Subtitle “British Women in India”
To anyone who has read about the history of India, especially during the years when the Europeans travelled there, there is a misperception that women first started settling there from the 19th century onwards.
There is a stereotyped image we have of the British memsahibs in India. We imagine a woman in a long dress, a wide-brimmed hat, probably carrying a parasol. Possibly she is reclining languidly in a chaise-longue. Maybe she is at a garden party. She might even be wafting around, playing croquet.
Much has been laid at the feet of these 19th century & early 20th century female arrivals, blaming their staid Victorian & Edwardian views for the social distancing that developed between Indians and the British. Things were more relaxed we are given to understand, when there were just British chaps running around India. It was the arrival of the “Memsahibs” that spoiled all that.
Well, this brilliant book throws a completely new light on the women who went to India, and it is an absolute joy to read.
Let’s listen to the author in, literally, the opening page of the book:
“The time frame of this book – 1600-1900 – covers the centuries between the very first stumbling English attempts to make contact with India to, approximately, the death of Queen Victoria, self-styled Empress of India, who died in 1901…I have chosen instead to concentrate on the women of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about whom far less has been written (and in the case of the seventeenth century, so far as I am aware, almost nothing)…”
And it is with this tantalising premise that this wonderful book takse off.
We meet a fabulous cast of women – some brave, some foolish, some curious about their new home, some not so curious – and through letters and diaries Ms Hickman has brought this wonderful cross section of women to life.
As the book starts, we meet a Mrs. Charlotte Hickey setting sail for India in June 1782.
And what a woman she is:
“…ever since she had left London six months previously, she had been playing a part. For all the glamorous outward show, Charlotte was not the gentlewoman she appeared to be. She was not, in fact, even Mrs. Hickey, but Charlotte Barry, one of London’s most notorious courtesans…Stepping on to the vessel as plain Charlotte Barry, she would step off it the other end in Calcutta as Mrs Hickey, a married lady of unimpeachable virtue, ready to take a full place in Calcutta society.
So far away from home, surely no one would be any the wiser?”
Re-inventing yourself, the 18th century version.
The women who sailed to India often endured great hardship – like not even being allowed on deck even to get fresh air – and once in India were prone to the same risks of disease as the men, but they also had to content with loneliness, and oftentimes crushing boredom.
But what shines through these pages is the resilience of many of these women, who learned to cope, travelling hundreds of miles with their husbands, and making do as best they could. They detailed their thoughts and emotions – and sometimes delightfully catty remarks about their peers – in letters sent home to England. They tried to make their homes as pleasant and “English” as possible, and learned to live with the absence of their children – if they survived – who were sent back to England as wee little things, to be educated.
Ms Rickman tells the stories of these women against the background of political India, and there are moments of introspection. Fanny Eden, a woman of huge privilege, being the sister of the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, wrote tellingly in 1837:
“These people must have been so very magnificent in what they did before we Europeans came here with our bad money-making ways.”
Some women reach out from the pages of this lovely book and almost speak directly to the reader. Women like Henrietta Clive who was interested in everything about her new home in Madras, despite the boredom “It is impossible to imagine the sameness and dullness of this place” and the brutal weather, “…the solitude, the confinement and the heat make me at times so low that I can scarcely support it.”
Henrietta Clive lived a life of privilege as the wife of the Governor – Clive of India no less – but she longed to travel. And, in 1800, travel she did. Finally. And in what style.
She set off with her 2 daughters (& 14 elephants, 100 bullocks and 2 camels) to explore south India on a journey that would take them more than 7 months. She wrote regularly to her husband, telling him about the sights and sounds they saw and the plants she had collected, as well as giving him family updates – the girls were having their music lessons, her eldest daughter got her first period – and the more she travelled, the more she fell in love with India, collecting “not just plants, but…almost anything that could be bottled, stuffed or catalogued.”
Henrietta is one of my favourite women from the wonderful cast of characters Ms Hickman brings to life.
India is a dazzling, beautiful, perplexing backdrop for much of the book, exactly as it was for these women. The events of 1857, when there was a violent uprising against the British by the Indians, followed by equally brutal reprisals, make for harrowing reading.
This is a wonderful book, entertaining, erudite in the lightest possible way, and one that will fill you with admiration for women whose stories have been ignored and untold for hundreds of years.
Highly recommended.