Although Ganjam was only 370 miles from Calcutta, this was an extraordinarily rash decision. Ganjam itself had only been brought under an uncertain degree of British administration since 1767. There was now a garrison of two thousand Company troops, but the place remained under threat of attack from the north by Maratha armies, ‘a lawless tribe, who are forever breaking treaties’, as Elizabeth wrote with the utmost conventionality. In order to reach Calcutta, her party would have to travel northwards through Orissa, and ‘we had not a clear plan of the journey we were going’. Outside of Midnapur, Orissa was substantially under Maratha, not Company, control. Moreover, since 1775, the Marathas and the Company had been in a state of open war. For the first time since leaving Dhaka, Elizabeth Marsh was committing herself to moving beyond the limits and the effective coercive reach of the Company state.69 Over the course of the month that remained to her as a traveller, a period that fills almost a third of her diary, she progressively cast off a succession of other supports.
On 30 May, she, George Smith and their party reached Lake Chilka, at forty miles long, Asia’s biggest salt-water lake, separated from the sea only by narrow strips of land and shale. For fear of getting stuck in the surrounding sands, they decided not to travel around it, but to cross part of it by ferryboat, and move decisively into Orissa that way: ‘our palanquins were placed across the boat, the baggage and servants under them; the night passed very well’. When they disembarked at midnight on 31 May on the beach at Manickpatam, it was to learn that a famine was in progress inland, and that obtaining sufficient new supplies of rice for the whole of their retinue was out of the question. This forced another sloughing off. They decided to send most of their coolies back to Ganjam on the same boat. This necessarily also meant that they had to let go of many of their heavy European artifacts and comforts: ‘our tents, table, chairs, and a large chest of linen belonging to me’. It is an indication of how strangely privileged her progress had been at one level that even after this, their travelling party still seems to have numbered about sixty, of whom all but she and Smith were Asian. As they entered the town that she called ‘Jaggurnaut’ on 2 June, she recorded yet another falling away: ‘the chowkey people, or customs officers stopped us … enquiring for our pass, and doubting our right to proceed’. George Smith eventually smoothed things over, but this seems to have been the first time she was brought face to face with outright indigenous opposition, explicit non-deference.70
‘Jaggurnaut’ was the modern Puri, with its extraordinary two-hundred-foot-high twelfth-century temple to Vishnu in his form as Jagannath, or Lord of the World. It is in relation to this place that Elizabeth Marsh’s limitations as a witness and reporter – and some of her strengths – emerge most strongly. The ‘high street’ here, she wrote, was ‘about as broad as the Haymarket in London – and as the moon was at full, the people were all out, conversing in the street, and the crowd was prodigious’. Easing their way through the crowds, the pilgrims, the temple functionaries, the sellers of palm-leaf paintings, jewels and food, they passed what she called ‘the grand pagoda, where the famous God, Jaggernaut is deposited’. But, she was told, ‘as the natives are never suffered to see the image, no stranger is permitted even to approach its walls’: that is, the fortress-like stone wall surrounding the temple complex with its elephant, lion, horse and tiger gates. Typically, she was unsatisfied, and sought to find out more: ‘I had a description of the God from a Brahmin, who said it has only one eye, and that is a diamond, of immense value, in the middle of its forehead, other riches surround it.’ In other words, this man spun her a line that was intended to impress and to provoke wonder in someone who was ignorant or, as in her case, an unbeliever. This, at least, she perceived. There were, she grumbled, five hundred Brahmins in Puri, and ‘the truth is not to be obtained, every Brahmin telling you a different story’.71
