly monolithic British imperial culture implies. In fact, Anglo-Indian culture was, as its name suggests, a hybrid of the British and the Asian. Qui hais, as old India hands were known after the phrase used to summon a servant, liberally sprinkled their conversations with Hindi phrases and their drawingrooms with Indian decorative objects. By the twentieth century, many Anglo-Indians were aficionados of Indian art, dance and music. In creating a home in the empire, therefore, Anglo-Indians did not, nor did they intend to, faithfully recreate metropolitan British 18 domesticity. Such an undertaking would have been not only impossible in physical and cultural terms, but actually antithetical to imperial needs. In general, Anglo-Indians did not exchange a traditional European lifestyle for indigenous customs; rather, they adopted and adapted Indian stratagems for dealing with the demands of a climate and geographic situation very different from that of Britain, while maintaining certain hallmarks of European domesticity which, they believed, distinguished the Anglo-Indian home from the Indian dwelling. Materially and symbolically, the British household in India was truly an Anglo-Indian space, incorporating various elements of European and Indian cultures to create a domestic environment that could uphold the imperial ethos and facilitate the business of empire in a physical and ideological environment vastly different from that of Great Britain. Physically, the Anglo-Indian home was distinguished from both prosperous Indian dwellings and the typical middle-class home in Britain. In almost every region inhabited by the British, from the major [ 61 ]

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urban areas such as Calcutta and Bombay, through the larger civil headquarters and military garrisons, to the smallest upcountry outposts, Anglo-Indians lived apart from Indians. In large cities, Anglo-Indians might settle into European-style hotels or rented flats or, for the more affluent, houses located in separate compounds. After the First World War, apartment living became more common as blocks of flats were built for Anglo-Indians in the larger cities.19 In the larger stations, separate civil lines for civilian officials and their families and cantonments for military personnel had grown up. Even in the ‘sleepy hollow’ described by one civilian’s wife, Anglo-Indians usually lived in close proximity to the cluster of bungalows comprising the public buildings such as the district treasury, police station, jail and hospital.20 Anglo-Indians even developed separate European holiday retreats in the mountainous regions of the subcontinent.21 Anglo-Indian perceptions of Indian and European homes emphasized both the differences between the two ‘races’ and the similarities within each ethnic group. Anglo-Indians typically described the ‘native quarter’ as a walled area, enclosing a mass of narrow, winding streets peopled by a swarming mass of filthy natives, including a generous sprinkling of beggars, lepers, cripples and other ‘grotesques’.22 The façades of the closely packed houses revealed little of the lives of their residents, especially the mysterious zenana women who lived in secluded quarters. Anglo-Indians represented Indian dwellings as inherently insalubrious and their inhabitants as sickly. Indian women, in particular, entombed in and defined by this noxious domestic environment, were perceived as the weak and pallid counterparts of robust Anglo-Indian women who throve on an active and sporting lifestyle unrestricted by the narrow confines of the home. Most Europeans, particularly women, avoided prolonged excursions to the Indian area of town.23 Set in opposition to this squalid Indian environment was the almost paradisical world of the British cantonments and civil lines. In contrast to the ‘noisy Burmese city smells and dirt’, for example, one woman described the British section of Mandalay as ‘a different world, a parklike [sic] world of trees and grass, neat gardens, city roads crossing each other at right angles, European bungalows, each with its garden of 24 flowers’. The defining feature of this orderly retreat from the chaotic native quarter was the Anglo-Indian home, typified by the bungalow.25 In reality, of course, not all Anglo-Indians lived in bungalows. The houses of the British in India varied greatly, representing differences in building materials, age, current and former uses, climate and local peculiarities. Anglo-Indian homes ranged from faux Swiss chalets at Simla, to houseboats rented by vacationing officials in Kashmir, to houses built on stilts in Burma. Despite this variety, both residents and [ 62 ]

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visitors emphasized the essential identity of Anglo-Indian dwellings: ‘but for the different names painted in white characters on the gate of every compound our visits might have been paid to the same bungalow, so alike are they one to the other’.26 This insistence on the identity among Anglo-Indian homes, in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, underscored the desire for cultural and ideological unity and uniformity among the imperial community. The residents themselves might be ‘birds of passage’, but Anglo-Indian residences stood as a testament to the continuity and cohesiveness of the empire.27 The Anglo-Indian home differed greatly from the supposedly cramped and squalid Indian residence. In design, the bungalow was ‘so crude in its architecture that it could have been dreamed up by a child, by someone utterly uneducated’.28 It was usually a single-storey box raised a few feet off the ground and surrounded by a wide verandah punctuated by supporting pillars. ‘There was nothing very cosy about an Indian bungalow ... The floors were all concrete, the plastered wall white washed and the lofty ceilings were white washed brick supported by steel girders.’29 Rooms opened into each other, with access to the verandah as well. ‘There were doors everywhere, all the way round; instead of windows there were doors like French windows all round the house.’30 Interior doorways might have cloth curtains to separate rooms without impeding airflow. Openings to the exterior often lacked glass panes, containing instead bamboo blinds, called chics, which minimized sunlight but permitted ventilation in the bungalow. Kitchen and servants’ quarters were at a remove from the house, so that the bungalow usually contained only bedrooms for family and guests, bathrooms, drawing-room, and dining-room. Although by the twentieth century such ‘typical’ Anglo-Indian bungalows were becoming rare outside the mofussil (up-country), they enshrined for many AngloIndians the glory days of the empire. Living in one of these old bungalows ‘was like stepping back three-quarters of a century, back to the days of the John Company [i.e. the East India Company]’.31 The typical Anglo-Indian bungalow thus presented both the perfect counterbalance to the Indian home and the antithesis of the insular middle-class residence in Britain. The Anglo-Indian dwelling was set in an open compound encircled by grounds (preferably a lawn and garden), rather than in a cramped urban street like its Indian counterpart. Where the prototypical Indian dwelling seemed, to European eyes, both uncomfortable and unhealthy, the Anglo-Indian home incorporated devices for ameliorating the ravages of the climate and for staving off incursions of exotic Indian germs and diseases. The ideal compound would contain a good well, both deep and in good working order – enclosures containing tanks or ponds were to be avoided, for fear of [ 63 ]

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attracting disease-bearing insects.32 Sanitary drainage for kitchen waste was considered essential, and pools of dirty water could not be allowed to collect near the kitchen, or anywhere else in the compound. Most importantly, the Anglo-Indian home was open to public view in even its most ‘private’ recesses. Where the enclosed Indian home was perceived as a breeding ground for moral and physical corruption, the openness of the Anglo-Indian bungalow dispelled any notions of unsanitary living conditions or ethical degeneration. The Anglo-Indian home embodied the ideals of the empire: it was within India, but apart from it; it was open and incorruptible; and it commanded respect from the colonized population. Imperial ends would not be served by slavish fidelity to British ideas of domesticity, however. In India, British women and men had to adapt to circumstances very different from those of the home life they had left behind. Insects, lizards, snakes, rabid animals were all facts of life in India, as was the absence or, where available, the exorbitant cost of many ‘modern conveniences’ introduced into British homes after the First World War. While Anglo-Indian homes were well-staffed with Indian servants, even the most energetic assistants could not compensate for the lack of electricity – common in the mofussil right up to 1947 – and, hence, the absence of refrigeration, electric lighting and air-conditioning. Although for some Anglo-Indians life in India was obviously a case of what couldn’t be cured having to be endured, others readily, even cheerfully, accepted both the positive and negative differences in lifestyle. As one rather surprised ‘Civilian’s Wife’ noted: ‘In England one thinks of lizards with feelings of repulsion and disgust, and it is curious how soon one gets accustomed here to seeing them 33 about the house.’ Of course, the hardships of Anglo-Indian life were apparent only in relation to standards of living back in Britain. For some, such as ordinary British soldiers and their families who had previously lived in wretched married quarters in Britain, the Anglo-Indian bungalow represented a distinct improvement because it was so different from the housing to which they were accustomed in Britain. One such army wife described her bungalow as an ‘absolute palace ... It was so lovely it was 34 another world, another world from England.’ For all classes, however, an attempt to replicate European domestic life would clearly have been foolhardy, promoting not convenience and security but discomfort and danger. The bungalow, for example, although dramatically different from the typical British house, was ideally adapted to the climatic needs of its residents. Thus, when blocks of flats and ‘modern-built’ houses equipped with many improvements and ‘more like an English country bungalow’ were introduced into India after the First World War, the older dwellings nonetheless continued to [ 64 ]

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be the preferred housing for experienced Anglo-Indians.35 While older bungalows were relatively cool in hot weather, modern ones were ‘little furnaces’.36 In undertaking to create and maintain a home in India, Anglo-Indians recognized ‘[t]he aspect of everything is so different from what it is at home’, but they simultaneously acknowledged that ‘there are a dozen reasons why the arrangements should and must be as they are’.37 The design of the Anglo-Indian home, both structural and decorative, also necessitated very different ideas about domesticity. The spacious and airy plan of the typical Anglo-Indian bungalow, structured to maximize coolness and air flow during the hot season, was the antithesis of many British homes, marked by small rooms overflowing with large, ornate furniture and bric-a-brac. Although some bungalows had two storeys, most were built on a single level with very high ceilings, both to allow heat to rise from the living area and to permit the free movement of punkahs, the wide cloth ceiling fans common during the nineteenth century and still found in non-electrified upcountry areas as late as the interwar period. Bungalows were generally quite spacious, but were divided up into just a few oversized rooms. The childhood home in Bengal of the authors Jon and Rumer Godden, for instance, had only six 38 rooms, ‘but each of these was as big as a small ballroom’. The bungalow’s architectural and technological simplicity meant that many of the concerns crucial to the smooth functioning of a British household (and the bane of the British housewife’s daily existence) were irrelevant in India. ‘For here are neither staircases nor passages to keep in order; neither blinds nor sashes to repair; no windows to be cleaned; no gaspipes to leak; no water-pipes to freeze; no boilers to burst; no grates to polish.’39 The open design of the bungalow, combined with Anglo-Indians’ continuing efforts to minimize the effects of the Indian heat, meant that privacy within the home was almost impossible. To maximize airflow, most rooms were outfitted with numerous doors and windows, which usually could not be closed or shuttered, although they generally had curtains or chics to demarcate separate rooms. During the cooler early morning and evening hours, domestic life took place outdoors, either on the verandah or in the garden. Many people even hauled their bedding onto the flat roof of the bungalow to sleep under the protective covering of mosquito netting during the hot months. The compound and the ‘private’ rooms of the bungalow were alike open to all comers, including neighbors, boxwallahs (travelling salesmen), the local inhabitants, and fellow government officials on tour. Fostering an open and inviting aspect to the Anglo-Indian bungalow was part of the imperial design to rule by seeing and being seen. Both in their bungalows and in their tents [ 65 ]

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– the surrogate homes generally employed for inspection tours – imperial officials and their wives opened their homes to visitors, petitioners and informants, even in the most intimate aspects of their lives. The Raj conceived the jobs of its officials to be twenty-four-hour employment. For the Anglo-Indian home to have served as a haven from imperial cares and responsibilities would thus have been a dereliction of duty. Assaults on privacy arose from within the home as well. Servants were, of course, ubiquitous in a household where the absence of ‘modern conveniences’ necessitated a staff of a dozen or so domestics. In nonelectrified bungalows, ‘punkah coolies’ sat outside each room, pulling a string attached to the large cloth fans that provided a breeze in each room and, even in the bedroom, ‘a chintz purdah [curtain] is all that divides you from the punkah coolies in the verandah and the world at 40 large’. The sanctuary of the bedroom itself was often invaded. One woman, who characterized her sleeping chamber as ‘a section of a street with a bed in it’, awakened each morning to find in her room ‘a couple of bearers bringing in lamps and a curious-looking bheestie, or watercarrier, filling my bath from a black buffalo skin; another man bringing hot water, a fourth with chota hazeri, or small breakfast of tea and fruit’.41 Even in fulfilling the most intimate biological functions little privacy was available. Bathrooms were simply and literally rooms with tin baths, with no plumbing, flush toilets or running water. Bathing required the assistance of servants to heat the water, fill the tub and, when the bath was finished, pour off the water onto the floor, allowing it to flow out via a small hole cut for that purpose into the bottom of the wall. One female visitor to India, after noting that the bheestie, or watercarrier, was ‘always hovering in the background, silent and invisible’, nonetheless concluded that Anglo-Indian ablutions worked ‘without a hitch or a plumber’ and that the ubiquitous bheestie was ‘much less disturbing than pipes’.42 Similarly, after using the thunder-box (commode) it was necessary to call the sweeper to empty and clean it. The only concession to European notions of privacy accorded in the Anglo-Indian bungalow was that each bedroom had its own bathroom, and many Anglo-Indians found it difficult to accept the notion of shared facilities upon their return to Britain.43 One woman, proud possessor of a very large bungalow, thus had eight bathrooms in her house, surely unheard of in all but the most elaborate residences in Britain.44 Anglo-Indians’ racially-differentiated ideas about the physical nature of their Indian domestic servants contributed to the perception that privacy could not exist in the imperial home. Anglo-Indians averred that their servants’ dark skin and habit of not wearing shoes allowed them to [ 66 ]

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glide silently in and out of the shadows while attending to their employers’ needs. While such unobtrusive service certainly had many advantages, it could also be disconcerting. ‘It is odd how startled one is at first to perceive a black figure at one’s elbow or outside the windows and doors along the verandah’, noted one recent arrival.45 Some AngloIndians tried to maintain the remnants of a private life by, for example, hiring only non-English speaking servants. Nonetheless, it was an accepted fact of Anglo-Indian domesticity that the most intimate details of one’s life would be bruited about the native bazaar via the servant grapevine. Although Anglo-Indians claimed to be mystified about how such information was transmitted, many Indian servants undoubtedly understood more English than they (or their employers) acknowledged. It is, however, a measure of the inherently self-centered nature of imperialism that most Anglo-Indians were not averse to displaying their private lives for the amusement and edification of the Indians. AngloIndians perceived their home as the setting for an ongoing imperial drama: ‘the extraordinary lives we lead ... unravel themselves like a 46 ceaseless play before the eyes of our dependants’. The openness of the Anglo-Indian home increased the vulnerability of its occupants to theft, assault – or rebellion. While many AngloIndians employed a chowkidar, or watchman, to guard the home, particularly at night, the general consensus among Anglo-Indians was that these sentinels were useless, employed more out of custom or charity than for their protective powers. The inviolability of the AngloIndian home depended not on locks or guards but on Anglo-Indians’ 47 ‘sublime faith’ in the nature of imperial authority. The complete openness of Anglo-Indians’ homes indicated their security as imperial rulers. When Margery Hall, feeling vulnerable in her isolated home with her husband away during the ‘Quit India’ disturbances of 1942, tried to get locks installed on her doors, the Indian workman refused, explaining: ‘Memsahib, I would like you to remember that this house is in British India.’48 The stability of British rule in India was predicated on the belief that none of the colonized peoples would dare trespass on the domestic security of the Raj. As nationalist agitation increased, Hall and other Anglo-Indian women were less willing to rely on respect, rather than locks, to secure their safety, indicating the decline of imperial authority and control. Despite its ideological significance to the Raj, however, this drama (or, occasionally, comedy) of imperial domesticity was played on a stage devoid of elaborate sets and props. The Anglo-Indian domestic aesthetic was spartan. Unlike Europe, where middle-class prosperity and individuality and the emergent consumer society combined to foster the notion of the home as a canvas for the expression of a woman’s unique [ 67 ]

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aesthetic vision, in India such fastidious attention to home decoration would have proved both impossible and counterproductive. Except in the largest cities, there were few stores selling furniture or decorative items, and shopping as a time-consuming, all-engrossing leisure activity was impracticable. Although European consumer goods were increasingly available in India from the late nineteenth century onwards, AngloIndians found that the relative decline in their salaries made many of these products prohibitively expensive. One woman recalled that she and her friends suffered from a ‘disease’ they christened ‘catalogueitis’. The symptoms included a sudden longing for ‘the fleshpots of the civilized world’. The cure was to thumb through various catalogues, making lists of desired articles, although rarely actually purchasing them.49 The unavailability of consumer goods made impossible the kind of ‘vulgar display’ common to many nouveaux riches hostesses in Europe.50 For instance, at large dinner parties (which were a common Anglo-Indian entertainment), the hostess often lacked sufficient china and plate for all her guests, thus necessitating discreet borrowing of dishes and cutlery from her neighbors. Sometimes servants would lend crystal and china to their counterparts in other homes without first securing the memsahib’s approval; many a new arrival, unaware of the tradition of sharing among the Anglo-Indian community, was surprised to behold on her neighbor’s table a soup tureen or dessert dishes that looked suspiciously like her own. (More cautious women had their plate monogrammed to ensure that it would not be ‘misplaced’.) Furniture, too, often migrated from one home to another within a station, since the costs and difficulties of transporting goods within India or home to Britain were prohibitive. Anglo-Indians often rented a houseful of furnishings by the month, returning it to the Indian lessor in the bazaar when they left that town. ‘A table goes through quite an adventurous life out there, and will most likely have passed through 51 most of the cantonment bungalows before it is landed in ours.’ In hill stations, where accommodations were scarce and expensive, a house and all its accoutrements might be shared among several families, and during the housing shortages of both world wars families often doubled-up in their regular postings, as well. With household furnishings thus effectively treated as community property, it was a pointless affectation to devote much attention to home decoration. Anglo-Indian homes were functional, but not necessarily luxurious or even comfortable; the ‘primitiveness’ of the Anglo-Indian lifestyle often surprised newcomers and visitors.52 ‘Fresh from England one still looks for “little comforts”. There are none here, and very soon one ceases to expect ... them.’53 Although high-level officials lived in quasi-regal opulence in [ 68 ]

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government-owned and equipped residences, for the wives of ordinary civil servants and military men the watchwords were practicality and economy. Costs for European furniture, or anything differing from the standard serviceable style, could be prohibitive.54 Young couples, often hard up for money, designed and built their own furniture or simply covered old packing crates with pretty material.55 Anglo-Indians who lived in a town with a prison could buy cheap furniture made by the inmates, but even then one young official calculated that he and his wife could not afford both ‘a larger round of drinks after tennis at the club’ and a chair, which cost about the same amount.56 Many wives adopted the expedient of renting furniture upon their arrival at a new station, which for a small bungalow before the First World War would cost Rs 15–25 per month (roughly £1), significantly more thereafter. Little luxuries, commonplace in prosperous British homes and European residences in the largest Indian cities, created a stir in the Indian mofussil. One man, as an ‘act of devotion’ to his wife, imported an English porcelain bathtub to replace the cramped uncomfortable tin tub that was a standard fixture in Anglo-Indian homes. Once installed, the bath attracted a number of envious and admiring visitors, one of whom wistfully remarked to the lucky wife: ‘He [her husband] must love 57 you very much. For those whose husbands were not so attentive, such comforts could be enjoyed only on trips ‘home’, excursions to the city or during holidays at plush hill-station hotels. A wife who sought her identity in the physical presentation of her home, or who searched there for fulfilment or merely a pastime in decorating would be sorely disappointed. While this ascetic regime might be taken to exemplify Anglo-Indians’ seriousness of purpose and singular devotion to the empire, there were also eminently practical reasons to shun elaborate decorations, over and above excessive cost and lack of availability. Because Anglo-Indian bungalows merged seamlessly into the surrounding environment they provided a welcome shelter not just for travellers and boxwallahs, but for insects and animals, some harmless if unpleasant, others potentially lethal. Thus, walls were never papered, but simply whitewashed, to prevent insects from taking up residence beneath the paper. Housewives avoided carpet and drapery, which could harbour poisonous snakes and scorpions, and instead covered their floors with rush matting and their 58 windows with blinds. Insects and the climate posed even greater threats to prized domestic possessions. Bugs of varying appetites ate their way through wood furniture, destroyed clothing and stripped the glue from book bindings. They established residence in places as varied as the inside of a piano or the evening’s soup. The hot, humid climate common to many areas of [ 69 ]

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India caused clothing to rot, even when stored in sealed containers, and glued furniture to come apart. Conversely, during the dry season, wooden furniture would crack. Ethel Savi, a popular novelist of AngloIndian life, commented that, living among these plagues of animal and insect infestation, ‘we acquired Spartan nerves’.59 What Anglo-Indians did not acquire, however, were expensive and elaborate household furnishings. The structure of the civil services and the armed forces also militated against possession of an extensive household set-up. Rather than advancing within one district, a young civil servant would be transferred from station to station as his career progressed. Military officers, too, were frequently transferred along with their regiments. One woman and her family moved twenty-four times during ten years in 60 India. Thus, the government placed a premium on mobility. In the nineteenth century, the ideal district officer’s ‘whole establishment consisted of a camp bed, an odd table chair or so and a small box of clothes such as could be slung on a camel’.61 By the twentieth century, the reality, of course, was quite different. Most mid-level and senior officials were married and owned more than the bare minimum of household articles. However, while the public works department packed and stored furniture for important personages such as provincial governors, it was left to the wives of lesser officials to ensure that transfers could be accomplished quickly and efficiently. Their unofficial motto was ‘Pay, pack and follow’. Old India hands advised memsahibs always to be prepared for imminent transfers. They should keep a list of all their possessions, so that household goods could be packed and 62 unpacked rapidly. Transportation was difficult. Human porters and animals, not removal vans, carried household effects on bumpy roads, over treacherous mountains, and across swift-moving rivers. The common wisdom was that ‘two moves is as good as a fire’ for devastating one’s worldly possessions.63 Thus, large and heavy items, fragile objects and valuable goods were all to be avoided.64 If a couple had sufficient capital, they could purchase rather than rent their furniture. Furnishing a small bungalow required the outlay of about Rs 1, 000 before the First World War.65 Despite complaints about increases in the cost of living, in 1938 the price of acquiring ‘a fairly complete inventory of locally-made furniture and carpets’ in Madras was £65, about the same.66 A large market in used furniture throve among the European community in India. Upon receiving a transfer notification, a woman drew up a list of the furniture and household goods she wanted to sell and circulated it among the other British residents of the community. Often the list included the price originally paid for each item. Her fellow Anglo-Indians then submitted bids for the [ 70 ]

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desired pieces. An officer relieving a colleague would often simplify matters for both parties by purchasing all of his predecessor’s household effects.67 The accelerating Indianization of the imperial services after the First World War challenged the concept of a uniquely Anglo-Indian home as emblematic of imperial domesticity. As ranking civil servants and the military officers of the Raj, Indians too, could now claim a residence that was not only situated in the European quarter but that also embodied the values of the empire they served. Just as Anglo-Indians expressed hostility towards the expanding role of Indians in imperial politics and administration, so too did many Anglo-Indians resent this Indian encroachment upon imperial domesticity. British observers often ridiculed Indians who incorporated elements of Western dress in their attire or who furnished their homes in European style. Although Indian candidates for the ICS were sent to a British university for one or two years, with the intent, as the India Office noted, ‘that they may be, to put it crudely, to some extent Europeanised’, these so-called ‘brown 68 sahibs’ were never expected to abandon their Indian identities. For many Anglo-Indians, the demise of the Raj and the breakdown of barriers segregating Anglo-Indian from Indian home life were linked. While Anglo-Indians could do little to thwart Indian officials’ occupation of government residences, they nonetheless strove to maintain the ideological distinctions separating Anglo-Indian from Indian. In particular, Anglo-Indians criticized aspects of Indian domestic hygiene, describing the homes of Indian officials as dirty and disorderly. Anglo-Indians were particularly offended at taking over official bungalows – those assigned to the incumbent of a particular position in the imperial services – from an Indian predecessor. Moving into a bungalow that had not been occupied by a European for several years was enough to evoke ‘utter horror’ in the wife of one Anglo-Indian police 69 officer. Another claimed that, to render it habitable by Europeans, a four-month old house had to be ‘completely redecorated’ after its Indian occupants departed, because it ‘was filthy’.70 Moreover, Anglo-Indians criticized Indian imperial officials for their apparent failure to comprehend the correct functioning and arrangement of the imperial home. One British official believed that his bath tub ‘had been used’ – by the previous resident, an Indian officer – ‘to receive something other than bath-water’; he repoured the cement in the room to render it suitably hygienic. A friend, hearing his tale, countered, ‘That’s nothing. When I took over I found that old so-and-so had been using the best bedroom as a cow-stall and his women had lit cooking fires all down 71 the main passage. I had to have the whole place done up again.’ AngloIndian tales about Indians’ purported innate filthiness reinforced, of [ 71 ]

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course, many of the stereotypes associated by the British with Indians and, indeed, almost all colonized ‘others’. When levelled against Indian imperial officials, however, such slurs served a political purpose, in addition to reinforcing race-based ideas of difference. To Anglo-Indians, Indians’ inability to order their homes indicated not only the partial and superficial nature of their Anglicization but their inability to order, and hence to govern, their greater national home, India. Anglo-Indians also believed Indianization of the imperial services had upset the delicate economic balance of the imperial household. One woman, whose newlywed daughter and son-in-law moved into a bungalow previously occupied by an Indian official, expressed dismay that he had taken all the furniture with him and left the house ‘in a condition of less than western cleanliness’. She explained the myriad practical and financial problems such uncollegial behavior engendered for British officials and their wives: In the old days (our days) when an officer was transferred he took over the house and basic furniture of his predecessor. It might not be his heart’s desire in the way of furniture but it was at anyrate [sic] a bed to sleep in, a chair to sit on, and a table to eat at; but an Indian officer occupying the job, naturally furnished his house in a manner suitable to his habit of life and took his household necessities with him when he moved. That meant that the European officer with his more complicated necessities had to carry his furniture about with him too, which made a move a great deal more complicated and expensive than it had been in our day, especially as no further provision had been made for the extra expense incurred. It came particularly hard on the young officials who all had to move constantly at one stage of their service.72

While generally circumspect in criticizing the ordained policy of Indianization, Anglo-Indians’ discontent with these apparently trivial domestic matters, like their contempt for Indian household hygiene, allowed Anglo-Indians to vent their hostility towards Indians, Indianization and the looming spectre of self-government in India. If Indians were ‘not our kind’ with respect to these insignificant matters, then how could they be entrusted to carry on British imperial traditions in governing India? This concern about Indian encroachments on Anglo-Indian domestic space reflected the fact that the Anglo-Indian home was, of necessity, less a private residence than it was hotel, restaurant, office and community centre rolled into one. One of the most important ways in which Anglo-Indians integrated home and empire was in deploying their households as substitutes for these absent public institutions. Public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants were rarely found 73 outside the larger cities or hill stations. The quality of food, service and [ 72 ]

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furnishings in such facilities was often unacceptable. Although even the smallest stations generally boasted a ‘club’, where the Anglo-Indian community could congregate for tennis, dances, drinks and gossip, it was the common consensus that the club was an inappropriate venue for discussion of official imperial business. This was even more the case as many clubs opened their membership to Indians (either voluntarily or under governmental duress), whose political sympathies were often suspect, even if they were imperial officials. By organizing the home for diverse public uses, Anglo-Indians, particularly Anglo-Indian wives, performed several important functions for the government, at no cost to the public treasury. At the upper reaches of the imperial hierarchy, the residences of viceroy and governors were not unlike resort hotels, providing guests with a programme of meal times and a list of the daily events from which visitors selected their activities.74 One of the most important duties for the wife of an ordinary official, similarly, was to create a home that could easily accommodate guests and visitors. Every wife held herself ‘responsible for the comfort of every stranger, official or nonofficial, who enters [her home]. Who they are and what they are is a matter of quite secondary importance: they must be looked after in any case.’75 Guests, who might be friends, acquaintances or complete strangers, would pop up in a compound at the end of a long day’s march, expecting the resident Anglo-Indians to feed and house them in an appropriate manner.76 Thus, the imperial home was, to a great extent, communal property. A woman’s job was to facilitate this public domesticity. A wife’s home was not a private retreat for her and her family; the memsahib must ‘accept the fact that her house, and all that therein is, belongs, in a large measure, to her neighbour also’.77 Although bachelor officials were also expected to extend hospitality to their fellow Anglo-Indians when necessary, the lion’s share of entertaining fell on married couples, perhaps because they maintained larger and more comfortable households, or perhaps because ‘those who are misguided enough to marry can do no less, by way of reparation, than keep open house for their wiser brethren’.78 The introduction of Indian officials into imperial society strained the apparently open-handed hospitality of Anglo-Indians. While some AngloIndian officials denied that racial distinctions were important – or even that they existed – many others were quick to point out the difficulties of compulsory socialization between these diverse groups. How could one dine, for instance, with a person who observed complex dietary practices or whose spouse, in purdah, refused to socialize on equal terms? While some Anglo-Indians tried to accommodate their Indian colleagues by, for example, preparing special vegetarian meals for [ 73 ]

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observant Hindus, others simply blamed Indians for disrupting wellestablished patterns of sociability. Despite this potential for creating awkward situations, the Raj nonetheless encouraged free socializing among its European and Indian officials, because the Anglo-Indian ethos of unquestioning hospitality saved the government a great deal of money and bother. The government could dispatch its civilian and military officials across a widespread area without investing in capital improvements, such as hostels and provisioning stations, to accommodate those officials.79 During the Second World War, when the wartime influx of military and civilian personnel exceeded the supply of European housing, imperial officials were expected to open their homes on a long-term basis to these strangers, sometimes as ‘paying guests’, sometimes gratis. The onus of these governmental economies fell on Anglo-Indian wives, who were generally responsible for balancing the household accounts. Although travellers often tried to minimize the financial burden imposed by their unexpected arrival by carrying their own bedding, linens and tents (in case the bungalow were already filled), and by bringing their own servants to wait on them at meals and provide personal services, it is clear that the flow of visitors often stretched the limits of the AngloIndian household budget. One woman who had been delegated, along with the other ICS wives in her station, to put up visitors for a cricket match complained: ‘As there are only 5 of us it comes rather heavy to 80 provide for 100 people.’ The compulsion to provide general, yet economical, hospitality meant that in India many of women’s traditional domestic activities acquired new, more public, significance. In India, as in Britain, gardening was a popular activity. (In the empire, however, the need to uphold imperial prestige meant that ‘when I speak of doing a thing in the garden myself, it merely means I sit, or stand, and see it done. In this land no 81 one does any gardening personally.’ ) While Anglo-Indians frequently used their gardens for outdoor dining and entertaining, and also grew flowers to adorn the interior of the home, gardening had more practical applications. Given the constant influx of visitors, a vegetable garden provided an economical way to feed these multitudes of guests and to vary limited supplies of Indian vegetables with European varieties. Setting up and planting a garden was often a truly public-spirited activity. Often, just as wives were about to reap, literally, the benefits of their labours, they would be transferred to a new location. While some women thus found gardening frustrating and unrewarding, most considered it part of their duty to the greater Anglo-Indian community to 82 leave behind a nice garden. Not surprisingly, Anglo-Indians assumed that their Indian successors would fail in this, as in other aspects of [ 74 ]

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imperial domesticity. ‘What would happen to my beloved garden?’ wailed one dedicated botanist upon learning that an Indian official was to move into her home.83 Particularly in the nineteenth century, many Anglo-Indians raised their own livestock to ensure fresh, cheap and ample supplies of milk, meat and eggs. Wives often supervised a veritable household menagerie, which might include buffalo, cows, goats, rabbits and a variety of poultry. Several European families in a station would ‘club’ together to share the expenses and benefits of these livestock ventures. Since few Anglo-Indian families could, for example, consume an entire sheep before it spoiled, several households would contribute to the expenses of raising a flock and then apportion the various cuts of meat as each animal was slaughtered. The wife who headed up such a mutton club was, effectively, running a small business from the home. She had to ensure that costs did not exceed subscriptions paid to the ‘club’, oversee the feeding, care, and health of the livestock, and distribute meat to the club members in an equitable fashion. Far from allowing a wife to retreat into domestic solitude, the ‘club’ system compelled her to engage in serious commercial dealings with her fellow Anglo-Indians, and with Indians, too. The club system might be extended to other food products, 84 including dairy and bread, thus complicating a wife’s life even further. Thus, the Anglo-Indian home was both colonized and commercialized by the needs of empire The open-door policy of the Anglo-Indian household served governmental purposes beyond simple financial savings. It was in the interests of the government, like any employer, to ensure that the morale of its officials remained high, so that they would perform their tasks cheerfully and efficiently. The knowledge that a comfortable bed, a good meal and a welcoming presence were available down the road undoubtedly buoyed the spirits of many a touring official, as well as relieving the loneliness of his hosts. It was the wife’s job to ensure that her household not only was always prepared to meet the physical needs of the unexpected European guest but provided the necessary spiritual rejuvenation for an overworked official. One gardening primer recommended, for example, that every memsahib install a lawn in her compound. In addition to creating a welcoming aspect to the house and a site for games and socializing, lawns ‘are the symbol of peaceful contentment, and a relaxation to the body and mind after the stress of 85 official or other duties’. In the Indian imperial context, however, greater stakes were at issue than merely relieving stress. The friendly and welcoming attitude of the Anglo-Indian home also encompassed a more sinister aspect, by encouraging mutual surveillance by hosts and visitors. It was common [ 75 ]

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practice in many upcountry districts for a neophyte civilian officer to live with his superior officer and his wife, thus to be trained and observed in his personal as well as his professional habits. As the services became progressively Indianized, senior Anglo-Indian officials generally extended this courtesy to their Indian and British subordinates alike. In the case of young Indian officials (and perhaps also British officers of humbler origins), the training was as much in the social conventions of Anglo-India as in the professional and technical requirements of the position. One young Indian officer, for example, was publicly reprimanded by his superior when he attempted to follow the ladies out of the dining room at the end of a formal dinner rather than remaining to smoke and drink with the men.86 Government also worried about the well-being of isolated officials. Shortly after the First World War, the wife of a civilian official in the remote Lushai hills recalled: [A]n order had come down from high places that that [sic] every district officer was to see his European subordinates as often as possible. Some unfortunate things had happened in lonely outposts, where young men had suffered both in mental and physical health from the utter loneliness, lack of companionship and civilised amenities, and even adequate medical help. I enthusiastically, and I hope tactfully, watched over the health and welfare of our young bachelors.87

Although the governmental directive had been officially addressed to the district officer – he being the only authority the Raj acknowledged – his wife immediately recognized that this message was directed primarily at her. Because the government was unable to monitor all its functionaries, it successfully delegated the task to a vigilant, efficient, willing (and unpaid) corps of observant wives. The widespread availability of the quasi-European cuisine, furnishings and social activities facilitated by Anglo-Indian women minimized the temptation to ‘go native’. The government thus gained some assurance that its officials would be shielded from the supposed lure of the exotic Indian lifestyle, thanks to women’s efforts to provide an attractive alternative. The heightened intimate sociability of Anglo-Indian life also ensured that few could stray from the expected norms of behaviour and lifestyle without being observed and, perhaps, reported to the appropriate officials, or at least set back on the straight-and-narrow path. The Anglo-Indian home was defined not by its physical structure, location or decorative accessories, but rather by the practical and symbolic work for empire conducted within its precincts. The AngloIndian bungalow allowed the public work of empire to permeate the private world of domesticity. In the Anglo-Indian home, social occasions [ 76 ]

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became opportunities for discussing and formulating imperial policy. Personal interactions within the home allowed the colonized peoples to observe the rulers and the rulers to observe each other. The openness of the Anglo-Indian home symbolized Britain’s confidence in its imperial authority. Perhaps most importantly, at a time when Indians were successfully claiming greater political power and authority in the subcontinent, the values of the Anglo-Indian home were the values of the Raj as well. Anglo-Indians represented the domestic space of the bungalow as an orderly, healthful and open counterpoint to a chaotic, noxious and secretive Indian domesticity. Anglo-Indian women’s connection with the domestic sphere was not a mechanism for secluding them from the world but, rather, for integrating them into the symbolic and functional practices of imperialism in India.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12

F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 7th edn (London, 1909), 9. Perhaps the best-known of Anglo-Indian cookbooks, this text was first published in 1888 and went through ten editions. It was popular among Anglo-Indians through to the end of the Raj. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, 1991). John Tosh and Ronald Hyam, however, have interpreted both the empire and imperial masculinity as rejections of this domestic idyll, implicitly also negating the historical role of domesticity and femininity in the construction of empire. See John Tosh, ‘Imperial Masculinity and the Flight from Domesticity in Britain 1880–1914’, in Timothy P. Foley et al. (eds), Gender and Colonialism. (Galway, 1995), 72–85; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990). Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994), 109, 94. Patricia Grimshaw argues that in nineteenth-century Hawaii American missionary women who did not employ servants for child care were unable actively to work at missionary endeavours because of the constraints imposed on their time and energy by the demands of caring for their children. Patricia Grimshaw, ‘“Christian Woman, Pious Wife, Faithful Mother, Devoted Missionary”: Conflicts in Roles of American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii’, Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 489–521. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London, 1973). Anne Campbell Wilson, Letters from India (Edinburgh, 1911), 48. David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986). K. Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart: Memoir of an Indian Police Officer’, 185, British Library. Interestingly, it was not always apparent which of the two spheres took precedence. Officers were advised that high-ranking Indian and British officials should be received in the drawing-room but were warned: ‘if you are a married man and the drawing room is not at your disposal ... any other suitable furnished room that may be available’ would suffice. Manual on Indian Etiquette for the Use of European Officers Coming to India (Allahabad, 1910), 2. Edith Dixon, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Novels by women authors who had themselves been part of the ‘official’ British community in India often included at least one dinner party scene in which a female character discourses knowledgeably on politics and imperial policy. See e.g. Mrs Kenneth Combe,

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13

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14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Cecilia Kirkham’s Son (Edinburgh, 1909), 41; Maud Diver, Ships of Youth: A Study of Marriage in Modern India (London, 1931), 154. On the imperial uses of architecture see Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley, CA, 1989); Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660–1947 (London, 1985); Jan Morris, with Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire (Oxford, 1983). Iris Portal, ‘Memoir’, 59, Portal Papers, University of Cambridge. Decima Curtis, ‘The Last Twelve Years of the British Raj Recollected by the Wife of a British District Officer’, 51, British Library. 88See e.g. Diver, Ships of Youth, 154. Ann L. Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities in Sumatra and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 31 (1989). The exception to this may have been British planters and their families who, unlike imperial officials, settled into one home for a number of years. Wives of British imperial officials often commented on the ‘Englishness’ of planters’ residences, so unlike their own hybrid domestic life. See e.g. Christian Showers Stirling, ‘Notes on Her Life’, 95, British Library. Kate Platt, The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies (New York, 1923), 16– 17. Anne Campbell Wilson, After Five Years in India; or Life and Work in a Punjaub District (London, 1894), 13–15. For a provocative analysis of the rise and fall of the hill stations, see Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, CA, 1996). Platt, Home and Health, 29 In Burmese Days, for example, Elizabeth, a visiting Englishwoman, feels that Flory’s attempts to take her to the bazaar and other places frequented by the ‘natives’ were ‘all wrong, somehow’. George Orwell, Burmese Days (New York, 1964), 126. Rosemary Schofield, ‘Mandalay’, British Library. See Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London, 1976), for a history of the bungalow worldwide. Norah Rowan Hamilton, Through Wonderful India and Beyond (London, 1915), 35. Yvonne Fitzroy, Courts and Camps in India: Impressions of Viceregal Tours, 1921–1924 (London, 1926), 191. Amy Smith, ‘The India I Knew’, Smith Papers, British Library. Mary Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers: Dhanbad 1925–1927’, British Library. Smith, ‘The India I Knew’. Amy Smith, Untitled, Smith Papers, British Library Mrs Eliot James, A Guide to Indian Household Management (London, nd), 35; Platt, Home and Health, 21. E.A. King, Diary of a Civilian’s Wife in India 1877–82 (London, 1884), vol. 2: 153. Elizabeth Harrington, Interview (tape recording), The British Army in India, Imperial War Museum. Platt, Home and Health, 18. Lady Dring, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Wilson, Letters from India, 48. Jon Godden and Rumer Godden, Two Under the Indian Sun (New York, 1966), 39. Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India (Edinburgh, 1909), 62. King, Diary, vol. 2: 104. Constance Gordon Cumming, In the Himalayas and on the Indian Plains (London, 1884), 15. Lady Lowther, Land of the Gold Mohur (London, 1932), 201. See e.g. Portal, ‘Memoir’, 13. Katherine Smith-Pearse, Interview (transcript), British Library.

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HOME IS WHERE THE EMPIRE IS 45 46 47 48

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49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

76

Lowther, Land of the Gold Mohur, 14–15. Edith H. Cuthell, My Garden in the City of Gardens (London, 1905), 89. Lowther, Land of the Gold Mohur, 15. Margery Hall, ‘And the Nights Were More Terrible than the Days’, 17, Hall Papers, University of Cambridge. Ruby K. Gray, British Library. Margaret Morison, A Lonely Summer in Kashmir (London, 1904), 91. James, Guide, 28. Caroline Sinnickson to her father, 18 April 1909, An Enchanted Journey: The Letters of the Philadelphian Wife of a British Officer of the Indian Cavalry, ed. Alan Jones (Edinburgh, 1994), 80. Norah Rowan Hamilton, Through Wonderful India and Beyond (London, 1915), 20. Platt, Home and Health, 65. See e.g. Mary, Lady Maxwell, ‘Memoirs 1911–1947’, 1, British Library; Colonel Walter Long, ‘In Search of Fun’, 77, 78, British Library. Quoted in Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India 1930–47 (London, 1980), 122. Elinor Tollinton, ‘Memoir’, British Library. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 29; A Lady Resident, The Englishwoman in India (London, 1864), 37. Ethel Savi, My Own Story (London, 1947), 75. Mrs E. Lermit, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (Columbus, MO, 1984), 102. Elizabeth Garrett, Morning Hours in India (London, 1887), 36 Monica Martin, Out in the Mid-Day Sun (Boston, MA, 1950), 55. Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 28. Chota Mem [Mrs C. Lang], The English Bride in India, Being Hints on Indian Housekeeping, 2nd edn (London, 1909), 19. Hunt and Harrison, District Officer, 123. See e.g. ‘J.A.D.’, Notes on an Outfit For India and Hints For the New Arrival (London, 1903), 24. Quoted in Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 116. Martin Wynne (ed.), On Honourable Terms: The Memoirs of Some Indian Police Officers 1915–1948 (London, 1985), 237. Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers’, 4. Ronald Johnston, One Man’s Life’, 127–8, British Library. See also Cyril Grassby, ‘Diary’, 23 February 1936, British Library. Beatrix Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 361–2, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. The government did provide dak (postal) bungalows along many routes frequented by travellers. These provided a room for the night, available on a first-come, first-served basis, and were staffed by a bearer/cook who would provide a meal for the travellers. The accommodations seem to have ranged from the acceptable to the truly awful, and the meal inevitably consisted of tough, stringy chicken, which became one of the standing jokes of Anglo-Indian society. Mrs B.M.D. Lee Warner, Guided Destiny (Norfolk, nd), 161, British Library. Wilson, Letters from India, 55–6. The obligation to act as host also extended to the nonofficial community in India. Ethel Savi, the wife of an indigo planter in Bengal, recalled that she and her husband often fed and lodged government officials on winter tours of the remote district. Savi, My Own Story, 82. Steel and Gardiner warned: ‘Never let a cook run down in his cooking ... [I]nsist on everything being done every day in the same style. Then if a friend comes into dinner unexpectedly, you need have no anxieties. The dinner may be plain, even frugal, but it will be correct, even to the most minute details.’ Steel and Gardiner, Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 72 (emphasis in original).

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80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Diver, Englishwoman, 49. Ibid., 60. Certain branches of the government, such as the Forest Service, whose officials spent virtually all their time touring, did have their own bungalows, strategically located to accommodate touring officials. The Indian State Railways provided special carriages for their officials to live in while inspecting the rail tracks. Margaret Cowie, Letter, 6 October 1921, British Library. Cuthell, My Garden, 163. Mrs R. Temple-Wright, Flowers and Gardens in India: A Manual for Beginners, 7th edn (Calcutta, 1922), 137. Viola Smith, ‘Merely a Memsahib’, 335, British Library; see also, Amy Smith, Untitled. Mrs Temple-Wright urged her readers to build bakehouses in their compounds and to form bread clubs. Mrs R. Temple-Wright, Baker and Cook (Calcutta, 1912). Temple-Wright, Flowers and Gardens, 137. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 107. Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 127–8.

