Until the last decades of the East India Company, most British men in India spent at least part of their careers living with at least one Indian or Eurasian woman – usually more than one, and often for most of their time in India. It was not a matter of class, temperament, availability or an excessively licentious manner of living. In the eighteenth century it was what happened. A member of council was as likely to have a ‘bibi’ or native mistress as a tradesman in Calcutta. John Shore was a pious official in the Company who had an Indian bibi and two half-Indian children; he returned to England and married an English girl (who produced nine children), went back to India as governor-general (1793–8) and in retirement became president of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The bibi was very much more than a concubine. Richard Burton, who spent seven years as an officer in India in the 1840s, lauded his first mistress as a nurse, a housekeeper and a teacher ‘not only [of] Hindostani grammar, but the syntaxes of native life’ too; furthermore she knew how to keep ‘the servants in order’. In later years he recalled that the erotic skills of Indian women were so superior to those of English men that no bibi had ever been able to love her lover, a deduction which, whether true or not, was – as one of his biographers has pointed out – ‘a melancholy admission on his own part’.1 As he later demonstrated with his translations of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden, Burton was an expert on sex, a prototype sexologist, but he may not have been an expert ‘practitioner’. One of his theories was that British soldiers were too rough and rapid when copulating – which may well have been the case – while Hindu women, ‘whose natural coldness’ was increased by their ‘vegetable diet and unuse of stimulants’, could not ‘be satisfied … with less than twenty minutes’. The men would have performed better, he believed, if they had learned the Hindu ‘retaining art’, delaying their ejaculation by drinking sherbert, chewing betel-nut or even smoking.2
There are many romantic stories, at least in the telling, of love affairs between British men and Indian women. When Job Charnock, traditionally regarded as the founder of Calcutta, came across a young Hindu widow about to be immolated on her husband’s funeral pyre, he was so struck by her beauty that he carried her off and married her. When William Linnaeus Gardner, a British officer and former mercenary, was negotiating a treaty in Surat, he suddenly glimpsed behind a curtain ‘the most beautiful black eyes in the world’. They belonged to the fourteen-year-old daughter of a nawab who, despite initial parental disapproval, was allowed to marry Gardner the following year: the marriage was so successful that, as he put it some decades later, he had never wished to take ‘another wife’, which surprised ‘the Musselmans very much’.3 Other marriages of this kind were equally enduring. In 1810, at the early age of twenty-two, the Company official Thomas Cobbe married ‘Nuzzeer Begum’, a Muslim from Bengal, with whom he had ten children. Their relationship lasted until 1836, when, on the voyage to England, he died after suffering a paralytic stroke while playing chess and was buried at sea.4
Several marriages between senior Company officials and upper-class Indian women took place at the end of the eighteenth century. Both James Dalrymple, commander of the British forces at Hyderabad, and James Kirpatrick, Resident at the nizam’s court at Hyderabad, married aristocratic Muslims. David Ochterlony, the Resident in Delhi early in the nineteenth century, is reported to have had thirteen wives who each had her own elephant in order to accompany him on his evening ride around the city walls.
Yet marriages at all levels of society were less frequent than relationships with a bibi. A native mistress might require a couple of servants and an allowance for betel, clothes and ornaments, but she would be less expensive to maintain than a wife (and safer, of course, to have sex with than prostitutes). One army officer believed that it was cheaper for him to keep a ‘harem’ of sixteen Indian mistresses than to look after a single English wife.5 Another pattern, common before about 1830, was for British men to have a bibi when young and then in middle age to marry an Englishwoman, often with the consequence, as in the case of John Shore, of having two sets of children. The artist Tilly Kettle arrived in India in 1769 and earned his living by painting portraits of Indian aristocrats in the style of Reynolds; while on the Subcontinent he had two children with an Indian woman, and on his return he had some more with an English wife.6 Sometimes it is difficult to tell from the records how many of such and such a general’s children were ‘natural’ and how many were legitimate. In the eighteenth century General Sir Robert Sloper, a commander-in-chief in India, certainly had six legitimate sons (two in British regiments, another in the Madras Army) and seems to have had at least half a dozen ‘natural’ children, including one son in the Dragoon Guards and another in the Light Dragoons, as well as a daughter whose husband was a Writer in the Company and a future postmaster-general in Bengal.7
William Hickey found it difficult to make the transition from one ethnic type to another. After his English mistress, Charlotte Barry, had died in Calcutta in 1783, Hickey remained chaste for some time but, being ‘of an amorous disposition’, he ‘one night sent for a native woman’. When one arrived, however, he lost all desire. Impotence recurred on two further occasions as he felt ‘the horror’ of the thought of ‘a connection with black women’. The horror receded when he realized that some Indian ladies were in fact ‘very lovely’ and that it was not ‘correct to call them black’; those from the Upper Provinces were actually ‘very fair’. Soon his wealthy friend Robert Pott, the Resident at Murshidabad, sent him ‘a very pretty little native girl’ called Kiraum ‘whom he recommended for my private use’. After cohabiting together for a year, she produced a boy whom Hickey considered to be ‘suspiciously dark’, and his suspicions about the paternity were confirmed when he found Kiraum in bed with another servant. Matters improved for Hickey when he met a ‘lovely Hindostanee girl’ called Jemdanee, whom he invited to ‘become an intimate … which she consented to do’. By his own account, the relationship was a great success. Unlike other women, ‘she never secluded herself from the sight of strangers’ and she took part in his extremely boozy ‘male parties, cordially joining in the mirth which prevailed, though she never touched wine or spirits of any kind’. They went to live in Chinsura, the old Dutch settlement on the Hooghly which was slightly cooler than Calcutta, and Jemdanee became pregnant. She hoped for a ‘chota William sahib’ and did indeed have a boy, this one ‘remarkably fair’, but alas she died in childbirth, and the baby died not long afterwards.8 Burra William sahib was deeply upset by their deaths.
Hickey’s love life in Calcutta was not unusual, and it was certainly less chaotic than those of some of his contemporaries. Richard Blechynden began his career as a midshipman but soon realized he preferred dry land to sea, and by 1784, at the age of twenty-four, he was working as an assistant to the Company’s civil architect in Calcutta. He never married, but he had mistresses who were Indian, Eurasian, Armenian and ‘country-born’ English. His favourite bibi was a Muslim lady with whom he lived openly in Calcutta, much as Hickey did with Jemdanee, though she did not visit his married friends. When she died in his arms, he wrote in his diary: ‘Thus have I lost one who had slept in them for near 7 years and an half and by whom I have had 5 children, 3 of whom survive her, and have lost an affectionate and too indulgent a mother.’9 Yet he had not been faithful to her and within a few weeks he had a new mistress, followed ‘to my sorrow’ by ‘plenty’ since. He usually kept them, one at a time, in a ‘garden house’ outside Calcutta.
None of Blechynden’s other lovers was in the same league as the Muslim lady. They did, however, belong to a different league of very heavy drinkers. An Armenian girl was a ‘drunken baggage’, but at least she was good-tempered, while ‘country-born’ Charlotte had tantrums after drinking beer, Madeira or bazaar arrack – it does not seem to have mattered what, as long as there was enough of it; she once drank nine bottles of Madeira in two days. In the mornings she would wake up in such a temper that she would pour water over her lover and tear his clothes. Even more violent was Isabella (probably Eurasian), who was prone to smashing things, drinking a couple of decanters of Madeira and then tearing the curtains and sweeping all the plates off the table and the sideboard. Even when she was sober she annoyed Blechynden by doing little all day except lounge about on a charpoy entertaining a ‘whole gang of Mousaalmannys singing and tom-toming’.10
One might conclude that Blechynden was a poor picker, but he did not really pick the girls. They effectively chose him and were either introduced by his servants or else they arrived at his gate as supplicants looking winsome and attractive. Although experienced, Blechynden was quite naive, and he would quickly convince himself that he had met the perfect girl with whom to enjoy ‘all the comforts of marriage without its plagues’. Only later would he realize that he had formed ‘one of the most unfortunate connections’ of his life.11
Blechynden’s diaries tell us a good deal about how a moderately prosperous Englishman might arrange his life in Calcutta in the decades either side of 1800. They also tell us a fair amount about masculine attitudes towards bibis and other women: one man called Doncaster was supposed to be looking after the bibi of his friend Collier, who was away, but as she was three months ‘gone with child’, he felt he could ‘strum’ her without risking a pregnancy. Blechynden’s pages are informative too about British women in Bengal who did not belong to the class that married colonels and civil servants. According to a scornful letter of Surgeon John Stewart, most of the women in Kanpur at that time were apparently ‘mere adventuresses from the milliners’ shops on Ludgate Hill and some even from Covent Garden and Old Drury’.12 At least some of the women in Calcutta belonged to a similar class. Blechynden’s Charlotte, who was now twenty, had been married at the age of thirteen to a sergeant-major in a Madras regiment; when she was too ill to accompany him to some place, she allowed herself to be seduced and kept by a lieutenant. Numerous acquaintances come to life in descriptions from Blechynden’s pen or his editor’s: a Mrs Rees who found her husband (a journalist) in bed with a Miss Rawlinson and so went to live with an army medical officer called Frushard; a Mrs Mulder who left her husband to live with a pilot called Collins: a Mrs Tucker who kept a brothel, a Mrs Macnamara who procured mistresses, and a Mrs Wade, whose husband found ‘a black fellow in bed with her’, after which she ‘moved in with the blacksmith Myers’.13
It is not always clear whether these and other women mentioned were British, Eurasian, ‘country-born’ or sometimes Indian. To Blechynden and his friends it did not seem to make much difference. We are still in an age when class mattered more than race as, at a different level of society, the marriages of Gardner and the British officers in Hyderabad have already shown. Blechynden treated his mistresses in much the same way, regardless of race, though the Muslim lady who died in his arms seems to have had certain advantages – in terms of respect, social life and household expenses – over the others.
Nobody could claim that relationships between British men and their Indian bibis were fair or balanced, yet many of them were enduringly affectionate; often they ended only in death. Hickey gave a number of examples of mutual concern and attachment: one ‘beautiful Hindostanee woman’ tried to wean her mate (Colonel Cooper) ‘from the destructive and baneful practice of drinking brandy or other spirits profusely … even in the morning’, while Dr Wilson, who had been ordered home for health reasons, was ‘so miserable at the idea of forever quitting a Hindostanee woman who had lived with him many years and borne him several children, that he could not prevail on himself to leave her’. He died soon afterwards, still in India.14
Bibis also received more concrete proofs of affection, including servants and allowances, and, after their lovers’ deaths, legacies to themselves and their children. When Major Charles Hay Elliot drew up his will in 1817, he left specific sums to three illegitimate daughters, and a further 35,000 rupees were set aside for the unborn baby which his bibi was carrying; a codicil later in the year revealed that the ‘expected child has now arrived’. If a man died unmarried, his bibi might receive the entire fortune, houses and animals as well as money and jewels. Even if he also had a wife and legitimate children, he would often attempt a reasonable distribution of his wealth. Captain James Nicholson wanted his estate to be divided equally among his ten children, two of whom he had had with his British wife, and the others with several Indian women. The legacy of Major Charles Campbell was to be shared more simply between just two sets of progeny, three children born to an Indian woman between 1820 and 1822, and five born to his British wife between 1825 and 1831. The wife was given custody of the three half-Indian children.15
By the time of Major Campbell’s Indian romance, the era of the bibi was already in decline. Analysis of the wills of the period has shown how after 1800 she became gradually less often a beneficiary.16 The custom did not of course end abruptly. Nobody was going to force old Colonel Chutney to give up his hookah, his bibi and his mulligatawny soup. At Gwalior in 1840 Emily Eden and her party dined with ‘Colonel J’, who lived ‘quite in the native style, with a few black Mrs Js gracing his domestic circle when we are not here’. A few years later, Colonel Meadows Taylor, an administrator and novelist, was found living at Sholapur like ‘a Turkish pasha in the midst of a well-filled harem’ that included one girl whose only duty was to ‘mull’ the colonel’s eyebrows.17 But young officers and Civilians were no longer openly keeping Indian mistresses. They did not keep British ones either, and very few had wives before they were thirty. Celibacy in their most sexually potent decade was for many British men now unavoidable.
The eclipse of the Indian mistress has traditionally been blamed on the arrival – in large numbers – of British women, who could travel to India much quicker than before and who, when they got there, were not prepared to tolerate someone who was both a competitor and a moral affront. Yet customs and morals had changed in Britain, and among men too. The kind of society that the Prince Regent had relished would have been abhorrent to the Prince Consort. Evangelicals may have been enthusiasts for the abolition of slavery, but they were not enthusiasts for cohabiting with other races or even sympathizing with their cultures. Utilitarian ideas were often accompanied by contempt for beliefs that were not Christian – and often for the holders of those beliefs themselves. As an obvious consequence, the British came to know and understand India very much less well. The old Company officers with their bibis had lived at least partly in another culture, imbibing, even passively, the scents and sounds of other peoples and other religions; they were bound to learn not only the grammar of their lovers’ language but also some of its nuances, just as they were bound to understand something about Diwali or Mohurrum if they were attached to someone who celebrated such festivals.
The disappearance of the bibi from British lives was followed by an attempt to efface her from British history. When Captain Williamson wrote The East India Vade Mecum in 1810, his book contained interesting information about bibis; when the second edition appeared in 1825, this had all been removed.18 When in 1854 John Kaye published his life of Sir Charles Metcalfe, he suppressed the fact that his subject had had an Indian wife and three half-Indian sons, one of them a distinguished soldier who was awarded the Order of the Bath and an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.* It seemed that the whole idea of interracial physical relationships was so appalling that people had to pretend not just that they had stopped but that they had not even happened. Henceforth only the inquisitive or the antiquarian would understand the significance of that little ruined building in a corner of a compound, concealed behind palms and smothered by convolvulus, that once had been the bibi khana, the residence of the bibi.
