Love Letter to India by Charlotte and Mariella

Love Letters to India From Charlotte and Mariella

Mayhews and Memsahibs: In January 1928 Ann Ogilvy was shipped off to India by her parents at the age of 22 in the hope of finding a husband, as were many women at the time. Her hunt for a husband began when she was a debutant in London, but she failed to find a husband so went off in the Fishing Fleet (fishing for a husband) to India. However, again she came back without a husband, which was rare at the time, and so was seen as a bit of a failure. During her time in India, she wrote many letters back home to England to her family describing the different cultures that she saw out there.

One thing that is drawn from the letters is the stark difference in how Ann was treated, contrasting to the ‘real’ side of India that she saw. She mentions that ‘we all went back on our special train’ and ‘our Ayah was busy covering up out hats in towels against the dust and un-packing handkerchiefs for us to tie around out heads’ this is directly compared to the ‘small boys […] herding little dun-coloured cattle over dusty scrub, where it seemed extraordinary that anything eatable could be found’. The visible contrast to how the British memsahibs were treated in their private trains with their own maids (Ayahs) really emphasises the poverty in parts of India when she was there.

Within her letters, she also draws upon the differences between India, more specifically in this letter, New Delhi, and home. ‘The sellers of sweetmeats and oranges carried their wares in things like large sieves […] they carried them on their heads’.

She is seeing all of this from her train where there was a specific compartment for her personal Ayah, contrasting their positions in this society. Although she describes her carriage as ‘palatial’ she mentions that there are ‘no corridors’ and a ‘stale smell of food’, which she would have been comparing to the trains taken in England. In this letter, there is a hint at what effect Colonialism has had on India, as she watches ‘a Polo tournament’ where the players are assumedly Brits who are enforcing colonialism, as she refers to them as ‘his Kashmiri team’ and ‘the 4th Hussars’, which was a class of light calvary, and used to address horsemen. The luxuries for Ann continue with the letter, as she describes ‘Lady Robinson’s room’, whilst she was staying at Flagstaff House in Delhi. The description is of ‘a huge bedroom, a sitting room, a verandah facing east, a verandah facing south, a bathroom, an unoccupied dressing-room with another bathroom to itself’. The expanse of this room contrasts the room that Ann was staying herself, as she was staying in a ‘tent’ although the way that she describes this is that ‘you would think that my tent was a house’. She then proceeds to list the various rooms of her tent, with the ‘5 electric lights’. This opulence that she is given is not passed unnoticed, as she alludes to a bathroom elsewhere ‘which has no drains’. This conveys

the way that the memsahibs were treated in relation to the day-to-day harsh reality of the normal Indian person.

Ann’s described India as a place where ‘I have never known such beauty as those terraces of white marble, still warm from the heat of the sun’. This was from a letter that she wrote back home to her mother on March 1st, 1928. In this letter, she is staying at ‘Hotel Cecil, Agra’ and describes a journey that she is taking ‘where the elephants were waiting to carry us’. On this journey, ‘our route was guarded by the village police’ showing the importance of their presence and visit purely from being British. As well as this, the effect of Colonialization is highlighted, with a ‘palace as usual (it was the 6th we had seen in Rampore) was modern and hideous’. This forced modernisation of India was noticed by her, as she contrasts the horrible modern palaces to the ‘country […] waiting for the spring plough’ that she sees from her train. At this palace, Ann talks to the ‘private secretary’ about ‘the native way of producing sugar’.

She was interested in this but was doubtful of the secretary’s honesty; ‘he assured me that most of the more disgusting ancient practices had been done away with – I doubted’. This could show the British exploitation of India in reference to the natural resources, but also the labour that they found there amongst the people, and the way that the British used this.