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CHAPTER THREE

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Servants of empire

‘And, oh, it tires me to think of what a lot of housework we had to get through [in Britain] – such slavery! I am afraid I shall never want to retire in England. It would be too much fag.’1 (‘Mrs Hurst’ in Ethel Savi’s Birds of Passage) When I came back to England, oh my Lord, it was terrible. I had lived a different life. I had lived as the colonel’s lady and it was very hard to come back to being ‘Rosie O’Grady.’ In fact, I started at six o’clock in the morning and I finished at nine at night, I was still going it.2 (Mrs Harrington)

The problem with the memsahib, according to her many critics, was that she was both spoiled and lazy. She unashamedly rejected the ‘slavery’ and ‘fag’ of housework and revelled in her status as the ‘colonel’s lady’. Metropolitan visitors to India frequently and disapprovingly noted that Anglo-Indian women were not engaged with the details of household management. Indians, too, were critical of the Anglo-Indian woman’s domestic failures and, in nationalist discourse, pointedly contrasted her with the estimable Indian woman who devoted herself to home and family.3 Indeed, Anglo-Indian women themselves readily admitted that housekeeping was, at best, a peripheral concern in their lives. Far from being preoccupied with domestic responsibilities, as their British sisters were, Anglo-Indian women adopted a ‘slap-dash way of housekeeping’ which even they acknowledged as an ‘unusual life’.4 Many an AngloIndian woman ‘had never boiled an egg in her life’, and some, apparently, ‘did not even know where [their] own kitchen was’.5 Being a British wife in India obviously did not mean being a house wife. But if the AngloIndian woman was not a paragon of domesticity, then what exactly was her role in the home and, by extension, in the empire? Their inability readily to answer this question discomfited metropolitan observers of the Anglo-Indian scene. As Leonore Davidoff has pointed out, ‘housewife’ is a residual classification for women who [ 81 ]

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cannot easily be assigned to any other readily identifiable category such as ‘wage-earner’ or ‘professional’ or ‘volunteer’. Anglo-Indian women’s occupations in the empire, however, did not fit into any of the existing and acceptable categories of feminine activities. Anglo-Indian women disrupted settled expectations about where a woman should find her place in society. Visitors to India chastised the memsahib for her apparent idleness because she was not recognizable as ‘working woman’, ‘philanthropic woman’ or, most damning of all, ‘domestic woman’. The Raj itself made many attempts, both explicit and covert, to essentialize Anglo-Indian women as housewives. In the 1881 Census of India, officials rejected returns in which women reported their occupation as being the same as their husband’s, reclassifying these women, instead, as housewives.6 Even during the Second World War, when the government expected women to assist in the war effort, the Raj still assumed that a woman’s primary occupation would be domestic. A ‘Form of Particulars’ to be completed by Anglo-Indian women asked ‘Do you or have you done over the past two years any work other than housekeeping?’, thus assuming that a woman would naturally be responsible for household duties, whatever else she might also undertake.7 Historians of the Raj have perpetuated this idea that women’s lives must inevitably be centred around domestic work. Questionnaires circulated to former memsahibs and oral interviews conducted with these women focus on domestic details to a far greater extent than similar research undertaken with men who had lived in India.8 This insistence, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that ‘unemployed’ women must be engaged in housekeeping tasks, has obscured both Anglo-Indian women’s actual role in the domestic sphere and her many activities in the empire beyond the home. The prevailing assumption that domesticity is inevitably feminine has also prevented historians from examining men’s roles in constructing Anglo-Indian domesticity. The central paradox of Anglo-Indian domestic life as, indeed, of the Raj itself, was that the crucial mechanisms for running both home and empire were entrusted to Indians, with the British relegated to the role of symbolic, if authoritative, presence. Housekeeping, as the fictional Mrs Hurst pointed out, was indeed ‘too much fag’, in both metropolitan house and imperial bungalow. But in India, the burden was borne by Indian domestic servants, not Anglo-Indian wives. Just as the AngloIndian home differed from the typical British residence in its physical layout, practical functions and symbolic import, so too did imperial household management differ from metropolitan modes of housekeeping. If the Anglo-Indian home was to serve the practices and ideology of empire, then the means used to achieve these ends in the home must also embody imperial values. In both household and empire, [ 82 ]

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the day-to-day chores that facilitated British imperialism in India were undertaken by Indians working as soldiers in the army, constables in the police force or servants in the home. Furthermore, not just manual labour, but much of the planning, preparation, and oversight of home and empire were carried out by Indians. Indians were both the brains and the brawn of the British Raj and the Anglo-Indian home. What role, then, did this leave for Anglo-Indian men and women? Anglo-Indians were to ensure the smooth functioning of both household and empire, a goal best achieved with a modicum of effort and an abundance of symbolic authority. In Anglo-Indian domestic ideology, there was thus no inherent contradiction in Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s dictum, set forth in their popular housekeeping manual, that ‘an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, [sic] without dignity and prestige, [sic] than an Indian empire’, and their injunction that ‘half-an-hour after breakfast should be sufficient for the whole 9 [housekeeping] arrangements of the day’. In both home and empire, Anglo-Indians’ most important task was to be present and, through their presence, to radiate authority. In the ICS, Anglo-Indian officials were required to spend a large proportion of their working lives touring their districts, to see and be seen by the colonized peoples over whom they ruled. High-ranking police officials apparently spent more time inspecting the various police stations in their district than in grappling with the nitty-gritty details of criminal activity. In peacetime, army officers surveyed their troops during daily parade, but were often at leisure for the remainder of the day. Similarly, the manager of an AngloIndian home would inspect the domestic premises and the persons of her servants, issue general orders, and ensure that an efficient housekeeping routine was in place, but would rarely bother with the myriad details of daily household management. This construction of housekeeping as a supervisory and symbolic practice, rather than a hands-on, time-consuming and labour-intensive task, had profound implications for Anglo-Indian women and their relationship to the empire. Historically, much of the time and effort women have devoted to housekeeping tasks have been masked, because women themselves hid from public view their ‘unladylike’ involvement in mundane and often messy household chores. In India, however, the virtual unanimity of prescriptive and descriptive sources describing household management responsibilities precludes the possibility that Anglo-Indian women were modestly minimizing their domestic labours. Both household management guides and women’s actual recollections of the ‘daily round’ of household duties in India indicate that domestic activities were kept to a minimum. Although women were still associated with the home, domestic functions in India were not expected [ 83 ]

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to occupy the bulk of a woman’s time. Their situation was not unlike that of wealthy aristocratic women in Britain, who had long relied on battalions of servants to carry out household duties while they devoted themselves to overseeing the family estates, serving as society hostesses and, discreetly, using their position, power and wealth to intervene in politics. One important difference between British noblewomen and imperial wives, however, was that most Anglo-Indian women were neither aristocratic nor wealthy but, rather, were ordinary middle-class women unexpectedly granted a reprieve from a lifetime of domestic responsibility. The other difference was that the empire literally lay at their doorstep, offering the most obvious outlet for their newly unharnessed energies. Thus divested of domestic responsibilities and ties, women created structure and meaning for their existence by dedicating their potentially vacant lives to the work of empire. The peculiar construction of Anglo-Indian domesticity, therefore, facilitated women’s engagement with the empire and with imperial politics. However, such unprecedented freedom for women did not come without a cost. In the empire, the inequitable distribution of power meant that the price for women’s political involvement was paid not by the memsahibs themselves, but rather by the legions of Indian servants who relieved them of their domestic chores and duties. In India, a modest domestic establishment required the services of at least half-a-dozen servants to achieve a level of comfort approximating that of the middle-class home in Britain. To cater to their needs, even a junior civil servant and his wife would generally employ a bearer, who performed the duties of butler and valet, a khitmutgai, who waited at table and performed a housemaid’s chores, a cook, who prepared meals, planned menus and did the marketing, a ‘cook’s boy’, who washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen, a mehter (sweeper), to dispose of rubbish and empty the commodes, and a bheestie (water carrier), as up to at least 10 1947 most bungalows lacked running water. Depending on family circumstances and finances, they might also retain the services of a mali (gardener), a syce (groom), if they kept horses, and, for those living in oldfashioned bungalows, punkah wallahs to pull the large ceiling fans during the hot weather. Families with children often employed an ayah to take charge of nursery duties, although the more affluent might hire a Eurasian or even British woman for this position. In addition, most Anglo-Indian families shared the services of a dhobi (laundryman) and a dirzi (tailor) with a few other European families rather than employing these servants exclusively. Depending on the husband’s position in the imperial services, the government might pay the wages of semiprivate/semi-public official servants such as chowkidars (watchmen) and chaprassis (messengers). With the exception of the ayah, the servants in [ 84 ]

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a north Indian household were exclusively male. In Anglo-Indian establishments in south India, a few of the more lowly positions might be held by women. Generally, the ‘upper’ servants (i.e. bearer, cook and khitmutgar) would accompany their employer when he was posted to a different location, while other servants would be hired afresh for each new domestic establishment. Although servants’ pay was low, the numbers of servants employed meant that the total expense for wages ‘was enough to make a very big hole in one’s income’.11 In grander households, of course, the number of servants (and the concomitant expense) was greater. In 1905, the viceregal domestic staff numbered 900, although most of these were undoubtedly paid by the government rather than from the viceroy’s personal funds.12 Although Anglo-Indians scaled back the size of their domestic staffs after the First World War, and once again cut back during the Second World War, they did not suffer a servant shortage comparable to that experienced in Britain. Clearly defensive about their extensive domestic staffs, Anglo-Indians blamed the servants themselves. Indians’ purportedly archaic ideas about caste, which dictated the types of labour any individual servant could undertake, made it necessary to hire a different servant for each household task, claimed the Anglo-Indians. Experience of running a household in Britain could not have prepared a middle-class woman to manage the typical Anglo-Indian domestic establishment. In Britain, at least before the First World War, a middleclass household would have employed one or two maids and perhaps a cook, all of them female. After the war, as domestic help in Britain became harder to find and retain, a middle-class family might have employed one female servant for the heavier work, with the wife herself tackling the remaining domestic tasks using ‘modern’ labour-saving devices, such as the vacuum-cleaner. Furthermore, since domestic service in Britain was not a lifelong career, female servants tended to be 13 Theoretically, these young female domestics were more young. malleable and easier to command than the older, male servants employed in India. Furthermore, as the empire drew its imperial officials and their spouses from a broader class spectrum during the interwar period, a wife might have had little prior experience of domestic supervision. Indeed, it was not unlikely that the wives of the ‘other ranks’ in the British Army in India had themselves worked as domestic servants prior to their marriage.14 Whatever their class background, however, most Anglo-Indian wives were initially ill-equipped to tackle the supervisory functions of the larger Anglo-Indian household and its male cadre of servants. Furthermore, the imperial setting and, more importantly, the imperial implications of the Anglo-Indian home [ 85 ]

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presented unique challenges to British women’s understanding of their household responsibilities. Given the supposed peculiarities of imperial domesticity, therefore, new arrivals to India, whatever their household management experiences in Britain, needed guidance on how to manage their homes in the empire. A handful of Anglo-Indian cookbooks and household management guides had been written in the early nineteenth century, but with the establishment of a sizeable female population by the last quarter of the century such texts were published in greater number to assist the novice Anglo-Indian housekeeper address the peculiar problems of household management in India. The genre apparently remained popular through to the end of the Raj, judging by the issuance of new books and of revised editions of established texts, and by anecdotal evidence from Anglo-Indians. Moreover, the advice doled out by these manuals remained remarkably consistent from the late nineteenth century up through Indian independence in 1947 indicating, perhaps, a greater stability in Anglo-Indian domesticity over this time period than in its metropolitan counterpart. In format, content, intended audience and overall approach, these Anglo-Indian volumes are not unlike cookbooks and household management guides addressed to the metropolitan British housewife. Broadly speaking, both British and Anglo-Indian texts included such information as recipes, instructions for general cooking techniques, culinary terminology and household management advice, often enumerating rules for supervising servants and budgeting domestic expenditures. The Anglo-Indian books, however, as befitted their unique niche, also included information peculiarly relevant to housekeeping in India. In addition to instructions for cooking European dishes, AngloIndian texts generally set out recipes for Indian foods such as the ubiquitous curry, explicated cooking techniques for potentially unfamiliar foods such as rice, translated cooking terms, food names, and weights and measures from one or more Indian languages, and provided sample menus for uniquely Anglo-Indian social events such as the picnic in the jungle. Some of the more wide-ranging books also included information on how to set up and run a household in India, with information on appropriate management of Indian domestic servants, including their titles and duties, customary wages, descriptions and price lists for necessary domestic articles, an outline of the daily household routine, and advice for budgeting in a country where ‘the money runs 15 away in a hundred and one odd ways, you hardly know how’. Flora Annie Steel, a best-selling fiction writer as well as co-author of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, considered her ‘cookery book’ to have done more good for her readers than any of her popular novels or [ 86 ]

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short stories. ‘I have had letters without end, thanking me for it from would-be housekeepers, gardeners, cow-keepers, and chicken rearers’, Steel recalled in her autobiography.16 In setting forth principles of household management, these texts drew on a model that would become intimately familiar to their readers: the British Raj. The domestic scheme proposed by these books emulated the techniques and ideology of British imperialism in India. The memsahib in her home, like the district officer in the mofussil or the army subaltern on the frontier, was a lone European surrounded by colonized Indians. Physical force would not suffice to maintain the empire over the long haul. Although the British would have ever more frequent recourse to physical compulsion and violence in governing India during the twentieth century, the invocation of force represented a failure in imperial practice. Thus, the British governed home and empire not through violence but rather by instilling the habits of discipline in a potentially unruly population, by commanding respect from the colonized peoples and by setting an example of rational and ‘civilized’ behaviour. In running her household, an Anglo-Indian wife would ideally employ these techniques, thus inscribing imperial ideals at the most mundane and most intimate points of contact between rulers and ruled. In running their households and directing their cadre of domestic assistants, therefore, Anglo-Indian wives grounded their actions in and adopted many of the techniques of the ideologies employed by their husbands in governing the empire. From the Anglo-Indian perspective, the relationship between master or mistress and servant re-enacted in microcosm the principles of discipline and respect on which the empire rested, and provided an object lesson for the greater Indian population on the benefits of British imperialism. However, domestic supervisory duties were not merely a vapid imitation of the serious and manly work of empire but rather a discrete and important component of British imperialism. Through their relationships with their servants, women, in particular, were expected to serve as exemplars of European superiority and to instil in Indian domestics the habits of discipline and respect that formed the basis for British governance of the Raj. A household in which the domestic staff was sufficiently welltrained that little or no managerial intervention was required was the imperial ideal. Thus, although it might initially be necessary to demonstrate a task to a servant, ‘having to do it [yourself] is a distinct 17 concession of failure in your original intention’. Steel and Gardiner emphasized that women had other calls upon their time and interest beyond the mundane duties of domestic management: ‘it must be distinctly understood that it is not necessary, or in the least degree [ 87 ]

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desirable, that an educated woman should waste the best years of her life in scolding and petty supervision. Life holds higher duties.’18 A household thus could ‘run itself’ – or, rather, the servants could run it essentially unsupervised – when the domestic staff had successfully absorbed the imperial values of their Anglo-Indian mistress and master, averting the need to scold, oversee or do the task yourself. Once the household was smoothly functioning, the mistress could then focus her attentions on the higher duties of the empire. Household management books, therefore, underscored the general importance of commanding the unwavering respect of the household staff and, more specifically, prescribed appropriate behaviour for the various servants engaged in their normal household duties. The bearer must salaam ‘profoundly’ when he entered a room.19 An ayah, upon awakening her mistress in the morning, [a]t the time specified by her mistress ... should knock at the door of the bedroom and bring in the early tea, placing the tray on the table, or wherever her mistress directs. She should never forget to salaam to her mistress, and ask if anything is wanted, and what time her mistress desires to rise. She should then draw back the curtains and leave the room, remembering to take away the lamp, dirty boots, &c.20

Indians could undermine the respect owed to the memsahib not just by their actions, the books warned, but simply by an improper appearance. Although the British habitually described Indians as dirty, it was considered ‘a positive insult’ for a servant to appear unwashed in his mistress’s presence.21 Similarly, a servant’s clothing should always be spotlessly clean, done up in an appropriate manner, with no loose ends hanging out, and sporting all essential accessories, such as a cummerbund.22 Although these offences might appear trifling, ‘they indicate a want of respect, and would correspond at home to a butler appearing in checks or a footman appearing in bedroom slippers’.23 Such deference was due the Anglo-Indian wife not just as mistress of the household but also as the embodiment of imperial authority. Servants occasionally wore uniforms or livery indicating their employer’s official position. In one household, for example, all twenty servants displayed the husband’s regimental badge on their turbans.24 Thus, any irregularities in servants’ appearance or behaviour had public as well as private import. To the husband, Indian servants accorded respect naturally, by virtue of his official position and his gender. Wives, however, often felt that they were treated as second-class citizens in their own homes. ‘I know an instance’, wrote ‘A Lady Resident’, ‘in which a boy remonstrated with his mistress at breakfast upon her taking a particular egg. “That our fowl [ 88 ]

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egg, that for master; others bazaar eggs, they good for missis.”’25 Such treatment underscored the general Anglo-Indian conviction that Indian men lacked respect for women generally. While the British might deplore Indians’ treatment of their own women, it was necessary for imperial prestige that Indian men accord Anglo-Indian women due deference. The Anglo-Indian wife, according to the advice books, should elicit the respect of her servants through her authoritative and self-confident manner. Thus, imperial household management replicated the connection forged in the empire between ‘the command of language and the language of command’.26 According to Steel and Gardiner, a memsahib must learn the indigenous language to communicate her orders effectively. This opinion was apparently shared by some experienced Indian servants, who assisted their employers’ linguistic studies. One woman recalled her bearer’s insistence that ‘[a]ll Memsahibs should learn the language’. He daily instructed her in practical household vocabulary. ‘I had to learn the Hindustani for each item and woe-betide me if I did not know them next day.’27 It is difficult, however, to assess the actual linguistic competence of the average memsahib. Most claimed sufficient knowledge of an Indian language to address the servants, although many admittedly lacked the grammar and vocabulary to converse politely with educated Indians. One woman noted that her husband ‘constantly censored my flow of language’.28 The government sponsored a memsahibs’ language exam and awarded the successful candidate Rs 100, which was just enough, as one successful candidate wryly noted, to pay for language tutelage.29 Since it was apparently possible to pass the exam after only three months’ study, the test could not have been rigorous.30 Some women may have hidden their lack of knowledge behind the notion that feigning ignorance of the vernacular would enable a wife to run her household more effectively because it facilitated eavesdropping on servants’ conversations. One woman, who claimed to have picked up ‘a smattering of seven dialects’, believed that most memsahibs ‘knew somewhat more of the language than we owned to, finding it to be a good plan on the whole though we 31 did not always relish what we caught’. However, the language translation charts and household vocabulary lists in many Anglo-Indian domestic management texts indicate that at least some wives lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge of an Indian language. Furthermore, the prevalence in at least one listing, from a household accounts book of the 1940s, of such phrases as ‘Be quiet’, ‘Have things done properly’, ‘Don’t trouble me’, and ‘Do what I tell you’, appears to confirm E.M. Forster’s conclusion that memsahibs who ‘had learned the lingo’ had done so ‘only to speak to [the] servants [and] so ... knew none [ 89 ]

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of the polite forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood’.32 Women also elicited respect by requiring obedience only in household affairs and generally adopting a hands-off policy regarding their servants’ private lives. The Anglo-Indian household generally mimicked the official imperial policy of non-interference in Indian cultural and religious practices. Many British observers had attributed the 1857 uprisings to fear among both Hindus and Muslims that the British were undermining their religion; thereafter, at least officially, the British government offered little encouragement to Christian missionaries in India. In staffing their households, wives, too, showed no favouritism towards Indian converts. Christian servants were scorned by experienced housekeepers as untrustworthy, uppity (since they considered themselves to be ‘master’s-caste’), and lacking in the self33 respect characteristic of unpretentious ‘heathens’. Although some missionaries regularly employed converts in their homes, at least one woman reported that she had been warned against Christian servants by a missionary’s wife: ‘she [the missionary] has little faith in native Christians: she has tried them in every way, and has had nearly twenty years’ experience’.34 Similarly, the authorities, both governmental and authorial, discouraged wives from engaging in social work among Indians, at least to the extent that such involvement could be construed as interference with the indigenous lifestyle. Anglo-Indian women might safely engage in limited charitable works for the benefit of their staff and their servants’ near relations, particularly female domestics, servants’ wives, and their children. A memsahib was responsible for the general health and wellbeing of her employees and their families, although even in this respect she should not (unless requested) impose upon them Western standards of medical care, diet or living conditions. Similarly, although it was customary for the families of male servants to live within the compound, the memsahib’s charitable bounty should be both circumspect and clearly delimited. The extent of her responsibilities halted at ‘a very sharp line’ drawn ‘on the other side of the mothers-in35 law’. Thus, while ensuring a minimal level of health and comfort for their servants, most Anglo-Indian women refrained from attempts at more generalized reform and social uplift aimed at their domestics. The paternalistic beneficence of the Anglo-Indian household was much less generous and benevolent than that of a similar establishment in Britain. In Britain, the mistress fed servants at her own expense, housed them in her home, and usually provided suitable clothing. In India, dietary restrictions absolved women from feeding their domestic staff. Servants normally outfitted themselves, except in unusually cold climates or if special liveries were required, as in the upper-crust social [ 90 ]

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circles of Simla. (Employers who neglected to provide adequate coldweather clothing were often outraged to discover that their grooms borrowed the horses’ blankets for added warmth at night. Anglo-Indian sympathies invariably lay with the horse.) Rudimentary living arrangements for servants were a ‘part of the natural order of things’.36 In pre-First World War India, servants ‘had one little room with a little bit of a verandah and a tiny bit off to cook in ... They’d have a well and they’d have to wash out by the well and they probably had sort of a latrine for all of them but no water laid on or anything like that.’ Later on, conditions improved, for ‘by the time we left India we would never have allowed such a thing’.37 Thus, while the Anglo-Indian wife could attempt to secure the obedience of her servants by monitoring their appearance, by learning the language and respecting their personal lives, such obedience could not be coerced. Like the empire, the Anglo-Indian home must be ruled by example, not physical compulsion. As her husband was expected to embody certain tenets of Western civilization, applying European logic rather than despotic oriental force to govern his district or command his regiment, so the wife should rule her household by presenting to the servants a stellar example of European womanhood (and British culture) at its best. A wife must rule her servants with a firm hand. She must not hesitate to point out errors, to ‘[i]nstruct, reprove, admonish as much as may be necessary; give warning, or if need be turn the worthless out of 38 the house’, while also remembering to praise a job well done. Authors of housekeeping texts routinely condemned physical chastisement of servants as unladylike, un-British and unlikely to yield the desired results. They also recommended avoidance of screaming, fits of temper and ‘fly[ing] into a fury’, as similarly unsuitable behaviour, more likely to frighten and distract the servant, while rendering the memsahib foolish, than to instil household discipline.39 Anglo-Indian women themselves soon realized that the mistress who abused her servants physically or verbally aided neither her own cause nor that of the empire. The British envisioned the Indian bazaar as a hotbed of gossip; a bad mistress would soon be known to the entire local population and she would find it extremely difficult to hire and retain servants. Egregious behaviour could rouse servants to retaliate. One woman who threw a slice of toast at a servant had to pay him £12 for ‘purification ceremonies’.40 In an interesting parallel to Gandhian civil disobedience tactics employed against the Raj, servants at a hill station hotel engaged in a work stoppage to protest their maltreatment by a visiting memsahib. More significant, however, was the embarrassment experienced by other Anglo-Indians witnessing such misbehaviour by a [ 91 ]

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fellow imperialist. The woman who reported the ‘strike’ among the hotel servants described the offending Anglo-Indian woman as ‘a queer girl and so bad-tempered’, and deplored her tendency to say ‘the most dreadful things to the servants’.41 How, then, should a wife discipline her servants? Just as differences arose among various imperial administrators as to how the empire should be governed, so too Anglo-Indian household management experts offered differing suggestions on regulating one’s servants. Wives could ensure that a task was correctly performed by forcing the offending servant to do his job under her supervision. Frequently advocated was a system of petty fines for each ‘offence’ against the household routine, although some urged that a corresponding system of incentives for improvement should be instituted to allow servants to recoup lost wages. However, at least one author found the whole notion of fining to be ‘utterly repugnant’.42 Some experts, adhering to the commonly held idea that all Indians were merely overgrown children and should be treated as such, recommended dosing with castor oil if a servant chronically misperformed.43 Finally, of course, as in all employment relationships, the Anglo-Indian employer held the ultimate power of dismissal and refusal to provide a reference, without which most servants would find it difficult to obtain another position. Direct insubordination requiring disciplinary action was not a problem in most Anglo-Indian households, however. By establishing explicit rules and standards regarding the performance of duties, AngloIndians could clarify expectations for their domestic servants. Just as the Indian Army had set days for parade and inspection, or a civil servant established specified hours for receiving petitioners, so a wife must set up a routine for her domestic tasks, such as inspecting the cookhouse at a certain time each day or regularly observing the dairyman as he milked the cow to ensure fresh and undiluted milk. By structuring their household duties, wives would not only establish a schedule guaranteeing effective use of their own time, but would provide a model 44 for servants to emulate. Just as imperial rule had, according to the British, brought order and unity to the chaotic Indian subcontinent, so British housekeeping principles would instil efficiency and discipline among domestic servants. In practice, most Anglo-Indian wives appear to have followed similar daily routines, approximating the model advocated by household manuals. Following breakfast, generally served at about nine, British husbands throughout India departed for courthouse or police station, and British wives, similarly, sat down to business in their drawingrooms. First, a wife would confer with the cook to settle accounts from the previous day’s marketing (cooks were entrusted with purchasing the [ 92 ]

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food, as well as preparing it) and to plan the day’s menus. She might then meet with the bearer, the head of the household staff, to discuss any problems that had arisen and to distribute supplies from the storeroom, to which, usually, she alone had the key. Most women then performed a quick tour of kitchen, garden and stables, to inspect the staff and ensure that her standards of cleanliness were intact. A fair number of women, acting on the principle that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, omitted the daily inspection – and, contrary to expectations, lived to tell the tale. Just as their husbands detailed the workings of the empire in memoranda, minutes and official budgets, so most wives maintained some form of account book and a household log – although probably in less detail than the advice book authors would have liked.45 What is clear from both the prescriptions of household management guides and the recollections of Anglo-Indian women is that domestic supervision occupied a minimal amount of time in an Anglo-Indian woman’s daily life. Unlike Betty Friedan’s zealous American housewife of the 1950s, whose housekeeping aspired to ever more demanding levels of perfection to fill otherwise vacant hours, Anglo-Indian housekeepers were advised by the authors of household management guides to minimize their domestic duties.46 ‘[D]o not worry over trifles, life is not long enough’, advised ‘Chota Mem’, one such author.47 Thus, it was the superficial and symbolic aspects of domestic tasks, the adherence to the outward forms of discipline and routine, that were important, rather than the substance of those duties. In the production of Anglo-Indian domesticity, the backstage areas of the home, where Indian servants performed the hard manual labour of housekeeping, were not only hidden from sight but were actually off-limits both physically and mentally to the Anglo-Indian wife. Most wives did not know, for example, what went on in their kitchens nor, so long as their servants produced a tasty dinner in a timely and proper fashion day in and day out, did they care. Domestic ignorance was bliss. Anglo-Indians characterized the cook’s hard labours as ‘mysteries’ that resulted in 48 ‘gastronomic miracles’. Hidden from view was not only their own exploitation of domestic employees but any possible insubordination or resistance by the servants. Anglo-Indians often recounted anecdotes of the rude awakenings in store for those who probed too deeply into the backstage processes of their own homes. One woman, believing ‘[i]t was perhaps as well’ that she remained ignorant of how her cook carried out his tasks, recalled: There was a popular story of a memsahib whose cook made a particularly delicious pastry. She knew that he made it actually during the course of the meal so that it was really fresh and one day she and her guests decided to

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raid the kitchen and steal the secret. They discovered the cook in action – the pastry dough spread across his chest, beating it with his hands!49

The model propounded by household management guides, therefore, was one of almost lackadaisical supervision. This attitude is clearly apparent in three crucial areas of domestic management: the ‘daily round’; culinary hygiene; and kitchen finances. The daily round encompassed those supervisory tasks a good housekeeper should complete each day. Generally, household management texts advised that the daily round include an inspection of the cookhouse (although the experts were divided over whether this should occur consistently at a preappointed hour or as a surprise visit), along with, perhaps, a review of pots and pans, dishcloths and the personal appearance of the cook and his assistants. (One text advised only a weekly inspection, on the plea that ‘a visit to [the kitchen] affords little pleasure to the English matron’.50) These procedures were neither rigorous nor particularly timeconsuming. Indeed, the domestic management texts clearly did not intend them to consume a woman’s energy and attention for the day. One household management guide flatly proclaimed: ‘Having ordered your dinner, dismiss it from your mind.’51 Even the most zealous housekeeper was not expected to devote more than the Morning Hours in India, as one household management guide was entitled, to her daily round of domestic duties.52 In practice, women seem to have been even less attentive to their supervisory duties than the cursory regimen outlined in these texts would suggest. Once she had interviewed the cook and unlocked the storeroom, ‘[t]his ended my duties for the day’, pronounced one woman.53 Another confessed that her ‘housekeeping was sketchy’, and thus she would only ‘occasionally go and inspect the kitchen’.54 Many women did not take even their minimal housekeeping responsibilities seriously; Mildred Archer confessed: ‘I found all that [i.e., housekeeping] very amusing.’55 Particularly after the First World War, as Anglo-Indians were drawn from a wider spectrum of class backgrounds, some women, unused to directing subordinates, were clearly embarrassed by their newfound authority. Although most household management guides assured their readers that inspections of the domestic premises and staff would only enhance their servants’ respect, some felt uncomfortable with this blatant display of power and thus renounced, for example, the practice of keeping supplies under lock and key. Indeed, excessive domestic supervision could be counterproductive, provoking the servants to become restive and resentful. One man grumbled about his wife: ‘Joan will never keep a good nanny. She is too hard and exacting, and girls [ 94 ]

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won’t stand for such treatment. She won’t make allowances for people, expects them to do as she does. I shall have to speak to her seriously.’56 Thus the Anglo-Indian philosophy of housekeeping was essentially to ‘leave the servants alone ... and let things rip’.57 Anglo-Indian attitudes toward culinary hygiene were consonant with this cursory attention to the daily round of domestic supervision. This casual attitude towards the sanitary aspects of food preparation did not arise from ignorance of potential hazards. Anglo-Indians perceived connections linking dirt, disease and death, on the one hand, with food and eating, on the other. In part, this knowledge arose from evolving scientific discoveries linking diseases such as cholera to impurities of food and drink. Equally influential was the Western perception of Indians as disease-ridden and dirty, particularly in the preparation of 58 Thus, Anglo-Indian cookbooks and household management food. guides prescribed a regime to contain the dangers of food contamination. Ironically, however, Anglo-Indians depended on their ‘dirty’ Indian servants to ensure a healthful environment in the home.59 Indian servants performed the actual labour connected with these sanitary precautions, while Anglo-Indians were responsible, at most, for setting up a system for hygiene and ensuring its proper functioning through periodic inspection. As medical and scientific knowledge increased, the causes of diseases such as cholera, which had seemed so fearsome because so mysterious, could be pinpointed and preventive measures more specifically targeted. Among the few sanitary measures that appear to have been almost universally adopted by Anglo-Indians by the interwar period were, first, the use of potassium permanganate (or pinkipani) as a disinfectant and, second, the consumption of bottled water or, where that was not readily available, the filtering and boiling of all drinking and cooking water. Mothers of small children often exercised extra vigilance regarding milk, which was particularly vulnerable to adulteration. Beyond this, however, most women apparently instituted few other sanitary regulations in their kitchens. Furthermore, an air of fatalistic bemusement coloured AngloIndians’ approach to hygiene. The combination of climate, lack of modern conveniences such as refrigeration, and the perceived innately unsanitary nature of Indian servants made it impossible, according to Anglo-Indian thinking, for even the most dedicated housewife to ensure the health of those gathered round her dinner table. Thus, there was little incentive to attend zealously to sanitary precautions when all circumstances conspired against successful fulfilment of hygienic requirements. No matter how diligent the housewife, the Indian heat would still cause fish to go bad (thus making it acceptable to ‘put one’s fish to one’s nose before one eats it, even at a dinner-party and ... warn [ 95 ]

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one’s host’).60 Similarly, servants could never be completely regulated. One cookbook explained: ‘it is their [cooks’] nature to be very dirty, and Europeans will never make them clean’.61 Ordinary Anglo-Indians found the cookbooks’ warnings apparently confirmed in the habits of their own servants. A woman who considered herself a ‘keen housewife’ and who inspected her kitchen daily later discovered that ‘directly I’d gone the cook produced two filthy saucepans which he cooked out of ... and put everything on the floor and held things between his toes’.62 Such stories gained currency among Anglo-Indians because they reinforced widely held stereotypes not just about Indians’ inherently filthy persons but about their innately devious natures. These tales were, no doubt, widely accepted among Anglo-Indians because they provided an explanation and justification for lax housekeeping and dirty households that laid the blame on Indian servants rather than their Anglo-Indian employers. Hygienic failings thus became risible, rather than worrisome, as examples of the apparently uncivilized and uncivilizable nature of the colonized peoples. Wyvern, a well-known cookbook author, marveled, ‘we are absolutely callous enough not only to tolerate barbarisms, but even to speak of the most abominable practices as jests! Though cognizant, that is to say, of the ingenious nastiness of our cooks, we shrug our shoulders, close our eyes, and ask no questions, accepting with resignation a state of things which we consider to be as inevitable as it is 63 disgusting.’ Old India hands transformed these ‘revolting facts’ into the imperial equivalent of urban legends, told and retold to gullible newcomers. One example is the ‘well-known Indian anecdote’ retailed by ‘A Lady Resident’ in a nineteenth-century housekeeping manual and repeated in at least two travel books about India: ‘Boy, how are master’s socks so dirty?’ ‘I take, make ’e strain coffee.’ ‘What, you dirty wretch, for coffee?’ ‘Yes missis, but never take master’s clean ’e sock. Master done use, then I take.’64

Similarly, the financial overseeing of the cook, carried out mostly during daily morning conferences, was not a task that dominated a woman’s day. Although the housekeeper was expected to review spending on foodstuffs with the cook, the fact that the cook undertook the marketing himself allowed him either to overcharge his Anglo-Indian employers or to pilfer foodstuffs. Far from holding the cook to a high level of honesty and accountability, however, most of the texts evidence an air of resignation, conceding that Indian cooks will naturally pad their accounts and siphon off supplies, and that any interference with this system of dustur, or custom, would result in complete disruption of the [ 96 ]

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household’s normal functioning. As with their servants’ alleged poor hygiene, Anglo-Indians easily accepted depictions of Indian dishonesty, both because these confirmed racial stereotypes and because it made their own lives easier. As one text pragmatically noted: ‘Never quarrel with a good cook if his only fault be that of eating from your kitchen; all cooks will do so, and a good one will eat no more than a bad one.’65 Most cookbooks thus advised housewives to become accessories to their cooks’ embezzlements, tacitly allowing them to pocket either a fixed percentage above cost or a small sum each month, ‘as long as they do not make too much out of you’.66 Given this minimization of their own household role, many wives necessarily delegated great authority to their servants. Surprisingly, given the many generalized complaints about servants’ incompetence, laziness and untrustworthiness, women accorded their own domestics great latitude for the simple reason that servants were generally quite good at their jobs. Just as a British colonel might swell with pride at his regiment of ‘sturdy Gurkhas’, or a civil servant find an Indian subordinate to be particularly intelligent and promising, similarly many wives (and the experts who guided them) found that Indian servants performed exceptionally well with scant resources. Mrs M.A. Handley, who spent many months in camp with her Forest Service husband, marvelled that she had ‘known ices and iced wine and coffee to appear, as a matter of course, under circumstances seemingly impossible for more than a biscuit or two. No one shall ever say a word against native servants in my 67 hearing.’ One woman even regularly introduced her cook to her guests, ‘and explained that all these delicacies were his work’.68 There were several reasons why it was acceptable for Anglo-Indian women effectively to surrender control of their households to Indian domestics. First, experienced servants, especially bearers who were generally older men with many years’ service in Anglo-Indian homes, undoubtedly knew a great deal more about running a household than did a young bride. When Ethel Savi married at the age of 18, the bearer threatened to quit, but was forestalled by her husband. ‘“There will be no change,” said Johnnie [her husband]. “The memsahib will need your advice and help. She is young. You must look after her.” This was the 69 right note, and the old bearer never failed me.’ Some Anglo-Indians believed it was futile to limit the authority of a generally capable servant, even if this meant turning a blind eye to some unorthodox, or at least un-British, methods of housekeeping. Left to themselves, servants would generally discover a solution to even the most vexing housekeeping dilemma. If the mistress interfered unduly, however, servants might wreak havoc on the household by, to cite just a few examples, providing meagre provisions for an important dinner party, [ 97 ]

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festooning drying laundry in the drawing room when the couple expected important guests, or serving a partially cooked dinner because the memsahib, in her wisdom, had failed to provide sufficient fuel.70 As long as the outcome was acceptable and the symbols of authority respected, Anglo-Indians were willing to overlook gross irregularities in the processes of domesticity. A second reason for allowing great leeway to the servants, or perhaps merely a justification for what was already a fait accompli, was that a British woman could not compromise her dignity by prying too intimately into the workings of her household. The cookhouse was not a place where she should spend more time than that necessary for her brief morning inspection. Perhaps this is the reason why when Anglo-Indian women cooked – if they did so at all – they baked. Baking could be accomplished without even entering the kitchen, a hot, dirty, cramped room that also served as a gathering place for the servants and was, as such, beneath the memsahib’s dignity. Ingredients could be assembled on the verandah and then whisked off to the kitchen to be baked in the 71 crude oven common to bungalow cookhouses. The hot, humid climate, and the widely-held belief that Europeans should remain safely ensconced in their bungalow protected from the sun’s rays, also discouraged more direct involvement in the details of housekeeping. Finally, however, and perhaps most important, it is clear that many Anglo-Indians developed an intimate relationship with their servants and trusted them with their possessions, their money, their health, their children, and even their lives. Although household manuals and cookbooks clearly encouraged women to toe the imperial line in their relationships with their servants – abjuring physical force, encouraging the respect and discipline that formed the backbone of British rule, and generally advocating non-interference with Indians’ lifestyle – women’s relationships with their servants did not simplistically replicate at the domestic level the broader governmental policies of the Indian empire. For almost all British women, and for many of their husbands as well, the most intimate and complex relationships they would form with Indians would be those developed in the context of the Anglo-Indian 72 home. Although these mistress-servant relationships were coloured by the ethos of the British Raj, they also undoubtedly shaped in new and different ways the tenor of British rule in India. Relationships with Indian servants, created and maintained primarily by women, were a complex mixture of intimacy and trust counterbalanced by feelings of fear and suspicion. Although frowned upon by advice books, close personal relationships sometimes developed between mistress and servant. In this context, the question of sexual relations between the colonizers and the colonized [ 98 ]

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has attracted significant interest. Female domestic servants, both in Europe and the empire, have often been required to fulfil all of a wife’s traditional functions, providing both housekeeping and sexual services. Mrinalini Sinha has expanded this argument, urging that in the racially charged atmosphere of the Raj, British women also exploited their position of imperial superiority to extract sexual services from their male servants.73 While some Anglo-Indian women apparently did have sexual relations with their servants, it appears that the majority of them perceived Indian servants as non-sexual creatures. Many Anglo-Indian women unblushingly revealed that when their husbands were away, Indian servants (or, in troubled times, police officers or soldiers) slept in the passageways of their homes. The average wife viewed servants more as loyal retainers than as potential despoilers of British womanhood. These feelings of security were not necessarily rooted in an abiding faith in the goodwill of the Indian people towards their rulers, although some women believed that their husbands’ good offices towards the local inhabitants would guarantee their safety. Rather, British women perceived Indian men, particularly domestic servants, as non-threatening because they were ‘arrant coward[s]’, who did ‘not count’ as human 74 beings. Certainly both Anglo-Indian men and women spent sufficient time with their servants for sexual opportunities to present themselves although, given the open nature of the Anglo-Indian home, keeping such encounters secret would have been difficult. The historical record is, not surprisingly, all but silent on this question of sexual intimacy between colonizer and colonized – and, indeed, on the broader issue of the sexual mores and behaviour of the Anglo-Indian community generally.75 Any extrapolation, therefore, from the few documented instances of mistressservant sexual relations to broader generalizations about the AngloIndian community as a whole would be overly speculative. Other types of relationship are, however, more fully documented. The connection between an Anglo-Indian woman and her domestics was not always that of mistress and servant. ‘Friendships’, as memsahibs characterized these relationships, were common between mistresses and their ayahs. Such intimacy may have developed because the ayah was usually the only female servant in the household, performed personal services for her mistress, and was often a mother who could share her childbearing and rearing wisdom with an anxious young wife. Hilda Bourne’s ayah was ‘a rock in the background’ when Bourne’s daughter was born. ‘She was a born nurse and had had much practice with other English babies, so knew exactly what to do. She taught me so much, 76 bless her!’ However, female affinity alone cannot explain women’s friendly relations with servants, for in the absence of an ayah wives often became deeply attached (in platonic fashion) to their male bearer. [ 99 ]

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What ayah and bearer usually had in common was a good command of English, allowing the memsahib to communicate comfortably with them in her own language, an understanding of British ways, and the power to command other servants. Such a servant functioned as a link between the cultures of colonizer and colonized. ‘[T]hanks to [my son’s nurse], I learnt not only much useful language to do with home, family and children, shopping and so on, but gained a deep insight into what Burmese people consider admirable or contemptible, terrifying or reassuring, beautiful or ugly, amusing or dull, also about their 77 superstitions, ethics and much else besides.’ An ayah or bearer was thus the wife’s ‘staunch ally’ in her daily struggle to regulate her household along imperial lines.78 As her husband undoubtedly discovered in his own work, such ‘native’ accomplices eased the difficult task of governing a foreign realm, be it Indian empire or Anglo-Indian bungalow. Men, too, often developed close relationships with their bearers. While it may be true that no man is a hero to his valet, certainly many Indian bearers were heroes to their employers. Men wrote of the ‘trust’ that developed between themselves and their bearers, and not infrequently maintained a correspondence with them long after Indian independence.79 One woman, compiling a brief memoir of her husband, an ICS officer, included tributes not only from his colleagues in the civil service, but also from his bearer, indicating the important role this domestic servant played in his employer’s life and the high esteem in which the widow held this servant’s opinion of her spouse.80 It appears that these affectionate feelings were often reciprocated by Indian servants – at least in Anglo-Indians’ perceptions. Although accounts by Indian servants are rare, Anglo-Indians recollected many instances of kindness by their domestics. One woman, who slept in the open during hot weather, even in the absence of her husband, discovered that one of her servants had been sleeping outside her tent each night to protect her from potential dangers. The servant discreetly returned to his quarters early each morning so that his concern would not be discovered.81 Although Anglo-Indians interpreted such behaviour as evidence of their servants’ benevolence and affection, such actions can also be construed both as a manifestation by the servant of self-respect and as a means of preserving his individual status. By constructing a situation in which the employer ‘needs’ the servant, the servant reverses roles: he becomes the parent to the employer’s needy child. Whatever the psychological motivation behind servants’ actions, many AngloIndians interpreted such actions as evidence of concerned and caring behaviour. [ 100 ]

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Indeed, Anglo-Indians were apparently so anxious to conceive of their relationships with their domestic servants as grounded in benevolence and trust that they attributed to the servants’ stupidity or to their own lack of familiarity with Indian custom what may have been acts of resistance. Housekeeping manuals constantly reminded readers that memsahibs themselves were often to blame for servants’ supposed failings. If a woman’s Hindustani was flawed, then how could a servant understand her instructions? If she failed adequately to check references provided by a prospective employee, why should she be surprised if a servant turned out to be insolent or incompetent, or a thief? Finally, if a wife were too parsimonious to provide her cook with adequate implements and ingredients, then what right had she to complain if the pudding were too thin or the chef used ‘his cloth for a sieve, and his fingers for a spoon or fork’?82 Of course, not all Anglo-Indians viewed their domestics as ‘friends’ as well as servants. Indeed, some probably were incapable even of perceiving their servants as human beings. Anglo-Indians, for example, often presented their servants as possessions, who could be ‘stolen’ by rival families offering higher wages.83 An extreme example of this dehumanization of the Indian domestic servant is provided in the story of an Anglo-Indian luncheon party. Following an inordinately long wait for the next course, a frightened servant reported that the cook had just been murdered by his assistant. The distraught hostess burst out, ‘Just when he had learnt so many new dishes.’84 It is clear that, whatever other roles a servant might play, as teacher, confidante or protector, his primary responsibility was always to learn the recipes, cook the dinners and, generally, relieve the household manager of her domestic duties and cares. Servants also embodied a potentially disruptive force that threatened to upset the apparent solidarity of the Anglo-Indian community. In hiring new servants, Anglo-Indians generally relied on their current servants to find new recruits, usually from among their own family members. However, if this method failed, Anglo-Indians would employ new domestics based on letters of recommendation from their former employers. The process of hiring new servants often brought to the fore within the Anglo-Indian community different standards which, like other potential sources of concern in the Anglo-Indian household, were neutralized as humorous anecdotes. Lillian Luker Ashby, for example, hired two servants despite their appalling references, which were written in English and, hence, were incomprehensible to the servants. The better of the two references read: ‘This man served in my employ for one month as cook; that was a month too long.’ Nonetheless, under Ashby’s 85 tutelage, these two unpromising recruits developed into fine servants. [ 101 ]

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Not all prior employers were so ‘honest’. One woman hired a nurse for her children without an interview, relying on letters from her previous positions. The nurse turned out to be a ‘disaster’, and the new mistress concluded that the prior employers ‘were so anxious to get rid of her that they misled us’.86 The lesson was that a woman must use her own judgement and not rely on her predecessor’s assessment in hiring servants. This process of hiring and firing servants reveals the pivotal role domestics played in sustaining the Anglo-Indian household. A bad servant was not merely an inconvenience, but a ‘disaster’ to be ejected from the household, even at the risk of deceiving and annoying one’s fellow Anglo-Indians. Hiring, retaining and, most importantly, trusting domestic servants was a necessary component of the Anglo-Indian lifestyle. Anglo-Indians willingly granted their servants great responsibility and freedom within the household and as a matter of selfpreservation turned a blind eye to possible transgressions. Without servants who could effectively play their designated roles in the imperial household, domestic duties would have inevitably devolved on AngloIndian women. Thus, the appearance of a smoothly functioning household, whatever the backstage reality, allowed women to direct their mental and physical energies to other endeavours. That women in India were excused from traditional domestic responsibilities, and not burdened by feelings of guilt about delegating their housekeeping duties to Indian servants, indicates an important transformation in women’s relationship to domesticity. The imperial home was not gendered as a strictly feminine realm. The fact that virtually all domestic servants in an Anglo-Indian home were men certainly undermined the notion of the home as woman’s sphere. However, Anglo-Indians often perceived Indian men as both effeminate and desexualized, so that their presence as servants in the home did not, of itself, transform domestic space into a masculine arena. Rather, it was the association of Anglo-Indian men with the home and household management duties that both legitimized the lackadaisical style of Anglo-Indian housekeeping and severed the link between femininity and domestic duties. To a great extent, men, both single and married, exercised the same (attenuated) degree of supervisory responsibility for the household as did women. Men’s expected and accepted participation in domestic activities was thus the corollary of women’s participation in the public world of empire. Prescriptive literature reinforced the ambiguous gendering of the household. While most Anglo-Indian cookbooks were structured as advice from an experienced Anglo-Indian woman to her younger female colleagues, as evidenced by such titles as The English Bride in India, [ 102 ]

