It has been eons since I posted!
One of the many things that I have
learned during the last year and a half of writing this blog is that I can
either post consistently or I can make steady work on my fiction projects. I
can’t seem to manage both at the same time – even in the summer when I’m not
teaching! So, I’ve decided to try and
be content with whichever one is working, as long as I spend some time every
day, butt in chair, writing something.
Lately, when I come home from a
long day of teaching and all I want to do is lie on the couch binge watching
old episodes of the Great British Bake
Off and dreaming of a massive ice cream sundae, it’s a lot easier to dig up the energy to work on my silly little
fantasy novel that requires no research than to churn out a blog post.
In 2017, in addition to writing
more, I set a goal for myself to read 25 books – and, by the skin of my teeth,
I succeeded, finishing my last book around 1 am on December 31. That last book
was Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives,
and Daughters of the British Empire in India, by Margaret MacMillan. I was
drawn to this book not only because it is clearly about babes, but also because
Margaret MacMillan is one of my favorite historians. Her writing is lucid and
she is able to produce a compelling narrative without (in my opinion)
sacrificing the historical value of her work. She also tends to write about
topics I find interesting – in addition to Women
of the Raj, I have also enjoyed Paris,
1919 and Dangerous
Games. Plus, she’s a good idol for any writer: despite the fact that
most publishers weren’t initially interested in the topics she chose to write
about, she kept on researching and writing about the topics that interested her.
Women
of the Raj did not disappoint.
I you ever learned anything about
British women in India when you were in school, it might have been this:
In
the eighteenth century, when the British East India Company (Notorious BEIC)
was just beginning to wrap its tentacles around the Indian subcontinent, most
of the British living in India were men. Company jobs, after all, were exclusively
for men. The journey from Britain to India was long, difficult, and dangerous.
It wasn’t the sort of trip a respectable girl was expected to undertake – and why
would they? The company employed some disreputable dudes: they weren’t exactly husband material. As a result of there
being few British women around, British men followed the centuries old tradition
of all other merchants who traded on the Indian Ocean: they messed around with/married
Indian women. The
result was a period of cultural hybridity and exchange, the echoes of which
can still be heard in Anglophone culture: for example, the word (and practice) shampoo. (Eighteenth century Europeans
had notoriously bad hygiene, while purity and cleanliness were important parts
of both Hindu and Muslim culture. You can fill in the blanks.)
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| A portrait of Robert Clive, edited by me |
What put an end to this era of hybridity? According to some narratives, it was the women.
Certain versions of the story give
one the impression that in the nineteenth century, British women fell from the
sky, like dour, stern, uninvited Mary Poppinses; they dragged their men out of
the bibighar and into the bungalow, insisting in strict separation of British
and Indian, forever poisoning relations between ruler and ruled.
As you no doubt know, the truth is more complicated.
It is true
that over the course of the 19th century, more and more British
women began to settle in India, in part because new technology (the steamship,
and later, the Suez Canal) made the journey safer and easier. But unlike the
impression one might get from narratives like the one in the linked video,
these women did not come as an unbidden wave of fun-killing banshees. MacMillan
points out in her book that it is unfair to blame women entirely for the
deteriorating relations between the British and Indians. After all, these women
lived in a patriarchal society, and came to India in such droves because the
British company men had become more interested in European wives. Therefore,
the arrival of the memsahibs was a
symptom of changing British attitudes, not the cause.
There is a lot NOT to admire about these
women. They were, after all, quite racist,
believing that Indians were made perpetually infantile by the damagingly hot
climate in which they were unfortunate enough to have been born. They were
suspicious of Indian men, seeing Hinduism not only as idolatrous, but also
overtly and dangerously sexual, compared to chaste, Victorian virtues. (Highly
ironic given chastity and monogamy for women actually is an important virtue in Hinduism.) These women lived vapid, gossipy,
insular lives, never venturing beyond the confines of their British enclaves.
Given these
tendencies, it is easy to understand why the memsahibs don’t have a great
historical reputation. And yet, there are more layers underneath that MacMillan
meticulously peels away in her book.
To start
with, what would inspire a young British woman of the nineteenth century to go
all the way to India? The trip was no simple jaunt, after all, even after the
advent of the steam ship. India offered Britain’s young women the same thing it
offered men: opportunity.
