Her Influence and Position
Our present subject is not that of the Indian native lady. Her hapless case, in all its pathetic helplessness, has not failed in securing eloquent pens to paint its disabilities; and noble lives, inspired by unselfish devotion, are spent in seeking its amelioration. But though that on which we are about to dwell, touches ourselves more nearly, it yet bears more closely, than may at first sight appear, on a subject that is deservedly attracting, from the highest to the lowest circles, much sympathetic interest in our land. While the native lady, immured from infancy to age, within the bare and silent walls of those castles of ignorance and listlessness, they call their homes, calls for our compassion; is there, we would ask, no touch of pathos, no appeal to sympathy in the position of the Englishwoman in India? No need of a friendly voice to plead with and for her? No call to reflect as to her actual condition? as to the influences of the new mode of life to which she is subjected on her mind and character, as well as upon the influence she herself is having on the destinies of that great Empire, over which her husbands, brothers, or fathers in various capacities, are exerting a certain sway?
The days are long past, when in units or by twos and threes; English ladies landed on these shores, braving the dangers of the sea and risks of climate; to be eagerly appropriated by the lucky-favored few, out of a host of aspirants to their hands: and who reigned henceforth the petted and adored queens of the little circles they adorned. They now come in scores; and as facilities for travel increase, means of communication multiply, and our picked men elect India as the scene of their career, so must their wives, daughters and sisters follow in larger numbers, Year by year, the eastward emigration is increasing. English mothers are sending forth their sons and their daughters, and while steam and wire do their work of unification, are not India and England being yet more firmly welded into one Empire by the unseen yet indestructible threads that unite millions of loving hearts across the seas?
Must not, then, such questions as these become both nationally and individually of ever-increasing importance. What is the influence of Indian life and surroundings on England’s daughters? Do the circumstances of their Indian homes tend to the development of that which is noblest and best in them? Are their lives, as a whole, on a higher or a lower level than those of their sisters at home? Does their wider knowledge of the world, their opportunities of travel and observation, tend to their intellectual advancement? Are their lives telling for good or for evil on the people among whom their lot is cast, and between whose women-kind and themselves so great a gulf is fixed?
Surely these are questions that must be issuing in differing words from hundreds of mothers’ hearts who have seen their young daughters, their faces to the East, leave fearlessly the shelter of their happy English homes, to share for weal or woe, the fate of bridegroom or brother, as well as from those of others who through long years of separation have anticipated, with mingled feelings of hope and dread, their daughter’s adolescence, and their consequent return to the land that gave them birth, and to the risks and chances of Indian life!
English ladies in India may generally be classed under three several heads:—
1st—Those who might par excellence be termed Anglo-Indians. Whose parents, and it may be grand-parents, were Indian officials; whose antecedents, early associations and future naturally are linked to Indian life, and whose enforced residence in England for educational purposes has been regarded as a parenthesis in their existence.
2ndly.—Ladies who come to India at a maturer age, with habits and character formed, and tastes developed.
3rdly—Those who first come to India as young brides, but who have had no previous Indian associations.
Let us picture to ourselves the case of the young girl, who, at a tender age, was deported to England for education, and whose bringing up has remained in the hands of relatives or others to whom she was entrusted by her parents.
What to the young and clinging heart of childhood must have been the agony of that moment, when either on the platform of a railway station or on the deck of one of our great steam vessels, she felt for the last time the clasp of a mother’s arms and the impress of a father’s kiss? But years pass quickly; and impressions on the waxen tablets of childhood’s memory rapidly succeed and obliterate each other. Fainter and fainter become the memories of a distant home: and with home, of the parents with whom her life in it was passed.
True, at greater and lesser intervals, these parents will have appeared upon the scene, and taken a brief part in her existence. But by the time the estrangement of forgetfulness was beginning to melt into use and fellowship, the furlough has expired, and the bond with difficulty woven, has been ruthlessly snapped asunder. Youth is impatient of suffering. Only the very small minority among the young happily, are capable of long retention of useless regrets. Those who most constantly and actively are occupied with a child’s comfort and well-being, will naturally, to a certain extent, supersede in its memory the parents, whom it sees but rarely. Thus the saddest, yet inevitable result of Indian life, is the loosening of the sacred family bond. It is the fashion now-a-days to talk of the luxurious lives of Indian officials. Has it ever occurred to those who thus indulge in such cheap and cruel reflections on some of Her Majesty’s most conscientious and laborious subjects, at what an expense to them the work of the great Empire of India is carried on? It is said, and said truly, that the Englishman is pre-eminent among the nations of the earth for his love of home! Let it be remembered, then, that it is at the sacrifice of his home-life that the Englishman in India earns his, by no means, immoderate and ever-decreasing income.
