Everyday travel was by a shaded palanquin, a form of travelling bed or armchair which could cost as much as 250 rupees and was an expensive necessity for the new arrival. Palanquin bearers were normally hired for a specific journey. They worked in teams of eight with four men carrying the passenger and the others following, ready to take over when their colleagues became weary. If the going was good and travel by night, when it was cool, they could jog as much as twenty-five miles in eight hours. Their profession required skill and stamina and they were probably the least biddable of all servants. In the 1790s the Calcutta palanquin carriers set up a trade union to protect wages and maintain a closed shop, but their monopoly collapsed with an influx of bearers from Dacca and Patna, who undercut them. In 1797, when James Cochrane, a Madras customs official, gave his ‘palanquin boys’ a ‘refreshing’ (i.e. beating), they retaliated by burgling his house. There were other forms of revenge for disgruntled palanquin bearers, as his friend Alexander Read observed ruefully: ‘I would advise all lads like me who can’t swim to keep in with their Palanquin boys in the monsoon time, otherwise they might get a Dinso in some of the nullahs [streams].’39
Moderate physical punishment of disobedient or slack servants was legally tolerated in India, as it was in Britain well into the nineteenth century. Europeans were, however, discouraged from using fist, stick or whip for their use was so incompatible with their moral status. ‘Moderation, temper, and kindness’ were the distinguishing features of the British officer, according to general orders issued by Sir John Malcolm in 1821.40 His exhortation was necessary, for in July, Lieutenant Vignolles of the 26th Bengal NI had been tried for flogging his syce with a buggy whip. The victim suffered eighteen strokes and complained to Vignolles’s commanding office, a reminder that even the humblest Indian took British claims to moral integrity at their face value. During the subsequent trial for assault, it emerged that the defendant was a sadist who had been previously reprimanded for thrashing his servants, an activity which one witness noticed gave him ‘seeming pleasure’. Two other officers had stood by while he delivered the final beating and throughout his examination Vignolles was insouciant. He was cashiered as a warning to others who might feel similarly inclined.41 The same judgement was delivered against another junior officer who struck two sepoys with a buggy whip in Calcutta in 1824. Between 1835 and 1845 the lash was abolished as a punishment for sepoys on the grounds of their natural tractability and the fact that it was degrading for men from the higher castes, for whom dismissal was shaming enough.
Public humanitarianism was one thing; what happened in private was another. T. W. Webber, who worked in the Indian Forestry Service from 1861, recalled at the end of his forty-year career that many of his contemporaries saw nothing wrong in abusing and ‘thrashing’ their servants. He confessed to having twice struck a native and considered that in ‘courage, high principle, and honourable feeling’ many of his servants were equal to ‘educated Christian gentlemen’.42 He was thinking in particular of the shikaris (professional huntsmen) and gun bearers who accompanied him in pursuit of game.
Throughout history and across the world, hunting for its own sake has been the prerogative of the rich and powerful with time on their hands. This was so in Britain and India, which made the chase a major source of common interest and everyday contact between Indian noblemen and British gentlemen. The connection was brilliantly shown in John Zoffany’s most famous Indian painting, Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, where sporting Indians mingle with like-minded British officers. This informal but animated scene, executed in 1786, so impressed the Nawab of Awadh that he commissioned Zoffany to make a copy, which hung in the palace at Lucknow until the 1857 Mutiny. The picture is a reminder that shared tastes stimulated mutual respect, even friendship. During the early 1830s the Nawab of Firozpur regularly invited British officials and officers to join him on extended lion and tiger shoots in the countryside west of Delhi. His companions instantly recognised him as a gentleman, with all the virtues of a fox-hunting squire from the pages of Surtees: ‘He was enthusiastically fond of hunting and shooting, and naturally of a frank and generous disposition.’43
Indian princes frequently entertained high-ranking British visitors by staging contests between fighting elephants, a spectacle they understood would appeal to the sporting tastes of British gentlemen – its near equivalent, bull baiting, was only abolished in Britain in 1835. An elephant fight was presented by the Nawab of Awadh for Colonel Forrester and his party during their stay in Lucknow in 1809. The guests were taken to a verandah overlooking an arena within a bamboo palisade. Aficionados explained how the war elephants had been fed on a highly-spiced diet which kept them in a permanent bad humour. This was raised to a pitch of fury when their favourite females were sent ahead into the ring. But sexual tension failed to ignite the first pair of elephants, who gave ‘little sport’. There were no disappointments from the second pair, who battled away head to head and had to be separated by fireworks thrown between them.44
There was ‘nothing very remarkable’ about a duel between the Raja of Ladwa’s fighting elephants, who went through their paces for Richard Cust in 1844, but he enjoyed ‘a capital contest between two deer’.45 In 1851 the Raja of Bharatpur’s elephants performed for Lord Anson, the commander-in-chief and his staff, one of whom heard afterwards that the beasts had had their tusks blunted.46 Maybe this was a precaution against the loss of a valuable animal, or else an acknowledgement that the sahibs’ tastes in blood sports were less robust than formerly. Sporting gentlemen with a sense of history and the stomach to watch these contests wondered whether the show had its origins in the diversions of the Roman circus.
