What struck new arrivals first was the heat, sometimes like a scorching blast from a hot oven, sometimes sticky and damp.
To Europeans, the sun was the enemy; to protect against its assault, one garment was essential: the topi. ‘We were all convinced that to abandon it even for a moment meant sickness and death,’ wrote Owain Jenkins, in 1929. Most of the Fishing Fleet would have bought theirs at the invaluable Simon Artz on the way out. This lightweight helmet, made from the pith of the Indian plant sola and covered in khaki cloth, was worn almost to the last days of the Raj. Earlier, the spine pad was also deemed essential for soldiers and sportsmen: this object, about seven inches long by three inches wide, filled with cork shavings, hung down from the collar of jacket or coat (it disappeared in the early 1900s).
One of the stranger habits of the Raj was the insistence on wearing flannel next to the skin, advocated by virtually all doctors until well into the twentieth century. ‘There are few of the ordinary diseases in India, which may not in the majority of cases be traced to the action of cold on the surface of the body, relaxed by the antecedent heat,’ ran one piece of medical advice.
As flannel was thought to absorb perspiration more successfully than cotton or linen, this fabric was recommended as underwear – in one of the world’s hottest climates. In the 1880s it was a ‘must’ for outdoor exercise, usually in the shape of a long-sleeved flannel tunic and flannel drawers. In the 1890s, as the heat in Simla increased, poor Lady Elgin, the Viceroy’s wife, spoke anxiously to their doctor about wearing winter clothing in such heat. He answered firmly, ‘No underclothing was to be changed.’
The stomach in particular was considered to be most at risk through over-rapid cooling, so a special flannel belt was designed, known as a cholera belt, supposed to protect against the disease. This quickly became a standard item; it continued to be worn long after the discovery of the cholera bacillus and the way that this was transmitted. In 1902 Ruby Madden was writing: ‘I wear my belt every night and find it a comfort.’ Unsurprisingly, perhaps, when she wanted to take a cold bath to counter the heat, Ruby was told that she couldn’t, as it laid one open to ‘all sorts of illnesses’.
As well as stifling in flannel underwear, women invariably wore corsets – it was a girl’s ambition to have, at marriage, a waist measurement no more than the number of years of her age – together with several petticoats, trimmed with frills or lace, beneath long-sleeved dresses. (In the nineteenth century, the fashion for crinolines and bustles had led some Indians to believe that European women had tails.) As the Raj was several years behind England in customs and fashions it was not until the 1920s that cotton dresses and light underwear made their appearance. Yet even as late as 1929 Jean Hilary was writing home, with a touch of excitement: ‘I found I could keep my stockings up rolled round garters, so wore no stays on the journey, which was much cooler!’
What sometimes caused even more problems was the question of dealing with the monthly menstrual cycle. Before tampons, women relied on sanitary towels or, sometimes, washable towelling squares. Adding to this inconvenience was the silence and embarrassment surrounding the subject; the thought of buying these necessaries from a male assistant in a chemist’s shop would have sent most girls away scarlet-faced. In the Raj, a girl caught unawares could only rely on female friends; although most had washable towels tucked away in case of emergencies, this was not always foolproof. Jean Hilary discovered, to her slight indignation, that the dhobi (washerman) in one house was too high-caste to undertake this task ‘so shall have to have mine burnt. Such a bore, as I seem to have very few left. They were always done in Calcutta.’ To a girl brought up with servants, now in a land where women did even less, the idea of doing such an unpleasant job herself simply did not occur.
The seasons – cold, hot or wet – dictated the pattern of British life in India. The start of the cold weather, lasting from November to April, was marked by the flowering of social life, the arrival of the Fishing Fleet and the return of the British officers and ICS men who had been on leave in England – most of them took leave to coincide with the English summer, though some in cavalry regiments preferred the winter, with its chance of a season’s hunting with a crack pack.
In Calcutta, the capital of British India until 1911, the seasons were predictable and easily dated. During the four winter months it was, in the opinion of Marian Atkins, ‘perfect summer weather, 70°F and no rain except for a few days either before or just after Christmas and therefore known as the Christmas rains.’ November was a popular month for weddings; it was also the month for a number of Indian festivals, such as Diwali. Christmas was celebrated as at home – from which presents had been ordered as early as October – but with local variations such as peafowl instead of turkey and perhaps a swim later in the day instead of an energetic frosty walk.