To the child, fortunate in her care-takers, however, the filial sentiment will often go far to supply the impulse withdrawn by the absence of her parents, and this sentiment may become a powerful factor in the formation of her character. As time and distance obliterate their actual memory, so will their fancied image gain in charm and beauty. Should there be no adverse influence at work, each one’s ideal of her own parents will be that which, in her estimation, combines all that is most perfect in man or woman.
The mere memory of a dead mother, as in the case of Cowper, will influence more powerfully the character of one man than the actual presence and existence of his own, that of another. Ideality in the case of the former, be his imagination and sentiment ever so strong, runs no risk of rude comparison with fact. Not so with the Indian girl separated for long years from her parents. As advancing time brings the hour of reunion nearer, the ardent temperament of youth will constantly add in glowing tints, new touches to the original picture. And the moment of meeting will be rehearsed with an intensity of effect known only to the roseate atmosphere of a young girl’s affection.
The other evil to which the inevitable separation exposes both parent and child, is that of indifference. Endowed with less imagination and consequently more at the mercy of her immediate surroundings, another girl will attach herself more easily to those with whose kindness she is in daily contact. As the time approaches for her rejoining her parents, her anticipations will perhaps largely partake of the nature of presentiment.
Not without distrust can she view a life, in itself unknown, which is to be passed with beings, who, although the authors of her existence, are in all essentials strangers, and for all she can know, may prove unsympathetic.
Crucial tests these of the strength of natural ties. The results in either direction are not difficult to foresee. In the first place, the parents must be brought face to face with that preconceived ideal, and the happiness of the family will greatly depend on the result of the ordeal. They either stand or fall. If the latter, great will be the fall, and the influence on the young life for which they are responsible, disastrous. Like a boat loosed from its moorings, her mind and conscience will be tossed and battered about, between duty to her parents and that higher moral standard, which the whole course of her training may have helped to build up. Their faults and failings to which daily use would have blunted her perceptions, will be painfully obvious should she have been religiously brought up; any defect in reverence of faith, will come as a terrible shock. If she has learnt to look upon life as the battle ground for good against evil, and vanity, frivolity, idleness have hitherto been regarded as baneful vices, what must be her reflexions, if from the day her outfit became an all-absorbing question, she finds the duties of the toilet erected into a religion; and arrayed in garments of a variety and richness to which she has hitherto been a stranger, she finds that “looking well,” is for the future to be one of the chief aims of her existence. If instead of that vie intime to which she has taught herself, with infinite yearnings, to look forward, she finds her life mapped out in an endless cycle of engagements:—and dancing, theatricals, lawn-tennis, badminton, &c., and its all important pre-occupations,—what must be, we ask, the reflexions of a thoughtful girl? and ere she can accommodate herself to an ephemeral existence such as this, what must be the revolution of which her own bosom is perhaps the only witness?
Bewildered, puzzled, hesitating, must we not, looking with painful anxiety on the mass of our countrywomen in India, picture her, as letting slip, one by one, her nobler impulses, the untested principles of a schoolgirl’s code, and as half unwillingly but surely, gliding down the current? Soon the waters of fashionable life will engulph her; anon she will be in their vortex, and if, in the evermore rarely recurring moments of quiet reflexion, she pauses to ask whither she is tending, must not her scruples be easily laid to rest if she find her father, her mother, her friends look on approving, if not even participating? Must not her natural conclusion be, that her earlier impressions of life and duty, were a tradition of puritanism, and that to laugh, to dance, to sing, to beguile time, and to chase dull cares, these are the true objects a woman has to seek,—the end and aim of her being?
But underneath this seemingly gay surface, she will, by imperceptible degrees, discover a more serious underlying stratum. No one will perhaps hint it in words, but is not this sentiment in the very air she breaths? Reluctantly she discovers that the chief duty of girlhood is to secure a good match. Her friends and companions are passing one by one into bridehood, and the wisdom or the reverse of their choice is discussed with a reckless freedom before her, that once she would have felt bordered on the indelicate. Verily, she will find that she, who in the matrimonial market doeth well to herself, will in India be well spoken of. Not the tender daughter, the loving sister, the studious modest girl will be the theme of station applause. If she, too, is not to be considered by all, parents included, a failure, must she not bethink herself of fulfilling their unexpressed ambition, by securing an eligible parti? The. least sophisticated, cannot long mix in Indian society without early learning wherein success or failure lies for her, And the bloom and: sacredness from her sweet maidenhood seems brushed away, when she inadvertently hears herself referred to as one of a list of unsuccessful “spins” who has not yet “gone off.”
