Beyond the memsahibs

Accounts of the East India Company’s rule, and later of the British Raj (which technically began only in 1858, when the British government began to govern India directly) are mostly about how men built up and ran the Indian Empire. The relative paucity of accounts of the lives of British women in India co-exists with the general belief that, as Katie Hickman puts it in the Introduction to She-merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen “if it were not for the snobbery and racial prejudice of the memsahibs there would, somehow, have been far greater harmony between the races.”

 

Ms Hickman writes that this stereotype persists even though in the last 30 years there have been a handful of histories that have attempted to portray a more nuanced account of women’s experiences (they are listed in the bibliography). The letters, diaries and memoirs left behind by Englishwomen in India, she points out, “reveal an incredible range of experiences and responses to India.” True, many were bored or frightened in a distant country vastly different from their own, others were repelled by cultures and people they never understood, “but just as many delighted in their experiences there.”

 

There is another reason for the book. The photographic evidence dating from British times suggests that Englishwomen in India were mostly “memsahibs” or gentlewomen (wives of senior administrators or military officials) — ladies sitting about on the verandas of their bungalows, or in shooting parties, or picnicking by rivers, or playing tennis and croquet at their clubs. Ms Hickman is at pains to point out that this record offers only a partial picture.

 

She emphasises that from the 17th century onwards large numbers of them also worked as independent women in their own right — as milliners, bakers, dressmakers, actors, portrait painters, maids, shopkeepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors, nurses, missionaries, doctors, plant-collectors, writers and even traders. Women also acquired shares in the Company, invested in goods and claimed their dividends. By the end of the 17th century, there were 56 female shareholders; a hundred years later, women owned more than 16 per cent of all Company stock, and took active part in shareholder meetings.

 

One of the first women to travel to India, a Mrs Hudson, arrived in Surat in 1617, armed with £100 (a large sum, around £24,000 in today’s money) to invest in the indigo trade. The Company allowed her to trade only in cloth instead. She was a rich woman by the time she returned to England in 1619. Another woman, active from the 1660s, was Constance Pley, who ran a highly successful business dealing in canvas sail cloth. In Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1770s, Mary Cross traded regularly with Persia, while a wealthy Calcutta (now Kolkata) widow named Johanna Ross ran a thriving money-lending business.

 

The real surge in careers and business opportunities for women took place in the 18th century. By the 1780s professional actresses were beginning to be imported to take the female leads in theatrical productions (chiefly because of the appalling performances of amateur actors). There were successful portrait painters (Sarah Baxter and Catherine Reid), and miniaturists (Martha Isaacs and Diana Hill), too. In 1780, a Mrs Hodges opened the first school for girls in Calcutta, while a certain Eliza Fay managed a millinery establishment, learning double-entry book-keeping in order to do so. Englishwomen were active as shopkeepers, and ran bakeries, confectionery shops and boarding houses. Much to my disappointment, there is no reference at all to the buccaneers mentioned in the title (publisher’s hype, perhaps?). But there is much to read about “gentlewomen” from the upper-middle classes, such as Henrietta Clive — Robert Clive’s daughter-in-law (a collector of plants and minerals) — and Honoria Lawrence (the wife of Brigadier Henry Lawrence, who died during the siege of Lucknow in 1857). Ms Hickman also writes about others who came from lower down the social scale — women who travelled to India as attendants, companions and maids and, increasingly, as educated governesses and music teachers.

 

Among the most remarkable women Ms Hickman profiles is Flora Annie Steel. Arriving in India in 1867, she married an Indian Civil Service officer, learned a few north Indian languages, set up schools for girls in Punjab, authored a collection of folk stories gathered during her travels, and was appointed an inspector of schools in the province. Her greatest claim to fame was The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, which she co-authored in 1888 with a friend. A best-seller in its day, it dispensed practical advice on how to handle almost every possible situation that an Englishwoman running a household in India might encounter.

 

Ms Hickman makes no pretence at presenting a social history of British women in India during the Raj. She gives us glimpses of the lives of select women who have left their own accounts through letters, diaries and memoirs. And she does so with a great deal of wit and humour, making She-Merchants... a delightfully entertaining read. Does she succeed in dispelling the impression that British memsahibs’ view of India was coloured by assumptions of racial and cultural superiority? Not entirely.

  She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen: British Women in India, 1600 – 1900

Katie Hickman

Hachette India; pages 390, Rs 699