Delhi Week, with the Viceroy’s Ball as its climax, signalled the end of the cold-weather season. On 12 March the men changed into white and the hot weather officially began, with the temperature gradually increasing up to a maximum of around 45°C (or 130°F in the shade).
Even in the cold weather, though, the dust in Delhi was a byword. ‘Quite a foot deep on the road and powdery white stuff – you can’t see a yard in front of you,’ wrote Ruby Madden, who went out riding with a veil to protect the pink and white complexion she was so proud of. ‘When I got home my veil was perfectly white one side and green the other, so it showed what I had been saved.’
‘We are beginning to feel the real heat,’ wrote Lady Canning, wife of the Governor-General* in March 1856. The shutters were shut and the punkahs kept going but the Calcutta heat took its toll. ‘Any attempt to go out, even in a carriage, makes one gasp, and dissolve immediately, and an open window or door lets in a flood of hot air, as though one were passing the mouth of a foundry,’ wrote Lord Canning. Other seasonal hazards were snakes and monkeys. Lady Canning wrote that in her bedroom were lizards, running about the floor, and bats. ‘One evening I had five in the room flying about and squeaking and worse in the night; I was glad of my mosquito net for protection.’
‘The Punjab [then in the north-west of India, now in Pakistan] has a bad climate,’ wrote Bethea Field. ‘For the four months of the so-called “winter” it is pleasant – sunny, though chilly at night. Through February and early March, it is enjoyable. Then suddenly the great “heat” starts. In April and May there is relief from time to time from a sandstorm, bringing in its wake a cooler wind. Late May, June and July is a hell of heat, with daytime temperatures up to 120°F in the shade. In August the monsoon arrives, bringing relief from the high temperatures – but also so much humidity that the human body has to exist in a state of sweat.’
In the time of the Raj, long before air conditioning had been invented, the hot weather was an appalling strain for Europeans unused to its intensity – the heat, the flies, the dampness, the general discomfort, the glare. It was dreaded by everyone; some felt the northern part of India (except the north-west, which did not get the monsoon rains), where the temperature rose to great heights, was the worst, others that the damp heat of Bengal or Karachi, where the humidity was often 90 per cent or more and clothes had to be changed several times a day, was intolerable.
‘This is the way the hot season begins,’ wrote Lady Dufferin. ‘Day by day the wind gets hotter and hotter till it scorches as though it came out of an oven. The sound of a strong wind on a warm day is very depressing – there is something unnatural about it.’
Those who could stayed indoors all day, venturing out only just before sundown. Windows were shut by 7.30 a.m., and large screens made from reeds were kept wetted and hung over windows to cool any breeze that came in. At night, sleeping on verandas under mosquito nets was common. Sometimes it was possible to eat outside. ‘We used to have dinner on the lawn – dining tables and chairs, drawing-room furniture and standard lamp were carted out there every evening,’ wrote Rosemary Redpath, then living in Indore State.
When the hot weather really took hold it was no good relying on the proverbial ‘good night’s sleep’ to repair the ravages of the day: the heat, the noises of the night and the discomfort saw to that. It was the season when frogs croaked, cicadas sawed away relentlessly and jackals howled, an ululating, almost human shriek that rose and fell around the horizons or nearer – the drains in cantonments or stations were favourites for dens – setting off the barking of the numerous pi-dogs (mangy, feral skulking beasts with no owner) that scavenged round every village.
The summer was the time of year when rabies was most prevalent and if your dog had been bitten by a rabid dog it was often put down at once. For humans too the hot weather was intensely debilitating: boils, eczema, infections and fevers were common. Prickly heat* was almost impossible to avoid and although not health-destroying, could be appallingly unpleasant. Lord Minto, who was Viceroy from 1905 to 1910, described one of the Madras judges, Sir Henry Gillin, discovered by a visitor ‘rolling on his own floor, roaring like a baited bull,’ so tormenting was it.
‘Sitting on thorns would be agreeable by comparison,’ wrote one young lieutenant, ‘the infliction in that case being local; now, not a square inch of your body but is tingling and smarting with shooting pains, till you begin to imagine that in your youth you must have swallowed a packet of needles, which now oppressed by heat are endeavouring to make their escape from your interior.’
