# The Calcutta Review/Series 1/Number 1/Article 1

See also: The English in India—Our Social Morality
THE CALCUTTA REVIEW.
Art. I.—1. Anglo-India, Social, Moral, and Political; being a collection of papers from the Asiatic Journal. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1838.
2. Society in India, by an Indian Officer. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1841.
3. The Stranger in India, or Three Years in Calcutta, by G. W. Johnson, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1843.
4. The Bengallee, or Sketches of Society in the East—a new Edition, 2 vols. 8vo. Calcutta. 1843.
Not very many years have passed away, since even well-informed people in England knew little more about an Anglo-Indian, than that he was very rich—very yellow—and very ill-tempered; that he dwelt in a country where fevers and liver complaints were abundant, where tigers and mosquitoes preyed on the human race, where hookahs were smoked and widows burned, and curry eaten and wealth acquired; that he left England young, healthy and poor, and came back old, decrepit, and rich; that he spent a life of luxurious solitude and wretchedness, and brought home his ill-gotten wealth, to bestow it after a few years of isolation and discontent, upon some distant relative, or compliant friend, who had invested his patience in a profitable market, and borne with the old man’s humors to the last. These liver-decayed old Indians were principally useful in bad novels and worse comedies. They appeared, in the third volume or the fourth act, to make a virtuous maiden happy for life, or to disconcert the schemes of some unprincipled nephew (for it will be observed that in novels and comedies old Indians are always uncles) to the consummation of poetical justice and the advancement of public morals. Of India itself little more was known, than that Calcutta and Madras were, somehow or other, two of its principal components; that the climate was very hot and very unhealthy; and that the Great Mogul, the hero of the playing cards, was one of its most magnificent potentates. ​Whether Madras was in Calcutta, or Calcutta in Madras; or whether they were contiguous cities, like London and Westminster; whether Tippoo Sahib was the Great Mogul, or whether the Great Mogul was one of the Princesses of Oude: all these were questions, which only the very knowing were competent satisfactorily to solve. We have now before us a novel written just a quarter of a century ago—one, too, which enjoyed some popularity in its day—wherein the heroine is said to have proceeded to Madras up the River Hooghly; and another party is described as spending his time between Calcutta and Madras, as though they were as close as London and Hampstead. We quote this as no solitary instance of the amount of knowledge possessed even by book-writers, when we were some few years younger than we are now. It is not to be forgotten that a certain reverend poet, novelist and dramatist, conspicuous less for his talents in either of these capacities, than for his intense admiration of a profligate monarch, commenced his greatest poetical work with the notable line—
Bengal being about as famous for its mountains, as the PaysBas; but not more so. We need not multiply examples. Whilst writers, undertaking to instruct the public, manifested this amount of ignorance, it is not surprising that more ordinary people, in the intercourse of daily life, fell into the most egregious blunders;—confounding the three presidencies; conceiving India to be one small integral principality, traversed in a few days; entrusting to a Bengal cadet or writer, letters or parcels for parties at Bombay, with strict injunctions to deliver them in person; enquiring from a returned Bengallee after some denizen of Madras, whom of course he “must know”—all these things, we say, were not to be wondered at, even although there were few respectable families in the country, not connected, through some of their members, with our glorious dependencies in the east.
Until within the last ten years, the communication between England and India has been both slow and irregular. The establishment of a line of steam-vessels, reducing the distance by two-thirds, and conveying not only mails but passengers, from India to England in little more than a month—this, following close upon the renewal of the Charter, under which the country was thrown open to adventurers of every class—has increased, in an enormous degree, the amount of passengers and letters, despatched to and from India; and by giving a proportionate impetus to the local press, still further multiplied the sources of information thus thrown open to the mother country. ​The number of letters, despatched every month, by the Bombay steamers, exceeds thirty thousand; the number of printed papers ten thousand. Many of these letters and papers are delivered in London five weeks after they are despatched; and in little more than two months an answer to a letter sent from Bombay may be received at that place. This rapidity of communication, coupled with its certainty, is an extreme provocative to frequent correspondence, not only between parties engaged in business, but between private individuals. In former years a letter was four, five, six, perhaps, seven months on its way. “We are now,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, in 1805, “within five days of six months from the date of our last London papers;” and again in 1811, “seven months from the date of the last London News.” If an answer were received within the year, the letter-writer thought himself fortunate. This was disheartening and repelling. Correspondence, even between intimate friends and dear relatives, soon flagged; fell off by degrees; and ere long ceased altogether. Parties in England, or in the interior of India, had no knowledge of the date of a vessel’s departure. Hence further delays. A letter was, perhaps, several weeks, lying idle at the General Post-office, or in the duftur-khana of a Calcutta agent. After this long rest, it was probably despatched by a vessel, bound for several intermediate ports, and did not reach its destination, until other letters of a more recent date had been received. All this was vexatious, in the highest degree, and as regular correspondence was out of the question, people soon began to meditate on the expediency of abandoning that, which was fraught with so much inconvenience and annoyance. The establishment of a regular Steam Communication between the two countries has remedied all this, and made every Englishman and English-woman, in the three presidencies, a periodical letter-writer.
The rapidity and regularity of the communication between the two countries induced, at the same time, a greater desire after Indian News. The number of local journals despatched to England was soon multiplied. A class of publications, unknown before, sprang up, and in a short time acquired a strenuous vitality. Papers were prepared, expressly for the Overland Mail, containing a summary of the month’s news, and issued on the morning of Post-day. These were despatched, in large numbers, by Indian residents to their friends at home. The British press soon began to perceive the importance of obtaining the earliest and most correct Indian in​telligence. The leading morning journals secured the services of clever and experienced correspondents at Calcutta and Bombay. These writers despatched their letters, containing an abstract of the month’s news, and the most interesting extracts, afforded by the Indian journals, to the care of an agent at Paris, whose business it was to forward the despatches to the coast by a special courier. Thus the French mail was often anticipated by several hours. Second editions were published; and the Indian news, for the time, was even more talked of than the last partisan debate in Parliament, or the state of the poll at a pending election.