For the British the loss was much greater than what Sudipta Sen has called ‘the decline of intimacy’,19 much more drastic than the deprivation of erotic and domestic pleasure. The loss meant above all a forfeiture of understanding, of connection and even of knowledge. By disconnecting themselves from this area of human experience, the British were cutting an important link with the people they ruled and whose tacit consent to that rule they needed. The Resident at Hyderabad who had a Muslim wife and Muslim friends learned far more about what was happening in the nizam’s court than his Victorian successors were ever able to know.
The disappearance of the bibi did not put an end to British–Indian sexual relationships. British men still married Indian women,* they still used Indian prostitutes,† and some of them still had Indian concubines, though usually in remote places, in the hills or on the periphery, far from the sight of disapproving memsahibs at the Club. In the tea-growing highlands of Travancore, noted Monica Francis, planters often took a ‘beautiful plucking-girl’ to their beds. So did they in the hills of Assam. As in the stories of Kipling or Somerset Maugham in Malaya, most men had the local girlfriend before they found the English wife, but Maurice Lewis, a tea planter in Assam born in 1901, did it the other way round. After the failure of his conventional marriage, he took up with a ‘garden girl’ (as they were known in the north-east), with whom he had three daughters. William Sinclair Thom, a retired policemen in Burma, also went maritally from west to east. In 1930, when he was already in his sixties, he divorced his British wife and soon afterwards married a Burmese woman, Ma Tin, with whom he had several children; he also took a mistress from the country, with whom he had two more.20
The one place in the Indian Empire where something like the bibi system survived for another couple of generations was the part that was least Indian: Burma. British men had admired Burmese women since the eighteenth century, when officers from ships trading at Rangoon found them beautiful, charming and remarkably independent.21 Such views were retained. Comparing Moulmein in 1850 with what he had seen in India, Lord Dalhousie found ‘most singular’ the employment of ‘Burmese maidens in the shops, the prominence and freedom of the women generally, and their marriage at the mature age of eighteen to husbands of their own choice’.22 The men too were generally liked. Writing in the 1930s, one ICS officer recalled that he had ‘seldom met an English official who did not speak up for the Burmese. It was one of our commonplaces to call them the most engaging people in the Empire.’23 Orwell’s characters in Burmese Days may not have agreed with him, but real people did. Besides their charm, their allure and their independence, Burmese women were free of both caste and purdah.
In the last decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, the British authorities in Burma concurred that the climate was so bad in so many places that it was unsuitable for British women to live there. Charles Crosthwaite, the chief commissioner in the late 1880s, advised his officials not to marry because he considered the mortality risk to be unacceptably high. Memsahibs from later generations were able to demonstrate that the chief commissioner had been overcautious, but at the time the evidence seemed to prove him right. Alexander Mackenzie, his successor, lost his first wife in Burma in 1892 and nearly lost his second one there three years later. Not surprisingly, he suggested that all British wives in Burma should be advised to leave.
Timber firms working in Burma disapproved of British wives for another reason: they wanted their young recruits to be mobile and unburdened by a family. Such restrictions inevitably led to relationships between British men and Burmese women long after similar liaisons in India had faded away: in the early twentieth century, according to an investigator who lived there, 90 per cent of the British in Burma had local mistresses. Many of them were leading lonely lives in faraway places as Civilians, forest officers, timber agents or frontier policemen; they often did not see another European face for months at a time. Burma was the largest province of the Indian Empire and in 1901 contained just 8,537 British subjects, soldiers and civilians, most of them living in Rangoon or Mandalay. Outside those cities a few hundred British men and a much smaller number of British women were living spread over an area about the size of Spain. A young man in his twenties obviously needed someone to look after him, and if he could not have a British wife – because of his current income and her future health – it was natural for him to find a Burmese girl. So thought the benign George Hamilton, the secretary of state for India at the end of the nineteenth century. Burmese women, so he had ‘always understood’, made ‘most admirable housekeepers’ and were, besides, ‘busy engaging females, with a natural aptitude for the society of men’.24
Burma’s chief commissioners tended to be less sympathetic to the plight of their juniors, fearing that the practice of keeping a mistress would encourage corruption (the woman taking bribes from people who thought she had influence), would damage imperial prestige, and would lead to a class of Anglo-Burmans who would not belong to one community or the other. Yet Crosthwaite also felt that it was not the duty of the government ‘to enforce morality’, Mackenzie thought it was not his business ‘to pry into private life’, and his successor, Frederick Fryer, agreed that it was ‘out of the question’ to ‘stamp out concubinage in Burma, human nature being what it is’.25 There was a proviso, however, to all these viewpoints: that there should be no scandals and that nobody would make a fuss.
Unfortunately, these were impossible to prevent. Complaints about the immorality of officials in Burma had been made before; a bishop of Calcutta had been making them since 1870. But in 1900 two new purity-crusaders approached the viceroy (Curzon), Mrs Ada Castle and her husband Reginald, a police officer in Burma whom Fryer had had to remove from his post at Pegu because the couple insisted on criticizing the district officer, a man who, though now middle-aged and married to an Englishwoman, had in his younger days possessed a Burmese mistress. Mrs Castle’s new target was a junior district officer, Walter Minns, who, she alleged, lived openly with two Burmese women and even took one of them on official tours. Curzon disliked the idea of Mrs Castle and her ‘morbid puritanism’, but he was always tetchy if he thought imperial prestige was at stake. When he asked for explanations, Minns claimed that he had been ill on a tour and that the woman had come with him ‘not as a mistress but as a nurse’. The viceroy found this explanation ‘profoundly unsatisfactory’ and suggested that the errant official should be denied promotion for a time. Yet Minns was a good officer and a good linguist (doubtless he had good teachers), and before long he was deputy commissioner of Rangoon.26
Fryer’s solution to the general problem was to tell his officials to lead ‘a clean life’ or else forfeit promotion. The response of many was to marry their mistresses, which may have pleased the bishop of Calcutta and the purity-mongers, but it was not what Fryer himself wanted. By 1903 twenty-five British officials in Burma were married to Burmese women, nearly all of whom had previously been their mistresses. Fryer could now envisage lines of supplicants coming to the DO’s door, handing a present to the Burmese wife and expecting favours from the deputy commissioner. Curzon too was sufficiently alarmed to ask the India Office in London to issue rules discouraging the practice of marrying Burmese women. Hamilton could not make such decisions himself but had to rely on the judgement of the Council of India, a body of elderly men, most of whom were retired Civilians. Temperamentally inclined to block change – on the grounds that it had not been necessary ‘in their day’ – the councillors could not become enthusiastic about this issue. Alfred Lyall failed to see why a man should be penalized for marrying his mistress, while Crosthwaite, who knew as much about the problem as anyone, thought the government had no ‘right to dictate to its officers whom they shall or shall not marry’. The amiable Hamilton was relieved that he did not have to issue any rules. He admitted that he had ‘always been disposed to make very great allowance’ for British officers ‘shut off from contact with women of their own race and nationality’.27
All British careers in the Indian Empire discouraged early marriage. Some explicitly forbade it. You could not join the Political Department if you were married at the time of your application. Nor could you join the Frontier Scouts unless you were a bachelor who undertook to remain unmarried for at least three years. Other employers might not be so specific yet make it clear that they wished to hire young men who were single and mobile. No tea planter wanted an apprentice encumbered by a young family. When Robin Drummond asked a fellow member of the Forest Service to be the ‘best man’ at his wedding, the friend refused, insisting that marriage was a ‘bad thing for a forester’.28 India was a country for outdoor work, for young men ready to jump on a horse and gallop across the desert or into the jungle.
Mobility was certainly essential for a cornet or a subaltern, and many young officers would have agreed with Kipling’s lines in The Story of the Gadsbys:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
Early marriage would be a disaster – and fatal to ambition. As Captain Gadsby’s friend Mafflin sings,
You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,
That a young man married is a young man marred!
Even if a soldier was inclined to marry young, the military made it almost impossible for him to do so. In the late nineteenth century, noted Private Fraser of the Northumberland Fusiliers, only twenty-five or thirty women – known as ‘officers’ ladies and wives of other ranks’ – would be attached to each battalion.29 When a regiment sailed for India, it usually had a quota of twelve places for women for every hundred for men; if more than 12 per cent of the soldiers were married, some of their wives would thus be left behind – unless, as sometimes happened, they managed to get themselves smuggled on board. In India there was a married quarters ‘roll’ on which sergeants were given priority, followed by corporals. Although restrictions on the number of women brought obvious financial advantages – the military did not have to spend more money on allowances and married quarters – such a stark gender imbalance in so confined a space as a barracks inevitably encouraged resentments, jealousies, infidelities and, occasionally, murder.
With officers the chief obstacles to marriage were more hierarchical and financial than numerical. One would be a fool, thought an ensign, to ‘shackle’ oneself to a ‘doll’ and have to bring up children on a junior officer’s salary. An unwritten rule declared that ‘subalterns must not marry; captains may marry; majors should marry; and colonels must marry’.30 A corollary of the rule, as one colonel’s wife pointed out, was that subalterns should not waste the time of unmarried girls by dancing with them; they should leave them to waltz with the older men who were in a position to marry them, ‘the majors and captains or the very charming deputy commissioner’.31 Lieutenant Amies, whom we have already encountered, fell in love with Margaret Douglas on his first home leave in 1921 but did not feel he had enough money even to ‘declare’ himself then or during his next leave; fortunately Margaret was still available in 1926 when he proposed by post.32 By the time they married, at the end of that year in Bombay Cathedral, Amies was nearly thirty, the age when most officers were captains and when all were entitled to the marriage allowance. Yet their eligibility lasted only for a few years because, as one sharp-eyed memsahib noted, many men became increasingly ‘Mess-bound’ in their thirties, pampered by their servants and spoilt by the Mess and thus reluctant to exchange so comfortable a life for the uncertain pleasures of matrimony and domesticity.33 Hesitant suitors might also be put off by the prospect of asking the colonel’s permission, even though this was usually a formality,* and of introducing their fiancée to the Mess to make sure she was socially acceptable to senior colleagues and their wives.34
Early marriage for civil servants was discouraged almost as fervently as it was for soldiers. ‘Don’t marry till you have five years’ service,’ a senior civilian warned a Punjab griffin in 1890; it would be ‘ruin, utter ruin to your prospects’. Griffins tended to agree with him, imparting the ‘dreadful news’ when a colleague became engaged and warning each other of a dismal matrimonial future. Young Civilians were ‘generally totally spoilt by marriage’, wrote one of them, J. W. Hose, in 1887. From being fairly well off and able to participate in most areas of Indian life, work or sport, they became frugal and reclusive, going nowhere without their wives; instead of riding a horse, they sat on a seat in a dog-cart; instead of playing serious sports such as cricket or tennis, they played badminton; and they went to church with depressing regularity.35 ICS officers were fairly well paid, but they also had standards to keep up. When his fiancée, Geraldine, tried to hasten the date of their marriage in 1891, Lucas King, who was then thirty-four, pleaded his ‘impecuniosity’. Not only would she have to bring from England her trousseau, plate and crockery, together with a saddle and a piano, but he would need to provide a dog-cart, at least three horses plus a dining-room table and some other furniture for their house.36
In spite of the impediments, early marriages in the ICS did sometimes occur, and not always to the ‘utter ruin’ of the husband’s prospects. Henry Cotton rose to become chief commissioner of Assam in 1896 even though at the age of twenty-one he had married a teenage Irish girl whom the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron had found begging with her mother on Putney Heath. It was more common for civil service probationers to become engaged while still in England and then to wait a few years before they married. Sometimes the delay might be enforced by parental disapproval: hoping that his son would find a more suitable bride in Calcutta, John Beames’s father extracted a promise from him that he and his fiancée, Ellen, would wait two years without seeing each other before they married. (His ploy failed.) Others delayed their marriages until they had earned some promotion and saved enough money – or until they received financial support from one of their relations. Maurice Hayward could afford to marry in his mid-twenties only because his future mother-in-law, a widow, gave him the money. And Lucas King did not really have to fret about the cost of his wedding and his future domesticity: Geraldine’s brother was Alfred Harmsworth (the future founder of the Daily Mail), who paid for her trousseau and the piano, and later gave her an extremely generous allowance.37
For those without financial assistance, there was nothing to be done except wait in India, write letters and hope for the best. Engagements often lasted four or five years – sometimes without a single leave during that time when the pair could meet – and towards the end they would become fraught with anxieties, about the wedding day, about the couple’s feelings for each other, about how the girl would adapt to the realities of India and her husband’s commitment to his work. ‘I quite dread your being depressed by the monotony of India’, wrote Walter Ritchie to his fiancée, Augusta, in 1845, three years after he had last seen her, a monotony ‘which I, being interested in my labours, have never found disagreeable’.38
Even in Britain young people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries got engaged without knowing very much about their future partner. In India the situation was exacerbated by distance and by the extreme slowness of communications: a man writing to his fiancée from Calcutta at Christmas 1795 might not receive a loving reply before 1797. Even in the twentieth century men working in India sometimes felt that they did not know a girl well enough to propose face to face and decided it would be less awkward to do so later on by airmail or by telegram. Philip Martyn ICS met his future wife, Margaret, in Manchester in 1936, saw her twice more that summer before he returned to Bengal, proposed to her by letter six months later and, two and a half years after that, announced his intention to marry her in England and return with her to India.39
Perhaps the oddest engagement in a pretty rum catalogue was that of Maurice Zinkin, one of the last and cleverest members of the ICS (he got a triple first at Cambridge). At his university in 1936 he had a single meeting with his future wife, Taya, who corresponded with him over the following nine years under the impression that he was ‘the handsome six-footer’ she had met on the River Cam rather than his ‘shy companion’. For people who had only met once, their letters were certainly intimate: in 1942 he told her that he was ‘a snob’ about whom he went to bed with because it was ‘very sordid to sleep with somebody one can neither talk to the following morning nor introduce to one’s friends the next evening’. Perhaps this put her off. At any rate they both became engaged to other people and then got simultaneously disengaged from them. As if it were the most logical thing in the world, Maurice then proposed by post from India and Taya accepted by post from America even though ‘ten thousand miles and nine years separated us’.40
As far as one can judge, most of the long and hazardous engagements had an appropriately happy ending. Yet some inevitably went wrong. The betrothed of Henry Middleton Rogers decided in the end to stay in England to become in 1874 the second wife of the 10th Duke of St Albans. Such an act of decisiveness at least spared the girl the trauma of the voyage to India, the danger of falling for someone attractive on board ship, and the risk of an unhappy meeting on the quayside when, after so many years apart, the couple realized that they no longer found each other appealing. In the 1780s a Major Burn proposed by letter to a Miss Kearman, whom he had known many years earlier in Ireland, and on her acceptance sent her money for the journey. She duly arrived to find that the major, away on campaign, had asked his friend Colonel Watson to look after her in his absence. The colonel duly did so but, according to Hickey, ‘became so deeply enamoured of the Major’s intended as to render him quite miserable’. As Miss Kearman returned ‘the Colonel’s passion’, he felt obliged to confess all to the major, who, instead of following the custom of the time and challenging his friend to a duel, said that no ‘consideration upon earth [would] unite himself to so errant a jilt’ and that the colonel was ‘heartily welcome to the capricious lady’.41
A fortunate minority of British men found British wives in India, often daughters of senior officers and officials. Given the gender imbalance, there was inevitably a lot of competition for the daughter of a general or a lieutenant-governor but, unless the father rebuffed all suitors, somebody had to win. ADCs, lounging about Government House with nothing much to do except organize parties, were especially well placed. When Lord Minto was viceroy (1905–10), his daughter Lady Eileen Elliot was keen to marry one of her father’s ADCs, but for snobbish reasons her mother disapproved of the match – the man was a subaltern in the Deccan Horse – and she eventually married another ADC who was in the Grenadier Guards and more socially acceptable: Lord Francis Scott, a younger son of the Duke of Buccleuch, who was a neighbour of the Mintos in the Borders.42 Junior Civilians in the secretariats had a similar advantage because they were bound to mix socially with the families of lieutenant-governors and other senior officials, meeting them at dances and picnics and tennis matches. They certainly had the upper hand over jungle wallahs or colleagues working as subdivisional officers in the mofussil. William Mackworth Young was one of several Civilians who married the daughter of a lieutenant-governor and who, twenty or thirty years later, occupied the same post (or a comparable one) – in this case the Punjab.
