Indian society too is pyramidal and brutally exclusive. Its barriers and spitefulness are revealed in the picaresque tragedy of M. R. Anand’s Coolie, which appeared in 1936 and gives a finely observed worm’s-eye view of the Raj. The hero, Munoo, is a hill boy placed by his family in the service of an Indian bank clerk, whose status is announced by a blackboard set on his verandah: ‘Babu Northoo Ram – Sub-Accountant of the Imperial Bank, Sham Nager.’ Munoo is baffled by the ways of his new master and is soon in trouble after he excretes by the bungalow, infuriating his mistress. ‘What will the sahibs think who pass by our doors every morning and afternoon! The Babuji had prestige to keep up with the sahibs.’ So too has a neighbour, an Indian judge, whose wife is outraged when Munoo quarrels with one of her servants. ‘These low babus are getting so uppish,’ she exclaims. ‘Let my husband come and we will show you what it is to insult your superiors.’ Like Munoo, the greenhorn British official had to learn rules which were vital for his survival. Why was explained in A Passage to India, after his mother and prospective bride, Adela Quested, challenged Ronny Heaslop for behaving like a god. He replies:
Here we are, and we’re going to stop, and the country’s got to put up with us, gods or no gods. ‘Oh, look here,’ he broke out, rather pathetically, ‘what do you and Adela want me to do? Go against my class, against all the people I respect and admire out here? Lose such power as I have for doing good in this country, because my behaviour isn’t pleasant? You neither of you understand what work is, or you’d never talk such eyewash. . . . I am out here to work, mind, to hold this wretched country by force. I’m not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I’m just a servant of the Government; it’s the profession you wanted me to choose myself, and that’s that. We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to do.’
This is the cost of the Raj; its servants cannot fulfil their vocation without self-containment and setting a distance between themselves and those whom they govern. What the outsider, like Forster, interprets as haughtiness is essential for the perpetuation of a system which, its defenders believed, worked for the interests of India.
Forster was repeating what he must have heard many times during his time in India in 1912–13 and in the early 1920s as secretary to Tukoji Rao II, the Maharaja of Dewas. An aesthete and intellectual who detested the athletic public-school spirit which pervaded the British community, and in particular its clubs, Forster was bound to recoil from much of what he saw and heard. It disturbed a man who believed with all his being in the value of human relationships that here was a world in which they were strictly regulated to the point where close contact between British and Indian was all but impossible. And yet, his India was, in its way, as subjective as Kipling’s, and both were selective. Malcolm Darling, his Cambridge undergraduate friend and civil servant, was the antithesis to Mr Turton even though, in time, he came to share the general belief that the Westernised Indian did not represent the ‘real’ India.
There were certainly plenty of authentic Turtons in India, but the point was that they were there to govern fairly, not court the affection of those Indians who wanted to be their successors. They did not treat these people as equals simply because, as administrators, they had to appear dispassionate. The aloofness and emotional callouses which dismayed Forster were part and parcel of their job for many, but not all, British officials. They were in India to command respect and not cultivate intimate friendships, although the two were not always incompatible. There was a body of opinion, strong among the older generation of officials, that thought excessive familiarity might prove dangerous, even if it was desirable on a purely human level.32 Sir Bampfylde Fuller, one of the old school, admitted that his countrymen’s condescension upset Indian susceptibilities. Nonetheless, he wondered whether Indians who complained of British frostiness were employing a double standard. They forbade their wives and daughters to mix with Europeans and their womenfolk, and some high-caste Hindus refused to eat with Christians.33 Not every Hindu was bound by taboos. Sir Henry Lawrence, commissioner of the Sind between 1916 and 1918, dined with Gokhale and other leading Hindu figures at their houses and invited them to his.34
Lawrence not only enjoyed warm relations with Indians, but favoured the land nationalisation and the state ownership of public utilities. The ICS was not solely the preserve of men of the same mental mould as Forster’s sun-baked bureaucrats. Moreover, new generations of administrators discounted the shibboleths of the old hands. Penderel Moon, who joined the service in the early 1930s, caught the clash between old and new in an imaginary exchange between a new official and his older superior. The newcomer questioned whether India had been the net economic beneficiary of British rule, and the older replied testily:
Here are we who have spent our lives in India working for the peasants – devoting all our energies to their welfare in the heat of the day – and then you come out and tell us that they are worse off than when we began. I don’t know where you get these notions.
