ROMANCING THE RAJ
It is difficult to define romance. It is a highly
subjective feeling. Many find romance in the jungle lore of Rudyard Kipling and
Jim Corbett while some others in the heroic feats of Rani of Jhansi. However, as
commonly understood romance is an emotive love affair surfeit with fantasy,
with or without heroism and adventure thrown in. In a broader sense, therefore,
nearly two hundred years of British rule in India, commonly referred to as the era
of the Raj or simply the Raj, was one continuing romance. Notwithstanding Kipling’s
‘twain’ theory, for the British as well as the Indians the east-west encounter
worked as an attraction of the opposites. Fact and fiction fanned this romance.
Plenty but not enough ‘romancing’
of the Raj has been attempted in the literature of the time and films made on
them.
Stories about the opulence of the Mughal
court and the life style of its nobility had reached Britain in bits and
pieces. Added
to this was the popular notion that India was a quaint land of naked sadhus, snake charmers, beggars and elephants.
Adventure and opportunity beckoned triggering flights of fantasy. Romance was in the air before the ships of
the East India Company set sail. Having
joined the service in India in their teens, these Company civilians succumbed to the spell of India right away.
Their ‘unattached male’ existence
accentuated their sense of isolation. They sought comfort in the arms of
native women whom they took as mistresses and concubines and rarely as
legally wedded wives. Among the signs of their ‘Indianization’
were adopting Indian dress and customs and the wearing of immense whiskers
and beards. Several took to smoking hubble-bubble and developed a liking for
local cuisine. They behaved like
little ‘nabobs’; William Dalrymple in his magnum opus The White Mughals calls
them ‘white Mughals’. They were enjoying the romance that was India.
The idyll was shattered in 1857 by the events
of the Sepoy Mutiny. There were by now a sizable number of white women in
India. In a crisis situation there invariably was a knight, white or brown, to
come to the rescue of damsels in distress. For all its violence and mayhem
the Mutiny spawned some captivating fiction which was an amalgam of chivalry
and romance. Love Besieged: a Romance
of the Defence of Lucknow by Charles E. Pearce is a mix of romance and military adventure within
the walls of the besieged city of Lucknow. Katharine Gordon in Emerald
Peacock narrates the story of love between an Indian prince and a young Irish
woman during the Mutiny. These writings are merely illustrative.
A lot of things
changed with the British government assuming direct control of administration
in India. Both civil and military officers now looked forward to a more
settled life style. Wives braved a month long grueling voyage to join their husbands.
Bachelors sought and found romance where and when they could, with
Anglo-Indian girls and native maids, but it meant tight rope walking in small
places in full public glare.
The opening of the
Suez Canal cut the travel time short.
Larger steam ships made the journey more bearable. The onset of
India’s cold weather saw hordes of young English women sail out for India on
their husband-hunting mission regardless of the inconveniences and hazards of
tropical living. They came with such regularity that they were teasingly
dubbed the ‘fishing fleet’. The prize catch would be a member of the ‘heaven
born’ Indian Civil Service but even lesser ones would do. Those who returned
home unwed were unfeelingly referred to as ‘returning empties’. This
was a subject dealt with by Mrs. F.E. Penny in her novel The Happy Hunting Ground, and savagely satirized by E. M. Forster
in A Passage to India.
Often a man went home on leave and got
engaged. The girl joined him a year or two later in India where the wedding
took place. But strange are the ways of Cupid. Shipboard romance was a
predictable feature of every voyage. A few days under a full moon could lead
to a shift in commitment. Imagine the beau waiting at the pier of Bombay (as
it was then called) or Karachi (now in Pakistan) dock to find that his
fiancée had already left with someone she had met on the voyage.
As
wives of junior officers these brides had to set up their first homes often
far up-country after a journey involving trekking and pony ride. Physical
inconveniences were more than made up by the ambience most suited for a
honeymoon romance. The luckier ones landed in more civilized stations. Having an army of servants to pamper them
felt very nice in the beginning but left the ‘powder puff memsahebs’ with all
the free time. Sheer idleness and the stifling heat of the Indian summer made
them vulnerable to depression and they found escape in different ways. Olivia, a beautiful, spoiled, bored English colonial wife
in the 1920s, the heroine of Ruth Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust, is drawn inexorably into the spell of the local
Nawab and elopes with him.
That
such scandals were few and far between was because action shifted from the
plains to the hills. The retreat to the Hills in
summer provided a brief escape from the heat of the plains. Field officers
could not leave their station but their wives could. Women who did migrate to the cooler climes
of the hills found a freedom they could not enjoy in small places. Both
circumstances and surroundings were highly conducive to romance and. a lot of
people were lonely. Flirtations were inevitable. Discreet dalliances were not scorned. Be it
Darjeeling, Simla or Ooty extra-marital affairs between married women and men
on leave was an open secret and connived at. Men were ‘fairly broadminded and wouldn’t really
expect their wives to go up and live in monastic seclusion.’ To even the score the husband left behind
would have an occasional fling with one of the young household maids.
Spirits lifted as the weather got cooler. There
was romance in the air in anticipation of the arrival of the fishing fleet. Life for the young women became a whirl, ‘a
tea dance or a dance or a ball or a dinner party’, something or the other
every day. Winter tours and life in
camps were something to be looked forward to. Women accompanied husbands on
portions of these tours. For the couple it became a kind of honeymoon and
also took care of the seven years’ itch in men. These tours allowed two widely separated cultures
to meet in friendship and affection. Being a part of India’s rural landscape
was romance in itself.
Notwithstanding Curzon and his ilk frowning
on miscegenation, inter-racial romance and mixed marriages happened with
increasing frequency though these did not always have a fairytale ending. The love stories in the Anglo-Indian romance
novels written during the later phase of the Raj were symptomatic of British
fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial
relations as well as experimenting with the femininity of the New Woman. The
Far Pavilions by M.
M. Kaye is an epic
saga set in 1850s India. An Englishman brought up as a Hindu in India is torn
between loyalty to the Raj, and love for an Indian princess. In Caste and Creed F.E. Penny tells us
the story of a fair-skinned Eurasian girl just arrived from England. A
romance ensues between her and a British District Collector who does not
initially realize she is half Indian. Prejudice, discrimination,
marriage and relocation follow. On the other hand in Lilamani Maud Diver spins a happy
alliance between a British male and an Indian female of matching aristocratic
lineage. Bhowani Junction, a novel by John
Masters, portrays the Anglo-Indian protagonist,
Victoria Jones, as tugged in different directions by three suitors each
representing a different ethnic community.
The empire may have been a playground
for British men to experiment with a variety of sexual experiences they could
not indulge in back home. But it was a two-way traffic. After the Mutiny, Indian princes had been
cultivated as close allies of the British. During the princes' visits to
Britain, their aristocratic status was given full recognition, and they were
admitted to the most exclusive of social circles. The accusation from jealous
English men that certain Indian princes enjoyed the sexual favours of white
women of all classes is understandable. The smartest peeresses were only too
ready to make a fuss with Bikaner and other Indian chiefs. If status and
wealth worked like magnet, so did dark skin. When Indian contingents went to
England for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria the great difficulty of the
officers was in keeping the white women away from the dark-skinned ‘native’
soldiers.. Victorian morality be damned.
(Sudhir Kumar Jha)
The author is a former Director General of Police, Bihar
and a free-lance researcher.
|
||||
I
Malwarebytes Support
ReplyDelete