It’s all the Raj!

What a charming, funny book! Despite the occasional annoying typo (“fille de joir” instead of joie and “non-pareill”), it’s the most amusing read unlike a lot of ploddy accounts of the Bad Old Days which had as much skip as Colonel Hathi. The author, Pran Nevile, a former diplomat known to many Delhiites as an unabashed Lahoriya Saheb and fan of Kundan Lal Saigal, has a long record of researching the Raj and its nautch girls, English and Indian. His rich collection of details, pictures and extracts from letters make for a lively arrangement of aspects in aspic, jellied in time but not in interest.

Five sections with loosely linked component stories start expectedly with women: the scarcity of white women in the early days of the Raj, the Indian bibis of the first colonials, the arrival of the Fishing Fleet (husband-hunting women from England) and the Returned Empties (the ones who went home husbandless). Interestingly, this section also tells of the 1911 British ban of devadasi Muddupalani’s Telugu erotic poem Radhika Santwanam first published in 1887, under pressure from the Anti-Nautch campaigners, those exceedingly busy missionaries, churchwomen and principled English spinsters who came here after the British military takeovers, in a curious repeat of how the Sufis came to India in the wake of Muslim invasions — all to save the benighted Hindus from their decadent selves. The ban was lifted after Independence by Tangaturi Prakasam, freedom-fighter and first CM of the former Madras Presidency.

Another interesting section talks about the art of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the portrayal of Indian women by British artists. The demand of the Male Gaze of the time, for both Indian and Western women, is extraordinarily doll-like that it cannot but amuse a person in the here and now. Here’s a bit from the chapter on a Strayed White Woman, dancer Lola Montez, aka Mary James. She was for a while, a companion of the composer Franz Liszt and knew literary gentlemen like Theophile Gautier and Alexander Dumas. She behaved so badly with the subjects of a minor European princeling that she had to leave their principality in a hurry, only to take up with old King Ludwig of Bavaria. A Polish newspaper in 1845 detailed how she fit the current canon of 27 beauty points which included a large bosom, short legs and plump arms, thighs and hips!

Nevile tells of the 1911 ban of devadasi Muddupalani’s Telugu erotic poem ‘Radhika Santwanam’, under pressure from the Anti-Nautch campaigners

Besides the number of chapters devoted to the fornicating predilections of the gora sahib, there are a few chapters on their tastes in smokin’, drinkin’, huntin’, sportin’, too. Just the kind of book to cheer up an elderly and depressed relative with or just anybody who enjoys tidbits of times past.