There was much going on, though, that she was unable to perceive. A learned, often inaccurate literature existed in English, going back to at least the early seventeenth century, on Puri’s massive significance as a pilgrimage site. Naturally, Elizabeth Marsh was ignorant of it.72 She was able to discover that their arrival had coincided with ‘the high festival, when pilgrims (from the most distant parts of India) go … with presents to the God Jaggurnaut’, and she sensed that the Brahmins whom she tried to converse with were withholding vital information of some kind. But neither she, nor apparently Captain George Smith, understood that the Ratha Yatra was imminent, the car festival of Lord Jagannath. Nor did they understand (and their Hindu servants seemingly either did not know or, more likely, chose not to tell them) that, far from ‘the natives’ never being suffered to see Jagannath, they were about to do so, and that she and Smith were being hurried out of the town as it prepared for one of the most spectacular and important Hindu religious festivals in the subcontinent.73
Jagannath’s eyes are large, staring, and round like lotus flowers. His complexion is blackish, and he smiles and his emblematic arms are cast wide because he is all-merciful as well as all-seeing. Customarily his image is about five feet tall, but that is not how he appears at the Ratha Yatra. The great central road through Puri that reminded Elizabeth Marsh of the Haymarket, the Bada Danda, is wide because it has to be. During the festival, it must accommodate the forty-five-foot-high car or chariot of Jagannath, with its sixteen wheels, each seven feet wide, and the only somewhat smaller chariots of Jagannath’s brother, Balabhadra, and his sister Subhadra. These are all three storeys high. Constructed and painted anew every festival, they are covered with carvings, mirrors, pictures, brass bells and iron gongs; it is on these huge chariots or rathas that the images are hauled ceremoniously through Puri, covered in brilliant fabric canopies.74 Because she was a stranger and hobbled by ignorance, Elizabeth Marsh missed seeing all of this. But she persisted in looking. Her diary over the next few days is full of references to the pilgrims whom she watched moving relentlessly towards Puri as her own party increasingly left it behind. There were ‘prodigious numbers of people, all loaded with different presents’; ‘thousands of pilgrims, going to pray to Jaggernaut’; ‘many with old and decrepit men and women upon their backs, carrying them to die at Jaggernaut’. As she correctly observed, a disproportionate number of the pilgrims were women, many of them ‘with a pot of Ganges water, neatly tied up’. Elizabeth Marsh seems to have found it easy, up to a point, to sympathize with her indigenous servants, organizing fires to warm ‘the poor people who carried us’, for instance, when they got drenched in the monsoon rains. But her comments on the Puri pilgrims are the closest she comes to expressing some sense of common humanity with, and curiosity about, ordinary Indians outside her employ, perhaps because these people too were involved in motion across vast distances. Some of them, she discovered, ‘had already travelled upwards of 1000 miles’. ‘They appeared perfectly harmless, and suffered us to pass without interruption,’ she recorded: ‘I did not expose myself to view, but cut a hole in my bulker, or cover of my palanquin, from whence I could see, and not be seen.’75
As they moved nearer to Cuttack, however, her party began to encounter physical harassment and open hostility. On 5 June, when a ‘severe hot wind … almost took the skin off’, the only choultry they could find to shelter in was ‘occupied by some Maratha horsemen, and they would not quit it. They behaved rather insolently to Captain Smith, but nothing would do but temporizing with them, and leaving them as fast as possible.’ The few sepoys who remained with them wanted to make a fight of it, but Smith ordered a retreat. On seeing this, an East India Company army officer and Company sepoys backing away from an armed encounter, their own remaining coolies became in turn ‘distressingly insolent, [and] refused to take the baggage, unless we gave them double pay, which we were obliged to comply with’. When they reached Cuttack, Orissa’s capital and a Maratha power centre, ‘large and irregular [and] crowded with inhabitants’, the pressure on them increased. One morning they ‘were refused liberty to pass through their town’.