It must be admitted, however, that much of the interest, which has lately been attached to the news from India, owes its birth to the important and exciting character of the events, which have been enacted in the romantic countries beyond the Sutlej and the Indus. The history of the English in India, during the last six years, is one of extraordinary interest. The chronicles of the whole world do not furnish a series of more vivid and exciting scenes of picturesque warfare. Contemplating the whole, it is difficult to believe, that we are not poring over some highly wrought narrative of fictitious adventure. “Truth is strange; stranger than fiction.” The siege of Herat—Herat, wrested from the grasp of the Persian by the wondrous energy of a young British officer, who chance-guided to the “gate of India,” threw himself into the beleaguered city to revive the failing energies of the besieged, and sustain them unvanquished, until diplomacy had done the rest; the assemblage of the “Army of the Indus;” the magnificent gathering at Ferozepore; the march of the Bengal and Bombay columns of the grand force, through an unknown and dangerous country; the triumphant entry of Shah Soojah into Candahar; the capture of the stronghold of Ghuznee; the preparations made for our reception at Urghundee, where Dost Mahomed, having drawn up his guns in position, was basely deserted by his followers; the flight of the Dost; the pursuit of the chivalrous Outram; the progress to Caubul; the mummeries enacted there; the march to Bameean; the passage of the Hindoo Khoosh; the return of the Bombay Troops; the capture of Khelat; and the death of Mehrab Khan; the lull, the deceitful calm, and then the re-appearance of the Dost, the assemblage of the Oosbegs, and the rising of the ​Kohisthanees; the victory of Bameean; the defeat of Purwundurrah; the last gallant charge of the Ameer, and the surrender, of the single horseman in his dress of goat-skin, at a moment when the pale face of panic was watching despairingly the progress of events. Have we not here the first volume of an exciting romance? It awoke the slumbering interest of the people of England. Peace had girt us around for many a long day; there was “a pin-drop silence;” and the trumpet of war was heard from afar, heard for a time even above the din of sonorous faction. Country gentlemen were seen looking at their maps; and the works of Elphinstone and Burnes were diligently sought after by all the oracles of the Town. Diners-out crammed themselves with forced-meat balls of Affghan history and geography; and members of Parliament learnt just enough to enable them to expose their ignorance to the world.
At the same time, another great drama was being enacted in the far east—one, too, which excited even more interest than the great Central-Asian tragedy. The war with China broke out. This was eminently calculated to excite not only interest, but alarm. People, as they laid down their breakfast cup, and took up the morning paper, to read how Commissioner Linn had out-manœuvred Capt. Elliott, sighed as the thought stole over them, “and there shall be no more tea.” Of Affghanistan they had known nothing, before England marched an army across the Indus to depose the reigning monarch; and even then they cared little about the matter, except as something to talk about. But China—every body knew that China yielded us our Hyson and Bohea; some that it was famous for roses, pigs and porcelain; and a few had dim notions of ivory toys, preserved ginger, and damask silks. Of the inhabitants, we deemed that the men wore pig-tails, and that the popular admiration for little feet, or the inherent propensities of the Chinese dames to elope from their legitimate guardians, rendered it necessary that the Ladies should be crippled. China and the Chinese had in fact been ever an interesting place and an interesting people; and when the war broke out, it engrossed more of the popular attention in England than the war on the other side of the Indus. The lead was taken, but not kept. The Caubul insurrection, in all its fury, burst over the heads of the British representatives. Suddenly they found themselves girt around with rebellion; fire and slaughter on every side. Then began the second volume of the great Caubul Romance. The rising of the Ghilzies—the march of Sale’s force—the attack upon the city—the murder of Sir A. Burnes—the beleaguered cantonments—the blockaded citadel—the gathering of the enemy on the heights—our ​spiritless efforts to dislodge them—the deadening effects of cold and starvation—the melancholy vacillation of the Military authorities—the negociations of the Envoy and the insolence of the enemy—the massacre at Charekar—the interview with Mahomed Akbar—the bloody scene which ensued—the march of the defeated army from Caubul; the terrible butchery in the passes; the fall of Ghuznee; and the captivity of our country-women in the hands of the “relentless” Affghans—here were events calculated indeed, but too well, to fill the hearts of Englishmen with pity and dismay; and to excite the most painful interest among all classes of the community. Never had the eyes of Great Britain been turned, with such eager and intense expectancy, towards the countries of the east. China, and the jeopardised tea were for a time almost forgotten.
Nor was the interest thus engendered much diminished, when the army of retribution set out on its perilous march to inflict upon the Affghans “the punishment of their crimes.” And here begins the third volume of this remarkable romance, opening nobly with the defence of Jullalabad. The interest scarcely flagged for a moment—east and west, exciting scenes were enacted; the gathering of the advance of the new army at Peshawur; the first attempt to throw reinforcements into Jullalabad; the repulse of Brigadier Wild; the arrival of the main body of the new Caubul army; the forcing of the Khyber; the relief of the “Illustrious Garrison;” the no less memorable exploits of the army of Western Affghanistan; the negociations with the enemy; the halt at Jullalabad; the failure of carriage; the repulse, on the other side, of General England; the lost laurels regained; the junction of the two forces to the westward; the simultaneous advance of Pollock and of Nott; the re-capture of Ghuznee; the conflict at Jugdulluck; the triumphant entry into Caubul; the recovery of the prisoners; the destruction of Istaliff; the return of the combined army; the festive gathering at Ferozepore; and, as a last scene of all to end this strange eventful history, the restoration of Dost Mahomed, whom we had risked so much to depose.
Here was enough to excite even apathetic John Bull, at a distance of some thousands of miles. The English journals teemed with particulars of these momentous events; the arrival of the monthly mail was anticipated with painful anxiety; hundreds of families had been plunged into deepest sorrow by the tidings of the terrific massacre in the passes; hundreds presaged, with fear and trembling, similar calamities, when the second army entered Affghanistan. Even Parliament condescended to bestow a passing notice upon the far-enacted drama; and for a time the chief ​actors furnished the print-sellers with subjects, and the Leo-Hunters with red-hot lions. Thousands of copies of the “Narrative” of Lieut. Eyre, and the “Journal” of Lady Sale were sold in a few weeks; and against that “monster” Mahomed Akbar, young ladies lisped vengeance with their rosy lips, and old men mumbled it with their toothless gums. People, who a few years before did not know very distinctly whether Caubul was in South America, or in Central Africa, were to be heard talking familiarly about the Balla Hissar, the Seea Sung, Behmeru, and the Huft-Kotul; and to increase the recondite knowledge of the public, the enterprising proprietor of the Amphi-theatre, on the Surrey side of the Thames, gratified the rising generation with a view of the war, which bore as close a resemblance to the actual drama, as the domestic tragedy of Punch and Judy. And when all this was over—when the Governor General had left the Affghans to suffer in peace (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant) “the punishment of their (quere, our) crimes”—when, for certain party-reasons, it had been deemed expedient to drop the subject, in Parliament,—then, just as the Affghan interest was on the descendant, the war in Scinde commenced, and that concluded by the unblushing appropriation of the territory of the Ameers, the revolution in the Punjab broke out; the royal family of Lahore were sent to people Hades; the Seikh sirdars took to slicing one another’s throats, and lo! a new excitement was established. The annals of the East have lost nothing, in modern times, of their romantic character; and at such a season as this, even phlegmatic Englishmen can afford to turn their faces to the east. There have been other momentous dramas enacted in Hindostan. The war in the Carnatic was one of these, but it was cotemporaneous with the French Revolution. We had not then a “pin-drop” silence. The clamour of one mighty event drowned the clamour of another, and the most remote fared the worst. But we have now enjoyed nearly thirty years of peace in Europe; and a war even in India has become a bon bouche to the excitement-hunters.