It was common to marry within one’s service. Several officers in the Royal Engineers married the daughters of older officers in the Royal Engineers.43 Frederick Currie, a Civilian and the last chairman of the East India Company, had twelve children from three wives, all of them daughters of civil servants. Yet such marriages were more the result of opportunity and circumstance than of snobbery and superior feelings of exclusivity. Several Civilians found wives in the business community of Kanpur: Philip Hutchins married a girl whose father owned a sugar factory.44 Business families may in fact have been more exclusive than those higher up in the social rankings. They were after all rooted to a certain place, to Kanpur say, or Calcutta, in a way that Civilians and army officers obviously were not. Many girls from these backgrounds understandably preferred to remain near their families rather than follow husbands from one station or cantonment to another. Rumer Godden, the novelist, was one of four sisters brought up in Bengal who all married businessmen in Calcutta. Rumer’s own marriage, unlike her sisters’, was a disaster, her husband Laurence being a ‘cheerful Philistine’ who fell asleep in concerts and thought Omar Khayyam was a curry. According to one of their friends, Laurence was also ‘completely sports-mad’ while Rumer ‘didn’t know a golf ball from a tennis ball’. He was also financially idiotic. They got divorced in 1948.45
Some British men met their future wives on board ship. In 1938 Roy Urquhart, an army officer aged thirty-six, was on his way to the north-west frontier to rejoin his regiment, the Highland Light Infantry, when he found himself playing deck games with the twenty-year-old Pamela Edith Condon.46 They married the following year in India, a few years before Urquhart, by now a major-general, led the parachute drop on Arnhem, an exploit that earned him further fame when he was played by Sean Connery in the film A Bridge Too Far. Other men were lucky enough to meet in India and later marry the relative of a friend, a girl who had come out to visit a brother or to chaperone a sister about to marry a planter or a forestry official.
Yet these people were always in a minority. Most officers and officials had to wait until their first furlough, their first return to Britain, before they had a good chance of finding a wife. By that time they were thirty years of age and often feeling what one IMS officer called ‘the pangs of sexual starvation’. After years in a remote station, some were so desperate that, as Emily Eden noted, they proposed to ‘the very first girl’ they met. On his voyage west the Civilian John Maynard encountered his future wife in Egypt and proposed to her in Venice, behind a pillar in St Mark’s, before he had even got home. The policeman Bill Tydd waited till he had got to Edinburgh and then proposed to a girl under an arch of the Forth Bridge.47
Yet most courtships, at least in the Victorian era, were more methodical and less romantic than these. For many men, sex and love were lower priorities than ‘suitability’ and ‘character’ and whether a woman could be considered ‘well fitted to adorn an Indian home’. George Campbell, a future lieutenant-governor of Bengal, thought that on the whole it would be advantageous to ‘provide’ himself with a mate, though on furlough he spent less time looking for one than writing books and reading for the Bar. John Lawrence, the only Civilian ever to become viceroy, embarked on his furlough with the intention of finding a woman of good health, good temper and good sense. He had no ambitions for a romantic attachment – he referred to his still-imaginary future wife as ‘the calamity’ – and diligently sought ‘good sense’ first in Bath and then, having failed to find her there, in Donegal, where he succeeded. When George Partridge, a Madras Civilian born in Devon in 1865, started looking for a wife in his forties, he set off on the quest not because he wanted a companion in India but because he required a chatelaine for the small estate he had bought for his retirement in Devonshire. At Ooty one year he had been so taken by the charms of two married sisters that on his next furlough he went to their family home in northern Ireland and persuaded one of their siblings to marry him.48
Sometimes a wedding could be arranged quickly and celebrated on home ground. More often, even when engagements were made face to face in Britain, preparations were done intercontinentally. The man went back to his work in India, and his fiancée followed him, generally with a chaperone, months – or often years – later. Some parents opposed to the marriage took advantage of this interval to attempt to persuade their daughters to change their minds. The mother of Gwendolyn Prideaux tried to put her daughter off by telling her about all the unpleasant insects she would find in India; Gwendolyn disregarded the warnings and, after a two-year engagement, sailed to India in 1909 to marry Reginald Gadsby in Bombay Cathedral.49 Even with maternal co-operation, there was a lot to organize for a girl about to undertake three very big adventures: marriage to a man she hardly knew, life on a continent she may never have visited, and the beginning, in difficult conditions, of many years of motherhood. Geraldine Harmsworth did her best to prepare herself by taking riding lessons and reading Kipling: her bossy fiancé, Lucas King, had told her that she would have to ride well if she was going to be a ‘50
Weddings could take place anywhere from Karachi to Rangoon, but after 1869 the most common venue was Bombay, which possessed two cathedrals and almost all the relevant chapels, kirks and churches. Every Friday, recalled one local businessman, ‘The voice that breathed o’er Eden’ could be heard ‘from morn to evening as the newest batch of brides was wedded’ at the Anglican Cathedral.51 Bombay was the favoured spot because, even if the groom lived in Kanpur or Madras, it was considered preferable for the girl to get married as soon as she reached India, and after Bombay to enjoy a brief honeymoon – sometimes in Agra, visiting the Taj Mahal – before travelling to her husband’s station. Like many other women, Phyllis Field was married straight ‘off the ship’ in Bombay. She had met Charles Watson ICS in 1910 at St Moritz, where her mother took her for winter sports and where she became part of a bobsleigh team driven down the snow run by the German crown prince, known as ‘Little Willy’. She was at the time twenty-three; Watson was thirty-five and on leave from his post as political and judicial secretary of the Bombay government. In London a few weeks later, he put on a silk top hat, took her to Chelsea to see Wren’s chapel in the Royal Hospital and proposed to her in a hansom cab afterwards. For reasons unknown, they then had to wait two years before Phyllis sailed to Bombay; she was married the day of her arrival at All Saints Church and, thanks to her husband’s position, had the wedding reception at Government House on Malabar Point.52
The pattern for Bombay weddings was followed over four generations. In 1929 Laurence Fleming’s mother was also married ‘off the ship’ in the city. She arrived on the morning of her wedding day on a Lloyd Triestino boat from Genoa and was met on board ship by her fiancé, who worked for the Assam and Burmah Oil Companies; he had reached the city after 2,000 miles of train journeys. After disembarking, the bride spent the morning at the hairdresser’s and a shoe shop – her silver kid shoes had been ruined during the voyage – before lunching with a few friends at the Yacht Club. The wedding took place in the afternoon at the Church of Scotland in Waudby Road, following which the newly married couple moved to the Taj Hotel, where they gave a dinner for their wedding guests and danced to the music of Cherpino’s Broadway Follies, who were in town at the time. The next day they set off for their honeymoon in Pachmarhi, the chief hill station of the Central Provinces.53
Few people left records of wedding nights and honeymoons. Some of those who did left no doubt – even implicitly – how difficult and sometimes disastrous these could be. Fanny Maxwell’s Indian honeymoon consisted of accompanying her husband, an ICS officer, on a working tour of his district at the beginning of the hot weather. Her diary does not describe the couple’s physical relationship, but curt references to ‘cross husband’ and entries no more romantic than ‘usual number of meals, nothing else worth chronicling’ or ‘I have not room to describe my feelings’ do not suggest that it was an idyll.54 Mary Collyer had a Scottish honeymoon with her much older husband, the engineer Jack Shaw Stewart, but it was clearly such a failure that she refused afterwards to go with him to India, where her mother had died of cholera when she was a baby. She remained in Britain for six months and only joined her husband because her father took her to Marseille and forcibly put her on the steamer, ‘accompanied by her maid Knowles’.55 One man who bravely recorded in Stendhalian terms the ‘fiasco’ of his wedding night was Roger Pearce, who belonged to the last batch of British ICS officers in Sind. After a year’s separation on different continents, his bride, Joan, arrived in Karachi, met a lot of strangers, got married the same day and spent her wedding night at a hotel where at breakfast next morning the other guests ‘were doubtless imagining a night passed full of bliss and passion’. Alas it had not happened. As her husband sadly recalled, ‘Two virgins meeting on their wedding night’ had been ‘very tired, overwrought, unsure’ – and ‘unskilled too’. Luckily things improved the next day when they moved to a cabin on a bay north of Karachi, a place where they could sleep, swim, lie in the sun and make love.56
We cannot know how often impotence was a wedding-night problem, though we might guess it was unusual for the husband also to be virginal. Yet even if the sexual dimension worked from the start, there were many other sides of the relationship that were unknown, untested and potential marriage-wreckers. Rumer Godden was not the only intellectual to marry the sort of man who disliked concerts and had never heard of Omar Khayyam. Edyth Gubbins was a passionate Wagnerian and lover of Mughal architecture who discovered she had married an army captain who thought the Taj Mahal was ‘a hideous monstrosity’ and whose chief interest was shooting and recording the numbers and species of birds he had killed.57 One problem was the fact that most couples had hardly had any time to get to know each other before they were married. Another snag was the ignorance of older husbands, set in their ways after years in the Mess or the jungle or the civil station, who had had no tutoring in understanding their young wives’ needs. ‘Stalky’ Dunsterville, who married on his thirty-second birthday, was engagingly frank about his shortcomings in this respect. After referring to his wedding in Bishopsteignton, his brief honeymoon in Devonshire, and the long voyage to Bombay, he recognized that this had been ‘rather a rough start in life for my wife’, which had perhaps been ‘made rougher by the fact that I was not at all cut out for the rôle of the kind, thoughtful, protecting husband’. Matters did not improve after they reached the port. During the train journey from Bombay to Peshawar, ‘my wife was rather wishing she had never come to India’.58
A third drawback, common to most professions in India but especially true of the military, was the custom of transferring employees, often every couple of years, so that wives could seldom feel they had settled down in a place long enough to have a family home and plan a garden. Dunsterville and his wife had to set up house five times in the first two years of their marriage, a process of upheaval that prompted Mrs Dunsterville to write ‘Disillusionment’, a newspaper article contrasting the expectations of a bride in India with the reality of her life there. The military was invariably unsentimental about the movements of married couples. After his honeymoon Captain John Prendergast went back to his fort on the Khyber, while his wife, Peggy, began married life by herself in a flat in Peshawar. The Gurkha officer Robert Bristow had a similar experience, returning after his wedding to his battalion at ‘monastic’ Razmak and leaving his wife in a hotel in Murree. In his twenty-nine years in India Bristow lived in fifteen ‘peacetime’ stations, not counting army courses and summer leaves in hill stations.59
In addition to the other shocks – marriage, sex, sea voyage, strange land and usually pregnancy – a new wife had to begin married life in a home which very seldom possessed the amenities she had known in Britain. Towards the end of her time in India, Alice Hayward may have lived rather grandly in Bombay, where her husband was a High Court judge, but at the beginning (1892) the future Lady Hayward had to live in a bungalow where the floors were made of cow dung (covered in date matting) and where, on first arrival, she found a cobra lying outside the door.60 Other wives might find nicer bungalows but in unpleasant and dangerous places. Jacobabad in Sind had one of the worst climates in India, a place which in the nineteenth century took a terrible toll on the lives of wives and children. Even though the risks were reduced in the following century, the Civilian Roger Pearce (who liked it) knew that he ‘would have courted marital disaster’ if he had extended his term there.61
In his story ‘By Word of Mouth’ Kipling described India as ‘a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption.’ This was doubtless very true, though one wonders how many couples Kipling saw – apart from his parents – where the folk really were ‘wrapped up in one another’. And for those who were not, India must have been a terrible place. In the mofussil, in jungles or canal homes or remote stations, a husband and wife would be more dependent on each other than they would ever need to be in the cities or in Britain. And unless one of them died, they were probably stuck with one another for a very long time in an extremely difficult environment.
