ADVENTURES OF THE EARLY SPICE GIRLS
SHE-MERCHANTS, BUCCANEERS AND GENTLEWOMEN: BRITISH WOMEN IN INDIA by Katie Hickman (Virago £20, 400 pp)
ASUPERB spectacle was seen across Northern India in 1838: exotic figures riding elephants and horses, followed by some 12,000 soldiers and servants. They travelled around India and the whole tour took a leisurely 18 months.
At the head of the column, holding a gold umbrella, rode not some Mughal prince, but one George Eden — an old Etonian who was now Lord Auckland, the Governor-General. For this was British India now, and the British wanted India to know it.
Yet the reason we know all about the journey in such rich detail is because George Eden’s mischievous sister, Emily, rode with him on an elephant, and wrote some of the most brilliant, funny and sometimes plain bitchy letters about the British in India. (She was great fan of Jane Austen). In one letter, she described sardonically how some of the visiting rajas at a British ball think the ladies who dance ‘are utterly good for nothing, but seem rather pleased to see so much vice’.
It is upon rich sources such as these that katie Hickman has drawn to give us this colourful, witty and elegantly written new perspective on British India through the eyes of some of the women who were there.
The she-merchants of the title were those enterprising women who, like the men, went out to India to work hard and make their fortune. Many set up as milliners and dressmakers, boarding- house proprietors, nurses and plant collectors.
BY
THE end of the 18th century, more than 16 per cent of East India stock was owned by female shareholders, with full rights to attend shareholder meetings and vote.
There was one figure known as Poll Puff who, during the 1760s, was a common sight on the streets of Calcutta, selling the ‘exquisitely light apple puffs for which she was famous’, a business she kept up ‘for upwards of 30 years’.
Eventually, when she was too old to earn her living, her regular English customers clubbed together and set up a fund to keep her in her old age.
Other female newcomers from England found it more difficult to settle in and prosper. One wrote of the servants she saw in Ceylon: ‘They wear nothing at all about them but a little piece of rag about their waist, which to us at first appeared very shocking.’
Another tutted: ‘ The almost stark-nakedness of the lower classes is disgusting.’ But the English ladies could, in their turn, meet with disapproval from wealthy Indians for not displaying enough jewellery and fine clothing.
In contrast to the vivid greens, scarlets, yellows and golds of the Indian style, the plain, dresseddown look of the English women suggested to the Indians merely that ‘their husbands and fathers held them in low esteem’.
Some British women were less conventional, even smoking spiced hookah pipes.
One redoubtable traveller, Fanny Parkes, who was never happier than when she was ‘vagabondising about India’ like some 21st- century backpacker in the 1830s, noted: ‘ The conduct that shocked them was our dining with men not our relations, and that, too, with uncovered faces.’ She added that ‘ a lady going o u t on horseback is monstrous’. Indian ladies would never go out to pay a social visit without at least two or three of their own slaves in tow.
The British men could be pretty adventurous, too, of course. The sub-continent was Britain’s ‘Wild East’, says Hickman, where ambitious young men, often fleeing bankruptcy, went out to make their fortunes.
They took to India with alacrity, often exchanging their clothing for a looser-fitting Indian style and even turning vegetarian.
Many took several Indian mistresses, or ‘bibis’: wills made by East India Company men show that no fewer than one in three left money either to some companion or their illegitimate offspring.
Later on, though, notes Hickman regretfully, bossier types came out ‘not to revel in the Orient but to improve it’.
In 1857 the Indian Mutiny showed the British that not all in India were happy with their presence — though many Indian regiments stayed loyal to the British, as mutineers rampaged through the streets yelling ‘ AllahiMare Feringhee!’ (By the will of God, let us kill the foreigners!). They slaughtered white men, women and children in horrific mob violence.
Hickman spares us no details of the mutiny, nor the ferocious reaction of the British. It was a tragic episode which showed up the profound differences between the two peoples, with much mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides.
HICkMAN
gives us a wealth of entertaining details of domestic life: in 18th- century Calcutta, one English household dined on ‘ a soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a fore- quarter of lamb, a rice pudding, good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread and excellent Madeira’. After that, unsurprisingly, came siesta.
Alcohol consumption was consistently high. One Charlotte Hickey, a beautiful prostitute from London whom a wealthy lawyer adopted as his live-in wife, treated her fever at sea by pouring ‘a glass of red wine down her throat every ten minutes’ until she’d got through a bottle and a half. ‘ Not surprisingly she soon passed out into a profound sleep. The next morning, however, her fever had broken.’
A useful tip for next time one is stricken with a quartan fever, somewhere off the steamy Coromandel coast. . .