He blamed them on the preparatory year spent studying at University, ‘reading seditious literature and studying phonetics’.35 There were other sceptical minds abroad. After a tour in a district near Benares in 1940, Hugh Martin was asked by the commissioner to list all that he had observed which could not have been seen 2,000 years ago. He truthfully answered kerosene, bicycles and Singer sewing machines.36 This exchange would have been unthinkable in Forster’s Chandrapore at a time when the Raj, while under siege, still believed in its own durability. Nearly twenty years after, when it was clear that Indian self-government was inevitable and a new generation of officials were in place, attitudes had changed considerably.
Shared pleasure in sport demolished racial barriers. It was sadly ironic that the only satisfactory relationship Forster’s Dr Aziz has with a European is playing an impromptu game of polo with a British subaltern – ‘Aziz liked soldiers – they either accepted you or swore at you, which was preferable to the civilian’s hauteur’. After a lively chukka, each goes their own way, each thinking: ‘If only they were all like that.’ Some time after, when Aziz is under arrest for the alleged assault on Miss Quested in one of the Marabar caves, and the white community coalesces around a shared sense of racial outrage, the officer appears and, somewhat tipsy, addresses his countrymen. ‘The native is all right if you let him alone. . . . You remember the one I had a knock with on your maidan last month. Well, he was all right. Any native who plays polo is all right. What you’ve got to stamp on is these educated classes, and, mind, I know what I’m talking about this time.’
Here, A Passage to India conveys an authentic resonance of the Raj. B. N. Lahari, one of the first Indians to be admitted for training as a senior police officer in 1921, recalled that he was treated in a friendly manner by all his European colleagues. He was tolerated, he believed, because he did not chew betel or play Indian gramophone records and because of his willingness to engage in mess horseplay and fight back.37 In the early 1940s Alan Flack got on splendidly with his superior, Muhammad Zillah Khan, who was ‘a good tennis player, billiard player, shot and in fact a fine chap of the old Mussulman school’. Yet despite their friendship, Slack never met his wife, who remained in purdah.38
IV
Contemporary law banned any explicit references in fiction to sexual contacts between British and Indians. Forster knew about them, probably in some detail, through his shipboard meeting in 1912 with Lieutenant Kenneth Seabright of the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment), with whom he later stayed at Peshawar. Seabright was a homosexual with an enthusiastic and insatiable appetite for teenage boys, and he seems intuitively to have recognised Forster’s latent homosexuality, as did some young Indians. The young subaltern, who struck Forster as a Byronic figure, was already at work on an epic poem which recorded in lubricious detail his encounters with various Indian partners, whose colour excited him. Paradise for Seabright was the North-West Fro
ntier, where his tastes were abundantly catered for:
And now the scene shifted and I passed
From sensuous Bengal to fierce Peshawar
An Asiatic stronghold where each flower
Of boyhood planted in its restless soil
Is – ipso facto – ready to despoil
(Or be despoiled by) someone else; they yarn
Indeed so has it that the young Pathan
Thinks it peculiar if you would pass
Him by without some reference to his arse.39
What is remarkable is that Seabright’s activities appear either to have passed undetected or have been ignored by his brother officers and superiors. If revealed, his conduct would have rendered him liable for a court martial and, at the very least, a dishonourable dismissal; an officer who merely spoke to his men about sexual subjects was cashiered in 1916.40 Seabright’s extraordinary career gives the lie to the predictable assertion of Baden-Powell that polo and pig-sticking had purged the British subaltern of his former vices.41
Evidence of their persistence, at least in matters of sex, comes from the anonymous confession of a bisexual officer who was strongly attracted to Asian women, particularly Japanese. His Indian experiences included affairs with British women (one married and another picked up at a ball), an orgy in a Bombay brothel which lasted three weeks, and a chance encounter with ‘a fairly good-looking punkah woman’, who opportunely turned up at his bungalow.42 There is no reason to disbelieve this testimony, although corroboration is hard to find among the reminiscences of those who lived in a far more reticent age. Nonetheless, one survivor recalled an encounter in 1918 with the wife of a senior civil servant, whose pastime it was to travel on trains heading northwards from Bombay and engage the more handsome, newly-arrived subalterns as bedmate for the night.43