The alternative was divorce, which could not take place just because spouses got bored of each other, or separation, which could be done gradually and quite discreetly, especially if the children were at schools in Britain and needing the presence of their mother. Yet separations could be handled, in India as anywhere else, quite brutally. In 1890 Alexandra Campbell, the daughter of an army officer, married Reginald Warneford, a railway engineer who had rescued her when the ponies of her trap had bolted. Yet after a few years she clearly felt she could have ‘done better’ for herself. Although she stayed with him long enough to produce a son and four daughters, she resented his profession, his attachment to the railways, and his fondness for his Indian employees. Eventually she left him, without a note or an explanation, and took their daughters to live with her parents in Darjeeling. After waiting a few months for Reginald to drink himself to death in the Plains, she married an army officer and sent her son Rex to live with her former father-in-law in England.* 62
Most couples, however, did not separate. They felt it would be too difficult to do so, too embarrassing, too unsettling for their children, their relations and their professions in India. It was easier, really, just to keep plugging on. Alfred Lyall was one of numerous Civilians who realized he had made a mistake on his first furlough, in his case when in 1863 he married a Dutch girl called Cora Cloete. ‘The way to get on with a male Lyall,’ he reminded one of his sisters, was ‘to leave him a good deal alone’. Yet this was obviously not a policy poor Cora could pursue: she was forced to follow him around, with their growing family, as Alfred was promoted from the North-Western Provinces to the Central Provinces, to Calcutta and Simla, to Rajputana, to Calcutta and Simla again, and finally back to where he started, in the NWP as lieutenant-governor. Soon after the birth of his elder son, Lyall said that he did not want to be ‘hampered’ by any more children, partly because he wished to concentrate on his work but also because he was ‘generally averse to babies and their appurtenances’. Even though he was presumably at least partly to blame for soon accumulating four children, he resented them and sometimes wished they did not exist, especially his daughter Sophy, whom he suspected of having ‘very strong sexual instincts’ and who embarrassed him by her blatant infatuation with his private secretary.
Yet his resentment was chiefly directed at his wife, whom he described in letters to his sisters as his ‘misfortune’. Half his life, he moaned, had ‘been wasted by one mistake’: Cora was no help with his work and gave him no counsel or rest at times when a man needed them. He realized with bitterness but also with resignation that he would never have ‘a pleasant home’ with her in India or afterwards. After fifteen years of marriage he was wishing she would go to England and look after the children there, but the more he tried to persaude her, ‘the more she [was] disposed to hold tight’. Cora did indeed stick it out till the end, enjoying ‘her rank and dignities’ as a lieutenant-governor’s wife in Naini Tal and Allahabad, leaving India with him for good in 1887, and living with him in South Kensington until his death in 1911.63
Alfred Lyall was one of several lieutenant-governors of the North-Western (later known as United) Provinces who were very unhappily married. When John Hewett was appointed to the post in 1907, his separated wife insisted on returning to him to enjoy being ‘her ladyship’, though they lived in different wings of Naini Tal’s Government House and seldom spoke to each other. They were succeeded by James Meston, who had a sick wife unable to control her jealousy, and then by Harcourt Butler, whose wife, Florence, apparently abandoned him – at least temporarily – as they came out of church on their wedding day; she had rejected his first wedding proposal and was clearly regretting that she had changed her mind. Many years later, she gave an order to her husband’s under-secretary: ‘Mr Lupton, never leave me in the room with Harcourt.’ Poor Butler, a highly sexed man with a salacious sense of humour, confessed to the same subordinate that, although he and his wife had been married for many years, they had not lived together for more than eight days. One of the cleverest and most erudite of British officials, he drank himself slowly to a premature death in 1938. Florence did not attend his memorial service.64
Few British marriages in India ended in divorce, but many ended early in death, which led to a good deal of rapid remarrying. In the army second and further marriages were partly a consequence of age gaps – a teenage girl from an orphanage having married a much older sergeant – but also a result of financial imperatives. Such considerations did not greatly affect the widows of ICS officers, who received a good pension whatever age or rank their husbands had attained, or widows of other officials, who were likewise looked after. But the widows of private soldiers enjoyed no such security. Within three months of the deaths of their husbands, they were struck ‘off the strength’ of the regiment and needed to find somewhere to live and something to live on. The mortality rate among soldiers was so high – from disease and drink more than from death in battle – that anxiety was almost a constant. Fortunately, the gender imbalance being what it was, a widow could usually – unless she had made herself obnoxious to everyone – find herself a replacement before the three months were over. Marianne Postans, the wife of a captain in Bombay, recorded in the 1830s an incident when, within an hour of a gunner’s death from fever in a hospital, his widow had received three offers of marriage, and within a week she remarried. The process was repeated twice more, after similar intervals, and might presumably have continued indefinitely if the woman herself had not died, still at a young age.65
In 1846 a British army ended the First Sikh War with a victory at Sobraon on the banks of the River Sutlej. Yet the casualty rate was high, creating fourteen or fifteen widows in one dragoon regiment. Several of these women, according to Sergeant Pearman, had been married three or four times already, and most of them were able to remarry within a month, almost immediately after their ‘return to quarters’; when one of them married Sergeant Gooderson of H Troop, she was embarking on her sixth marriage.66 Mrs Postans criticized the ‘heartless indifference’ of the way such women talked ‘of the probable fate of their husbands’, but she also understood the ‘temptations, restraints and miseries’ to which they were subjected in their daily lives.67 If, as was alleged, some of them had lined up potential replacements before their husbands were in any obvious danger, this might be regarded as sensible rather than heartless, especially if the age gap was such that even in the normal course of events their spouses would predecease them by two or three decades. In any case such things did not only happen in their particular class. William Hickey was unusually and unfairly censorious when he criticized Sir Arthur Heselrige’s second wife – ‘a wild and giddy girl of fifteen’ whom he had married in his forties – for being a ‘wanton widow’ when, after Heselrige had died from ‘bilious fever’, she ‘consoled herself in the arms of a handsome young lieutenant of infantry … who became her second husband’.68
Soldiers’ wives may have been the most needy, but they were not of course the only widows who wanted to remarry and stay in India. If a woman had been away for many years and had got used to large houses, lots of servants and summers in the Hills, then she might find it more convenient and less disruptive to seek a bachelor or a widower still at work on the Subcontinent than to go home alone and live by herself (at least to start with) in Eastbourne or Cheltenham. Maurice Hayward observed how one widow, the sister of a Colonel Grantham, targeted the district judge of Poona, William Henry Crowe, ingratiated herself by pruning the creepers on his bungalow and, ‘in spite of wearing bloomers to the scandal of Poona’, succeeded in becoming Mrs Crowe.69
The eighteenth century witnessed rather more colourful and ‘scandalous’ examples of remarriage. In 1709 Katherine Cooke, ‘a most beautiful lady not exceeding thirteen or fourteen years of age’, was obliged by her parents to marry the chief of the factory at Karwar, south of Bombay, a Company official ‘in years’ and apparently ‘deformed’. Within two years her husband died, and she married a younger, more suitable factor. Before another year was over he had been killed at sea by a cannonball fired by Maratha ‘pirates’, who then boarded her ship and captured this twice-widowed and heavily pregnant teenager. After she had been rescued, she married yet another Company official, who was also killed in a fight with ‘natives’, this time in southern India, after which – by now in her mid-twenties – she became the mistress of the commodore of a British squadron who took her home to England.70
The most famous remarried widow in British Indian history was Frances Croke, who was born in the south at Fort St David in 1728. The daughter of a civil servant of the EIC, she became Mrs Templer at the age of fifteen, Mrs Altham at the age of twenty, and Mrs Watts also at the age of twenty (James Altham having died of smallpox twelve days after their wedding). Now living in Bengal, she had four children with William Watts and retired with him to England, but after his death in 1764 she realized that India was where she wanted to be. On returning to Calcutta she made the worst mistake of her life when, at the age of forty-six, she married the Rev. William Johnson, a smug and greedy chaplain sixteen years her junior. As death this time did not remove her husband, she had to do so herself, giving him a sizeable pension on condition that he went to England and did not return. Now known as Begum Johnson, Frances remained in Calcutta for another quarter of a century, a well-known hostess and much-loved figure. She died in her eighties in 1812, the year that her grandson, the second Lord Liverpool, became prime minister of Great Britain.71
British men might have been as keen to remarry as British women, but the ratio of the sexes gave them fewer opportunities to do so, certainly among the rank and file of the army. In Britain it was generally accepted that a man should wait at least a year after his wife’s death before he remarried, but such restrictions were rarely observed in India. Three months or so seem to have been a reasonable time limit, even for senior officials and army officers. A shorter period managed to outrage William Hickey, himself no slouch when it came to promiscuous and indecorous behaviour. After Mary Keighley’s death in the 1780s, her husband, who was head of the Company’s factory at Cossimbazaar, ‘seemed inconsolable’, yet ‘at the end of a fortnight took unto himself another spouse, marrying a Miss Peach’. Bizarrely Hickey chiefly blamed the second wife, declaring that he could not conceive how any ‘female possessing a particle of feeling could have consented to unite herself to a man who had been only a widower a few days’.72
Hickey did not live long enough to witness the marital career of George Jenkin Waters, a judge in the south who became known as ‘the Bluebeard of the civil service’ after burying four wives in the decade from 1823, the first two honoured by a large mausoleum in Chittoor. Later he slowed down. He did not bury his fifth wife until 1857 and then delayed until 1871 before marrying his sixth. He himself died at Brighton in 1882 at the age of ninety.73
Whatever criticism the custom provoked, British men continued to marry Indian, Burmese and Eurasian women until the end of the Raj and beyond. In smaller numbers British women also married Indian men. As we have noted, a few senior Company officials married aristocratic Indian girls, in Hyderabad and elsewhere, at the end of the eighteenth century, and a hundred years later officials in Burma were marrying their mistresses. Yet a good deal of intermarriage took place at other times and in other places.
Few sites in British India were more ‘establishment’ – to use a later word – than the Bengal Club in Calcutta, which was founded in 1827 at about the same time that the Garrick, the Reform and the Athenaeum clubs were set up in London. Yet a glance at the list of founder members suggests neither the snobbery – it includes bankers,74 A generation later, Judge Kemp, who joined the ICS in 1831, married an Indian woman, as did a number of other judges, especially in Burma, until Independence. Sir Henry Sheldon Pratt, who was chief justice in Rangoon, married Ma Win from Bassein in 1902, and together they produced five children. After his wife’s death, near Maymyo in 1935, Pratt had her tomb inscribed with the words ‘Far above Rubies’.75
Planters, policemen, missionaries and members of every other profession also married Indian and Burmese women. Often they chose tribal brides from the hills, girls unhampered by the inhibitions of caste or purdah. When Ernest Bradfield, the head of the Indian Medical Service, visited the Kulu Valley in 1937, he found that most of the British settlers in that part of the Himalayan foothills had married hill women. At Darjeeling in the same period, the Scottish manager of a tea garden, a widower in his sixties, married Jeti, a teenage girl from a local tribe who had worked for him as a tea-picker. Another admirer of tribal women was the remarkable Verrier Elwin, once described as ‘the anthropologist who married his fieldwork’. In fact he did so twice, first with a Gond girl called Kosi and later with a Pardhan girl called Kachari; while living with them and their tribes he became recognized as an academic expert on tribal sexual behaviour.76
Such unions were not of course easily accepted. The tea manager was not permitted to take Jeti to lunch in the Planters’ Club at Darjeeling. Verrier Elwin’s mother told her son that with his ‘brains and powers’ he really couldn’t ‘go on as a cave man’.77 The surgeon Owen Berkeley-Hill had had problems with his mother all his life and only went into the IMS to stop her nagging him. When stationed at the Secunderabad cantonment before the First World War he had an affair with a (female) punkah wallah, and he later married Karimbil Kunhimanny, a Tiyyan girl by caste, an event that ‘incurred the displeasure’ of many of his friends and family. It could not, however, incur the displeasure of his mother because he did not dare tell her until a few years before her death that he had an Indian wife and four children.78
British–Indian marriages might not ultimately affect a Civilian’s career, but they remained frowned upon in the ICS until the closing years of the Raj. In the 1930s Michael Carritt was advised by his superiors ‘in the most friendly and avuncular way’ that it would do his career ‘no good’ if he married a girl from the Armenian community of the Bengali town of Asansol. In Agra in the same decade W. H. Pridmore received a less friendly warning from his very unsympathetic collector: he would be banished to a difficult and unpleasant district in the UP if he married a girl called Sybil who had a half-Indian mother and a father who was an Irish soldier.79 Yet such disapproval seems to have melted away in the Second World War. Robert Dutch ICS had a comparatively easy ride when in 1946 he married a Bengali widow with three children.