This is not without profit. It is unquestionable, that within the last few years the public knowledge of Indian affairs has greatly increased: but whether this is a temporary, or a permanent advantage, may, we frankly acknowledge, be questioned. For​tunately, however, we do not rely merely upon the adventitious aid of an exciting period, in India, or the adjacent countries, to render our glorious dependency familiar to the home-staying circle. The opening of the Trade and the liberation of the press had accomplished much, before Central Asia became the vast theatre of war; and these influences will exist, in increasing force, when the Peace which Lord Ellenborough restored to Asia, in a proclamation, and inscribed on a medal, has really begun to spread its branches over the land. Since the annihilation of the Company’s monopoly, the annual amount of shipping in the River Hooghly has encreased more than 100 per cent. The number of vessels which arrived at Calcutta, in 1832, was 246; in 1839, it was 516; and it has since gone on gradually increasing. Of the increase of passengers brought by these vessels we do not know the extent. We have no statistics to enable us to record an accurate opinion, and we have no leisure to prepare any. The amount of the British population in India has, however, greatly increased; and in the present day a propensity to visit England, much greater than that which existed in the old times, exists among all classes of the community. Occasionally, we meet an old Indian, who has never set his foot on British soil since he first arrived in India, as a writer or a cadet; but this class of men is becoming rapidly extinct.
Passages to Europe are cheaper than they were, and more rapidly performed. The passenger vessels, too, as regards comfort and accommodation, are of a greatly superior description.—They are, indeed, floating hotels, or boarding houses, where a man must be somewhat enjoyment-proof, if he cannot contrive to enjoy himself. It is true that fruit and fresh-laid eggs and green-peas are denied to him; but he has good meat, excellent poultry, wines of every description, from Champaigne to Sherry; and the best of sauces, a sharp appetite. He cannot play at billiards, it is true, but he can enjoy his rubber of whist and an enjoyable thing it is, in a snug cuddy, with a glass of mulled wine within reach, on a cold evening, rounding the Cape. What if the floor does form an angle of 45° with the horizon? Such little inconveniences as these soon become a source of amusement. One can put up with a good many discomforts in a place, where there are no bills. The immunity from all the cares of business and house-keeping, which the passenger enjoys, is truly delightful. He pays his passage money, before he ascends the side of the vessel; and is kept like a prince for three or four months, without one disturbing thought of the morrow. No wonder that, aided by the fresh bracing air, he soon runs to flesh. Among the amusements of a voyage, weighing is not one of the least consider​able. It is pleasant, especially in a homeward-bound, to watch the gradual advance of the passengers in obesity. Like Voltaire’s trees, they grow, because they have nothing else to do. But people rarely know when they are happy, and, except when strong attachments are formed on board—and such attachments are rarely otherwise than deep-rooted and permanent—every body is glad to escape from the vessel. This is not unnatural, though the ship be the finest in the world, and the captain the best fellow possible. Indeed, now-a-days, both ships and captains are unexceptionable. The magnificent passenger-vessels, built by Messrs. Green and Messrs. Wigram, officered as they almost invariably are by gentlemen, leave one nothing to desire. These splendid locomotive boarding-houses are great inducements to the voyage to England. The comfort, the rapidity, and the cheapness of the passage tempt many to undertake it, who, when a ship was five or six months on its way, and an indifferent cabin cost five hundred pounds, would have prolonged their residence in India, till wealth enabled, or death compelled, the worn-out old Indian to retire finally from the scene of his labors.
The establishment of a regular line of Government Steamers from Bombay, and of the Oriental and Peninsular Company’s noble steam-ships, from Calcutta, has encreased still more the home-going tendency; and we not seldom find a hundred passengers embarking, in a single month, on board the Hindostan or Bentinck. There are other powerful influences to which this tendency may be traced. Not the least of these are the greater liberality of the retiring regulations, now in force in the Company’s services; the establishment of sundry retiring and other funds; and the increase of marriages in India, strengthening as it naturally does, through the medium of family connexions, the hold of his country upon the heart of the exile. In former days, when wives were few and native mistresses many, the greater number of residents were tied to India, and had little inducement to quit it. Now, however, wives are many, mistresses few: and whilst the number of illegitimate children is diminishing every year, the lawful offspring of British residents in India is progressively on the increase. The books of that noble institution, the Military Orphan Asylum, show, that whereas in 1810, the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate children subsisting ​on the charity of the Fund, was as ten to eight; in 1840 there were forty legitimate wards to every eleven of the other class. In the present day, there is no scarcity of brides; and Merchants’ clerks and Ensigns are eligibles. A married man has many inducements to visit his home; his wife’s health may require it; his children, perhaps, are sufficiently advanced in years to render it necessary that they should be removed to England for the sake both of physical health and mental culture. The voyage has now no terrors for delicate women or young children. The latter thrive luxuriantly on board-ship; they are the happiest of the happy. They scamper about the deck; pull the ropes; and are great favorites with the sailors. They never slip through the port-holes, and seldom tumble down the hatchways. The sweet little cherub, who sits up aloft, and keeps watch for poor Jack, seems to have one eye at least to watch over these infant passengers. Times have greatly changed, since that excellent man, Mr. Shore (afterwards Lord Teignmouth) was twice under the necessity of tearing himself from a wife, to whom he was fondly attached, rather than that she should brave the horrors of the deep, and the dangers of so savage a country as India, by accompanying him to the scene of his labors.