Can we wonder if she takes the plunge and becomes, with the rest, the devotee of dissipation, and her modest, retiring manners: are exchanged for their reverse? Her ambition is now to be a skilful lawn-tennis player, a good dancer, a brilliant fabricator of chaff—chaff being the staple commodity of Indian conversation! She now chaffs with the best, and her admirers speak of her as “awfully jolly.” Probably, a season or two will land her in a new home. Her husband, engaged in his office for all the long hours of the sultry Indian day, time will soon begin to hang heavily on her hands. Confined by the necessities of the climate for its greater length within the four walls of her home, she will soon long for the freedom and excitement of scenes of amusement! She will recoup herself for the dreary hours of imprisonment by snatching all the liberty she can in those of emancipation. When the hot weather has laid its veto on station festivities, she will long to follow in fashion’s wake, and recommence its monotonous round upon the hills. Her husband distressed to see her “mope,” and anxious for her health, will easily be persuaded, even if he does not originate the idea, that the plains do not suit his wife in the hot weather. In this way, the Indian husband shows great unselfishness. Condemned by the exigencies of the public service and of his private purse, to remain below in the melting heat, he resigns himself to six months of celibacy, and takes what consolation he can find out of life in his club, which alone offers him a resource against the intolerable loneliness of his home. A semi-estrangement, or at least indifference, springs up, Husband and wife have learnt to seek their pleasures apart. A “home” if it can bear the name, whence the presiding genius of home,—the wife and mistress is absent half the year,—is at best a hollow pretence. The taking for “better and worse” has on one side become a broken compact, To take for the better, viz. the cool weather—to forsake for the worse, the hot—has become the order of the day.
Happy, if that were all. But is it possible that the detached better-half will content herself with a sad and solitary existence on the hills? Her work, her place in the social circle abandoned, is she not in terrible danger of seeking out consolations? Other idlers than herself will be on the hills also. What more alluring than the charm and excitement of flirtation without its possibilities and risks? Besides, can one see one’s friend’s wife ride and walk, unchaperoned, when one has nothing better, certainly not more agreeable to do than accompany her?
Is this the life an English mother would covet for her child? Is this the ideal of the fresh young maiden whose errant thoughts, straying into the dim future, picture a life Of mutual sympathy and affection with that unknown one, to share whose lot and to bear whose burdens she will be ever ready. Could such a woman be brought face to face with her future as above depicted, and see her likeness there, and were some seer, as of old, to pronounce on her the sentence “Thou art the woman,” might we not hear her indignant rejoinder as she disclaims it and asks: “Am I a dog?”
There is the next, but less common type, viz., the young lady of riper years and experience, who comes either married or perhaps single to cheer a brother’s lonely bungalow, and share the ups and downs of his career. She may at home have been a visitor of the poor, a Sunday-school teacher, or leader of a village choir. It has not occurred that such pursuits may be all but impracticable in India. On the contrary, she rather comes seeking a wider sphere, a less beaten track for her energies. She is at the prime of her zeal, her enthusiasm, and her health.
The gradual chill of disappointment creeping into the heart of such an one, may be easily divined. Obstacles of which she could have no previous conception spring up in her path at every turn. The climate, the difficulties of locomotion, the absence of that parochial machinery which offers to innumerable ladies of active and philanthropic tendencies in England, an easy and well worn path of usefulness, are wholly absent. Poor, there are none; nor perhaps children to instruct. At least between her and the only poor she sees, the natives, a gulf is fixed, for they cannot understand her, nor she them.
She will then, perhaps, bethink herself of learning the language, but here again new difficulties await her. She applies to her male protector, expressing her desire for the services of a Moonshi or a Pundit. To her surprise her apparently reasonable request is far from favorably received. Many Englishmen have an insuperable objection to the ladies of their families having intercourse of any kind with natives: their plea is, that natives regard woman from so low a standpoint. It is quite possible that they do so regard the women of their own nation, whom their customs have systematically degraded for centuries; but the revelation has possibly never been made to them, of what generations of religious and moral culture, has done for the ladies of the West. But it is undeniable that this feeling, well grounded or otherwise, has proved a serious impediment in the way of numerous ladies intelligently studying native tongues. Thwarted in this direction she takes her Primer and commences to study alone. Her progress is slow and unsatisfactory: but she has been told that “if bent on learning the language, which she had much better let alone, he himself, husband or brother, will help her.” Making the best of circumstances she struggles on, but soon discovers that, immersed from morning till evening in business, he has little inclination for a drill in language, or the meagre mental relaxation to be found in dictionaries and grammars during his few hours of repose.
