NOTES ON A SCANDAL
A new book examines how an interracial marriage during the British Raj caused private anguish and public outcry
IN
the early days of the East India Company in India, social intercourse between Indians and the British was hardly unknown. This was the era popular British historian, William Dalrymple, has referred to as that of the “white Mughals”. Many Englishmen who had come to India to seek their fortunes became genuinely intrigued with the country’s culture, heritage and history and took an avid interest in these subjects. Not an inconsiderable number also married Indian women even as others consorted with courtesans, kept concubines and visited prostitutes.
These interactions, both
intellectual and physical, however, were to mostly come to a close after the uprising of 1857 and the formal advent of the British colonial enterprise. Whatever cordiality had existed prior to that critical moment mostly vanished. Instead, notions of racial superiority, cultural arrogance and fears of miscegenation soon became the order of the day. As the formal empire took hold, racial segregation in every sphere of life became increasingly common.
It is against this historical and cultural backdrop that Benjamin Cohen, a historian of modern India who has previously written on associational life in colonial India, has set his latest book, An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj. The account the book revolves around is the release of a libelous pamphlet directed against a Muslim notable and lawyer, Mehdi Hasan, from Lucknow, who had moved to the domain of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and his Indian-born, British wife Ellen Donnelly. The allegations were relatively straightforward if shocking. Pared to the bone, they held that Donnelly had never really married Hasan, and worse still, had been a prostitute in her earlier life in Lucknow.
Hasan, who at the time of this charge, had assumed the position of a senior judge in Hyderabad, quite understandably, sued his accuser. It is fascinating to note that he chose to take this case to a local British magistrate’s court rather than seek redress through the Indian legal system. His decision was almost entirely based upon the prevailing belief amongst English-speaking Indians of a certain social stature in the impartiality of British justice. Since he himself was an officer of the court, had been called to the bar in London and had a British wife, he was firmly convinced that only a recourse to British justice would suffice.
Cohen, who is intimately familiar with the outlook of Indian subjects of Hasan’s political inclinations, argues that they had little use for the development of nascent Indian nationalism. In fact, as he shows, such was his devotion to the putative magnanimity and fairness of British rule in India that he had self-consciously sought to disassociate himself from the emergent nationalist cause. He also shows how Hasan’s meteoric rise within the ranks of Hyderabad’s judiciary had contributed to jealousy, intrigue and chicanery amongst those of his social circle.
What transpired at the trial and what befell him and his wife is a deftly told tale of colonial prejudices, legal skullduggery and dubious justice. The outcome of the trial shattered Hasan’s touching faith in the independence and probity of British justice and his own distrust of the nationalist movement. Cohen’s account of Hasan’s professional ascent and his dismal personal fate amounts to a compelling foray in accessible, social history. ■
The book is set in a colonial India marked by racial superiority, cultural arrogance and fears of miscegenation