Abstract
Cultures of intimacy, togetherness, friendship, romance, love, marriage and family life in early colonial India have provided us with some exciting new works in the recent past, most significant being those by Indrani Chatterjee and Durba Ghosh. They tell us how family increasingly became a locus of identity and belonging, and how everyday life, including spheres of work, home, leisure and personal relationships witnessed continuities and significant changes in the period. Peter Robb’s two expansive companion volumes are an exciting addition to these works. They offer a delightful account of intimate histories of self and household, and through that of colonial Calcutta, in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries. Encompassing the prolific diaries and papers of more than eighty volumes of Richard Blechynden, a skilful surveyor, civil engineer, architect and building contractor in colonial Calcutta, these books provide a profound peep into the quotidian, everyday life of colonial households, emotions, friendships, concubines and ordinary men.
Blechynden arrived in Calcutta in 1782, when he was twenty-two years old, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He progressively became deaf in one ear. However, he wrote regularly for the Chronicle newspaper, and more importantly, copiously penned his experiences, thoughts and daily life in his diaries since 1791. Robb brings these remarkable texts to attention, packed with vivid characters and events. These diaries are narratives of self and the city through recorded experiences, and mark how Blechynden was constantly caught between sense and sensibility. As modes of memory, they not only bring out the force of the author, but more significantly carry a package of emotional values, reflecting eternal sentiments, contextual selves and flavour of the times. The milieu of Robb’s rendering is Calcutta’s lower-middle class of European businessmen, officials and professionals, and their varied households, wives, allies, assistants and servants. Playfully eavesdropping into the lives of people from all walks of life—Europeans and Indians, men and women, masters and servants, adults and children—these volumes bring together the personal, private and domestic with the public and the outside.
The volume Sex and Sensibility concentrates on stories about concubines. Women form the heart of this book, as it narrates to us politics of power within European households at that time, and the position of women in them. Not about the upper class, European, white memsahibs, it tells us the daily tales of bibis, who were a combination of housekeepers, wives and mistresses. The virile, sexual and romantic Blachynden at almost all times kept at least one concubine. He colourfully noted and commented on experiences of friends, others and self with them. Traversing thus the lives of many lively Indian, Eurasian and European women, this volume recounts the intricate and constant arrangements, negotiations and contracts between women and men.
The beginning stories tell us of friends’ wives and concubines. We encounter Mrs Tiretta, a fifteen-year old woman married to a sixty-seven-year old man, who in spite of the distressing situation asserts herself. We glean how a European’s ‘irregular’ liaisons were regarded as both ignoble and inevitable (p. 35), and various elements of friction, mistrust, pride, defiance and dependence in such relationships. The book moves on to elaborate Blechynden’s own experiences and the personal and cultural conflicts with his concubines in his household and in public. We hear of Jeebun, and then more substantially of Mary Walker and the obsessive pining and pursuit of her by Blechynden, which ends in a failure. The day-to-day account of the lovesick travails of a lover betrayed, are juxtaposed to that of a girl struggling with her own destiny. The melancholic appendix on her, through the daily diary entries, also tells us a saga of moral policing and ideas of propriety. Then there is Charlotte, the bibi who comes in Blechynden’s life in May 1800. Though an interesting foil to Mary, she is occasionally drunk, and is often full of rage and violence. Through her we glimpse the public repercussions of domestic dissent and disputed standards of conduct. Continuing and concluding her story, the next chapter turns to the diarist’ conflicts of duty—to the woman, her children, other family members, friends and reputation. And lastly there is Isabella Evans, Blechynden’s last long-term bibi. While Mary and Charlotte had scorned and disturbed him, with Isabella, we are told, he achieved a companionable calm. At the same time, she was an ambitious woman, and we stumble upon turbulent disputes over codes of conduct and proper respect between man and mistress.