Then an old Indian was a rarity; a young one a greater rarity, in England. Now they are plenty as blackberries. You can scarcely walk into a dining house (provided it be a good one) in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, at seven o'clock, without finding yourself in company with a batch of them. Indian Officers on Furlough—private affairs or sick certificate—swarm about this locality; young men, too, the greater number of them. The race of genuine old Indians is nearly extinct. Few men now pass thirty or forty years in the country without a visit, to Great Britain. There may be a few of the ancient flock still to be found looking into the Oriental Club; or sauntering along the streets of Cheltenham. But, ere long, a regular, liver-diseased, parchment-faced, shivering, querulous, rich old Indian, who feels himself when at home as in a foreign land, so strange and distasteful to him are its manners and customs, will have become as rare as a mummy. The complaint of the singularities of old Indians is now dying away. An Indian Officer or Civilian returning to England is very much like the rest of the world. He has brushed up all his old English habits and feelings, once at least before his ultimate retirement. Moreover, thanks to steam communication, and the progress of the public press, if he be an attentive reader of the Indian Journals, he will find himself only a few months behind the London world in his knowledge of public events—impor​tant or unimportant—a new tariff or a new dancer. Men from India are no longer necessarily old; necessarily yellow; or necessarily rich. If they differ much from other members of society, it is in being a good deal less stiff and somewhat more liberal. A returned Indian once complained pathetically to us that the English were “magnificently selfish.” He had been a quarter of a century in the East without once returning to his native land; had he taken a furlough in the interim nothing would have seemed strange to him. Few men neglect this now-a-days. The number of applications for furlough—unless any new war renders it necessary that no leave should be granted to Military Officers—is increasing every year.
We have thus briefly explained the principal circumstances, which whilst they have rendered people in England more familiar with Indian affairs, have extinguished the tribe of genuine old Nabobs; as Gun-powder, the Brandy-bottle, and the Small-pox, have extinguished another more interesting race of Indians. Old Indians are not in these days so much unlike the rest of the world. Neither do they turn up unexpectedly, with mines of wealth, to lavish upon unsuspecting relatives. There is an Indian Army List or Directory in almost every principal street of London; and the Indian Journals are filed in so many, that any one anxious to gain information relative to a brother, an uncle, or a cousin, may ascertain to a nicety all his movements—when he was promoted to this or that rank, when he received this or that appointment, when he obtained six month’s leave of absence—or, if he happened not to be in “the Services,” when he went through the Insolvent Court. Indeed, by the payment of a guinea a year, for one of the Overland Summaries of the Indian Newspapers, he may have all this interesting intelligence laid on his breakfast-table once a month. An expectant heir, by the aid of a Directory and a monthly Newspaper, may keep himself cognizant of the movements of an antiquated relative, with very little trouble to himself. But, in good truth, antiquated relatives in India are not very much worth looking after. Fortunes are not easily made; and if they are, they are easily spent. Men do not, now-a-days, hoard up wealth for unknown nephews and nieces. Whether they ever did, we think extremely doubtful, in spite of the comedies and the novels of the early part of the present century.
And yet, within the last fifty years, society in India has undergone so many other changes, that perhaps it may have changed in this respect too. It will not be altogether uninteresting to trace a few of the more important changes—to shew what Anglo-Indians were and what they are, when dwelling in their adopted ​homes. We do not purpose to comment upon political changes. Our readers are well acquainted with the principal events attending the growth of the British power in the East; they know how a few insignificant factories were in time erected into a great Empire; how a few mercantile clerks, with a scanty guard, became in time the rulers of the land. We shall not meddle with this subject. Our article is devoted to social changes; and what we lose in profundity perhaps we may gain in novelty. We do not wish to be always on the stilts.
If an old Indian resident, of 1770 or 1780, were to arise from the grave, to revisit the scene of his labors, the first thing to strike him would be the magnificent improvement in the appearance of the European portion of the Towns, especially of the capital, Calcutta. It is recorded in the biography of Lord Teignmouth, that when his Lordship (then Mr. Shore) arrived in India, as a young writer on the Bengal establishment, “he found it (the city of Calcutta) consisting of houses not two or three of which were furnished with venetian blinds or glass windows; solid shutters being generally used; and rattans like those used for the bottoms of chairs, in lieu of panes, whilst little provision was made against the heat of the climate. The town was rendered unhealthy by the effluvia of open drains, &c. &c.” Whatever may be the state of the drains now-a-days, and in some parts of the town it is bad enough, nothing can be said against the houses. The absence of glass windows, an evil of no trifling magnitude during a great part of the year, when it is of the utmost consequence to exclude the hot air, is almost unknown in the European residences of Calcutta. In Madras, however, a large proportion of the houses are deficient in this essential item of comfort. In Calcutta people shut up their houses; in Madras they throw them open. In the former the chief object is to exclude the wind, the dust, and the glare; in the latter to admit the Madrassee’s boast, the delightful sea-breeze. We imagine that time has done more to increase the comfort of a residence in an Indian city, than to add to its splendor. Fifty years ago, though the Governor-General was no better housed than his neighbours, there were many fine buildings in Calcutta. A French traveller, who visited India, in 1789-90, says—“The Governor-General of the English settlements, east of the Cape of Good Hope, resides at Calcutta. As there is no palace yet built for him, he lives in a house on the Esplanade opposite the citadel. The house is handsome, but by no means equal to what it ought to be for a personage of so much importance. Many private individuals in the town have houses as good; and if the Governor were disposed to any extraordinary luxury, he must curb his inclination for want of ​the necessary accommodation of room. The house of the Governor of Pondicherry is much more magnificent. As we enter the town, a very extensive square opens before us, with a large piece of water in the middle, for the public use. The pond has a grass plot round it, and the whole is enclosed by a wall breast high, with a railing on the top. The sides of this enclosure are each nearly five hundred yards in length. The square itself is composed of magnificent houses, which render Calcutta not only the handsomest town in Asia, but one of the finest in the world.” We must accept the testimony of M. Grandpré with all confidence, for it is the testimony of an enemy. The square of which he writes, known now-a-days as “Tank Square,” remains in all its primitive magnificence. Half-a-century has altered it but little, save on one of the four sides, which runs parallel to the river, where erst stood the old fort, now no longer in existence. In its place we have a range of buildings, the Union Bank, the Bonded Ware-house and others. But the present magnificence of the city is not derived from the four sides of this fine square; but from scores of splendid edifices, which have sprung up all round it—edifices, which have earned for Calcutta the high-sounding name of the “City of Palaces.” The Government House at Calcutta, on a moderate calculation, would hold a dozen such palaces as that of the Pondicherry Governor; and leave plenty of room for his Excellency, and all his troops into the bargain. Then there are other public buildings of splendid aspect, a Town Hall, another hall yclept Metcalfe, fine churches, not known in M. Grandpré’s time, though Calcutta was then not churchless, and a Theatre somewhat different in every respect, from that of which the French writer set down the record, “Close to the old Fort is the Theatre, which does not accord in appearance with the general beauty of the town, and in which there are seldom dramatic representations for want of performers.” This reproach, which never would have been uttered had the French been the original settlers in Calcutta, for their first thought is ever the erection of a theatre and the garrisoning thereof (theatrical representations not even being held incompatible with a state of active warfare) cannot be levelled now-a-days against the denizens of the Metropolis. Since M. Grandpré’s time another theatre has been built, another theatre destroyed; and the City of Palaces ​now boasts of a new one, with somewhat more actors than patrons.
