Sep 7, 1998
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BOOKS Raj Ranis Nineteenth century India meant all things to all women. By Gillian Wright MEMSAHIBS ABROAD Victorian memsahibs rarely travelled without their pens. Their menfolk slew beasts, and they wrote journals. The act of writing was not a mere feminine accomplishment, it was a sign of nascent emancipation. Women wrote to establish their identity. Their earnings, however, were rarely their own. Until the 1870s, married women in Britain had no right to any property. They could not even sign a contract with their publishers -- that was the husband's job. No wonder then that some memsahibs found zenana life no less exciting than their own, that they praised Muslim Personal Law for the rights it gave women. No wonder that perhaps the greatest of them, Fanny Parks, wrote: "The laws of England relative of married women, and the state of slavery to which those laws degrade them, render the lives of some few of the higher, and thousands in the lower, ranks of life one perpetual sati." There is plenty of Fanny Parks and also of Emily Eden in Memsahibs Abroad, admirably compiled by Indira Ghose. They were, after all, the pick of the diarists and this book arranges the most lively lady's writing thematically. Although omitting authors like Meer Hassan Ali, who actually married an Indian and lived in a zenana, Ghose has collected a formidable array of ladies. They include the correspondent of the Daily Graphic, a "bluestocking" critic of the Raj, a social reformer involved in girls' education in India, a novelist, a missionary and the only officer's wife to accompany the British Army during the Crimean War. They were very different characters but all confined within one century, the 19th, and one society. They were also constant travellers, whether through choice or duty. Some of them wrote with stupendous ignorance and odious self-righteousness. Hindus were prey to "the horrible darkness of the most corrupt and abominable superstitions" and Holi was "a degrading Saturnalia". "It is," wrote one woman, "almost impossible to find a native who is either truthful or pure-minded." It's unfortunate that these accounts too were important in creating the India of the colonial imagination. Many of Ghose's memsahibs show much more will to understand even though they are tempted to put the adjective "picturesque" into every paragraph. They describe Diwali's "chaste grandeur" at Benaras, how a talented Bengali playwright regards the British, a visit to a school for dancing girls. The wife of an ICS officer tries to explain how faith saves Hindus from the materialism which sees spirit in nothing. She also tries to show there is more to the caste system than simply "man's inhumanity to man". Others keenly satirise the Raj. The anthology is perhaps at its best when there's a gripping tale. The Mutiny created a huge British market for survival stories. Ghose had many to choose from. She picked a lady whose husband was shot by sepoys. Later, disgusted Delhi had not been razed to the ground as a lesson to "the natives", this lady is introduced to the defeated Bahadur Shah Zafar. He meekly salaams her. The imprisoned Zeenat Mahal is still fighting though, and the black-clad widow is forced to retreat when the queen pointedly asks what happened to her husband. The writings in fact reveal more about the memsahibs than about the then India. If anything's lacking, it's that Ghose's four-line potted biographies leave them largely unexplained.
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