There was a conspicuous candour about sexual matters among the British community in India, at least during the earlier part of the nineteenth century. In 1813, Poona was home to an odd European club in which new members underwent a pseudo-masonic initiation which involved, among other things, the ‘frank confession of all the principle sins’ of the novitiate. Recording one rumbustious session, Montstuart Elphin-stone told Lady Hood how a certain Captain Campbell, ‘a grave and respectable and orderly figure’, had confessed to being the father of three ‘innocent black babies’. Members thought it a great joke to convey this news surreptitiously to Mrs Campbell. Major Warren admitted that he had opened the curtains of Mrs Smith’s palanquin, chased her into the bedroom of her house and kissed her. There may have been more, but Elphinstone forebore to tell it.36 Even less inhibited was the ‘Rajah Nob Kissen’s nautch’ an allegedly fictional diversion for officers described by Captain Henderson who, one assumes, knew what he was talking about. At one stage an infatuated subaltern composes a poem about one of the dancers. It opens:
A dove-like bosom, where a mimic load
Of swelling ripeness rears its twin abode.37
This occasion, or one like it, may have been one of the ‘lascivious orgies’ held by temple nautch girls which, according to Sellon’s Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus, could set a young officer back 150 rupees (£15).38
Not all nautches were sex parties. A formal nautch dance was no more indecent than the Italian ballet he had seen in England, thought Captain Beaven, who added that this was the opinion of Anglican clergymen who had attended them. But then, Georgian clergymen were more worldly than their successors. Reflecting on a nautch he had just witnessed at the palace of the Raja of Bharatpur, Captain Halket concluded that it had not been ‘indecent’, but ‘of course one can have an indecent nautch as well as an indecent dance at home, but it is not usual’.39 Again, it would appear that Indian sexual diversions paralleled those in Britain in form if not embellishments.
Erotic dances, Hindu phallus worship, sculptures and paintings, together with an abundance of attractive young women expert in making love for its own sake, gave the overwhelming impression that the Indians were a lascivious people, dedicated to sensuality and undisturbed by any sense of shame. Additional evidence of licentiousness was provided by Muslim polygamy and Hindu child marriages, in which the bride was expected to have intercourse on or even before her twelfth birthday, a custom which shocked some commentators. In this and much else that was said and written on this subject, disapproval involved the application of double standards; in England twelve was the age of female consent until 1885.
Evangelicals found evidence of depravity everywhere. A journey down a Ludhiana street in 1847 was a sequence of distasteful encounters for the prim and pious Mrs Colin Mackenzie. ‘You may imagine,’ she wrote, ‘the degraded condition of the people here, when I tell you we constantly pass women in the open street bare down to the hips, little children have generally no clothing at all, and many of the men have the smallest possible quantity. They do not seem to have the least sense of decency.’ On another occasion she passed ‘a pretty little girl, singing at the top of her voice’ and asked her husband, an army officer, the meaning of the words. He replied saying that they ‘were so utterly detestable and vile, that hardly any man among the worst in London would sing such, unless previously intoxicated’.40 The singer must have been a prostitute tempting potential clients, but whether Mrs Mackenzie inferred this from her husband’s explanation she did not say.
Youthful promiscuity was blamed for the prevalence of syphilis in the north-western districts in an official medical report of 1840–42, which noted, disapprovingly, that Indian boys in Delhi ‘lose their virility’ quickly and were consequently driven to pester Company dispensaries for aphrodisiacs.41 An all-pervading and contagious licentiousness was the explanation for the fact that British soldiers in India had higher rates of syphilis than those stationed in the West Indies. This was the conclusion reached in 1829 by an army surgeon, who added that in India the rate of infection rose during periods of famine.42 Was it perhaps that, as in Britain when times were hard, poor women were driven to prostitution to keep themselves and their families alive?
