Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [72]
The challenge of maintaining an English way of life in the tropics was enormous. Admittedly, women who in England might have had to manage with few or no domestic staff might have several servants in India. On the other hand, the conditions of life – notably the suffocating heat – added an unwanted challenge to the most mundane tasks. A soldier’s wife who arrived in mid-nineteenth-century India was told by a fellow memsahib with experience of ‘hot-weather housekeeping’ that the challenge in cooking meat was ‘to grasp the fleeting moment between toughness and putrefaction when the joint may possibly prove eatable’. As the century wore on, the memsahibs were helped by improvements in imperial food technology – tinning, bottling and preserving. But still, the sort of meal which might be conjured out of the available ingredients was not necessarily guaranteed to be a treat. It was memorably depicted by E. M. Forster’s description of a Raj dinner party in A Passage to India: ‘The menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-India … the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it.’
Fortunately, guidance was available to the imperial hostess in the form of The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (published in 1888), a sort of Mrs Beeton for young memsahibs, ‘giving the duties of mistress and servants, the general management of the house and practical recipes for cooking in all its branches’. Largely written by Flora Annie Steel, the wife of a civil servant stationed in the Punjab, it contains brisk, practical advice on just about everything from cooking food to treating dog bites. There was nothing aristocratic about Mrs Steel (her father had been a political agent, brought low by the collapse of a colonial bank), but in India she was still a member of the ruling class and her wry weariness shines through on every page. It would be unfair to describe her as hostile to Indians, but she remained part of the Raj, and the manual’s object was not to assist wives to become Indian but to help them create as closely as possible a replica of life in Britain. Her recipes run from the prosaic (braised cutlets) to the exotic (kidneys with champagne or Ferozepur cake). But the advice on how to run the kitchen might stand for the whole British presence in India: ‘Dirt, illimitable, inconceivable dirt must be expected, until a generation of mistresses has rooted out the habits of immemorial years.’ The newly arrived wife should learn the local language as soon as possible, if only to be able to order the staff better, because ‘the Indian servant is a child in everything save age and should be treated as a child; that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness’. There was, needless to say, no shortage of menials of one sort or other, from butlers, through cooks and khitmutgars who served the food and musolchis who did the washing up, to bheesties to look after supplies of water, an ayah to tend the children, a syce or groom for the horses, a dirzie to do the sewing and a dhobi for the laundry, not to mention the sweepers who emptied bedpans and the gardeners tending the sweet peas. They were to be controlled by rigorous routine, rewards and punishments, enforced by constant vigilance. The primary responsibility was to set an example, because an untidy mistress would soon find herself with untidy servants and a lax one with lazy servants. Succumbing to the idea that if you want a job doing properly you should do it yourself was disastrous. The manual asserted in italics: ‘Never do work which an ordinarily good servant ought to be able to do. If the one you have will not or cannot do it, get another who can.’
The possibility of creating some tropical approximation of the English Home Counties made life more