The next, some local officials slapped ‘a heavy tax upon our baggage’. When they finally extricated themselves from the city, ‘the palanquins could hardly be squeezed through the crowd of men and boys, each with a drawn scimitar or knife in his hand, loading us with every abuse’.76
The famine, and the seething hostility of the villages they were now passing through, obliged them to begin rationing food. The days of Madeira and oysters were long over, and for a period – as they all did – Elizabeth ate nothing but a few water-sodden biscuits. There were other changes to her body at this time, and other types of discarding. Since the heavy monsoon rains had now set in, she purchased some rolls of muslin from a Maratha ‘peddler’, and wound the open-weaved fabric loosely around herself and over her Western clothing. It is unlikely (though, since her husband dealt in textiles, it is not impossible) that Elizabeth Marsh understood that, in Indian society, the cloth that individuals selected and wore could be understood as part of their substance, as almost as integral to them as their very skin. But she did now begin experimenting with different modes of dress and cloth in a manner that was unusual among European women in the subcontinent, and in ways that she had not done in the Madras region, irrespective of the weather. When they stopped for the night at Balasore, for instance, the main port of Orissa, she accepted the loan of a dress belonging to a ‘Portuguese’, a term that usually signified someone of mixed race, and was sometimes a euphemism for the indigenous concubine of a white official.77
What seems, but may not have been, her most significant relinquishing of familiar things occurred shortly after this. According to her diary, Captain George Smith had been acting without orders in continuing to accompany her through Orissa. For the sake of his career as an officer of the Madras army, he could not afford to go any further and cross into Bengal and another Presidency without his superiors’ permission. She had been anticipating their imminent parting for some weeks by now: ‘the thought of being soon separated from my dear cousin embitters every moment’, even though she tried hard to ‘reconcile myself to that common event in life, parting with those we esteem and admire’. ‘The dreadful hour of separation’ occurred ‘about 5 o’clock’ on the morning of 13 June. ‘I parted from my dear, dear cousin – he for Ganjam, and I for Calcutta,’ she wrote: ‘some hours my whole soul was absorbed in grief.’78
Yet it is not so much grief as irritation and a sense of mounting constraints that are most evident in her account of the last phase of her journey. When she reached Midnapur, the settlement that marked her formal return to safety and to the East India Company’s dominion, she sat on the ground alone for a while ‘under some trees, near the fort’, before going to present herself to the local chief, Mr Pearce. He received her ‘politely’ enough, and they ‘walked and chatted’. But it seemed ‘stiff and formal’, and she wished herself ‘seated again under the large tree I had just left, enjoying freedom and ease’.79 She was exasperated, too, by having to cope with a Mr Brishen, whom they had encountered in Orissa, lost and virtually penniless. George Smith had insisted on Brishen travelling with them so that Elizabeth would have a European male to protect her after his own departure. But she did not want him. He was ‘extremely illiterate’, ‘an over-grown boy of about 20’ without money who insisted on sharing her own scant supplies of food. ‘He … found me very convenient,’ she snapped, ‘and I found him a very useless piece of baggage.’ Earlier in her progress she had noted acidly in her diary how on one occasion the sight of a tiger caused their native servants abruptly to ‘set down our palanquins’ and run off: ‘Capt. Smith threatened them … but it was in vain, for they would have done the same the next moment.’ By now, though, she was less dismissive and more trusting, and she no longer felt the need for any European chaperone, ‘having sepoys and peons sufficient to protect me’. Understandably, Brishen hid in his palanquin for much of the time. So in the end it was substantially left to her, and above all to her sepoys, coolies and palanquin-bearers, to find the safest way back into the heart of Bengal, ‘wading through the wet ploughed ground’ of paddy fields.80
