Memsahibs in the Raj

Ipshita Nath's book captures the hermetically sealed nature of the memsahibs' world from the country in which they lived

Memsahibs: British Women in Colonial India
Author: Ipshita Nath
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 294
Price: Rs 699

The Raj exerts an enduring fascination for educated upper middle class Indians in a way that the Mughal era can rarely match. The author, Ipshita Nath, is well aware of this appeal when she selected as a topic for doctoral thesis this study of memsahibs in colonial India. As she writes in a lengthy prologue, “…sometimes a voice in my head asked if… I had been bitten by the ‘Raj nostalgia’ after all?” Her answer is that her interest was simply a “scholarly inclination given my long-standing obsession with the histories of the Victorian age”.

The objective of her study was to debunk stereotypical notions of the memsahib and scrutinise their part in the colonial process, since Raj wives, though subordinate to their civil servant or soldier husbands, were expected to “do their bit” for the cause of the British Empire in every way — from sustaining an exhausting and expensive social whirl, to serial childbearing and, occasionally in informal advisory roles.

Ms Nath, thus, seeks to offer a voice and agency to the often overlooked women of the Raj.

To this end, she has trawled through scads of memsahib writings — such as the journals of women such as Emily Eden, who accompanied her brother George, Governor General of India, the travel writer Fanny Parks and Harriet Tytler, whose An Englishwoman in India is a staple bestseller for Raj aficionados. She has also visited many Raj haunts (Simla, Landour) to gain a better perspective of their lives.

She chronicles in great detail the struggles of these women, from the time they boarded uncomfortable ships and endured sea-sickness, disease, hurricanes and occasionally sexual harassment to make the long journey to the jewel in the British crown. We get a granular description of their lives in India — the quirky bungalows, the weather, the daily psychological battles with armies of servants, the rigid, exhausting and yet promiscuous social lives, the dangers and discomforts on the road when memsahibs were travelling upcountry, the loneliness, the discomforts of serial childbearing and primitive healthcare and the tragedies of parting with their children.

The voice of the memsahibs comes through loud and clear in exhaustive detail, which may be necessary for a thesis presented at an American university but can be tedious for an Indian reader and occasionally at the cost of analysis. Ms Nath is careful to establish that memsahibs that made the journey to India were “not overzealous and dreamy travellers who wanted to experience the romance of life in the East with its unlimited wealth and luxuries. They were practical women who knew… that they must be prepared for all contingencies in a harsh, unpredictable and unforgiving land.” But she does not ask why they chose this life.

It is well known that the Raj was the road to fortune for impoverished minor sons and sundry chancers of British society. In Britain, respectable women wouldn’t have touched most of them with a bargepole. But hard-headed calculations in a Georgian- and Victorian-era marriage market skewed against women made these men extremely eligible simply because they were or could become super-rich. Whether East India Company agents or Crown employees, they openly ran lucrative side businesses — soldiers and officers routinely took cuts from locals on supply contracts, for example. To be “rich as a nabob,” an anglicised version of the Urdu term “nawab”, still carries pejorative connotations. The married memsahibs and girls on the “fishing fleets” — unmarried women in search of husbands in India — travelled by choice with a full understanding of the risk and opportunities for wealth creation embedded in the Raj. It would have been more interesting — at least for an Indian reader — if Ms Nath had examined the social background of the memsahibs who chose to take on this curious life of luxury and hardship and traced their post-Raj lives.

Ms Nath rightly points out that Raj society tended to be more rigid, hierarchical and class conscious than back home. “Prestige and power were in direct accordance with rank and position… everything, from seating arrangements at dinner tables to other social formalities was governed on this scale.” Her account entertainingly describes how memsahibs made a “tremendous effort in constructing a social system because they had built a duplicate England in India and were willing to do everything to maintain it.” To this end, they even wore silks and velvet gowns and silk stockings for evening parties whatever the weather.

But she does not examine the memsahibs’ role in creating and enforcing these social mores. These were a means of consolidating their powers and upstaging the local bibis and mixed race consorts of early Company servants, a social transition evocatively described in William Dalrymple’s White Mughals.

The book is interesting because it captures the hermetically sealed nature of the memsahibs’ world from the country in which they lived. There are servants everywhere in this book — shadowy presences at parties, balls, picnics, hunts, camping trips, in the children’s nurseries and even offering shelter during the 1857 uprising. But beyond their role as servitors, they have no voice because, Ms Nath points out, the servants left no account of their lives. It is only after the Uprising of 1857 — one of the best chapters — that the memsahibs gain a dim inkling of the wide gulf between rulers and the ruled. 

Far from debunking conventional notions about memsahibs, the book reinforces them. Considering many of these women lived in India for decades and left vivid written and visual accounts, the striking point that Ms Nath overlooks in her eagerness to give them agency is that they left almost no mark on post-colonial Indian society --  barring some snobby social rules in successors to managing agencies. That is fitting, since they came to India as handmaidens of colonial exploitation.