III
The ordinary soldiers’ addiction to Indian prostitutes was a moral and logistical headache for the Company. Statistics collected between 1816 and 1818 showed that an infected soldier spent between twenty-one and forty-five days in hospital recovering if he was treated with emollients, including magnesia in fennel water, and a diet strong in vegetables. If, however, he underwent the more usual medication by which mercury ointment was applied to the sores on his penis, he would expect to spend between thirty-three and fifty-days as an invalid.43 For the next half-century, between an eighth and a third of the British garrison in India was infected with syphilis each year. Various experiments were tried to eliminate this wastage of men and money. The obvious practical solution was supervision of the prostitutes in the regimental bazaars through what were called Lock hospitals. The bazaar and army medical authorities identified infected women and compelled them to undergo treatment in quarantine. This form of control, with variations, was adopted in each presidency after 1800, or, at a local level, by regimental commanders. It worked after a fashion, although it was never possible to restrain those reckless spirits who wandered off into the native quarter in search of whores. But what, on one level, made good clinical and economic sense was, on another, an official endorsement of promiscuity. Spasms of conscience among the men at the top led to periods in which the Lock hospitals were abandoned.
The problem was not confined to India and it is certain that many soldiers carried the infection with them when they were posted there. Assistant Surgeon Frederick Robinson of the 74th Highlanders noted that the worst outbreak in his regiment occurred when it was stationed in Limerick. Interestingly, what he described as a near epidemic of syphilis occurred throughout Ireland during 1849–50 in the aftermath of the potato famine.44 One sure way to keep men out of the syphilis ward was to encourage individual soldiers to stick with one woman. This was difficult because military regulations severely limited the numbers of men who could be married and whose wives and families could live with them in barracks. This hurdle was overcome in India where, with their colonel’s approval, soldiers were free to make semi-permanent liaisons with native or Eurasian women.
In 1804 the Company decreed that those half-caste wives of British soldiers who had been educated were entitled to half the allowance given to British spouses. It was argued, with breathtaking pomposity and arrogance, that having been ‘born in India and habituated to live chiefly on rice, the wants and wishes of the Half Caste are much more confined than those of a European woman’. In consequence, the latter received eight rupees (80p) a month, the former, four.45 The emotional needs of the non-European wife were also less; they and their children were forbidden to follow their husbands back to Britain. It was callously suggested that once there, they would become destitute and seek poor relief, which was a common destiny for soldiers and their dependents. Since ‘they have no parish to support them’, it was best that they remained in India. In 1819, the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York, was displeased when he heard that men from the 66th Regiment had brought large numbers of native wives with them when they transferred from Ceylon to Bengal. He refused these women passage to Britain and, rather than leave them stranded in Bengal where they were bound to ‘obtain a livelihood by vice’, they were to be returned to Ceylon. Those of their children born in wedlock would be supported by army funds.46 The Duke, one of George III’s more lumpish younger sons, had kept a mistress for many years who had once got him into a scrape for peddling officers’ commissions.