British–Indian marriages naturally led to a great many children variously described as ‘half-caste’, Eurasian and (in the twentieth century) Anglo-Indian. In their turn the daughters of these unions often married British men, especially soldiers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century General James Innes in Madras had six Eurasian daughters, most of whom married British Army officers.80 Such situations became less common over the years, but a few survived well into the era of mid-Victorian disapproval. In Calcutta on the eve of the Rebellion John Beames met General Birch’s wife, whom he described as ‘an aged half-caste of vast rotundity’.81 One of her contemporaries was Frances Marsden, the daughter of an Irish major and his Indian bibi: she lost her first husband, Colonel Thomas Oliver, in Afghanistan in 1841, but by then she already had eight children by another British officer, Hugh Massy Wheeler, and a ninth one was on the way. As a Eurasian and an adulteress, she was obviously a scandalous figure in British society, but she and Wheeler married three months after Oliver’s death. Hugh Wheeler later became a knight, a general and commander of the garrison at Kanpur, the town where he, Frances and the two daughters then with them were murdered in the Rebellion in June 1857.
It had been a ‘common occurrence’, wrote Captain Albert Hervey in the 1840s, for officers and Civilians to marry what he called ‘Vepery Brahmins’, ‘half-caste’ inhabitants of the Vepery district of Madras. ‘Time was when officers of the Madras Army used to mix promiscuously with them.’ Yet while he had known a few ‘young care-for-nothing lads’ who had been ‘entrapped’ by Eurasian girls, ‘such things seldom happen now-a-days’. A few years after Hervey wrote, Alfred Lyall sensed potential entrapment when he arrived as a griffin in Calcutta in 1856. He was invited to a dance given by ‘a young ladies’ school’, where the ‘avowed purpose’ was to get the girls married off with the inducement of a dowry of £200. Lyall was proud to be considered ‘an eligible party’ but relieved that he was not tempted by the girls (all ‘more or less [with] a shade of colour’) and that after passing ‘the ordeal safely’, he emerged ‘as a free man’.82
Eurasian girls were seldom aimed at Old Etonian Haileyburians like Lyall. Many of them were brought up in military orphanages – either as orphans or as girls whose fathers had left India – from which they might emerge as soldiers’ wives, nannies or governesses, and later on as nurses, midwives or typists. The marital success rate of these places was high. Between 1800 and 1818, 380 girls from the Lower Orphan School in Calcutta – mostly Eurasian, though probably a few of them were ‘poor white’ – married British men.83 Some institutions continued to aim for the elite, but not usually with much success. In the 1870s the Kidderpore Orphanage in Calcutta invited all the new medical officers to an annual dance but, according to one of the guests, none of ‘the dusky beauties’ found a mate among the IMS.84 The most promising territories were those places, such as Lucknow and Dinapur, that contained both a cantonment and a Eurasian/Anglo-Indian railway community. In 1945 Brigadier Packard noted how British soldiers stationed in them would be ‘invited to dances and other social occasions’ and that, ‘despite official discouragement’, some then ‘married locally’. Older soldiers nearing the end of their service in India also married into the community. Private Richards recalled several men of his battalion who stayed on after doing a course of railway training and married Eurasian girls.85
It was widely agreed that the British-Indian ‘mix’ tended to produce attractive girls, but men and women from the British middle classes looked down on them for both snobbish and racial reasons, mocking their provincialism, their ‘chee-chee’ accents and the way (they said) that they smelled of garlic and cheap scent. The barrier between ‘true caste’ and ‘half-caste’ had become so rigid since the days of General Innes that Eurasian/Anglo-Indian girls went to desperate lengths to pretend that they were not at all Indian and that, if their skin was slightly darker than was normal in England, it was because they had a Spanish grandmother. Yet they seldom fooled a class of people well attuned to the nuances of class deception; apart from the problem with their voices, they were often over made-up, and sometimes they put on so much powder that, instead of becoming white, their faces went slightly mauve, especially in the shadows under their eyes.86
Occasionally the deception worked. Jimmie Simon, an English dancing teacher in Calcutta, recalled how British girls refused to perform in the same class as a pretty Anglo-Indian girl called Queenie Thomson, who ‘used to whitewash herself from the waist up’. All her life ‘Queenie’ pretended that she was a native of Tasmania, though in fact she had been born in Bombay, the daughter of a Eurasian woman and a man said to have been a railway engineer from Darlington. It made no difference in the long run because she ended up as a celebrated actress in Hollywood with the name Merle Oberon. Nor did the ‘half-caste’ stigma affect the career of her Eurasian contemporary, Vivien Hartley, whose mother seems to have been partly Parsi. She also went to Hollywood and became famous as the actress Vivien Leigh.87
When King Edward VII requested the presence of Indian soldiers at his coronation in London in 1902, the viceroy Curzon was worried because, ‘strange as it may seem, English women of the housemaid class, and even higher’, were so attracted by Indian uniforms and physiques that they might offer themselves to these men.88 Many other Britons believed – or affected to believe – that it was ‘stranger’ for English women to fall for Indian men than for Englishmen to be attracted by Indian women. M. M. Kaye, a novelist who spent much of her life in India, declared that, although she knew ‘several very happy and successful marriages between Western men and Asian women – who make marvellous wives!’, she had never come across ‘one, the other way round, that [had] lasted’.89 Probably this view reflects the society she lived in and a social life in the ‘Roaring Twenties’ that evolved around ‘hilarious parties’ and ‘screamingly’ funny japes in Simla, Delhi and Kashmir. A wider look at British–Indian unions suggests that those involving Indian men were at least as successful as the others.
There existed a long tradition of nawabs, rajas and maharajas having – or wishing to have – European women as wives or mistresses. In 1903 Curzon had felt the need to urge the Raja of Jind ‘to resume conjugal relations’ with his two Sikh wives, whom he had ignored since his marriage to the daughter of a European aeronaut, because it was his duty to produce a son and heir for his state.90 Yet there was also a tradition of middle-class Indian–British marriages which did not have to contend with this type of problem. In 1892 Henry Beveridge visited an English woman in Bengal, ‘alone in Murshidabad among the Mahomedans’, contentedly married with ten children. She was ‘very big and blonde’, he noted, while her husband was ‘insignificant looking’ although ‘well disposed’ and ‘an excellent billiard player’.91
Some such unions were of course unsuccessful. Memoirs of the last decades of the Raj tell tales of a Kutchi who had lured an Englishwoman into marriage with false promises, or a ‘rascally Powindah money-lender’ who had abducted a British woman and then refused to marry her.92 Yet in his recollections of the period, the policeman Leslie Robins blamed the failures of unions he had witnessed on impossible English women who had got bored of their decent and honourable Indian husbands.93 More memoirs, however, mention marriages that were both successful and ‘socially acceptable’ in a way that many unions ‘the other way round’ were not. The marriage between an Indian judge or doctor or Kashmiri pandit to an educated English girl was obviously a very different thing from a union between a Scottish planter and a plucking girl from his tea garden.
It created a very different future for the children too. Whereas the progeny of the tea garden would probably be consigned to an orphanage in the Hills and might with luck get a job on the railways, the children of the other marriages could aspire – at least in the twentieth century – to the same positions as their parents had gained. Born in 1891, Vivian Bose was Indian on his father’s side – his grandfather was a High Court judge – and English on his mother’s. He himself studied in England, at Dulwich and Cambridge, was called to the Bar in London and then returned to practise in India, where he married Irene, the daughter of John R. Mott, an American Christian leader and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. After Independence Bose became a much-admired judge of the Indian Supreme Court. A generation later, Keith Roy, who had a Bengali father and an English mother, was educated in Leicester and London, joined the ICS in 1935, was a government under-secretary by 1947, worked for the States’ Department in independent India, and subsequently became the managing director of an American pharmaceutical firm linked to Tata.94 Mixed parentage was at last no longer a stigma.
In the spring of 1885 Lieutenant Hubert Du Cane, stationed at Rawalpindi with the Royal Artillery, informed his father that he had applied for three months’ leave at Simla. The prospect did not enthuse him, however, because he had heard that the town’s ‘main occupations’ were ‘gambling, drinking and breaking the 7th Commandment [“Thou Shalt not Commit Adultery”], none of which presents any great attraction to me’.95 Perhaps Du Cane was rather a prig, or perhaps he was trying to reassure his father, because in British India Simla was known as ‘Capua’, the Italian town famous for its perfumes and loose living in the early Roman Empire. Otherwise, how could a subaltern, sweltering in the Punjab in the hot weather, not want to go to Simla?
The hill station’s reputation has traditionally been blamed on Kipling, but Du Cane’s disapproval – and the Capuan comparison – preceded the publication of any of the writer’s stories. The artillery officer blamed Simla’s notoriety on the regime of Lord Lytton, a flirtatious viceroy of the 1870s who was suspected of having affairs with the wives of two of his ICS subordinates. In fact these women were not his lovers but those of two of his ADCs. One of them, Mabel Batten, was an unusual memsahib. After a childhood in India, she had studied music in Dresden and Italian in Florence and had then returned to India, where, at the age of nineteen, she had married George Batten, a forty-three-year-old Civilian. Within months of her marriage she was flirting with Edward, Prince of Wales, on his visit to Agra in 1876, but while the attraction was strong and mutual, a recent biographer of the future king thinks ‘it was probably no more than a flirtation’.96 At Simla the following year, the beautiful Mabel met one of Lytton’s visiting friends, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a Tory radical who modelled himself on his wife’s grandfather (Byron), but whose principal triumphs were philanderous rather than political or poetical. She confided in him at their first meeting, apparently telling him about her own love affairs and those of ‘all Simla’. Whether or not the two of them were lovers in India, they certainly became so in the summer of 1880 when, on a trip to Goodwood Races, she stayed at his house in Sussex and left her door ajar at midnight. The next morning he felt like ‘a god’ and later believed he had been the only person to satisfy Mabel’s ‘nameless cravings’.97 In fact he was not. In London, years after her husband’s retirement, she enjoyed the most important relationship of her life, a very passionate love affair with the young lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall.
If Simla’s reputation for amorous immorality was first suggested by the ambience of Lytton’s court, it endured afterwards thanks to the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who spent parts of five summers there in the 1880s as a reporter for the Civil & Military Gazette in Lahore. The young writer was quite blatant about his search for characters and ‘copy’ for his stories, using one of his first afternoons in the town to lope alongside his mother’s rickshaw, ‘learning most of the scandal’. Then he would spend his time talking – and above all listening – to anyone from whom he could acquire ‘curious yarns’ or ‘goodish material’. From Isabella Burton, the effervescent lady who inspired his fictional Mrs Hauksbee, he gained ‘half a hundred ideas and some stories’. Sometimes he did not need to listen but merely to observe, as in the case of Lady Edge, the wife of the chief justice of the Allahabad High Court, who ‘was inclined to be naughty though much over forty’. According to Kipling, she gave ‘herself away in double handfuls’.98
In his first book, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, published when Kipling was twenty, half the verses in the ‘Ditties’ section have adultery as their main subject. In Plain Tales from the Hills, which came out two years later, marital infidelity is a recurring topic in the stories set in Simla, as it was subsequently in The Story of the Gadsbys and Under the Deodars. For someone who appears never to have committed adultery himself – or indeed to have had a love affair with anyone other than his wife – this is an interesting fixation. It certainly interested numerous critics who thought it reprehensible and irresponsible for someone to write about such ‘flagrant immorality’ in the summer capital of Queen Victoria’s Indian Empire. Kipling seldom made concessions to his critics but he did deny that he thought all Simla life was frivolous or improper. In his preface to Under the Deodars (1888) he attempted ‘to assure the ill-informed’ that British India was ‘not entirely inhabited by men and women playing tennis and breaking the Seventh Commandment’ – an assurance that may have puzzled the ill-informed when they discovered that most of the stories in the book were precisely about such people (minus the tennis).99
In Don Juan Byron had quipped that ‘adultery’ was ‘much more common when the climate’s sultry’. Yet he had been contrasting the south of Europe with the north. In India the situation was reversed, at any rate for the British. The climate in Madras, observed one sardonic Civilian, ‘runs to getting into the billiard room and taking off one’s coat and calling for a succession of long drinks, but it emphatically does not run to Plain Tales from the Hills’. You could not have ‘a Plain Tale’ in so ‘enervating’ an atmosphere.100 But 7,000 feet up in the Himalaya, surrounded by forests of pine and cedar, ‘Plain Tales’ behaviour was more appealing. Simla and other hill stations were romantic and hedonistic places, where the parties went on day after day, where the summer nights were warm enough for moonlit picnics, and where officials and their families from remote stations could relax in the company of their fellow countrymen. Bishop Welldon suggested that the men and women who went to Simla for their holidays were like ‘people dancing under the shadow of a volcanic mountain’.101 Perhaps they were. Perhaps that explains the frivolity of so much of their behaviour when they were there.