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authorial pseudonyms like ‘A Lady Resident’, or, most pointedly, Steel and Gardiner’s dedication of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook to ‘The English Girls to whom fate may assign the Task of Being HouseMothers [sic] in Our Eastern Empire’, the genre was not limited to women as either authors or readers.87 One of the most knowledgeable authors of Anglo-Indian cookbooks, for instance, was ‘Wyvern’, otherwise known as Colonel Arthur Kenney Herbert, who served as military secretary to the governor of Madras. Other cookbooks by male officials of the Raj, who paraded their imperial credentials on the volumes’ title pages, include The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery by W.H. Dawe, ‘Assistant Secretary to the Board of Revenue, N.W. Provinces’, and Notes on an Outfit for India and Hints for the New Arrival by ‘J.A.D.’, a graduate of the 88 Royal Indian Engineering College. Given the construction of AngloIndian domestic space as a realm crucial to sustaining the empire and the parallels between imperial and domestic management, it is perhaps not surprising that male imperial officials would intervene in the public and politicized arena of Anglo-Indian domesticity, extending their imperial expertise to the home and household supervision. More unexpectedly, however, several cookbooks addressed either men, or a mixed audience of men and women, as the household manager. This peculiarity arose from the distinctive professional culture of the Raj. The disparagement of early marriage meant that the AngloIndian community had a large cohort of young single men who might remain bachelors for the first five or ten years of their imperial careers. While unmarried men in Britain often lived with female relatives, bachelors in India usually had their own households, or shared an establishment, called a ‘chummery’, with similarly situated young 89 men. Married men, too, might have their own establishments in India, if only temporarily, when their wives had returned to India to supervise the children’s education. The plight of these men, thrust unprepared into household management, spurred at least one cookbook author to address her text specifically to them. ‘I have so frequently been called upon to “mother” our young friends, and begged to help them to buy their own pots and pans, their stores and their necessities, that it occurred to me it might be of some use, if I furnished those who propose to come to India with information as to what they will require when they arrive there.’90 She included information specifically tailored to the needs of unmarried men, such as a list of the kinds of servants required to maintain a bachelor’s household.91 Similarly, the anonymous male author of the Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book addressed his text to ‘Families and single individuals’, the latter being predominantly men, while ‘Wyvern’ used the masculine pronoun to refer to ‘the reader’ in his [ 103 ]

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cookbook Culinary Jottings.92 Furthermore, even those books apparently aimed at a female audience incorporated a role for men in the responsibilities of the household. Mrs J. Bartley, for example, conceded that the initial arrangements of the kitchen lay ‘more in the hands of the master’ (presumably because he would have established a household in India before his marriage), while the wife’s job was to ensure only that ‘things are clean and kept in their places’.93 Another author argued that the job of hygiene was a joint responsibility satisfied only by ‘the frequent visits of the lord and lady of the mansion to the cook’.94 Ordinary Anglo-Indians found nothing unseemly or unmasculine in men’s involvement in domestic and culinary affairs. Indeed, some saw it as an eminently practical skill for the imperial male. ‘I think boys should be taught to cook’, wrote one Anglo-Indian woman after returning from a disastrous dinner with a neighbour whose wife resided in Britain, ‘if it’s only to save them from that kind of fate [i.e. poisoning with bad food] out here’.95 Indeed, one future governor of Assam ‘prided himself on the perfection of his housekeeping’, and was noted for maintaining ‘a most elegant establishment’.96 Another husband and wife together superintended the monthly ceremony in which servants received their wages. ‘In this way we hoped to suggest that we were jointly responsible for them and that they could look on us as one.’97 Furthermore, it is clear that by the time they did marry, many men had acquired the (admittedly limited) knowledge and skills necessary to run a household, either from cookbooks or simply through experience. One woman whose husband had lived in India for seven years before their marriage described her spouse as ‘a very efficient housekeeper with a keen eye for detail’. He taught her ‘the essential routine of kitchen inspection, the cook’s accounts and the constant need to pay attention to 98 hygiene’. Thus, neither the physical space of the home nor the knowledge and skills required of the good imperial household manager were narrowly gendered as feminine. The result of this ambivalent gendering of tasks associated with domestic management was the downgrading of the roles of homemaker and household supervisor to subsidiary activities for all – women as well as men. A man in India could not be expected to devote his time fully to administration of the household: the responsibilities of administering an empire placed more important demands on his and his fellows’ time. Thus, as household management guides made clear, the role of household administrator could safely encompass a very limited and specific range of supervisory responsibilities that could easily be accomplished with little effort and less commitment of time to accommodate men’s professional responsibilities. Significantly, however, the scope of these domestic duties was not substantially altered if a woman rather than a man were [ 104 ]

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directing the household. Although women were responsible for the bulk of domestic management duties, these tasks were not strictly gendered as feminine, nor were domestic duties accepted as a sufficiently engrossing full-time occupation, even for women. The operation of gender in the imperial context is thus crucial to understanding this construction of an Anglo-Indian domesticity that was considerably less rigorous and less demanding than its British counterpart. For Anglo-Indian women, therefore, a lackadaisical attitude towards household management resulted in free time. While a few women missed the opportunity occasionally to engage in lighter household tasks such as ‘tidying up’ or domicile-based hobbies such as gardening, most revelled in the opportunities unexpectedly afforded to them when 99 relieved of housekeeping duties. ‘You had the time and leisure, which one hadn’t at home, when life is full of domestic chores, to do the things that you were interested in doing.’100 An excess of idle hours, however, was a potential danger. Household management books warned that ‘if [the mind] be allowed to lie fallow and never exercised, or if the thoughts are unemployed, they act as a depressant, lower vitality, and prey upon the human frame’. Others suggested answers to the question ‘How am I to spend my time?’101 While the panaceas prescribed for the vexing problems of boredom and idleness often tended to the banal – women should fulfil even their limited household responsibilities, engage in such useful and feminine pursuits as needlework, exercise daily, and maintain hobbies such as sketching and music – the greater temporal freedom of Indian life could also allow women other options. ‘An Anglo-Indian’ thus advised women to dispel the problems of idleness ‘by taking an intelligent interest in the country, in the natives, and in your own immediate surroundings’.102 Steel and Gardiner, more pointedly, advised women to minimize their domestic responsibilities so that they could attend to ‘higher duties’.103 For both men and women in India, therefore, the work of empire took precedence over domestic responsibilities. A cadre of capable Indian servants freed women from the quotidian burdens of housekeeping. But, equally as important, re-imagining gender in the empire freed AngloIndian women from the seemingly inevitable associations pairing woman and home, wife and housewife, femininity and domesticity. Relieved of the practical and ideological burdens of housework, AngloIndian women could turn their energy and attention to the work of empire both in the home and beyond.

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Notes 1 2

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3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Ethel Savi, Birds of Passage (London, 1939), 97. Elizabeth Harrington, Interview (tape recording), ‘The British Army in India 1919–1939’, Imperial War Museum. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 379. See also, Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 233–53. Frances Robertson, ‘The Blackberry Basket’, 75, British Library. Ibid., 200; B. Macdonald, India: Sunshine and Shadow (London, 1988), 4. A similar phenomenon occurred in the 1881 Census in Great Britain in which women working at home were classified specifically as ‘unoccupied’ and removed from occupational tables, thus constructing ‘housewife’ as an essential quality of women, rather than as an adopted professional identity. See Leonore Davidoff et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy 1830–1960 (London, 1999), 28. Form of Particulars, Rich Papers, British Library (emphasis added). See e.g. the form of ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’ utilized by the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 7th edn (London, 1909), 9, 5. This list of servants is for a typical Anglo-Indian home in north India; the titles, numbers and tasks of servants differed slightly in south India. Ronald Johnston, ‘Memoir’, 166, British Library. Until the First World War, when wages rose precipitously, a domestic staff cost £8–12 per month. See e.g. ‘Anglo-Indian’, Indian Outfits and Establishments (London, 1892), 49; Mrs Eliot James, A Guide to Indian Household Management (London, nd), 47; Constance E. Gordon, Anglo-Indian Cuisine (Khana Kitab) and Domestic Economy, 2nd edn (Calcutta, 1913), 87–8. Total monthly expenses on servants’ wages for a household of two Anglo-Indian couples and their five children in 1944–45 were Rs 274, or approximately £20. Rich Papers, British Library. Mary, Countess of Minto, India, Minto and Morley 1905–1910 (London, 1934), 13. Some of these staff members were undoubtedly European. Servants were often little more than girls, usually under 20 years of age. See Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York, 1995), 22. Sarah Davidson, Interview (tape recording), ‘The British Army in India 1919–1939’, Imperial War Museum. James, Guide, 53. Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity (London, 1929), 187. Steel and Gardiner, Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 5. Ibid., 1. James, Guide, 49. Steel and Gardiner, Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 85. Elizabeth Garrett, Morning Hours in India (London, 1887), 31 (emphasis in original). See e.g. Annie Campbell Wilson, Hints for the First Years’ Residence in India (Oxford, 1904), 36; James, Guide, 49. James, Guide, 36. John Prendergast, Prender’s Progress: A Soldier in India, 1931–47 (London, 1979), 13. ‘A Lady Resident’, The Englishwoman in India (London, 1864), 61 (emphasis in original). Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ, 1996). Viola Smith, ‘Merely a Memsahib’, Smith Papers, 12, British Library. Monica Martin, Out in the Mid-Day Sun (Boston, MA, 1950), 22. Leonora Starr, Colonel’s Lady (London, 1939), 24

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SERVANTS OF EMPIRE 30 31 32

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66

Ibid., 24. Mrs M.A. Handley, Roughing It in Southern India (London, 1911), 5–6. Memsahib’s Daily Account Book (1942?), 8, Rich Papers, British Library; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York, 1952), 42. ‘A Lady Resident’, Englishwoman, 55. E.A. King, The Diary of a Civilian’s Wife in India 1877–1882 (London, 1884), 145. Steel and Gardiner, Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 4. King, Diary, 38. Joan Allen, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. W.H. Dawe, The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery (London, 1888), 5. Ibid., 5; ‘Wyvern’ [Arthur Kenney-Herbert], Culinary Jottings: A Treatise in 30 Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles 6th edn (Madras, 1891), 13. Handley, Roughing It, 9. Queenie Mansfield, Letter, 14 September 1924, Mansfield Papers, University of Cambridge. ‘Lady Resident’, Englishwoman, 58. The police, too, apparently used this tactic to dissuade potential troublemakers from initiating political disturbances. See Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India (London, 1980), 98. See e.g. Steel and Gardiner, Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 5. For example, ‘Chota Mem’ recommended maintaining an account book, a ‘diary’ with information on the servants and a register of valuable possessions. Chota Mem, The English Bride in India (London, 1909), 12, 15. An example of a household account book used in the early 1940s is in the Rich Papers: see Mss Eur. C403, British Library. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963). Chota Mem, English Bride, 8. Johnston, ‘Memoir’, 164; Mary J. Maddock, ‘Naya Dumka March 1927–30’, 2, British Library. Maddock, ‘Naya Dumka’, 2. Garrett, Morning Hours, 19. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Carol Hyde, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Ibid. Mildred Archer, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Cyril Grassby, Diary, 11 February 1936, British Library. Margaret Cowie, Letter, 21 April 1921, British Library. This perception, of course, ignores the many rituals of purification associated with cooking and eating, particularly in the Hindu tradition, but also in the Muslim religion with respect to slaughtering meat, for example. See K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Delhi, 1994), 63–4. Similarly, although Indian servants living in the Anglo-Indian compound represented the most likely point of incursion for communicable diseases such as smallpox, most AngloIndians were unwilling to give up their servants, or even to regulate them more closely, to ensure their own health. Pamela Hinkson, Indian Harvest (London, 1941), 25. See also Lady Lawrence, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Chota Mem, English Bride, 76. Mrs J.P. Mills, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge. ‘Wyvern’ Culinary Jottings, 539–40. ‘A Lady Resident’, Englishwoman, 68 (emphasis in original). The same anecdote also appears in Isabel Fraser Hunter, Land of Regrets (London, 1909), 53, and ‘U.A.’, Overland, Inland and Upland: A Lady’s Notes of Personal Observation and Adventure (London, 1874; reprinted Calcutta, 1984), 72. ‘A Thirty-Five Years’ Resident’, The Indian Cookery Book, 6th edn (Calcutta, 1944), 3. Chota Mem, English Bride, 8.

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DOMESTICITY 67 68 69 70 71

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72

73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Handley, Roughing It, 24. Ruth Donnison, ‘Memoir’, 7, British Library. Savi, Birds, 70. See e.g. Handley, Roughing It, 8–9; Ethel Grimwood, My Three Years in Manipur and Escape from the Recent Mutiny (London, 1891), 95–6. Indian cooks, Anglo-Indians believed, would also skimp on ingredients to save food for their own use or profit. In baking, of course, an incorrect proportion of ingredients could produce inedible results. Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Memsahibs and their Servants in Nineteenth-Century India’, Women’s History Review 3 (1994). Chaudhuri, however, argues that memsahibs’ representations of their Indian servants were unrelievedly negative. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘“Chathams, Pitts, and Gladstones in Petticoats”’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992). Margaret Cotter Morison, A Lonely Summer in Kashmir (London, 1904), 70; Handley, Roughing It, 260. The recollections of the few Anglo-Indians who discussed sexual behaviour in the AngloIndian community provide no clear consensus. Hilda Bourne, ‘It Was Like This’, 38, Bourne Papers, University of Cambridge. Donnison, ‘Memoir’, 129. Lillian Luker Ashby, My India (Boston, MA, 1937), 170. Johnston, ‘Memoir’, 155; Hunt and Harrison, District Officer, 125. Margaret Cowie, ‘A Short Memoir of William Patrick Cowie – CIE, ICS’, British Library. Donnison, ‘Memoir’, 260. ‘Wyvern’, Culinary Jottings, 542. See e.g. Walter Long, ‘In Search of Fun’, 152, British Library. Robertson, ‘Blackberry Basket’, 63. Ashby, My India, 262. Mary, Lady Maxwell, ‘Memoirs 1911–1947’, 37, British Library. Steel and Gardiner, Dedication, Indian Housekeeper and Cook. Dawe, Wife’s Help; ‘J.A.D.’, Notes on an Outfit For Indian and Hints For the New Arrival (London, 1903). Leonore Davidoff discusses male expectations in Britain ‘of being “serviced” by women’. See Davidoff, Worlds Between, 76. Wilson, Hints, 7. Ibid., 33. Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, Preface (emphasis added); ‘Wyvern’, see e.g. p. 2. Mrs J. Bartley, [‘An Anglo-Indian’] Indian Cookery ‘General’ for Young Housekeepers, 8th edn (Bombay, 1946), 15. ‘A Thirty-Five Years’ Resident’, 1 (emphasis added). Beatrix Scott, Letter of 19 November 1923, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Maddock, ‘Naya Dumka’, 22. Donnison, ‘Memoir’, 124. Mary Lines, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Archer, Interview; Lady Griffiths, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Ibid. Dawe, Wife’s Help, 21; Garrett, Morning Hours, title of chapter 3. Bartley, Indian Cookery ‘General’, 139. Steel and Gardiner, Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 1.

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PART II

Violence

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CHAPTER FOUR

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Re-writing the Mutiny

In 1858, the appearance of Sir Joseph Noël Paton’s painting In Memoriam created a furore in the British art world. It was not the painting’s artistic merits (or lack thereof) that excited comment, but its subject matter. At the centre of the composition, a woman kneels in a subterranean chamber. Her refuge is disordered, with objects strewn about, indicating a hasty and tumultuous flight thither. Yet the woman’s serene face, bathed in white light, is lifted upwards towards heaven and her outstretched hand clasps a book that is undoubtedly the Bible. Two younger women (perhaps her daughters) cling to her, one joining her in fervent prayer, while the other clasps her hands (perhaps in supplication, perhaps in despair) at the older woman’s knee. At her feet, a child lies peacefully sleeping. To one side of this central grouping is a second cluster of figures. Another English woman caresses a sleeping infant and a young girl, while an Indian ayah protectively covers the infant with her hand. The ayah glances apprehensively towards the entrance of their subterranean shelter where someone is about to intrude on this pathetic scene. Who is it that approaches these helpless women and children? Friend or foe? The subject matter of Paton’s painting was the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1 1857. For Anglo-Indians, the Mutiny served as a constant reminder of the tenuous nature of imperialism in India. In addition, the overt violence of the colonized peoples’ resistance and the brutal methods employed by the British to crush the rebellion revealed the centrality of force in establishing and maintaining imperial rule, on the one side, and resisting it, on the other. The Mutiny and its aftermath also uncovered the interconnections of gender, violence and imperial political power in India. In particular, the powerful and emotive images of British women as helpless victims of Mutiny violence shaped cultural norms about women’s position in the context of any future violent threat to the empire and remained a dominant trope in the cultural and political discourses of British imperialism until Indian independence in 1947. [ 111 ]

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However, the representation of women that developed from the Mutiny did not remain uncontested. In novels about and non-fiction accounts of the Mutiny and other violent episodes in Indian history, Anglo-Indian female authors created an alternative role for women that served as an exemplar of empowering and heroic feminine action. This imaginative construction of feminine roles beyond that of Mutiny victim was particularly important in enabling women to establish their right to participate in the politics of the empire. As Nancy Paxton has argued in her persuasive analysis of several of the more famous ‘Mutiny’ novels, ‘these national epics of the race were designed to shore up Victorian notions of gender by assigning British women to the role of agency-less victims, countering nineteenth-century feminists’ demands for women’s greater political equality and social participation’.2 Anglo-Indian women broke free of these gendered constraints on their political participation by constructing a discourse of imperial violence in which women were active agents, thus ‘earning’ the right to participate in the politics of the Raj. The Mutiny shocked and appalled the Victorian public, and resulted in far-reaching administrative and military changes in India.3 In 1857, rebellious Indian troops serving under the East India Company, joined by portions of the peasantry and several discontented rulers of indigenous states, rose up in the most serious challenge to the imperial presence in India in almost a century of British rule. The European population in India was the target of the uprising and in the course of the violence, which took a year for the British to quash completely, European (and, of course, Indian) men, women, and children perished. The Mutiny delivered a severe jolt to the complacent attitude of India’s British rulers, who had previously prided themselves on the pacific, beneficent, and well-received nature of their reign in India. Although the ‘illusion of permanence’ still characterized Anglo-Indian perceptions of empire, after the Mutiny it became apparent that military force must buttress British 4 rule. The strategic and psychological upheavals occasioned by the Mutiny required both explanation and catharsis. The Mutiny became a central cultural symbol in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, the position of the Anglo-Indian woman became a crucial trope in making sense of the unexplained events of 1857–58, in shaping the imperial mentality during the post-Mutiny years and in defining the future role of women in the empire. In rethinking their own position in relation to Indian insurgency, Anglo-Indian wives of the interwar period had to grapple with two hallowed conceptions of appropriate feminine responses to violence. These conceptions were neither empowering nor particularly appealing for women. The peculiar history of Paton’s painting, In Memoriam, [ 112 ]

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exemplifies these dual discourses that arose in the wake of the Mutiny.5 In Paton’s original version of In Memoriam, the ayah turns her head to see who approaches the women’s sanctuary and espies – oh, horror! – a ravening horde of rebellious Indian soldiers eager to dishonour, defile and dismember these tragic, yet noble, emblems of British womanhood. To spectators in Britain, viewing the painting a mere year after news of the rebellion had reached them, the canvas undoubtedly awoke memories of the Cawnpore massacre, considered the most horrific defeat for the British during the Mutiny. To the British, the tragic events at Cawnpore epitomized Indian treachery and brutality, on the one hand, and the sanctity of British womanhood, on the other. At Cawnpore, the besieged British garrison, including a large contingent of women and children, surrendered its ill-chosen encampment after a few weeks of interminable shelling and gunfire from Indian rebels. Believing their Indian captors would allow them to make their way to safety by boat, the British placidly marched to the river, where they were attacked and many, including almost all the men, were killed. It was the lurid fate of the remaining women and children, however, that shocked the British public and evoked furious vengeance from British troops quelling the Mutiny. After fifteen days’ imprisonment in wretched and disease-ridden conditions, the women and children were massacred and their bodies unceremoniously dumped in a well in the courtyard just hours before the rescuing British forces arrived. Although the cellar in which Paton depicted his prayerful women could be any hiding place of fugitive Englishwomen, it could also be Cawnpore on the brink of the infamous slaughter. Thus the initial version of In Memoriam depicted one possible role for Anglo-Indian women: the sanctified victim of rapacious Indian brutality. While the British public revered the Englishwomen slaughtered at Cawnpore as martyrs to the cause of imperialism – the well itself became hallowed ground, topped by a marble angel, screened from immediate view and set in a garden closed to Indians until independence – the reality of their gruesome fate was clearly unpalatable. One of the first British soldiers to reach the site after the bloody events stated: ‘I have looked upon death in every form, but I could not look down that 6 well again.’ Indeed, the ‘Well’ itself, was soon sealed over, with no attempt to identify and remove for interment the remains of the victims. Paton’s original conception thus proving too vivid for his British audience, he altered the painting for display. In the revised version of In Memoriam, the intruders are no longer rapacious mutineers, but rather the welcome figures of British soldiers (attired in kilts, so that the viewer will have no doubt that rescue is at hand). To underline this new message, an 1862 engraving of the painting included the information [ 113 ]

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that the work was ‘designed to commemorate the Christian heroism of the British ladies in India during the Mutiny of 1857, and their ultimate deliverance by British prowess’.7 An alternative Mutiny narrative was, therefore, the story of valiant British soldiers rescuing helpless British women from the Indian mutineers. Thus the two options for Anglo-Indian women created by the legacy of the Mutiny were either to suffer the fate of the women of Cawnpore, ending one’s life in a martyrdom of blood and the anonymous darkness of the Well, or passively and pathetically to await rescue by the heroic British male. The continuing deployment of these two complementary images in the years after the Mutiny served the ends of the British government. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, the image of slaughtered Englishwomen was deployed to justify the otherwise inexplicably brutal behaviour of British soldiers towards the Indian rebels. In the decades after the Mutiny, the desire to avert another Cawnpore provided an emotionally satisfying rationale for a strong British military presence in the subcontinent and, when violence erupted after the First World War, for its deployment against a civilian population. Mainstream British narratives of the Mutiny deprived the Anglo-Indian woman of personal and historical agency; her powerful iconic value lay in her depiction as perpetually endangered victim, to be slaughtered and revered, or heroically rescued. Furthermore, because these discourses present them as passive and pacific, women are positioned as hindrances to the inherent and necessary violence of imperialism. Thus the sanctification of the female victim allowed the government both to justify its extreme tactics in the empire and to create a scapegoat for the failure of those policies. While the rhetorical and political value of the sacrificial British female is apparent, it is also clear that for real Anglo-Indian women neither incarnation of Paton’s In Memoriam offered a viable model for their own behaviour. Women, naturally, would not blithely accept their preordained role as the victims of Indian violence. However, they were also obliged to reject the notion, so comforting to the British public, that British men would unfailingly protect and rescue them. In this respect, another famous painting of the Mutiny, Jessie’s Dream (1858) by Frederick Goodall, perhaps more accurately (albeit unwittingly) reflects women’s actual position during the 1857 rebellion. Goodall’s work, like the revised version of Paton’s canvas, was intended as an inspirational presentation of Mutiny history. The painting depicts Jessie Brown, a Scottish lass’ besieged in the Residency in Lucknow, who awakens from a fitful sleep avowing that she hears the skirl of bagpipes signalling the imminent arrival of the rescuing British troops. Although the tale of Jessie is most likely apocryphal, Scottish troops did manage to fight their [ 114 ]

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way into the Residency four months into the siege. Unfortunately, they were so battered by the contest and so reduced in numbers that they could not relieve the Lucknow survivors. Instead, the troops themselves sought refuge in the Residency, to await rescue alongside the people they had hoped to liberate.8 Thus for the many Jessies scattered throughout India during the Mutiny, the bagpipes’ promise of rescue proved to be, in reality, no more than a dream. Post-Mutiny India was generally a remarkably safe locale. There was thus no immediate imperative for Anglo-Indian women to reconceptualize their stance in relation to imperial violence. Following the partition of Bengal in 1905, however, as Indian opponents of partition incorporated terrorism into their repertoire of political tactics, the spectre of violence became an increasingly troublesome part of AngloIndian life. After the First World War, Indian nationalists became disenchanted both with the British government’s failure to live up to promises regarding self-government for India and with the increasingly repressive nature of imperial rule. Terrorist acts, as well as other forms of violence, such as rioting and robberies, directed against Europeans became a continuing concern for the Anglo-Indian community. For Anglo-Indians, this threat of violence was generally more imagined than it was real, and it was the colonized peoples rather than their rulers who were the more likely victims of violence perpetrated either by the imperial rulers or by their fellow Indians. Nonetheless, Anglo-Indians viewed this upsurge in politically inspired violence as a threat, to themselves and to the empire, that must be checked. For Anglo-Indian women, the palpable threat to empire posed by the growing nationalist movement gave a new focus to their endeavours to construct a place for themselves in the Raj. As this violent challenge to empire developed from the early twentieth century onwards, Anglo-Indian women used literature to re-imagine their role in the empire. Particularly in novels, women re-examined and rewrote the existing tropes of the Mutiny and engaged, as well, with controversial issues raised by the violence of 9 twentieth-century Indian politics. The government of the Raj deployed the resources of law enforcement, including regular police officers and networks of informants, an intelligence bureau and the judicial institutions of the empire to uncover and punish those who threatened imperial rule. Indeed, the extirpation of terrorism seems to have become an obsession for the various law enforcement agencies of the Raj. The widow of the commissioner of police in Calcutta described her husband’s career as, essentially, a ‘struggle against organised political terrorism’, ignoring other facets of the police work that must (or should) have occupied some 10 of his time. The imperial government also enacted special legislation [ 115 ]

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restricting the press (Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act 1908; Indian Press Act 1910), entry into India (Foreigners Ordinance 1914; Ingress into India Ordinance 1914), and free speech and the right of assembly (Defence of India Act 1915) to control the potentially rebellious colonized peoples.11 The Rowlatt (Sedition) Commission justified the retention of repressive measures after the First World War as the only way to combat the terrorist threat. Indeed, the bulk of the Commission’s Report consists of a lengthy recitation of the various terrorist acts and conspiracies that had threatened the Raj before and during the war. The Commission proffered these numerous examples as sufficient justification for the government’s controversial abrogation of civil rights 12 in the immediate postwar period. Terrorist conspiracies hinted at an insidious and hidden threat to the Raj, which garnered public attention only on those rare occasions when such plots came to fruition in bombings, assassinations attempts and daring dacoities (robberies). More troubling to the Anglo-Indian community, however, was mob violence, which not only awakened dormant memories of the Mutiny but indicated, unlike the actions of select and secretive terrorist organizations, a mass public revulsion against imperial rule.13 The events in April 1919 at Amritsar, a city in the Punjab, are surely the most infamous instance, from both British and Indian perspectives, of the disastrous consequences of imperial violence. AngloIndian discussions of the events at Amritsar also reveal the centrality of gender in understanding the role of violence in imperial politics. The upsurge in anti-imperial violence following the First World War originated, in part, from the cruel disappointment of nationalist hopes for the swift implementation of self-government. During the First World War, the Indian empire supplied beleaguered Britain with men, materiel and money. The British government employed a carrot-and-stick approach to disarm the nationalist threat and thus safeguard the uninterrupted flow of soldiers and supplies from the empire during the First World War. The carrot was the offer of self-government seemingly promised to India in 1917 by Secretary of State for India Edwin 14 Montagu. The stick was a set of repressive measures that curtailed civil liberties in India and extended greater power to the police in rooting out anti-British agitation. The combination of these two tactics, reported a British historian of terrorism in India, succeeded in all but eliminating nationalist agitation by 1917.15 After the war, however, it became clear that the British would not grant self-government to India immediately and, furthermore, that the repressive measures would be retained, sparking violent demonstrations. On 10 April 1919, the ousting of two nationalist leaders from Amritsar led to rioting in the city and the deaths of five Europeans, as [ 116 ]

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well as the burning and looting of buildings in the city. On 13 April, however, much greater loss of life occurred when a British general, Reginald Dyer, ordered his (Indian) troops to fire on a peaceful gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh, a large enclosed public space. Because egress was limited, hundreds of Indians were killed. Dyer justified his actions by noting that the meeting violated the ban on public gatherings instituted after the 10 April disturbances. For the Anglo-Indian community, however, and for many in Britain as well, the pivotal event in Amritsar was neither the massacre at the Jallianwala Bagh nor the general rioting in the city, but the sufferings of one woman. A missionary, Miss Sherwood, had been trapped in the Amritsar rioting and brutally beaten. Allegations that Sherwood had also been raped were widespread but never substantiated. On the street where Sherwood had been beaten, Dyer ordered two extra-legal punishments. First, a whipping triangle for public corporal punishment was set up, although it is unclear whether its function was other than symbolic. Second, any Indian man venturing down the street was ordered to crawl on all fours, as a general sign of guilt and remorse for Sherwood’s sufferings. Explaining these bizarre actions to the Hunter Committee, the British government panel investigating the Amritsar disturbances, Dyer said: ‘I felt a woman had been beaten. We look upon woman as sacred or ought to. I was searching my brain for a suitable punishment to meet this awful case ... I felt the street ought to be looked upon as 16 sacred.’ Thus, as had the British soldiers in the Mutiny, Dyer used the image of an Englishwoman’s suffering to justify his own barbaric retribution. While the sixty-odd years separating Cawnpore from Amritsar had apparently done little to alter the image of woman as sacrificial victim, the passage of time and the massive slaughter of the First World War had effected a seachange in British perspectives on violence as a political weapon. Outside of the Anglo-Indian community, Dyer’s actions were met with revulsion rather than approbation. Indian public opinion was shocked not only by the loss of life, but by the government’s subsequent handling of the affair. British authorities in India initially resisted the suggestion that an inquiry be conducted into 17 the ‘Punjab disturbances’. When the government rejected the request of the Indian National Congress that all persons arrested in connection with the disorders be released, the Congress decided to boycott the official inquiry and to conduct its own investigation.18 British and Indian opinions diverged on simple questions of fact, such as the number of people killed, and on more complex issues, such as the extent, if any, to which Dyer’s actions were justified and the culpability of the entire imperial regime in the massacre.19 The debates in parliament and in the British press over Dyer’s actions in Amritsar concerned much more than [ 117 ]

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simply one officer’s conduct.20 The central question was the future course of British rule in India. Should India be perceived and governed as ‘a different moral universe’, in Derek Sayer’s term, or should Indians be accorded the rights, liberties, and privileges extended to citizens in Britain itself?21 In short, the issue was whether Britain could and should use extreme force to retain its imperial domination of India. The Anglo-Indian community, feeling particularly vulnerable, was generally united in support of Dyer.22 During the rioting, British women and children in Amritsar had been evacuated to the fort. After an anxious and uncomfortable few days, most departed for the safety of Simla.23 Thus, with the exception of the unfortunate Miss Sherwood and a handful of other women who had been threatened by the rioters, most Anglo-Indian women were not directly harmed during the disturbances in Amritsar. Nevertheless, Anglo-Indian women were at the forefront in expressing their support for Dyer.24 In Bengal, over 6,000 British women petitioned the prime minister on Dyer’s behalf.25 Women also supported Dyer in print. An anonymous ‘Memsahib’, writing in 1920, alluded feelingly to ‘what the women of the Punjab endured last April’, while an ‘Englishwoman’ more forcefully concluded: ‘No European who was in Amritsar or Lahore doubts that for some days there was a very real danger of the entire European population being massacred, and that General Dyer’s action alone saved them.’26 Indeed, Ethel Savi, a prolific Anglo-Indian novelist, credited ‘the drastic action of General Dyer at Amritsa [sic]’ with ‘sav[ing] the country and restor[ing] order and peace (at the cost of his own unjust expulsion from the Army)’.27 Maud Diver, another well-known Anglo-Indian novelist, also weighed in on Dyer’s side. The hero of her 1921 book Far to Seek opines: ‘it’s the general opinion that prompt action in the Panjab[sic] has fairly well steadied India – for the present at least’.28 In Diver’s Lonely Furrow, published two years later, a dinner-party discussion of the constraints on British rule in India also hearkens back to the Punjab disturbances of 1919. ‘“What surprises me,” remarked the new lady doctor, who had listened with interest, “is that any British official can still be induced to act vigorously – after our treatment of General Dyer.”’29 Women also provided material evidence of their support for Dyer. A committee of Anglo-Indian women raised money to present a ‘sword of honour’ and pecuniary recompense to ‘The Saviour of the Punjab’, lamenting that his dismissal from the army was ‘a result of partial and prejudiced evidence and [an expression of] indignation at the dangers of pandering to a small band of disloyal agitators whose noisy mouthings the deluded British public are mistaking for the voice of the loyal millions of India’.30 Women contributed to the subscription fund [ 118 ]

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launched by the London Morning Post for ‘The Man Who Saved India’. Among the donors to the fund, which eventually totalled more than £26,000, were ‘one of the many wives who have to spend most of their time in India’, ‘a daughter and sister of officers who have served in India’, and ‘A British Officer and his wife who have spent several years in India’.31 Indeed the general’s female supporters had not forgotten him several years later. At Dyer’s funeral in 1927, two women carried a wreath with the inscription ‘An Englishwoman’s gratitude’.32 Contemporary historians have often assessed British women’s role in the Amritsar affair as simply a continuation of the discourses originating in the Indian Mutiny.33 Indeed, Dyer’s own references to Sherwood as a justification of his actions invoke the Mutiny trope of the English-womanas-helpless-victim, looking to the virile Englishman as her saviour. This interpretation, however, not only disempowers Anglo-Indian women but also ignores their intense engagement with imperial politics. Anglo-Indian women’s response to Amritsar was just one facet of a larger picture in which women renounced not only the Well at Cawnpore and its cult of female victimization, but the entire political ideology that preached the pacific (if gradual) accommodation of Indian nationalist demands. If Anglo-Indian women supported General Dyer, it was not because of his chivalrous regard for Miss Sherwood (and, by extension, for all British womanhood as such), but rather because he had acted swiftly, forcefully and decisively in quashing a violent threat to imperial rule. By forswearing the role of victim, women no longer had to fear violence; indeed, they could welcome it as a potent means of eviscerating Indian nationalism and thus preserving the empire. Anglo-Indian women did not see themselves in the helpless Miss Sherwood; rather they identified with the decisive and decisively violent action of General Dyer. Through their public support of Dyer, women not only claimed the right to participate publicly in imperial politics but staked out a position committed to the preservation of empire – even at the cost of violence. Women’s embrace of General Dyer and his violently repressive measures was rooted in their response to the Mutiny. Although images of women’s martyrdom and rescue dominated cultural and historical representations of the Mutiny, other voices and other visions emerged. Mutiny survivors constructed their own version of its history, while fictional representations of the uprising also subverted the dominant discourse. These counter-narratives, which re-position women in relation to violence, are important in understanding Anglo-Indian women’s subsequent imperial politics. The Mutiny was a palpable presence in many Anglo-Indian women’s lives, not a distant and irrelevant historical event. When they were living in stations that had [ 119 ]

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witnessed rebellious episodes in 1857, they noted the historical facts in their diaries, letters, and memoirs. They made pilgrimages to famous Mutiny sites where violence was ‘very real; brutally, shudderingly real’ and aroused ‘feelings of burning indignation, and ... a new fresh personal sorrow’.34 Anglo-Indian wives of the interwar period, facing the threat of nationalist agitation, thus drew on both historical and fictionalized representations of women’s responses to the Mutiny to understand their own position in an increasingly turbulent India. For twentieth-century Anglo-Indian women, the lessons of the Mutiny for the future conduct of imperial policy were clear. Rioting in the 1940s, for example, was a signal that, ‘We were not wanted in India ... It was frightening, very frightening and made one picture only too vividly the days of the Mutiny.’35 The Mutiny also offered guidance for contemporary political quandaries. Writing in the 1930s, one woman wondered: ‘Remembering what [British men who fought during the Mutiny] endured, it is unbelievable to me how anyone can breathe, even in secret: Let us abandon India! Must the fruit of such heroism be thrown aside and left to rot in the chaos India would become without England’s just and firm guidance?’36 As the Raj faced serious and potentially violent challenges to its rule, the Anglo-Indian community looked back to the greater challenge it had met and overcome during the Mutiny. Although fiction about the Mutiny began appearing right after the rebellion and continued to be published for at least a century thereafter, there was a surge in publication of Mutiny novels from the mid-1880s through to the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.37 As the nationalist movement became a genuine threat to imperial rule beginning in the twentieth century, Anglo-Indian fiction also began to address contemporary political issues, rather than simply hearkening back to the Mutiny.38 Rewriting the Mutiny and imperial violence to provide an active, empowered role for women was a necessary component of the image of the politically active and engaged ‘imperial wife’. If women were to be partners, through marriage, in the imperial endeavour, then they should expect no special exemptions from the dangers and travails inherent in the work of empire. Texts that reformulated women’s position in the Mutiny and their relationship to imperial violence were but one facet of the larger cultural shifts that accompanied wives’ efforts to create an integrated position for themselves in the twentieth-century Raj. Amelia Bennett, one of the few survivors of the Cawnpore massacre, wrote her autobiographical account of that historic event in 1913, shortly after the first serious outbreak of terrorist activity in India. Bennett explicitly connected her narrative with contemporary Indian [ 120 ]

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politics, in the hopes of averting yet another violent challenge to British imperialism. The organised unrest that is now spreading through the length and breadth of India has prompted me to place this reminder before my fellowcountrymen of the horrible atrocities perpetrated on our women and children in those dark days of 1857. The misplaced sentimentalism dealing with Indians to-day, in the face of the repeated discovery of the existence of secret societies having for their object the overthrow of British rule, is opening a way for the addition of an equally terrible chapter to Indian history.39

Just 18 when the Mutiny broke out, Bennett survived the initial attack at the river, from which she was rescued by an Indian soldier, and then lived in captivity among Indians disguised as a Muslim woman. Her post-Mutiny ostracization by the British community (presumably because she was suspected of having ‘allowed’ her rescuer to rape her), to which Bennett alluded in her essay, perhaps emboldened her to say openly what many Anglo-Indian women must have thought. Although the narrative outline of Bennett’s account closely follows the structure of much Mutiny fiction and the veracity of her memoir is open to doubt, Bennett’s articulation of the relationship of gender and imperial violence is nonetheless illuminating. Bennett’s narrative represents a scathing indictment of British leadership in India, particularly at Cawnpore. According to Bennett, British men failed to anticipate the Mutiny, despite adequate indications of dissatisfaction among Indian soldiers and the princes who joined their cause. Indeed, in Bennett’s estimation, it was a woman, her own mother, who most astutely assessed the situation at Cawnpore. ‘“Look around you,”, said my mother [to a fugitive seeking refuge in Cawnpore], “and judge of our insecurity. Do you think we can hold out here with but a handful of men?” He wisely listened and proceeded on to Allahabad, 40 taking steamer from there to Calcutta and safety.’ British men also failed adequately to defend the beleaguered Europeans. Bennett condemns the leadership of General Wheeler, noting that his site for the entrenchment had been ‘unwisely selected’, that the fortifications were ‘most paltry and indefensible’, and that ‘[e]ven those who had little pretensions to military tactics [the women of Cawnpore?] perceived the utter insecurity of the place’.41 Finally, British soldiers failed to suppress the Mutiny swiftly enough. While her account praises the valour of the British men defending Cawnpore, it is clear that Bennett’s experience, including the massacre of her family and her own sufferings in rebel hands, would have been less tragic had military intervention been swift and effective. Indeed, Bennett’s life was preserved not by the heroic acts [ 121 ]

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of British soldiers, but by a mutinous Indian soldier who ‘brutally’ dragged her from a burning boat and hauled her to shore.42 Amelia Bennett’s story is noteworthy because she attributed the disaster at Cawnpore to British men’s ineptitude, thus demolishing the cherished Mutiny myth of the Englishman-as-saviour. However, like the Scottish lass Jessie Brown who can only dream that help is on the way, Bennett never actively seized control of her own fate. Her survival was ultimately a matter more of luck than of her purposeful endeavour. Other authors, however, presented a version of Mutiny events in which women were neither the helpless victims of Indian aggression nor the pathetic dependants of virile British men. In both novels and non-fiction works, women depicted themselves and other Anglo-Indian women as active agents of their own fate, vigorously defending not only themselves and their children but even sometimes their husbands, against the depredations of mutinous Indians. In these accounts there is no prayerful vigil, no helpless succumbing to the slaughter, but rather resourceful action, intellectual acuity, strong nerves and physical valour. The daughters of a Mrs Wagentreiber, who successfully engineered her family’s escape from Delhi, wrote two of the most striking accounts of a vigorous woman heroically defending her family during the 43 Mutiny. The intrepid Mrs Wagentreiber not only belies the image of passive, victimized female, but appears in many instances more competent and physically courageous than the bumbling men around her, including her husband. As in Amelia Bennett’s narrative, the men are condemned for doing too little too late. Unlike the passive Bennett, however, Mrs Wagentreiber literally seized the reins to safeguard herself and her family. Many of the men at Delhi, where the Wagentreibers lived, were caught off guard by the Mutiny; some ‘completely lost their heads, so taken aback were they by the unlooked for and unexpected event’.44 Not Mrs Wagentreiber: ‘[s]he had her suspicions, and for some time before the Mutiny broke out had often mentioned them.’45 Once the Mutiny erupted, Wagentreiber acted swiftly, decisively and correctly. She saved her husband’s life, for the first of several times during the course of their adventures, by recalling him from the city of Delhi with a false message that she was ill. (This was the only time in her harrowing adventures that Wagentreiber called on her husband’s chivalric instincts – but the unconventional purpose of this stereotypically feminine behaviour was to save him, not herself.) Disregarding the advice of several prominent men, Mrs Wagentreiber insisted that her family flee for their lives.46 Once separated from the other British during the family’s lonely flight, Mr and Mrs Wagentreiber’s gender reversal became complete. The [ 122 ]

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wife assumed the role of omnipotent protector and the husband that of defenceless victim. When they sought refuge in the home of a friendly Indian, Mrs Wagentreiber stood guard, while her husband and daughters cowered at the top of the house behind a locked door. Again, it was Mrs Wagentreiber who undertook the difficult task of driving the carriage during the escape. Although ‘the horses were wild with fright’, the family staved off three separate attacks by roving bands of mutineers because Mrs Wagentreiber ‘was a good driver and the animals knew her well’.47 In all of this, Mr Wagentreiber ‘was guided entirely by [his wife’s] judgment, for he knew she was better able to understand the natives than he was, and he trusted her steady determined manner of dealing with them’.48 Mrs Wagentreiber was apparently so concerned with protecting her husband even from emotional upset that, her daughter reported, when she received a wrenching blow in the arm she ‘never uttered a sound, fearing the effect it might have on my father’.49 Thanks to Mrs Wagentreiber’s determination, courage and sound judgement, the family eventually reached the safety of Simla. Implicitly contrasting her mother’s cool-headed bravery with the cowardly dithering of AngloIndian men, Miss Wagentreiber closed her recitation by noting: ‘we learnt that the people at Simla were in a continual state of alarm, partly on account of the groundless rumours spread by unnerved men, some of whom so completely lost themselves as to be wholly unable to control their feelings’.50 The themes outlined in these ostensibly factual accounts are echoed in Anglo-Indian fiction, which enjoyed a wide readership in both empire and metropole. Flora Annie Steel’s novel On the Face of the Waters, an instant bestseller in 1896, tells of Kate Erlton, an Englishwoman hiding in Delhi during the Mutiny disguised as an Indian woman.51 Jim Douglas, a disgraced military officer and sometime intelligence agent, facilitates her subterfuge by sheltering Kate in the home of his late Indian mistress. Like the traditional helpless female of many Mutiny tales, Kate depends on Douglas for her continuing survival and he, in turn, curses her dependence as hampering his participation in the Mutiny. Steel’s novel, however, eventually veers away from this familiar gendering of the Mutiny narrative, and the tables are turned. Douglas falls ill and Kate, now completely at ease in her adopted Indian persona, nurses him back to health. Douglas grudgingly confesses to Kate her own power and his impotence: ‘[Y]ou’ve learned everything, my dear lady, necessary to salvation. That’s the worst of it! You chatter to Tara [his Indian servant] ... You draw your veil over your face when the water-carrier comes to fill the pots as if you had been born on a housetop. You ... Mrs Erlton! – if I were not a helpless idiot I

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could pass you out of the city tomorrow, I believe. It isn’t your fault any longer. It’s mine, and Heaven only knows how long – Oh! confound that thrumming and drumming. It gets on my nerves – my nerves! – pshaw!’52

