Sahib (57 page)

There had been frequent grand dinners and ‘reciprocal arrangements’ which brought British officers and officials together with what were often called ‘native gentlemen’ on more or less equal terms. John Zoffany’s painting ‘Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match’, executed in 1786, showed British officers mixing happily with Indians. It was one of the many terrible little ironies of the Mutiny that a copy of the picture was commissioned by the Nawab of Oudh and hung in his palace at Lucknow until 1857. Issues of caste made such intercourse easier with Moslems than with Hindus, but there was often much mutual interest, with both races sharing ‘common trades, such as soldiers and diplomatists, as members of a governing class, and common tastes in hunting, feasting, wine and nautches’.
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The Nawab of Firozpur was acclaimed as a bang-up Corinthian, ‘enthusiastically fond of hunting and shooting, and naturally of a frank and generous disposition’.
⁶⁵
James Skinner’s biographer suggests that both Skinner and his companion, William Fraser, did not simply have favourite wives and wider
zenanas,
but enjoyed camp life to the full, and in the process ‘helped to populate half the villages of his district’. A friend wrote:

I had the happiness to march over the Doab with him for nearly three months. We visited nearly every village, and the
zameendars
used to talk freely over their concerns and of the British rule; and all classes, high and low, used to come to our tents, and we went into their little forts and dwellings … Nothing was to me more beautiful than his great humility, to see him with the poor sitting on the floor, and conversing with them on their several cases … At the termination of our tour the
zameendars
came and paid the Colonel a visit of three days at
his jagir of
Belaspore, and were feasted in turn.
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In the late seventeenth century the East India Company started trying to address the lack of European women in India by providing free passage and ‘diet’ for a year to those women – thoughtfully classified as ‘gentlewomen’ and ‘other women’ – who were prepared to travel to the subcontinent in search of husbands. Problems inevitably arose at the end of the year for some of ‘the Fishing Fleet’ (as they were
often unflatteringly termed) since no return passage was provided. In 1675 there were warnings that ‘some of these women are grown scandalous to our nation, religion and Government interest’, and the following year those who had neither gone home nor found husbands were to be ‘confined totally of their liberty to go abroad and be fed with bread and water’.

By 1809, in Bombay for instance, numbers of European women remained low, with three times as many men as women, though their numbers would increase when the shorter route to the subcontinent was fully established from the 1840s, the last leg running from Suez to Bombay by steamer. Lady Falkland, whose own husband was Governor of Bombay in the early 1850s, wrote that:

The arrival of a cargo (if I dare term it so) of young damsels from England is one of the exciting events that mark the advent of the
cold season.
It can be well imagined that their age, height, features, dress and manners become topics of conversation, and as they bring the latest fashions from Europe, they are objects of interest to their own sex.
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Officers strove to impress in their dashing uniforms, but members of the Indian Civil Service had the edge because they were the famed ‘three-hundred-a-year-dead-or-alive-men’ whose widows drew substantial pensions. Lady Falkland was delighted to relate that when one newly married fisherwoman heard, at a dinner party, that she was not entitled to an immediate settlement of £300 a year she shouted at her husband down the dinner table: ‘It’s a do, after all. It
is
a
do.’
The poet Aliph Cheem summed it up in the words he put into the mouth of Miss Arabella Green:

I do believe entirely in

The Civil Service ranks

The best are worth a deal of tin,

And none exactly blanks.

But I do believe that marrying

An acting man is fudge;

And do not fancy anything

Below a pucka Judge.

Not all the women were successful in their quest, however, and unkind wags quipped that ships going back to Britain at the end of the cold season were full of ‘returned empties’.

Ladies who arrived with dowries could present somewhat different problems. Sir John Sayer, Governor of Bombay, decided that Miss Ward, with her £3,000, would suit his son very well. Unfortunately, by the time he had reached this conclusion she had married a junior clerk; but the Governor did not let that stand in the way of the family’s fortunes: the marriage was annulled and Miss Ward married the Governor’s son. The delighted Sir John then arranged for a schoolmaster ‘to teach her to write good
English,
but, neglecting those orders, he taught her something else, and was discovered Practising … ’. A blast of gubernatorial fury had the offender shipped home in chains, but it was not an auspicious start to any marriage.
⁶⁸

Albert Hervey admitted that the arrival in Madras of Amanda, the niece of a ‘gallant officer’, had driven

all duty matters out of my head. My books fell into arrears; my reports were never written; I made no enquiries as to how matters were conducted in the Company I commanded; I never went near the men; I took an utter dislike to everything connected with my profession except my red coat, and that merely because I fancied I looked well in it.

When his commanding officer heard that he had allowed his
subadar
to pay his company in his absence, the colonel at once told the adjutant: ‘Put Mr Hervey’s name in orders as having been removed from the command, and take that company yourself. Good morning to you; you may go!’ The fair Amanda apparently ‘cried like a child’ when she heard the news, but went up-country and got married two weeks after arriving at ‘some station’.
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Hervey recognised that he had forgotten his duty, and he blamed a woman for making him do it.