In the concluding pages of this volume, Robb very briefly reflects on the significance of discovering routine, ordinary and non-consequential events. He poses the question whether such trivia is a fit subject for the historian, and how does the study of what does not matter, matter (p. 210)? And perceptively answers that these private stories and testimonies are valuable because they tend to be transitory and quotidian rather than normative (p. 211). Robb does not wear his theory on his sleeve, and largely lets these deeply intimate stories speak for themselves. For me, each intriguing narrative, spanning several diary entries, begins with a new promise of sentimentality and melodrama. It reads like many fictions woven into one, as a novel or more aptly a soap-opera. At the same time, these stories gently offer qualifications to seeing sexual politics only as an expression and assertion of male power, and as symptomatic of the modern state. While recognising oppression, these are also tales of spirited, ‘troublesome’, recalcitrant and assertive women, speaking their minds, pouring their heart’s desires and revealing their capacity to act. Many of the diary entries are also partially women’s testimonies, of what they thought and did and how men reacted. Of course, these narratives enforce patriarchies, but they also cleverly tell us how women drew as much as they could from situations and how concubines were at times better off than wives. In short, the impact of colonial rule on women’s lives was much more complex than self-evident.
The next companion volume conjoins self and sentiment. It invites us to consider constant, evolving and changing concepts of self, which are also concerned with ‘proper’ motives and moral actions. Simultaneously, it shows how Blechynden created his identity from a selection of sentiments—through his occasional sympathy for servants, passions for work, and responsibility for his children. This book is further divided into two parts. The first part constructs rich details of the daily life of Calcutta from the eyes of Blechynden. Weaving the colonial city, its system and experiences, it reveals British attitudes to the city and its Indian habitants. Several aspects of relationships between Europeans and Indians are illustrated through the most formative sites of their interaction, that is, mores and the household. Alongside are raised issues related to nationality, race, values and clash of culture. The section then concentrates on servants, and through them highlights the regulation of labour and employment. Blechynden’s household had thirty-five loyal servants, and the complex master–servant relationships often carried expectations of shared sentiments, along with conflict. While servants were privy to household intimacies, Blechynden too was often involved not only in the servants’ work but also their private affairs. Through the servants, Robb also underscores the changing role of law, which was frequently invoked with mixed results.
Part two of this second volume focuses on Blechynden’s children during his lifetime. Painting a rich canvas of his mixed race and illegitimate children, it emphasises the means of constructing identity in the English context, in ironic juxtaposition with practice. For daughters, the main concern was to be a bride and find ‘suitable’ husbands in marriage; for sons it was about ‘respectable’ careers and professions. The section indicates the remarkably different status of children from their mothers or the bibis. While bibis could be dismissed, pensioned off, and if possible reformed; children entailed parental obligations, were a lifetime responsibility and had to be nurtured and formed. It marks how the children interacted with their father, and how their identities were configured through education, social and cultural assimilation. Converting to Christianity, they were self-framed as much by ‘otherness’ as by sentiment, where moral and proper behaviour was seen as the cornerstone of their identity.
Taken together, the two volumes are fascinating chronicles of not only private lives, but also the larger dynamics of class, culture, gender and race in colonial Calcutta. They are about constructions of British identities, ideas of race and duty, practices of work, petty administration, and experiences of corruption, empire and law. Emotional baggage of passion and affection, friendships and family, gossips and taboos overwhelmingly ride the diaries, and these volumes. Moreover, as Robb says, they reveal how sentiment was modified by sense and sense reinforced by sentiment. Vivid and minute expressions of personal relationships give us a peep into the dynamics of a European household. Robb takes on the historian’s craft of a narrator, where he presents thick details of experiences, practices and lived lives, and unobtrusively lets the diaries speak for themselves. Without any pre-conceived notions and ideologies, this record of everyday is not judgemental. Robb is not concerned much with the anxieties of the colonial state, but the constant negotiations that went on between the coloniser and the colonised in the intimate spaces of the household and in their social interactions. He shows a novelist eye for interesting details, with an amalgam of story-telling and research. At places one desires more analysis, more ‘native’ voices in first person and more of bibis’ enunciations. But then Robb is clear that in this account of the ordinary, his job is to portray a world of lived experiences and relationships through a particular person’s eye, without attempting any ‘cataclysmic’ high social, political or economic history of the British Empire, and it is here that lies the biggest strength of these books.