When Kate eventually executes a successful escape from Delhi it is at her own initiative and by her own planning (with a little help from Tara), but with no assistance from Douglas, who has disappeared at this crucial moment. Thus, On the Face of the Waters is, finally, the story of a woman who successfully transforms herself in the face of danger and ultimately takes responsibility for her own survival. Two less well-known Mutiny novels, The White Dove of Amritzir (c. 1896) by Eliza Pollard and The Devil’s Wind (1912) by Patricia Wentworth, also offer alternative models of women as strong and courageous agents of their own destinies.53 Although structurally both books are contrived romances, with unbelievable coincidences leading inexorably to the ultimate happy ending, their depictions of the Mutiny and their presentations of female characters depart radically from traditional Mutiny narratives. In The White Dove of Amritzir, Pollard presents powerful images of British women’s potential for courage and physical strength in the face of violence. She writes ‘of the deeds of daring delicate women accomplished to save their husbands and children’, including ‘the wife supporting the wounded husband, until 54 they reached an English station’. The exploits of two minor female characters, trapped in Delhi as it is ‘given up to rapine and murder’ forcefully counter stereotypes of female passivity and willing martyrdom. As sepoys are about to overrun their refuge, Kate and Lina grab some pistols and prepare to defend themselves. ‘Fire!’ said Lina Humphrey, between her white lips. At the same time the gun she held went off, and the foremost man fell dead. Kate also had drawn the trigger of her pistol, and by chance, or rather guided by God’s will, she had also wounded her man, who fell to the ground beside his companion. Happily there were only two of them. ‘Quick!’ said Lina, throwing down the heavy gun; and snatching up two other pistols out of the case, she leapt over the prostrate forms, and rushed down the stairs into the street.55

The Devil’s Wind similarly recasts the Mutiny as a tale of English men’s impotence and English women’s courage and determination to survive. When the soldiers mutiny at their small station, the heroine, Helen, leads her flirtatious cousin Adela to safety. Although Adela believes that ‘A man – any man – spelled protection and safety’, the men who have survived the initial onslaught are sorry specimens.56 One is unconscious, while the other, Mr Purslake, ‘looked dreadfully uncomfortable. He was not formed for tragedy. He felt bewildered and confused, like an actor who has learned his trivial part, and finds himself [ 124 ]

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suddenly set to play the hero in some strange unknown drama.’57 In the end it is, of course, Helen who shrewdly assesses the situation, proposes a course of action and, by force of personality, compels Purslake to effect her plan. ‘He did not admire her composure, but it had a stimulating effect on him.’58 The group of survivors led by Helen eventually reaches the supposed safety of Cawnpore, where Dick, Adela’s husband, whom Helen secretly loves, soon joins them. When news comes of the garrison’s impending surrender, Dick initially tries to cushion the blow. ‘He had begun some cheerful speech when he met [Helen’s] eyes. Something in them – an intelligence, a courage that equalled his own – spoke and was answered, in silence.’59 During the massacre at the boats and its aftermath Helen proves she truly is Dick’s comrade – and more than his equal. Dick is wounded by the mutineers’ gunshots and falls out of the boat. Helen springs into action, evidencing both mental composure and physical strength, and saves him from a watery grave. After the two miraculously escape the slaughter at the river, Helen protects Dick, who is wounded and suffering from amnesia. Hidden in a cave for several months, the two survive by eating frogs and birds Helen kills with her bare hands! It is only at the very end of the book that the accepted presentation of woman-as-victim intrudes. Helen, by now happily married to Dick, encounters a white woman living as an Indian. (The woman is – surprise – Adela, long believed to have died at Cawnpore.) Dick points out that ‘there was only one condition under which any woman could have saved herself from the Cawnpore Massacre’ (i.e. by forming a sexual alliance with her Indian rescuer), and Helen shudders at the fate of such a pathetic creature. Dick reassures her: ‘It could never have been you. 60 There was always a choice, always death.’ Given what we know about Helen’s bravery and resourcefulness, however, it is impossible to believe that she would not have fought her way out of any difficult situation. Because the Mutiny was a foundational event both in shaping the Anglo-Indian community and in situating women within that community, women used fiction to confront and counter the myths and icons of the Mutiny and thus to create an active role for themselves within the Indian Empire. Anglo-Indian women recognized the crucial significance of the Mutiny as a discursive reference point for their own imperial experiences. Particularly after the First World War, the horrors of which made the Mutiny seem tame by comparison, many AngloIndians were concerned that the Mutiny would be erased from British memory. Yvonne Fitzroy recounted in her published memoirs a tour of Mutiny sites in Delhi. ‘I cannot begin to tell you all the Mutiny stories but the incident of one of our guests who, on being first shown the [ 125 ]

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“historic Ridge”, indifferently murmured, “Ridge, what Ridge?” has so shaken my faith that I feel I must remind you a little.’ Fitzroy then went on to relate briefly for her readers, who might prove as ignorant or forgetful as the ‘guest’ in her account, several tales of British bravery and Indian brutality in 1857.61 Remembering the Mutiny – or at least British versions of the Mutiny – was necessary to explain and to justify the escalation of violence in the twentieth century to an increasingly sceptical metropolitan public. Only those who had learned the lessons of the Mutiny could correctly assess the contemporary political situation in India. Thus Anglo-Indian women foregrounded the spectre of the Mutiny and of Mutiny violence in many of their writings. Sometimes this awareness was presented humorously, as in O. Douglas’s novel Olivia in India. Realizing that her bedroom has multiple doors and windows, few of which can be locked, barred or fastened, the perky narrator exclaims in mock horror: ‘What I should do if a Mutiny occurred I can’t think!’62 Most commonly, however, references to the Mutiny in Anglo-Indian fiction are sombre, intended to convey the ever-present threat of insurgence to the Anglo-Indian community and to the empire. The heroine of Cecilia Kirkham’s Son thus explains why she refuses to read about the Mutiny: ‘“I don’t care,” her voice was very low, but there was an odd vehemence in it, “to read about things that make me sick with terror to think of. You can read all these ghastly horrors and – go back to England. I can’t. I’ve got to live out here for the present at any rate. And,” with a short little laugh, “I’ve got 63 an imagination.”’ Remembering and rewriting Anglo-Indian women’s role in containing the threat to the empire in 1857 validated women’s political participation when Indian ‘rebels’ again threatened the Raj in the twentieth century. In shaping their relationship to a violent imperial politics, however, Anglo-Indian women did not look solely to the past. Anglo-Indian fiction of the interwar period incorporated quite specific references to the turbulent politics of the era and constructed a central role for women in these imperial political debates. Just as women used fiction to ‘rewrite’ the Mutiny, so they also addressed in their novels the new types of violence that threatened British women in India, such as terrorism, mob violence and dacoity. Like the three Mutiny novels discussed above, books about the dangers of nationalist violence in India depict strong women proceeding with their lives calmly and bravely despite the constant threat of violence. The Sword and the Spirit, by Beatrice Sheepshanks, evokes themes of men’s impotence and women’s competence common to Mutiny 64 narratives. Clearly patterned on the Amritsar disturbances, the book describes rioting in the city of Andhari. Anne, the heroine, is missing, [ 126 ]

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and Mr Acland, a married man secretly in love with Anne, fears for her safety. He eventually locates her at the home of Miss Glover, a missionary badly beaten by the mob, whom Anne has been tending. To Acland’s chagrin, Anne refuses to assume the role of helpless victim; he jestingly complains to her: ‘So I came to fetch you, secretly hoping to find you mildly hysterical, or at any rate displaying some feminine weakness that could be met on my part by an equal display of masculine strength.’ [...] ‘Instead of which,’ he went on with an assumption of lightness, ‘you greet me at the door, cool-eyed and clearheaded, as if we were meeting at a garden-party, and as if I were a stranger, to whom you were willing, if necessary, to be politely amiable for a little! ... So much for my hopes and fears!’65

Anglo-Indian women’s interwar fiction also attacked pressing political issues of the day head-on. In writing about nationalist violence, Anglo-Indian women authors overtly positioned their fictional characters within the context of recent political events. Anglo-Indian authors, believing that the British public was both unaware of and unconcerned about the volatile political situation in India, were not always willing to rely on their readers’ ability to decipher the political truth and significance of their works. Sheepshanks prefaced The Sword and the Spirit with the brief notation: ‘The incidents in this book are 66 founded on fact.’ Although she does not indicate the specific historical referents, the mob violence in the fictional city of Andhari would surely have been recognizable to many readers as paralleling events at Amritsar. Sheepshanks, however, also drew on less well-known events with which her audience might not have been familiar. For example, she carefully sets up a scene in which the British judge in Andhari has received a terrorist bomb disguised as a book. By pure chance, he fails to open the package and, before any harm can occur, the hero of the novel disarms the weapon. This echoes an incident that occurred in 1908, when a Judge Kingsford received a book bomb that similarly failed to explode because the package was not opened. Maud Diver, author of a series of polemical novels addressing the problems of contemporary India, made even greater claims to historical veracity than did Sheepshanks. In an ‘Author’s Note’ to The Singer Passes, for instance, Diver wrote: ‘As I have attempted a vision of Northern India during the eventful year of 1931, I wish to make it clear that not only all events, but all Indian episodes – even the least – are 67 based on actual fact.’ Of course, the events Diver selects from that ‘eventful year’ and the manner in which she presents them are clearly crafted to sustain the diehard Anglo-Indian perspective of the empire. In [ 127 ]

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that novel, Diver illuminates relationships among three of the central characters through a discussion of an attack by an Indian nationalist on an Anglo-Indian woman and her two children. This replicates an incident in 1931 in which an Indian nationalist killed the wife of an army captain and severely injured their two daughters, in a failed attempt to murder the officer.68 Diver’s decision to highlight an ‘outrage’ in which the victim is ‘[n]ot a man this time’, underscores both Anglo-Indian women’s vulnerability to attack and their commitment, nonetheless, to remaining in the empire.69 By integrating political events with fictional narratives, and by drawing attention to the realistic framework of their novels, female authors could defuse criticism that their portrayals of the dangers facing the Anglo-Indian community, and women’s courageous responses to those threats, were unrealistic or overblown. Female authors’ incisive presentations of recent political events also undermined assertions that Anglo-Indian women were politically naive or ill-informed. Of course, women were not the only Anglo-Indian authors who used fiction to present their perspective on imperial politics to the British public. In his short story ‘The Englightenments of Pagett, MP’, for example, Rudyard Kipling depicts a knowledgeable ICS officer who gradually instructs Pagett about the ‘true’ state of imperial affairs in 70 India. As Teresa Hubel points out, however, the works of many male authors, from supporters of imperialism like Kipling to critics such as E.M. Forster, ignore women as political actors in the empire.71 AngloIndian women’s novels, therefore, construct a political legitimacy for women, as well as for men, rooted in on-the-spot knowledge of empire and, in particular, of firsthand experience of the violence associated with imperialism. By virtue of their female authorship, these novels implicitly argue that Anglo-Indian women’s political voices must be acknowledged and validated because these women are among the few who have personally experienced the violence of empire. Like Kipling’s ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, MP’, many AngloIndian women’s novels portray visiting politicians and journalists – whom Anglo-Indians believed were presenting a distorted picture of life in the empire to the British public – as stubbornly attached to their ignorant misapprehensions about the Raj and the Anglo-Indian community. Anglo-Indian women novelists attacked as naive those interlopers who believed that the problems of empire could be solved without recourse to violence. Sara Jeannette Duncan’s novel The Burnt Offering traces the Indian experiences of Vulcan Mills, a visiting MP, 72 and his daughter Joan. Foolishly rushing in where the imperialist angels feared to tread, Joan and her father unwittingly succour a group of violent Indian nationalists who, in a failed attempt to assassinate the viceroy (reminiscent of an actual attempt on the life of Lord Minto, in [ 128 ]

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1908), succeed in murdering an earnest ICS officer in love with Joan. The involvement, unknowingly, of an MP (and his daughter) in the murder of an Anglo-Indian official symbolizes the greater complicity of the British government in endangering the lives of the entire Anglo-Indian community through their misguided imperial policies. Although claiming political expertise for themselves and, by implication, for Anglo-Indian women generally, many female authors conflated and confused the various nationalist groups, along with their methods and their motives. Indian nationalists represented a wide spectrum of political ideologies, embracing collaboration with the imperial rulers, Gandhian civil disobedience, socialism, terrorism and military action. Anglo-Indian women authors generally present nationalists, lumped together by Diver as ‘Nehru’s lot’, as self-serving, dishonest and violent. Even in a romance such as Ethel Savi’s Birds of Passage, in which the political content is generally muted, the Indian villain is, significantly, a self-described ‘Nationalist’. He abuses his British wife and is described as ‘sensual, gross, tending towards 73 obesity’. Similarly, at the end of Maud Diver’s Lonely Furrow, the wife of an imperial official is set upon in her train compartment by a crowd of animalistic nationalists who ‘spat and made mouths at her’ while shouting ‘the war-cry of the moment – “Out with all English monkeys! Gandhi ki jai! Hindu-Mussulman ki jai!”’74 Many women novelists portray the diehard Anglo-Indian position as both the sole rational political choice and the only humane path for India to follow. The converse of the Anglo-Indian position, non-violent Gandhian nationalism, is presented as a fraud. Indian nationalists are working not for the benefit of their people and their country, but for their own selfish advantage. In Beatrice Sheepshanks’s The Sword and the Spirit, an Indian warns a British officer of impending trouble from the ‘sedition-mongers’. The official asks, rhetorically: ‘The usual methods, I suppose? Lying rumours carefully circulated. Secret societies where it is hinted that future sacrifices shall be of white goats [a code phrase presumed by the British to signal the assassination of British officials]. Some spicy little leaflets speaking of police torture, of British intrigue, and British oppression generally. Something of that kind? It’s the 75 beginning, I suppose?’ The nationalist leaders thus are reduced to a pack of tricksters, ‘a handful of lawyer intellectuals’, as Diver characterizes them who, if the British shirk their responsibilities towards the ‘millions here who need us – white and brown’, would ‘soon come in without any desire to bring peace or justice’.76 Thus, ironically, although justifying imperial violence, novelists like Diver and Sheepshanks present diehard Anglo-Indian imperialists as the true pacifists, while the advocates of [ 129 ]

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Gandhian pacifism are depicted as the scurrilous promoters of dissent, disorder and violence. These historical and novelistic representations of imperial violence and of women’s relationship to the violence of empire coloured AngloIndian women’s assessment of interwar politics. Anglo-Indian women, to a greater extent even than Anglo-Indian men, allied themselves with the diehard political faction advocating defence of the empire at all costs. Anglo-Indian wives deprecated the nationalist ‘threat’ both quantitatively and qualitatively. Many Anglo-Indians, women and men, believed that the nationalist movement did not express the aspirations of most ‘ordinary’ Indians. Although Winifred Donald, for example, witnessed political unrest and riots during her years in Burma, and her husband was occasionally accompanied by troops for protection in his forestry work, she nonetheless placed blame for unrest ‘at the door of intellectual political leaders and ... priests. We never met anything but friendliness amongst the Burmese.’77 Indeed, in this view it was the Anglo-Indians themselves who could best represent the subcontinent’s downtrodden masses. Thus, Coralie Taylor, although she regularly carried a gun to protect her husband from terrorists, believed that ‘ordinary inhabitants’ posed no threat but, rather, welcomed the empire’s imposition of law and order in India.78 Ironically, although Anglo-Indian wives allied themselves with the forces of imperial violence, they often cited Britain’s ability to bring peace to India and impose order in a chaotic environment as imperialism’s greatest benefits. In characterizing the nationalists’ challenge to British rule, women contrasted images of Indian men’s impotence with those of the strength of Anglo-Indian wives. Although women’s memoirs and letters often mentioned anti-British incidents, for the most part officials’ wives adopted the attitude of Nora Ford-Robertson, the wife of an Indian police officer, who avowed that she ‘never had a glimmer of a fear’ in India, even when living in Cawnpore, half-a-mile from the ‘Well’.79 At any rate, if such fear was experienced, it could not be revealed. Maud Diver, in The Singer Passes, explains this attitude in a dialogue between a husband and wife who have just learned of yet another anti-British ‘outrage’. The husband comments: ‘As for Nehru’s lot, if they think they can frighten us out of the country, they’ll find themselves mightily mistaken.’ ‘All the same,’ Rose stated in her changed voice, ‘India will soon be no place for English women and children.’ ‘To admit it, my dear, amounts to playing their game. We’ve got to let ‘em see that an outrage here and there won’t scare our women in to showing the white feather.’80

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Perhaps taking a cue from such novels, real Anglo-Indian women were proud that nationalists had not prompted them to ‘show the white feather’. Rather than fear, a smugly humorous tone typifies women’s narration of encounters with the purportedly dangerous Indian nationalists. Beatrix Scott recalled that when she and her husband, an officer in the ICS, encountered a nationalist demonstration by ‘hysterical’ youths, ‘We were just going to our baths, and we paid it the compliment of not disrobing ourselves till it was over.’81 According to Barbara Donaldson, the sight of her young son toddling up the driveway with a toy gun on his shoulder was enough to defuse one ‘Quit India’ demonstration, while Viola Bayley recalled that her Australian terrier ‘took exception to an open air meeting of Gandhi’s and joyfully scattered disciples to left and right with playful nips’.82 If children, dogs and bathrobed Britons were enough to scare off Indian demonstrators, then what chance did nationalists stand against a determined and wellordered campaign to put down violence? The intrepid Lady Crofton charged on horseback past two men who shouted insults and waved lathis at her as they headed towards the city to make trouble. The men vaulted over a wall to escape Crofton and scampered away. She wryly commented: ‘If this was typical things should go well in the city.’83 Because Anglo-Indian women framed interwar imperial politics as necessarily a violent confrontation between beneficent imperialists and evil nationalists, they could neither understand nor accept the political tactics and philosophy of Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. AngloIndians assessed Gandhi as, among other things, ‘a guerrilla leader’, ‘an extremely shrewd politician’, someone it was ‘not safe to put ... into any 84 position of power’ and ‘a tiresome old humbug’. Anglo-Indians were so committed to the idea that a strong hand was necessary to govern India that they could not credit as genuine Gandhi’s commitment to a nonviolent politics. The Gandhian alternative of non-violence was not an option, many Anglo-Indians believed, either because it was not honestly proffered or because it simply was not feasible in the political climate of interwar India. Some Anglo-Indian observers, essentializing their own inclination towards violence, believed that neither Gandhi nor anyone else could compel Indians to adhere to a programme of non-violent resistance. Gandhi ‘has very little authority with the mass out here. Even if he promises that civil disobedience will stop it will continue as his 85 followers will take no notice of him if they do not agree.’ Others believed that Gandhi himself was being disingenuous in his protestations of non-violence. The civil disobedience campaign ‘was a clever political move, for Gandhi knew very well that left-thinking progressives could be relied on to emphasize the call for non-violence, [ 131 ]

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while ignoring or excusing the bloodshed’.86 Anglo-Indians also dismissed Gandhi’s anti-imperialist political agenda as irresponsible, particularly during the ‘Quit India’ campaign of 1942 at the height of the Japanese threat to India. Because Gandhi was a fraud, Anglo-Indians believed, the logic of Gandhian politics could presumably be undermined by a quick dose of British facts. One woman described how her husband quelled ‘a near riot’ in 1921 by such tactics: When one of them began to shout for ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ he [the husband] asked ‘Why are you saying that?’ ‘Because if Mahatma was in power we should all have plenty of work in the mines and factories.’ ‘No you wouldn’t – Mahatma doesn’t approve of factories. You would have to spin every day and do everything by hand.’ Anyway they stopped yelling, listened to what he had to say, gave him a round of applause and went home.87

With Gandhi thus eliminated from imperial politics as an impotent impostor and his ideas of non-violent resistance dismissed as fraudulent, Anglo-Indians could construe imperial politics of the interwar years solely in violent terms. A violent challenge to British rule by Indian nationalists would be met with requisite violence from the imperial community – including its women. Although tropes of the Mutiny remained prominent in British culture, Anglo-Indian wives challenged the images of sanctified martyr and victimized female in both their literary discourses and the practices of their everyday lives. In order to be fully integrated into British imperialism in India, Anglo-Indian officials’ wives had to reject notions of women’s helplessness and dependence. While the empire capitalized on the depiction of sacrificial British womanhood, such an image neither empowered women nor permitted them a voice in contemporary political debates. By renouncing their iconic martyrdom, Anglo-Indian wives showed themselves ready, willing and able to share with their husbands the burdens, as well as the benefits, of imperial rule. AngloIndian wives met the perceived challenge of violence to the Raj by integrating themselves into the culture of imperial violence, not as victims, but as active, assertive and assured defenders of the empire. They thus linked their personal fates as Anglo-Indian wives with the political future of British imperialism in India.

Notes 1

The narrow term ‘mutiny’, indicating a purely military revolt, is a misnomer for the 1857 rebellion, because mutinous Indian troops were joined by peasants, indigenous rulers and other members of the civilian population. Although recognizing its inherent inaccuracy, I

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4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19

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nonetheless employ the term ‘mutiny’ as the one the British themselves used, both in 1857 and subsequently, to refer to those events. Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999), 112. The British government displaced the semi-private East India Company as the ruling imperial authority. Britain also reorganized its armed forces in India so that the ratio of Indian to British troops would never exceed three to one. Finally, the government expanded development of the railway system in India, to facilitate rapid movement of troops around India, and improved communications within the subcontinent. Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ, 1967). For a discussion of the history behind In Memoriam, see Brian Allen, The Indian Mutiny and British Painting’, Apollo 132 (September 1990): 156. Quoted in Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion (London, 1996), 126. Allen, Indian Mutiny’, 156. Lucknow was eventually relieved on 16 November 1857, almost two months after the arrival of the initial British force. Rashna B. Singh, The Imperishable Empire: A Study of Indian Fiction on India (Washington, DC, 1988), 15; see also Teresa Hubel, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (Durham, 1996). K. Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart: Memoir of an Indian Police Officer’, British Library. The government relied on the extant ordnance, Regulation III of 1818, to deport troublemakers convicted under the new provisions. For an assessment of the efficacy of these provisions, see Sedition Committee, Report (1918; reprinted Calcutta, 1973) (hereafter, Rowlatt Report). Rowlatt Report. Retrospectively, Mary Henry, the wife of an Indian Army officer, cited ‘mob violence’ as one of the major hazards of life in India, but noted that the British had to learn to live with it. Mary Henry, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh and British Judgment, 1919–1920 (Honolulu, HI, 1977), 74. H.W. Hale, Political Trouble in India 1917–1937 (reprinted Allahabad, 1974), ix. Quoted in A. Draper, Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj (London, 1981), 171. For one example of Anglo-Indian opinion, see Sir Michael O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It 1885–1925 (London, 1925), 318–19. O’Dwyer was lieutenant-governor of the Punjab at the time of the disturbances. V.N. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh (Ludhiana, 1969), 111. Dyer estimated the number of dead at 200 to 300, while Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, an Indian leader, estimated the fatalities at about 1,000. Datta, Jallianwala, 104. While the Hunter Committee condemned Dyers’s ‘excessive measures’, the Congress report denounced the massacre as ‘a calculated piece of inhumanity ... unparalleled for its ferocity in the history of modern British administration’. Quoted in Datta, Jallianwala, 120, 124. Raja Ram has argued that the massacre was a ‘premeditated plan’, in which General Dyer ‘had not acted on his own but had just played the part assigned to him by the British bureaucracy which had plotted the design’. See R.R. Sethi, ‘Foreword’ to Raja Ram, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, A Premeditated Plan (Chandigarh, 1969), xii. The Hunter Committee, the British Army and the House of Commons all upheld the relatively mild sanction of dismissal from the army without court martial. The House of Lords, however, voted its support for Dyer, passing a motion, ‘that this house deplores the conduct of the case of General Dyer as unjust to that officer and as establishing a dangerous precedent to the preservation of order in face of rebellion’. Quoted in Fein, Imperial Crime, 136. Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past and Present 131 (May 1991): 139. Ibid., 151. A brief and quite unemotional account of women’s experiences at Amritsar is presented in

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

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49 50 51

‘Amritsar, by an Englishwoman’, Blackwood’s Magazine CCVII (April 1920): 441–6. References to Dyer and the events at Amritsar are rare in memoirs and interviews recorded after 1947. Subsequent events, including Indian independence, rendered support for Dyer unpopular and impolitic. In an interview for the BBC radio programme ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, however, Lady Rosamond Lawrence stated (after some pressing by the interviewer): ‘I think [Dyer] was probably right to fire, but what was wrong, I think, in doing, was to say that he’d fired until all his ammunition was dead.’ Lady Rosamond Lawrence, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, 158. ‘The Memsahib’s Point of View’, Cornhill Magazine 48 (May 1920): 598; ‘Amritsar, by an Englishwoman’, 446. Ethel Savi, My Own Story (London, 1947), 206. Maud Diver, Far to Seek (London, 1921), 394. Maud Diver, Lonely Furrow (Boston, MA, 1923), 261 (emphasis in original). Quoted in Draper, Amritsar, 238. Quoted in Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, 158 and Fein, Imperial Crime, 170. Quoted in Draper, Amritsar, 266. Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, 162. Norah Rowan Hamilton, Through Wonderful India and Beyond (London, 1915), 146; Isabel Fraser Hunter, The Land of Regrets (London, 1909), 135. Viola Bayley, ‘One Woman’s Raj’, 126–7, Bayley Papers, University of Cambridge. Alice Lowther, Land of the Gold Mohur (London, 1932), 210–11. Robert Druce, ‘“And to Think that Henrietta Guise Was in the Hands of Such Human Demons!”: Ideologies of the Anglo-Indian Novel from 1859 to 1957’, in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen (eds), Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures (Amsterdam, 1993), 18. Singh, Imperishable Empire, 15. Amelia Bennett, ‘Two Months’ Captivity After the Massacre at Cawnpore’, Nineteenth Century and After LXXIII (1913): 1212. Ibid., 1214–15. Ibid., 1214, 1215. Ibid., 1232. The two accounts, Julia Haldane’s The Story of Our Escape from Delhi, in 1857 (Agra, 1888) and Miss Wagentreiber’s The Story of Our Escape from Delhi in May, 1857 (Delhi, 1894), parallel each other in almost every detail and, in places, use almost the same language. This is not surprising since the younger sister, Wagentreiber, was an infant at the time of the Mutiny and drew on the memories of her half-sister and her father (including, undoubtedly, her sister’s previously published account) for her own work. Haldane, Mrs Wagentreiber’s daughter from a previous marriage, had been an adolescent in 1857. Wagentreiber, Story, 1. Ibid., 2. Haldane, The Story, 6. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 8; Wagentreiber, Story, 12. The reference to Mrs Wagentreiber’s ability to understand Indians may be an allusion to her (apparently) part-Indian parentage. Both daughters note that their mother was a daughter of Colonel Skinner, a renowned cavalry officer of Eurasian descent in the service of the East India Company. However, this statement may also refer to the fact that Mr Wagentreiber, as noted by his daughter, was a relatively recent arrival in India whose vernacular skills were not as well-developed as his wife’s. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 55. Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters (London, 1896). See also Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994); Paxton, Writing Under the Raj; Nancy L. Paxton, ‘Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels About the Indian Uprising of 1857’, Victorian Studies 36 (September 1992): 5–30; Nancy L. Paxton, ‘Feminism under the Raj: Resistance

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76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87

and Complicity in the Writings of Flora Annie Steel and Annie Besant’, Women’s Studies International Forum 13 (1990): 333–46. Steel, On the Face of the Waters, 300 (emphasis in original). Eliza F. Pollard, The White Dove of Amritzir (London, 1896?); Patricia Wentworth, The Devil’s Wind (London, 1912). Pollard, White Dove, 193, 212. Ibid., 201–2. Wentworth, Devil’s Wind, 165. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 319. Yvonne Fitzroy, Courts and Camps in India: Impressions of Viceregal Tours, 1921–1924 (London, 1926), 41. O. Douglas, Olivia in India (London, 1922), 54. Mrs Kenneth Combe, Cecilia Kirkham’s Son (Edinburgh, 1909), 41. Beatrice Sheepshanks, The Sword and the Spirit (London, 1928). Ibid., 194. Ibid., Epigraph. Maud Diver, The Singer Passes (New York, 1934), Author’s Note. It is interesting that, of the many terrorist incidents that occurred in 1931, Diver selected one in which a woman is killed simply because she happens to be the wife of an AngloIndian official. Diver, The Singer Passes, 127. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, MP’, in In Black and White (New York, 1898). Hubel, Whose India?, 36–7, 118. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Burnt Offering (New York, 1909). Ethel Savi, Birds of Passage (London, 1939?), 33, 62. Maud Diver, Lonely Furrow (Boston, MA, 1923), 393, 392. This translates roughly as ‘Long live Gandhi! Long live Hindus and Muslims!’ Sheepshanks, The Sword and the Spirit, 88. According to the Rowlatt Report (pp. 162–3), the reference to white goats originated with Bepin Chandra, who suggested in a speech in 1907 that the worship of Kali should include the sacrifice of white goats. ‘A Madrasi gentleman’ who spoke after Chandra more pointedly suggested that, at every new moon, each village should sacrifice ‘108 whites (not white lambs [sic] but those who were their enemies).’ Rowlatt Report, 162–3. Diver, Lonely Furrow, 264; Maud Diver, Ships of Youth: A Study of Marriage in Modern India, 223. Winifred Donald, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Coralie Taylor, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Nora Ford-Robertson, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Diver, The Singer Passes, 129 (emphasis in original). Beatrix Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 258–9, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Barbara Donaldson, ‘India Remembered’, 8, Donaldson Papers, University of Cambridge; Bayley, ‘One Woman’s Raj’, 40. Lady Olive Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 69, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge. Margaret Ackland, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge; Lady Violet Haig, ‘Memoir’, Haig Papers, University of Cambridge; Lawrence, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’; Mrs J.P. Mills, ‘Memoir’, 9, Mills Papers, University of Cambridge. Queenie Mansfield, Letter of 23 February 1931, Mansfield Papers, University of Cambridge. Ronald Johnston, ‘One Man’s Life’, 174, British Library. Mary J. Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers’, 15, British Library.

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CHAPTER FIVE

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Good sports?

In the early 1920s, a young British woman visiting India met the man she would subsequently marry. As her daughter would reveal some seventy years later, the woman and her companions ‘were just sitting down to dinner when he came in through the door and one of the bearers came forward to take his gun and clean it, but my father would have none of that. He always cleaned his own gun before he did anything else. This impressed my mother.’1 If the narrative halted there, the contemporary reader might construe the story as yet another example of traditional gender dynamics. The lovestruck young woman admiringly observes the male imperialist’s competent, professional handling of his firearm, symbol both of his mastery over the colonized Indian landscape and its people and of his masculine sexual prowess. In this instance, however, the young woman was no passively adoring female quivering before this symbolic display of male power and sexuality. She herself, as her daughter revealed, had been ‘brought up with guns’ and was a ‘crack shot’.2 Her admiration for the man who would become her husband stemmed not from feelings of awe or feminine inadequacy but rather from her cool assessment that here was someone who was her equal – and could be her partner – in hunting, shooting and the handling of firearms. Indeed as their daughter recalled, the successful marriage of these two gun aficionados was based in part on the wife’s participation in her husband’s hunting duties as an official in the Indian Forest Service. Since both of them were excellent hunters who wanted to avoid contentious competition in their marriage, the wife decided that she would shoot only immobile targets, while her husband would handle moving prey. Once again, it might appear that the wife was consciously choosing the subordinate, traditionally feminine, role – except that the wife’s chief quarry was the crocodile! Certainly most British women in India did not spend their days lying on a riverbank, loaded gun at hand, waiting for a crocodile to emerge so [ 136 ]

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they could plug it between the eyes. Nonetheless, many British women in India were competent markswomen who employed their skills in a wide variety of ways, including target practice and recreational hunting. They used their knowledge of firearms, as well, to protect themselves, their families and their empire from the threat posed by the wild animals of the Indian subcontinent and, during the interwar years, from the even more insidious dangers of Indian terrorists. Anglo-Indian women were not only shooting and hunting but playing polo and cricket, breaking polo ponies and dressing in men’s attire. These activities, however, were not the revolt of the ‘New Woman’ of the late nineteenth century or the flapper of the 1920s against the traditionally circumscribed female role. Rather, sport was an integral and essential component of an imperial femininity, which incorporated traditionally masculine attributes without completely eradicating fundamental gender distinctions. The ideal imperial wife combined the best of both genders: ‘she is one of those capable, delightful women, who ride well and dance well and shoot straight and don’t seem to neglect their houses and homes or husband and children either’.3 Far from constituting a rebellion against patriarchal authority, Anglo-Indian women’s hunting, shooting, riding and games’ playing were sanctioned and encouraged by their spouses. Anglo-Indian women’s involvement in sports in the Indian empire – in particular, their aptitude for hunting and shooting – reveals the interdependence and interaction of the social construction of gender and the dictates of British imperialism. However, Anglo-Indian women’s use of firearms extended beyond the realm of sport, both practically and symbolically. If the gun were the talisman of the male imperialist, then women’s appropriation of this weapon endowed her with imperial power and authority, as well – if she were willing to use her weapons on the same terms as men. Guns symbolized the threat of violence underpinning imperial power. Increasingly, the maintenance of imperial power in India hinged on the willingness of the rulers to use their guns not just in sport but in enforcing their political will. For Anglo-Indian women, therefore, the ability to use guns not only integrated them into the masculine world of imperial sport but legitimized their engagement with the politics of empire. Because Anglo-Indian women were ready to kill and to die for the Raj, their voices had to be acknowledged in the debates over the future of India that characterized twentieth-century imperial politics. Anglo-Indian women’s involvement with guns during the British Raj provides an illuminating illustration of the development of a new model of feminine behaviour in the imperial context, both because it contravenes many accepted ideas about gender in the empire and because women’s changing relationship to guns mirrors their evolving [ 137 ]

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relationship to the empire and to the changing politics of the Raj itself. Before the First World War, when the future of the Raj seemed relatively stable, the gun was primarily an instrument of sport, aimed at the wild animals of India. After that war, however, as the nationalist movement rapidly gained adherents and threatened the future of the empire, the gun became a weapon to be used against the human opponents of imperialism. The gun exemplified literal and metaphorical potency as both the actual instrument of British conquest and dominance in India and the symbol of Western mastery over the colonized peoples. Thus, women’s willingness to take up firearms for both sporting and political ends indicates their commitment to the hard realities of Britain’s political, military and economic dominance of the subcontinent, as well as to the ideological implications of imperialism. Only by embracing the violent ethos of imperialism, in practice as well as in theory, could Anglo-Indian women legitimize their participation in imperial politics. Just as women’s exclusion from the military forces of most Western nations has often been presented as a justification for denying them full and equal rights as citizens, so too the Raj attempted to ‘protect’ Anglo-Indian women by distancing them from violence and thus denying them legitimate access to the imperial political arena. Although many officials’ wives were both well-armed and well-versed in the use of their weapons, the government of the Raj in the twentieth century continued to view women in essentially the same light as it had during the Mutiny. To the government, women were the most vulnerable link in the fragile chain of imperial defence. The government continued to believe that the imperative to protect helpless women diverted imperial officials from the crucial tasks of defending and preserving the Raj. Governmental indignation at these special efforts reflected an official perspective that ignored women’s many contributions to the empire and strictly insisted on their non-official status. Presumably, extra efforts to rescue male officials from dangerous situations excited neither criticism nor attention. Death or injury of an official’s wife also had negative symbolic ramifications for the government. Ursula Graham Bower, who successfully overcame governmental objections to accompanying her husband into a dangerous area in the waning days of the Raj, speculated: ‘They [the government] were, I think, bothered less about the expense of a punitive expedition if we were all scuppered. Political Officers were presumably expendable when on duty, but dead wives implied 4 domesticity destroyed and indignant letters to the paper.’ To minimize distractions at times of imperial crisis, the government barred officials’ wives from accompanying their husbands to the most dangerous postings, while in certain other stations it strictly regulated and [ 138 ]

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circumscribed wives’ daily activities. In Midnapore, where terrorists had assassinated three civil service officers within two years, ‘[w]e were surrounded by armed guards, 50-foot barbed wire, blazing electric lights all night, I was not allowed to move, or even to go for a ride without armed guards following me’.5 In some stations on the North-West Frontier, the entire cantonment was situated within a barbed-wire perimeter, while in other outposts ‘walking outside one’s own gate was not encouraged for a woman alone, and I never did more than step round to see the wife of the Political Agent or of the Garrison Engineer, whose bungalows were one on each side of us’.6 Clearly, these restrictions were only half-measures. While the government believed that women needed extra protection – best achieved by restrictions on their mobility – it never completely banned wives from India. Not unnaturally, many wives resented even these limited protective measures as unwarranted governmental encroachments on their personal lives and marital relationships. However, because violence was one of the foundations of imperialism, it proved impossible to sequester it from everyday life: violence permeated Anglo-Indian society and culture. Thus, even had Anglo-Indian women desired it, imperial officials could not ‘protect’ them from violence by removing them or their families from dangerous 7 areas without removing them from India entirely. Although women rarely voiced fears for themselves, they often expressed concern for their children’s safety. As the wife of a civil servant stationed along the Frontier, Decima Curtis was afraid her children would be kidnapped and, therefore, kept them within the confines of the compound, which was surrounded by barbed wire.8 Another civilian official’s wife confessed that she ‘got a little more nervous when I had children’, and although she never believed ‘it’ would happen, she nevertheless planned to ‘go and hide somewhere or hide my children somewhere’ if anything untoward occurred.9 Other women averted all such concerns by simply leaving ‘the nursery behind in England’.10 Anglo-Indian women also expressed concern about their husbands’ safety. Despite the dangers to themselves, wives were usually reluctant to leave their husbands in perilous circumstances. After two unsuccessful attempts on her husband’s life, Olwen Barnes and her young infant were ‘whisked off’ to greater safety in Peshawar; Barnes’s recollection of her emotions was that she ‘hat[ed] leaving my husband to manage alone’.11 Some women, however, were reluctant to abandon their husbands for more pragmatic and less emotional reasons: they believed that their physical presence provided necessary protection for their spouses. Coralie Taylor, the wife of a police officer, recalled that in the interwar years terrorists were ‘bumping off our officers all over the place’. She carried a gun regularly for four years, serving as her husband’s [ 139 ]

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‘added personal guard’. Mr Taylor thoroughly approved of his wife’s actions, and taught all the official wives in the district to shoot.12 Anglo-Indian women were generally reticent about concerns for their own safety, except when ridiculing governmental measures to protect them. Whether they were genuinely unconcerned or merely maintaining a stiff-upper lip is unclear. However, officials’ wives probably faced some residual danger, if only because their private lives were so thoroughly integrated into their husbands’ professional work. Nationalists rarely targeted wives or children, generally accepting the Raj’s assessment that only men could embody imperial authority. However, by virtue of their race, their social and economic status and their position within the ruling hierarchy, Anglo-Indian wives were clearly associated with British imperialism and thus were potential victims of violent anti-imperial resistance. Sometimes the dangers women faced were accidental. The wife of an official greeting the Simon Commission upon its members’ arrival in India, for example, was ‘badly bruised’ when demonstrators pelted their car with stones.13 Occasionally, however, violence was directed specifically at an Anglo-Indian woman, although usually in her spousal rather than individual capacity. During the 1930s, for instance, the wife of the judge presiding in the trial of the assassins of a British ICS officer received threats against her own life.14 It would be misleading, however, to characterize Anglo-Indian women’s use of guns as purely a mode of self-defence. Women were concerned not just to protect themselves and their families, but to defend their empire as well. Although the government tried to shield Anglo-Indian women from violence, the pragmatic needs of the British Raj demanded that women become involved in protecting the empire. Throughout the period of the Raj, the British community represented a minuscule percentage of the population of the subcontinent, yet the appearance of its absolute dominance was crucial to imperial control. Thus, everyone in the Anglo-Indian community, whether soldier or businessman, imperial administrator or plantation manager, man or woman, was of necessity integrated into the imperial project. While the ramifications of imperial dominance among Anglo-Indians took many forms, mastery of the gun was a crucial component in Britain’s literal and symbolic dominance in India and throughout the empire. As Dane Kennedy points out in his study of white settler societies in Kenya and Rhodesia, where women were similarly encouraged to gain experience with firearms, this active engagement with imperialism by the entire European community served not only defensive ends but helped to 15 promote white solidarity. For women, therefore, the dictates of imperial rule often demanded the assumption, in whole or in part, of the trappings of the masculine [ 140 ]

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imperialist including, not least, competence with firearms. Pragmatism trumped gender ideology. Thus, although Anglo-Indian women were perceived to be vulnerable to sexual depredations, they were not relegated to the passive feminine role of victim. Because their putative attackers were Indians, and thus outside the Anglo-Indian imperial community, self-defence and defence of the empire blended. In the unique political context of empire, women’s presumed feminine vulnerability allowed them to undertake the eminently masculine task of defending the empire by physical violence. Perceived threats to British imperialism, whether from crocodiles hungry for lunch or Indian nationalists hungry for political power, to a large extent overrode concerns about appropriately gendered behaviour. Women, therefore, had both to think and to act like male imperialists. Intellectually, they had to accept firearms as a legitimate means of imperial control; practically, they had to be ready, willing and able to use guns when the situation demanded. As discussed in the previous chapter, Anglo-Indian women constructed a discourse of imperial violence in which they played an active role as defenders of the empire. By taking up arms for the empire, Anglo-Indian women transformed this imaginative construct into reality. This transformation involved learning how to use guns for hunting and other purposes, as well as immersing themselves in the masculine arenas of imperial sport and violence, which were intimately connected. ‘Sport was an obsession in British India’, replete with practical and 16 symbolic import for Anglo-Indians and colonized peoples. Sports of all kinds served diverse functions for the Anglo-Indian community, blurring the lines separating work, imperial duty and recreation. In remote upcountry stations, where cultural diversions were nonexistent, sports were often the main community recreation, and women participated in such masculine games as cricket and even polo, along with the tamer pursuits of croquet and tennis, both for their own amusement and to 17 provide the requisite number of players for the opposing sides. Indeed, some women became quite adept at masculine sports. Several AngloIndian wives were noted for their ability at breaking and training polo ponies, for example.18 Sports also enabled the British to ‘keep the flag flying’, for the edification and intimidation of the colonized peoples, providing a demonstration of the courage, vitality, and physical prowess of the imperial race.19 Finally, sporting ability was a prerequisite for many official positions. Candidates for the ICS had to pass a riding test; Forest Service officers’ duties included shooting animals such as tigers, elephants and crocodiles, which posed a threat to people, livestock and property; and many imperial officials regularly trekked through rugged terrain on tours of their districts. Wives who wished to accompany and [ 141 ]

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assist their husbands in their official duties thus had to share their many sporting enthusiasms. It was hunting, however, which was the quintessential sport of British India. Although British women, especially those in the upper classes, had already been admitted to sporting activities such as fox-hunting earlier, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that women in the metropole became actively involved in significant numbers in a wide variety of physically demanding and competitive athletic activities.20 Women’s widespread involvement in sports and hunting in India was similarly delayed. Although Fanny Eden, sister of a governor-general of India, had enthusiastically taken up tiger hunting in the 1840s, it was not until the late 1800s, as female athletic activity became more prevalent and acceptable in Britain, that ordinary women began to write about their hunting experiences in the empire in such works as Isabel Savory’s A Sportswoman in India and How I Shot My Bears by Mrs R.H. Tyacke.21 Important differences existed, however, in the modes of female athletic participation in metropole and empire. In the late nineteenth century, as Jennifer Hargreaves has argued, ‘there was no question that sports were the “natural” domain of men and that to be good at them was to be essentially “masculine”’.22 Anxious to avoid this ‘trap of unfemininity’ associated with women’s penetration of the masculine realm of sport, most sportswomen minimized the connections between athletic endeavour and female emancipation, emphasizing instead their feminine attributes.23 While sporting activities such as cycling and tennis were often associated with the advent of the New Woman, female athletes drew few explicit connections between sporting activities and feminism.24 Initially, therefore, women who participated in sports in Britain trod a thin line between acceptably feminine physical activity and unwarranted intrusion into the masculinized world of sport, which necessarily affected their modes of participation in sporting activities. According to Kathleen McCrone: ‘To assure that they projected an image of respectable femininity, the majority of sportswomen accepted the idea of limited sport, with special rules and techniques and cumbersome costumes that may have hindered skilful play, but safeguarded modesty and avoided “unhealthy” strain and so won approval.’25 In later nineteenth-century India, however, British women were less restricted by convention than were their sporting counterparts at home, and this facilitated their full participation in all sports and, in particular, in hunting. As one self-described sportswoman noted: ‘When the Albert Docks are left behind, and faces turn eastwards, some of the old shackles drop off, and a more simple and independent spirit takes the place of the false and conventional one.’26 Sport in British India allowed few [ 142 ]