Imported Japanese prostitutes employed in Bombay brothels were highly rated by the unknown philandering officer. Several hundred Japanese girls, some as young as twelve, were hired by Rangoon whoremasters and, according to Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, they ‘had the reputation of being the cleanest girls in town’. There was an international flavour to Rangoon’s Red Light district at the beginning of the century, with one street housing prostitutes from all countries. The patriotic Richards remembered that ‘I felt thankful when I was told there was not an English girl amongst them.’ His memories of the Edwardian Raj were published in 1936 with the encouragement of Robert Graves, and were extremely frank for their time. Richards described the various brothels reserved for British servicemen, which were flourishing, despite the exertions of various ‘purity’ lobbies over the past thirty years. The Agra prostitutes lived in a street in the Suddar bazaar, a short walk from the barracks, and had an exclusively military clientele. Regimental policemen patrolled the street and gave a savage caning to any Indian who had the temerity to speak to the girls. There were about forty of them, aged between twelve and forty, and each stood in front of her cabin proclaiming her skills in love’s arts. Every prostitute was examined three times a week by army doctors, and any with venereal infections were removed for treatment in the native hospital. Some bold spirits ventured beyond the official pale of indulgence. ‘If a man hired a gharri to go for a ride somewhere, the driver would immediately say: “Sahib, you want nice bibi [concubine], me drive you to bungalow of nice half-caste, plenty clean, plenty cheap, only charge one rupee, Sahib.” The result was often the pox, a spell in hospital and a punitive reduction in pay.’44
Indian lack of inhibitions about sex, which surprised many British soldiers, horrified Katherine Mayo. She praised official efforts during the 1920s to crack down on newspaper advertisements for concoctions which revived virility and were vindicated by candid testimonials from satisfied customers.45 Unlike them, the campaign flagged. The Delhi Liberator of 21 September 1947 contained a puff for ‘Lifenjo’, whose promoter, Mrs Swatty, a mother of ten, declared: ‘The roses are still blooming on my face and my beauty is unmarred. My husband finds me good as a virgin of sixteen.’ Those wishing to share her felicity were promised that ‘our confidential letters shall guide you well in all matters relating to sexual science.’
British women too could learn some of the ploys of the zenana. During the autumn of 1919, advertisements for ‘Wana Ranee’ scent showed an Indian girl, one breast coyly uncovered, set against the outline of Oriental buildings. This ‘Oriental fragrance’ offered ‘a mystic charm’. Women who suffered from unwanted facial and bodily hair were promised relief through an Indian remedy in an advertisement of 1922. The puff claimed that the formula for this depilatory had been disclosed to a British officer by a sepoy whose life he had saved. Hitherto it had been ‘the closely guarded secret of the Hindu religion’ which forbade women hair on any part of their bodies save the head. Now it was available through Mrs Hudson, who ‘belongs to a family high in Society and is the widow of a prominent Army Officer, so you can write to her with every confidence’.
An oblique, literary admission of Indian sensuality was the country’s frequent representation as a woman. In Sara Jeanette Duncan’s novel about Indian nationalism, Burnt Offering (1909), Yavada, a pro-British guru, imagines his nation is Britain’s bride. ‘England is the husband of India,’ he suggests, adding that in consequence, ‘we are the children of England, also.’ The authoress was borrowing a conceit from Kipling, who had used the metaphor of marriage to illuminate the relationship between the two countries. For him the bride was prone to wilfulness and, therefore, required a firm, wise groom.46 India, a young woman clad in a sari, respectfully bows before her King Emperor in Bernard Partridge’s Punch cartoon drawn to celebrate the durbar of 1911.47 As a woman, India demanded respect and honour, a point made in Kipling’s story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. In it, a pair of devil-may-care discharged soldiers make their way deep into the Himalayas to Luristan, where, with their modern weapons and tactics, they make themselves rulers. Revered as gods, they betray their subjects’ trust by plundering their shrines and are ultimately destroyed. On one level, this is a parable of the ravishment of India that had been perpetrated by the greedy nabobs of Clive’s era. They were, of course, as Kipling makes plain elsewhere, superseded by worthier suitors who chose to woo rather than rape.
