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By Root 1148 0

have endowed the memsahibs with an unappealing reputation, as superficial snobs and irredeemable racists who ended an era of happy coexistence. But, like any group of human beings, they must have been a varied bunch. There were plenty who never bothered to go beyond learning ‘Kitchen Hindustani’ in order to shout instructions at servants. But there were others who developed a genuine affection for the country, founded orphanages, taught in schools and sacrificed their own health to improve the health of Indians. Women confident enough to reject the role assigned to them by men could sometimes become forceful enemies of the very masculine business of imperialism. Like the Victorian socialist Annie Besant, they could find the colourful abundance of Indian spiritualism an intoxicating alternative: when she moved to India in 1893, Besant took to wearing Hindu mourning dress in grief at what the British had done to the country, and spent decades encouraging Indians to throw off colonial rule.

Subversive figures like these were, of course, hugely outnumbered by the conventional memsahibs, exerting what they considered a civilizing influence in the military cantonments, towns, cities and hill stations. How many younger officers wanted to cohabit with an Indian woman when the colonel’s wife so clearly disapproved? Indian sexual gymnastics were no match for raised British eyebrows.

The presence of hostesses meant different sorts of social gatherings – elaborate picnics and dinner parties, tennis and badminton tournaments, amateur theatricals and Sunday attendance at mock-Gothic churches with corrugated-iron roofs. The memsahibs endured the sweltering heat in stays and bonnets rather than saris and sandals. Though some of them did valuable work on their own account in schools, clinics and colleges, much of the time they must have been bored senseless. The men at least had a clear mission and in their spare time could retreat to the clubs they had founded, where they smoked cigars and drank too much. In these refuges, the maleness of colonization survived for generations. (Even in the 1920s when an incompetent rickshaw-driver delivered a woman visitor to the United Service Club in the hill station at Simla, a horrified porter barred her way by snatching a notice from the wall and holding it up between them. It read ‘Dogs and other noxious animals are not allowed in the Club’.) The expatriate men and women lived together in communities of bungalows (the name comes from ‘Bengal’) behind self-important gates and gravel drives, with scratchy lawns in homage to Camberley and Godalming, filling their gardens with English flowers, fighting a never-ending war to keep the termites from eating the piano and placing wicker chairs on the verandah so they could meet Indian tradesmen without letting them intrude on the holy of holies within. In the world’s biggest spice-garden they lived on over-boiled vegetables, tinned fruit and suet puddings.

The memsahibs have become the lightning-conductor for much that was wrong with imperial India. But they can hardly be blamed for all of it. In truth, they can hardly be blamed for it at all, unless they can also be taxed with engineering the religious revival which swept Victorian Britain, plotting the Mutiny, inventing the telegraph, building the Indian railways and then digging the Suez Canal which made their access to India so much easier. Once the British had decided that their overseas possessions were something more than a trading arrangement, separation of the races was inevitable. Among the expat community it became an ideological conviction that, to be treated as rulers, the British had to behave like rulers. ‘Decent’ behaviour in front of the natives mattered. It was not merely that the natives must see you doing the right thing, but that the rest of the white community must do so too: failure to strike the right attitude risked undermining the whole imperial edifice. To a free spirit, the social conventions – receiving visitors, tiffin, dressing for dinner every night – must have seemed as