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concessions to women’s supposed frailty or to traditional metropolitan notions of feminine modesty. Hunting, especially, was physically rigorous. Isabel Savory warned: ‘Do not set out on a tiger shoot without being prepared for a great deal of discomfort. Your temper, your personal comforts, will all be trodden underfoot, and every annoyance must be borne under circumstances which amount sometimes almost to purgatory. Unless a woman is physically strong, it would be foolhardiness to spend eight weeks under such conditions.’27 Women soon realized, as well, that good sport and good fashion were often incompatible. In the late-nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian women regularly modified their attire to make it more functional, albeit often at the expense of style and modesty. Among the early female hunters, Mrs Tyacke wore ‘a very short plain skirt ... stockings with the feet cut off ... [and] plenty of underwear’, while Isabel Savory disdained the assistance of an ayah, or lady’s maid, on her hunting expeditions, thus indicating the relative unimportance of attire and appearance when faced with the physical requirements of sport.28 By the interwar period, many serious sportswomen had abandoned the effort to maintain any sort of distinctively feminine garb for their athletic undertakings. They simply adopted approximations to men’s clothing for their outdoor activities despite meeting with ‘some disapprobation’.29 One woman described her normal daytime wear while on tour as jodhpurs, shirt, tie, coat and topi, altogether ‘very like my husband’.30 Another woman emphasized the sporting environment of the Raj in determining women’s attire: ‘[W]e were so perpetually jumping on and off horses, that it seemed hardly worthwhile changing out of our jodhpur britches ... [so] I spent a great deal of my time in trousers of various sorts and an open shirt’.31 In modifying their physical appearance to facilitate participation in hunting and other sports, however, women were redefining, not abandoning, ideas about femininity and gender difference. When the wives of instructors at the Indian Army’s small-arms school formed a rifle club, their course of instruction, which included ‘having a go at ... a machine gun’, as one enthusiastic student reported, permitted only one concession to their gender: ‘By special request we were allowed a small pad between the shoulder and rifle butt, as the bruised collar bones were voted “not becoming” in evening dress.’32 Although women’s participation in sports in both Britain and India gradually expanded, hunting continued to be coded as masculine because of its link with imperial leadership and the wartime pursuit of the human quarry, both male activities.33 Women’s involvement in a sport normally associated with men had important symbolic implications for British imperialism in India. In particular, women’s participation in big[ 143 ]

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game hunting, which required skill in shooting and handling guns, reveals how imperial imperatives constructed gender in the British empire. Using guns, a woman could be the true partner of her husband and other men because her skills as a hunter were more important than her sex. The use of a gun obviously did much to compensate for women’s generally smaller stature and lesser degree of brute force, factors which might hamper their competitive ability in other sports, although some women were compelled to adopt lighter, less powerful, weapons because they couldn’t withstand the recoil of larger guns. Thus, although hunting was ‘rather a man’s world’, according to one AngloIndian woman, ‘any woman who was really good was of course accepted into the man’s world’.34 As John M. MacKenzie has argued, it was ‘capacity in the Hunt which marked out the virile from the “effeminate” imperialist’.35 By participating in the rituals and realities of hunting with men, Anglo-Indian women both transcended traditional ideas about gender and provided a crucial role for women in sustaining the British Raj. Women aligned themselves with the masculine model of imperial ruler, rather than resigning themselves to the subordinate ranks of the effeminate imperialist or, indeed, of the feminized colonized peoples. Guns were both instruments of imperial conquest and emblems of the supposed superiority of European civilization.36 In India, however, once the initial wars of conquest had been completed by the end of the nineteenth century and the challenges to imperial control effectively put down in the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny, guns were associated primarily with sport and with protection against the natural environment of India. British rule in India was, according to the official imperial line, subject to few challenges from the colonized peoples, who supposedly recognized and accepted the civilizing benefits of the Raj and its Pax Britannica. At the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the complacent Anglo-Indian community could foresee few instances in which it would be obliged to turn its firepower against the Indian people 37 themselves. In the years before the First World War, therefore, it was the environment of India itself that Anglo-Indians felt compelled to discipline and subdue through the use of firearms. The abundant wildlife of India naturally lent itself to big-game hunting, and shooting became an integral part of Anglo-Indian culture.38 Historians have analyzed the camaraderie of the hunt as primarily an opportunity for male bonding, thus implying the absence of women. According to one historian of hunting in British India, ‘men simply preferred that women stayed away from this opportunity for men to enjoy male companionship’.39 In addition to providing psychological sustenance for the imperial male, however, hunting served important functions in the broader imperial [ 144 ]

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community. The hunt and its attendant social and cultural rituals acted as a bulwark against ‘going native’, provided an opportunity to bring together the British in India to reassert their shared heritage and to reinforce their presumed cultural and racial superiority, and created an environment in which to forge new links of friendship and marriage binding the entire imperial community more closely together. For all of these purposes, the presence of women was indispensable. Hunting framed many of the most important social and recreational undertakings of the imperial community. Although hunting was a part of everyday life primarily for Anglo-Indians living upcountry, it was, for almost all Anglo-Indians, a symbolically important cultural institution. Even those who lived in urban areas or whose official duties did not easily accommodate frequent excursions in remote areas welcomed opportunities for shooting and hunting as defining moments of the Anglo-Indian experience. The emotions experienced by Yvonne Fitzroy, who served in the viceregal entourage of Lord and Lady Reading during the 1920s, illustrate the construction of the hunt as a symbolically significant imperial ritual for all Anglo-Indians. Although her time in India was regimented to a great extent by the extensive official schedule of the viceroy and his wife, Fitzroy nonetheless enjoyed hunting. ‘To us ... the jungle represented the one real release from officialdom and a plunge into the fringes of a natural world. I say the fringes since for me the release was usually a matter of hours, but even so they were the best I spent in India, though I never myself shot, or tried to shoot, anything 40 more alarming than a black buck.’ Anglo-Indians who moved in less elevated circles than Fitzroy often centred their holidays in India around hunting. Shooting expeditions to remote picturesque locales such as Kashmir were popular with both men and women. The traditional ‘Christmas camp’, in which Anglo-Indians celebrated the holidays at a forest bungalow in a prime hunting location, was just one instance of the successful integration of hunting into the social and recreational life of the Anglo-Indian community. In British India, even Cupid abandoned his bow and arrow for a rifle and ammunition. The link between hunting and matrimony was often forged at the inception of a romantic relationship since Christmas camps and other large shoots provided a good opportunity for women and men to meet and court. One woman even received ‘a small rifle’ as a wedding gift (interestingly, from the district superintendent of police, an Indian) 41 so that she ‘could shoot black buck’. After marriage, husband and wife often sat up together all night in a machan (a hunting blind perched in a tree), sharing the anticipation of the kill, although the need for silence and the inherent discomfort of the wooden hunting blind probably precluded any sort of romantic interlude. Indeed, hunting was such a [ 145 ]

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hallmark of British life in India that it became de rigeur for important personages visiting the empire to participate in at least one hunting expedition. John MacKenzie even argues that the ethos of hunting and shooting was so crucial to the ideals of the Raj that the government selected viceroys as much for their shooting skills as for their political and diplomatic abilities.42 An indication of the popularity of hunting can be gleaned from the figures provided by Sir Harcourt Butler, a governor of Burma and himself an avid sportsman, who estimated that from 1917 to 1921 hunters in India and Burma killed 1,590 tigers, 5,743 leopards and 2,630 bears.43 There were, essentially, three methods of big-game hunting popular in India, indicative of temperamental differences among hunters and of varying modes of symbolically framing the hunt for presentation to the colonized peoples. For those hunters endowed with the patience, not to mention the ability, to sit silent and motionless for extended periods, the use of a machan was the preferred method. If an animal such as a tiger had been sighted in the vicinity – and particularly if it had recently made a kill – a machan would be set up in a location the animal was likely to revisit. Often bait, such as the remains of the animal’s kill or a fresh target, would be set out as an additional lure. Perched in the machan, the hunter would wait, quiet and unmoving (and usually in the dark, since many of the animals were nocturnal predators), until the quarry appeared. The hunter would then have one or, at most, two opportunities to shoot the prey before it fled back into the night. Although Anglo-Indian hunters were frequently assisted by a shikari (a professional hunter, often an Indian), this type of hunting required real proficiency in shooting. For those less patient, and perhaps less skilled, ‘beats’ were an option. Indian beaters would comb the underbrush, attempting to drive the prey from its cover into the open where the hunters could shoot it. Beaters were generally on foot, while hunters usually rode elephants. Beats were associated mainly with recreational hunting while the use of a machan was more suited to the elimination of a particular animal posing a hazard in a certain locale. Viceroys and other important personages favoured the former mode of hunting since an entourage of spectators could easily and safely accompany the hunter during the beat to witness and applaud his hunting prowess. In addition, steps could be taken to ensure that the prey was in the area covered by the beat, thus increasing the likelihood of a kill. Finally, for those who emphasized both the risk and the skill inherent in hunting, animals could be tracked on foot. According to proponents of tracking, the true sportsman forswore the protection afforded by the machan and the easy shots facilitated by the beat to [ 146 ]

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engage in a contest of wits and stamina with the hunted beast. This mode of stalking was much more dangerous to the hunter than the other two methods (although in a beat the Indian beaters on the ground were endangered), since an animal could spring on him unawares or a wounded animal turn and charge. Although glorified in many hunting accounts, not surprisingly this method appears to have been rarely used except by skilled professional hunters determined to bag a trophy. If the gun implied the superiority of British civilization over that of the colonized peoples, then each successful hunting expedition implicitly restated Britain’s right, by virtue of its subjects’ superior ability with firearms, to rule inhabitants of the subcontinent. In Britain, a similar elite monopoly of the symbolism of the hunt had been achieved with legislation that defined the hunter’s prey as the property of the landed classes and punished the crime of poaching with draconian penalties of fines, transportation or even death.44 In India, however, no legislation was necessary to restrict hunting to an elite. Much big game was naturally located either in remote areas, accessible only to those with ample leisure time and financial resources, or in the princely states, outside of the legislative jurisdiction, if not the influence, of the Raj.45 Officials of the Forest Service, however, did have authority to close off certain areas to hunting, including restricting the rights of the indigenous population. Even among Anglo-Indians themselves, an unwritten code reserved certain types of animal for high-ranking officials. One low-level ICS officer recalled, only half-jokingly: ‘Had I shot a tiger except in self defence – a very unlikely event, indeed – I should have been transferred to one of the penal stations of the Province.’46 Nonetheless, although environmental and political circumstances conspired to make hunting a ‘natural’ pastime of the British imperialists, it was necessary for them to uphold the mantle of authority by demonstrating their mastery of the talents and tools of the hunt. AngloIndians derided as effeminate what they perceived as the more utilitarian and risk-averse Indian modes of hunting.47 It was crucial, therefore, that Anglo-Indians who engaged in public demonstrations of their shooting ability be skilled in the use of guns. One civil servant, for example, who had managed to bag only nine ducks by lunchtime had to be helped out by a colleague. ‘“That won’t do,” said Edwards, “we must keep up the prestige of the service” and he gave me twenty of his, for all the scores were recorded in “The Pioneer”, the provincial newspaper.’48 Women and men were held (and held themselves) to the same high standards. Learned skills, rather than the immutable characteristics of sex, provided entrée into the masculine world of hunting. Contrary to the dynamics of sexual politics in Britain, where many men were wary of the New [ 147 ]

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Woman’s sporting proclivities which threatened to poach upon traditionally male preserves, Anglo-Indian men actively encouraged their wives and daughters to excel as sportswomen and husbands often taught their wives to shoot.49 One woman, who lived in India around the time of the First World War, recalled her father insisting that all the women in the family be ‘good rifle shots’. He personally established a ‘Ladies’ Rifle Club’ in their station to enable every woman to improve her marksmanship.50 Emphasizing the equal effort demanded of men and women engaged in sports, no concessions were made to supposed feminine frailties. ‘There was no nonsense about men with wives in a shoot being put up in a tree. If Madge [his wife] came out with me, as she generally did, she had to be on the ground with me.’51 Training in the technical and mental aspects of shooting was necessary because few British women arriving in India possessed the skills necessary in the hunt. Although sports became an integral part of the curriculum at many British girls’ schools by the end of the nineteenth century, female participation was generally limited to activities such as gymnastics, tennis and, after the First World War, hockey.52 While big-game hunting was, of course, not available in metropolitan Britain – which accounts, in part, for the exotic allure of the imperial hunt – associated sporting activities such as riding and shooting were generally accessible both financially and culturally only to the upper classes in the metropole.53 Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that the daughters of a viceroy, Lord Minto, himself a noted hunter, rider and member of the aristocracy, won prizes in the Tollygunge Ladies’ Steeplechase, ‘in which all the hard-riding ladies compete’, and the Annandale Gymkhana, another prestigious riding competition.54 However, most imperial officials and their wives did not move in the same social circles as the Mintos – either at home or in India. While men might have learned to shoot and ride at school or in the military, most Anglo-Indian women presumably had little prior exposure to the upperclass pastimes of hunting, riding and shooting.55 Sports engaged in only by the wealthy in Britain were much more accessible to Europeans in India. Particularly before the First World War, many men seem to have selected an Indian career primarily because they could indulge their taste for these ‘posh’ pastimes less expensively; recalled one such recruit: ‘you could hunt very, very cheaply indeed, for almost nothing’.56 For AngloIndian women, however, it was necessary to overcome the double handicaps of class and gender in pursuing hunting as an imperial pastime. Once a woman’s level of skill had been established, however, she was free to participate in the full panoply of hunting rituals that reinforced imperial rule in the subcontinent. At the highest echelons of [ 148 ]

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imperial society, women’s symbolic importance to the Raj was recognized through hunting. Hunting often provided a means to reinforce alliances between the Raj and its supporters among the Indian aristocracy, and hunts arranged by Indian princes were a highlight of official tours in the native states. While underscoring Britain’s debt to these supporters of imperial rule, however, the protocols of hunting also reinforced British dominance. At a shoot in a princely state, the viceroy would inevitably secure the largest bag, demonstrating his supreme position in the political hierarchy of the Raj. The local maharajah, as befitted his subordination to British authority, would bring in the second-largest haul of the day. However, next honours were traditionally reserved for the vicereine, thus demonstrating the supposed inherent superiority of a British woman even to such politically significant 57 Indians as the maharajah’s son and heir. Even at less rarefied levels of imperial society, British women’s simple participation in hunting expeditions, in which Indian women rarely joined, reinforced the idea of Britain’s inherent cultural (and martial) superiority. Women hunters recorded the ‘amazement’ of Indian villagers when ‘a “Miss Sahib” risk[ed] her life in such hazardous adventures’ as tiger hunting.58 Unlike their cloistered Indian counterparts, Anglo-Indian women presented themselves as robust, athletic and the equal of any (Indian) man. Any Anglo-Indian woman could thus reaffirm the imperial order by renouncing feminine hysterics and shooting calmly, steadily – and fatally. More practically, many Anglo-Indian women and men would shoot ‘for the pot’ when they were on tour in their district or camping in the mofussil, although, as one woman confessed: ‘we would have fed poorly if it had been only me [shooting]’.59 However, this ability to use their hunting skills to feed themselves freed the imperial rulers from dependence on the kindness of strangers as they moved around the empire. Since they could provide their own food, they did not have to buy provisions from local villagers. Furthermore, because they provided food not just for themselves but also for the Indian servants who invariably accompanied them on trips away from their postings, both Anglo-Indian women and men reaffirmed their authority in the household. Hunting and shooting skills also allowed the Anglo-Indian woman to present herself to Britain’s Indian subjects as ‘Lady Bountiful’ with a rifle. The wild beasts of the Indian jungle often posed a threat to the 60 physical and economic well-being of the colonized peoples. Indians would have been at the mercy of rampaging elephants and voracious tigers without the beneficent protection of well-armed male and female imperialists (at least according to the Anglo-Indians). Although it was officially the duty of the male civil servant to protect the Indians in his [ 149 ]

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district, in reality wives possessed of the necessary shooting capabilities stood ready to assist their husbands in these imperial duties. The daughter of a Forest Service officer in pre-First World War India commented: ‘The jungle people counted on my father and mother to rid them of these pests [i.e. wild animals].’61 Women thus developed their sporting abilities not simply for their own pleasure or for the recreational benefit of their husbands and the greater Anglo-Indian community, but for the good of the British empire as a whole. The Raj tacitly consented to wives thus deploying their shooting skills within the framework of imperial service. Although women’s sex disqualified them from most official positions in the Raj, the assumption of masculine traits and skills allowed them to assume unofficially many of the duties of imperial rule. For some women, therefore, guns became an indispensable part both of their daily lives and of their identities as wives and women in the empire. Recalled one Anglo-Indian woman: ‘In camp it was natural always to carry a gun, and it became my habit to sling it over one shoulder, or, more convenient still, to tuck it under one arm, balanced 62 through the crook of my elbow.’ A gun was thus a natural accessory for the wife who wanted to prove herself useful both to her husband and to the empire. Anglo-Indian women’s use of firearms, however, was not confined to the realm of sport. Indeed, Anglo-Indian women’s devotion to firearms outside the world of the hunt highlights not only the reliance on physical force and threats of violence that characterized British imperialism in India but, in particular, women’s commitment to the continuing deployment of violence to sustain the Raj. Hilda Bourne, who lived in southern India before the First World War, recalled that her husband, a railway official, was anxious about leaving her on her own during his frequent inspection trips on the rail line. He set up a target, the painted figure of a life-sized man, in their compound, gathered their servants to watch, and encouraged his wife to practise shooting the target with a revolver. ‘At first I was hopeless’, she recalled, ‘but by constant practice I could hit the figure at any spot he told me to. This, of course, greatly impressed [the servants] and he felt I would be in a better 63 position to look after myself’. Bourne’s husband presented her with a Colt revolver. She slept with it under her pillow, a potent substitute for her absent husband/protector. Bourne’s testimony illustrates the imbrication of gender, violence, and imperial practice implicated in British women’s use of firearms. Bourne’s demonstration of her developing shooting prowess in front of the assembled domestic staff underscored that the ‘Missus’, as Bourne referred to herself, was well qualified to take charge in the sahib’s absence. Indeed, on the only occasion when Bourne actually used a gun [ 150 ]

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(a .22 calibre rifle, not her revolver), she handily dispatched a cobra lurking in the garden. With the domestic staff once again observing, Bourne proved both her equality with her husband and her superiority to the Indian servants by killing the snake with the first shot. (Thank heaven’, was her comment, indicating her relief both at shooting the cobra and in successfully upholding the mantle of imperial authority.)64 Bourne’s use of a human-shaped target, however, carried with it an implicit warning for her Indian servants – and, by implication, for all colonized peoples. Those who threatened the physical safety of British imperialists and, indeed, of the British Raj itself, could expect swift retribution from women no less than from men. In practising on a humanshaped target, women were following the lead of male imperial officials. Charles Tegart, a commissioner of police in Calcutta, made clear the intended human targets of his shooting practice: ‘He had a lifesize sketch of a Bengali assassin, levelling a pistol, made on canvas, which was kept on the roof and when another officer ... joined in the practice it was the custom for one or other of them, while they did their morning exercises, to give a sudden, unpremeditated yell; on this the other had to switch round with his automatic and shoot the canvas in 65 some vital part of his anatomy’. In Bourne’s case, on the sole occasion when she might have used her revolver against a human being rather than an animal, she had neglected to put the gun in its accustomed place under her pillow. Nonetheless, to frighten away an intruder from the train compartment she was sharing with her children and their nanny, Bourne ‘pointed my finger at him as if I were aiming and he fled’, thus demonstrating the power associated with guns by both Anglo-Indian 66 women and, if Bourne is to be believed, at least one Indian, as well. Tegart, on the other hand, survived three attempts on his life, although not by shooting his assailant.67 The intruder who attempted to enter Bourne’s train compartment was, by her own assessment, probably just a common thief. In the prewar period, when that incident occurred, few members of the AngloIndian community felt their lives or the stability of the empire to be seriously threatened by the colonized peoples.68 Although one British historian of anti-imperial violence counted 140 so-called ‘terrorist outrages’ between 1907 and 1915, including attacks on successive viceroys, the British believed they had successfully quelled this violence through a combination of repressive tactics, wartime jingoism and political promises.69 By the interwar period, however, the political situation in India had changed significantly, with the development of nationalism as a mass movement and increasing calls for India’s independence. A number of assassinations of British imperial officials in the 1930s caused great consternation among Anglo-Indians. Many in the [ 151 ]

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Anglo-Indian community believed that it was no longer simply their material possessions which Indians hoped to steal from them, but the empire itself. Throughout these turbulent times, and right up to the transfer of power in 1947, hunting continued to be a popular recreation for AngloIndian men and women and a pivotal institution for the Anglo-Indian community. However, the years after the First World War witnessed a signal change in the symbolic signification of hunting and shooting, as gunplay took on additional importance for the empire and its rulers. The ferocious beasts of the Indian jungle were no longer the main danger to British rule; instead, the ferocious opponents of British imperialism presented a greater threat to the Raj. Just as tigers could be destroyed with guns skillfully deployed, however, so too, Anglo-Indians believed, could this latest enemy be eliminated by the superior firepower of 70 British imperialists. After the First World War, the Raj ratcheted up the level of violence directed at its colonized peoples and most AngloIndians, including Anglo-Indian women, supported this more aggressive posture.71 Women who felt at ease with a hunting rifle slung over their shoulder readily adopted the habit of secreting a pistol in their purse in anticipation of this new assault on the empire.72 Unlike big-game hunting, which was a regular feature of life predominantly for AngloIndians in the mofussil and an occasional recreation for the remainder of the community, taking up arms against the terrorist threat became a facet of life in both cities and up-country stations. Although the most popular current conception of the Indian nationalist movement is that of Gandhian non-violence, for the AngloIndian community, which generally downplayed Gandhi’s widespread appeal, the real threat to the British empire arose when the colonized peoples attempted to claim for themselves the symbols and substance of 73 the violence previously monopolized by the imperialists. In these political circumstances, the gun itself became a talisman of British imperial power, one which could undermine the foundations of the Raj, if it fell into the wrong – i.e. Indian – hands. Thus the Rowlatt Commission explicitly connected Indians’ illicit possession of firearms to the nationalist assault on the Raj. The Report alleged, for example, that the use of guns in robberies indicated that these crimes were not ‘ordinary dacoities’, but rather the work of a terrorist conspiracy, since ‘by reason of the Arms Act, which requires a permissive and not merely a revenue licence for the possession of firearms, they cannot readily be obtained without an organisation for their illicit acquisition beyond the resources of the ordinary criminal’.74 The Report further drew a direct causal link between Indians’ possession of firearms and assassination attempts against British officials: ‘In this year [1909] members of the [ 152 ]

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India House [an Indian organization in Britain] began to practise revolver-shooting at a range in London, and on the 1st July 1909 one of the young men connected with the India House named Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated Colonel Sir William Curzon Wyllie, Political ADC at the India Office.’75 More subtly, as Mrinalini Sinha has pointed out, possession and use of firearms were connected with the construction of masculinity and ideas about the right and the ability to rule India.76 A ‘humorous’ incident related by one woman reveals the centrality of guns in defining gender roles and reinforcing the relative positions of imperial ruler and colonial subject. Hearing screaming and shouting coming from the verandah where a number of armed Indian police officers were supposed to be guarding the house and its occupants, an Anglo-Indian woman ventured out to investigate. She found the police literally asleep on the job; they had stacked their rifles on the verandah and dozed off. The disturbance had been the sounds of one of them in the throes of a nightmare. As a joke, the woman stole the police officers’ rifles, causing them much consternation when they awakened. Indian guards’ sleeping on the job clearly indicated their unfitness not just for the role of imperial police officer, but for the larger responsibilities of governing the empire. The fact that a woman could steal their rifles, the symbol of their masculine power, indicated her greater claim to authority in the subcontinent. Women’s association with firearms thus not only aligned them with the empire but also staked an implicit claim for women’s fitness to rule over the Raj’s Indian subjects, male and female alike. For Anglo-Indians confronted with the violence of interwar Indian nationalism, the political was clearly also the personal. Terrorist societies numbered among their declared objectives the assassination of British officials. In a speech to the Royal Empire Society in London in 1932 on the subject of ‘Terrorism in India’, Charles Tegart described a pamphlet purportedly recovered by the police in 1910 which revealed the terrorists’ policy of targeting officials. Referring to a ‘campaign of ... assassinations’, the pamphlet urged: ‘Terrorise the officials, English and Indian, and the collapse of the whole machinery of oppression is not very 77 far.’ By the 1930s, nationalist terrorists were becoming quite successful at effecting these goals. Among those killed were the inspector-general of prisons, shot while in his office in Calcutta; three successive district magistrates of Midnapore, including one shot on the playing field while participating in a local football match; and the district magistrate of Tippera, assassinated by two schoolgirls.78 Anglo-Indian women in particular characterized terrorist violence aimed at their husbands as an assault on the marital partnership that [ 153 ]

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formed the core of their connection with the Raj. Husbands embodied the dual roles of beloved partner and representative of British imperialism; an attack on an imperial official threatened not just home and family, but the empire. In one particularly histrionic account, an anonymous ‘Memsahib’ portrayed the terrorist threat specifically as an assault on Anglo-Indian wives and the marital cornerstone of the Raj: Do men and women at home in England realise what every conspiracy revealed, every political murder committed, must mean to the Indian official’s wife? [...] People at home have read, perhaps shuddered at, the story of the woman at Poona whose dinner-gown was stained with her husband’s brains as they drove home together; of the Collector’s wife in the south who, landing at Tuticorin after a hurried journey to her mother’s deathbed, was met by her husband, and reached her home a widow, with his murdered body in her arms; of the woman in Madras the other day, a wife of a year’s standing, awakened from her sleep by the shot which had killed her husband [...] Others may come out to study the country and its people; the official’s wife is chiefly interested that her husband shall leave India for ever, before it is too late. Who is entitled to blame her for this? Surely not men whose wives have no cause to be troubled by haunting memories of murder.79

As this ‘Memsahib’ indicated, wives took steps to protect their husbands. Some wives regularly checked to ensure that their husbands were armed whenever they left the house. Others even carried guns themselves to protect their husbands.80 Although framing their own right to carry and use guns as both a spousal and an imperial duty, Anglo-Indian women were quite disapproving of Indian women’s involvement with violent nationalism. In the interwar period, as Anglo-Indian women began to arm themselves to defend their empire, some Indian women similarly turned to violence to wrest their nation from British control. After the successful raid at Chittagong in 1930, in which a group of terrorists, including some women, captured the armoury and the telegraph station, Indian women joined terrorist organizations as ‘housekeepers, messengers, custodians of arms and sometimes as comrades’.81 Two female high-school students assassinated a British district magistrate in 1931 and a ‘girl graduate’ attempted to shoot the governor of Bengal during the convocation ceremonies at Calcutta University in 1932.82 As Purnima Bose has pointed out, these acts represented an even greater challenge to imperial hierarchies than did Anglo-Indian women’s engagement with violence. While the latter reinforced Anglo-Indian racial distinctions, the former [ 154 ]

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subverted both gender and imperial hierarchies by ‘undermin[ing] European manhood’ and ‘inverting the colonial ordering that equated strength with the masculine and the colonizer, and weakness with the feminine and the colonized’.83 Anglo-Indians deplored Indian women’s involvement in such activities, lamenting the process by which ‘young Indian women, by tradition and culture gentle among their sex, were perverted from their natural instinct to commit the most treacherous and brutal murders’.84 Clearly, racial as well as gender distinctions came into play when violence and imperialism intersected. Thus, although Anglo-Indian women who defended the empire were good sports, it was clearly not sporting, by Anglo-Indian lights, for Indian women similarly to engage in imperial politics on violent terms. The threat of nationalist violence even penetrated the sanctum of the Anglo-Indian bungalow. Olivia Hamilton, the wife of a Forest Service officer, slept with a gun under her pillow whenever violent political disturbances threatened.85 Living in Sind in 1918, which she described as ‘the edge of a volcano’, Rosamond Lawrence and her husband nightly barricaded themselves, their son and his nanny into a bedroom on the top storey of the house. Indicating the married couple’s shared responsibility for safeguarding the imperial home and family, Lawrence’s husband placed a loaded revolver between the couple’s two beds.86 By the interwar period, therefore, the threat to the Raj, which had previously been confined to the jungles of the subcontinent, became, in the minds of Anglo-Indians, all-pervasive. If nationalist violence could trespass on the privacy of the marital bedchamber, then it could easily invade more public locations. The railway, which had previously been a secure means of transportation for women travelling alone, became a particularly unsafe environment. As moving targets, trains attracted random acts of violence. In the early 1920s, Lady Griffiths was dressing for dinner when a large ‘brickbat’ was hurled through the window of her train compartment, missing her by inches.87 Terrorist groups occasionally made trains the objects of dacoity, by which they supported their political and military activities. Perhaps the most notorious incident of terrorist violence on an Indian train occurred in 1931, when two British military officers were stabbed in their berths on the Punjab Mail.88 The physical layout of Indian trains, which in more secure times had guaranteed the exclusivity of the usually all-European first-class carriages, now enhanced passengers’ vulnerability. Indian railway carriages did not have corridors; exterior train doors in first class gave access directly into individual compartments. Once the train started moving, passengers were confined to their compartments and could not [ 155 ]

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walk about the train. Since each first-class carriage contained its own toilet and washing facilities, the only inconvenience occasioned by such a system was that passengers wishing to eat in the dining car had to wait until a station stop, transfer to the dining car, and then remain there until the following station. However, with terrorism and dacoity a concern, the isolation of train compartments became a fearful luxury, particularly for women travelling alone, since ‘[a]pparently robbers usually went for carriages marked “Ladies Only”’.89 Although generally locked into their train compartments by a solicitous conductor, women feared that an intruder would burst in upon them through the open windows.90 If an incident occurred while the train was moving or when it was stopped between stations, the Anglo-Indian passenger could depend only on her own courage and initiative to prevent robbery, mayhem and murder. Because of these perceived dangers of post-First World War train travel in India, many women who otherwise might not have armed themselves deemed it prudent to carry guns on railway journeys. Anna Chitty found that her training in handling a revolver ‘came in very useful as I always carried a loaded one when travelling alone by train’.91 One woman who had neglected to bring her gun ‘felt like a rat in a trap’ when someone tried to enter her compartment.92 Umbrellas or flashlights might masquerade as weapons in a pinch, as she and other women had discovered, but she experienced ‘a very distinct desire for a revolver’ when trouble seemed imminent.93 Lady Olive Crofton, married to an ICS officer in India in the 1920s and 1930s, recounted with obvious relish one such encounter on a train. Crofton’s husband insisted that she pack her revolver for her trip to a meeting of Girl Guide commissioners because there had been ‘a good deal of trouble on the railways lately with train thieves, including several murders’. As the train pulled out of the station, an Indian man attempted to enter her compartment via the window, but Crofton directed him to the third-class carriages and he disappeared. Ten minutes later, when we were well out in the open country and going fast, the flicker in my glasses came again. Turning quickly I saw the same man, now half way through the window, and he had a short leaded stick in his hand and a large dagger in his belt. My dressing case was open beside me on the bunk, so I quickly picked up my revolver and releasing the catch, pointed it at him and said, ‘Tum ko marna chahta?’ (’Do you want to be shot?’) An expression of utter horror came into his face as he threw himself backwards out of the window. A surprising and most unladylike thing for a lone woman to carry a revolver apparently!94

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In the interwar period, some women received specialized professional training in the use of firearms, specifically to enable them to combat the perceived nationalist threat. Sheila Mitchell, for example, whose husband was in the finance department of the Indian government, learned to shoot as a direct response to the nationalist threat, ‘in case students invaded [the] civil station in Lahore’.95 Just as husbands encouraged their wives to develop the requisite skill to participate in hunting, so too men aided their spouses in acquiring the necessary facility with handguns and other weapons to combat nationalist violence. Margaret Ramsay-Brown and her sister undertook the army’s rifle training course shortly before Ramsay-Brown’s marriage to a captain in a Gurkha regiment who presumably facilitated the women’s enrolment in this professional-level training programme.96 Wives of instructors at the army’s small-arms school in the 1920s completed the military course in rifle and revolver shooting, with some ‘allowed to have a go with the Lewis and I think a machine gun’, as one enthusiastic student recalled.97 The regimen for these female students was almost identical to that prescribed for military personnel at the school. Thus, by the interwar period Anglo-Indian husbands found it expedient to enlist their wives in the defence of empire. They recognized that for Anglo-Indian women successfully to fend off the nationalist threat to themselves, their husbands and their empire, they must be both well armed and well trained. The broadening scope of Anglo-Indian women’s use of guns, from hunting animals to taking up arms against the perceived threat of Indian nationalism, reveals how women forged a place for themselves in the empire. First, women’s participation in these activities indicates that they were willing, even eager, to participate in traditionally unfeminine ways to defend the British Raj in India against perceived threats, whether from the exotic and fearsome animals of the Indian environment or from the equally exotic and no less fearsome Indian people who subsequently posed a violent challenge to British dominance in the subcontinent. Thus the power of women’s allegiance to the empire and to imperial ideals was strong enough to convince many of them to jettison traditional gender roles and to adopt, at least in part, masculine personae in defence of the Raj. Second, women’s active participation in – indeed, their heady embrace of – pre-eminently masculine activities, demonstrates that the altered circumstances of life in the empire complicated ideas about gender, while simultaneously rendering more apparent the socially constructed and historically specific nature of masculinity and femininity. By metropolitan standards of acceptable gendered behaviour, the lives of Anglo-Indian women were a welter of contradictions. How many Girl Guide leaders in Britain, for example, attended meetings as [ 157 ]

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well armed as Lady Crofton? Another woman, without any apparent awareness of incongruity, combined stereotypically feminine behaviour with quintessentially masculine activities. On the one hand, she was a faithful reader of the women’s periodical Home Chat, sent to her weekly in India. However, on many afternoons this paragon of domesticity shouldered her rifle, mounted an elephant and headed off alone to hunt down a man-eating tiger menacing the local residents.98 The daughter of this sharpshooting subscriber to Home Chat later marvelled that as a child, ‘it did not seem in the least strange to us to have our Mother leave home to go after a tiger’.99 While Anglo-Indian women’s use of guns gave them a certain degree of autonomy as well as equality with their husbands and other European men, their use of firearms must not, of course, be romanticized; nor is it to be interpreted as a feminist gesture. At a time when women were formally barred from positions in imperial administration, those who participated in sports replete with imperial symbolism, such as hunting, who shared their husbands’ hunting-related official duties and who undertook the violent defence of the Raj secured for themselves a role in the empire and re-ordered ideas about the relationship between gender and imperialism. Women’s use of firearms was thus primarily for engaging with the empire, a means not only of demonstrating their support for the imperial undertaking but also of integrating themselves into the symbolic and practical politics of the Raj. That this instrument was a deadly one serves only to underscore the inherently violent foundations of British imperialism in India.

Notes A version of chapter five was published in the Journal of British Studies (October 2001) and is reproduced here with permission. 1 Mary McDonald Ledzion, Forest Families (London, 1991), 19. 2 Ibid., 19. 3 Caroline Sinnickson to her aunt, 18 June 1913, in An Enchanted Journey: The Letters of the Philadelphia Wife of a British Officer of the Indian Cavalry, ed. Alan Jones (Edinburgh, 1994), 192. 4 Ursula Graham Bower, The Hidden Land (London, 1953), 5. 5 Lady Griffiths, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. 6 Isabel Gross, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire, University of Cambridge; see also Lady Dring, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. 7 Wives often bore their share of the increased stress and heavier workloads that arose during periods of threatened violence. Beatrix Scott wrote of her husband’s tenure as chief secretary to the government of Assam in 1936: ‘My own memories of those months, when noncooperation and civil disobedience were rife, were of being wakened up night after night

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with reams of cipher wires which we conscientiously deciphered till dawn lit the sky.’ Beatrix Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 321–2, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Decima Curtis, ‘The Last Twelve Years of the British Raj Recollected by the Wife of a British District Officer’, 73, British Library. Mrs Symington, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Lady Olive Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 61, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge. Mrs H.M. Barnes, ‘Memoir’, British Library. A decade after this event, an assassin killed Mr Barnes. Coralie Taylor, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Lady Violet Haig, ‘Memoir’, Haig Papers, University of Cambridge. The Simon Commission reviewed the progress of the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, which extended greater political self-determination to India. The lack of Indian appointees to the Commission excited widespread criticism and occasional violence. Margaret Ramsay-Brown, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, 1987), 135–7. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), 168. Edward Blunt, The ICS: The Indian Civil Service (London, 1937), 225. Anna Chitty, Musings of a Memsahib (Lymington, 1988), 3; Iris Portal, ‘Memoir’, 46, Portal Papers, University of Cambridge. Chitty, Musings, 87. Sir Derek Birley, Land of Sport and Glory (Manchester, 1995), 123. Although Eden did not herself shoot a tiger she was well aware of her extraordinary status as a woman on a big-game hunting trip. She wrote: ‘Certainly this expedition has quite answered to me in point of pleasure. Then I am rather proud of having seen a tiger killed, because, except for Mrs Cockerelly, there is not another woman in India who has, I believe.’ Quoted in Janet Dunbar, Golden Interlude: The Edens in India, 1836–1842 (Boston, MA, 1956), 81. Isabel Savory, A Sportswoman in India: Personal Adventures and Experiences of Travel in Known and Unknown India (London, 1900); Mrs Richard Tyacke, How I Shot My Bears, or Two Years’ Tent Life in Kalluf Lahoul (London, 1893). Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (London and New York, 1994), 43. Birley, Land of Sport and Glory, 123. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 36; Kathleen E. McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870–1914 (London, 1988), 271. McCrone, Sport, 284 Savory, A Sportswoman, 343. Ibid., 282–3. Tyacke, How I Shot, 43, 45 (emphasis added); Savory, A Sportswoman, 152, 255–6. Scott, ‘Indian Panorama’, 62. Mrs J.P. Mills, ‘Memoir’, 10, Mills Papers, University of Cambridge. Grace Seton similarly wore ‘Jodpur [sic] breeches, heavy boots, a Viyella shirt, a double terai (felt hat) a spine pad’ as her normal hunting attire. Grace Thompson Seton, ‘Yes Lady Saheb’ (New York, 1925), 132. Lady Vere Birdwood, interview, tape recording, ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Chitty, Musings, 26–7. John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times’, in J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940s (Manchester, 1987), 178, 188. Joan Allen, interview, tape recording, ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer’, 179.

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Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY, 1989). The one exception was the North-West Frontier province where the British were continuously embroiled in conflict with tribes along the borders of the empire. The British believed it imperative to keep guns out of enemy hands; weapons and ammunition were carefully accounted for and soldiers placed under strict orders to retrieve all lost weapons from the battlefield. Other types of hunting that did not require the use of guns were popular. Emulating the British squirearchy, Anglo-Indians rode to the hounds, although their quarry was the indigenous jackal rather than the fox. Pig-sticking, a dangerous sport involving the spearing of a wild boar with a 7–9-foot long weapon (shooting the ‘pig’ was considered unsporting) was also popular, particularly among army officers. Anglo-Indian women participated in both sports. Scott Bennett, ‘Shikar and the Raj’, South Asia 7 (1984): 76. See also M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Gender Negotiations: Hunting and Colonialism in the Late 19th Century Nilgiris’, in Patricia Uberoi (ed.), Social Reform, Sexuality and the State (New Delhi, 1996), 243. Yvonne Fitzroy, Courts and Camps in India: Impressions of Viceregal Tours, 1921–1924 (London, 1926), 103–4. Mary, Lady Maxwell, ‘Memoirs 1911–1947’, 4, British Library. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 171. Sir Harcourt Butler, A Big Game Shoot in Upper Burma (Rangoon, 1923), British Library. See E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975), for a discussion of the social and cultural dynamics of eighteenth-century legislation against poaching in Britain. For a summary of the various laws regulating hunting in England, see Kenneth G. Whitehead, Hunting and Stalking Deer in Britain through the Ages (Pomfret, VT, 1980), 161–85. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 283. James Cecil Moore, ‘Chota Sahib, Memoir of the British Raj in India 1909–16’, 6, British Library. Pandian ‘Gender Negotiations’. Moore, ‘Chota Sahib’, 10. Birley, Land of Sport and Glory, 2; Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 42; Hilda Bourne, ‘It Was Like This’, 27, Bourne Collection, University of Cambridge. Mrs M. Ravenscroft, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge. Moore, ‘Chota Sahib’. McCrone, Sport, 86. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 119. Mary, Countess of Minto, India, Minto and Morley 1905–1910 (London, 1934), 198, 318. Anglo-Indian boys and girls undoubtedly rode and perhaps also took up shooting, although it is doubtful that they would have attained a high level of skill or retained their abilities without constant practice. See, e.g., Mrs B.M.D. Lee Warner, Guided Destiny (Norfolk, nd), 55, British Library. Walter Pryke, Interview (tape recording), ‘The British Army in India’, Imperial War Museum. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 194. Savory, A Sportswoman, 271–2. Janet Humble, ‘Out of Burma and Back Again 1942–1946’, British Library. In the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, tigers killed 1,600 people per year. A single tiger was capable of destroying cattle worth £600–700. The British government in India offered rewards for killing tigers of Rs 50–200 per animal, as well as lesser amounts for the killing of panthers and leopards. See MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 180, 182. Norah Burke, Jungle Child (New York, 1955), 77 (emphasis added). Monica Martin, Out in the Mid-Day Sun (Boston, MA, 1950), 140. Bourne, ‘It Was Like This’, 27.

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GOOD SPORTS? 64

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65 66 67

68 69 70

71

72

73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

Ibid., 115. Women were often called upon to shoot dangerous animals that wandered into the compound, particularly mad dogs. See e.g. Katherine Smith-Pearse, Interview (tape recording), British Library; Queenie Mansfield, Letter of 1 July 1923, Mansfield Papers, University of Cambridge. One woman even had to shoot her own dog after it had been bitten by a rabid animal and her husband proved too squeamish to undertake the task. Martin, Out in the Mid-Day Sun, 172. K. Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart: Memoir of an Indian Police Officer’, 252–3, British Library. Bourne, ‘It Was Like This’, 115. Nationalists targeted Tegart, according to one Indian, because ‘[h]e was very, very notorious, and went out of his way to try out methods of torture on the revolutionaries’. See Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 115. This feeling of security endured despite protests, including some terrorist acts, associated with the 1905 partition of Bengal. H.W. Hale, Political Trouble in India 1917–1937 (reprinted Allahabad, 1974), 1; Kali Charan Ghosh, The Roll of Honour, Anecdotes of Indian Martyrs (Calcutta, 1965), 231. John MacKenzie, ‘The Imperial Pioneer’, 176–98, similarly points out the connection made by Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement between training hunters and creating soldiers. Those few Anglo-Indians who supported Indian nationalist aspirations often felt alienated from the rest of the Anglo-Indian community. See e.g., Mildred Archer, Interview (tape recording), British Library; William and Mildred Archer, India Served and Observed (London, 1994), 6. See e.g. Nancy Archer-Shee, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Although at least one Anglo-Indian woman, Mildred Archer, asserted that few Europeans carried guns (neither she nor her husband were ever armed, although her husband, a civil servant, did have a police bodyguard during the ‘Quit India’ disturbances of 1942), my researches reveal numerous instances of gun-toting wives during the interwar period. See Archer, Interview. While particular districts such as Midnapore, where three ICS officers were assassinated by terrorists (one during a football match), or Calcutta, where terrorists successfully raided a government office building killing several officials, might have been particularly dangerous, it appears that nationalist violence was more apparent than real in most regions of India. The British version of nationalist terrorist activities is presented in Hale, Political Trouble; the Indian perspective is set forth in Ghosh, Roll of Honour. See also Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest (Delhi, 1987). Sedition Committee, Report (1918; reprinted Calcutta, 1973), 27 (hereafter ‘Rowlatt Report’). Rowlatt Report, 8. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). Sir Charles Tegart, Terrorism in India (reprinted Calcutta, 1983), 6. Hale, Political Trouble, 27, 32, 35–6, 33. ‘The Memsahib’s Point of View’, Cornhill Magazine 48 (May 1920): 598–9. See e.g. Kathleen Tegart, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Hale, Political Trouble, 24. Ibid., 33, 35. The extent of women’s involvement in violent nationalist activities, however, is tiny compared with their massive participation in Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence. Purnima Bose, ‘Engendering the Armed Struggle: Women, Writing, and the Bengali “Terrorist” Movement’, in Thomas Foster et al. (eds), Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance (New York, 1996), 159. K. Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart’, 252–3. Olivia Hamilton, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge; see also Lady Rosamond Lawrence, Indian Embers (Palo Alto, CA, 1991), 384. Lawrence, Indian Embers, 384.

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87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Lady Griffiths, Interview. Hale, Political Trouble, 115. Pamela Hinkson, Indian Harvest (London, 1941), 31. However, Grace Seton, an American travelling on her own in India in the 1920s, remarked: ‘I think that nowhere in the world can a woman alone (attended by a good native servant, of course) travel more comfortably and safely, than in First-Class Reserved Ladies Compartment on Indian Railroads, except in those parts where seditious, anti-British propaganda has inflamed the masses.’ This despite the fact that Seton had herself fended off a threatened break-in while on an Indian train! See ‘Yes Lady Saheb’, 63, 60–1. Chitty, Musings, 27. B. Macdonald, India: Sunshine and Shadow (London, 1988), 115. Ibid.; Seton, ‘Yes Lady Saheb’, 61. Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 102. Sheila Mitchell, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Ramsay-Brown, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Chitty, Musings, 26. Burke, Jungle Child, 78. Ibid.

