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By Root 1204 0

wives of British soldiers should be entitled to a living allowance, but that because they had 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’. As a consequence, they would be entitled to only one-twentieth of the allowance given to British wives. When their husbands returned home to Britain they were not to expect to accompany them, because when their menfolk later threw themselves upon poor relief, no parish could be reasonably expected to take responsibility for supporting foreign wives – better they remain in India. Yet did they really belong in India, either? In 1791, the Company had tried to ban mixed-race men from senior positions, on the grounds that they would never command the respect due to whites. And the ambiguity of the social position of mixed-race children could trouble their fathers. Anglo-Indians were often considered exceptionally good-looking, but Sir David Ochterlony’s letters record his worries about what might become of his Anglo-Indian daughters. Their ‘dark blood’ made them vulnerable to mockery from the white community. Yet could he really face the prospect of their adopting an Indian identity and possibly ending up in a Muslim prince’s harem?

By 1820, the Company had decided it was better to try to forestall such worries altogether. A manual of that year warned new arrivals to be on their guard against the ‘insinuating manners and fascinating beauty’ of Eurasian girls, for fear of making ‘a matrimonial connexion which he might all his life-time regret’ as he languished in the social isolation into which a wife with a darker skin would plunge him. But, like almost all efforts at prohibition of pleasure, the decree was doomed to failure. The ‘bibi’, or mistress, was simply a fact of life. Even in 1859, Garnet Wolseley – one of the many Irishmen who, like the Scots, found the empire was the making of them – admitted in a letter that he had acquired an ‘eastern princess’ who performed ‘all the purposes of a wife without giving any of the bother’. He sorted himself out by establishing a more permanent arrangement nine years later, marrying Louisa Erskine and becoming a devoted father to the garden designer Frances Wolseley. Would he – could he – have achieved his subsequent eminence as commander in chief of the army if he had kept his eastern princess? For it is noticeable that the greater the British control over India, the more their tolerance of these cross-cultural relationships shrank.

The uprising in 1857 – and the answering brutality of the British – left a very long legacy of bitterness and mistrust between the two cultures. From now on, the races would maintain some distance. The decision that henceforth India would be run not by the East India Company but by the British government meant greater involvement by elected politicians, and required administration on a much more formal basis. The development of fast steam ships, the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 and then the laying of telegraph cables made it possible for London not merely to state its will but to intervene to make sure it was carried out. This was to bring about a big change in how the British saw India, and, in turn, how they saw themselves.

The Company’s opening up of India had delighted some Europeans. In the 1780s Sir William Jones declared Sanskrit ‘more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’, and enthused Europeans with the notion that India lived and breathed ancient civilization. At much the same time a young East India Company officer, Charles Stuart, was enjoying daily walks along the banks of the Ganges where he took purifying bathes. As he rose through the officer class Stuart’s devotion to Hinduism deepened: he built a temple, ate according to Hindu ritual and published pamphlets telling European women they would be much better off – and more attractive – if they were to take up wearing the sari. ‘Hindoo’ Stuart was passionately opposed to the