Although there was a great deal more to the memsahibs than snobbishness and racial sensitivity (as we shall see later), their growing numbers contributed to a transformation in the upper tier of British society in India in which the relative cosmopolitanism of
1750, with its
bibis,
the
zenana
and the hookah, was replaced by the racial and religious discrimination of 1850, a process which both helps explain, and would be in turn worsened by, the Mutiny. As Sita Ram described it, in about 1812:

most of our officers had Indian women living with them, and these had great influence in the regiment. They always pretended to have more influence than was probably the case in order that they might be bribed to ask the sahibs for favours on our behalf … In those days the sahibs could speak our language much better than they do now, and they mixed more with us … The sahibs often used to give nautches for the regiment, and they attended all the men’s games. They also took us with them when they went out hunting, or at least those of us who wanted to go.
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The memsahibs displaced the
bibis,
and a recent historian has claimed that it was indeed the memsahibs who had the effect of:

spoiling that cohesive relationship which had been so enjoyed by the sahib and his sepoys in the past. With her petty insularity, her home-grown prejudices and petulant dependence on her countrymen, she had succeeded, by the time the Mutiny broke out, in divorcing the officer from his man, the collector from his clerk: Britain, in fact, from India.
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For a time some gentlemen like Sir John Hearsey maintained two separate domestic establishments. But by the 1830s the easy ways of the past were becoming condemned. When Robert Sale was commanding HM’s 13th, Bessie Fenton, an officer’s wife, noted that:

he will not allow a soldier to marry a native woman but laments he cannot prevent the officers from
disgracing
themselves. There is only one half-caste lady in the 13th, and it is rumoured that she is likely to leave it shortly: it is so far fortunate.

She had herself been looking forward to seeing her cousin Frank Gouldsbury and his new wife, but was too ill to do so when she reached Patna, and by the time she recovered he had been posted away. However, she remarked that it had turned out for the best, because:

My sanguine feelings had been a good deal quenched by the finding that the lady was a half-caste, in fact a natural daughter of Mr E—’s. Of this we had
not the most remote idea,
and felt very unwilling to be the medium of conveying it to his family, knowing the surprise and disappointment they must feel who were so wrapped up in him. I was a little mortified, as I had not supposed that I had a single connection in the country of that colour which seemed so unfashionable.
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She did, however, disapprove of an officer of the 47th Regiment ‘who left his “dark ladye” behind in India, when I called it deserting her’. The man ‘asked me, what could he do in England with a limited income, and a wife who could not wash her own face … ’ (ladies returning to England were rumoured to be so used to servants as to be unable to do anything for themselves).
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Things moved more slowly in Burma: ‘there there was no caste and no purdah, and women of all social grades went freely whenever they liked’. Many officers and officials married Burmese wives, or had a long-term relationship with:

a Burmese girl who kept house for him, darned his socks and looked after his money … Snooker and whist at the club would never have taught him what he learned from Ma Phyu. And surely a man who had loved a Burmese girl must at least think of the Burmese as human beings, not as columns of figures in his fortnightly returns.
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But customs changed even in Burma. In 1881 Colonel W. Munro, Deputy Commissioner of Bassein in Lower Burma, was denied promotion because he had a Burmese wife who had borne him several children. He protested that the relationship had begun twenty years before, when such things were looked upon more gently, but although his superior conceded that the practice had lasted ‘a full generation’ longer than it had in India, Munro was not promoted. And as if to prevent further misunderstandings, in 1894 the Chief Commissioner in Burma warned that a British officer who took a Burmese mistress ‘not only degrades himself as an English gentleman, but lowers the prestige of the English name and largely destroys his own usefulness’.
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In 1834 Albert Hervey described how some young officers had already lost the warm affection for their sepoys which had characterised his own generation:

There was a young spark amongst the batch of cadets doing duty with the —th who was very fond of using abusive language towards the men on parade; for instance, when dressing his Company he would come out with such expressions as the following, interlarded with many oaths – ‘Dress up, you black brute’. ‘Do you hear me, you nigger?’ finishing up with epithets that must not pollute our page. This was not a matter to be passed over unobserved, so the young man received a reprimand, with a threat that repetition would be attended with severe measures.
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In the aftermath of the Mutiny, William Russell thought that the transformation was complete. He dropped in at the railway office to get his baggage forwarded, and felt,

obliged to confess the fears which are expressed – that the sense of new-sprung power, operating on vulgar, half-educated men aided by the servility of those around them, may produce results most prejudicial to our influence among the natives – are not destitute of foundation, if I may take the manner of the person whom I found at the chief engineer’s house as a fair specimen of the behaviour of his class … If Europeans are not restrained by education and humanity from giving vent to their angry passions, there is little chance of their being punished for anything short of murder – and of murder it has sometimes been difficult to procure the conviction of Europeans at the hands of their own countrymen.
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But he had already seen that it was not just the ‘vulgar, half-educated’ who treated Indians with a disdain which would have shamed their grandfathers. In April 1858, Russell was smoking and reading the paper in the main office of Sir Joseph Banks’s bungalow in Lucknow when:

A
chaprassy
came in and announced that Munoora-ud-dowlah, formerly a man of great rank in Oudh, an ex-minister, and related to the Royal family, craved an audience with the Chief
Commissioner. He was ordered to walk in. A very old and venerable-looking gentleman entered, followed by two or three attendants, while his chief secretary paid us many compliments, expressive of delight at seeing us.

Sir Joseph’s two aides then haggled about whose turn it was to go in to the chief commissioner, and whether it might not be simplest to say he was too busy rather than to be ‘bored by this old humbug’. Sir Joseph eventually came in and greeted his friend with courtesy, but in the meantime Munoora had been ‘the very type of misery; for to an Oriental of his rank all this delay and hesitation about an audience were very unfavourable symptoms’. The old gentleman had always, Russell continued,

been noted for his hospitality to the English, for his magnificent sporting parties, and for his excellence as a shot at both large and small game. He had upwards of one hundred rifles of the best English make in his battery.

Munoora must have seen his nawab’s copy of the Zoffany painting of British officers and Indian gentlemen enjoying a cock-fight together many times. But while a previous generation might have regarded him as a genial fellow sportsman, in the era of the Mutiny he was just an ‘old humbug’. He never recovered from the ignominy, and died soon afterwards.
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