Most people who recorded their memories of Simla insisted that Kipling exaggerated and that a good majority of ‘those little liaisons in the Hills were as harmless as you can think of’. When a young man in jodhpurs went ‘doe-hacking’ at Simla, it meant he was taking a girl for an innocent ride, not planning to do anything improper with the doe.102 In 1909 Maud Diver published her book, The Englishwoman in India, with the purpose of refuting the idea that British women habitually misbehaved on the Subcontinent. Those who agreed with her liked to emphasize the practical difficulties of committing adultery in a country where privacy scarcely existed. It was sometimes said that the only safe place to do it was on a night train. Harcourt Butler thought that British society was so ‘moral in act’ because it lived in rooms with six doors, usually open, and servants padding about at all hours in bare feet. ‘Illicit loves’ were thus an impossibility, and the British reputation for having them was quite ‘undeserved’.103 Amorous governors and viceroys had the additional problems of ADCs who never left them alone. Lord Carmichael, the governor of Bengal during the First World War, tried to dodge them so that he could flirt with ‘a very pretty maharani’ in the garden of Government House, but even if he had succeeded he could not have achieved anything other than a tête-à-tête.104
Yet from Simla and other hill stations there is much evidence, not just from Kipling’s sources and Mrs Batten’s remarks to Blunt, that ‘illicit loves’ were common though perhaps not compulsory. In Simla’s early days, recalled General Godfrey Pearse, who was born in 1827, ‘there had been a few frisky young dames, and a few young fellows full of mischief’, who used to have ‘tender meetings’ in jampans along ‘those dark umbrageous pine-lined roads’.105 Later the idea of the predatory ‘grass widow’ – a middle-aged woman spending the summer in a hill station while her husband was working in the Plains – became a widespread reality, even a sort of institution. The most notorious of such ladies acquired nicknames, widely circulated and laughed about, such as ‘the Passionate Haystack’ (‘pretty doll-like girl … china blue eyes’), ‘the Charpoy Cobra’ (‘languorous dark-eyed brunette … fingernails as scarlet as her lips’), ‘Bed-and-Breakfast’, ‘the Lilo’, ‘the Subaltern’s Guide to Knowledge’ and ‘the Vice Queen’, a woman who ‘collected other ladies’ husbands and cut a notch in her bedstead for every conquest. No one knew why the bedstead was still standing.’ As in other places, sexual promiscuity in British India increased in wartime, and the Passionate Haystack was especially active in Karachi at the time of VE Day. M. M. Kaye blamed ‘the pressures of war’ for her affair with an officer who could not divorce his wife and marry her until 1945, when she was pregnant with their second child. Wartime India also seems to have had its share of officers ‘missing, presumed dead’, who returned to find their ‘widows’ consoling themselves in the arms of other men.106
John Masters, the Gurkha officer who became a novelist, was like Kipling a perceptive observer of society in hill stations. Grass widows, he maintained, were competing with each other and measuring their success not by comparative wit or beauty or intelligence but by their ‘ability to annexe the most desirable man and hold on to him in the face of all competition’. What Masters found strange was that people behaved in a fashion which they might have got away with in a large city but could not possibly do so – unnoticed – in a hill station.
Captain A. comes up to join his wife in Mussoorie for his month’s leave. The station forms a wordless conspiracy never to let him know of the existence of Mr B., a resident official who has, they all know, spent most of his days and nights with Mrs A. for some weeks past, and will resume this practice as soon as Captain A. has returned to Sweattypore. And around Mrs C. there are wonderfully public manoeuvrings for position; she has really given up any pretence of being monogamous. Her husband eventually cites sixteen co-respondents in his divorce suit.107
In his unpublished autobiography Harcourt Butler may have claimed that British society in India conducted itself with an almost unequalled sense of morality. Yet in his private correspondence as a governor he relished the details of scandals. Writing to an old friend in 1920, he salivated over a ‘full-blooded scandal’ in Simla that was heading for the divorce courts. A Mr and Mrs King were staying at Corstorphine’s Hotel with their friend, a cavalry officer called Vikhary. As Mr King could not dance, he encouraged his friend to take his wife to balls, but he soon became suspicious at the lateness of their return from these parties. He therefore ‘filled himself up with drink one night, went up to V’s rooms and found his wife in bed with him. Laid out V with a poker (not seriously), woke the hotel up to call witnesses…’ After such a noisy melodrama, the three of them quickly fled Simla. Butler was chortling with delight. ‘As soon as I got the news, I wired back, “the poker pokered”.’ He was chortling again when he heard that Vikhary had been sent to the Remount Department: the appointment suggested that the army had a sense of humour.108
Neither Kipling nor Masters suggested that adultery only took place in hill stations. Intrigues, passions and tragedies could happen anywhere, even in enervating Madras. Men and women agonized over the same dilemmas, faced the same kinds of choices, and made the same sorts of mistakes all over India – and beyond. One district officer, a man with nine children, was seduced by a predatory ‘Becky Sharp’ while his wife and family were in England; the novelist Flora Annie Steel, a very forceful lady, realized that he was having a nervous breakdown and so marched into his bungalow, took up residence inside it, and eventually forced poor ‘Becky’ to retire and give birth to her lover’s baby in a place specially prepared for her.109 Another mature DO, a collector of Kanpur in the late nineteenth century, was not so lucky. He married a sergeant-major’s daughter and, in the hope of turning her into a burra memsahib, sent her to England to learn manners. The scheme did not work. On her return she was still, apparently, ‘coarse and rude’, ’behaved very badly’ and had an affair with a manager of the Elgin Mills; the DO then took to drink and died of alcoholism, and his wife died in the same week, probably from a mismanaged abortion.110 Similar tragedies might also happen in the army, especially if a middle-aged officer married a much younger woman who refused to take part in station life. In 1905 Major Cooper of a Punjabi regiment shot himself because he was unable to control a young wife whose behaviour with ‘a bad lot’ was so ‘unseemly’ that she had been thrown out of hotels in Mussoorie. A few years later, when serving in Africa, Captain Manners killed himself after learning of his wife’s infidelity in India.111
Romantic disappointment very nearly claimed the life of Frederick Lugard too, encouraging the army officer to undertake desperate adventures in a quest, according to his biographer, ‘for excitement and danger and, if possible, death in some distant place’. In the 1880s he had made a good start to his career in India, serving in the Afghan and Burmese campaigns, but then he fell in love with a remarried divorcée, a veteran femme fatale, who jilted him. On hearing that she had been badly injured in a coach accident in Lucknow, he dashed from Burma to see her, only to discover that she had sailed for England; rushing after her again, he arrived home only to find that she had quite recovered and was ‘bestowing her affections elsewhere’. Thinking he would go mad, the highly strung Lugard then fled to Africa, risking his life in reckless attacks against Arab slavers before he was badly wounded near Lake Nyasa.112 He recovered to become one of the great ‘empire-builders’ and in due course the founder, for good or ill, of a united Nigeria.
Such cases are not of course representative of the behaviour of British women in India. Few of these were femmes fatales, Becky Sharps or Passionate Haystacks. Many were unhappy with their marriages – and the strains that India put on their relationships – but very few subjected themselves to the stress and publicity of a nineteenth-century divorce. Many more gradually and discreetly achieved a sort of de facto separation, the wife spending increasing amounts of time in Britain with the children, the husband visiting them (if they were still on friendly terms) when he was on leave. When Sir John Grant retired as lieutenant-governor of Bengal in 1862, he did not wish to go on living with a wife who had produced, among her eight children, two who were not his. Not divorce or cohabitation but lives led separately – it seemed a reasonable solution. Yet Grant’s wife and his eldest daughter, Jane Strachey, begged him to change his mind, which he eventually did: the resulting ‘reconciliation’ alas led to a further three decades of married misery.113
Discretion was impossible, however, if a husband sued for divorce, as George Hilario Barlow did when, after a controversial period as governor of Madras (1807–13), he discovered that his wife’s fifteenth child had been fathered by his cousin and ADC, Captain George Pratt Barlow. Angry husbands like Barlow tended to go straight to their lawyers, as Lieutenant-Colonel Johnston Napier of the 40th Native Infantry also did in January 1838 on discovering that his wife, Isabella, had left their home in Madras to move in with Edward Elliot, the city’s superintendent of police. He immediately filed two suits, one against his wife for divorce, the other against Elliot for ‘trespass’ and ‘adulterous and criminal conversation’. A trial quickly took place at which Napier’s lawyer called Isabella a woman of ‘lewd and vicious temper’ and Elliot a man ‘of loose morals and profligate habits’. In February the police superintendent was ordered to pay Napier a large sum in damages, in April a divorce was granted, and in November this was ratified by an act of Parliament in London. In the course of that year Isabella had a child by Elliot, and two more later on, after the couple had married in 1839.114
Matters took longer in Britain than in India. When Captain Cautley, the engineer on the Ganges canal, found out that he was not the father of his wife’s twin babies, he also immediately began divorce proceedings. As he was then (1846) in England on leave, this meant that first he had to go to the civil court to claim damages, then to the ecclesiastical court, which dealt with the matrimonial offence, and ultimately to the House of Lords, where the matter was very publicly settled.115 The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made the divorce process simpler, cheaper, quicker and sometimes less embarrassing, but it was still very public and stressful. And the act failed to make things fairer for the wife. Jane Strachey may have prevented her father from divorcing her mother but she could not prevent her son Oliver in India from divorcing his wife, Ruby, for adultery, gaining custody of their child (whom he subsequently ignored) and presenting himself as the wronged party even though he had infected his wife with VD, had consistently been the more unfaithful of the two, and had long been pursuing his programme of getting ‘on copulating terms’ with as many women as possible.116
Patterns of separation and reconciliation were much the same in India as in Britain, even if the process was sometimes longer and spread over two continents. The parents of the film director Lindsay Anderson separated in India in 1926 following an affair between his mother, Estelle, and Major Cuthbert Sleigh. Estelle then took her small sons to England but returned to Bangalore in 1932 to attempt a reconciliation with her husband. This lasted long enough for her to become pregnant but was otherwise a failure; the couple was divorced, and in 1936 Estelle married the major, who had by now been invalided out of the army.117
Adultery in Victorian Britain was regarded as so scandalous a matter that it could ruin political lives, as it did in the cases of Charles Dilke and Charles Stewart Parnell. Yet in Victorian India it did not destroy administrative careers or even delay promotions very much. Perhaps a spectacular break-up in Simla or at a Government House might have had repercussions, but this did not happen even with unhappy lieutenant-governors like Lyall, Hewett and Harcourt Butler. And below their level the officials in charge of promotion did not seem to care. His long and noisy divorce did not prevent Probyn Cautley from becoming the director of Canals in the north, a member of the Council of India in retirement, and a knight commander of the Bath. Even citation as co-respondent did not usually wreck careers. Elliot remained superintendent of police and also became the chief magistrate of Madras until his retirement in 1856. During a stay at the Cape in 1850, assistant surgeon Lestock Wilson Stewart began an affair with Mrs Martha Bell. He was cited by her husband, Charles Bell, the surveyor-general of Cape Colony, and it was well known that he was the father of Mrs Bell’s fourth child, but none of this obstructed his rise in the Indian Medical Service; when he died at the age of fifty-two, he was already deputy surgeon-general. His contemporary in the ICS, Charles Moore, made similar progress: his role as co-respondent, after running off with an army officer’s wife, did not impede his advancement to the post of district judge. He duly married the officer’s wife, Margaret Emma, and had four children with her, but she later seems to have disappeared from the records. Moore took early retirement and in the 1890s was living in London’s Cavendish Square with another spouse; he was also visiting someone else’s wife, whom he kept as his mistress, in Chelsea.118
The ICS was a difficult institution to join because the exams were hard and the competition was vigorous. Yet once you were in, it was hard to get rid of you unless you committed the greatest sin of Victorian (and post-Victorian) India: peculation or some other form of corruption. Arthur Travers Crawford, a Bombay Civilian born in 1835, led a far more rackety life than his contemporary Moore but managed to rise higher in the service. In his fifties he was described by a younger colleague, A. R. Bonus, as a man who had already ‘run away with two women, has been separated from his own wife, and during one Poona season lived with two actresses whom he imported from America’. Yet afterwards ‘he was received back into social circles as if nothing had happened’.119 What ruined Crawford’s career was not his sexually promiscuous style of living but the ways in which he funded it, which included taking bribes and accepting advances from certain rajas. When news of some of these appeared in the press, his own government placed Crawford under house arrest, but he escaped from Poona and was apprehended in Bombay wearing a false beard. He did not go to jail, but he was dismissed from the ICS without a pension.120
When explaining Crawford’s earlier social rehabilitation, Bonus had suggested that it was the climate that encouraged British ladies to say things that had ‘almost petrified’ him ‘with surprise’ and which ‘would create the wildest scandal in England’.121 Men like Bonus, in that first generation of readers of Plain Tales from the Hills, often experienced such conversations, were amazed by ‘the malicious scandal talked’, and concluded that Kipling was ‘much more true to the life in his women-kind than most Anglo-Indians would allow’.122 Such an ambience might explain the survival of a figure such as Lepel Griffin, a Civilian who in the 1880s filled the senior post of Resident of Indore and Agent to the Governor-General in Central India. Griffin was ‘a flashy and not very reputable person’ in the view of the viceroy, Lord Dufferin, who was repelled by his subordinate’s ‘pleasure in passing himself off as a destroyer of female virtue’ and by his ‘habit of ostentatiously maintaining intimate relations with some vulgar second-rate woman’.123 Although Dufferin became unusually obsessive on the subject of Griffin, his views were shared by some of the Civilian’s contemporaries. When Alfred Lyall saw his colleague flirting in Simla with Kipling’s friend Mrs Burton, he compared him to an ‘unblushing rake’ and on another occasion to Louis XIV for always having ‘somebody else’s wife living with him in state, a reigning favourite to whom everyone else must bow down’.124 When the Duke of Connaught, the son of Queen Victoria and commander-in-chief in Bombay (1886–90), arrived to stay in Indore, his wife hinted that the current mistress, a divorced lady, might absent herself when she lunched at the Residency. Sir Lepel noticed the hint but refused to take it, informing Her Highness that if she felt unable to meet ladies staying in his house, then he would have to forgo the pleasure of entertaining her.125
In spite of alienating the royal family, the viceroy, his colleagues and several of the princes of central India (notably the Begum of Bhopal and the Maharaja of Holkar), Griffin reached the top of the service because he was very able, even though he was clearly deficient in both tact and good sense. Dufferin may have refused to give him the post he wanted, the lieutenant-governorship of the Punjab (where he had been an excellent chief secretary), because of his ‘vanity and egotism’ and scandalous private life, but he did offer him the top job in another province, Burma, where he would have been ‘less en évidence from a social point of view’. Shattered by the Punjab rebuff, Griffin showed no interest in Rangoon. Accusing the viceroy of treating him ‘with a complete absence of consideration’,126 he retired early to England, married at the age of fifty-one and tried unsuccessfully to begin a political career.