The children abandoned when the 66th embarked for Britain were part of a growing Eurasian community which occupied a social and racial no-man’s-land, spurned by Indians and shunned by Europeans. In 1791 the directors excluded Anglo-Ind
ians from senior administrative and military posts on the grounds that Indians would never look up to them in the same way as they did to the British. The ban was never absolute; James Metcalfe, Charles’s son by his Sikh mistress, became a Company cadet in 1836 and an aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, in 1848.47 His advancement may have owed much to his father’s influence, while that of Colonel Sir Robert Warburton was the result of his knack with frontier tribesmen. Warburton was born in 1842, the son of an Anglo-Irish gunner officer and a niece of the Afghan amir, Dost Muhammad. He was educated in India and at Kensington Grammar School before passing through Woolwich and Addiscombe. In the 1870s he found his niche on the North-West Frontier thanks to his knowledge of local languages and customs and a rare ability to command respect and affection among the Raj’s most turbulent subjects.48
Warburton and Metcalfe were exceptional. Most other Eurasians could expect only junior posts, placing them alongside the Indian babu in the Company’s hierarchy. Nor were they admitted into British society. The prevailing convention was set down in a manual for cadets written in 1820, which warned new arrivals to be on their guard against the enticements of Eurasian girls, who had been confined by their fathers in Calcutta’s boarding schools. If he was ensnared by their ‘insinuating manners and fascinating beauty’, the officer would make ‘a matrimonial connexion which he might all his life-time regret’. He and his Anglo-Indian wife would be socially ostracised.49 An illicit union, one assumes, was unlikely to blight the young man’s prospects. Where no institutions existed for the care of Anglo-Indian children, and if the father had a conscience, he provided a modest income for the support of his offspring. In 1810 Lieutenant Good-behere left £200 for the maintenance of his child by his Indian mistress, appointing a brother officer its trustee.50
What treatment this infant might have expected when it grew older is described in one of a sequence of short stories by ‘a Lady’ set in India during the 1820s. The hero, Walter, is the half-caste son of General Vane of the Madras army, who has sent him to Britain to be educated. In Britain he was never made aware of his mixed race or status until a cavalry officer told him that his colour disqualified him from a commission in the Company’s army, although it would not stop him from obtaining a command in a princely army. On Walter’s return to India, Mrs Vane shows him ‘cold politeness’, while her daughters are downright rude. ‘You are a half-caste – that is blacky – and mamma says, you always show black blood,’ he is told by one, who continues, ‘and you have no proper mamma, like ours, and your mother is a blacky, like our Ayah, and it is not proper for Europe children like us to talk to half-castes too much, mamma tell us.’51 When he protests to his father that what he has learned in England had stirred in him ‘such feelings and aspirations’ that made his humiliations doubly hurtful, he is brusquely informed that the alternative had been an upbringing with ‘yonder half-savage Indians’.
Walter’s miseries multiply. His birth prevents him from marrying the English girl with whom he falls in love and his Hindu mother, now living on General Vane’s monthly allowance of twenty rupees, rejects him as a foreigner and infidel. He has some consolation in the knowledge that no shame attaches to her among her own people. Unable to be part of their world or that of his father, his only escape is to return to England where, he imagines, he may be accepted. For all its melodrama, this tale has the ring of truth, not least in its portrayal of the British women as more racially intolerant than men. Only Arthur Vane, Walter’s half-brother, treats him decently.
This was understandable since British women were bound to be jealous of Indian mistresses, with their rumoured sexual virtuosity, and offended by reminders of their husbands’ infidelities. At the same time, the philanderer’s pursuit of the erotic and exotic damaged the prestige of his race and imperilled his soul. Much to her disgust, Mrs Mackenzie heard that in the past British officers under the sway of their mistresses had gone so far as to paint themselves and publicly perform Hindu rituals. She saw India as a source of profound moral corruption for her countrymen, and, in July 1850, she was pleased to record in her diary that they were learning how to resist its temptations: ‘The recent improvement in the religious and moral standard at home causes a marked difference between the majority of men under fifty and those above it.’52 This was a premature judgement, for in 1858 Colonel Garnet Wolseley, then aged twenty-five, told his brother that he had acquired a native mistress who fulfilled ‘all the purposes of a wife without giving any of the bother’.53
Nonetheless, and in spite of many exceptions, there was a change in the moral climate of British India after 1850. It has partly been explained in terms of the influx of more and more European women, the wives of officers and administrators and those seeking husbands among them. Certainly the numbers who travelled to India rose steadily. They were taking considerable risks and flying in the face of current medical wisdom, which held that the female constitution was more fragile than the male, and therefore more likely to suffer from the Indian climate and those ‘miasmas’ which were imagined to disperse fever.54 Moreover, India was a dangerous place in which to conceive and have children. An 1829 medical guide listed the hazards, which included births attended by native midwives or the wives of British soldiers and ayahs whose diet of ghi, garlic and ‘sour and acrid vegetables’ produced milk that was thin and unnourishing. A shortage of doctors, especially in country districts, compelled the mother to become an amateur physician, and the book included a list of infantile symptoms and remedies.55
As the doctors predicted, losses of wives and children were high. Richard Cust, whose wife followed him to India in the early 1850s, wrote on her death an epitaph which would have served for many others:
Far in that Orient land, whose annals show
The price paid yearly of domestic woe;
Where many a blooming wife and mother lie
Who left their native country but to die.56
Whole families were all but extinguished, and the very young were always the most vulnerable. The memorial to Captain Joseph Haydock of the 53rd Regiment in Bath abbey records that he died, aged forty-one, of the effects of ‘exposure’ suffered during the 1857 Mutiny. His son, Francis, died aged one at Karachi in 1849, his daughters Mabel and Maud during their sea voyage home in 1860, aged fifteen and four months. The graveyards of cantonment churches across India tell similar, melancholy stories.