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PART III Race

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CHAPTER SIX

Imperial femininity and the uplift of Indian women

What, exactly, were Anglo-Indian wives doing in India? If the man and woman on the Clapham omnibus had hazarded a response to such a query, they would undoubtedly have replied that Anglo-Indian women were doing good in India. That is, they were helping their less fortunate Indian sisters to ascend to the level of modern British womanhood. The respondents might have elaborated by alluding to zenana visits, education for girls, the benefits of Western medicine, and other assorted charitable endeavours. The more well-informed could have named the Lady Dufferin Fund, the Girl Guides and the Bluebirds, and the Lady Hardinge Medical College as specific examples of this imperial philanthropy. This British view of Anglo-Indian life was predicated on the strict gendering of imperial responsibilities. While their husbands focused on the manly work of imperial governance, Anglo-Indian wives were to concentrate their efforts on reforming Indian womanhood. By serving as exemplars of a more ‘advanced’ civilization and instructing Indian women in British values, so the thinking went, Anglo-Indian wives would help to modernize Indian society, imbue it with acceptable moral views and prepare Indian women to take their proper place in Indian politics and society. There was just one problem with this tidy view of the empire: it wasn’t true. By their own admission, Anglo-Indian wives were not doing in India what most people supposed they were doing there. Some AngloIndian women were troubled, at least in retrospect, by this apparent dereliction of feminine duty. ‘Looking back, it worries me that so few of 1 us young wives were co-opted into good works.’ Others were aggressively unapologetic: ‘I did little welfare work, apart from raising money and so on for Angle-Indian [sic] charities; the ’30s was a time of encouraging Indians to manage their own affairs ... our responsibilities were first to our own’.2 Whether their words reflected feelings of guilt or defiance, however, [ 165 ]

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Anglo-Indian wives’ failure to take up the white woman’s burden not only shaped their own role in the empire but inevitably affected the complex relationship between Anglo-Indian women and their Indian ‘sisters’. The ‘uplift’ of Indian womanhood was an important component of Britain’s civilizing mission in India, because Indian women were presented as the segment of Indian society most resistant to change and, simultaneously, as its most oppressed social group. The British served up the spectre of suffering Indian women in need of rescue as one justification for their continuing presence in India. Gayatri Spivak’s well-known definition of imperialism as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ could easily be expanded to include white women, as well, in the heroic role of saviour of their less fortunate 3 ‘sisters’. Starting in the 1830s with the debate over the abolition of sati(Indian widow’s ritual self-immolation), and continuing into the twentieth century, the British critiqued and occasionally tried to remedy such perceived abuses as child marriage, maltreatment of widows, seclusion of women (purdah) and inadequate education for girls. British women in India appeared ideally suited to carry out the work of bettering the lives of their Indian sisters. Many women and men in Britain and India assumed that women’s similarities as women could transcend any cultural, racial or linguistic differences: ‘Women of widely different racial, social, economic and intellectual attributes can come into sympathetic moral and, even, spiritual relationship with each other 4 by means of certain “built-in” qualities of their womanhood.’ Indeed, in a society where many women lived in seclusion and refused to interact with men other than their own close relations, Anglo-Indian women were the only members of their community who could cross over between the zenana (women’s quarters) and the public world of the Raj.5 Furthermore, Anglo-Indian women lived in India, where they came into daily contact with Indian women, could assess the problems of Indian womanhood firsthand and could commit to their long-term solutions. As David Savage has argued in the context of Indian women’s education, such direct contact with ‘superior’ European women would, the British hoped, inspire Indian women to emulate these models of womanhood and 6 improve their own situation. British women’s role in the empire also played a crucial discursive function in the domestic and imperial political debates of metropolitan Britain, as Antoinette Burton has compellingly demonstrated.7 Although most Anglo-Indian wives were not feminists, British women activists argued the necessity of a female presence in the empire to sustain their own claims to political citizenship. Imprinting metropolitan models on the empire, and working from the idea of a monolithic and universally homogeneous womanhood, these activists assumed that British women in India would ‘naturally’ be drawn to work [ 166 ]

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IMPERIAL FEMININITY

with and for Indian women. Finally, middle-class women’s philanthropic endeavours for their less-fortunate sisters in the metropole symbolized the public face of women’s purportedly more moral nature and constituted a critical component of British feminine identity. That feminine philanthropy should, like trade, follow the flag into the outposts of empire was a natural progression. Anglo-Indian women’s charitable work for the uplift of Indian women would thus appear to have been overdetermined. It is, therefore, surprising to peruse Anglo-Indian wives’ diaries, letters and memoirs from the late nineteenth century onwards and find scant mention of 8 philanthropic work or concern for the uplift of Indian women. While some women saw the undertaking of good works among Indian women and children as ‘part of my job as [the] wife of [an] ICS man’, many others realized that ‘there are many women [to take on philanthropic work] ... and in any case you can get out of doing anything if you want’.9 Of course, philanthropic work can take many forms. Much of AngloIndian women’s involvement with charitable endeavours mirrored female activities in Britain, where women raised money for good causes by hosting fundraising events such as fancy fairs and by eliciting donations from their well-heeled friends. Such financial support for charities that benefited Indian women did not, however, necessitate Anglo-Indian women’s presence in the empire. Indeed, many of the better-known and more prestigious charitable organizations, such as the Lady Dufferin Fund, attracted numerous benefactors in Britain as well as in India. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, without abandoning this fundraising role, women in Britain had also adopted a more participatory approach towards philanthropy. Middle-class British women hoped to provide such uplift to their working-class sisters by visiting them in their homes, teaching them the essentials of healthy cooking, household management and child-care, and even living among them in settlement houses. This model of edification through personal contact could also be extended to the empire where, it was hoped, Anglo-Indian wives’ direct interactions with their Indian counterparts would enlighten Indian women about Western ways and lift them out of their purportedly degraded way of life. Anglo-Indian wives, however, rejected this type of philanthropic engagement. They refused to take up the white woman’s burden. Anglo-Indian wives’ failure to focus their charitable undertakings on direct work with Indian women, their refusal to acknowledge any essential womanly characteristics linking them to Indian women, and their denial of any potential for common ground between themselves and their Indian ‘sisters’ indicate that Anglo-Indian women did not envision [ 167 ]

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their main function in the empire to be primarily philanthropic. Although British feminists, the British public, and the governments of Britain and India assumed that Anglo-Indian women would find a natural outlet for their talents and energies in the elevation of Indian women, Anglo-Indian wives themselves did not see such philanthropic work as a necessary rationale for their presence in India and thus felt no compulsion to pursue it vigorously. Nonetheless, these expectations about women’s philanthropic role in the empire, and the perceived necessity to uplift Indian women, coloured the relationship between Anglo-Indian wives and Indian women. Even if they were inclined to active charitable work, most AngloIndian wives lacked the linguistic and practical skills necessary to engage in effective social, medical or educational reform among Indian women. Few Anglo-Indian wives had pursued professional careers – or, indeed, employment of any sort – prior to marriage. Because they did not see their role as officials’ wives as primarily philanthropic, most AngloIndian women did not attempt to secure any training in medicine, nursing, education or social work. To the extent that they did engage in charitable work, therefore, most were content to practise on an amateur level, dispensing medicines for example, for diseases that they often could not even diagnose. Thus, during the Second World War, one woman ruefully reported the discontinuation of her public health visitations to village women, ‘owing to my ignorance of Oriya language ... I am sorry about it, as these visits always created a very friendly feeling between them and us. They tried to improve their conditions at least for the sake of our visits and they always welcomed us with a smile.’ Although this Anglo-Indian wife clearly enjoyed her role as benefactress, whether the Indian women who were the intended beneficiaries of these visits learned anything about ‘general sanitation, having plenty of fresh air and to drink pure water, preferably boiled 10 water’, is unclear. Anglo-Indian women’s race-based apprehensions about Indians, many of whom they viewed as dirty and diseased, no doubt also made ‘hands on’ charitable work unattractive. Margaret Martyn, the wife of an ICS officer in Calcutta in the 1940s, described her abortive attempt to become a Girl Guide leader in terms that evoke racial stereotypes of the colonized peoples. Visiting a sick Girl Guide, she went round a maze of back streets to this dilapidated and shabby crumbling large house where this [Eurasian] family plus an old grandmother live in a squalid sitting room and, I suppose, some other rooms. There was a smell of spicey [sic] food and the mother and the girl insisted on telling me all about the girl’s dysentery so that I felt really sick and terrified of catching the germs that seemed to be stalking about the room!11

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Institutions established to remedy the perceived problems of Indian women, such as the provision of homes for widows, maternity hospitals, and girls’ schools, were staffed primarily by women recruited from Britain (and, increasingly, the United States) specifically for that purpose. Often these women were professionally trained educators, medical practitioners or social workers who came to India for the sole purpose of working to improve the lives of Indian women. For example, shortly after its inception in the late nineteenth century, the YWCA of India sent out an appeal for European and American volunteers, explaining that ‘it is absolutely necessary that, in the first instance at least, ladies be sent out from home. Ladies of the resident English population, free and willing to work, are constantly shifting about and on this account cannot be depended upon as permanent officers.’12 Many of the more well-established charitable endeavours, such as mission schools, the YWCA and social work settlements, operated outside the ambit of the official community of the Raj. Professional charity workers often had a commitment to the umbrella organization sponsoring these Indian institutions, such as the YWCA or a denominational missionary society, rather than to the Raj. Socially, they generally kept apart from the official community of Anglo-India, trying to integrate themselves more fully into the lives of the Indians they were trying to help.13 Because these charitable groups often had religious as well as philanthropic goals, their relationship to the Raj and its officials could be problematic. Although India had been officially open to missionary endeavours since the early nineteenth century, the government of India looked askance at efforts to convert Indians to Christianity or otherwise to interfere unduly with indigenous culture. For the wives of officials, whose primary ties were to the empire, involvement with some of these organizations might have resulted in conflicting loyalties, if not a conflict of interest. Additionally, many of these charitable organizations preferred or required their female workers to be unmarried, reflecting a similar bias in effect in many professions in Britain. Thus, in 1890, of the forty ‘lady doctors’ working for the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, commonly known as the Lady Dufferin Fund, thirty-four had never married and, of the remaining six who used the title ‘Mrs’, some may have been widows. Similarly, most educational institutions required their employees to be tied down by no family connections. One woman recalled that upon her arrival in Calcutta to take up the position of principal of a girls’ school, the school committee welcomed her by remarking: ‘We would like you to be the kind of Principal who stays.’ The school’s attempts to upgrade its standards had been repeatedly thwarted by a succession of principals [ 169 ]

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who then had married and left the job before reforms could be implemented.14 Although the marriage bar in both Britain and India embodied patriarchal notions about the primacy of domesticity and maternity for women, in the empire there was a pragmatic aspect, as well, to this bias against married women’s employment. Since a woman’s first duty was to her spouse, and through him to the empire, she would follow him wherever his duties took him – to another posting in India, home on leave, or back to Britain permanently for retirement. Charitable organizations rightly believed that they could not depend on AngloIndian wives to give priority to their volunteer work and, similarly, many Anglo-Indian women could not in good faith make long-term commitments to these organizations. During the Second World War, in order to attract more recruits from the Anglo-Indian community, the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) created a special class of service that allowed a wife both to serve as a volunteer and to fulfil her wifely duties. If the husband of a volunteer were transferred to another post in India, his wife in the WAC(I)s could request a transfer to that station, as well. If no suitable positions were available for the married WAC(I) in the new 15 station, she was relieved of her obligations to the corps. Ironically, Indian women, whose familial ties were more likely to be rooted in one place, faced none of these handicaps in undertaking charitable work. Although some Indian traditionalists needed to be convinced that professional qualifications did not unfit a woman for her maternal and spousal duties, nonetheless many Indian wives were actively engaged in charitable work as well as in more demanding professional employment, as doctors, educators and social workers.16 For Anglo-Indian wives, however, although they could often serve as trustees of charitable institutions, raise money for them and, perhaps, undertake low-level tasks, their marital status disqualified them from the more important, demanding and, perhaps, more satisfying longterm professional positions in these organizations. This prejudice against married women was, of course, the opposite of the situation in the official institutions of the Raj where women’s status and access to political power and influence were predicated on their marital status. Thus, while work for the Raj reinforced the idea of an imperial marital partnership, philanthropic work frequently conflicted with these spousal imperial duties. Although the governments of the Raj and of Great Britain remained unwilling to accord women any official recognition for their contributions to imperialism, they were, nonetheless, eager to take advantage of wives’ presence in the empire to further their own ends. This was especially true when the obligations of imperial politics [ 170 ]

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became entangled in ostensibly ‘feminine’ matters such as socializing between the Anglo-Indian and Indian communities. As the Indianization of the services proceeded after the First World War, the government expected encounters between Anglo-Indian and Indian women to bridge the yawning chasm between the races and to promote greater understanding between colonizer and colonized. This greater human understanding would, in turn, it was hoped, smooth the way for the greater integration of Indians into the imperial government, fostering acceptance among Anglo-Indians and an appreciation for Western values and practices among Indians. Thus, Anglo-Indian wives’ charitable work was not necessarily a manifestation of altruistic impulses; in India, as elsewhere, a variety of motives can inspire philanthropic undertakings.17 It appears that many of women’s philanthropic activities served as a noble cover for less worthy undertakings such as career advancement, self-protection, socializing and entertainment, motivations having little relation to the promotion of racial harmony. Philanthropic work for a woman was often a responsibility linked to her husband’s position in the official hierarchy of the Raj. One man’s description of his wife’s enlistment as president of an infant welfare organization is applicable to many women’s ‘voluntary’ duties: ‘it would have been ex-officio if she held an officium to begin 18 with.’ It was customary, for example, for the vicereine to serve as the titular head of the Lady Dufferin Fund, emulating her predecessor, the Fund’s founder. In the military in India, the ‘colonel’s lady’ was generally acknowledged to be responsible for the well-being of regimental wives and children, although the degree of involvement varied greatly. Officers’ wives might run a monthly baby ‘weigh-in’ to verify that each infant of the regiment was being adequately nourished. The more ambitious could sponsor a medical clinic for regimental families or even establish a social centre for the wives and children of the other ranks. Governmental priorities are apparent in many of these charitable undertakings. The attention and the amenities bestowed on the wives and families of Indian troops, for example, would ideally promote contentment in the ranks and foster loyalty to the Raj. While some women appear to have internalized and accepted these responsibilities, others were less amenable to taking on tasks for which they had no inclination or skill. Describing how she became involved with the Girl Guides, one woman explained that the wife of a senior official ‘pushed me into the job of 19 state commissioner’. Such compulsory charity may have dampened women’s enthusiasm for philanthropy or even compromised the efficacy of their work. Other philanthropic endeavours evidenced a large degree of selfinterest. In addition to aiding their husbands’ careers, women might [ 171 ]

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achieve recognition for themselves. Philanthropic activities were often recognized by a thank-you letter from the provincial governor or, for truly heroic efforts, the Kaiser-i-Hind medal awarded by the viceroy.20 Wives also often dispensed medical aid to their domestic servants. While there was clearly a humanitarian aspect to such endeavours, wives were also concerned to protect their families and themselves from diseases originating in the servants’ quarters. Furthermore, such assistance was often strictly limited, concerned more with protecting the Anglo-Indian family than with assisting a suffering Indian servant. Most Anglo-Indians had no compunction in ejecting from the compound servants with contagious diseases such as cholera or smallpox. Conversely, AngloIndians often turned a blind eye to genuine opportunities for the uplift of Indian women within their own households. Some Anglo-Indian wives were aware that their male servants had married underage girls, contrary to laws intended to protect Indian females and raise the moral tone of Indian society. Nonetheless, personal affection for their servants, or the inconvenience of finding new ones, made Anglo-Indians reluctant to dismiss servants for such immoral and illegal activities. Furthermore, many of the activities that passed as charitable work for the ‘uplift’ of Indian womanhood were, in reality, merely fundraising for various causes, involving no opportunity for the interaction of AngloIndian wives with their Indian ‘sisters’. Some of these purportedly charitable activities simply required a financial donation (often quite small, in the order of Rs 5–10), entitling the donor to recognition in the organization’s annual report. For example, the 1907 Annual Report of Lady Lamington’s Work Guild in Bombay reported 125 subscribers, who each contributed Rs 10 to the organization, but only twenty-seven active members who actually carried out the organization’s work of cutting and sewing garments to be distributed to various charities.21 Like the quasicompulsory social welfare work of officials’ wives, financial support for charitable fundraisers was also part of ‘the job’ for imperial administrators and their wives. ‘Any sort of subscription – the Viceroy’s Earthquake Fund, or Tuberculosis Fund – you had to head the list of subscriptions in your district. So we were always completely broke.’22 Contributing money to the worthy causes unofficially espoused by the Raj was often a matter of self-interest also for Indians. Anglo-Indian wives, in particular, pressured wealthy Indians to contribute to their various causes, and it appears that these imperial subjects often complied, providing much of the monetary support for ostensibly Anglo-Indian efforts. Lady Minto, wife of the viceroy, reported that an Indian nawab volunteered to contribute to her pet cause, the Minto Nursing Association. ‘I reminded him that the Sisters only nurse Europeans and [ 172 ]

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that Indians do not benefit under the scheme. He said he was aware of that, but that Europeans constantly assisted Indian charities, and he did not see why Indians should not equally help a European organization. This evening I have received a donation of Rs. 7000.’23 While these donations did not amount to bribery in the strict sense, important Indians could use philanthropy to stay in the good graces of their imperial rulers.24 Other types of charitable work were merely excuses for the socializing that took place between members of the Anglo-Indian community and the most elite elements of Indian society. A Mrs Ansorge organized a ‘Water Carnival’ to raise funds for the war effort during the Second World War. The carnival was a night of luxurious dining, music and elaborate entertainments on the river. Participants, who were mostly ‘native’ gentleman but also included the governor and his suite, rented boats, apparently provided gratis by the public works department, from which to enjoy the aquatic festivities. The event 25 netted Rs 2,600. Carnivals, bazaars, sporting events, second-hand stores, even badminton matches ‘at which the losers paid up to the good cause’, were instances of the rather frivolous social activities of AngloIndia endowed with a veneer of respectability by their association with charitable fundraising.26 Although these entertainments provided constant diversions for the Anglo-Indian community, it is unclear how successful they were as fundraisers, since many of these efforts required an initial outlay of money. When members of a local branch of the International Council of Women for Social Work, an interracial and religiously diverse group, decided to organize a children’s fair as a fundraiser in 1940, ‘they hired a cricket ground, invited children from an entire city, and had the temerity to drop handbills in all the schools’. As one of the organizers recalled, this event ‘realiz[ed] some thousands of rupees, but [lost] nobody knew how many thousands through mismanagement’.27 Money was wasted at higher levels, as well. In the 1920s, the vicereine’s plans for a maternity hospital were in such disarray that the project had to be scrapped – but only after Rs 40,000 had already been expended.28 Although Indian women were commonly the financial beneficiaries of these fundraising efforts, such events required almost no personal interaction between Anglo-Indian benefactors and those Indian women who were the objects of their benevolence. The moneys raised by these efforts would normally be used to hire professional women such as doctors and teachers to minister to the needs of Indian women. The Lady Dufferin Fund provides a good example of a well-known charity in which Anglo-Indian women primarily raised money, while others, with greater training, time, commitment and, perhaps, compassion, actually provided services to needy Indian women. Its history also indicates some of the [ 173 ]

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pitfalls of the practice of imperial philanthropy.29 Founded in 1885 by the wife of the viceroy, the Fund was headed up by a succession of vicereines, but also enjoyed the official patronage of the British aristocracy, Indian rulers, and even Queen Victoria herself. Its starstudded list of patrons and its goal of remedying what was perceived as the greatest hardship for Indian women – their lack of access to Western medical care – made the fund one of the better known efforts for the uplifting of Indian women. Although the Fund’s Annual Report stated that its aims were to provide medical education for women doctors, hospital assistants, nurses and midwives, and to provide medical relief to the women (and children) of India through the establishment of hospitals, dispensaries and wards under female supervision, the primary function of the Fund’s central committee was raising moneys for distribution to its various branches throughout India. Lady Dufferin often visited women’s hospitals, but her main duties with the Fund were to ‘have one meeting every week and ... see individuals on particular points, write and receive letters, and keep a record of all that I do with 30 regard to this matter in a very dry and businesslike way’. The actual work of supplying women’s medical aid was undertaken by women doctors recruited primarily from Europe and the United States. Furthermore, the efficacy of that work is open to question. In 1910, for example, the Fund came under criticism from a group of prominent medical women in Britain who asserted that the central committee not only lacked control over its local branches which were ‘irresponsible and not infrequently capricious and inefficient bodies’ but was floundering in its main work of fundraising, so that public revenues were supporting the Dufferin hospitals. Even with adequate funding, the small scale of the endeavour in relation to India’s female population meant that the Dufferin Fund, like many other charitable organizations, could have no 31 impact on the vast majority of Indian women’s lives. Despite these failings, the Dufferin Fund became the model for much of Anglo-Indian women’s philanthropic work for the uplift of Indian women. Emulating Lady Dufferin and other vicereines, AngloIndian wives would often become patrons of various charitable institutions, lending their names and prestige (and, by extension, their husbands’ status in the Raj) to these organizations. A patron would also donate some money, but probably not much time, energy or attention, to her adopted charity. Her personal contacts with her chosen charity were usually rare and fleeting, although often noteworthy for the institution and its beneficiaries. The visit of Lady Lloyd and her husband, the governor of Bombay, to the Poona Seva Sadan (Home of Service for Women) in 1919 gives some idea of what such ceremonial visits entailed and of the superficial [ 174 ]

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connection between Anglo-Indian wives, on the one hand, and these charitable organizations and their beneficiaries, on the other. After arriving ‘exactly at 4 P.M.’, the Lloyds and their entourage were greeted by the officials of the institution, who then took the visitors round the several departments in the following order: – Work-room classes, The Show room, The Practising School, Training College classes, Primary Classes for grown-up women, Music and Harmonium Classes, and the English Classes for advanced pupils, including one class for teaching English to intending Probationary Nurses and Midwives. They were also shown the hostel rooms, the Nature Study plots &c. In all these classes Their Excellencies listened with interest to the singing and reading of the pupils. They also listened to some recitations and examined the handwriting of some of the students. They were greatly interested in weaving, sewing and the hosiery work in the Institution.32

Including speeches by the Seva Sadan’s secretary and Lord Lloyd, the entire visit lasted a mere one-and-a-half hours! The Lloyds and their entourage must have dashed through the various classrooms, with little opportunity to comprehend the training and education taking place there and no chance to converse with the Seva Sadan’s pupils. Like many other imperial tasks, much of Anglo-Indian women’s charitable work merely involved being seen in public by the colonized peoples. The encounters, centered in schools, hospitals and other charitable institutions, between the Anglo-Indian Lady Bountiful and her Indian beneficiaries, such as the Lloyds’ visit to the Seva Sadan, were no doubt artificial and uncomfortable for all the participants. While such charitable undertakings may have been both patronizing and demeaning, these meetings among Indian and Anglo-Indian women at least had a recognizable purpose – e.g. to weigh the babies, dispense the medicine, hand out school prizes – in which participants on both sides of the charitable divide understood their role. Anglo-Indian and Indian women also encountered each other in quasi-social situations unconnected with any overtly charitable purpose. The uplift of Indian womanhood and the promotion of the imperial agenda were also the implicit goals of these encounters. Anglo-Indian wives were to present themselves as a model for their less ‘advanced’ Indian sisters to emulate. The lack of any specific agenda for these meetings, however, compounded by cultural misapprehensions and lack of a common language, made everyone uncomfortable. When Lady Irwin and her party dined privately with the queen of Afghanistan, for example, the vicereine reported to her husband that the evening had been ‘something of a strain’ because ‘the Queen’s 33 English and her conversational resources were limited’. Of course, Lady Irwin’s Afghan was not so much limited as non-existent, and she [ 175 ]

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presumably initiated no discursive gambits herself. We can only assume that the Afghan ladies passed an equally grim evening. Like the Afghan queen and Lady Irwin, Indian and Anglo-Indian women encountered each other in a variety of informal social situations, none particularly comfortable for either group or conducive to greater understanding between them. Anglo-Indians were accustomed to socializing among themselves, primarily in two different venues: in the home, usually at dinner or another meal; and at the club, where they played tennis and bridge, and later sipped drinks on the verandah. They expected Indians to emulate these habits as a sign of their successful westernization. Not surprisingly, Anglo-Indian women felt most comfortable with those Indian women who had adopted these modes of sociability and, similarly, those Indian women who could (and would) socialize in British fashion were themselves most at ease in Anglo-Indian society. Mrs N.B. Bonarjee, the wife of an Indian ICS officer, dined out frequently with her husband and entertained ICS colleagues in their home; she also was an expert tennis player (she hitched up her sari) who enjoyed hunting and shooting (for which she abandoned the sari in favour of khaki trousers).34 Mr Bonarjee believed that his wife’s facility with British social and recreational pursuits gave him ‘an advantage denied to anyone else in the Province, British or Indian, civilian or military officer’.35 Those who were not completely assimilated into the Anglo-Indian way of life stood out in the official community. One Indian ICS wife, for example, who was less Westernized than the Anglo-Indians with whom she frequently socialized at the station club, endured friendly chaffing about her tee-total habits.36 Another Indian ICS wife, who had family connections to terrorist organizations engaged in antiimperial activities, found it difficult to get along with either AngloIndian wives or their Westernized Indian counterparts. She complained about the Anglo-Indians’ ‘patronising’ attitude towards Indians: ‘We ... were supposed to be grateful for our status and power and were never allowed to forget the source of that power and position’.37 Few Anglo-Indians were sufficiently introspective or sufficiently critical of imperialism to query why only Indians should be expected to bridge the cultural gap separating imperialists from the colonized peoples. They singled out Indian women as responsible for the uneasy relationship between Anglo-Indians and their Indian subjects. Explained one Anglo-Indian wife: ‘They [Indian women] couldn’t unbend. I don’t 38 Although Anglo-Indians generally think it was my fault.’ acknowledged racial distinctions between themselves and the Indians, they did not attribute their social unease to racism. An army officer dismissed the notion that a ‘colour bar’ created difficulties between Indians and Anglo-Indians, explaining instead that ‘it was this question [ 176 ]

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of women. You could have an Indian official ... who would come to your house, but you would never go to his, if he was married. You would never meet his wife ... You were friends with the chap in the office, but you could never be friends family-wise.’39 The Indians’ apparently retrograde views on women inhibited the collegiality between AngloIndian and Indian officials that should have developed with the Indianization of the imperial services. Anglo-Indians did socialize with Indians, particularly aristocrats and wealthy supporters of the Raj, but their visits to the homes of those Indians were carried out more in the spirit of imperial noblesse oblige than as informal social encounters among equals, thus solidifying Anglo-Indian impressions about the ‘backwardness’ of Indian marital relationships. While Anglo-Indians viewed caste and dietary restrictions that prevented Indians from dining with Europeans as quaint and irrational customs vaguely insulting to the British, they cast purdah as the major obstacle to Indian women’s fullfledged participation in civil society and imperial politics and to India’s 40 advancement as a nation. Critical as Anglo-Indians may have been of the apparent backwardness of Indian women and the oppressive nature of Indian religions and traditions, they were nonetheless forced to socialize with Indian women – and, for the most part, on Indian rather than European terms. Indian women’s simple refusal to abandon the customs associated with purdah, as well as their adherence to various dietary restrictions and religious observances, dictated how they interacted with AngloIndian women. (These religious restrictions were not, of course, confined to interactions with Anglo-Indian women: ideas about caste also limited Indian women’s interactions among themselves.) Anglo-Indian and Indian women socialized primarily in two formats: the zenana visit and the purdah party. Although Anglo-Indian women generally assumed the role of cultural benefactor in these encounters, Indian women asserted their own cultural autonomy in ways that destabilized the imperial relationship. European women missionaries and educators had begun visiting Indian women in their homes in the early-nineteenth century, hoping to convert the ‘zenana women’ to Christianity and to educate them sufficiently so that they would become aware of their oppressed condition. While such zenana visitations by missionaries and teachers continued into the twentieth century, the wives of Anglo-Indian officials were concerned neither with conversion nor with education in their visits to the zenana. Rather, it was expected that whenever an official paid a visit to an important Indian under his jurisdiction, his wife would, similarly, pay a courtesy call on the zenana women. These visits were usually brief, intended merely to symbolize the Raj’s concern for its [ 177 ]

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female as well as male subjects. Anglo-Indian women almost always described these encounters as extremely uncomfortable, and perhaps pointless. Even Anglo-Indian men were ill at ease with the ‘uncanny’ and unseen presence of the zenana women who often observed dinners, dances and ceremonial occasions from behind curtains or lattices.41 Anglo-Indian women preferred to spend their visits to Indian households in the company of their husbands and the Indian men, where discussion would often focus on important political questions and issues. Although willing to fulfil their imperial responsibilities through the ritual zenana visit, they were reluctant to be classified with these representatives of oppressed womanhood. One Anglo-Indian woman, visiting the purdah ladies in a wealthy household that would be hosting an important dinner that evening, arranged a secret joke with them that illustrates the ambiguous relationship between Indian and Anglo-Indian women. While the zenana women viewed the dinner from a slatted gallery, the Anglo-Indian arranged that ‘for fun ... I would pat the back of my head as a message to them and they said they would poke a hankie through a slot to say they had seen me – much giggling – but woe betide 42 them had they been caught’. While she thus evidenced solidarity with her cloistered sisters, this Anglo-Indian women clearly saw her rightful place in the thick of political discussion with the men, rather than with the passive Indian women observing the scene. Anglo-Indian women thus distinguished themselves from their secluded Indian counterparts while aligning themselves with the masculine world of imperial politics inaccessible to the Indian zenana women. Anglo-Indians also invited Indian women into their own homes. Especially after the First World War, when the government of India encouraged greater socializing between Anglo-Indians and Indians, purdah parties became a common format for interactions among women of the different communities. Anglo-Indian women were to socialize Indian women into Western ways by socializing with them. In practice, this socializing was not indiscriminate but was generally restricted to women with a connection to the Raj, such as the relatives of imperial officials or wives of soldiers in the Indian Army, wealthy women, such as the wives and family of landowners, merchants, and industrialists, women from the ruling families of princely states, and Indian women who were already somewhat westernized. A selfdescribed ‘Memsahib’ writing in 1920 noted that over the previous ten years, ‘many Englishwomen, led by the wives of the heads of the Provinces, now threw themselves eagerly into the effort to bring about social intercourse between the two races’. She also indicated the official impetus motivating these efforts, remarking that officials’ wives were ‘pathetically anxious, poor women, to do anything which “as my [ 178 ]

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husband’s wife” seems to be a duty’.43 Like more institutionalized efforts for the charitable uplift of Indian women, entertaining Indian women at purdah parties was a compulsory, although unwritten, aspect of the job description of officials’ wives. However, the dictates of purdah and dietary restrictions rendered these encounters equally foreign to and uncomfortable for Anglo-Indian wives as were zenana visits. The Anglo-Indian hostess would ensure the privacy of her Indian visitors by banning all men, including her husband and servants, from the house and compound, and strategically hanging curtains to shield the purdah women from the unwanted gaze of male passersby. More culturally sensitive Anglo-Indian hostesses would try to serve food acceptable under the various religious restrictions of their guests, although this was not always successful. At a typical gathering: ‘All male servants were excluded and the strictest “purdah” observed. English and Indian tea and fruit drinks were served and about once a month some form of entertainment, plays, music, country dancing, 44 recitations were organized.’ At some get-togethers, hostesses organized childish games such as charades and ‘bean-bag toss’ as entertainment. One enterprising woman even planted a maze in her garden ‘and the Indian women loved to get lost in it’.45 Perhaps the Anglo-Indian hostess was also glad to have her Indian guests literally out of the way for a while. Language barriers made even small talk difficult (one woman found these encounters ‘quite alarming, my urdu being what it was’), and it appears that at most of these receptions Indian and Anglo-Indian women kept to themselves.46 Sara Jeannette Duncan, a well-known Anglo-Indian novelist, highlighted the linguistic and cultural divide between Anglo-Indian and Indian women in her description of a purdah party in The Burnt Offering. Responding to a request from her hostess to liven up the gathering by singing, an Indian woman launches into a patriotic (and anti-imperial) Bengali song familiar to all the Indian guests, but incomprehensible to 47 the Anglo-Indians. While Indian women could thus express some resistance to imperial rule, for Anglo-Indian women such staged encounters at purdah parties did little to break down linguistic, cultural and political barriers, but served merely to reinforce their perception of Indian women as ignorant, childish and politically disengaged. Although this socializing was semi-compulsory, few Anglo-Indian or Indian women were willing to go beyond the bare minimum of interaction in which it was expedient to participate. In 1907, for example, the Bombay Ladies’ Branch of the Indian National Association tried to further the organization’s goals of fostering ‘friendly relations’ between Indians and Anglo-Indians by organizing monthly ‘Purdah at Homes’ for the members. They sent out 185 circulars asking for [ 179 ]

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volunteers to host these gatherings. The results were disheartening: fourteen members wrote to approve of the scheme, while only nine volunteered their assistance. The rest of the members did not even bother to reply. The officers scolded: ‘It is very difficult to carry through any new scheme when the Committee finds it is not supported by the Members of the Association.’ It is interesting to note that a lecture series sponsored by the same organization on topics ranging from Old Bombay’ to ‘Whittier and His Poetry’ attracted 40–100 women.48 Perhaps events that offered a diversion were less awkward and less boring than those focused exclusively on socializing. Because interactions between Indian and Anglo-Indian women were mainly false and artificial, Anglo-Indian observers constructed their views of Indian womanhood based on superficial characteristics. These observations inevitably led to the conclusion that Indian women were not ready to assume the responsibilities of political engagement currently shouldered by Anglo-Indian wives. To Anglo-Indians, the most immediately apparent feature of the Indian woman was her elaborate and expensive attire. Anglo-Indians frequently commented on Indians’ colourful saris of rich materials. They also noted admiringly the jewels with which Indian women (and men) adorned themselves. Anglo-Indians were not sparing in their praise of the physical attributes of these gorgeously clad ‘delicious creatures’; they frequently described them as 49 beautiful and graceful. However, these descriptions often rendered the sari-clad Indian woman as no more than a mannequin, whose sole purpose was to display these lovely garments. Thus robbed of their humanity, Indian women themselves became merely beautiful objects. For Anglo-Indians, Indian women’s clothing was also symbolic of their greater oppression. While in awe of the elaborate and costly jewelry worn by many Indian women, Anglo-Indians also noted the ‘anklets and 50 wrists heavy with silver’. These decorations took on the connotations of imprisoning bonds, bejeweled chains that prevented Indian women from advancing to equality with their British sisters. Similarly, the burqua, the heavy black garment worn by purdah women to preserve their modesty outside the zenana, symbolized the degradation of Indian women in a ‘backward’ society. One official’s wife happened to travel to India with a Turkish princess, ‘a young lady brought up in France in the freedom of Europe’, destined to marry the son of the nizam of Hyderabad. The Anglo-Indian wife observed in horror that as the ship left Europe behind and approached India the young princess was ‘progressively being prevented from mixing with the other passengers and going into purdah, until [she] left the ship at Bombay hidden in the tent-like bourkas of the more strictly confined Moslem women’. The British Resident in Hyderabad took up the princess’s case with the [ 180 ]

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nizam, arguing that her enforced seclusion violated the terms of a marriage contract that guaranteed her ‘personal freedom’, but also pointing out, significantly, that ‘in modern times, the consort of an Indian Prince needed to take an active social role’.51 The princess’s literal journey from Europe to India mirrored, for Anglo-Indians, her symbolic transition from freedom to oppression. Anglo-Indian women also interpreted Indian women’s relationship to their homes and domestic spaces as very different from their own. AngloIndians saw the zenana, in particular, as a sordid and unhealthy space that perverted Indian women’s natures and sickened them emotionally, causing, according to one European physician, a host of physical complications ranging from ‘the early appearance of menses’ to ‘backache, pelvic troubles, and anaemia’.52 Anglo-India glorified sports, and Anglo-Indian women revelled in their own athletic prowess. The zenana life, they believed, stunted the natural and healthy development of women’s physical abilities. ‘Far off is the day, alas, which will see the Indian girl free to spend every unoccupied moment in healthy out-of-door games like her English sister.’53 Of course, many lower class and lower caste Indian women did spend much of their lives engaged in physical labour outdoors. But, in constructing a type of Indian womanhood, AngloIndian women generally ignored these more robust women. This image of Indian women as uniformly weak, sickly and unathletic had implications beyond the realm of health and medicine: Indian women’s degenerate physical state – pointedly juxtaposed with the robust physicality of Anglo-Indian wives – disqualified them from claims to political power. Anglo-Indians associated the physical life of the zenana with rampant sexuality and an equally unchecked fecundity. The AngloIndians conflated the zenana with the harem of orientalist legend and characterized the relationship between Indian men and women as primarily sexual. This sexuality was not the healthy affection expressed by the Anglo-Indian husband and wife, but a diseased and perverted relationship. Indian women’s bodies were literally diseased because of their sexual relationships with their husbands. Taking an interest in the wives of Sikh soldiers under her husband’s command, Iris Portal brought them to a zenana mission hospital, where the doctor brutally informed her of her charges’ unhealthy state: ‘I suppose you know that most of the women have venereal infections? ... Naturally, none of it is their fault; they are married very young and collect the infections from their 54 husbands.’ Anglo-Indian women also associated Indian women’s bodies with maternity. Indeed, they reported that conversations with zenana women centered almost exclusively on the number and sex of the children of each woman present. However, Anglo-Indians interpreted this concern [ 181 ]

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with childbearing as unwholesome and degraded. Describing the wife of an Indian doctor, an Anglo-Indian woman disapprovingly noted that ‘she was fat and lethargic and spoke no English. When one of the English ladies paying a courtesy visit asked, “How many children have you?” she answered ... “Three and one in my belly.”’55 Furthermore, their husbands, rather than Indian women themselves, seemingly controlled their fertility. Anglo-Indian women were more surprised at Indian women’s ignorance about birth control than they were shocked by the common requests for information on Western methods of limiting fertility. Anglo-Indian husbands often forbade their wives from disseminating information related to sexual practices, including birthcontrol methods and information on venereal disease, for fear of offending Indian men and undermining their loyalty to the Raj.56 However, the practice of condemning the situation without attempting to ameliorate it also served Anglo-Indian women’s aims. Women whose bodies were diseased by their husbands’ sexual excesses and weakened by excessive and uncontrollable childbearing were clearly physically and morally unfitted to exercise the duties of an official’s wife in the Raj. The relationship between Anglo-Indian and Indian women was complex, however, coloured by expectations about femininity and women’s role in the empire. Despite their deprecations of Indian women’s lives, Anglo-Indian women were, nonetheless often envious of certain aspects of their lives. In the masculine world of the Raj, AngloIndian women could feel superior to their Indian counterparts in their greater athleticism, more cosmopolitan experiences and greater facility with imperial politics. In the feminine world of the zenana, however, Anglo-Indian wives were made conscious of their own inadequacies as women. In comparison to the ‘dainty and exquisite’ Indian women, their 57 Anglo-Indian counterparts seemed ‘clumsy and gauche’. While mantailored shirts and khaki trousers may have been practical for life in camp, ‘[o]bserving these lovely saris, one realizes how hideous are one’s own garments’.58 Certainly the luxuries enjoyed by women in the wealthier Indian households represented unattainable riches to AngloIndian wives. Anglo-Indian women enviously described the ‘treasure chests’ of jewels housed in the zenana and the yards of sari cloth trimmed with real gold.59 Anglo-Indian women also entertained mixed emotions about Indian women’s relationship with their children. While the absence of children greatly facilitated Anglo-Indian women’s participation in their husbands’ work and in other imperial activities, many also envied the close family life enjoyed by Indian mothers and their offspring. In the confined world of the zenana, Indian women lived surrounded by their children and [ 182 ]

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other relatives, while the more independent Anglo-Indian wives were frequently separated from their children for long stretches of time. Since conversations during zenana visits usually centred on the ages and sexes of the women’s children, often accompanied by expressions of regret that the Anglo-Indian youngsters were not with their mothers, these encounters with Indian women only underscored the ‘unnatural’ maternal situation of Anglo-Indian women. The Anglo-Indian vision of Indian womanhood in many ways resembled the Victorian angel in the house, but seen through a distorting lens of cultural difference. Like the middle-class Englishwoman, the Indian woman displayed her affluence on her person with her silken saris and lavish jewellery. Like the Victorian female, her Indian cousin was weak, docile and obediently submissive to her husband. Her place was in the home and her life revolved around her children and her mate. Whatever her failings, the Indian woman seemed, in some respects, more feminine and more a true woman than her masculinized Anglo-Indian counterpart, who socialized freely with men, wore trousers, drank and played cards, delegated her domestic and maternal duties to hired help, and meddled in the workings of the empire. However, rather than conceding their own apparent lack of femininity, Anglo-Indian women presented Indian women as unnatural and their ‘feminine’ characteristics as perverse and degraded. For them, the true measure of feminine worth became a woman’s ability to work for the empire. These complex attitudes to women’s philanthropic role in the empire, the uplift of Indian womanhood and the intractably ‘backward’ nature of Indian women came to the fore during the crisis of the Second World War. Despite Anglo-Indian women’s own rather spotty record of ‘good works’ before the war, they had not hesitated to chastise Indian women for their lack of participation in philanthropic endeavours. When Indian wives begged off from working at a child welfare centre, citing lack of transportation, Katherine Smith-Pearse, for example, criticized them as ‘very lethargic’. Englishwomen rode their bicycles to the centre; why 60 couldn’t Indian wives do the same? Nonetheless, because the ethos of the Second World War demanded that each citizen of the empire pitch in and do her or his bit, Anglo-Indians attempted to rally Indian women to the cause of imperialism through a variety of channels, including knitting parties, canteen work, hospital visitations and service in the WAC(I). These efforts were not wildly successful, especially in appealing to the overwhelming component of the Indian population with no religious, racial, or professional connections to the Anglo-Indian community or to the Raj. For example, in the WAC(I)s and the Women’s Royal Indian Navy Service – the women’s wartime services that required the greatest [ 183 ]

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commitment of time and energy – most of the officers (767 out of 1,011) were Europeans, followed by Eurasians and Indian Christians. Only fiftyeight of the officers were described as Hindus, Parsees (sic) or Others’. Similarly, of the 8,818 ‘auxiliaries’, only 1,313 were Hindus/Parsees/Other.61 Anglo-Indians interpreted Indian women’s general unresponsiveness to wartime recruitment as indicative of their lack of political commitment and patriotic spirit. While such apparent apathy was undoubtedly connected to the rise of Indian nationalism and anti-imperial sentiment, Anglo-Indian women’s serious misunderstanding of the concerns and capabilities of their Indian compatriots also doomed many of these recruitment efforts to failure. One of the most basic volunteer activities for women in India during the Second World War, and also one of the most successful in attracting Indian women’s participation, were the knitting and sewing parties, which outfitted Red Cross hospitals with sheets, bandages and blankets, and provided socks and warm clothing for soldiers serving overseas. Anglo-Indians successfully deployed the institutional weight of the Raj to enlist Indian women in these endeavours. Many wives of Indian troops, working under the supervision of the Anglo-Indian officers’ wives, participated in these work parties. In part, this was just another aspect of their spousal ‘job’ for both Anglo-Indian and Indian wives. However, many Indian women may have felt this to have been one way in which they could aid their husbands who, along with other Indian soldiers, would be the recipients of these socks and bandages, without helping the Raj as well. Whatever the motivation of these Indian women, their Anglo-Indian supervisors frequently faulted their work. Complaints about Indian women’s ineptitude, even in the quintessentially feminine tasks of knitting and sewing, colour Anglo-Indian descriptions of these endeavours. One woman, who had recruited Indian women to sew pajamas for soldiers during the Second World War, reported: ‘the first lot of pyjamas came back, some stitched up the wrong way which no man could possibly have put his leg into, of course I had to undo it – all this meant added work and I had to make it up the correct way but the ladies 62 did their best, as they were not used to doing things like this’. It was not just sewing and knitting which apparently confounded Indian women. Anglo-Indian wives deemed their Indian subordinates and colleagues inferior in all manner of wartime work, from filing documents to serving tea at army canteens. They contrasted themselves to Indian women as the competent and responsible workers who stepped in to save the day – and the empire – in a pinch. Anglo-Indian women themselves contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to the difficulties of integrating Indian women into wartime [ 184 ]

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voluntary services. Anglo-Indian women’s own lack of experience in organizing and performing such work, stemming from their reluctance to undertake charitable efforts during peacetime, probably rendered them inefficient volunteers and leaders. One woman, active in a sewing party at Government House, asked the organizer why the tedious sewing of bandages couldn’t better be accomplished by machine rather than handstitching. ‘“Actually you could,” [the organizer] whispered, drawing me out of ear shot. “But machine is so quick. I might run out of work for all you dear enthusiastic people.”’63 Iris Portal, who claimed that ‘a search for and desire for worthwhile war work had been met by “a slap in the face with a wet fish”’, spent part of the war attached to a division of ‘VIP Memsahibs who tied each other up in bandages, as usual, and spent a great deal of time drilling’.64 Despite their own failings, Anglo-Indian women were often unwilling to share authority with Indian women and did not trust their competence when forced to delegate responsibility to them. One woman prided herself on her own apparent broad-mindedness on not ‘snoop[ing] round’ to check on the Indian wives she allowed to serve one meal ‘on their own’ at the local military canteen.65 Others were apparently unwilling to allow Indian women even that limited degree of autonomy. Wartime activities devised by Anglo-Indian women were not designed to appeal to Indian women nor to draw on their unique abilities to assist the war effort. The WAC(I)s, for example, required all volunteers to speak colloquial English, a rare attainment among ordinary Indian women.66 Many of Anglo-Indian women’s wartime services replicated their peacetime charitable activities, focusing on fundraising through social activities such as carnivals, sports competitions, entertainment and even thrift shops, designed by and for the AngloIndian community. Although Indian women did participate in such endeavours, they were likely to be Westernized women whose husbands held official positions in the civil services or the military. Anglo-Indian social activities, even for a worthy cause, probably held little appeal for most Indians. The story of one wartime endeavor, a magazine entitled Women in India, aptly illustrates the individualistic nature of much of AngloIndian women’s wartime activities. Started by a budding journalist, the wife of an official in the public works department, Women in India was intended to disseminate war propaganda among ‘the women in the bazaars and villages’. It failed in this objective because it was both written in English and expensive to purchase, obstacles to its success which could have been anticipated by anyone not completely divorced from the realities of ordinary life in India. Although the magazine [ 185 ]

