• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1182 0

tolerable for the expats. But the permanent presence of white women in India raised some troubling sexual anxieties for the men of the Raj. The British saw the potential for depravity all around them – men who wore inadequate clothing, dancing girls, erotic temple carvings. Even in the 1920s a former editor of the Civil and Military Gazette wrote a book about India in which the first chapter was entitled ‘The Land of the Sex-Mad Millions’. The pure Englishwoman, symbol of English innocence, had to be zealously guarded. Inevitably, hanky-panky was much more likely to occur within the British community: a man who dispatched his wife to the comparative comfort of a hill station while he continued to work on the Plains during the hot season had to be utterly confident he could trust her. As the (female) author of The Englishwoman in India commented in 1909:

the grass widow in the Hills has pitfalls … to contend with; and perhaps the two most insidious are amateur theatricals and the military man on leave. It is hardly too much to say that one or other of these dominant factors in Hill station life is accountable for half the domestic tragedies of India … for a woman who is young, comely, and gifted with a taste for acting, Simla is assuredly not the most innocuous place on God’s earth.

As the verse about hill stations went:

Jack’s own Jill goes up the hill,

To Murree or Chakrata;

Jack remains, and dies in the plains,

And Jill remarries soon after.

But as the hill-station graveyards testify, women and children were at enormous physical risk themselves. In 1875, the eminent gynaecologist Edward Tilt described how British women in India were not only prey to every passing disease but were also likely to suffer chronic inflammation of their wombs. Most would suffer from ‘deranged menstruation’, inducing ‘abdominal pains, nervousness, depression of spirits, and perhaps hysteria’. Women who endured this ‘morbid womb’ with its ‘hideous progeny’ would return to England unable to breed. Any women who gave birth in India risked all the hazards they would have faced at home, together with the added dangers of the climate, local diseases, inadequate nursing care and terrible sanitation. Those who survived and stayed too long in India merely postponed the fate of their line: the Pioneer warned in 1888 that European children settled permanently in India would ‘die out about the 4th generation, degenerating steadily up to that point’. Many families would send their children back to Britain to avoid this fate and to be educated at one of the new empire-minded boarding schools popping up across the country at the time. And it was the practice of sending children home for their schooling that created probably the greatest emotional hardship for British women in the empire – many would not see their children for years on end and, when they did, they might barely recognize each other. This unique colonial arrangement was not only enormously painful for the mother but would go on to haunt a generation of British children who would grow up in England with the memory of absent parents. Rudyard Kipling, sent from India to Southsea, England, in 1871 at the age of six referred, in his autobiography, to his adoptive childhood home as ‘The House of Desolation’. The writer Alan Ross, born more than fifty years later, describes a similar experience, having been sent to England from Calcutta at the age of seven: ‘When the time came, the prospect of seeing my parents again, and having to own emotional allegiance to people I could scarcely remember, became increasingly embarrassing. Before long it was my parents who appeared to be strangers.’

You can see why those women who were not naturally robust felt the need to act tough. And so the starchy manners, the close but not-quite-right replication of life at ‘home’, the slightly out-of-date mannerisms, the shabby gentility, delineated the imperial presence, and perhaps stopped the women from understandably falling apart. ‘What would India be without England, and what would the British