The British in India by David Gilmour

Author:David Gilmour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

MIXED MARRIAGES

Whatever criticism the custom provoked, British men continued to marry Indian, Burmese and Eurasian women until the end of the Raj and beyond. In smaller numbers British women also married Indian men. As we have noted, a few senior Company officials married aristocratic Indian girls, in Hyderabad and elsewhere, at the end of the eighteenth century, and a hundred years later officials in Burma were marrying their mistresses. Yet a good deal of intermarriage took place at other times and in other places.

Few sites in British India were more ‘establishment’ – to use a later word – than the Bengal Club in Calcutta, which was founded in 1827 at about the same time that the Garrick, the Reform and the Athenaeum clubs were set up in London. Yet a glance at the list of founder members suggests neither the snobbery – it includes bankers,74 A generation later, Judge Kemp, who joined the ICS in 1831, married an Indian woman, as did a number of other judges, especially in Burma, until Independence. Sir Henry Sheldon Pratt, who was chief justice in Rangoon, married Ma Win from Bassein in 1902, and together they produced five children. After his wife’s death, near Maymyo in 1935, Pratt had her tomb inscribed with the words ‘Far above Rubies’.75

Planters, policemen, missionaries and members of every other profession also married Indian and Burmese women. Often they chose tribal brides from the hills, girls unhampered by the inhibitions of caste or purdah. When Ernest Bradfield, the head of the Indian Medical Service, visited the Kulu Valley in 1937, he found that most of the British settlers in that part of the Himalayan foothills had married hill women. At Darjeeling in the same period, the Scottish manager of a tea garden, a widower in his sixties, married Jeti, a teenage girl from a local tribe who had worked for him as a tea-picker. Another admirer of tribal women was the remarkable Verrier Elwin, once described as ‘the anthropologist who married his fieldwork’. In fact he did so twice, first with a Gond girl called Kosi and later with a Pardhan girl called Kachari; while living with them and their tribes he became recognized as an academic expert on tribal sexual behaviour.76

Such unions were not of course easily accepted. The tea manager was not permitted to take Jeti to lunch in the Planters’ Club at Darjeeling. Verrier Elwin’s mother told her son that with his ‘brains and powers’ he really couldn’t ‘go on as a cave man’.77 The surgeon Owen Berkeley-Hill had had problems with his mother all his life and only went into the IMS to stop her nagging him. When stationed at the Secunderabad cantonment before the First World War he had an affair with a (female) punkah wallah, and he later married Karimbil Kunhimanny, a Tiyyan girl by caste, an event that ‘incurred the displeasure’ of many of his friends and family. It could not, however, incur the displeasure of his mother because he did not dare tell her until a few years before her death that he had an Indian wife and four children.

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