“It’s got that tinge, that certain taste of Darjeeling tea, a sweetness there,” Sarda said one soggy morning, “a certain taste that comes through that inherent bitterness intrinsic in green teas.” He stood with his arms crossed watching the steady parade of people with umbrellas passing outside the shop as a fresh curtain of water sluiced the city. Rivulets of water cascaded down Laden-la Road, so steep and slick that nugget-size stones have been embedded directly into the tar for traction.
CHAPTER 10
The Raj in the Hills Above
The British thirst for inexpensive tea significantly shaped the history and rule of India. “The Flag went forth so that Trade could follow,” wrote Jan Morris, keen chronicler of British colonialism, “and very often, in point of fact, the order was reversed.”1 Trade and empire swung hand in hand, and indeed commerce brought the British to India—initially in the guise of the East India Company, merchants! Soon profits and tax revenues helped develop this most dazzling and extraordinary imperial possession. “As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world,” Lord Curzon said as viceroy in 1901, referring to modern-day India but also Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma. “If we lose it, we shall drop straight-away to a third-rate power.”2
India was not a settler colony like Australia or Canada. Most British returned back home at the end of their working life. But they were not transients. The relationship lasted three centuries, and some 2 million Brits died in the subcontinent, most prematurely, many by tropical diseases.3
The degree of interaction between the British and those they ruled is unexpected, wrote acclaimed Delhi-based author and historian William Dalrymple. “Contrary to stereotype, a surprising number of company men responded to India by slowly shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress and taking on the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace.”4 Some wore lungis (a sort of cotton loincloth) and ate spicy local dishes; others went further with friendships, business partnerships, love affairs, even marriage, and not infrequently children. At times they did this in dramatic fashion. Calcutta-founder Job Charnock notoriously snatched a young Hindu from her husband’s funeral pyre and lived with her and their extended family.
Numerous Company employees became exceptional scholars, studying Sanskrit and producing treatises on temple sculpture or translating classic religious texts. Charles Wilkins did the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1785; a decade later, William Jones—linguist, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and judge on the Supreme Court of Bengal—prepared one of the important Vedic discourses known as Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu). Both were sponsored by the first governor-general for British India, William Hastings.5 With a mastery of Urdu and Hindu, Hastings also backed translations of important Islamic texts,6 founded an Islamic college in Calcutta,7 and ordered the construction of a Buddhist temple along the Hooghly.8
The depth of involvement for many men was profound. Dalrymple found that more than a third of British men working for the East India Company in India in the 1780s left in their wills their possessions to Indian wives or children from Indian women.9 Children with a father rich enough were often sent back to school in England. “According to one estimate of 1789, one boy in every 10 at English schools was ‘coloured’—but not too dark,” Ian Jack observed,10 responding to reports that DNA tests showed Prince William has Indian blood, traced back to Eliza Kewark, the housekeeper of Theodore Forbes (1788–1820), a Scottish merchant working in the port of Surat, and passed down on Princess Diana’s side.
But such intermingling didn’t last. Along with the starched mores of Victorian society imported into India’s ruling class, two events hastened its end and set up the environment for Rudyard Kipling’s famous edict that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”11
One was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The journey from Britain to India around the Cape had been reduced from six months to three or four with the advent of the steamship in the mid-nineteenth century and was further trimmed down to as many weeks by cutting through the canal. Wives and children could join the men, friends come for the cool season, and visits be made back to Britain. Home became harder to forgo and impossible to forget.
European womenfolk, though, needed to be secluded, or at least protected. That included wives, sisters, and aunts, as well as the young, unmarried ladies who traveled out to India to spend the festive winter season with married relatives. Their annual influx was dubbed the Fishing Fleet. With a (European) male-to-female ratio of roughly four to one, India became fertile husband-hunting ground among colonial administrators, army officers, businessmen, and even planters. Fit from plenty of sport, dashing when in uniform, and craving attention from the opposite sex, the men feted the eligible ladies with balls and afternoon teas, shooting parties (a tiger hunt with a bejeweled maharaja for the truly connected), races at the Gymkhana, and picnics in tea gardens or under Himalayan deodars. They escorted them on morning rides and walks in the hills to see orchids and rhododendrons, played afternoon games of tennis on the clay courts, and danced at the Club to gramophone records in the evening, all chaperoned of course. Romances were, by necessity, quick, as the hot weather spelled an end to the social season. Young ladies who failed to snag a spouse by the heat’s arrival traveled back to Britain as “Returned Empties.”12
Those who did catch a husband became full memsahibs and often ended up in remote posts, not only far from the London (or Oxford or Edinburgh) society in which they had spent their lives, but also from the parties and exotic excursions where they had first been wooed in India. Along with not succumbing to cholera, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and malaria, avoiding prickly heat and snakes, and trying to adapt to life in a highly unfamiliar country, they frequently had to endure large chunks of time alone while their husbands traveled through the districts they administered or went off on military maneuvers. Fellow foreigners were generally few, or too far away, to visit. Contact with Indians remained largely restricted to their servants and often limited to a level of the local language known as kitchen Hindustani. Children brought a measure of comfort, though both boys and girls were nearly always sent home—a place they had never set foot—to boarding school, often as young as eight years old, to forge independence and proper British character.13
Another major event that hampered the intermingling of the British with the locals was the uprising of 1857, also known to the British as the Mutiny and to Indians as the First War of Independence. Tensions between the rulers and the ruled had been mounting for some time on the street and, more dangerously, among the Indian soldiers—sepoys—in the East India Company’s barracks. The tipping point came when their Enfield rifles began using a new cartridge rumored to be greased either in tallow (beef fat, which was offensive to Hindus) or pork fat (offensive to Muslims). The cartridges had to be bitten open before they could be used, an act that made a Hindu lose caste and defiled a Muslim.