Most of the
women who chose to go to India were middle or lower middle class sorts. There
weren’t many opportunities for them at Home, and their marriage prospects in
Britain – where they were small fish in a big pond – were limited at best. But
women who made it to India found themselves in a seller’s market: in an
environment where British men far outnumbered British women, their marriage
prospects dramatically improved – and that’s a big deal for the economic
prospects of a nineteenth century woman. It’s as if going on a harrowing
sailing trip suddenly gave you good odds to get into an Ivy League school,
instead of middling prospects at a mediocre state university.
While
finding a husband in India might have been easy, being a British wife often
wasn’t. Most of these women had no knowledge about sex before their wedding
nights, and weren’t expected to enjoy it anyway. They were expected to continue
to wear heavy, European gowns in the unforgiving Indian climate and were told –
for purposes of reproductive health – to be active, but not too active. They were expected to set up
a semblance of a British home in a bungalow infested with snakes, red ants,
scorpions – all manner of nasty beasties that were not only completely alien,
but destructive and dangerous. The memsahib would have far more servants in her
employ than a woman of equal status would have at home in Britain, partly
because Indian labor was cheap, and partly because the traditions of the caste
system restricted servants to only fulfill very specific roles, while British
domestic help could multi-task. Although assisted by an army of servants, the
memsahib often didn’t understand their languages or customs and was constantly
inundated with cultural messaging that told her that none of her servants were
truly capable or trustworthy. (That said, there is evidence that some British
families and their servants formed deep, almost familial bonds.)
Still don’t
pity the memsahibs?
Whenever
her husband changed station, the woman would have to pack up the house and
move. Since travel was difficult, most furniture and household goods had to be
left behind and new ones procured at the next station. The woman would have to
go on an extended camping trip, across difficult terrain, often only in the
company of strangers, since her husband would not be with her. Once arriving in
the new station, she would have to adapt to a new climate, new customs, new
servants, and submit herself again to
the drudgery of the ritualistic and class-conscious society of women in her new
station.
The number
one job of the memsahibs was to have children who would serve the empire.
Assuming both mother and child survived the birth, childhood in India – indeed,
adulthood too – was overshadowed with the threat of diseases that could kill an
otherwise healthy person in a matter of hours. Assuming a woman’s children
survived to about the age of 7 or 8, she was then expected to send them away to
England for their education, as the climate of India was considered unhealthy
for British children. In families where there was enough income for this
arrangement, the memsahibs faced a choice: they could either accompany their
children to Britain and be separated from their husbands or, stay with their
husbands in India and not see their children for years at a time.
These women
had two jobs: wife, and mother. The practice of sending children Home to be
educated meant that the women were doomed to fail at one of them.
These women were bored. They were
lonely. They carried the weight of their nation’s honor on their shoulders, and
felt, at every turn, vulnerable to attack by either the climate or people of India.
Some of them led extraordinary lives – like Annette Beveridge, who learned
Persian and translated the memoirs of Babur (founder of the Mughal Empire) into
English. But many of them led the circumscribed lives that were expected of
them, despite the sometimes tragic consequences. I wouldn’t call them unsung
heroes – because mostly, they weren’t heroic, and the entire imperial project
that brought them to India was deeply flawed. But I do have a grudging sort of
respect for them, and empathy for them that I didn’t have before reading
MacMillan’s book.
Although MacMillan dives into
plenty more issues, I will leave you now with a recommendation to read the
book, and some of MacMillan’s own conclusions about the women of the Raj:
If a balance sheet is to be drawn
up for the women of the Raj, let it be remembered to their credit that they so
often loved their servants and were loved in return…let it be remembered that
they lived in a difficult country with bravery and competence…they travelled
miles on their own, endured hardships and dangers as a matter of course. And
they tried to be ladies in all circumstances, like the woman who amused herself
when her husband was on tour by shooting tigers and then returning to camp and
sitting down to do exquisite needlepoint; or the woman who, when things became
tense before Independence, refused to alter her daily routine – but slipped a
revolver into her handbag just in case.
Today they tend to be remembered
as dim, comic figures or as vicious harridans who poisoned relations between
the Indians and the British. Neither memory does them justice. They were living
women with worries, happinesses, and sorrows like anyone else…They had a duty
to do and they did it to the best of their abilities. Most of all, they simply
got on with living.
Sources:
Women of the Raj: The
Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India, by Margaret
MacMillan.
Another wonderful book about the transition
of British attitudes and policy in India from the eighteenth to the nineteenth
century is William Dalrymple’s White
Mughals.
You can check me
out on goodreads to find out what else I’ve been reading.