V
It was Kipling’s India of dashing men and their exploits rather than Forster’s flawed Raj which filled the cinema screens during the inter-war years. His tales of the scapegrace but fundamentally decent British rankers were adopted by Hollywood for Gunga Din (1939). Like so many products of the American studios at this time, the film was a vehicle for its stars: Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Victor MacLagen. After a series of adventures, they, together with the humble bhisti, Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), save the Raj from Hindu fanatics, one of whom in his simple dhoti bears more than a passing resemblance to Gandhi. He meets his death bravely, which prompts one of his antagonists to remark that he was, in his way, also serving his country. The climax of the film is a battle in a mountain pass in which the British forces (including kilted Highlanders who sing, with unintentional irony, the Jacobite ballad ‘Will ye nae come back again’) are saved from ambush by Gunga Din. There are Gatling guns, cannon mounted on elephants and a spectacular charge by Bengal lancers.
In Gunga Din and similar films, Hollywood producers saw India’s North-West Frontier as an extension of America’s Wild West, another region peopled by a race which had defiantly impeded the white man’s progress. India’s frontier was also the setting for Lives of the Bengal Lancers (1935), in which American actors play British cavalrymen under the stern eye and fierce moustache of C. Aubrey Smith, whose visage and bearing marked him out as the cinema’s perfect sahib. From him the young men learn their duty and the meaning of service to a Raj which brings order and justice to the wayward tribesmen. The fanatic opponents of the King Emperor’s peace are finally overcome after a fast-moving sequence of scenes in which pigs are stuck, anti-British conspiracies uncovered, and battles won in
the nick of time. The films ends on a poignant note as the heroes receive medals for gallantry, one awarded posthumously and pinned to the saddlecloth of his horse. Self-sacrifice is the price of empire and, as the bugle sounds, one feels a wave of sympathy for the Raj and its gallant defenders.
Another blend of Henty and Hollywood appeared in 1935, with The Charge of the Light Brigade. In spite of a breathtaking historical contortion, in which the Cawnpore massacre precedes the Crimean war and is avenged by Errol Flynn and his horsemen, the film succeeds as pure romantic adventure. It was stirring stuff and audiences loved it. Another Indian release of the same year, Clive of India, was a British production. It starred Ronald Colman as the hero and Loretta Young as his wife, and tended to concentrate on their private life, with tension created by her yearning to return to England. Nonetheless, and in spite of being shot in a studio, it contained what one critic called ‘lively and picturesque moments’ with elephants appearing at the battle of Plassey. There was also a political message, with Clive proclaiming his personal creed: ‘India is a sacred trust. I must keep faith.’ It was also, as British cinema-goers were aware, the lodestar of those responsible for the modern Raj.
How the present rulers of India kept faith with its people was shown in The Drum, produced by Alexander Korda in 1938 from a script by A. E. W. Mason, the author of The Four Feathers. The story revolves around anti-British subversion in the frontier state of Tokut, masterminded by the ruthless Ghul Khan (Raymond Massey), who embodies the two most potent sources of opposition to the Raj. He is Oxford-educated (Balliol, needless to say) and a fanatical Muslim, having fought alongside the Turks and against the British at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. Currently he is planning a jihadic uprising to unite the tribes, whom he will arm with modern weapons smuggled from another enemy of the Raj, Russia. Against him is the British resident, Carruthers (Roger Livesey) aided by Azim, the young, dispossessed Raja of Tokut (the fourteen-year-old boy star, Sabu), who is first won over to the sahibs by the bravery and kindness of Mrs Carruthers, played by Valerie Hobson. Ghul Khan decoys Carruthers, his wife and a small detachment of Highlanders to a party, in which they will be massacred. Carruthers suspects treachery, but attends alone, quietly telling his friends that individual self-sacrifice has always been necessary for the advancement of the empire and with it, peace and civilisation. He cites the example of Gordon at Khartoum. After his departure there is a moving vignette in which his wife plays the piano and is toasted, along with all the memsahibs in India, by the regimental adjutant and doctor, who praise them for their endurance and for making their menfolk’s exile so agreeable.
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