Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [68]
Sexual relations were quite as exploitative, then, as the East India Company’s other relations with India. But significant numbers of early British visitors made more permanent arrangements and took Indian wives and mistresses, who seem to have occupied a recognized position in society. Although later politicians and officials claimed to be scandalized when missionaries reported that miscegenation was occurring, it would have been more astonishing if men possessed of the energy to leave Britain and seek their fortune overseas were not also keen to satisfy more immediate physical and emotional needs – soldiers and adventurers have behaved in much the same way since long before Julius Caesar picked up his sword. There is ample evidence of easy social relations in the early stages of the British presence in India. Johan Zoffany’s 1780s Lucknow painting Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match shows the notoriously louche nawab of Oudh* enjoying himself among English officers. Colonel James Skinner, founder of the Indian cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse, was the son of a Scottish officer and his Rajput mistress and, although it was denied by many of his family, eighty children claimed him as their father. One of the great spectacles of early nineteenth-century Delhi was said to be the sight of the East India Company Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, taking the evening air by riding an elephant around the walls of the Red Fort, followed by his thirteen Indian wives, each mounted on her own elephant. The wills of employees in the East India Company archive show that while Ochterlony may have been more energetic than most, his multicultural marital arrangements were not necessarily all that unusual. Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, who became acting governor general in the 1830s, had three Anglo-Sikh children, one of whom, James Metcalfe, commanded an army unit which fought at the siege of Lucknow during the Mutiny.
The records show that in the 1780s about one in three East India Company men left all their worldly goods to an Indian woman. By 1800, the proportion had dropped to one in four, by 1810 to one in five, by 1820 to one in seven, and by 1840 there are no Indian women mentioned in any official Company wills. This is not, of course, to say that sexual relations between Indians and British stopped. Richard Burton’s service in the subcontinent did not begin until the 1840s, but, in an unerringly male way, he certainly noticed the benefits for a British officer when he took a local lover:
She keeps house for him, never allowing him to save money, or if possible to waste it. She keeps the servants in order. She has an infallible recipe to prevent maternity, especially if her tenure of office depends on such compact. She looks after him in sickness, and is one of the best nurses, and, as it is not good for man to live alone, she makes him a manner of home.
The language is revealing: ‘a manner of home’ points up the temporary nature of the relationship – the real home is in Britain, and the declining number of Indian women mentioned in wills coincides with the growing preoccupation with a British moral mission in India. In practice, the ‘recipe to prevent maternity’ was anything but ‘infallible’. The Anglo-Indian community which resulted came to occupy a convenient – if sometimes awkward – position as a sort of buffer between the Raj and the Indians. They spoke English as a first language, were usually Christian in belief, and often discharged the sort of role in officialdom (on lower pay) that white men might once have been expected to perform. By the time of independence there were reckoned to be 300,000 Anglo-Indians living in the subcontinent.*
In 1804, the East India Company grudgingly decreed that Anglo-Indian