Sport drew British and Indians together in other ways. Villagers were peremptorily pressed to serve as beaters whenever an officer or official paused on his journey and spent a day shooting. Perhaps those summoned welcomed the call as a break in the humdrum routine of their lives, and if they did not, then they dared not say so. The ryots of the Deccan were always accommodating to Major Beaven, revealing to him the haunts of deer, porcupine and hogs. Looking back over many hunting trips during the 1810s and 1820s, he interpreted this co-operation as a token of the greater respect shown to anyone who wore a red coat and cocked hat. The peasantry, he imagined, regarded officers like himself as the natural heirs of the warrior overlords who had so recently dominated the countryside. This sense of deference was finely tuned to the point where a villager could detect the difference between a senior officer (‘burra sahib’) and a junior (‘chota sahib’), in other words a great and a minor gentleman.47 There were, of course, plenty of chota sahibs who behaved as burra sahibs. When Tom Raw, the hero of Sir Charles D’Oyly’s comic epic, travels up country, he lords it over zamindars and ryots, brandishing his sword and bellowing, ‘Hum Comp’ny ke lupteenant! Bhote Kubberdar’ (I’m a Company Lieutenant! Mind what you’re about). The phrase does not appear in Gilchrist’s compendium, but variations of it, delivered with bluster, must have been many Indians’ experience of the British.
Indians were imagined to possess a social sixth sense which made them immediately recognise a gentleman. This facility was notably well-developed among the Indian nobility. Hastings was highly gratified when it was reported that a raja had said of him:
This man knows what to say to us. You ought always to have a great sirdar [senior officer] at the head of the government. Sir George Barlow [Governor-General, 1805–07] was of the weaver caste, and could not flatter us with anything he said.48
Barlow had disclosed his middle-class background by his inability to master that courtly manner which would have struck a chord with princes who had grown up surrounded by elaborate ceremonial and fulsome addresses. Hastings, with a noble pedigree that stretched back to the Middle Ages, knew what to say and said it elegantly. This clearly mattered, even if some high-born Indians were regrettably unable to detect an authentic gentleman and treat him accordingly. ‘Manners go for nothing in India,’ Montstuart Elphins
tone complained to his friend, Lady Hood, in 1814. Nonetheless, his experiences as a soldier and diplomat had taught him that, when ‘handling Indians’ it was best to stick to ‘the principles of good breeding’.49
It was pleasing to find Indians who appreciated and lived by these principles. Elphinstone, like many others, warmed to the warrior castes of the Ganges valley, whom he considered to be the ‘most warlike and manly of the Indians’. Colonel James Tod praised the Rajput nobility for their ‘courage, patriotism, loyalty, honour, hospitality and simplicity’.50 ‘No English gentleman could conduct himself with greater propriety and good breeding’ than the elder sons of Sadat Ali, Nawab of Awadh, concluded Colonel Forrest after having dined with them.51 Their polish no doubt derived from their father, who was infatuated by everything British. ‘His breakfasts, dinners, houses are completely English,’ remarked another of his guests, Charles Metcalfe, who also noticed that the nawab employed a French cook and a band with European instruments. Anand Rao, Raja and Gaikwar of Baroda, displayed ‘the esprit and manners of a gentleman’ on state occasions, but soon forgot himself in private. Then, according to Brigadier Alexander Walker, the prince acted like a ‘common Maratha horseman’, drinking more cherry brandy than was good for him and smoking too much opium.52
