Elizabeth Marsh’s willingness to begin looking outwards was clearly belated; and to readers now, this is likely to seem the most glaring paradox of her progress. She had been in motion since December 1774. Yet, on the evidence of her diary, it was only in the spring of 1776 that the cultures and the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent began to attract her sustained gaze and interest. Earlier, she had been obsessed with her own ill-health, and subsequently with other priorities. But of course these were not the only reasons why she behaved and reacted as she did.
South Asians naturally populated the entirety of her progress, just as at one level they populate the entirety of her diary. She mentions in passing how swiftly she is carried along once she leaves the city of Madras, far faster than James Rennell had judged feasible: ‘the palanquin boys run at the rate of 28 miles in less than six hours – only eight men, four to relieve four’. She makes regular references to her ‘three slave girls’, who looked after her clothes, organized her frequent baths in tank water and guarded her precious stock of tea, and who followed her for some of the time on bullocks, and sometimes in a doli, ‘which is a sort of palanquin but made in a more humble style’. She mentions the men who fetch fresh milk at intervals so as ‘to make butter for our journey’, and the man whose task it is to hold a chatta, an umbrella or parasol, over her palanquin when the heat is fiercest. And there are umpteen other individuals who make brief appearances in her diary when putting up and dismantling her tents, or cooking her meals, or taking her messages, or acting as porters. In this sense, indigenous individuals (particularly males) are omnipresent. But, to borrow a famous analogy, they appear mostly as servants in a country house traditionally do: as at once indispensable to the running of things, and firmly in the margins and in the background. And at no time does Elizabeth Marsh refer to any of these people in her diary by his or her own Indian name.55
This in itself does not signify all that much. On the few occasions that she and James Crisp refer in writing to such servants as they were able to afford in London, they do not name these people either.56 Servants, anywhere, of whatever origin, were not accorded the same courtesies that their self-regarding social superiors owed to each other. Even the fact that Elizabeth Marsh was now a slave-owner does not tell us as much about her attitudes to the peoples among whom she was now travelling as it might seem. In the Dhaka region where the Crisps settled, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, slave-ownership was widespread among the prosperous, whether they were Asian or European incomers:
The custom with respect to slaves in this country is this: Any one who is without a father, mother, or any other relation … who is destitute of the necessaries of life & should propose selling himself … becomes a slave, and any person possessing such slave or slaves and are in want of the necessaries of life may sell him, her, or them, to whomsoever they please & the purchaser, from that time is considered as the master of the slave or slaves. The children, grand children & so on to many generations become the slaves of their parent masters & they must do whatever is ordered, whether to cultivate, build, or any sort of drudgery.
A box palanquin, with four bearers and a parasol holder. Anonymous watercolour in the Benares style.
That Elizabeth Marsh was accompanied on her progress by at least three female slaves (two of whom she seems to have renamed ‘Phillis’ and ‘Mary’) reveals more about her pretensions to some affluence and status at this stage than it does, necessarily, about her attitudes to Indians and to race.57
More suggestive in this regard is the way in which she omits to name the few elite male Indians that she encountered during her progress. Whenever Elizabeth met a high-ranking white male official of the East India Company, she carefully recorded his name. But when, for instance, she describes how, en route for Aska in April 1776, ‘a severe land wind’ obliged them ‘to take shelter in a new built house, belonging to a black man of note’, this is all the detail she provides.58 Her not attempting to name this man suggests that in some way, and perhaps subconsciously, she chose not to view him as powerful. Instead, she treated this man on paper in the same way that she did virtually all of the white wives, stray white children, white private soldiers and white servants who briefly crossed her path during her travels: she noted the fact of his existence in passing, but withheld any acknowledgement of his individual identity or significance.
As this suggests, it would be quite wrong to romanticize Elizabeth Marsh’s attitudes to human difference. It would also be wrong to overstate – and no less wrong to ignore – what was distinctive about her responses.