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apparently came in for criticism – most notably from Lady Wavell, wife of the commander-in-chief, ‘who obviously thought that the staff and myself could have been more usefully employed’ – it continued in publication until 1943 when the editor returned to Britain, employing scant financial and human resources to provide entertainment to a small group of Anglo-Indian readers.67 Anglo-Indian women also failed to understand that Indian women would not necessarily rally to the cause of empire. Responding to a plea from prominent women in Britain to put aside their political differences and work together for victory in the war, seven Indian women leaders including the women’s rights’ advocate Sarojini Naidu and Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lahkshmi Pandit, described India as ‘a dependency which is being utilised at the British will ... We cannot be in love with Nazism or Fascism, but we may not be expected to be in love with British Imperialism. Now perhaps you understand why we, as women, are anti all war. Women’s part just now is to stand up for truth and non-violence as against the untruth and violence which surrounds us.’68 Indian women’s response to the call for wartime volunteers reflected this hostility towards British imperialism. One Indian woman, the wife of an Indian ICS officer, stormed out of a meeting of memsahibs in Bombay who wanted to raise funds for a Spitfire. She found this goal completely irrelevant to her as an Indian woman: ‘We weren’t fighting the Battle of Britain, we were fighting for India’s safety.’ Unlike some Indians, who disdained the war effort completely, she contributed, but on her own terms (she raised money for a blood bank), not those dictated 69 by the priorities of the Anglo-Indian community. Focused on the threat to Britain and the empire, Anglo-Indians ignored wartime events closer to India that were of greater import to Indian women, such as the great Bengal famine of 1943–44. Irene Bose, an American and a trained social worker married to an Indian judge, fed over 1,000 hungry children a day during the famine. As reported by Bose, however, the Anglo-Indian response to this tragedy was at times grotesquely inappropriate: ‘Lady Q, from Government House, has given us all their left over invitation and menu cards for use as ration cards until we can get some printed. What fiery material they would be for the revolutionary if the people could read English and French! On the one side are printed seven course dinners, and on the other the pitifully small 70 amount of rice or wheat to go to some family in the village.’ Interestingly, at the same time Anglo-Indians were bemoaning the lack of patriotism among Indian women, British newspapers and even the British government levelled the same charge against European women in India. Rebutting these accusations, an article in Indian Affairs claimed that ‘The British community in India has borne a heavy burden [ 186 ]

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throughout the war ... As for the women, the majority have given unsparingly of themselves. Apart from the few slackers who are to be found in every country, they have turned to new employments, voluntary or otherwise.’71 The figures provided in this same article did not necessarily support its contentions, however. Of the 14,300 British women in India aged 18–50 who were not already in government service, 2,225 were not engaged in any war work, around 2,000 claimed exemptions, and around 800 lived in areas too remote for any viable war work to be accomplished. Of the remaining 9,000 who had undertaken war work, however, only about one-third were working 20 or more hours per week. Given that most Anglo-Indians still employed domestic help (albeit on a reduced scale) and endured ‘no blackout, no sirens, no ration cards, no gas masks’, it is understandable that their reluctance to devote themselves whole-heartedly to the war effort aroused resentment from the hard-pressed British population.72 Officially, the government of India tried to project an upbeat attitude on women’s war work, emphasizing Anglo-Indian women’s willingness to volunteer and the racial harmony purportedly characteristic of wartime voluntary organizations. Rumer Godden’s Bengal Journey, published in 1945 under the auspices of the Women’s Voluntary Services, provided touching vignettes describing the war work of more than twenty women’s voluntary organizations in Bengal. According to Godden, these organizations allowed Anglo-Indian and Indian women to put aside racial, religious and cultural differences to work together for the war effort. Godden describes a WAC(I) inspection in which the ‘ranks of girls ... [are] all in uniform, all groomed to look the same, trained to do the same’. Yet, although they are ‘alike in their discipline, [they] are not at all alike’ since they include English, Indian, Eurasian, Bengali, Nepali, 73 Sikh and tribal girls. In its official propaganda, at least, the government presented an India in which the uplifting of women had been successfully accomplished. In practice, however, it appears that the government held both Indian and Anglo-Indian wives’ efforts in little regard. In 1945, the British and Indian governments considered giving priority in securing scarce passages on ships sailing from Britain for wives and fiancées of officials in India if they undertook part-time volunteer work in the empire. The government rejected the proposal for several reasons. Lady Reading, a former vicereine, had assessed women’s war efforts and found them badly organized and poorly supervised. However, the government also feared that many women would renege on their promise to undertake volunteer work once landed in India and that others, headed for their husbands stationed up-country, would find few opportunities 74 for voluntary work even if they were willing to pitch in. With respect [ 187 ]

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to Indian women, as late as 1944 the Raj stated that ‘every effort is being made to stimulate recruitment’, but the government had to concede that it was ‘doubtful if they would come forward in numbers enough to meet requirements as [the] majority have family commitments preventing them accepting whole time employment’.75 At the end of the war, with independence in sight, Anglo-Indian women openly questioned the capacity of Indian women to assume a meaningful position in Indian society without the leadership, supervision and shining example of Anglo-Indian wives. In an article arguing that Indian women must take up more of a role in public affairs, the author nonetheless presented a set-piece indicating the relative positions of Indian and Anglo-Indian women: ‘There comes a vision of an English lady dressed and leaving her home at six in the morning, surrounded by half a dozen Indian comrades – a visiting committee at one of the great hospitals. “We must have her with us,” said one of the Indian ladies. “She is so brave, she insists on seeing everything for herself, and will not take ‘No’ from anybody. We would not dare to do 76 that.”’ Even more than they questioned the capabilities of Indian women, however, Anglo-Indians doubted that Indian women had the proper spirit for the work that lay ahead of them. Although India was only their adopted country, Anglo-Indian wives believed themselves to be more committed to the good of the Indian people than their Indian counterparts and bitterly criticized Indian official wives for their practical and ideological failings in charitable endeavours. Indian women were not interested in the needy of their own country, according to Anglo-Indian opinion; whatever they did arose from self-interest rather than from a truly philanthropic spirit. Indian wives could not replace Anglo-Indians because they lacked ‘the concept, the idea of a pro bono publico ... What they did, they hoped to get something out of ... either a Kaiser-i-Hind [medal] or their husband getting a push-up or something 77 like that’. One Mrs Abbott, a military wife, described her epiphanal encounter with an educated Indian woman poised to take the AngloIndian woman’s place in the new India. The woman was ‘a lovely young Hindu girl who was a[n] ... immaculate, cool, creamy, sophisticated beauty’. She possessed a college degree and had also lived for a time in Europe. As Abbott explained to the woman the purpose of her visit, [s]he listened to me, a lazy smile on her lovely face. ‘But why should you, or I [sic] do such a job?’ she asked. There are eighteen lacs of rupees in the Commandant’s fund, so I’m told; there should be trained, reliable people to take over such a job. There are such people available, I believe, if you apply to the Government. My dear,’ the smoke ring she blew over my head was faultless, ‘how long have you been in India?’

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My lips became so tight I had difficulty in saying, ‘Eighteen years,’ ‘Really! Well, it is time you had a holiday – away from India.’ ‘Yes, I think you are right, it is time I took a long, long holiday. I have been in your country too long, your people’s poverty, misery, helplessness have grown on me.’78

Anglo-Indian wives wanted to believe, in 1947, that there were no Indian women ready, willing and able to assume the positions which they had filled under the Raj. In this belief – or hope – they were deluding themselves. Indian women were not the debilitated and oppressed purdah ladies of Anglo-Indian imagination. Many spoke English, boasted Western educations and lived a Europeanized lifestyle. Whether Westernized or not, Indian women had long been engaged with the social and political life of their country. Some had acquired extensive philanthropic credentials, impressive by any standard. Kishorie Bhatia, the wife of an official in the Indian Medical Service, had worked for sixteen different charities over the course of twenty years’ residence in Delhi and Bombay, devoting her time to infant and child welfare, 79 women’s elevation, education and even the war effort. Others, like Sarojini Naidu, had long been involved in politics through the women’s movement and, later, Gandhian nationalism. Although some AngloIndian wives conceded that these Indian women were well-qualified to take the place of the British in India, most never acknowledged the existence of this large group of politically active, involved and aware Indian women. Anglo-Indian women, however also misunderstood themselves and the role they had played in the Raj. Measured by the traditional yardstick of women’s public activities – the uplift of their less fortunate sisters and general charitable work – Anglo-Indian women fared badly. They had not modernized India, had neither altered its morality nor uplifted their Indian sisters; nor, apparently, had they been much interested in doing so. Indeed, their Indian counterparts probably outperformed them on this European scale of feminine worth and were better prepared to assume philanthropic responsibilities in an independent India. Anglo-Indian women, however, operated outside the gender framework of the metropole. Their role was not that of Lady Bountiful but rather that of the imperial wife, and they had constructed an identity based not on their philanthropic endeavours but on their roles as imperialists, married to the empire. Their difficulty, however, lay in their inability to convince the British and Indian governments – and, occasionally, themselves – of the validity of this alternative measure of femininity.

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Notes 1 2 3

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4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Viola Bayley, One Woman’s Raj’, 30, Bayley Papers, University of Cambridge. Barbara Donaldson, ‘India Remembered’, 4, Donaldson Papers, University of Cambridge. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL, 1988), 297. John Coatman, Portrait of an Englishwoman (London, 1960), 96. Janaki Nair, ‘Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings, 1814–1940’, Journal of Women’s History 2 (March 1990): 8–34. David W. Savage, ‘Missionaries and the Development of a Colonial Ideology of Female Education in India’, Gender & History 9 (August 1997): 213. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994). Mary Ann Lind analyses fifteen Anglo-Indian women who, she argues, ‘took an active role in social reform and in welfare activities’. Nonetheless, even Lind concedes that, outside her tiny sample, ‘only a small minority of British women came directly into contact with Indian women’. See Mary Ann Lind, The Compassionate Memsahib (New York, 1988), 2, 34. Lady Jessie Knight, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge; Margaret Martyn, Married to the Raj (London, 1992), 28. A. Verghese, ‘A Short Report of Public Health Sub-committee’, Ansorge Papers, University of Cambridge. Martyn, Married to the Raj, 36. Quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, The Story of Fifty Years of the Young Women’s Christian Association of India, Burma and Ceylon (Calcutta, 1925), 16. See e.g. Maisie Wright, Under Malabar Hill: Letters from India 1928–1933, ed. John Wall (London, 1988). Eleanor Rivett, Memory Plays a Tune: Being Recollections of India 1907–1947, [np, nd], 9. Radio broadcast of 19 March 1942 by Lady Linlithgow, L/I/1/1020, British Library; Deborah Morris, With Scarlett Majors (London, 1960). See e.g. Hilda Lazarus, ‘Spheres of Indian Women in Medical Work’, in Evelyn C. Gedge and Mithan Choksi (eds), Women in Modern India: Fifteen Papers by Indian Women Writers (Bombay, 1929), 53–4. On the varied motives for philanthropic activities in Britain, see F.K. Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’, in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750– 1950, vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), 362. Ruth Donnison, ‘Memoir’, 236a-7, British Library. Lady Olive Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 100, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge (emphasis added). See e.g. Ansorge Papers, University of Cambridge; Martyn, Married to the Raj, 90. ‘Lady Lamington’s Work Guild Annual Report’ (Bombay, 1907), Metaxa Papers, University of Cambridge. Fergus Innes, ‘British Voices from South Asia’, available: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/india/intvw3.htm Mary, Countess of Minto, India, Minto and Morley 1905–1910 (London, 1934), 410. F.K. Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’, 369–70, describes a similar phenomenon among the working classes in Britain, who joined philanthropic causes to stay ‘on the right side of an employer’. Ansorge Papers. Mrs B.M.D. Lee Warner, Guided Destiny (Norfolk, nd), 54–5. Irene Bose, ‘Unwoven Carpet of Hindustan’, 97, Bose Papers, University of Cambridge. Sir Ralph Verney, Letter of 30 July 1920 to Lady Verney, Mss Eur. D 921, British Library. Maneesha Lal, ‘Women, Medicine and Colonialism in British India, 1869–1925’, dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996, provides an interesting analysis of the Dufferin Fund.

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Lady Dufferin, Our Viceregal Life in India (London, 1888), vol. 2: 281. Lal, ‘Women, Medicine and Colonialism’, 132. The Poona Seva Sadan. An Account of the Visit of His Excellency Sir George Lloyd (Governor of Bombay) and the Honourable Lady Lloyd (Poona, 1919), iv. Earl of Halifax, The Fullness of Days (London, 1957), 138. N.B. Bonarjee and Mrs Bonarjee, Interview (tape recording), British Library. N.B. Bonarjee, Under Two Masters (London, 1970), 113. K.P.S. Menon in Kewal L. Panjabi (ed.), The Civil Servant in India (Bombay, 1965), 51–2. Mrs H. Ghosal, ‘The Memsahib I Could Never Be’, 4, Ghosal Papers, University of Cambridge. Carol Hyde, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge (emphasis added). Major-General William Odling, ‘British Voices from South Asia’, available: http://www.lib.lus.edu/special/india/intvw5.htm See e.g. Decima Curtis, ‘The Last Twelve Years of the British Raj Recollected by the Wife of a British District Officer’, 137, British Library. Captain Freddie Guest, Indian Cavalryman (London, 1959), 83. Viola Steel Smith, ‘Merely a Memsahib’, 39, British Library. ‘The Mem-Sahib’s Point of View’, Cornhill Magazine XLVIII (May 1920): 592–3. Lady Violet Haig, ‘Memoir’, Haig Papers, University of Cambridge. Nancy Vernede, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Isabel Gross, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Burnt Offering (New York, 1910), 115–16. ‘The 17th Annual Report of the Bombay Ladies’ Branch of the National Association from January 1907 to December 1907’, Metaxa Papers, University of Cambridge. Elizabeth Crawford Wilson, Dekho! The India That Was (Sanbornville, NH, 1958), 74. Ibid., 74 (emphasis added). Jack Bazalgette, The Captains and the Kings Depart: Life in India 1928–46 (Oxford, 1984), 44–5. Dr Mildred Staley, Handbook for Wives and Mothers in India (Calcutta, 1908), 66, 100. Ibid., 100. Mrs Iris Portal, ‘Memoir’, 81–2, Portal Papers, University of Cambridge. Mary Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers: Dhanbad 1925–27’, 4, British Library. See e.g. Betty Loch, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge; Portal, ‘Memoir’, 81. Wilson, Dekho!, 73. Joan Cruickshank, ‘Memoir’, 5, Cruickshank Papers, University of Cambridge Ibid., 7. Katherine Smith-Pearse, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Letter of 19 January 1946 from the information department to Reverend I.Z. Hedge of Edinburgh, L/I/1/1021, British Library. Mrs A. Hyndman-Stein, ‘An Account of My Life from the Time I Left Australia for India’, British Library. Bayley, ‘One Woman’s Raj’, 98. Portal, ‘Memoir’, 152. Katherine Smith-Pearse, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Linlithgow, Radio broadcast. Mrs M.O. Dench, ‘Memsahib’, 113–14, Dench Papers, University of Cambridge. ‘A Message to the Women of India’, 11 June 1941, and ‘Response’ reported in Reuter Special, 22 June 1941, L/I/I/1020, British Library. Mirza Baig and Tara Baig, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Bose, ‘Unwoven Carpet’, 124. ‘The Woman’s Part’, Indian Affairs IV (10 May 1945).

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76 77 78 79

Mrs J.P. Mills, ‘Memoir’, 10, Mills Papers, Cambridge University. Rumer Godden, Bengal Journey: A Story of the Part Played by Women in the Province, 1939–1945 (London, 1945), 14. ‘Passages – question whether priority should be given to families and fiancées of Indian officials wishing to go to India if they undertake to do part-time welfare work’: L/SG/7/743, British Library. Cypher telegram from government of India to Secretary of State for India, 25 May 1944, L/I/1/1020, British Library. ‘Women’s War Service in India: Consequences in a Future of Peace’, Indian Affairs (19 September 1940): 224. Mrs P. Lacey, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge. Mrs Isobel Abbott [Babbott], Indian Interval (London, 1960), 195–6. Mrs K. Bhatia, L/I/1/1005, British Library.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

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Women, men and political power

Sometime during the interwar period, one Nora Ford-Robertson, wife of a British officer in the Indian Police, chanced to have tea with Jawaharlal Nehru, soon to be the first prime minister of India and already a celebrated figure in the Indian nationalist movement. Although Nehru was outspokenly committed to ousting from India Mrs Ford-Robertson and her husband, and the British empire they represented, such social encounters between nationalists and imperialists were not uncommon during the interwar years. British leaders in the metropole and in India, hoping to retain control of the devolution of power, encouraged socializing among Anglo-Indian officials, Indian political leaders, and their respective wives. Recalling her meeting with the Indian leader some forty years after the event, Mrs Ford-Robertson explained that their encounter had not gone as well as she had hoped. While she found Nehru ‘extremely charming’, Ford-Robertson ruefully recalled that she ‘was just 1 sort of a brainless memsahib as far as he was concerned’. Although Ford-Robertson did not elucidate how she reached this conclusion, her conversation with Nehru was probably confined to polite chit-chat, rather than touching upon any of the contemporary political events with which Nehru and Mrs Ford-Robertson, as the wife of an official of the Raj, were intimately engaged. This apparently trivial encounter encapsulates the uneasy relationship between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men played out over the last half-century of British rule in India. As Indian men like Nehru gained greater political authority in India, Anglo-Indian women like Ford-Robertson felt increasingly shut out from the political discourses of the Raj. While their political opinions had often brought Anglo-Indian women into conflict with the British and Indian governments, and occasionally with their own husbands as well, it was Indian men who gradually emerged as the main obstacle to Anglo-Indian women’s continued exercise of imperial political power. As the Ilbert [ 193 ]

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Bill controversy of 1883 and, later, the interwar policies of Indianization revealed, Indian men, with the support of the British, were gradually moving into positions of authority in the Raj. The nationalist movement further demonstrated that Indian men would not be content with merely a subordinate role in governing their own country. While Anglo-Indian women struggled to voice their opinions in an increasingly raucous political arena, they also worried about the weight their political views would be accorded, given Indian men’s accession to power. Nehru’s apparently damning assessment of Ford-Robertson’s intellect, and her painful awareness – then and decades later – of his condemnation, reveal Anglo-Indian wives’ concern that the rapidly shifting contours of imperial Indian politics would consign them to the role of brainless memsahib. This model of political competition between Indian men and AngloIndian women runs counter to ‘a master trope of colonial discourse’ which positions Anglo-Indian women as the helpless victims of Indian 2 men’s rampant sexual aggression. This particular imperial script, which achieved prominence in British and Anglo-Indian representations of the 1857 ‘Mutiny’, is echoed in such well-known novels as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and Ruth Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, among others. The popular film versions of these works, produced during the ‘Raj Revival’ of the 1970s and 1980s, once again brought this theme of sexual violation to the fore. Although this particular imperial script has been analysed most extensively by literary scholars, many historians have accepted that sex, or at least the threat of sexual assault, was the dominant force shaping relationships between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men. As Jenny Sharpe has pointed out, Europeans’ fear of interracial rape comes to the fore when the colonial structure of power is threatened, as it was during the Ilbert Bill crisis of 1883 and, with ever greater force and urgency, as the nationalist movement gained 3 ground during the interwar period. While sexual fears and tensions (and possibilities) may have unconsciously lurked in the minds of Anglo-Indian wives, such concerns were not articulated by Anglo-Indian women themselves. Indeed, many Anglo-Indian women, assessing their imperial experiences in light of the renewed interest in the Raj within the past thirty years or so, strenuously criticized E.M. Forster and Paul Scott, and the filmed versions of A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown, for their unrealistic emphasis on rape and the fear of rape. According to one Anglo-Indian woman, rape ‘never entered one’s thinking’, and most Anglo-Indian women dismissed or minimized the possibility of their own vulnerability to assault, sexual or otherwise, at the hands of Indian 4 men. In retrospect, Anglo-Indian women and men were concerned to [ 194 ]

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emphasize that Indians were always very courteous even all through the non-cooperation movement’, and that women ‘never experienced the slightest discourtesy’.5 Indeed, drunken and unruly British troops may have posed a greater sexual threat to both Indian and Anglo-Indian women. One Indian bearer, for example, refused to let his female AngloIndian employer drive through the barracks area ‘because late at night rough British soldiers [are about]’, insisting that in the Indian quarter ‘no harm [could come to a] lady’.6 Thus, the experience of one woman, who happily ‘danced boomps-adaisy with [an] ... Indian naval officer’ in the waning days of the Raj seems more the norm than the travails of Forster’s Adela Quested or Scott’s Daphne Manners.7 If a fear of rape exists here, it is certainly well repressed. Like Nora Ford-Robertson, Anglo-Indian women did not fret about their own objectification as targets of Indian men’s lust and desire; rather, they worried that Indian men, viewing them as ignorant and illinformed, would erase them from the politics of the Raj.8 Anglo-Indian women and Indian men encountered each other not in sexual terms, but rather as political competitors vying for power in the combative environment of imperial politics. It was minds, not bodies, that mattered. This is not to deny, however, that sexual encounters between AngloIndian women and Indian men, although probably less common than liaisons between Anglo-Indian men and Indian women given the hierarchies of race and gender in the Raj, were an outgrowth of British rule in India. These sexual relations ranged from violent and illicit encounters to consensual and loving relationships within marriage. Many Indians who studied or worked in Britain, for example, brought with them their British brides when they returned to India. The AngloIndia community generally disdained such relationships, often impugning the woman as low-class and ignorant of Indian ways, and 9 perceiving such unions as inevitably doomed to failure. Morag Murray Abdullah, a Scottish woman who wed an Indian man from the NorthWest Frontier, was subjected to a barrage of negative images before her marriage: My life was one long-drawn-out repetition of stories of girls who had married Orientals only to find on the first visit to their husband’s [sic] country that he was already married, perhaps more than once, and that the new bride was obliged to wait hand and foot on the relations and finally, having been starved or deserted, was obliged to throw herself on a missionary’s mercy. There were wild tales of British girls having been killed mysteriously and never heard of again. I was told that all Orientals were married in their cradles and that it was a ninety-nine per-cent possibility that Syed Abdullah was married and that once in his country he would return to the degenerate ways of his clan and I would either be given ground

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glass in my food or be made a slave to his relations, whose womenfolk would be madly jealous of me.10

While Abdullah’s succeeding narrative of her married life nonetheless sustains many of the exotic stereotypes of these racially mixed unions (she lives in the zenana, is decked out in gorgeous clothes and expensive jewels, and receives the homage of her husband’s tribesmen), the reality of most such marriages was undoubtedly more prosaic. An American social worker who married an Indian high-court judge explained: ‘I am unable to produce a story in keeping with the traditional idea of either a glamorous harem, or of a western woman caught in a net of intrigue or strange social customs. I was neither captured nor enticed; I fell in love with my future husband on a bicycle.’11 While most Anglo-Indian women did not view Indians as potential spouses, Anglo-Indian wives regularly interacted with a wide variety of Indian men, including their domestic servants, Indian nobles, prominent landowners and village leaders with whom their husbands conducted imperial business, their husbands’ subordinates – soldiers, clerks, police officers – and, as Indianization proceeded, their husbands’ Indian colleagues and even superiors in the imperial services. Although it might be expected that Anglo-Indian women would have more commonly interacted with Indian women than men, it appears that because of language barriers (more Indian men than women spoke English) the absence of Indian women from the domestic staff of Anglo-Indian households, and upper-class Indian women’s observance of purdah, the reverse was probably the case. When Anglo-Indians thought, spoke, and wrote about ‘Indians’, they usually meant Indian men. Anglo-Indian women constructed an image of Indian men that undercut Indian men’s claims to participate in the governance of the Raj and, ultimately, of their ability to rule an independent India. This characterization coloured their interactions with Indian men from the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 right up to Indian independence in 1947. They saw Indian men as, first, uncivilized and insufficiently modern; second, as effeminate and ineffectual; third, as untrustworthy and disloyal; and, finally, as misogynistic. Although Anglo-Indian men shared and reinforced many of these stereotypical beliefs, they appear to have been less hostile than their wives, perhaps because they often got to know Indian men better as colleagues and friends through their work. Anglo-Indian women often remarked on the crudity and repulsive physicality of Indian men. Indian men openly picked their ears, and shaved not just their beards but their nose hairs and armpits in public view. When a corn was removed from his foot an Indian man would 12 ‘delightedly [roll] it between his fingers until it was a tiny ball’. Their [ 196 ]

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table manners were appalling, too. They ate with their hands, licked their lips and fingers, and allowed the juices from their curries to ‘dribbl[e] down their chins and trickl[e] on to the soft, pale brown waves of their bare stomachs’.13 More than good manners were at stake here, obviously. The essential repulsiveness of Indian men’s characters, as Anglo-Indians saw it, could be masked, but not eradicated, by lessons in European etiquette, British education and an appetite for cricket. Under pressure, the veneer of civilization imparted by Anglicization was likely to come completely unglued, revealing the Indian man in his essentially barbaric and uncivilized state. Given this public grossness of manner, many Anglo-Indians were both amused and a bit irked that Indians apparently regarded them as unclean. A young Englishwoman (apparently a visitor, and not an AngloIndian who would, presumably, have had a better understanding of Indian etiquette), attending a dinner party, asked to see a valuable ring worn by an Indian prince. ‘As she made to hand it back he spoke to the servant behind him. The man took the ring and a few minutes later brought it back lying on a napkin on a plate. It had been washed!’14 Such behaviour led some Anglo-Indians to absolve themselves of any racism or snobbery in their relations with Indians and instead to place the blame for interracial tensions on the Indians.15 The more significant political implications of such encounters, however, according to AngloIndian thought, was not merely that Indians were often physically repulsive, but that their archaic religious superstitions rendered them illmatched as colleagues for Anglo-Indians and ill-suited to participate in the modern community of nations. Anglo-Indian women also saw Indian men as insufficiently masculine, depicting them as weak and cowardly. As Mrinalini Sinha so convincingly demonstrates, this construction of the effeminate Bengali was a crucial element in the creation of British masculinity in the 16 nineteenth century. However, the portrayal of the Indian man was also important in substantiating the Anglo-Indian woman’s perception of herself as an engaged political actor in the imperial context. This feminization of Indian men was not unrelievedly negative: Anglo-Indians spoke warmly of faithful male servants who ‘are wonderfully gentle and patient nurses’, and who ‘with unwearied patience hush the tiniest babes to sleep’.17 While such canine devotedness made the Indian official an ‘excellent subordinate’, both Anglo-Indian wives and their husbands agreed that this natural effeminacy unfitted Indian men for positions of authority in the government.18 Soldiers believed Indian cavalry officers were likely to retreat in battle and ‘an equal number of British Cavalry mounted on donkeys would have cut them to mincemeat if they had clashed in a real fight’.19 They were similarly unsuited to police work, [ 197 ]

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for ‘the Bengali runs to brains rather than to brawn and does not take kindly to the discipline and order of a hard life’.20 Rather than displaying the decisive, take-charge, attitude appropriate to the ICS officer, the Indian civilian, faced with a riot, was likely to ‘wire to the commissioner’ for advice.21 Indian men’s effeminacy unfitted them even for veterinary work, according to one Anglo-Indian woman. When her dog was severely injured, ‘[a] small Hindu arrived, who said his religion forbade him to take life ... Really, Hindus can be beyond belief.’22 Anglo-Indian women not only deprecated Indian men for their unmanly nature but endowed themselves with those very ‘masculine’ qualities deemed essential to imperial rule. The woman with the injured dog, for example, was handed chloroform and cotton by the Indian vet. ‘The poor dog was in agony, so I did what had to be done.’23 This masculine firmness of manner was vital not just in humanitarian matters but for acting effectively in the troubled political world of India. During the violence over partition, for example, a Pakistani policeman found it impossible to keep order among people queued up for milk, who were demanding more than their fair share. ‘Mrs K., wife of the Commissioner, came along, and she said, “Ek line bunao,” which means “Make one line.” And they all shot into line at once and they all had one glass of milk apiece.’24 Anglo-Indian women did what had to be done to keep the empire running, from mercy killing to maintaining order, while the Indian was apparently not ‘man’ enough to be entrusted with such responsibility. Anglo-Indian women also saw Indian men as untrustworthy, professing loyalty to the Raj, while secretly working against the British. Some of this hypocrisy was treated humorously, as with the anecdote of a well-known Indian leader at a dinner party who vehemently advocated prohibition, but ‘could drink with the hardest’, explaining, ‘but that was in Council, here I am among friends and, of course, that is quite different’.25 But more often Indians’ supposedly two-faced character led to intrigue and inability to govern. Anglo-Indians were shocked by open expressions of disloyalty and criticisms of British rule from Indian men who continued to work for the Raj.26 Even Anglo-Indians sympathetic to Indian nationalism derided Indian men who supported the ‘Quit India’ resolution of 1942 as ‘foolish’ and ‘absurd’ for imagining that Japanese rule would be preferable to British sovereignty.27 Most threatening of all to Anglo-Indian women was the apparent misogyny of Indian men. Although Anglo-Indian women were often appalled at the position of Indian women in Indian society, they covered their repugnance with humour. One woman recalled a party in Simla in the 1920s at which ‘there were several eminent Maharajas with a great number of wives between them standing round the piano, loudly singing, “I’m tickled to death I’m single, I’m tickled to death I’m free.”’28 The [ 198 ]

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humorous picture she presents masks Anglo-Indian women’s revulsion towards polygamy. Nonetheless, Indians’ attitudes towards women generally, and towards their wives in particular, shocked many Anglo-Indian women, however much they might joke about it. Anglo-Indian women, particularly those with daughters, found Indian men’s preference for sons both maddening and repugnant.29 As Anglo-Indian women interpreted it, Indian men’s misogyny all but erased Indian women from public notice. The Manual on Indian Etiquette, distributed to novice imperial officials, advised that ‘it is contrary to the usage of this country to make any enquiry about the ladies of the [Indian] family’.30 Anglo-Indian women were repulsed, too, by tales of Indian women’s rituals of submission to their husbands’ repulsive demands as, for example, the new mother forced ‘as a token of submission’, to drink a bowl of water in which her husband had dipped his toe. (In the old days, the reporter of this incident noted, the husband would have washed his feet in the bowl, ‘but now, as a concession to modern hygiene he only 31 dipped his toe in it’. ) Indeed, it was this idea of submission in marriage, as opposed to the equality purportedly characteristic of Anglo-Indian marriages, that Anglo-Indian wives found the most disturbing, and the most threatening. They were appalled to hear Indian men casually refer to their spouses as ‘no more than a bed or a couch in my house’, or even as ‘an animal’.32 Although Indian women denied that they were degraded by marriage to Indian men, Anglo-Indians nonetheless believed that ‘India is a land in which the male is always in the right’ and that even an ‘Oxford-educated’ Indian would treat his wife as ‘chattel’.33 For AngloIndian wives, however, for whom the domestic and political realms were linked through marriage, Indian men’s ideas about women and wives anticipated a world in which women’s political voices would be silenced. They were afraid Indian men would say of Anglo-Indian women, as they said of their own wives: ‘It is no use talking to [her], she is but an animal.’34 To avert this fate, Anglo-Indian women crafted a version of political knowledge and expertise that privileged their own relationship to India while simultaneously excluding the claims of Indian men. The political competition that shaped the relationship between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men was itself a product of the dynamic politics of the empire. Political reforms instituted by British imperial rulers, beginning in the late nineteenth century and escalating rapidly by the interwar years, dramatically reformulated Indian politics and political institutions, reluctantly ceding greater authority to Indian men. First, India moved towards a democratic form of government as more Indians were enfranchised and as their votes carried more political weight. [ 199 ]

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Second, and more significantly from the Anglo-Indian perspective, an increasing number of elected and appointed government posts, including politically influential executive, legislative and administrative positions in the provinces and even at the centre, were reserved for Indians, often to the exclusion of Anglo-Indian career civil servants. Although Britain retained control of fiscal, military and foreign policy matters, by the late 1930s elected Indian officials governed at the provincial level and Indians were approaching parity with British officers in most imperial services other than the military. Ideas about race and gender further complicated these political transformations, as well as the relationship between Anglo-Indian women and Indian men. As long as the Raj remained in place, however diluted its powers, ‘whiteness’ and ‘Britishness’ retained the aura of authority. Anglo-Indian women benefited from their racial and national attributes: whether they were brainless memsahibs or politically savvy imperial wives, they were automatically accorded a degree of respect and status because they were white and British. Indian men, of course, could claim no similar privileges, whatever the extent of their Anglicization. On the other hand, the Raj’s official view that there was no role for women in the empire disadvantaged Anglo-Indian wives. Although the Indian political scene changed dramatically during the interwar years, the official view denying a political voice to women altered hardly at all. Observing changes that granted political power primarily to Indian men, Anglo-Indian wives were concerned that the unofficial roles they had carved out for themselves in the politics of imperial India also would be foreclosed. It appeared that the advantages of race might be cancelled out by the disadvantages of sex. Although individual Anglo-Indian men were adversely affected by Indianization, and many others simply objected to the policy, nonetheless it was white British men who remained the ultimate authority in the empire. This power was most tellingly demonstrated at the inception of the Second World War, when the viceroy unilaterally declared India to be at war without consulting any Indian officials. Thus, although Indian men’s political fortunes were surely waxing during the interwar period, just as Anglo-Indian women’s influence seemed to be waning, both were aspirants to power in an empire ultimately ruled by British men. Anglo-Indian men themselves reacted in a variety of ways to these dramatic political changes of the interwar years. Some, whether from racism or a sincere belief that Britain’s imperial mission in India had been compromised beyond recall, exercised their option to retire early as these 35 various reforms took effect. Others doggedly pursued their imperial careers, while grousing both privately and to the authorities in Delhi and [ 200 ]

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London about low pay, blocked promotions and the detrimental effects of Indianization (as the policy of reserving governmental positions for Indians was called) on the governance of India and the well-being of the Indian peoples. The devolution of authority to Indians also made it increasingly difficult to recruit British men to the imperial services, as the nature, purpose and future of the empire became more tenuous. Career paths were restricted; officials’ authority was circumscribed by the political agenda of elected Indian officials, who might be outright nationalists; and, even within the administrative organizations of the Raj itself, a Briton might find himself subject to the authority of a higherranking official who happened to be Indian. One young ICS official who had joined up in the 1930s advised his cousin not to follow in his footsteps in light of the complicated political situation. ‘The enigma of the ICS at present is that a Conservative would hate having to treat Indians as equals or superiors, and a Labourite would hate being unable to put his political principles into practice, & being the sort of little tin god I am here!’36 The more prescient – or pessimistic – among imperial officials feared that their careers, and their pensions, would be cut off by Indian independence. A smaller group of men, however, most prominent among the last cohort recruited to the Indian services, wholeheartedly supported Indian governmental reforms and hoped to play an active role in the transfer of power. ‘Most of us young chaps at Oxford’, recalled one former civil servant, ‘were all for conferring self-government on India, and I visualised myself very rapidly achieving the ambition of becoming a viceroy, or something like that myself and handing over the Government of India to its elected representatives at some kind of a big Durbar 37 (ceremony)’. Their wives generally did not share such visions of imperial benevolence. Few Anglo-Indian women, with the exception of a small number of ardent supporters of self-government who conceded that they were a distinct minority in the Raj, supported either Indian independence or the gradual democratization of the political process and greater participation by Indians in governmental administration. Indeed, in Anglo-Indian women’s retrospective assessments of the Raj, its greatest accomplishments were neither the creation of political institutions on the British parliamentary model, nor the education of the Indian people in liberal political philosophy and its practices. Rather, the authoritarian nature of British rule and the innovations that arose from this autocratic style of imperial governance garnered the most praise from Anglo-Indian women. The benefits of imperialism most often cited included material indicators of ‘civilization’ such as roads, railways, canals, irrigation, hospitals, schools, and communications, as well as less [ 201 ]

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tangible benefits purportedly enjoyed by their imperial subjects such as the imposition of order on the otherwise unruly subcontinent. British rule ‘produced order out of chaos’, one Anglo-Indian woman averred and, as another noted, to chaos India would swiftly return without ‘England’s just and firm guidance’.38 This surprising rejection of democratic values at the very moment when women in the metropole were demanding and attaining recognition as citizens is perfectly congruent with Anglo-Indian women’s political position in the empire. In the British Raj, AngloIndian women’s political power stemmed not from their citizenship in a democratic polity, but from their status as imperial rulers. As the wives of imperial officials and as members of the ruling race themselves, Anglo-Indian women had long been privy to the quotidian details of imperial administration and had actively participated in the ongoing discourses of the politics of empire. They had ‘never experienced any difficulty in having [their] way without a vote’.39 Democracy thus held little allure for women who had enjoyed access – even at one remove – to autocratic political power. In India, in particular, where democratic advances did not include the Anglo-Indian community, Anglo-Indian women could only be disadvantaged by such political reforms. Anglo-Indian wives thus constructed a political identity for themselves that was independent of democratic rights and responsibilities and, by virtue of their exclusion from employment in the Raj, independent also of the imperial authority associated with official position in the empire. Instead, they predicated their claims to political knowledge on the experiential authority inherent in their long-term physical presence in the Raj. The wives of British officials shared their husbands’ commitment to the empire and the concomitant belief that they were among the privileged few to understand the complexities of Indian society. They had consecrated their lives to the empire, working in tandem with their husbands in the empire. Despite their gender, Anglo-Indian women believed that they were better qualified to speak for the Raj and for the future of the empire than were ministers in Whitehall, ‘babus’ in Calcutta or the viceroy in Simla. To Anglo-Indians, objective political understanding developed from the ability to be simultaneously in India and aloof from its internecine rivalries. Political understanding, therefore, was not associated with high governmental position, for administrative seniority alienated an official from the ‘true’ India. Furthermore, because the Raj was an autocratic regime not a democracy, the right to voice political opinions and to shape policy was distinct from any entitlement actively to participate in the political process. Beginning with the Ilbert Bill of 1883, as British governmental policy shifted to accord more recognition and responsibilities to Indian men, such claims to experiential [ 202 ]

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political expertise increasingly brought Anglo-Indian women and men into conflict with aspiring Indian leaders and with the imperial authorities. Not surprisingly, Anglo-Indians argued that the expert knowledge vouchsafed to them was denied to Indians. Indians, the Anglo-Indians implied, were corrupted by divisive communal sympathies that prevented them from being the impartial guardians of all their countrymen. Furthermore, while they perceived most Indians as either apolitical peasants or avatars of an ancient oriental despotism, even those Indians who had apparently absorbed Western political ideas were in fact corrupt and self-interested. Just as Anglo-Indians believed Indians to be Janusfaced and self-serving in their dealings with the Raj, so too they believed that Indian men were deceiving their own people with false promises. They had never accomplished anything for India. ‘They just talked and that is 40 how they gained control.’ One of Maud Diver’s novelistic heroes explains to the misguided Indian nationalist who has tried to assassinate him the failings of the nationalist movement and its leaders: ‘If any damage has been done to India during these troubled years, it has been chiefly through Gandhi’s civil disobedience and the congress-wallahs. The Government they abuse strives only for peaceful progress. The white devils you would banish try to give you justice, feed you in time of famine and doctor you in disease. They bring water into the desert and make crops grow, where even grass never grew before ... This is true talk.’41

The Raj colluded in this denial of authoritative knowledge to Indians, generally forbidding Indian officials from serving in their home province, arguing that they would be susceptible to personal and communal pressures. It thus ignored a potentially vast reserve of linguistic and cultural knowledge among its recruits and consigned them to regions whose language and customs might be as foreign to them as to the British. Beginning in the 1880s, Anglo-Indian claims to a monopoly on imperial knowledge came under attack from ‘globetrotting’ authors and visiting MPs, on the British side, and Bengali babus and members of the Indian National Congress, on the Indian side, who claimed to ‘know’ India better than did the Anglo-Indians. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 was one of the earliest battles in which Anglo-Indians and British officials and, to a lesser extent, Indian men, fought over the prerogatives of imperial rule. For Anglo-Indian wives, in particular, this controversy proved significant. The Ilbert Bill debate marked women’s first largescale organized foray into public political debate about the Raj in which they relied on their experiential expertise of empire to trump the political prerogatives of officialdom. More importantly, although the Ilbert Bill controversy was debated primarily among Anglo-Indians, the viceroy and the British government, the substantive issue at the heart of [ 203 ]

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the struggle was the extension of greater political authority and legitimacy to Indian men. A seemingly innocuous piece of legislation involving the extension of the criminal jurisdiction of Indian judges, the Ilbert Bill pitted the Anglo-Indian community, with its claim to be the sole interpreter of Indian politics, against a viceroy and home government attempting to introduce their own vision of the Raj’s political development. It was clear that if the Bill’s supporters had their way, Indian men would accrue more and more political power in the Raj. Although this progression might be gradual, Anglo-Indian women, in particular, were determined to prevent the first step from being planted on this slippery slope towards Indian men’s political ascendancy. The Ilbert Bill controversy roused the hitherto quiescent Anglo-Indian community to a fevered pitch of political activity that waxed and waned but never completely abated in the succeeding years. At stake in the Ilbert Bill affair, as in subsequent controversies such as Indian constitutional reforms and Indianization of the ICS and the military, was not just the issue of Indian men’s ability to wield political power but the future course of the British empire itself. Lord Ripon, viceroy at the time of the Ilbert Bill dispute, favoured the gradual devolution of self-governance to Britain’s imperial possessions. Although acutely aware of the autocratic nature of his position, Ripon was determined to use his power to further the democratization of India. ‘I get more Radical every day and am rejoiced to say that the effect of despotic power has so far been to strengthen and 42 deepen my liberal convictions.’ Ripon and the law member of his council, Courtenay Ilbert, framed the ‘Amendment to the Criminal Procedures Act’ (as the Ilbert Bill was officially known) as an effort simply to rectify an inequitable anomaly in the law, thus permitting Indian judges to exercise the same jurisdiction over European British subjects in the mofussil (up-country) as was already extended to them in urban areas. Practically, the existing situation meant that a victim of criminal actions perpetrated by a European in the mofussil (a common example cited during the debate was that of an Indian plantation worker beaten by his European overseer), would be deprived of the opportunity to bring his assailant to trial unless he could afford the costs of transferring the proceeding to a city where a European judge could preside. The impetus for the change in the law, however, came not from these poor plaintiffs, deprived of their day in court, but from Indian judges who naturally viewed this legal anomaly as an affront to their professional abilities. Behari Lal Gupta, a civil servant and an Indian, had served as a judge in Calcutta where he had presided over trials with European defendants. In 1882, when Gupta received a promotion to [ 204 ]

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sessions judge in a mofussil station in upper Bengal, he could not understand why the scope of his jurisdiction should be curtailed and raised the point with the government of India.43 Ripon, too, was more concerned with assuring equality of opportunity for Indian civil servants than obviating any miscarriage of justice in the mofussil. His object was ‘to remove from the code at once and completely every judicial disqualification which is based merely on race distinctions’.44 The Ilbert Bill would itself have had little immediate practical effect because the integration of Indians into government service had proceeded slowly up to this point. Indeed, because the number of ICS officers was so small, especially at the higher levels, only two Indians would have immediately benefited and ten years later, only nine would have been qualified to exercise jurisdiction under its provisions if the Ilbert Bill had been enacted as initially proposed. Anglo-Indians, however, were concerned not simply about the immediate impact of the Bill, but about the decisive step it heralded for the future political course of the Raj. As Thomas Metcalf has pointed out, for many years British rule in India embodied the interplay of two conflicting ideas: the desire gradually to extend to India the rights of a liberal democracy; and the opposing desire to subdue and civilize India by the exercise of benign 45 autocracy. As Britain itself became more democratic over the course of the nineteenth century, the contrast with its autocratic empire became untenable for many. For Britain to be true to its heritage as the ‘mother of parliaments’, and to its whiggish future as an enlightened democracy, the same standards of civil rights and political participation must apply in the empire as in the metropole. The Ilbert Bill, with its emphasis on equal treatment for Indians, represented the ascension of this liberal ideal. For a variety of reasons, women felt that their role in the empire was linked to the perpetuation of the opposing view. Although the Ilbert Bill has been studied from several different perspectives, one of the most provocative analyses is Mrinalini Sinha’s contention that the Ilbert Bill was a crucial site for working out imperial relationships among men. The discourse of the Ilbert Bill connected ‘white men’s control over white women to their control over native men 46 and women’. Thus, Sinha argues, the rhetorical strategies deployed by British men in the Ilbert Bill debate bolstered the formulation of a ‘colonial masculinity’ that ‘reinforced not only the racial hierarchies of colonial rule in India but also the gender hierarchies in both Britain and India’.47 Although recognizing Anglo-Indian women’s unprecedented involvement in political discourse through the Ilbert Bill agitation, she argues that this politicization occurred ‘only within the confines of a reconfigured imperial patriarchy’.48 For men embroiled in the controversy, questions of competing masculinities were undoubtedly [ 205 ]