Thus, by degrees, her abortive efforts are abandoned, and the key which might indeed have opened before her many closed doors of usefulness, is let slip from her hand. This type is too sensible, too cultivated, to subside into the mere votary of station dissipation. She reads, studies, and is often missing at the general rendezvous. Indian society is impatient of revolt from its dominion. To be well with her, you must let yourself be led captive at her will. On lawn-tennis nights you must not be found wending your way in an opposite direction. It is expected of you that bat in hand you should converge to the general centre! On the night of a station ball, it is the height of churlishness if you prefer a quiet evening at home. At least, this sort of thing cannot be allowed to recur too often. Very soon, if refractory, you will find yourself confronted with the cold shoulder, and when you enter among your compeers, you will at once discover you are not au courant. Every body is discussing the last ball, the last theatricals, or the approaching tournament. You were not there? You are not going to join?” C’est bien assez.”
Ladies of a studious and thoughtful turn are not so rare in India as they have been. But they are still sufficiently so to find their social position far from happy. She, who is a reader or thinker, when she enters society, at a loss perhaps on the all-absorbing topic of the hour—the last tournament—or the coming Race week, has nevertheless her own contribution to bring to the general fund. But, alas! these other ladies neither read nor think. Their tongues are indeed ready with airy nothings: and in the society they frequent, such airy nothings are the staple commodity of conversation, The discussion of politics, social reforms, literature, still more religion is decidedly in “bad form.” There is, indeed, plenty of chaff, but of wheat and the heavier crops, butterflies in general have but a poor opinion! They savour too much of the market and the corn exchange when one has nothing to exchange.
The third class may be looked for among the many charming girls who come out as brides. They may belong eventually to either of the preceding classes, but there is a certain difference in their way of looking at or accepting Indian life. Unlike the first they have no Indian traditions: “Bara Mem Sahib” and “Chota Mem Sahib” are still terms for them. without meaning. They have not found out that the dearly prized prerogative of the one is to patronize, and the first duty of the other is to obey! No early association has robbed the freshness of a new country and new surroundings of their charm. Young love has not brushed the bloom from its petals, and her husband by her side, she gazes at the unknown with a tender interest, for this is the home of his adoption, and she too is ready to adopt it as her own. Not all at first does she awake to the monotony, the soullessness of the eternal round of society engagements. Early motherhood, perhaps, is in the near horizon, and the sanctity of bridehood, still throws its glamour around her. The youngest addition is herself a welcome ingredient, for she affords a fresh topic for discussion. The frailties of the Jones and Smiths are, alas! worn threadbare. All the rents and fissures in the domestic and social relationships of every one in the station, are common property. Is Mrs. Primptemps Verts pretty, or can she be merely said to be good looking? Here, in itself, is a subject which will occupy several sittings ere each and every lady will have aired her own, and refuted her neighbour's opinions. Who was she? Has she any money? Some think her very young, but another is nearly certain she is not as young as she seems. Some one has heard that she sings, another is equally sure she merely plays. But a third, better informed, knows positively she does neither.
Mrs. Primptemps Verts will find herself very well received! Each lady will be bent on being better informed than her neighbour as to her tastes and antecedents, when the station meets at the next lawn-tennis party, perhaps the awakening may in her case be long in coming, but it will come at last. How different this life from that of her English home! How dearly her love is purchased! She clings passionately to husband and child, but the cloud of early separation darkens her sky. Soon it will be the choice between that husband and that child. She knows where hers will fall, but she sees herself in the not distant future—a Rachel weeping for her children, uncomforted, because they are not, nor can be, where she is. She asks herself with deep heart-sinkings, how she will spend all the long sad days, when separated perforce by the necessities of his position from her husband, the walls and verandahs of her empty bungalow echoing no longer to the pattering feet and ringing laugh of her children, she will find herself alone.