As the temperature rose, so insect life increased. Lady Canning remarked that her dinner table in Calcutta ‘was covered in creatures as thickly as a drawer of them in a museum’. Sometimes floors seemed alive with beetles; Lady Canning described huge cockroaches (‘as big as mice’) in her bedroom, ‘some moving away, side by side, like pairs of coach horses’. Before the days of electric light, flying ants and bluebottles incinerated themselves in candles and lizards grew fat. Green flies piled up round the base of the kerosene lamps and there were moths everywhere.
Some of these creatures were not simply a nuisance but the cause of lesser or greater physical unpleasantness. Stinkbugs, the tiny black shield bugs with a horrible, penetrating odour, arrived in their thousands. One earwig-like insect, the blister-fly, which could settle on people without their being aware of it, left immediate large and painful blisters on the skin if crushed while removing it. ‘Some crept up gentlemen’s sleeves, others concealed themselves in a jungle of whisker,’ wrote one guest at a ball that had suffered an invasion of these insects. ‘One heard little else all evening but “Allow me, Sir, to take off this blister-fly that is disappearing into your neck-cloth” or “Permit me, Ma’am, to remove this one from your arm”.
‘This, however, did not stop the dancers and they polka’d and waltzed over countless myriads of insects that had been attracted by the white cloth on the floor, which was completely discoloured by their mangled bodies at the end of the evening.’
Slippers and shoes had to be shaken before being put on in case a scorpion had climbed inside. There were hornets that could give a powerful and painful sting, and would fly into rooms to build tiny clay nests on the legs of furniture, in which they laid a grub, fed by pushing caterpillars through the hole they had left. ‘We had to watch out when playing tennis as poisonous black bees hung in great clusters from the porch,’ wrote Betsy Anderson, a Fishing Fleet girl of 1923. ‘Directly they were seen moving we had to take refuge inside while the special bee men were fetched. They cleverly swept and shook them into sacks and carried them off to an unknown destination.’
Up to and including Lord Curzon’s time (1899–1905), jackals would howl in the shrubberies after emerging from their dens in the drains and stinking civet cats would climb to the roof of the house, occasionally entering the bedrooms – Mary Curzon once woke to find a civet cat drinking her bedside glass of milk.
In the hot, damp weather, with its extreme humidity, mould destroyed books and shoes or rotted dresses so that they hung in strips, white ants gnawed at the foundations of houses. These, properly called termites, could eat through a whole trunkful of clothes in a single night; the only wood that can withstand their ravages is teak, one reason for the prevalence of teak furniture in the Raj. (If spotted, through the grey powder deposits they left, paraffin poured over them was a sure killer.)
‘You seem to be going in for enormous temperatures up there judging from the Madras Mail reports,’ wrote Leslie Lavie to his fiancée in Secunderabad on 9 April 1896. ‘We have nothing like that degree of temperature here (96°F being our highest up to date) but the heat here has certainly been much greater than anything I ever felt in Secunderabad, I suppose from the fact that this is more or less a damp heat here.
‘The worst of these damp heat places is that one’s skin gets covered in prickly heat and all sorts of unpleasant-looking things, while a dry heat does not seem to have that effect at all. I thought I was too much of a veteran for prickly heat as I never got it in Secunderabad but I’ve got it everywhere now and in addition I’ve got that most irksome of all the minor ills that flesh is heir to – a stye in my eye. We’ve all had them in succession – Hudson, Searle, Storr and myself.’ Next day he told her that the four of them had been obliged to shut their house up to avoid the scorching wind that blew in. ‘The nights are as hot as the days and sleeping inside is unbearable. Storr and I sleep in the garden always, and are the cynosure of many a passer’s-by eye, in the morning.’
‘In hot weather sleep was a real problem,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin. ‘Punkah coolies would fall asleep and have to be woken, brilliant moonlight by which you could read a book roused dogs to bark, echoed in villages for miles around, jackals howled, night birds screeched and chattered, led by the brain-fever bird.’ Sleeping outside, under a mosquito net, was the only alleviation. People tried everything, from dining with a block of ice (harvested in the cold weather and buried in pits until needed) under the table to damping pillows, sheets and the screens across windows.
Those who could left for hill stations like Simla, Mussoorie, Darjeeling; Srinagar, Gulmarg and Sonmarg in Jammu and Kashmir; Manali, Naini Tal, Gangtok and Kalimpong in the east of India, and Munnar, Ootacamund (Ooty) and Mahabaleshwar. In practice, this meant the women and children, with the men escaping from the scalding heat of the plains for a brief week or two when they could. The exception was the bureaucratic heart of government, which rolled up to Simla, files and all, to make it the summer capital of the Raj.