As was customary at this time, she seems to have devoted only limited attention to the skin colour of the various people she encountered during her life. In The Female Captive she had described the various Moroccans she had encountered – Moors, Arabs, Jews, Berbers, Bedouins, sub-Saharan military slaves and more – sometimes as ‘dark’ in complexion, and sometimes as ‘sallow’; it was her publisher, and not her, who made use of the blanket term ‘tawny’.59 But, for all her elasticity of language in regard to complexions, Marsh had usually – though not invariably – insisted on the cultural, and especially the religious, gulf between her Moroccan captors and herself. In her book, the non-European peoples she meets in Morocco are sometimes ‘infidels’, whereas she is the ‘fair Christian’. When she escapes from Marrakech and Sidi Muhammad’s attentions, and takes refuge in the house of a European merchant, her first thoughts, at least as she publishes them, are ‘to return thanks to Providence for the happiness I then enjoyed, in being under the roof of those who professed the same faith as myself’.60
By the same token, although Elizabeth Marsh sporadically refers to indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent as ‘black’, as incomers from Europe had increasingly done since the fifteenth century, it was not skin colour that she focused on in her travel diary as the crucial mark of difference; and at no point does she ever refer to herself explicitly as ‘white’. Instead, she had recourse to George Smith’s military observations. She recorded how the old fort she saw at Vizagapatam was ‘not capable of making any great defence, especially against European powers’. At Bimlipatam, too, she stressed that the local fort ‘could only hold out against … Country powers’; while the fort in the Maratha stronghold of Cuttack was ‘small, and of no defence’, its few guards ‘chiefly supported for show’.61 These are clearly George Smith’s professional assessments, and – like Elizabeth Marsh’s earlier remarks on the East Indian squadron in the Bay of Bengal – they bear witness to the swiftly shifting balance of power in this part of Asia. For Marsh, though, parroting Smith’s opinions on indigenous fortifications in this fashion seems mainly to have been a way of asserting difference and superiority. She invoked, not Christianity this time, but rather Western military technology and might, as a means of distinguishing herself from the peoples amongst whom she was travelling.
Reacting in this manner was not always her instinct, however, and it became markedly less so as her journey progressed. Even in its early stages, Elizabeth Marsh’s written reactions to travelling overland in a party that was overwhelmingly made up of indigenous soldiers and servants seem relaxed and even accepting when compared to the recorded responses of some other female incomers to the subcontinent at this time. ‘I could not be reconciled to the vast numbers of black people who flocked to the shore on my first arrival,’ Jemima Kindersley declared in her published account of her arrival in India in the mid-1760s. Some women never became reconciled. ‘God knows what would become of me left quite alone with the black people,’ wrote Mary Morgan in the 1770s, after living in Calcutta with her army officer husband for some years. ‘God forgive me,’ she went on, ‘… I cannot bear the sight of them.’62 No outbursts of remotely this sort occur in Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian travel diary, and there is no evidence that she felt apprehensive at the prospect of being left alone ‘with the black people’. Indeed, towards the end of her progress she increasingly allowed herself to slip into precisely
that situation. This relative absence of anxiety was due in large part to her peculiar background. Virtually all women and most men migrating to India from Europe in the mid-eighteenth century had little or no prior experience of different continents, peoples and cultures: but this was manifestly not Marsh’s situation. Whatever the birth identity of her mother, she had arrived in the subcontinent having already been exposed not simply to Morocco, but also to the markedly cosmopolitan populations of Portsmouth, Menorca, Gibraltar and Bishopsgate; and, ever since childhood, she must have encountered stray black and Asian seamen on Royal Navy ships. Elizabeth Marsh might proclaim her own difference on occasion. But she was also sufficiently used to living among difference for it sometimes to recede in importance in her mind.