Adultery in British India had to be a mainly middle-class pastime because few British working-class women lived there. Even for those who did, the cramped married quarters of a barracks were not an ideal location. Private Richards recalled that most of the married women with the Welch Fusiliers were ‘very respectable’. Only two of them had ‘regular fancy-men’; one of the husbands gave his wife ‘two lovely black eyes’ (while she cracked his head open with a jug), but the other was either complaisant or else ‘too thick to find her out’. Whenever there was a ‘serious squabble between a married couple’, Mrs Bertie, the colonel’s wife, would step in: ‘nobody could continue cursing and throwing things at each other in her presence’.127 Yet sometimes matters were resolved before a colonel’s wife was able to reach the scene. At Sialkot in 1854 the soldier Thomas Pacey was sentenced to transportation for life for murdering Sergeant Robert French, who, he had just discovered, was having an affair with his wife.128 In ‘Love o’ Women’ (1893), one of his most moving stories, Kipling wrote of a similar incident, and after it ‘there remained only on the barrack square the blood of man calling from the ground … while inside a woman shrieked and raved with wicked filthy words’.
Adulterous officers had wider choices, better locations and greater opportunities than NCOs and private soldiers. Yet there is little written evidence of their activities, and what exists is often unreliable. A Captain Charles Devereux, plainly a pseudonym, wrote a ‘memoir’, Venus in India, that belongs to the genre of classic Victorian erotica. Much of the tale is obvious fantasy. The ‘captain’, who has left his young wife in Britain, rescues an English girl, who is being anally raped by an Afghan, and later seduces her and her two teenage sisters; meanwhile the girls’ father, the colonel, is galloping off to Peshawar to try out the regiment’s new prostitutes – at the rate of four a night – before they are brought to the cantonment.129 Captain Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life is a more credible memoir, and the author was at least a real person, who in 1866, at the age of forty-eight, shot himself in Piccadilly. Although the author’s exploits with British wives are rather formulaic, his narrative displays more individuality after he had ‘commenced a regular course of fucking with native women’. His knowledge of prices and habits, and his appreciation of the art of the courtesan, indicate that he was writing from experience. In his life after India Sellon admitted that no European woman bore ‘comparison with those salacious, succulent houris of the East’.130
Richard Burton wrote of his fellow officers and their bibis when he was with his regiment in Baroda in the 1840s. He also noted how some young ensigns seduced their superior officers’ wives and took them to rented rooms in the Indian quarter of the cantonment.131 Later generations of senior officers frowned on ‘poodle-fakers’, subalterns or other young men who went on leave to the Hills to play, party and – with luck – have an affair with one of the grass widows in residence. Young men, recalled John Masters, were supposed to ‘pursue animals, not girls’.132 Greater allowance may have been made for older officers, even if they were married. Owen Berkeley-Hill, whose own tastes were for Indian women, could not disguise his admiration for his superior officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Sutherland, ‘an enthusiastic sexualist’ who, despite his German wife, was ‘never without at least one mistress’ and, when his junior knew him (before the First World War), had two, the wife of a government official and a midwife at the Saugor Hospital in the Central Provinces.133
The problem for officers with adulterous ambitions was that the obvious candidates for their attentions, the women they saw most of, were their brother officers’ wives. And they were the great taboo. Whatever else happened, among the havoc and heartbreak that an affair entailed, an officer who disregarded it had to resign from his regiment. Inter-regimental liaisons might be tolerable, but intra-regimental relationships were not. In 1936 Miles Smeeton had to leave the Green Howards for an Indian Army regiment when he fell for the wife of his CO, an adventurous lady called Beryl, who had once walked across China to Burma. When warned about the hazards of the journey, the bandits and the risk of being raped on the way, she replied, ‘Oh, I shan’t worry about that. I’d far prefer dishonour to death.’134
There was once a belief that British ‘empire-builders’ did not enjoy normal sex lives because they were concentrating too hard on building the empire to dissipate their energies in frivolous pursuits. It is true that some unmarried imperial figures, such as Gordon and Kitchener, do not appear to have had sex lives, and that others, while married, may not have had very active ones. Yet this was because they were more or less asexual or, in some cases, because they might have indulged in a kind of sex that was illegal in Britain. They were not sublimating their desires for the glory of the empire.
Young middle-class men who went to India during the last century of the British presence knew they were unlikely to enjoy extensive sex lives unless they were prepared to defy the conventions of the time on mistresses, adultery, homosexuality and Indian women. Some decided that the gender imbalance with British women was so bad and the competition for them so strong that it was pointless to try. Why bother to compete with cavalry officers on leave? If uncommercial sex was unobtainable, why not settle for something that was almost as ‘delicious’ such as ‘strawberries-and-cream’?135 Long after Independence, Lieutenant- Colonel Paddy Massey summed up the position he had faced in India as a subaltern:
Sex was a subject which, possibly because it was so difficult to get, did not occupy one’s mind and was certainly not the universal topic it has become today. Marriage on a subaltern’s pay was out of the question; the pill had not been invented; one parent families were not acceptable; brothels only for the very foolish, and all that was left was lots of exercise.136
Exercise was indeed regarded as the panacea, as it was in so many British public schools. ‘Sweat the sex out of you’ was the rationale behind all those football games for Tommy Atkins and all those polo matches for the captains and the subalterns. ‘Pig-sticking’ or ‘hog-hunting’, the most dangerous and exhausting of sports, was considered the most effective and ‘pleasurable’ of antidotes. Yet you had to take it seriously, insisted its fraternity, and renounce other pleasures. ‘You must give up all attendance on “the Mall”,’ commanded Frank Simson, a senior Civilian in Dacca; ‘the pleasant morning and evening drives with the charming ladies of the station must be forgone.’ A serious pig-sticker should ask to be posted to a district with no society and no racecourse but plenty of tigers and wild boar.137 Major Alexander Wardrop agreed. In his book Modern Pig-sticking, a classic of a rather restricted genre, he admitted that in India he had spent all his leave and all his money on ‘spear and rifle’ and that he had ridden down and speared over 700 wild boar. In his opinion the man who married was a fool: he would get ‘far more pleasure by keeping good animals’ and going hunting.138 *
The misogyny of the pig-stickers and hog-hunters was frankly expressed in their verse. Captain Morris of the 9th Bombay Native Infantry, who was apparently regarded as ‘the poet-laureate of Indian sport’, was the author of a poem called ‘The Boar’, which was inappropriately sung to the tune of ‘My luve is like a red, red rose’. Another of his offerings was ‘Saddle, Spur, and Spear’, which included the lines:
Let others boast and proudly toast
The light of ladies’ eyes …
But since for me no charms I see
In all the sex can show …
I’ll change my theme and fondly dream,
True sportsmen pledge me here,
And fill my cup and drain it up
To Saddle, Spur and Spear!139
In case the message was not strong enough, a bard known as ‘C’ spelt it out again in ‘The Hunter’s Song’:
We value not false woman’s kiss,
We value not the miser’s bliss …
Let fools with women while away
The precious hours of youthful day …
A boar to us is comelier far
Than Venus in her dove-drawn car …
It was better for men to go pig-sticking than to ‘pass their lives … with snarling wives’.140
Few British men in India accepted the notion that sport was an adequate substitute for sex. Most would have agreed with the view of Francis Yeats-Brown, the cavalry officer who wrote Bengal Lancer, that a regular sex life was ‘more necessary in a hot than a cold country’.141 Britain’s greatest empire-builder – in terms of territory acquired for the empire – was in complete agreement. When Richard Wellesley was sent to Calcutta as governor-general in 1798, his wife, Hyacinthe, refused to go with him. Although their relationship in Europe had been tempestuous, it had also been very amorous, and he needed her in India. ‘This climate,’ he told her, ‘excites one sexually most terribly.’ In a long and accusatory correspondence – it took at least ten months to receive a reply to a complaint that one of them had made in the previous letter – he pleaded, cajoled and threatened. ‘As for sex,’ he told her, ‘one must have it in this climate.’ Hyacinthe told him to live without it as she had to do herself, but this eventually proved impossible.142 A mistress was found.
Whatever its injustices and its inequalities, the bibi system had some merits, certainly for British men and certainly to the advantage of relations between the races. Its demise encouraged the expansion of another system, prostitution, which had very few. Unmarried Civilians do not appear to have visited brothels, at least not in their own districts where the threat of exposure and blackmail was too great. Unmarried officers in the army and police did go to such places, though we do not know what proportion of them stuck to pig-sticking or stayed away for reasons of fear, aversion or morality. Customers were naturally more likely to look for the red-light areas of a large city, where they had a greater choice and a smaller risk of being seen, than to seek gratification in a cantonment. The bungalows of Karaya Road in Ballygunge, set back in secluded gardens, were a discreet venue for officers in Calcutta. In Delhi in the 1920s junior officers frequented a brothel known as the Turkish Baths.143
In his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis published his case history of ‘GR’, a British officer keen to sample different forms of sex with different kinds of sexual partner. He confessed to Ellis that he ‘used to have horrible orgies’ with his brother-officers: on his birthday one year he ‘ordered’ six women to his bungalow and ‘made a present of them’ to five of his friends after dinner. On another occasion, accompanied by two fellow officers, he had an ‘orgy in Bombay which lasted three nights. I started on a Greek and a Pole and finished up with a Japanese…’144
GR became emotionally involved with women who were not prostitutes and with comrades in the army,* and he also enjoyed physical experiments with animals and fruit. Remembering the Pathan proverb – ‘women for breeding, boys for pleasure, and melons for delight’ – he one day grabbed a melon ‘to try whether the proverb was in any way true’. It was. But a papaya was even better than a melon, ‘being the nearest approach to the human vagina’. GR might have become over-attached to his papayas had it not been for ‘the opportune arrival of a fairly good-looking punkah woman [who] put an end to this form of enjoyment by providing’ him with what he ‘wanted’. As it was clearly important for him to work out what he really did want, he gave Havelock Ellis a list of his preferences, beginning with ‘a woman, a friend and lady of [his] own class’, but if she was not available he would descend to a lady for whom he did not ‘care’, and thence to ‘prostitutes of all classes and colours’, followed by ‘men, boys, animals, melons and masturbation’.145
Tommy Atkins would never have had the chance to compile such a list as this. Apart from prostitutes, he seldom spoke to a woman except in the married quarters of the barracks, perhaps the wife of the bandmaster or the sergeant-major. Yet he would have heard a great deal about sex from the time of his recruitment, both from medical officers who warned him of ‘temptations’ and the risks of venereal disease, and from veterans in the barracks dormitories reminiscing after ‘lights out’ about women they had known and brothels they had visited: they could ‘keep an audience of fellows … attentive for hours on end’, complained Private Swindlehurst of the Lancashire Fusiliers. The private’s real complaint, however, was not the lack of sleep this caused, but the ‘constant repetition’ of their exploits that broke the ‘natural repugnance’ of young lads and encouraged them to ‘become patrons on pay nights’, pick fights in Lahore’s brothels, and end up in hospital with VD.146
Tommy would quickly learn the lingo of sex talk. If he was in India between the world wars, he would soon identify women as ‘a bit of skirt’, ‘a bit of fluff’, ‘a bit of crumpet’, ‘a bit of all right’ and, if Anglo-Indian, a ‘chilliecracker’. He would learn the meaning of ‘gobbling’, ‘jig-jig’ and ‘dipping your wick’, and might be in a position to ask a comrade, ‘Will she drop ’em?’ He would probably be made to understand what was meant by ‘the gunge’ (VD), ‘a dose’ (VD) and ‘copping a packet’ (catching VD). Yet whatever his linguistic expertise, the phrase most applicable to his own activities would have been ‘bashing the bishop’ – masturbating.147
In the nineteenth century the prostitutes that Tommy would most often see were the girls from the ‘lal bazaar’, a special area of the regimental bazaar, where they would be superintended (by an elderly lady) and inspected by doctors. In Agra they were housed in the Suddar Bazaar in a brothel known as ‘the Rag’, which was reserved for British soldiers. Some of the ‘barracks tarts’ followed the troops on the march and up into the Hills, spending the summer in the mountains and earning their livelihood in a cooler climate than in Agra.148
When he was in transit or stationed near a large city, Tommy could, if he chose, broaden his experience. Trumpeter Meneaud-Lissenburg did not realize how broad this potentially might be until, shortly before the First World War, he took a wrong turning after visiting the Botanical Gardens in Bombay and found himself in Grant Road, ‘a veritable den of iniquity and vice, where morphinists, sodomists and prostitutes ply their evil trades with the utmost vigour and semi-naked exposure’. Turning off the road, he entered Sutlej Street, where he was shocked to see ‘amidst the glittering lights hordes of sailors, soldiers and civilians [who] were literally falling out of taxis and gharries and forming groups…’ The street consisted of one-storeyed terraced houses with illuminated forecourts. On one side the trumpeter found ‘European women of every nationality, except British, displaying themselves seated on low chairs and clad only in semi-transparent chemises and stockings, loudly proclaiming their charms’. On the other, in contrast, ‘Japanese women [were] demurely seated on the forecourt patiently sewing or knitting and seemingly content to rely on their charming attire to attract customers’.149
