An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj,
An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj
The British memsahib is one of the great stereotypes of the Raj. As caricatured by E M Forster in A Passage to India – and in countless films since – she is snobbish, aloof and narrow-minded, playing bridge at the club and drinking gin and lime juice.
However, many British women were not like that. They worked as doctors and teachers; they travelled, learned languages and made Indian friends. Yet few became as integrated into Indian life as Ellen Donnelly, the protagonist of An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad. Married to an Indian Muslim in Lucknow, she spoke Urdu, observed purdah and converted to Islam.
Ellen’s husband was Mehdi Hasan, who was loyal to the British Empire and worked for the government. In 1883, the couple moved to the princely state of Hyderabad, where Mehdi was quickly promoted, becoming Chief Justice of the High Court and Home Secretary in the Nizam’s government. His success followed them to England, where Mehdi was called to the bar and Ellen was presented to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.
Yet their ascent provoked envy and, in 1892, an anonymous pamphlet was published with the purpose of ruining them. Titled An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad, it had an intended audience that went far beyond the boundaries of the state and ultimately reached the British governments in Calcutta and Westminster. It alleged that Ellen had been a prostitute in Lucknow and that several Indian men had formed a ‘joint stock company’ so as to maintain her and call on her services when they required them. In Hyderabad, the pamphleteer claimed, she had behaved even worse, permitting her husband to ‘pimp’ her to the Prime Minister in order to advance his own career. More outrageous still, according to the pamphlet, the couple had never married and Mehdi Hassan had allowed his ‘stinking wench’ to be present at a levée of the ‘noblest’ and ‘purest’ sovereign the world had ever seen, Queen Victoria.
As Mehdi could not discover the identity of the pamphleteer (though he had his suspicions), he decided to sue the printer – a disastrous mistake. The consequent trial in Hyderabad, which lasted almost a year, was an excruciating ordeal for Ellen, as a line of unsavoury men, Indian and British, gave evidence that they had had ‘connection’ with her in various places, sometimes on the rooftop of her family home in Lucknow. It was even alleged that she had committed incest with her drunken father, although her presence on his bed just after her mother’s death suggests that she was actually trying to comfort the old man.
An unsympathetic British judge favoured the defence and acquitted the printer. As the charges in the pamphlet were thus unrebutted and in the public domain, Mehdi was effectively ruined, without a pension or the possibility of another job. He and Ellen left Hyderabad and returned to Lucknow, where they spent the rest of their lives in poverty.
Richard Cobb, the great social historian of revolutionary France, was once berated for his interest in ‘low life’, on the grounds that ‘prostitutes do not make history’. A similar charge might be made of Benjamin Cohen’s book, but it would be equally unjust. Prostitutes may not make history, but they do belong to it; sometimes they can reveal as much about their times as admirals and Lord Chancellors.
Cohen is a good and scholarly sleuth who has delved deep into the archives. Yet he does not claim to have solved the mysteries of the pamphlet. Who wrote it? Were its accusations true? At a trial in which both sides were bribing witnesses, which one was telling the fewer lies?
Ultimately it may not matter to us although, like Cohen, we may feel sympathy for Ellen, who behaved with dignity throughout her trial and her penury beyond. The value of the book lies in its angles of vision, its understanding of the social complexity of India under the Raj, and its revelations of unexpected links between people of all races, usually on the fringes of society.
Readers of this fascinating work will appreciate that the Ellen Donnellys of the Empire were as much a part of British India as the Viceroys and their tigers.