The sort of woman that she was, and what she was not, shaped her experience of indigenous culture and society during her Asiatic progress in another respect. The almost complete absence of detail in her travel diary about even elite male Indians may well be a reflection of her racial, religious and national prejudices; but it was no less a product of her own insignificance and powerlessness, of the degree to which she was looked down upon. When Jemima Kindersley published her account of her Indian travels in 1777, she was able to preface it with an image of a zenana, the harem of ‘a great Mussulman’ in Allahabad who had extended hospitality to her and her officer husband. The hospitality from local elites that Elizabeth Plowden received when she visited Lucknow in the company of her husband Richard Chicheley Plowden in the 1780s was far more protracted and lavish. As her diary makes clear, Lucknow’s Nawab, Asaf ud-Daula, invited her to a succession of breakfasts, feasts, elephant-fights and displays of dancing and fireworks. He showed her some of his collection of precious stones, and poetry that he had written. And in 1788, towards the end of her stay, he presented her with a sanad (a deed of grant) awarding her the title of begum, or noblewoman. Even Mary Morgan was obliged to stifle her prejudices and fears when, in 1778, she and her husband received a visit in Calcutta from a local Nawab, with his two hundred attendants, ‘eight elephants, some fine palanquins, [and] a great many horses’.63
By contrast, Elizabeth Marsh experienced no elite attentions of this sort. At no time during her stay in Madras, for instance, does she seems to have been invited to the Nawab of Arcot’s new palace at Chepauk. The Nawab, Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah, combined a deep interest in Sufism and in Persian scholarship and poetry with a taste for European, and specifically British, art and commodities; and he is known to have admitted European women to his presence, the painter Catherine Read amongst them. If Elizabeth had visited Chepauk, she would surely have included this coup in her diary. But she does not. Nor, on the basis of what she writes, do any other indigenous aristocrats appear to have invited her into their presence, even on those occasions when they allowed her a place in which to stay. When the ruler of Cuttack, in Orissa, granted her brief shelter in his town, she recorded how ‘his palace, from description, is magnificent’. She herself was evidently never given the opportunity to find out.64
As in the house she sometimes lived in with James Crisp at Dhaka, Elizabeth Marsh was surrounded on her progress by traditional signifiers of high status in the subcontinent. She travelled in a palanquin, as Indian elite individuals and top East India Company officials customarily did, and amidst a very large retinue. On some occasions her party was even preceded by a chobdar, a ceremonial stick-bearer. Yet it would have been easily apparent to any interested indigenous witnesses that she was not noble in fact, but an outsider, religiously impure and meat-eating. They would likely have seen her too as a woman who was evidently of no great propriety, since she did not remain decently hidden behind the covers of her palanquin, but got out and walked at regular intervals, and talked, or laughed, or danced, or consumed alcohol in the open air with a variety of men. Along with her own prejudices, the suspicion and contempt that Elizabeth Marsh would have aroused among many Asians inevitably circumscribed what she could do, and what she could get to see and understand.
It was ignorance, though, which constituted her greatest obstacle. ‘Books of travels of Thevenot, Bernier, Tavernier, P. de la Valle,’ wrote James Rennell grandly in 1783, ‘… are in every body’s hands.’ He was referring to some of the best-known European authorities on the subcontinent: Jean de Thévenot (1633–67), Franc¸ois Bernier (1625–88), a physician who visited the Mughal court in Delhi, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89), and Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), all of whom, and more, a highly educated and/or highly ambitious Western incomer to India was likely to have heard of, if not read.65 One may safely assume, however, that these men’s writings, and other expensive learned works, rarely if ever passed through Elizabeth Marsh’s hands. She was, anyway, an intelligent and curious woman, not remotely a scholarly or a studious one. As the rest of her Asiatic progress demonstrates, she had been deeply intrigued by Quintin Craufurd’s conversations about Indian mythologies and religions. But she remained profoundly uneducated about them. And she was linguistically hobbled, shut off not just from the writings of Indo-Persian and Hindu scholars, but also from easy verbal communication with such native inhabitants as she encountered. By now, men who aspired to the East India Company’s senior ranks, such as her son Burrish Crisp, were investing more time in acquiring Asian languages, though few European males at this stage were familiar with the dominant spoken languages of those parts of the subcontinent Elizabeth Marsh progressed through: Tamil, Telagu, and Oriya in Orissa. She herself seems to have known enough ‘Moors’, or pidgin Hindustani, to tell her servants and slave women what to do, and to ask them questions. But she had limited opportunities, and crucially no career incentive, seriously to learn indigenous languages and customs.