But the public buildings of Calcutta have not earned for the city the proud title, by which it is so often distinguished. The “Palaces” are the private dwelling-houses. Few cities can boast of so many imposing edifices. “Palaces” they are not—and an English nobleman might think them pig-styes. They are, with few exceptions, according to English notions, indifferent houses—but a number of them congregated within a small space have a very imposing effect. They are white; the atmosphere through which they are seen is peculiarly clear; they are generally of an extensive frontage; often situated in an open space; and if not very fine specimens of architecture, they are helped out with a liberal supply of pillars and porticoes, which are always adjuncts to the picturesque. M. Grandpré said of the houses, which he saw in 1790:—“All the houses in India have argamasse roofs; that. is to say, are flat with a balastrade round them. It is there that the inhabitants in the morning and evening take the air. Some are. ornamented with a circular range of pillars on the first story, making a sort of gallery, to which they retire when the heat of the day is over.” “The English houses at Bombay,” wrote Mr. Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, referring to about the same period, “though neither so large nor elegant as those at Calcutta and Madras, were comfortable and well furnished; they were built in the European style of architecture, as much as the climate would admit of; but lost something of that appearance by the addition of verandahs or covered piazzas to shade the apartments most exposed to the sun; when illuminated and filled with social parties in the evening, these verandahs gave the town a very cheerful appearance; but since I left India, the town houses have been almost deserted by the English, who reside entirely at their country villas; the gentlemen only go to the Fort in the morning to transact their business; devoting the evening to domestic pleasure, and convivial meetings at their garden house.” The same practice was pursued then, as now, at Madras. “The houses,” writes the Rev. James Cordener, in his voyage to India, referring to a somewhat later period (1798) “are good, and generally of two stories high: but few people live constantly in them; in the afternoon they are almost all empty, and the Town looks quite deserted. The better sort of inhabitants at Madras may be said to live altogether in the country. Every gentleman has a villa, at a little distance from the Town. The ladies seldom approach the Fort; very few of them attend Divine Service there on Sunday; and the gentlemen use it only as ​the scene of business; they repair thither after breakfast, and return to their villas before dinner. Their conveyances are palanquins and carriages. Walking abroad is a thing unknown among Europeans.”
We are very much in the same condition now in respect of the outward aspect of our houses; but not of the number of them, nor of their internal fittings-up. Good houses have multiplied and are multiplying at the Presidencies; especially at Calcutta, where we have magnificent rows of houses on spots which erst were noisome swamps. “The activity and enterprise of the English,” wrote Mr. Tennant, the author of the Indian Recreations, from Calcutta in 1796, “ is, perhaps, nowhere better displayed, than in the rapid enlargement of the town. In the memory of persons still living here, the European houses were mean, and comparatively few in number. Those of the natives are, in general, still paltry huts; but as prospects of gain, or, at least, of employment, are always opening in the vicinity of European Society; the number of their dwellings has increased in a still greater proportion than that of Europeans.” “Calcutta,” wrote Bishop Middleton, in 1818, “considering that it has risen from two or three miserable fishing villages, within 120 years, is probably the most surprising place in the world.” And in another letter, “Nothing can exceed the beauty of Calcutta, I mean the European part. In every direction, as I look out of the window, I see an assemblage of white villas and trees and tanks, The church is I think, without exception, the handsomest modern edifice of the kind I ever saw.”—We are every year improving, too, the indoors’ comfort and elegance of our domiciles. We were not very long in discovering that large and lofty rooms, opening into one another with doors and windows in every possible direction, were better adapted to a tropical climate, than the low, close, passage-surrounded apartments, designed, with elaborate ingenuity, for the exclusion of air, which make up our ordinary residences in England. After a time, we came to a due understanding of the value of glass-windows and venetian doors; and having attained every possible contrivance for the mitigation of the severity of the climate, we have betaken ourselves to the work of adorning our dwelling houses, not always it must be admitted, without some sacrifice of bodily comfort. Year after year has witnessed the introduction of fresh European refinements; our dwellings have grown internally less and less Oriental; and though the change has not been unattended with inconvenience, we incline to think that on the whole we are gainers by it. Our rooms are no longer bare and unencumbered; they are chock-full of ​European furniture; the walls are hung with paintings; the floors are covered with warm carpets; the doors, perhaps the windows, are curtained. Hence an increase perhaps of warmth, and an unquestionable accession of mosquitoes; but there is a more cheerful look about our rooms; the eye is pleased; the spirits are raised; there is a greater feeling of home. The mistake of overcramming one’s rooms with furniture, as though they were upholsterers’ ware-houses, is too common not to be readily admitted: but for these errors of taste the system itself is not accountable. Every good thing will find people only too ready to over-do it; and the extravagances of its more tasteless votaries are no proof of the viciousness of any fashion. It is undeniable, that within the last few years, the internal aspect of our houses has brightened up greatly; and in no part of the ménage is this more strikingly apparent—in no one social improvement is the operation of an extended Trade more discernible—than in the furniture of the dinner-table. The quantity of fine Plate, fine Glass, and fine Porcelain to be seen at the tables of men of moderate income, would astonish an old Qui-hye of the last century; and he would look with little less surprise at the display of ornamental ware in all our drawing-rooms; the bronze, the papier maché, the porcelain, the alabaster, and, more than all, the beautiful glass lamps and lustres of every conceivable device, superseding the tasteless wall-shades, which stood out, of old, in all their ugliness, from the unvaried surface of whitewash plastered over the sides of our rooms.
