Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [67]
The departure of young men from Britain to try their luck in the expanding empire had two obvious social consequences. Firstly, it drained the pool of available marriage prospects for the young women left behind. And secondly, it raised the challenge of where the young men were to find an outlet for their own sexual and romantic needs. In the early days in India, they seem to have made their own arrangements, often on a commercial or semi-commercial basis. ‘I now commenced a regular course of fucking with native women,’ writes Edward Sellon in one of the rare accounts of sexual relations in the early days of the Raj. In his memoirs he paints a picture of available young Indian women who ‘understood in perfection all the arts and wiles of love’. There is no reason to believe that Sellon, who had arrived as a young cadet of the East India Company in 1834, was being impeccably accurate: his entire career (including a work called The Romance of Lust) testifies more to commercial need than anything else. But nor is there any particular reason to disbelieve him, and none at all to assume that British soldiers in India were entirely celibate. Sellon reported that most important temples had troupes of dancing girls attached to them, whose job it was to sing and perform traditional ‘Nautch’ dances, and ‘to prostitute themselves in the courts to all comers, and thus raise funds for the enrichment of the place of worship to which they belong’. He knew of cases where ‘Nautch girls’ had been paid 200 rupees for a single night’s company, which was ‘not very much to be wondered at, as they comprise some of the loveliest women in the world’. Elsewhere, he claimed to recall two distinct classes of prostitutes: one charging two rupees for her services, the other, an infinitely superior creature, five. The ‘fivers’ were ‘the handsomest Mohammedan girls’, and in his long experience of ‘English, French, German and Polish women of all grades of society’ he had never found one to compare with these ‘salacious, succulent houris’. They did not drink, they were scrupulously clean, shaved their pudenda, dressed sumptuously, wore flowers in their hair, played musical instruments and sang sweetly. There was no suggestion from Sellon that women might have been driven to sell themselves by anything as odious as poverty or misfortune. They fulfilled the male fantasy of being happy hookers. India, he preached, was a place where more or less any sexual service was available, free of shame, if not free of charge.
It is certainly true that in their imperial possessions the British encountered cultures with very different – and much more open – attitudes to sex than they were used to at home. In India, for example, young Britons gawped in astonishment at the decorations on the walls of some Hindu temples, with their depictions of intercourse in all sorts of positions not normally encountered in the rectories of Hampshire.* After being posted to India in 1842 the great orientalist Richard Burton set about investigating the sexual possibilities with the indefatigable dedication which would later characterize his attempts to find the source of the Nile. He became convinced that women in tropical countries were more passionate than men, reported the belief that if a man gave a woman seven large cloves to eat on the seventeenth of the month she became insatiable, noted the prevalence