All of this, her prejudices, her social and economic insignificance, her substantial ignorance, but also her unusual experience of different kinds of people and places and her curiosity about them, influenced what Elizabeth Marsh could see and do when, from the spring of 1776, she finally began on her Asiatic progress to look outwards. The vigour and eagerness of her vision, and the various and inevitable blinkers on it, emerge from her account of her first self-conscious effort to investigate the cultures through which she was travelling. This was on 20 April, on the route to Aska, and near the place the British usually referred to as ‘Chicacole’, because they found it so hard to pronounce Srikakulam. It was already hot, and she was ‘almost dying with fatigue’. But she
rose early, and accompanied by some gentlemen, went to see a famous mosque – I ventured (where no woman ever had) to the top – the steps were placed on one side, and not more than 1 foot 8½ width, and about half yard broad – these joined to the mosque on one side, and a very deep precipice on the other, no railing to support the footsteps – The gentlemen who were with me could afford me no assistance, except that I took hold of the skirts of one of their coats – and kept my eyes fixed on the steps – when we reached the top, which is a great height, I was delighted with the view, as it commanded one of the finest prospects that can be imagined – the returning was most to be dreaded – for our danger was exceedingly great – happy was I when I found myself safe at the bottom.66
It is impossible to be certain which of the important religious sites near Srikakulam this was, since the region contains so many. Almost certainly, however, it was not a ‘mosque’ that Elizabeth saw, but a Hindu temple. She may have gone to Arasavalli, a couple of miles from Srikakulam, the only temple in the subcontinent devoted to sun worship. It is rather more likely that she and her companions travelled to see the Srikurmam temple, and that what she climbed was part of its soaring gopuram, its remarkable five-storey gateway tower. Whichever temple it was, it would have been ornamented with sculptures and carvings of deities, semi-demigods and mythological figures and creatures, and possibly wall paintings, but she makes no mention of any of these. Elizabeth Marsh focused only on what she could understand, her own physical toughness, and the beauty of the scenery.
She did
much the same when she explored another ‘mosque’ six days later, writing of how she had climbed a mountain for two hours in order to view it, and once again letting herself become absorbed in the scenery and the picturesque. It was ‘a fine night’, she recorded when they finally reached Aska:
Went through several extensive villages, which had every appearance of opulence – the moon was high, and most of the towns surrounded by noble topes – rivers and fields of grain – in short, as we drew near to Aska, it was all enchantment – so delicious a country, stately trees, fine pasture, rising hills, fertile vales, winding rivers, that I never beheld any prospect so heavenly. To sleep was impossible, as the eye (though moonlight) was constantly engaged by a new object.
Yet, although she resorted to clichéd words from English novels (‘enchantment’, ‘delicious’, ‘heavenly’), she also noted how the scorching heat and wind made the bleached shrubs and undergrowth on the outskirts of the town brush against each other, and sometimes catch fire: ‘a pleasing yet awful sight’.67 And, as soon as George Smith’s court martial proceedings at Aska were over, they started travelling again.
They set out on 15 May, stopping at about 2 o’clock the following morning ‘to get a little sleep, and [we] did not wake till the daybreak; the other palanquins had passed us un-noticed, and missing us, hastened on to Ganjam, thinking we were before’. Alone, barring their immediate servants, the couple travelled on to an unidentified place ‘which was only inhabited by Brahmins’, a vast complex of (Elizabeth thought) over a hundred Hindu temples and sacred sites, some of which were underground. It is the first time that an element of guilt enters her diary. Because it was so hot, Smith escorted her into one of the underground temples. By now she knew that unbelievers were forbidden the interior of such places, and that one worshipped at a temple only after a ritual bath in a nearby tank or river. So this time she took note of ‘the great distress of the poor Brahmins, who no doubt had much trouble to purify it after us. It would take many sacrifices etc. before they could possibly make use of it again.’ And although she still referred to the place as a ‘mosque’, she observed some of the interior detail. Each of the subterranean temples, she wrote, had a ‘Swammy, or God in it’, a reference to Swami, a title of the Hindu deity Krishna. Exposure to scenes so utterly divorced from her knowledge did not tempt her to back off. When they reached Ganjam, she decided again not to wait in the settlement for a ship that would take her back to Calcutta. Instead, she would ‘pursue my journey by land’, on a route, she wrote carefully, which ‘no European lady had ever undertaken … before’.68
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh Page 24