Finally, although Ann did not find a husband when she was India, there was certainly some effort for her to find one. Throughout all her letters, she mentions numerous men who she dined with over ‘luncheon’; however, these men were all of the same kind. She mentions ‘The General’, the ‘Birdwoods and seven of their staff’, ‘the Khan sahib’ and ‘the Maharajah of Bikaneer’. From just being British, Ann managed to experience a different type of India to the India of the natives, and some would even go as far to say that India was a playground for the British generals. This can be seen throughout Ann’s journey, as the sole intention of her going was to find a husband. Not an Indian husband, but a British husband, who was in India because it was a colony, so played a certain role in the up-keeping of the country.

Satows and SS Persia: Mary Ramsey Robertson (my great grandmother) travelled to India on the S.S. Persia in 1905.

The journey from England to Bombay took three weeks. She married Charles Francis Satow in 1909. Charles was a civil engineer for the East Indian Railway Company.

(Side note: On 30th December 1915, 343 passengers and crew of the P&O ship SS Persia tragically lost their lives when the vessel was torpedoed without warning by a German U-Boat. At the time SS Persia was carrying a large quantity of gold and jewels belonging to the Maharaja Jagatjit Singh. In 2003 the world's deepest salvage operation was staged to recover the precious cargo and the gems found included rubies, amethysts, and moonstones. The Maharajah's treasure, amassed in London, Paris (he was an avid customer of Cartier) and in America, was worth £1 million at that time and its value could be as much as £50 million today.)

Mary Ramsey Robertson Calcutta 02.1906

Mary Satow and her mother (and dogs) at their Dak Bungalow

Flora’s “Wendy House” Dak bungalows were not necessarily welcoming to the weary travellers. The bungalows themselves were spartan: two, perhaps three bedrooms with simple frame beds, a few shelves of rough planks, a couple of rickety chairs and a table. The busier ones had a servant attached to them who could produce an indifferent meal, which usually featured a tough chicken.

-Women of the Raj The “Club” At the larger stations dinner on Saturday night would be followed by a dance at the Club and on Thursdays dances were held just between tea and dinner. As a social spot the Club verandah on a large station had few rivals. Most were buildings of no architectural merit and were hung with pictures of dead and gone cricket teams.

-Plain Tales from the Raj Women in the Heat “Don’t give in to [the heat], and it will give in to you,” Steel and Gardiner exhorted their readers. The women who lived in India in the heyday of the Raj could have endured the hot weather better if they had not been expected to continue to dress as though they were at Home. Even on the hottest days, they wore stockings and dresses, which fell, until after the First World War, in heavy folds to the ground; and, until standards were relaxed during the Second World War, they never went out with their arms bare.

Underneath they wore petticoats and camisoles and, for much of the Raj, the inevitable stays.

-Women of the Raj “My head often feels as if it were fried.”

-Mrs. King in Women of the Raj

Time travel, epistolary mysteries, clueless academics, dialectical discussion, doomed romance, witty conversation, the interplay between heart and mind, desire and creativity: Indian Ink has all the elements of a truly Stoppardian creation.

- Elizabeth Broderson

What I like to do is take a stereotype and betray it, rather than create an original character. I never tried to invent characters.

All my best characters are clichés.

- Stoppard, The New Yorker

India served as a kind of social laboratory for the principles of classic British liberalism.

Stoppard says that scenes of India continued to appear in his dreams until a return visit to India in 1991, after he finished In the Native State, put his childhood visions to rest. He found Darjeeling "remarkably unchanged," but adorned with the trappings of contemporary life; the horses of his romantic past have become the Land Rovers of the modern present.

- Paul Walsh

- Elizabeth Broderson In a play described as his most mysterious to date, Stoppard's characters search for the key to the enigmatic alchemy that is the creative process; Anish seeks to understand his father's identity as a painter, Pike tries to decode the clues to Flora's life, loves, and poetry, while Flora and Nirad struggle to cross a divide of cultural misunderstanding to find each other and themselves. An equally intriguing artistic riddle, is the attempt to comprehend how one man can synthesize so many ideas on so many subjects into works of theatrical and emotional power.

- Elizabeth Broderson