The women of the Raj
The Raj has had a bad rap of late; British contributions in terms of education, transport and the legal system have been overshadowed by accusations of racism and exploitation. The memsahib, the upper-crust Englishwoman, has become the totem for these failings.
“Moping and sickly, narrowly intolerant, vindictive to the locals, despotic and abusive to their servants, usually bored, invariably gossiping viciously, prone to extramarital affairs, cruelly insensitive to Indian women and hopelessly insulated from them – such is the memsahib stereotype. Even their hobbies were said to be trivial: all they did was play bridge and flirt.” Such is the summary of reputation of the memsahibs, as described by Ronald Hyam in Empire and sexuality: the British experience.
It seems unlikely, to paraphrase Donald Trump, that we simply didn’t send our best over to the subcontinent. They were simply ordinary women, placed in an unfamiliar setting and subjected to a range of testing factors: social, psychological, physical, cultural, societal, even meteorological. Margaret MacMillan, historian, professor at the University of Oxford and author of , noted that the “braying, hard-boiled,that the memsahibs, “were a mixed bag – like the rest of us. There was a range of human reactions: some developed good relationships with India and some hated it and some were somewhere in the middle.” And were they any more insular than the expat communities of today in Dubai, Hong Kong and elsewhere?