The young Meneaud-Lissenburg had already been shocked by the regimental brothel at his first posting at Secunderabad. The red-light district of Bombay offended him far more. After crossing the first intersection on Sutlej Street, he was confronted by ‘an even more revolting spectacle’ than before: Indian, Eurasian and other Asian women, dressed in white cotton chemises, were ‘shamelessly lifting the garment, exposing a blancoed torso…’ Yet worse was still to come – ‘the ultimate in degradation’ – after the next intersection: ‘native women of the coolie class seated behind bars like animals in a zoo were greedily gaped at by lascars, sepoys and coolies bargaining a price for admission’. As a commissioner of the Bombay Police admitted, the bars looked very bad, making the girls seem like ‘caged animals’, but they were put there to ‘save the women from being overwhelmed by a low-class male rabble, ready for violence on the smallest provocation’. The bars obliged the ‘low-class clientele to form a queue outside’ and enabled the ‘women to admit one customer at a time’.150
The vast majority of prostitutes in India were Indian, and so were a large majority of clients. Tommy Atkins spent more time with Indian women than with others because they were more available, but he was quite catholic in his tastes. As official reports from the 1870s noted, he was ‘not very particular in the distribution of his amorous patronage’, and sometimes he was too drunk to remember what nationality he had ‘cohabited’ with.151 When he was able to tell the difference, he particularly liked Japanese women, who were clean and seldom had VD; there was ‘a colony’ of them at Lucknow where they ‘obtained their living by the soldier’. The officer ‘GR’ also rated the Japanese the best because, apart from their cleanliness, their ‘charming manners and beautiful bodies’, they took an ‘intelligent interest in the proceedings’. His runners-up were Kashmiris and Chinese, but the ‘white women in the East were insupportable … the dregs of the European and American markets’.152
European prostitutes were usually found in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Rangoon and Karachi – all port cities, a fact which suggests that their clientele consisted mainly of sailors unaccustomed to Indian women. Not that there were very many of them even on the waterfronts. Calcutta had sixty-five in 1880, less than 1 per cent of the number of women working in the trade in that city. A few years earlier the capital had nine registered Englishwomen, but most places had fewer or none at all. In Rangoon in 1913 the European prostitutes consisted of one Spaniard, one Romanian, two Italians plus sixteen Jewish women, three from the Middle East and thirteen from Russia. Arriving in the Burmese capital in the same period, Private Richards was relieved to find there was not an English girl among them. In fact, according to a report of the Home Department of the government of India in 1913, there were ‘no British women openly plying this trade’ among India’s 234 European prostitutes, half of whom were in Bombay. Gratified though the authorities may have been that no British girls were there to damage the prestige of the imperial power, they were worried that the ‘natives’ might mistake the Russians and Italians for Englishwomen. A town-dweller, suggested a police superintendent in Rangoon, would know that the prostitutes were ‘not of the same class or race’ as a burra memsahib, but it was ‘doubtful whether the ignorant villager who pays a visit to Rangoon is equally aware of the difference’.153
In his quest for sexual gratification the chief problem for Tommy Atkins was the risk of venereal infection. This had been a hazard since soon after his arrival in India in the eighteenth century: by the first years of the following century a quarter of the British troops in Madras were diseased. The military authorities recognized their men’s need for sexual activity and, holding the belief that buggery and masturbation had harmful effects, both moral and physical, they thought they had no alternative but to permit prostitution and try to reduce the rate of venereal infection. ‘Lock hospitals’, where infected girls from the ‘lal bazaar’ in the barracks were detained, examined and treated, were thus set up. They did not bring the numbers down very greatly, mainly because soldiers continued to use girls from outside their bazaar, but, repressive and degrading though they were for the women, they were better than nothing for the troops.
After VD the next obstacle for Tommy Atkins and his quest was the ‘purity lobby’ that was outraged, in Britain and India, by the India Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, which led to the compulsory registration of brothels and the compulsory treatment of prostitutes available to soldiers. The lobby was appalled to discover the existence of sanctioned cantonment brothels, even though their purpose was to meliorate the health of British soldiers and allow them to do the job they had been sent out to do rather than lie in agony on a hospital bed, subjected to mercury and other treatments with excruciating side-effects. In the 1880s the Anglican bishops of India and Ceylon denounced all measures to help the troops because for them ‘the discouragement and repression of vice’ were ‘of far higher importance than the diminution of suffering or of other evils resulting from vice…’ They received plenty of support from outside the Church, among ‘purity-mongers’ in civil life and in Parliament. Under pressure from them, the lock hospitals and cantonment brothels were closed, which led to an immediate and inevitable surge in venereal disease: in some areas of Bengal in the late 1880s almost half the British troops were being treated; in parts of Bombay the proportion was even higher. The closures also led, according to the viceroy Elgin, ‘to even more deplorable evils … an increase in unnatural crimes’. When an Indian Government Act of 1895 reflected the victory of the purity lobby in Britain, officers were incandescent that such a measure so detrimental to the health of soldiers had been passed at the behest of ‘morbid married faddists and sexless unprofessional sisters’.154 Yet George Hamilton, who became secretary of state in that year, soon realized that the unregulated system of recent years was impractical and unworkable, and the brothels were discreetly re-opened. Disapproval, however, remained the official attitude. General Kitchener, who became commander-in-chief of India in 1902, exhorted his men to use self-control and urged them to imagine what their mothers would think if they did not. He also warned them that, if they became infected, they would not only suffer ‘cantankerous and stinking ulcerations’; their noses would rot and fall off as well.155
A career in the empire might survive adultery, divorce and kept mistresses, but it could not survive a homosexual scandal. Even a hint of an inclination could badly damage a reputation.
In 1845 General Napier, the recent conqueror of Sind, asked Richard Burton to investigate a rumour that some British troops might be using homosexual brothels in Karachi. As an incipient explorer and sexologist, Burton relished the commission, disguising himself as a merchant from Persia and observing very closely what went on in three of these establishments. Although he found no evidence of British involvement, he still wrote a report for Napier containing detailed descriptions of what services were on offer in these places and at what price they could be obtained. While the general had assured Burton that he would not forward it to his superiors in the Bombay government, the document was discovered after Napier’s resignation two years later. Its readers, enemies of Napier and his subordinate from within the army and the Bombay secretariat, believed – or affected to believe – that only a homosexual could have written such a report, and so they attempted to get Burton cashiered. Although in the end he was not dismissed – he had after all only been following the general’s orders – it was made clear that he would not be promoted and that his army career was at an end. In 1849 Burton left India to begin a new career as a writer and explorer.156
When it heard the revelations at the Oscar Wilde trials, the British public was horrified. It would have been even more appalled had it learned the details in the case of Hector Macdonald, the commander-in-chief in Ceylon. Macdonald was an authentic imperial hero, the son of a crofter who had risen from the ranks, beginning his career in India and serving in the Second Afghan War, the First South African War, the Nile Expedition, the Sudan Expedition and the Second South African War. In 1902 he was appointed commander-in-chief in Ceylon, where his military duties were undemanding and left him plenty of spare time, which he spent – allegedly – with dancing boys, temple catamites and waiters at the Grand Oriental Hotel. When he was caught misbehaving in a train with four Sinhalese boys, charges were laid before the governor, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway, a former officer of the Indian Army who had also served in the Second Afghan War. Macdonald’s behaviour had for some time been so reckless (with British boys as well, so it was said) that other charges were soon made, and apparently some seventy witnesses could have been called. Desperate to avoid a scandal, Ridgeway sent Macdonald on leave to England with the suggestion that he should ponder his future. In London the general met Roberts, then commander-in-chief in Britain, who told him he could only remain in the army if he returned to Ceylon to face a court-martial. In Paris on his way back, Macdonald wrote to tell him that he could not face a court-martial, which led the field marshal to hope that he would disappear, find some distant part of the world and be forgotten. The current c-in-c in India, General Kitchener, who may have been a repressed homosexual himself, hoped for a more dramatic finale: he wanted his colleague to be court-martialled and shot. In the end Macdonald shot himself in his Parisian hotel.157
Kitchener’s attitude may have been caused by resentment that Macdonald had broken a rule of celibacy that he and some of his bachelor entourage seem to have observed. For fear of exposure, many British homosexuals decided to lead chaste lives in India. The ICS had no scandals of this kind although, by the law of averages, a couple of gay men would have entered its ranks every year. On joining the service in 1930, Michael Carritt came across two examples, one known as ‘Oscar’ because he was a friend of ‘Bosie’ Douglas, Wilde’s most notorious boyfriend: he was clever, charming and ebullient and, as he caused no scandal, he rose high. The other, also an aesthete, was the district judge in Midnapore. ‘Welcome, dear boy … welcome indeed. I am Jameson,’ he told Carritt with a slightly affected lisp, ‘but call me Jimmie, dear boy,’ he added as he offered ‘a limp hand to shake’. Jimmie had won a Military Cross in Flanders, and he was brave in India too, refusing to carry a revolver in violent Midnapore and making himself a target for assassination by volunteering to sit on a tribunal to try cases of terrorism. He had a wife and child, but they lived in England, and he was a lonely unhappy man, wishing he was in Oxford or London rather than doing a job in a place where there was no outlet for his culture or his sexuality. Apparently he vented his frustrations on Indians by passing ‘notoriously severe’ judicial sentences.158
Homosexual relationships did exist in the army, though not in the numbers one would expect in a more tolerant society. Brigadier Packard, who commanded a battalion in the Indian Army in 1945, observed that his sepoys ‘often had homosexual relationships with fellow sepoys and any trouble within the platoon was usually connected with this’.159 Not a great deal seems to have gone on in British regiments although enough for the creation of a special vocabulary: ‘budlee-budlee’ for buggery in a barracks between ‘hammock-chums’ or, if they were bivouacking on a march, ‘bivvy-chums’; and enough rhyming slang was adopted for ‘arse’ to become Khyber Pass, though this could be used with sexual neutrality as in ‘Up your Khyber, mate!’160
Homosexual relationships among army officers were rare, but they too did happen. GR, the bisexual patient of Havelock Ellis, had an affair with a brother officer, who told him that he had ‘had connection’ with three other officers in their regiment; he did not mention them by name, but GR could guess who they were.161 Army men involved in homosexual activities were usually discreet, though an exception was Kenneth Searight, a young officer of the West Kent Regiment who befriended E. M. Forster on a voyage to Bombay in 1912 and confessed to a life that astonished the sexually inexperienced writer by its fullness and variety.162
With all their risks, homosexual adventures were probably easier to pursue in India than in Britain. As John Masters recalled, ‘a few homosexuals followed their secret star with comparative comfort in that large and easy-going country’.163 Lieutenant Searight certainly did. Although he had left England at the age of twenty-six as pretty much a sexual novice, he enjoyed a rampant sex life in India, especially with Pathan boys when he was stationed in Peshawar. Recording his exploits in 2,706 lines of rhyming couplets (‘Each boy of certain age will let on hire / His charms to indiscriminate desire’ is one of the more restrained ones) in a manuscript he called ‘Paedikion’, the officer added an appendix giving the names and ages of his partners with details of dates, places and the number of orgasms he achieved.164
Soon after his arrival in India, Forster went to Peshawar with two travelling companions to visit Searight, who invited them to guest night at his regimental Mess. Although Forster lost a collar-stud, arrived late and kept the band waiting before it could play ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, the dinner was a success. Afterwards Searight made Forster dance with him and gave piggy-back rides to one of his friends. According to the historian Ronald Hyam, Forster’s encounters with Searight made him more open to the possibility of sexual adventure and also to writing about it in his fiction; he started to work on his novel Maurice, unpublished in his lifetime, soon after his return to England.165
Searight’s exploits did not, however, inspire Forster to become similarly adventurous when he returned to India in 1921 as secretary to the maharaja of Dewas, a state near Indore. He sat about the palace in the hot weather, lonely, idle and sexually frustrated. Bored with masturbation, he finally made a botched attempt to seduce a Hindu workman, and afterwards, fearing that the maharaja had been informed of the episode, confessed it to his employer. Although the prince was sympathetic, he suggested it was more natural to want a woman, to which Forster replied that it was not in his case, because he had ‘no feeling for women’. The maharaja remained sympathetic, exclaiming that, as God had made Forster the way he was, he (the prince) must provide his secretary with a catamite. After much thought he suggested ‘K’, a palace barber, whose payment he would see to, though he begged the writer not to assume the passive role in the relationship. We do not know what role Forster did assume, but we do know that the two were lovers for a time, meeting (with the maharaja’s connivance) in a disused suite of the palace.166