But still more remarkable than the change in the aspect of the principal European abiding places are the changes in the aspect of European Society. We shall not attempt to give anything, which can aspire to be regarded as a complete picture of these changes; but content ourselves with noticing a few of its most prominent features. Old Indians, as we have already had occasion to observe, have been generally conceived to be distinguished for excessive wealth, diseased livers, a repulsive querulousness of manner, and a luxurious way of life. Who has not heard of the enormous fortunes and the Sardanapalian luxuriousness of the “Nabobs” of the old time? How far the general opinion may have been correct, we pretend not oracularly to decide, but it may be permitted to us, in all modesty to suggest a doubt. That large fortunes were made sometimes, and that the extreme of Oriental luxury was indulged in by some European residents, and hence imported, in a modified form, into the West, is a fact sufficiently well-established for us most willingly to concede; but we question whether these ​“servants of the mess, and one for hair-dressing and washing; so that I have one pagoda per month to feed and clothe me.” Fortunate young man!—Mr. Shore, it would appear, spent nearly double his pay on house-rent. We do not know the extent to which he was enabled to enrich himself by trade; but the incomings from this source must have been extremely moderate.“ The writers by their charter,” he wrote, soon after his arrival, “are permitted to trade, but under very severe restrictions. Before the arrival of Lord Clive, of infamous memory, they were allowed dustucks, i. e. a free trade and no duties,—and even since; but by a late order from our honourable masters, we are entirely deprived of any such advantages, which makes the risk very unequal.” In Bombay, the case was not better—perhaps, indeed, somewhat worse. It is recorded, that when Mr. Forbes arrived in India three or four years before Mr. Shore, his income amounted to 65£. a year. We do not know any work that furnishes a better picture of the cheerless prospects of a young Indian adventurer, on first setting his foot upon the shores of his adopted land, than the ‘Oriental Memoirs’ of this gentleman. “I found myself,” he writes, “a solitary, deserted being, without a letter to offer, or the knowledge of a single individual on the island;”—and it is set down in the chronicle, that he often went to bed sorely against his will, soon after sunset, because he could not afford himself the luxuries of a supper and a candle. This, we suspect, must have been the worst epoch of all—after Clive had cut down the trading, or more properly, the corruption system, but before the Company had thought fit to grant to their servants a fair scale of remuneration. During this interval, there was scarcely less corruption than before Lord Clive’s second administration; the only difference was that instead of stalking abroad in all its nakedness, it sneaked about decently clothed. The filth was all there; but it was hidden.
But even before Clive’s first administration, the condition of the younger servants of the Company was not one very greatly to be coveted. We smile at the ideas of exorbitant and reprehensible luxury entertained in the last century; yet such, according to prevailing notions, was the luxurious way of life to which the Company’s servants gave themselves up, that it was deemed necessary to pass sumptuary regulations! We are informed by an intelligent traveller, (Dr. Ives) who visited India in 1754, being Staff-surgeon with Admiral Watson’s fleet, that even the use of a chatteh, or rather the ​“servants of the mess, and one for hair-dressing and washing; so that I have one pagoda per month to feed and clothe me.” Fortunate young man!—Mr. Shore, it would appear, spent nearly double his pay on house-rent. We do not know the extent to which he was enabled to enrich himself by trade; but the incomings from this source must have been extremely moderate.“ The writers by their charter,” he wrote, soon after his arrival, “are permitted to trade, but under very severe restrictions. Before the arrival of Lord Clive, of infamous memory, they were allowed dustucks, i. e. a free trade and no duties,—and even since; but by a late order from our honourable masters, we are entirely deprived of any such advantages, which makes the risk very unequal.” In Bombay, the case was not better—perhaps, indeed, somewhat worse. It is recorded, that when Mr. Forbes arrived in India three or four years before Mr. Shore, his income amounted to 65£. a year. We do not know any work that furnishes a better picture of the cheerless prospects of a young Indian adventurer, on first setting his foot upon the shores of his adopted land, than the ‘Oriental Memoirs’ of this gentleman. “I found myself,” he writes, “a solitary, deserted being, without a letter to offer, or the knowledge of a single individual on the island;”—and it is set down in the chronicle, that he often went to bed sorely against his will, soon after sunset, because he could not afford himself the luxuries of a supper and a candle. This, we suspect, must have been the worst epoch of all—after Clive had cut down the trading, or more properly, the corruption system, but before the Company had thought fit to grant to their servants a fair scale of remuneration. During this interval, there was scarcely less corruption than before Lord Clive’s second administration; the only difference was that instead of stalking abroad in all its nakedness, it sneaked about decently clothed. The filth was all there; but it was hidden.
But even before Clive’s first administration, the condition of the younger servants of the Company was not one very greatly to be coveted. We smile at the ideas of exorbitant and reprehensible luxury entertained in the last century; yet such, according to prevailing notions, was the luxurious way of life to which the Company’s servants gave themselves up, that it was deemed necessary to pass sumptuary regulations! We are informed by an intelligent traveller, (Dr. Ives) who visited India in 1754, being Staff-surgeon with Admiral Watson’s fleet, that even the use of a chatteh, or rather the ​services of a chatteh-wallah, were prohibited by Government. “At the time we were at Fort St. David,” he writes, “the Governor and a few other gentlemen of the settlement kept a chaise and a pair of horses; some drove a two-wheel chaise, with a single horse, and others were content to take the air on horse-back. Since that time, however, the number of carriages is greatly increased. Almost all the Europeans resident in India, keep their palanquines, which is a covered machine with cushions in it, arched in the middle to give more room and air, and is carried on the shoulders of four or six men; the expense attending it is not less than thirty pounds sterling a year. This piece of eastern luxury, therefore, has been forbidden by the Company to their youngest servants. Some years before our arrival in the country, they found such sumptuary laws so absolutely necessary, that they gave the strictest orders, that none of these young gentlemen should be allowed even to hire a Roundel-boy, whose business it is to walk by his master and defend him, with his Roundel, or umbrella, from the sun. A young fellow of humor, on this last order coming out, altered the form of his umbrella from a round to a square, called it a Squaredel instead of a Roundel, and insisted, that no order yet in force forbade him the use of it.” We can cap this story with another, which if it does not display more ingenuity, has, certainly, more wit. Hugh Boyd records in the Indian Observer (1793), that “in times of yore our honorable masters were very attentive to correct any appearance of extravagance in their young servants. Hearing that laced clothes were very much in fashion in Fort Square, a sumptuary regulation was sent out against them. But a young gentleman, who could not entirely divest himself of his favorite habits, still sported a gold edging on his coat, and defended it against the graver powers by maintaining, that though lace was prohibited, the order was not binding.”