Wilting wives and children flocked to the temperate hill resorts at the onset of the hot season. In the spring of 1839, there were twelve gentlemen staying in Simla and forty-six ladies, including the sixteen-year-old Betty James, the recent bride of Lieutenant Thomas James of the 22nd Bengal NI.57 She soon divorced him, gained notoriety three years later on the London stage as Lola Montez, Spanish dancer, and then capered about Europe as mistress to various rich and famous men. No doubt she added some frisson to Simla’s social scene. Wherever they went, European women were always a welcome novelty:
. . . the fair of Britain’s isle.
When wafted to Indostan’s strand,
Amidst the sable nations smile
Like angels from a fairy-land.58
This exiled poet had in mind those young ladies, in their late teens, whose families despatched them to India with letters of introduction into those circles where they might find husbands, preferably well-paid officers and officials. Theirs was a precarious existence, for when visited by suitors they had to steer a course between over-accommodation and stand-offishness at the same time as always keeping an eye open for a profitable opportunity. These ‘debutantes’, as they were half-mockingly called, had a year in which to find their husbands, a task which was easier up-country than in the three presidency capitals where most congregated. If they did not succeed, they went home either with a reputation for being a ‘jilt’, or, sadly, as failures in what was effectively a seller’s market.59
Working-class women came to India as soldiers’ wives. Lieutenant Horward contemptuously described th
em as ‘heavy baggage’ in a letter of 1840 to his sister, Harriet. He also called them ‘milliners and dressmakers’, a choice of words which indicates that, as in Britain, they were easily corrupted.60 Sergeant John Ramsbottom from Sheffield, who had enlisted in the Bombay Fusiliers in 1854 after a quarrel with his sweetheart (‘as for Emma Bromhead her be buggered I have forgotten her’), found more than enough women in Karachi. He told a friend: ‘As for going among married women or any single I just get amongst them, as many as I can both black and white. I can assure you we have got some very fine blacks and they pass off very well.’61 Rankers reacted like their superiors if their wives committed adultery which, as Horward and Ramsbottom hint, they often did. At some date in the 1830s, a light dragoon private discovered that his wife had become the lover of a corporal in the same regiment, and challenged him to a duel. Neither was punished, although the regiment thought it prudent to expel the source of the row and so the errant wife was sent home.62
Outside the regimental cantonments, the moral tone of British India was being transformed, although the pace of change was gradual and its impact uneven. Some of the impetus was provided by a growing body of middle- and upper-middle class European women like Mrs Mackenzie. Their presence was most strongly felt in the conduct of social life: husbands were constrained by the presence of their wives and families and a pattern of off-duty entertainment which revolved around mixed formal dinner parties. The memsahib ousted the native concubine as bedmate and mistress of the household – a guide to Indian kitchen management and recipes appeared in 1860.63 Bachelor officers and civil servants ran the risk of social disapproval and isolation if they openly lived with Indian women.
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