• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1206 0

increasingly vocal demands being heard in Britain that missionaries be allowed to spread the gospel among the heathens of India. He did not prevail.* As British power grew, so too did the unshakeable conviction that They Knew Best. What William Jones and ‘Hindoo’ Stuart had seen as beauty and mystery increasingly looked like a freak show, with – as one visitor described it – Hindu holy men ‘standing for half a day on their heads, barking all the while for alms; some of their heads entirely covered with earth; some with their eyes filled with mud, and their mouths with straw; some lying in puddles of water; one man with his foot tied to his neck, and another with a pot of fire on his belly; and a third enveloped in a net made of rope’.

The religious convictions which gripped Victorian Britain were altogether more understated. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the intensity of the religious enthusiasms – Methodism, evangelicalism, the Oxford Movement, schisms big and small – which swept the country in the nineteenth century. All, in different ways, contributed to a belief that it was the duty of those to whom truth had been revealed to communicate it to others. The East India Company had always recognized a limited role for the Christian Church, in supplying garrison chaplains or supervisors of military orphanages. But the Company had now been displaced by governments vulnerable to public opinion, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the missionary societies in Britain had hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend each year in saving souls. However much the different Christian denominations might squabble among themselves, all agreed on their ineffable superiority to the native religions of the colonies. Busybody missionaries became a fact of life.

Once communications between Britain and India had improved, there was less and less excuse for men stationed in the subcontinent to adapt to local customs, least of all sexual customs. Soon there was no need for soldiers, officials and traders to keep a mistress in the bibi house. They could live, instead, a tropical replica of life in England, an existence which did not so much embrace India as defy it. The laying of railway tracks meant that European wives in India could be packed off to the hill stations in hot weather or, once the Suez Canal had opened, could perhaps be sent home to England for sickness or childbirth. Even those men who had arrived in the country as bachelors had only to wait for the start of the longed-for Cold Season and the arrival of what later became known as the Fishing Fleet – young women from the home country out to net themselves a husband from among the single men serving in India. As one twentieth-century official recalled, the racial discrimination was quite blatant. ‘In the hot weather you took out what was called the “B” class girl, usually Anglo-Indians, who were dears in every way and the greatest fun. But the moment the cold weather started they were taboo, because all the young girls from Roedean, Cheltenham and the great schools of Britain came out in the P&O liners and you were expected to toe the line.’ Throughout the Cold Season – of which Christmas was the high point – the young men and women circled each other at parties, dances and sports events, sizing up who might make a decent marriage partner. The women who failed to find anyone suitable went back to England, nicknamed ‘returned empties’.

The presence in India of what came to be known as ‘memsahibs’ (a corruption of ‘ma’am’ and ‘sahib’) changed everything. In the 1830s a magistrate in India had written home that he had ‘observed that those who have lived with a native woman for any length of time never marry a European … so amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please, that a person after being accustomed to their society shrinks from the idea of encountering the whims or yielding to the fancies of an Englishwoman’. He would not have dared to write like that fifty years later: let the Englishwoman loose in India and she fought her corner. Later generations