What would a young civilian of the present day think if an order were to be issued against top-boots, cut-aways, and Taglionis? Or a young ensign, if the yearly number of his white kid gloves and patent leather boots was to be regulated in General Orders? We suspect, that take it for all in all, the present generation consists of a more luxurious set of fellows than the generation of the last century, though there has more recently been an interregnum of right royal blades, as we have no doubt Writers’ Buildings could tell us, if those once classic abodes were to chronicle their autobiographies. “At the present,” says Lord Valencia, writing at the commencement of the present century, “there are ​few of these young men who do not keep their horses; commonly their curricles, and in many instances their race-horses, which together with the extravagant parties and entertainments frequent among them, generally involve them in difficulties and embarrasments at an early period of their lives.” There are some old civilians in India, who still are the victims of that lustrous epoch; but we have now attained a more healthy state of things, and though our young writers are not compelled, like Mr. Forbes, to go supperless to bed, because they cannot afford a meal or a candle, those costly Champaigne suppers with their after excesses, for which Writers’ Buildings were once so famous, are now but rare events; and we seem to be equally distant from the extremes of voluptuous extravagance and penurious self-mortification. We have heard some old Indian residents, staid and respectable men of unimpeachable morality, sigh over the extinction, as a class, of the young college writers, who erst made the buildings resound with their joyous songs and their loud rehearsing tally-hoes. Where are they now? Scattered over the face of Calcutta—or studying in the Mofussil—a dispersed race, never again to be restored. It is possible, that on some future occasion, we may abandon ourselves more freely to the consideration of this subject. “Writers’ Buildings” exist no longer, save aspiles of brick and mortar, inhabited by artists, brokers, lottery contractors, and other miscellaneous doers of a not very extensive business. The writers themselves, as a small privileged class of ex-officio fast men, no longer enliven the presidency and ruin themselves. It would be scarcely necessary to pass sumptuary regulations suited to the times and the incomes of the young civil servants of the Company. Their salary admits of a pretty free indulgence in cut-aways and Taglionis; or spectacles and white neck-cloths; and there are rarely any alarming exhibitions to call for the intervention of Government to limit the young civilian’s stud, or to set a bound to his expenditure of champaigne. Comfort and respectability seem now to be aimed at, and attained. There is little licentiousness to shock, and less poverty to distress. The picture, in a social point of view, is anything but a discouraging one.
The condition, too, of the young military adventurer has greatly improved during the last half century. We have shown that the pay of a cadet in 1780, was 17⁠1/2⁠ rupees a month, with free quarters. Sir Thomas Munro, who, had circumstances turned him out of the mould, an essayist or a novelist, instead of a soldier and a statesman, would have rivalled Addison or Smollet, describes with inimitable humor, dashed ​here and there with a touch of sadness, the sufferings and privations to which he was exposed during the first few years of his residence in India. “You may not believe me,” he writes, in a serio-comic epistle, which, though familiar to many of our readers, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting—“You may not believe we when I tell you, that I never experienced hunger or thirst, fatigue, or poverty, until I came to India; that since then, I have frequently met with the first three, and that the last has been my constant companion. If you wish for proofs, here they are—I was three years in India, before I was master of any other pillow than a book or a cartridge pouch; my bed was a piece of canvass stretched on four cross sticks, whose only ornament was the great coat that I brought from England, which, by a lucky invention, I turned into a blanket in the cold weather, by thrusting my legs into the sleeves, and drawing the skirts over my head. In this situation, I lay, like Falstaff in the basket—hilt to point, and very comfortable, I assure you, all but my feet; for the tailor not having foreseen the various uses to which this piece of dress might be applied, had cut the cloth so short, that I never could, with all my ingenuity, bring both ends under cover; whatever I gained by drawing up my legs, I lost by exposing my neck; and I generally chose rather to cool my heels than my head. . . . . . . My dress has not been more splendid than my furniture. I have never been able to keep it all of a piece. It grows tattered in one quarter whilst I am establishing funds to repair it in another, and my coat is in danger of losing the sleeves, while I am pulling it off to try on a new waistcoat.” Now it would be difficult thoroughly to convince ourselves that there is not some exaggeration in this. It is probable that Munro’s humor a little outstripped his accuracy. Blankets of an inferior description, but capable of imparting warmth, are so cheap in India, that few even of the poorest natives deny themselves such a luxury; and, in a country where the fibre of the cocoa-nut, which makes very tolerable bedding, is to be had in abundance, at so low a price, a man is not very likely to go three years without a better pillow than a book or a cartridge box. If Munro really suffered from these deprivations, he must have been sadly ignorant of the resources of the country. Warmth and sleep are blessings of too great magnitude to be beyond the reach of a Madras cadet on five pagodas a month; but we have it from Munro himself, that in less than a year after his arrival, he received his commission as ensign; and that in less than two years ​he was appointed to the Staff, as a Quarter-Master of Brigade. Making allowance, however, for a little humorous exaggeration, the picture may be advantageously contemplated by the young officers of the present day, who deplore, when on service, in such pathetic terms, the melancholy fact of their cheroots having all vanished in smoke, and write to their friends, in the spirit of the young cornet in the Bolan,—“D——n! it. I'm out of blacking, and those rascally Beloochees have carried off my patent leather boots.” We suspect, that if an Ensign of 1780 and an Ensign of 1840 were to compare notes on the hardships of active service, the former would feel very much inclined to laugh at the soft-cotton and band-box asperities of modern warfare. Young officers of the present day dress much better and live much better than those of the last century. Munro, when a Lieutenant, who had held for some time a staff appointment, talked, as we have shown, of his clothes falling to pieces; and we find him afterwards, when holding a good civil appointment, writing to his friends in England again, on the luxuries of the East, “I have dined to-day on porridge made of half-ground flour instead of oatmeal; and I shall most likely dine to-morrow on plantain fritters;” and this simplicity of fare “being the effect of necessity, not of choice;” not because he could not pay for anything better, but because he could not get anything better to pay for. Unquestionably we are in these days much more comfortable. Comfort and competence are more generally diffused. Splendid fortunes are now seldom made, for bribe-taking is no longer permitted; but moderate wealth is more easily, as it is more honestly, acquired, and carnally speaking, the things which render life agreeable, are far more within the reach of all. We should doubt whether Munro’s hands ever luxuriated in a pair of dress gloves during the first twenty years of his residence in India, or whether, during that time, his handkerchief was ever guilty of harboring a drop of perfume. But our young officers seldom deny themselves either the one or the other, as the records of the Exchange Hall and Tulloh’s Commission-Rooms can amply demonstrate. The pay of an Ensign in the present day is twenty times as great as was that of a young Civilian when Shore first arrived in India; and luxuries are to be purchased at less than half the price.
