REVIEW
Legacy of time travel
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Julia Maitland's letters give the reader a vision of India that was and continues to be, says TISHANI DOSHI.
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THE book was first published in 1843 anonymously because Julia Maitland's mother held book writing to be unladylike, so Letters from Madras was simply signed, by a lady. In its review it was described as the "very lightest work that has ever appeared from India, yet it tells us more of what everybody cares to know than any other." The book consists of 27 journal-style letters recording the insights of a privileged British woman's life in tumultuous 19th Century India. It was written at a time when letters took six months to reach their destination, and when the long passage from England to India seemed like travelling from one world to the next.
In her introduction, Alyson Price evokes the historical and social milieu of the country that Julia and her civil servant husband, James Thomas, were entering. The powerful East India Company had become the mainstay of the British economy. European women were coming over in shiploads to defend their national and religious identities, while simultaneously seeking suitable husbands. The delicate balance between the English and the Indians was being thrown into a spin for the first time in 200 years because of increased imperialism and missionary activity, which aimed at converting the native people in matters of religion and education. Julia arrived with firm assumptions about race: Indians, she believed were ignorant, lazy, servile, cheats, wicked and foolish. She called them a "cringing set," but she equally condemned the terrible way in which Europeans treated them. Price reminds us to put Julia in her time, and to bear in mind that her attitudes, although shocking today, were by no means as extreme as those of her contemporaries.
Letters from Madras begins with crossing the seas toward India, where Julia's days are filled with the concert of all kinds of noises, whale-watching, albatross-catching, and such colours as no shore-going people ever saw. She arrives in Madras in a great boat on the tip of a formidable surf and is at first quite pleased by the large, airy houses with high ceilings and rooms as large as chapels. But she soon discovers that she doesn't like Madras much at all.
She calls it "England in perspiration" and complains that all the institutions in Madras are committee ridden which she looks on as the next step to being bedridden. Everyone seems to be eaten up by laziness and listlessness. She's especially critical of the European ladies in Madras who spend all their time writing useless chits, then going on morning visits (which she cannot abide), taking tiffin with a friend, writing more chits and culminating the day at dinner parties that are dull, grand and silent, in mosquito-infested houses where nothing of interest is ever talked about.
What emerges in these letters is a voice that is witty, observant, analytical, border-line acerbic and full of child-like curiosity. Her life is soon embroiled in domesticity, duplicity, thievery and servants, of whom she says, "It seems to me they sleep nowhere, and eat nothing... They have mats on the steps and live upon rice. But they do very little... " She records her conversations with Brahmins, butlers, and rajahs with a great deal of humour and also includes excerpts of the many metaphysical debates she has with her Moonshee about astronomy, the nature of god, the transmigration of souls and their individual shasters. She has a soft spot for her "squinny" Moonshee despite his belief that, "Idols are of necessity for arl carmon people." She writes of being a spectator in an exotic world of jugglers, tumblers, snake charmers, fire-eaters, and nautch girls. Of being entertained by rajahs and of the tiresomeness of having to entertain passing travellers. Julia did not want to isolate herself from India like most European women, in fact, she showed great interest in all things Indian and was "dying to get into a native's house."
Unsurprisingly, weather is a great topic of conversation, and much is made of the ever-present heat and the entire household's removal from Madras to Rajahmundry, her husband's new posting, and summer getaway. She is much more impressed with the landscape of Rajahmundry and finds Teloogoo a far prettier language than Tamul. In Rajahmundry she busies herself with sketching, gardening, making butter, bottling snakes, collecting insect specimens, taming jungle peacocks and sending off hyena tails and leopard skins to her brother Frank.
Julia Maitland was a disarmingly honest woman; she was also tainted with a streak of self-righteousness and arrogance. She believed Indians had no notion of beauty or truth. She didn't allow pariah boys to attend her school for native children because even in England it would not do for a gentleman's son to attend the same school as his footman's son.
But at the same time she vehemently believed in the education of girls and talked every rajah and Brahmin's ear off about the advantages of doing so. She believed Indians should do away with suttee and the caste system; was critical of the glowing reports of the work missionaries were doing, and wholly condemned her country's ungodliness because of its participation in the Cooly Trade.
This book is important because of the specific visual images it conjures up of an India that was and continues to be. On one hand there's an almost wild beauty that has almost vanished in modern urban Madras, of sprawling houses in Harrington Gardens with deer prancing about on the front lawn and jackals howling under the windows. Simultaneously, there are failed monsoons, floods, famines racking the countryside and mothers fighting to feed their children — scenes all too familiar today. More disturbing is the fact that we are still battling the same stalwart issues of caste, class, race, religion, gender, and imperialism.
The legacy that Letters... leaves us with, is that of time-travel. It enables us to move backwards, to view the past through a certain shade of tinted glasses. It allows us to marvel and to be dismayed. But more than anything, it encourages us to move forward, taking all our present knowledge with us, in the hope that a hundred years from now we will not be judged for the same human failings.
Letters From Madras (during the years 1836-1839), Julia Maitland, Introduction, notes and appendices by Alyson Price, Woodstock Books, England, 2003, price not mentioned.
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