The rituals of state required that British gentlemen and Indian aristocrats behaved according to an elaborate code of etiquette. Lord Hastings gave the required four embraces to the Nawab of Karnataka when they met in 1814 and gave a further four to each of his sons and a nephew. Then, the nawab, his hand covered with a handkerchief scented with otto of roses, handed the Governor-General a betel nut and placed a chaplet of flowers round his neck. On Hastings’s departure, the nawab injected some amusement into the ceremony by uttering what he took to be a warm English farewell: ‘How d’ye do, Governor-General.’53 Before an audience with Bahadur Shah in 1837, Captain Fane and other officers were given muslin robes and asked to bind their cocked hats with scarves. Fane later heard that the Company was strict in enforcing respectful behaviour and that the late resident, William Fraser, had been reprimanded for handing his ceremonial costume to a beggar.54 Such occasions could be tedious and required considerable self-discipline; Fane’s companions found Indian singing ‘the most atrocious screaming they ever heard’, but as the formal concert proceeded, they became entranced. ‘Many of the airs were simple and sweet,’ the converted Fane wrote afterwards.
It is not known what the ‘principal native Gentlemen and Merchants’ made of the tunes played for them during the New Year ball held at the Governor-General’s Calcutta residence in 1822. There was dancing from ten until midnight, followed by a firework display which, ‘amongst romantic scenery’, struck guests as ‘most beautiful and picturesque’.55 The city was now India’s metropolis, and its Indian upper classes were drawn into its social life, adopting British manners and social forms. A contemporary invitation card illustrated just how far the process of assimilation had progressed:
Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy request the honour of Mr Hyde’s Company at a Nautch at his House near the Mumba Devi Tank, in celebration of his Son’s wedding, on the evening of Monday next at 8 o’clock, 7 February 1822.
There were many British guests and the entertainment was done ‘with great splendour’, although the bridegroom was only seven. Anglo-Indian social relations were stiffer in Madras despite the efforts of the Governor, Sir John Abercrombie, to introduce the Indian ‘higher classes’ into European society in 1812. ‘Aristocratic feelings’ among the Europeans frustrated intimacy and the gulf between the groups actually widened. Observing this, Captain Beaven remarked that this sort of snobbery did not exist in the country districts, where relations were informal and Europeans kept Indian concubines.56
III
The world to which Indians were admitted in Calcutta and Madras was one imported from Britain. In many respects, the exiles set about deliberately re-creating Britain, which was why the hillside resort of Simla became so popular from the 1830s onwards. Not only did it offer relief from the heat and dust during the summer, but visitors could actually imagine themselves in Britain. ‘Red rhododendron trees in bloom in every direction, and beautiful walks like English shrubberies on all sides of the hill,’ wrote Emily Eden in 1838.57 Others believed themselves transported to the Highlands of Scotland. The serendipity of finding Britain in India or, as was more usually the case, of contriving Britain in India, helped reduce homesickness and recurrent fears that the exile might never return:
This sigh for Britain, ever in the breast, –
Of all our pining, panting, exiled train,
Not one in twenty sees his home again!58
One of the most striking features of the artificial Britain in India was the tendency of its inhabitants to cling on to attitudes and fashions which had fallen into disuse at home. Duelling, for instance, had all but disappeared from Britain by 1840 under the pressure of public disapproval. It remained popular among the gentlemen of India: ‘The duello being pretty nearly as much a matter of recurrence to them, as a dish of curry at the mess table.’59 Its prevalence was explained by the Indian army officer’s overblown sense of personal honour, reckless gambling, heavy drinking and sexual adventures, all of which had been common enough among the aristocracy in Britain twenty or thirty years before. (When Mr Bennett set off to reclaim his eloping daughter, his family assumed that he would challenge her kidnapper to a duel.) Outlawed in Britain, duelling was indirectly condoned by the Indian authorities. In 1836 the young Irish wife of a sixty-year-old Light Dragoon major had been seduced by a young cornet in his regiment. When the husband found the pair in bed, he challenged the junior officer to a duel. The younger man first refused to return his opponent’s fire, but when a second round was demanded, he obliged and killed the major. His death was officially attributed to cholera, and the cornet was allowed to enter another regiment.60 Cholera was again given as the cause of death for another victim of a duel; an Irish Catholic subaltern, who had been driven to fight by the taunts of Protestant brother officers at Poona in 1841.61