The end of Elizabeth Marsh’s journey also meant an end to her interlude of escape. Her experience and knowledge were now far wider, and so were certain fractures in her thinking and in her sense of herself. Her Indian diary is eloquent about her delight in company and her yearning for acceptance by what passed for ‘European’ genteel society. It also documents her desire at times to get away from both. It discloses her extensive ignorance and her capacity for racial disdain and ruthlessness. It also reveals at times a hunger to learn, and a capacity for curiosity about, and for occasional empathy with, indigenous sites and people. And it shows how she was bound up with the East India Company’s power, and with the British Empire and nation, but not always assertively or unambiguously so. It is what is left out of the journal that illustrates this most clearly. If Elizabeth Marsh attended Christian worship at any stage of her progress, or made a private act of devotion, she never mentions it. Temples, or what she persists in calling ‘mosques’, progressively intrigue and interest her. But the Bible and prayer book are always missing. Nor, once she arrives at Madras, does she mention a single patriotic celebration on the part of the Company or its army. At the military cantonment at Ellore, and elsewhere, she would have been bound to see flags waved, guns fired, troops lined up in honour of royal birthdays and other canonical British anniversaries. Such occurrences are absent from her account, shrugged off in the course of her journey like so much else as she became increasingly deciduous.81
The silences and elisions in her text – what she leaves out or quickly passes over – are also suggestive about some of the contradictions in Elizabeth Marsh’s relationship with James Crisp. She returned to Calcutta on 20 June 1776. Instead of immediately hiring a river boat to take her back to Dhaka, and the husband and son she had not seen for eighteen months, she remained in the city for six weeks, staying in the garden house of her friend Johanna Ross. The likely reasons for this cast light on her journey more broadly. Johanna Ross was not just a connection of Elizabeth Marsh’s powerful kinsman, General Richard Smith, but a wealthy woman in her own right, with commercial interests. It was at one of her houses in Calcutta back in December 1774 that Elizabeth had said farewell to her husband and son, ‘who had been there upon business some time’, before embarking on her Asiatic progress with George Smith. Around this time, the mid-1770s, Johanna Ross is known to have lent James Crisp a substantial sum for his textile business.82 Elizabeth Marsh may have lingered in her house in late June and early July 1776 therefore not just (and perhaps not at all) so as to prolong her absence from her husband, but in order to assist him by facilitating this loan in some way. This possibility is reinforced by the likely identity of the man who went out to meet her on the outskirts of Calcutta at the end of her progress, and who escorted her into the city. He was a ‘Mr. Ross of Calcutta’, not as it happens a relation of Johanna Ross, but almost certainly Johannes Mathias Ross, the chief of the Dutch East India Company in Bengal, who is known to have done extensive business with many British Company and private traders.83
The closer one looks at Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian diary, the more one notices – not merely her delight in socializing and attention, her evident pleasure in the company of a younger and military male ‘cousin’, her growing, though uninformed, curiosity about indigenous religions, peoples, townscapes and landscapes, and her relish for distance and movement – but also her persistent interest in economic life, in business. She was particularly and understandably attentive to places where ‘a very considerable cloth trade … is carried on’: Machilipatnam; Madapolam; Pulicat; Ichapur, a centre for indigo; Cuttack; Ganjam and the like. She took note as she went along too of other kinds of economic activity: the ‘great trade carried on in brass and copper’ in Aska, where she noticed how the local inhabitants ‘feed well, and save money’; the salt pans outside Injuram, with ‘large mountains heaped up with that valuable article, ready for exportatio
n’; the manufacture and export of fine furniture carried out at Vizagapatam, where ‘a great number of artificers … nicely inlay in ivory and black wood’, and that town’s ‘stocking manufactory’ from which an ‘abundance [is] sent to all parts of the country’.84
Elizabeth Marsh clearly did not view the parts of the subcontinent she travelled through only as a ‘vast museum, its countryside filled with ruins, its people representing past ages’.85 She took note of certain ruined bridges, forts and palaces along her route, to be sure, but like other incomers to India at this time, she also saw some of the towns and settlements she passed through as flourishing environments for commerce, manufacturing and making money. It is possible, indeed, that sections of her Asiatic progress, and not just the end of it in Calcutta, were carried out in order to assist her merchant husband. The evident care she took at different stages to cultivate influential East India Company men, for instance, may have been designed to benefit James Crisp’s dealings in some fashion, and not just to cater to her own vanity and insecurities. And when, occasionally, she slips enigmatic lines into her diary like ‘finished all our business’, she may have been referring to more than just the personal business of packing up her chests and organizing her clothes.86
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh Page 25