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important, and the strategic deployment of an idealized and vulnerable English womanhood, similar to the gendered discourses that arose after the Mutiny, was an important tactic of the Bill’s opponents. However, the Anglo-Indian women actually engaged in the debate did not merely acquiesce in a patriarchal discursive strategy. For them, the debate was as much about femininity as masculinity, and about the role women would play in the empire. Of course, these debates occurred within the context of a patriarchal Victorian society, in which both law and custom sanctioned men’s economic, political and familial domination of women. But viewing power in a more Foucauldian sense, as a diffuse and shifting force, clarifies that while patriarchy may have constrained women’s political activities, it did not eviscerate them. Indeed, by publicly asserting an opinion on a highly politicized topic, women challenged much of the patriarchal structure of the masculine imperial endeavour. Although they were defending their husbands’ prerogatives in the Raj, Anglo-Indian women who publicly opposed the Ilbert Bill were also attempting to preserve their own political position against the encroachments of Indian men. The general discourse surrounding the Ilbert Bill controversy within 49 the Anglo-Indian community had two broad themes. First, AngloIndians felt that subjecting them to trial by an Indian judge in isolated mofussil districts, where the proceedings could not be monitored by their fellow Europeans and a sympathetic Anglo-Indian press, as in the cities, would expose them to false suits by vindictive natives. AngloIndian women’s conception of Indian men as duplicitous and barbarous shaped this discussion of the Bill. Playing on the themes of the corruptibility and bias of Indian judges (as opposed to the righteous objectivity of British civil servants) and the inability of even the most ‘advanced’ Indian to comprehend the British idiom and mentality, opponents of the Ilbert Bill argued that it would be impossible for upcountry Europeans to secure a fair trial and that the prestige of the British empire would thus be undermined. Second, the Bill’s detractors were concerned about the Bill’s implications for the future of Indian politics and their own political standing in India. Proponents of the Bill urged acceptance of the measure, in part on the grounds that its effect would be extremely limited. Opponents, however, recognized that Ripon’s commitment to implementing the dormant principles of racial equality in the Raj would not necessarily halt at the rather trivial goal of the Ilbert Bill. Indian men, too, would seize on the Bill’s underlying commitment to political equality to demand a greater role in imperial politics. The Bill was merely the wedge in the door leading towards complete Indianization of the imperial administration and the resulting destabilization (if not destruction) of the British Raj. [ 206 ]

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Officials’ wives felt obliged to participate publicly in the Ilbert Bill debate because their husbands were compelled to be silent. General rules of conduct for civil servants forbade their speaking in opposition to the government. During the Ilbert Bill controversy, rumours were bruited about, but never substantiated, that Ripon had issued a specific governmental directive prohibiting officials from expressing their opposition to the measure. Although officers of the Civil Service and the army attended mass meetings held to protest the Bill, and many retired civil and military officials figured prominently in the membership lists of organizations in Britain opposed to the Bill, few officials would have been willing to jeopardize their careers by speaking out publicly against the measure. The Ilbert Bill, as a precursor to Indianization of all the imperial services, directly affected the material and ideological concerns of the official community. Anglo-Indian women could not passively look to their husbands to protect their joint interest. Wives had to represent the official sector in the public debate, another example of the marital partnership action. Anglo-Indian women quite overtly denied any superior claims of the viceroy and the British government to regulate Indian affairs. Women who publicly opposed the Ilbert Bill argued that the type of knowledge vital to understanding imperial politics was obtainable more readily by women who lived in India, who dealt with Indians on a daily, intimate basis, and who shared in their husbands’ work, than it was by professional politicians like the viceroy and his superiors in Westminster. Neither Ripon nor Ilbert could claim any substantial experience in India prior to taking up their appointed positions. In addition, the quasi-regal lifestyle of the governmental entourage underlined the viceroy’s separation from the mundane existence of the ordinary civil servant or military officer and his wife. Viceregal responsibilities, with a strong emphasis on public appearances, pomp and ceremony, did not enable the viceroy to grasp the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ of Indian administration. Anglo-Indian officials and their wives, forced to remain in the plains throughout India’s brutal hot weather, saw the viceroy’s five-months’ residence in the hill station of Simla as further confirmation of his intellectual and geographic estrangement from the realities of Indian life. The ideal way, perhaps the only way, to understand India was to live the life of the average Anglo-Indian – indeed, of the average Anglo-Indian woman. One female correspondent to The Englishman, a Calcutta newspaper that took the lead in opposing the Ilbert Bill, acerbically suggested that the Marquis of Ripon forego his trip of pleasure to Simla this year; do away with his rank and with his wife; assume a nom de plume; take rooms in any one of our Calcutta boarding houses; engage bearers, kitmutgars; syces and

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dhobies, live and do exactly as his fellow Anglo-Indians, and at the end of three short months let us see if the Marquis holds the same opinion he now does, as regards the moral nature of his beloved Asiatics! He, the Marquis, has only five years to spend in this place, actually only twenty months of the five years, the rest in Simla, hatching discord for those whose lot it is to be down in the plains.50

In the end, the sustained outcry voiced by the Anglo-Indian community forced Ripon to retrench and implement a watered-down version of his proposal. Despite this initial setback, however, the British government still needed to address the question of Indian men’s demands for political authority. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 shortly after the Ilbert Bill debacle, initiated relatively conservative demands for greater Indian participation in the Raj, but gradually developed into the leading nationalist and anti-imperialist organization in India. As the government, faced with escalating demands from Congress and other groups, hesitantly pursued its policy of democratization in India in the decades between the Ilbert Bill and Indian independence, Anglo-Indian women continued to resist this devolution of political power to Indian men. As in the Ilbert Bill controversy, Anglo-Indian women challenged the imperial political knowledge of the Indian and British governments. By its failure to support its officials and their wives, Anglo-Indians argued, and to cede to them, as the men and women on-the-spot, the requisite authority to govern effectively, the government undermined the empire and endangered lives. India’s political landscape was irrevocably altered after the First World War by the growing popularity of the nationalist movement, Gandhian ideas of non-violent resistance to imperial rule and terrorist acts directed against the Raj. Just as the women of the 1880s had ridiculed Lord Ripon for his ignorance of India and condemned his attitude towards Indians as politically naive, so Anglo-Indian wives attributed the nationalist advance of the interwar period, and its attendant physical and ideological dangers, to the weak, ignorant and conciliatory governance of viceroys who accorded political legitimacy to Gandhi and the Congress. Anglo-Indian wives ridiculed Lord Irwin, who met personally with Gandhi. All over the country District Officers called for permission to take immediate and drastic action [in response to the civil disobedience movement], but the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who knew little of Eastern mentality, cherished hopes that Gandhi and his supporters might listen to reason and that everything might be settled peacefully; so that those who were responsible for the safety of the districts had to temporise and extemporise as best they might, while things became more and more difficult.51

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Similarly, Anglo-Indians criticized Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy who oversaw the ultimate handover of British power in 1947, for rushing India’s progression towards self-government. Anglo-Indians were ‘all furious’ with Mountbatten, and blamed him personally for the communal massacres that marked the division of British India into independent India and Pakistan.52 Like Lord Ripon half a century earlier, his successors Irwin and Mountbatten could not understand India nearly so well as the memsahib who lived out her life amidst its troubles. Specifically, what viceroys and British bureaucrats failed to apprehend, at least according to their Anglo-Indian critics, was that Indian men, whether they were Indian judges or the mahatma himself, could not be trusted with the exercise of political power. Anglo-Indians pointed to the disturbances of the interwar era and, later, the horrors arising from partition in 1947 as clear evidence of Indian men’s inability to govern. Although the Ilbert Bill dispute challenged Indian men’s political rights, the debate itself was waged primarily between the British government and its appointed authorities, on the one hand, and the women and men of the Anglo-Indian community, on the other. Throughout the controversy, Anglo-Indians impugned Indian men’s ability to exercise judicial power, but the political knowledge and authority of Anglo-Indian women and Indian men were not set up in direct opposition to each other. After the First World War, however, as the constitutional and administrative changes foreshadowed by the Ilbert Bill slowly came to fruition and allowed more Indian men a role in government, the political aims and aspirations of Anglo-Indian women and Indian men came more directly into conflict. And, like Jawaharlal Nehru and the ‘brainless memsahib’, Mrs Ford-Robertson, Anglo-Indian women and Indian men encountered each other more frequently in social situations politicized by the tensions and complications of imperial rule. With the accession of Indian nationalists to important positions in provincial governments and the Indianization of the civil services and the military, Anglo-Indian women found themselves abruptly shut out from the informal political discourses of the Raj. The inherently informal and unofficial nature of women’s political ties to the Raj meant that their voices could be easily ignored or silenced as the political landscape and the actors in it changed. Although Anglo-Indian women were engrossed in the politics of the Raj, they perceived Indian men as unwilling to broach serious political topics with them. Some attributed this to the frequent absence of Indian women from social gatherings, thus situating the Anglo-Indian wife as the odd woman out. ‘The fourth of the quarter was always missing’, recalled one woman, ‘and so you just 53 couldn’t get going’. Others attributed their exclusion to the effects of purdah and Indian men’s prior lack of exposure to intelligent, informed, [ 209 ]

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politically-engaged women. (This belief, of course, was predicated on the unfounded notion that Indian wives shared none of these qualities with their Anglo-Indian counterparts.) ‘Many of them [Indian men] were still unaccustomed to talking freely to women and seemed much more at ease with other men. The ways of an Indian household were not ours.’54 Indeed, one woman even believed that her husband’s Indian colleagues felt that she should ‘get behind the purdah’, rather than mingle with men at social functions. ‘You knew the men were looking at you and thinking you were a bit of a hussy to be about like this’, she recalled.55 As Anglo-Indians and Indians increasingly interacted in social situations at the club or at government dinners, politics was a conversational minefield best avoided if the political sympathies of other guests were unknown. With the proliferation of nationalists in interwar India, discussion of politics even in semi-private arenas such as the club became an indiscretion to be assiduously avoided by the politically astute. One woman, who avidly discussed Indian politics with her husband at home, recalled that during the interwar period Europeans renounced political discussion at the club and just talked about ‘frivolous subjects’. She was under strict orders from her husband to avoid ‘controversial subjects’ when conversing with Indian men.56 Thus, even as social interactions between Indians and Anglo-Indians became more frequent at official functions, private parties and chance encounters at the club, conversation degenerated from engaged political discourse to bland small talk. While Anglo-Indian women were thus silenced, many Indian men apparently enjoyed the freedom of speech that accompanied their newwon political power. One anonymous ‘Memsahib’, writing in the Cornhill Magazine in 1920, described the difficulties inherent in accepting as a dinner partner an Indian man whom one knows to be ‘a bitter opponent of Government’. (These political sympathies, she disdainfully pointed out, ‘in no wise affect the chances of ... meeting him at Government House’.) ‘You have a situation as little conducive to sympathetic conversation as can well be imagined.’ Her advice, although not necessarily consonant with proper etiquette, was to avoid being 57 paired off with any known nationalist advocates. Anglo-Indian women were particularly critical of the Congress ministries (headed, of course, by Indian men) elected in many provinces following the constitutional reforms of 1935. They condemned these governments as ineffectual in remedying the problems of the Indian people. One woman, for example, dismissed as unworkable Congress’s attempts to institute prohibition, since she assumed that all the (male Indian) enforcement officials would be bribed to ignore violations.58 Another described a visit by her husband and Lord Irwin through the [ 210 ]

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streets of Calcutta. ‘The viceroy was horrified by what he saw, perhaps most of all by the filth of the streets and the appalling smells. He asked whether nothing could be done to remedy matters, but Tegart [her husband] reminded him that this was an early example of local selfgovernment and that the Swaraj-dominated corporation were the responsible body.’59 This description does double duty in demonstrating Anglo-Indian women’s political expertise; the author not only condemns the Indian politicians running the city, but also derides the naiveté of the viceroy, who was so out of touch with the ‘real’ India as to be shocked by the scenes of poverty and squalor in an Indian city. Anglo-Indian women similarly blamed the great Bengal famine of 1943–44 on the mismanagement and corruption of the Indian provincial leaders, whom they often accused of manufacturing the shortage for their own financial gain.60 Provincial political autonomy thus provided a rhetorical boon to Anglo-Indian opponents of home rule, for it allowed them to attribute India’s many problems to the political ineptitude of Indian men, rather than forcing the imperial rulers to address the more complex origins of India’s difficulties. Adding insult to injury, Anglo-Indian women often depicted Indian governments as both wasteful and self-interested. Where the British might have run a province with only two administrators, Anglo-Indians insisted, the Indians would have four times that number, each of whom required ‘a bungalow, furniture, a car, and a Secretary, plus salary’.61 Winifred Heston, an American doctor who had come to India to minister to the medical needs of Indian women noted that her ‘republican principles’ had initially led her to champion the cause of Indian selfgovernment. But the methods employed, the lack of real patriotism or anything but selfishness on the part of so many of the leaders, fill one with dismay and discouragement. Where any real initiative is wanting, they are conspicuously absent. They are slow to step in where capital and cooperation, enterprise and speculation are needed. They commenced their campaign at the wrong end. Without levelling their own differences, or without even constructing a common platform, and still finding pleasure in lording it over tens of millions of pariah slaves ... you can see how absurd it is for them to seek the reins of self-government.62

However, Anglo-Indian women’s resentment of the political rise of Indian men cannot simply be reduced to a case of die-hard, female imperialists scorning their political opponents in the nationalist faction. Indeed, while Anglo-Indian women may have disdained the nationalist sympathies of Indian elected officials with whom they were obliged to consort at government functions and derided the accomplishments of [ 211 ]

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Indian provincial governments, their greatest hostility was reserved for those who, they believed, should have condoned their own more conservative political opinions. Although Anglo-Indians often questioned the loyalty of their Indian colleagues, they also expected them to be more sympathetic to imperial governance than, say, Gandhi and his disciples or nationalist terrorists. Nonetheless, at least from the perspective of Anglo-Indian women, even these potential allies appeared equally intent on barring them from the political discourses of the Raj. The policy of Indianization often put Anglo-Indian men and Indian men into direct competition with each other, which undoubtedly strained relations between them. As one Indian army officer noted, ‘every time one of us joined [a regiment] usually a British officer was transferred to another regiment in order to make room for us, which didn’t improve matters with the others’.63 Nonetheless, professional rivalries and cultural and social differences between men could be, and often were, bridged by the commonality of a shared employment in the Raj’s civil services and the military. Anglo-Indian women found that their gender foreclosed this avenue of interaction with Indian men. Anglo-Indian women were particularly sensitive to how Indian men interacted – or failed to interact – with them. An Anglo-Indian wife, accustomed to talking shop with AngloIndian men, was often at a loss when dealing with her husband’s Indian colleagues in the imperial services. One woman confessed in a letter home: ‘I wish to goodness Walter [her husband] would come back from [the] office before the Roys [an inspector of schools and his wife] descend. 64 I’m terrified of Indian gentlemen.’ Another woman, a bit more restrained in her reaction, wrote: ‘Indian men, with exceptions naturally, are found heavier in hand than the women at the social functions where we met.’65 Women’s sense of unease with Indian men stemmed from a perception of difference. Their ways ‘were not ours’, remarked one woman.66 ‘Their habits were quite different from ours’, remarked another and, ‘they weren’t really prepared to meet you on your own ground at all’.67 This perceived difference between Indians and AngloIndians added to Anglo-Indian women’s fears of Indian misogyny and their displeasure over the prospect of their own erasure from imperial politics. While Anglo-Indian men had been ready to defer to AngloIndian women’s implicit status in the imperial hierarchy, Indian men seemed less willing to do likewise. One army wife, explaining her failure to socialize with Indian military officers, recalled that ‘they [Indian men] were people who really weren’t interested in meeting English women ... 68 they were only interested in their relationship with the husbands’. Although Anglo-Indian wives had difficulty imagining any basis for a sisterhood between themselves and Indian women, it was the Indian [ 212 ]

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WOMEN, MEN AND POLITICAL POWER

man who epitomized the alien ‘otherness’ of the colonized person. The ‘orientalization’ of the colonized peoples served in most instances to reify the racial and cultural hierarchies of imperial dominance. For Anglo-Indian women, paradoxically, their construction of the Indian man as the repellant, corrupt and inept ‘other’ could not stem the tide of imperial politics. Indeed, Anglo-Indian women might have fared better in the endgame of empire if, like their husbands, they had been able to find some common ground with Indian men. A British imperial system that allowed no formal voice for Anglo-Indian wives, however, meant that Indian men could easily ignore women with no official position in the Raj. Although they had won the battle of the Ilbert Bill, Anglo-Indian wives and other diehard supporters of the British empire were destined to lose the war for imperial dominance. By the 1930s, if not before, the balance of imperial power had shifted. Just as Anglo-Indian women had fought the perceived infringement of European political hegemony during the Ilbert Bill crisis of the 1880s so, fifty years later, many Indian men felt no compulsion to share their growing political power and influence with the representatives of a waning imperial regime. Shortly after the Second World War ended, an Anglo-Indian woman happened to share with a young Indian student a two-berth compartment on a Bombay-bound train. The brief encounter of these two strangers, as recalled by the woman, encapsulates the shifting political dynamic that defined the relationship between Indian men and Anglo-Indian women. The student ‘politely said I could take the lower bunk and from his above me held forth in no uncertain terms about how pleased he was that we were departing from India, and spared no pains to show how much he disliked us’. While conceding that he had a ‘strong point’, she none the less argued the case for the British empire and for her fellow Anglo-Indians. In retrospect, she conceded that she probably hadn’t managed to change his opinions. This odd couple ‘parted quite amicably the following morning’. Within a few weeks, however, the Anglo-Indian wife was on a boat returning to war-ravaged Britain; the young man, along with millions of others of Britain’s colonial subjects, eagerly 69 anticipated the imminent birth of a free and independent India.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Nora Ford-Robertson, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999), 3. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN, 1993), 3. Margaret Ramsay-Brown, Interview (tape recording), British Library.

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8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Mrs Symington, Interview (tape recording), Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library; quoted in Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India (London, 1980), 18. Brigadier F.P. Roe, Interview (tape recording), The British Army in India 1919–1939, Imperial War Museum. Barbara Donaldson, ‘India Remembered’, 2, Donaldson Papers, University of Cambridge. While I am concerned here primarily with the experiences of Anglo-Indian women, I think it is also safe to assume that just as most Anglo-Indian women did not perceive themselves as sexual victims, most Indian men did not see themselves as sexual predators. See e.g. M.M. Kaye, The Sun in the Morning (New York, 1990), 435–6. Morag Murray Abdullah, My Khyber Marriage: Experiences of a Scotswoman as the Wife of a Pathan Chieftain’s Son (London, 1990), 19. Irene Bose, ‘You Ask How My Life in India Began’, 21, Bose Papers, University of Cambridge. Elizabeth Crawford Wilson, Dekho! The India That Was (Sanbornville, NH, 1958), 206–7; Mrs Isobel Abbott [Babbott], Indian Interval (London, 1960), 230–2. Abbot, Indian Interval, 231. Frances Robertson, ‘The Blackberry Basket’, 150, British Library. Mary J. Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers: Dhanbad 1925–1927’, 15, British Library. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). ‘U.A.’, Overland, Inland and Upland: A Lady’s Notes of Personal Observation and Adventure (London, 1874; reprinted Calcutta, 1984), 67. R.D. Macleod, Impressions of an Indian Civil Servant (London, 1938), 200. Frank Richards, Old-Soldier Sahib (London, 1936), 93. Kathleen Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart: Memoir of an Indian Police Officer’, 29, British Library. Macleod, Impressions, 200. Decima Curtis, ‘The Last Twelve Years of the British Raj Recollected by the Wife of a British District Officer’, 14–15, British Library. Ibid., 14. Patricia Edge, British Voices from South Asia, available: http://www.lib.lus.edu/special/india/intvw6.htm C.A. Kincaid, Forty-Four Years A Public Servant (Edinburgh, 1934), 198. See e.g. Lady Irene Squire, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Mildred Archer, Interview (tape recording), British Library Iris Portal, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. M.O. Dench, ‘Memsahib’, Dench Papers, 48, University of Cambridge. Manual on Indian Etiquette for the Use of European Officers Coming to India (Allahabad, 1910), 3. Maddock, ‘A Memsahib Remembers’, 29. Maisie Wright, Under Malabar Hill: Letters from India 1928–1933 (London, 1988), 79; Lady Henniker, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge. Kaye, Sun in the Morning, 436; Elizabeth Harrington, Interview (tape recording), British Army in India, Imperial War Museum. Henniker, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’. L.S.S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service 1601–1930 (London, 1965), 148. W.H. Saumarez-Smith, Letter of 16 February 1937, A Young Man’s Country: Letters of a Subdivisional Officer of the Indian Civil Service 1936–1937 (Salisbury, 1977), 58.

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

Mr Symington, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Doreen Heaney, Responses to ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaire’, University of Cambridge; Alice Lowther, Land of the Gold Mohur (London, 1932), 211. William Beveridge, India Called Them (London, 1947), 321. Mr and Mrs J. Rowe, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. Maud Diver, Ships of Youth: A Study of Marriage in Modern India. (Boston, MA, 1931), 222–3. Quoted in S. Gopal, The Viceroyalty of Lord Ripon, 1880–84 (London, 1953), 147. Christine Dobbin, ‘The Ilbert Bill: A Study of Anglo-Indian Opinion in India, 1883’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 12 (October 1965): 90. Quoted in Edwin Hirschmann, ‘White Mutiny’: The Ilbert Bill Crisis in India and Genesis of the Indian National Congress (New Delhi, 1980), 295–6. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994), x. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 47. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 54. Sinha discussed Anglo-Indian women’s involvement in an earlier article: ‘“Chathams, Pitts and Gladstones in Petticoats”’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN, 1992). Perhaps the best primary source for tracking Anglo-Indian attitudes toward the Ilbert Bill are the letters to the editor of The Englishman, an anti-Ilbert Bill Calcutta newspaper, at the time of the controversy. See also Hirschmann, ‘White Mutiny’, Dobbin, ‘The Ibbert Bill’ and Sinha, ibid., for secondary analyses of the situation. Letter to the editor, The Englishman (Calcutta), 14 March 1883. Lady Olive Crofton, ‘They Also Serve’, 64–5, Crofton Papers, University of Cambridge. Mrs Joan Davis, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge; Mrs B. LeBrocq, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge. Mrs H. Berkeley Smith, Interview (transcript), University of Cambridge. Viola Bayley, ‘One Woman’s Raj’, 62, Bayley Papers, University of Cambridge. Berkeley Smith, Interview. Drusilla Hawes, Interview (tape recording), British Library. ‘The Mem-Sahib’s Point of View’, Cornhill Magazine XLVIII (May 1920): 598. Beatrix Scott, Letter to her mother, 20 November 1925, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Anglo-Indians prided themselves on their probity, in contrast to the presumed corruptibility of Indians. Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart’, 207–8. This interpretation of the origins of the famine is not convincing. Paul R. Greenough presents a number of contributory factors, including the effects of war, nationalist resistance and government repression, and natural disasters. Greenough concludes, however, that most prominent among these factors was ‘a subordination of local needs, including subsistence, to official and military priorities’. See Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944 (New York, 1982), 97. Mrs A. Hyndman-Stein, ‘An Account of My Life from the Time I Left Australia for India’, 31, British Library. Winifred Heston, A Bluestocking in India (London, 1910), 190–1. Mr Baig, Interview (transcript), British Library. Beatrix Scott, Letter of 4 February 1924, Scott Papers, University of Cambridge. Bayley, ‘One Woman’s Raj’, 62. Ibid.

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69

Coralie Taylor, Interview (tape recording), British Library. Lady Birdwood, Interview (tape recording), ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’, Cornell University Library. B. Macdonald, India ... Sunshine and Shadows (London, 1988), 135.

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Conclusion

Recalling the end of the British empire in India, an Anglo-Indian woman who had spent eight years in the subcontinent as the wife of a civil servant contrasted her own view on the demission of power with her husband PD’s perspective: [W]hen the Raj came to an end, PD was delighted; this was what he had been working for, to hand over India. I, on the other hand, felt we had lost India, and my one thought, my one regret was for the next generation of young men and women who could never now have the enriching experience that I had had as an ICS wife, married to PD, and so to the Raj itself.1

Her heartfelt regret and sense of loss at the end of British rule in India typifies Anglo-Indian women’s attitudes towards Indian independence. More significantly, the marked difference between her own nostalgic sorrow and her husband’s satisfied sense of a job well done reveals the existence of a gender gap within the ranks of the Anglo-Indian community on the issue of Indian nationalism. If Anglo-Indian men could be more accepting than were their wives of the goals of the Indian nationalist movement, it was perhaps because they ultimately had less at stake in the transfer of political authority that marked the end of the Raj. Most Anglo-Indian officials still in India at independence departed shortly after 1947, acknowledging that they were generally neither wanted nor needed in the newly independent nation. However, they were not simply cast adrift in the post-imperial world. Recognizing that many of its officials, civilians especially, would suffer from having their employment cut short in mid-stream, the British government made generous lump sum payments to Anglo-Indian officials for ‘loss of career’. The government also provided counselling to ease their transition to new professions. While some older officials were content to accept early retirement, many younger men went on to new careers, some as officials in other British colonies, others in the home Civil [ 217 ]

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CONCLUSION

Service, and still others in completely new areas of endeavour. Elinor Tollinton’s husband, for example, a former ICS officer, decided to become a doctor. Although he received £14,000 for loss of career, ‘a sum [that] would have been far beyond any of us to have saved during our career in India’, finances were straitened. Tollinton supported the family with several jobs during her husband’s medical education, including one in which she drove new cars to various English ports for shipment 2 abroad. While the transition to a new life and new employment in Britain was often challenging and financially difficult, many former Anglo-Indian officials successfully rebuilt their professional lives after 1947 with the assistance of the government and, like Mr. Tollinton, of their wives.3 For women whose careers as wives in the empire had come to an abrupt end, there were no financial assistance packages and no guidance or retraining for life in postwar, post-imperial, Britain. The transition to life ‘back home’ had always been an unpleasant one for Anglo-Indians. After the Second World War, however, the return to Britain must have been especially difficult. Anglo-Indian wives arrived in a country devastated by war, to face cities damaged by bombing, an economy still on a wartime footing, shortages and rationing of consumer goods, including food, and a depleted housing stock. By the 1940s, their status as mere wives commanded little authority in Britain, where women had played a vital part on the home front during the war. Although AngloIndian women saw themselves as knowledgeable and active participants in the British imperial experience, those outside the Anglo-Indian community did not necessarily view them in that light. Margaret Martyn, the wife of an ICS officer in Calcutta, recalled attending a meeting with professional women social workers on a visit to Manchester in the 1940s: ‘I was introduced as a VIP from India, and a woman doctor with the Department of Public Health was most interested in my questions until she realised that I was not a professional, only a wife, and her interest 4 waned.’ More significantly for returning Anglo-Indians, the British turned increasingly inward following the Second World War, in an attempt to rebuild their own nation after the ravages of war. In 1948, as one indicator of this shift in focus, 50 per cent of British people could not name a single British colony.5 The empire had receded in most people’s minds in the face of the greater postwar domestic challenges of rebuilding Britain and re-establishing its society on a more equal footing with the inception of the welfare state. Anglo-Indian women had constructed an identity centred on the Raj. Although their perception was not shared by most of their fellow Britons, Anglo-Indian wives saw their time in India as characterized by service, sacrifice and fortitude. Anglo-Indian wives believed that they [ 218 ]

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CONCLUSION

had consecrated some of the most precious private aspects of their lives to the empire. As the wives of imperial officials, the central relationship of their lives – their marriages – was inextricably bound up with the Raj, and the marital relationship centred on joint service to the empire. Their homes were run in the service of the Raj, and the privacy of their domestic lives ceded to the public and political needs of imperialism. They sacrificed their maternal role to the needs of husband and empire. Anglo-Indian wives willingly took on ‘unfeminine’ roles as defenders of the empire, to justify and normalize their own apparently anomalous position in India. In return, Anglo-Indian wives were tacitly allowed to participate in the politics of empire, carrying out the quotidian tasks of governance and shaping the policies of British imperialism in India. Britain itself could offer little in the way of similar experiences, and it is not surprising that almost all of the memoirs produced by Anglo-Indian wives end abruptly with their departure from India. Anglo-Indian wives’ often problematic relationships with Indian women and men must be attributed not just to racial prejudices and cultural differences – although these certainly existed – but to Anglo-Indian women’s attempts to preserve their tenuous position in the empire from the encroachments necessitated, first, by the Indianization of the imperial services and, ultimately, by Indian nationalism and colonial independence. As Anglo-Indian wives had feared, Indian men inherited the mantle of political power from the British in 1947. Ironically, however, in light of Anglo-Indian assertions of Indian misogyny, women also rose to political prominence in both India and Pakistan after the departure of the British. With independence, Anglo-Indian women lost their longstanding battles with their opponents, in Britain as well as in India, over political knowledge and authority. Although Anglo-Indian wives could argue against Indianization and related policies, stand ready to defend the empire and emphasize their own unique and irreplaceable contributions to British imperialism, they could not preserve the Raj. In 1947, the British government unilaterally terminated Anglo-Indian women’s integral involvement with British imperialism in India and acceded to the long-standing demands of Indians for political autonomy. Indian men may have derided Anglo-Indian women as ‘brainless memsahibs’, but the British government similarly scorned their contribution to empire. After decades of being married to the empire, the Anglo-Indian wife suddenly found herself divorced.

Notes 1

Margaret Martyn, Married to the Raj (London, 1992), 125.

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3

4 5

Elinor Tollinton, ‘Memoir’, British Library. William and Mildred Archer represent a rare, perhaps unique, example of an Anglo-Indian official husband and wife, both of whom managed to translate their knowledge of and love for India into successful careers in Britain. He became the first head of the Indian section at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and she parlayed a temporary assignment at the India Office library into a full-time position there. Mildred Archer, Interview (tape recording), British Library; William and Mildred Archer, India Served and Observed (London, 1994). For a contemporaneous assessment of the problems encountered by officials in retooling for new careers, see R. Jasper, ‘Report on the Activities of the India and Burma Services’ Reemployment Organization’, 3 July 1948, Mss Eur. F173/81, British Library. Martyn, Married to the Raj, 101. Cited in Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share, 3rd. edn (Longman, 1996), 317. By then, of course, India, perhaps the best-known imperial possession, was no longer part of the empire.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival sources University of Cambridge, Centre of South Asian Studies Memoirs and collected papers Ansorge Papers Barton Papers Bayley Papers Bose Papers Bourne Collection Cartwright Papers Champion Papers Crofton Papers Cruickshank Papers Dench Papers Donaldson Papers Ghosal Papers Grant Papers Haig Papers Hall Papers Heaney Papers Hughes Papers Lord Papers Mansfield Papers Meiklejohn Papers ‘Memsahibs’ Questionnaires’ Metaxa Papers Mills Papers Mullan Papers Murison Papers Norton-Griffiths Papers Portal Papers Scott Papers Stavridi Papers

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Davis, Mrs Joan Lacey, Mrs P. Le Brocq, Mrs B., Mrs Macpherson and Mrs Meiklejohn (joint interview) Meiklejohn, Mrs F. Mills, Mrs J.P. Moffat, Mrs Agnes Mullan, Mrs K. Ravenscroft, Mrs M. Stokes, Lady Stuart, Mr M.M. Tyler, Mrs

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Hopwood Papers: Mss Eur. C384 Humble, Janet: Mss Eur. C341 Hyndman-Stein, A.: Mss Eur. G121/13 Indian Civil Service (Retired) Association: Mss Eur. F173/15, 20, 27 Jasper, R., ‘Report on the Activities of the India and Burma Services Reemployment Organization’, 3 July 1948: Mss Eur. F173/81 Johnston, Ronald: Mss Eur. C379 Long, Walter: Mss Eur. B306 Maddock, Mary J: Mss Eur. D918 Martin Papers: Mss Eur. C233 Maxwell, Lady Mary: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 128 McCutcheon, Jean M.: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 363 Merrington, Gillian: MssEur. D1229/16 Moore, James: Mss Eur. D775 Morris, Mabel: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 170 National Council of Women in Burma: Mss Eur. D1230/1 Platt, Joan: Mss Eur. C665 Pollock, John: Mss Eur. C518 Reynolds, Lady: Mss Eur. F226/25 Rich Papers: Mss Eur. C403 Robertson, Frances: Mss Eur. C701 Russell Papers: Mss Eur. A117 Schofield, Rosemary: Mss Eur. C777 Shore Papers: Mss Eur. B318 Showers-Stirling, Christian: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 36 Smith, Viola: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 210 Smith Papers: Mss Eur. D898 Stokes, May Florence: Mss Eur. PhotoEur. 326 Tate Papers: Mss Eur. B283 Tegart, K.: Mss Eur. C235/3 Tollinton, Elinor: Mss Eur. D1197 ‘Travellers’ Bungalows in Sikkim and the Darjeeling District, 1935’: Mss Eur. C650 Verney, Sir Ralph and Lady Janette: Mss Eur. D921 Warner, Mrs B.: Mss Eur. A201 Westlake, Alan: Mss Eur. C353

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INDEX

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Literary works can be found under authors’ names. Aitchison Commission (1887) 18 Amritsar 116, 117–19, 126 Archer, Mildred 48, 94 army 5, 30, 31, 35, 45, 83, 157 British Army 9, 10, 11 housing in India 64 other ranks 9, 37, 85 Indian Army 1, 10, 11, 19, 31, 92, 143 Indianization of 19 and marriage 31 pensions 15 see also military services bachelors 9, 73, 103 baking 98 see also pastry bazaar 67, 68, 89, 91, 185 Bell, Mrs G.H. Sahib-Log 32 Bengal 10, 118, 154, 187, 205 famine (1943-44) 186, 211 partition of (1905) 19, 115 see also Calcutta Bennett, Amelia 120–2 see also ‘Mutiny’, Cawnpore Bombay 10, 37, 38, 62, 172, 174, 179, 180, 189, 213 Bower, Ursula Graham 138 bungalow 21, 39, 57, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 76, 82, 98, 100, 155, 211 bathroom 66 bedroom 66, 155 design of 63, 65 furniture 68, 69, 70, 72 as office 59 privacy, lack of 65, 66–7 verandah 59, 63, 67, 153, 176 see also kitchen Burma 62, 130, 146 Burmese 9, 10, 62, 100, 130 Butler, Sir Harcourt 146 Calcutta 5, 10, 59, 62, 115, 121, 151,

153, 154, 168, 169, 202, 204, 207, 211, 218 see also Bengal cantonments 43, 59, 62 caste 85, 177, 181 Cawnpore see ‘Mutiny’, Cawnpore Census of India 8, 9, 45, 82 children (of Anglo-Indians) 12, 29, 34, 46–7, 84, 95, 98, 124, 131, 137, 139, 140, 181 absence of 16, 47, 182–3 childcare 58 education 14, 46, 58 civil disobedience 2, 91, 129, 131 civilizing mission 51, 166 civil lines 62 civil services 2, 9, 11, 12, 19, 50, 70 order of precedent 58 paperwork 50 pay 58 see also Education Service; Engineering Service; Forest Service; Indian Civil Service; India Office; Political Service class 16, 85, 94, 148, 181 of officials 11, 85 of wives of officials 12, 85 club (livestock) 75 club (station) 10, 48, 73, 176, 210 Colonial Office 39 cookbooks 86, 96, 97, 98, 102–3 see also household management, texts; recipes Croker, Bithia Mary 5 curry 86 daily round 83, 94 see also household management; housekeeping Delhi 60, 122, 123, 124, 125, 189, 201 see also New Delhi Dell, Ethel 5

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INDEX

Diver, Maud 5, 29, 45, 118, 127, 128, 129, 130, 203 Far to Seek 118 Lonely Furrow 118, 129 Ships of Youth 35 The Singer Passes 127–8, 130 domesticity 59, 64, 65, 73, 76, 81, 86, 102, 158, 170 Anglo-Indian 57, 61, 81, 82, 84, 86, 93, 103, 105 British 56, 61 Indian 71, 77 Douglas, O. 126 Olivia in India 126 Dufferin, Lady (Hariot Georgina, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava) 174 Duncan, Sara Jeannette 5, 16, 128, 179 The Burnt Offering 128–9, 179 dyarchy 20 Dyer, General Reginald 117, 118, 119

The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook 56, 103 gender 1, 2–4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 44, 88, 105, 111, 122, 136, 137, 141, 144, 148, 150, 155, 157, 189, 195, 200, 202, 205 Girl Guides 156, 157, 165, 168, 171 Godden, Jon 65 Godden, Rumer 65, 187 Bengal Journey 187 going native 61, 76, 145 Goodall, Frederick 114 Jessie’s Dream 114–15 ‘Great Game’ 7 guns 124, 130, 136, 137, 140, 141, 144, 147, 150, 153, 154, 156, 157 machine gun 143, 157 rifle 143, 145, 148, 151, 157, 158 Gupta, Behari Lal 204–5 Gurkhas 97, 157

East India Company 17, 63, 112 Eden, Fanny 142 Education Service 45 Engineering Service 15, 16 Englishman, The 207 Eurasians 9, 10, 51, 84, 184

Halifax, Lord see Irwin, Lord Herbert, Arthur Kenney see Wyvern hill stations 6, 10, 41, 46, 68, 72, 91 Simla 10, 46, 62, 118, 123, 198, 202, 207, 208 Hindi 61 Hindu 52, 74, 90, 129, 184, 188, 198 Hindustani 12, 89, 101 household management 81, 82, 83, 86, 89 texts 86–7, 89, 91, 94 see also cookbooks see also daily round housekeeping 21, 56, 82, 83, 91, 92, 97 and men 103–4 see also daily round housewife 16, 59, 81–2, 93, 105 Hunter Committee 117 hunting 16, 21, 30, 41, 47, 48, 136, 137, 143–50, 151, 157, 158, 176 attire 143, 176 beats 146, 147 in machan (hunting blind) 47, 145, 146 tracking 146–7

feminism 6 feminist 4, 112, 158, 166, 168 First World War 5, 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 35, 39, 41, 49, 57, 58, 64, 70, 71, 76, 85, 91, 94, 114, 116, 117, 125, 137, 144, 148, 150, 152, 156, 171, 178, 208, 209 Forest Service 1, 13, 34, 42, 79, 97, 136, 141, 147, 150 Forster, E.M. 16, 89, 128, 194, 195 Friedan, Betty 93 Gandhi, Mohandas 129, 131–2, 152, 203, 208, 212 Gandhian non-violence 19, 152 see also civil disobedience; Indian nationalism gardening 41, 74, 75, 105 Gardiner, Grace 56, 83, 87, 89, 103, 105

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INDEX Ilbert, Courtenay 204, 207 Ilbert Bill (1883) 193, 194, 196, 202, 203–8, 209, 213 incorporated wife 11 characteristics of 42–3 independence (of India, 1947) 18, 86, 111, 196, 201, 217 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 1, 9, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 31, 32, 40, 41, 45, 48, 74, 83, 100, 128, 131, 140, 141, 147, 156, 167, 168, 176, 186, 198, 201, 204, 205, 218 Family Pension Fund 15, 36 Indianization of 19, 71 and marriage 31 probationers 35, 48 professional identity 58–9 salaries 14 Indian food 86 Indian houses 62, 63, 71 Indianization (of imperial services) 18–19, 51, 52, 70, 72, 171, 177, 194, 196, 200, 201, 204, 207, 209, 219 Indian language 86, 89 Indian National Congress 19, 117, 203, 208, 210 Indian nationalism 157, 184, 219 nationalists 1, 19, 115, 128, 129, 141, 203, 209 Quit India 67, 131, 132, 198 and terrorism 115, 139, 153 see also civil disobedience; independence; terrorism Indians army officers 11, 19 children 52 landlords 60–1 officials 9, 10, 18, 20, 71, 75, 76, 177, 201, 203 women 53, 62, 154, 155, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185, 186, 188, 196, 209, 212 clothing of 180–1, 182 India Office 38, 71, 153 Irwin, Lady (Dorothy Wood, Countess of Halifax) 175–6 Irwin, Lord (Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax) 38–9, 208, 209, 211

Islington Commission (1917) 11, 14, 31 Jallianwala Bagh see Amritsar Jhabvala, Ruth 194 Heat and Dust 194 John Company see East India Company journalists 20, 128 Kaiser-i-Hind medal 172, 188 Kashmir 62 Kipling, Rudyard 38, 128 ‘The Enlightenments of Pagett, MP’ 128 Mrs Hauksbee 16 kitchen 63, 81, 93, 94, 98, 104 hygiene 95, 96 sanitation 64, 95 Kitchener, Lord H.H. (1st Earl) 37 Lady Dufferin Fund 43, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173–4 Lee Commission (1924) 15, 34 Madras 10, 103, 154 marriage 18, 20–1, 29, 30, 38, 145, 199 and bribery 32–3 expenses of 33–4 of Indian officials 51, 52 Indian reaction to 39 of Indians and Europeans 51, 195 probationary period 34–5 and the Raj 30–1 vetting of wives 38 wedding ceremony 38 military services 50, 70 see also army Minto, Lady (Mary, Countess of) 37, 172 Minto, Lord (Gilbert, 4th Earl) 37, 128, 148 Minto Nursing Association 172–3 missionaries 90, 177 mofussil 10, 63, 64, 87, 149, 152, 204, 205, 206 see also upcountry Montagu, Sir Edwin 116 Montagu–Chelmsford reforms (1919) 20

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INDEX Morley–Minto reforms (1909) 20 Mountbatten, Lord Louis (1st Earl) 209 MPs 20, 128, 129, 203 Muslims 90 ‘Mutiny’ (1857) 6, 17, 21, 37, 60, 90, 111, 112, 117, 119–20, 132, 138, 144, 194, 206 Cawnpore 112, 117, 119, 120–2, 125 Delhi 122, 123, 124 Lucknow 114–15 novels of 112, 115, 120, 123–6 see also individual authors see also Goodall, Frederick; Paton, Sir Joseph Noël Naidu, Sarojini 186, 189 Napier, Sir Charles 37 native quarter 62 Nehru, Jawaharlal 186, 193, 194, 209 New Delhi 10 see also Delhi novels 86, 115, 120, 126, 128 Anglo-Indian romance 5 see also individual authors; ‘Mutiny’ novels of official community (of AngloIndians) 2, 8, 10, 11, 17 Orwell, George 16 Oxford 48, 199, 201 Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi 186 partition (of India and Pakistan, 1947) 198, 209 pastry 93–4 see also baking Paton, Sir Joseph Noël 111 In Memoriam 111, 112–14 Penny, Fanny Love in the Hills 32 Sacrifice 35 pensions 15, 18, 34, 36 see also Indian Civil Service, Family Pension Fund Perrin, Alice 5, 34 The Anglo-Indians 40 philanthropy 6, 165, 167, 171, 173, 174 see also social work

Political Service 1 Pollard, Eliza 124 The White Dove of Amritzir 124 polo 6, 31, 34, 41, 137, 141 see also sports polyandry 52 polygamy 199 Poona Seva Sadan 174–5 purdah 44, 52, 66, 73, 166, 177, 178, 179, 180, 189, 196, 209, 210 purdah hospital 48 purdah party 177, 178, 179 see also zenana race 21, 66, 72, 140, 178, 195, 200, 205 Raj revival 4, 194 rape 121, 194, 195 Reading, Lady (Alice, Countess of) 145, 187 Reading, Lord (Rufus, 1st Marquess) 145 recipes 86, 101 see also cookbooks Ripon, Lord (George, 1st Marquess) 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 Round Table Conferences 20 Rowlatt Commission 116, 152 sati 166 Savi, Ethel 5, 70, 79, 97, 118 Birds of Passage 81, 129 Scott, Paul 16, 194, 195 The Jewel in the Crown 194 Second World War 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 44, 46, 48, 57, 60, 74, 82, 85, 168, 170, 173, 183, 184, 200, 213, 218 separate spheres 5, 6, 57 servants, domestic 16, 33, 58, 64, 66, 74, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 98, 102, 150, 151, 172, 179, 196, 197 ayah 84, 88, 99, 100, 111, 143 bearer 84, 88, 93, 97, 100, 207 bheestie 66, 84 chaprassis 84 chowkidar 67, 84 Christian 90 cook 79, 84, 92–3, 94, 96, 97, 101, 104

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INDEX cook’s boy 84 dhobi 84, 208 dirzi 84 discipline 91–2 duties of 84–5 hiring 101–2 khitmutgar 84, 207 living quarters 91 mali 84 number of 84–5 personal relationships (with employer) 98–101 punkah coolies 66, 84 and race 66–7, 97 sexual relations (with employer) 98–9 sweeper 84 syce 84, 208 uniforms 88, 90–1 wages of 84 sexuality 136, 181 Sheepshanks, Beatrice 126 The Sword and the Spirit 126–7, 129 Simon Commission 140 social life calling cards 59 dinnerparties 59, 68, 95, 97, 197, 198 hospitality 73 see also club (station); gardening social work 90, 168, 169, 173 see also philanthropy sports 41, 141–2, 143, 181, 185 see also hunting; polo; tennis Steel, Flora Annie 5, 45, 50, 56, 83, 86, 87, 89, 103, 105 The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook 56, 86, 103

On the Face of the Waters 123–4 subaltern studies 5, 8 Suez Canal 6 Tegart, Charles 151, 153, 211 tennis 41, 73, 141, 142, 148, 176 see also sports terrorism 2, 115, 116, 129, 153, 156 terrorist activities 10 terrorist organizations 19, 154, 176 tours 50, 66, 141 upcountry 10, 40, 43, 62, 63, 76, 187, 204, 206 see also mofussil vicereine 43, 149, 171, 173, 174, 175, 187 see also individual names viceroy 10, 37, 148, 151, 172, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 211 see also individual names Victorian 31, 57, 112, 133, 206 Wentworth, Patricia 124 The Devil’s Wind 124–5 Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India) (WAC(I)) 170, 183–4, 185, 187 World War I see First World War World War II see Second World War Wyvern 96, 103 Culinary Jottings 104 YWCA 169 zenana 62, 165, 166, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 196 see also purdah

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