Nonconformity in the broadest sense was frowned upon by British society in India. Major Havelock was sneered at by his brother officers, for ‘his manners are cold while his religious opinions [Baptist] seclude him from society’, wrote his friend Henry Broadfoot in 1841.62 Furthermore, and this was unforgiveable, he treated his profession ‘as a science’ which needed careful study. Richard Cust, who had passed through Eton, Haileybury and Fort William College and began his official career in 1844, recalled the India of his early years as a land ‘where no breath of intellectual air from the outside’ was ever felt and where intelligent conversation was impossible to find.63 The fault lay with the exclusiveness of Indian society, according to Major-General Sir William Sleeman, a distinguished warrior proconsul who died in 1854 after over forty years’ service. The trouble was that in Indian provincial cities British society consisted entirely of soldiers, administrators and, by the 1830s, clergymen, all of whom were agents of the government.64 Unlike British middle- and upper-class society, India possessed no businessmen, manufacturers, landowners, writers or creative artists who could contribute different perspectives to conversations.
Boredom was the recurrent complaint of many exiles. Lieutenant Blackwell spoke for thousands when he described life in the mess of the 13th Regiment at the close of 1823:
There was nothing but ennui and complaining of the abominable climate from morning to night . . . If a billiard table had not been purchased, I cannot imagine how many would ever have been able to have got through the dreary day.65
There were physical discomforts which were so commonplace that sufferers seldom bothered to record them in their journals or letters. James Welsh recalled an airless night when he unwisely discarded his mosquito net and was beset by swarms of the insects, which seemed as ‘large as bees’. The following morning he was ‘a mass of pimples; his clothes covered with blood’ and his eyes closed.66 The bowels were a co
nstant source of anxiety and tribulation. ‘I shall take care of my stern post in the future,’ Alexander Read told a friend as he was convalescing from a bout of fever which he had strangely diagnosed as a by-product of constipation.67 A pickled fish, eaten for breakfast, was blamed by Assistant Surgeon Oswald for a day of vomiting and diarrhoea in January 1858.68
Oswald also recorded his occasional hangovers. Among the officer and official classes, drinking was a common antidote to tedium, so much so that every guidebook warned the newcomer against excess. Wines were plentiful and cheap. ‘I drink hock, claret, and champagne only, and at dessert malmsey; the others, alleging the coldness of the climate, stick to port, sherry and madeira. I do not recollect having tasted water for the last seven days,’ a French visitor reported after a round of Simla dinner parties in the early 1830s. ‘Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘there is no excess.’69 A wide variety of drink was always available. Madeira, taken on board Company ships during routine stops during the outward journey, was universally popular and cheap, at roughly a rupee a bottle in the early 1800s. Another favourite was ‘English’ claret, to which brandy had been added to enable it to survive the Indian climate. It cost one and a half rupees a bottle and was infinitely superior to its rival, ‘Danish’ claret, which, Captain Williamson believed, was the source of ‘severe bowel complaints’. The sufferer who followed his advice would take port, which he suggested as an ideal restorative for the victim of diarrhoea.70 Williamson recommended porter, pale ale and ‘table beer’ and mild punches. One brew, known as ‘brandy shrob paunny’ and made up of brandy and water, was to be shunned for it ‘never fails to produce that sottishness at all times despicable, but particularly unsuited to Oriental Society, in which at least the better half are men of very liberal education, and all are gentlemen’.
Raj Page 21