Then came the monsoon – India’s climate is dominated by monsoons, strong, often violent winds that change direction with the season, blowing from cold to warm regions (because cold air takes up more space than warm air). They blow from the land towards the sea in winter, and from the sea towards land in the summer. As a result, winters in the north, though hot, were dry (the Himalayas acted as a barrier to the north-east winds), with perhaps a little rain around Christmas, while the summer monsoons, roaring into the subcontinent from the south-west, loaded with moisture from the Indian Ocean, brought heavy rains from June to September. These torrential rainstorms can cause landslides, sweep away villages and flood thousands of square miles.
Lady Canning wrote of a hurricane during her first May in Calcutta. ‘The house shook, windows crashed and smashed, shutters were blown here and there. In my bedroom the windows had been left open and though the shutters were shut, the rain came in horizontally and drenched everything, even on the far side of the room, and left it ankle-deep in water, which rushed down the stairs in a cataract.’ Her shoes turned ‘furry with mildew’ in a day, her husband’s dispatch boxes looked ‘white and fungus’y’. Crickets, grasshoppers, huge black beetles and cockroaches appeared everywhere, so much so that the wine glasses on the dinner table had to have lids to cover them.
‘The chota bursat (little rains) may arrive ahead of the real monsoon,’ wrote Monica Campbell-Martin in Bihar. ‘You think the monsoon has arrived, because rain has fallen for a few hours. Your burning skin is relieved, your prickly heat is eased, but only for a short time. All over again, the days grow hotter, and back you go to where you started, steadily dripping. Once again the clouds pile up in thunderous beauty. You breathe air that is a dank and heavy substance, almost tangible. Around you everything is still. Every living thing seems waiting. Each night after each burning day seems waiting, too, in deathly quiet.
‘Suddenly, with a crash, the sky disintegrates in a vast avalanche of water. It rains for about three and a half months with intervals of hours, or of a few days, until the cold weather. There is no gentle season of the falling leaf. There is no spring. There is the cold weather, the hot weather, and the rains. On the Northwest Frontier there is not even a monsoon. When the rains fall everywhere else, on the Frontier it grows hotter and hotter.’
That year the monsoon, which had swept up the Bay of Bengal, broke on 14 June, and the streets were flooded on and off until the cold weather, which began at the end of October. By Christmas Monica needed a blanket on her bed.
In the Punjab there were often dust storms, ‘upheaving, whirling and carrying everything before them,’ said Anne Wilson, on a camping tour of duty with her husband, a Deputy Commissioner. The Wilsons were on horseback for that day’s march, when suddenly they saw a dust storm on the horizon. ‘The air had become warningly cold. We cantered as hard as we could but in spite of our pace we were overtaken by the storm; darkness that could be felt enveloped us; straw, dust and leaves whizzed past us, thunder rolled, hail beat on our faces.’
As her frightened horse began to plunge, her husband dismounted to hold it still and quiet it, whereupon his own horse tore itself free and galloped away into the darkness. After the dust storm had passed they made their way in heavy rain to the camp, which their servants had taken the precaution of pitching on high ground, with mounds of earth heaped up protectively against the outer wall of the tents. Even so, in the morning they were surrounded by a lake and had to organise the digging of channels to carry the water away.
In Calcutta, the monsoon eased off from September on. ‘By the end of that month a collection of coolies could be seen replanting the tennis courts everywhere, with a grass that “ran” like strawberry runners,’ commented twenty-one-year-old Marian Atkins in 1931. ‘So by November 1st we were playing on a perfectly level, entirely covered, good hard grass court! The sight screens were of hessian dyed with indigo so were almost navy blue – they were first class courts. The Saturday club had hard courts lighted – I emphasise this as it was a new concept and enabled the “box wallahs” to get exercise after office hours. The Club also had a few squash courts and a new swimming bath – all in the middle of built-up Calcutta.’
In Simla, Lady Dufferin was writing joyfully on 3 September 1885: ‘It is true the monsoon is really over. Oh! It is a comfort; you can’t think now tired one gets of the gloom and the everlasting drip, and the impossibility of settling beforehand to do anything out of doors.’