Her heart involuntarily tells her the only salve to her sorrow would be a life of benevolent activity in the service of others, How many aching hearts have stilled their throbbings by ministering to those yet sadder than themselves. She will devote her life to useful or philanthropic pursuits. As one hails the flickering blaze of the lighthouse across a troubled sea, so does she welcome this glimmering hope. By living for others her own life may escape shipwreck. But how shall she accomplish her desires?. If in a heart-crisis such as this, a woman turns for help to her male companion, ten to one she gets small comprehension, little sympathy, still less will he aid her. That imperative demand for work on which he makes his manhood’s boast, appears to him unreasonable, if not importunate, when coming from the other sex. His pride and his prerogative is to work for her, and beyond a little ladylike supervision of his domestic arrangements, the part he would assign to her in life is too generally that of an onlooker. Can we wonder that so many sink into a life of inanition, varied only by an occasional flare up into the intoxication of pleasure, if this is the view taken by their protectors. A man will tell you that as long as he is hard at work the inconveniences, not to say the miseries of the climate sit on him comparatively lightly: but that the moment his attention and thoughts are unemployed, time becomes intolerably heavy. Why should we suppose that the mere difference of sex should so completely alter the character and predilections of beings of otherwise the same race and traditions, that what is utter weariness to the one, should be a satisfying existence to the other? No: we do our countrywomen the justice to believe that much of that apparent devotion to frivolity and amusement that so painfully characterises their Indian existence, is the result of misdirected energy: they having found, too often, every other field for its exercise practically closed against them.
But then it is argued a woman’s sphere is in attending to her house-keeping and her children, Let it be distinctly understood that all our preceding remarks refer almost exclusively to the unmarried, the childless, and the married ladies whose children no longer call for their care. To her whose children still share her home and her maternal tenderness, we can hardly too strenuously insist on the sacredness of the trust of motherhood, nor the absorbing nature of its claims. A task more difficult, nor one requiring more unremitting self-devotion than that of rearing our Anglo-Indian children, does not exist. In India everything is against them. Delicate exotics, they languish and pine beneath these sultry skies, these scorching winds, this death-dealing sun. Hours of infancy, by nature ordained to be hours of joy and innocent delight, are here too often but one weary martyrdom of sickness and misery. If ever motherhood deserved the dignity of being recognised as a mission, requiring all the exclusiveness of enthusiasm and of self-devotion, it is in India. Here is needed the vigilant eye to mark the earliest symptoms of disorder, as well as to ward off the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and the arrow that flieth by noonday. So great are her difficulties, so bright are the rewards of a faithful discharge of her duties, so disastrous are the results of neglect, that the English mother in India might well aspire to rank is a queen among mothers. For faithfulness or neglect mean to her offspring the enjoyment or the forfeiture of what comes to them but once, and the memory of which will be the fairest heritage of age, a happy childhood. Who can have failed to mark the difference, perceptible at a glance, between the neat, trim, chubby English child in India, smiles on its lips and dimples in its cheek as it sits complaisant and content in its ayah’s arms or trots cheerily by her side, and the pale, listless infant, with flabby spotty skin, tasteless ill-fitting garments, eloquent of the skill of the native durzie, dragging its weary footsteps along the dusty roads. In the one you see the mother’s darling, in the other the offspring of the woman of fashion, who, dancing or acting by night and sleeping by day, finds full occupation for her few industrial hours in refurbishing old costumes and concocting new ones, to meet the incessant demands of toilet consequent on her constant appearances in public. This sad and listless child, innocent victim of the violation of Nature’s laws, abandoned by its natural protectors to the tender mercies of ignorant and irresponsible native servants, will retain no reminiscences of its early home, but of dreary recurrences of fever and of colds, of mosquito bites and of prickly-heat. As its mind expands, its sufferings begetting fretfulness, it will revenge the neglect of its parent by acts of cruelty and petty tyranny on its care-takers, and when eventually deported to England, will be but another example of that already much deprecated creature—the passionate, mischievous and ill-behaved Indian child.
We think that we have in nowise overrated the trials, the drawbacks, the difficulties that beset the path of the Englishwoman in India: In our next paper we hope to deal more fully with her influence and her responsibility. We will enter into the question whether her present position is the highest or the happiest to which she might reasonably aspire. We shall ask whether there are insuperable obstacles to her life rising to at least a level with the lives of our noblest and best at home. Among whom, in their pure and lofty lives, our Queen’s daughters shine conspicuous; and in their active devotion to works of mercy and benevolence, call on England’s daughters to be true to the traditions of their race, their ennobling faith, and the honour of the great nation whom they represent.