But if the outset of the adventurer’s career is, in the present day, brighter than of old, and the closing scene somewhat less brilliant, it is hardly to be questioned that the middle stage, the general aspect, indeed, of life in India, is now more cheerful than it ever has been. There is nothing like poverty— ​unless there is both improvidence and misconduct—among the European residents in India. Men are often unfortunate; but they are very rarely poor. We mean by this, that they are seldom condemned to taste, in all their bitterness, the Marah-waters of poverty. The iron chain does not gall and fret; the manacles are well wadded. One man has a small salary; he is honest and he pays his debts. There is little of that severe struggling to keep up a decent appearance, which, unfortunately, prevails at home. Even this narrow-salaried man, if he be a gentleman, lives like one. He is not attended by a scrubby maid of all work, with red elbows and heel-less shoes, but by half a dozen turbaned fellows in black moustaches and white muslin. He keeps his horse, and, perhaps, his buggy; and changes his linen twice a day, with as much regularity as a Member of Council. False fronts, save-alls, and dinners with Duke Humphry are not the concomitants of narrow means. Again; a man becomes bankrupt, passes through the Insolvent Court, surrenders, or ought to surrender every farthing he has in the world, and what is the result? We do not see a pale-faced, dim-eyed wretch, with stooping gait, and slouched hat, and coat out at elbows, stealing along the streets towards his small furnished lodging in an obscure quarter of the town. No; on the very day that his name appears in the Gazette; whilst he is advertised to the whole world as “late of Calcutta and now residing in the Danish settlement of Serampore,” he may, perchance, be seen on the course of Calcutta riding a fine English horse, or lounging in an elegant Barouche. Outwardly, there is little descent. The cidevant man of wealth rides his friend’s horse, instead of his own. He attends, and does not give, burra-khanas. His establishment is reduced; but it is still an ample one; and—strangest contrast of all—his friends do not desert him. Severe moralists may say that this last fact indicates laxity of principle. We will not argue the question. It is true, that a man does not ruin himself without ruining others—that there is often carelessness, recklessness, cupidity, an overstrained spirit of speculation; still we honestly confess, that we do love to see the friends of the ruined man, rallying around him in his adversity, even though they do but open their doors to him, invite him to dinner, give him a mount, and smile on him, as in the days of his affluence. All this may have an injurious effect upon society. By diminishing the penalties, it may increase the frequency of bankruptcy. Still the failing “leans towards virtue’s side,” and the opposite is extremely forbidding.
“I assert,” says Mr. Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, ​that the character of the English in India is an honor to their country. In private life they are generous, kind and hospitable.. . . . . . . . . As husbands, fathers, masters, they cannot easily be excelled; whilst friendship, illustrated in its more general sense by unostentatious acts of humanity and benevolence, shines in India with conspicuous lustre. How often have the sons and daughters of misfortune experienced the blessed effects of oriental benevolence. How often have the ruined merchant, the disconsolate widow, and the helpless orphan been relieved by the delicate and silent subscription, amounting in a few hours to several thousand pounds, without the child of sorrow knowing its benefactors.”—“I can truly affirm,” wrote Lord Valentia, “that my eastern countrymen are hospitable in the highest degree, and that their generosity is unbounded. When an officer of respectability dies, in either the civil or the military service, leaving a widow or children, a subscription is immediately set on foot, which in every instance has proved liberal, and not unfrequently has conferred on the parties a degree of affluence that the life of the husband or parent could not for years have assured them. The hearts of the British in this country seem expanded with affluence, they do every thing on a princely scale.” Mr. Forbes tells us, in another part of his interesting memoirs, that very little of all this was the growth of Christianity; for though the European residents in India were very humane and very benevolent, they were, at the best, but indifferent Christians; and Lord Valentia seems to have entertained a similar opinion.
There is more Christianity in India, now-a-days, and we are inclined to think that there is as much benevolence. Not many years have elapsed since the large private subscriptions alluded to above were things of frequent occurrence. They are almost unknown now; but only because objects of such charity rarely present themselves, in our better regulated community. It seldom or never happens, that a man, occupying a respectable position in European society, dies and leaves his family destitute. The truly excellent Funds established for the maintenance of the widows and children of members of the services; and the inducements held out to others, by the different Insurance Offices, to provide for the weaklings who are dependent on them, have almost entirely superseded the necessity for private benevolence. We never, in these times, hear of a fashionable lady spending thousands of rupees on an entertainment one week, and, in the next, reduced to utter poverty, by the death of her lord and master, and dependent ​upon the contributions of her guests. A young Civilian is said by the husband-hunters to be “worth £300 a-year, dead or alive.” A young officer is worth only a third of this, but still there is no destitution. Private benevolence, therefore, finds not a vent in this channel. At the time when, according to Mr. Forbes, the charity of European residents in India was exhibited in the celerity with which large sums of money were raised for the support of the widows and orphans of deceased members of society, “There were no arts or sciences to patronise, no literary or charitable institutions to support, and neither hospitals nor infirmaries to call forth private benevolence.” This is far from being the case in the present day. There are numerous institutions to support, and numerous institutions are supported, by private benevolence. A much larger sum is dispensed in charity; but the dispensation is regular, periodical. The money subscribed is given to the poor poor, not to the rich poor. The widows and children of wealthy men are not thrown destitute on the world; and though wealthy men themselves are often reduced to a state of nominal poverty, there is a wonderful elasticity in them; and, like an Indian-rubber ball, they are dropped upon the ground only to rise up again to a greater altitude than that from which they have descended. Their friends assist them for a little while; there is a fresh start in the world; and then, practically at least, they are soon as wealthy as before.
There is no more striking feature on the face of Anglo-Indian society, than the general diffusion of all the outward characteristics of wealth. The number of equipages which crowd the Calcutta course; the number of richly furnished houses; the number of handsomely dressed women, are out of all proportion to the number of good incomes in this “splendid city.” The equipages are not well appointed; half dirt, half deity; well-built Phaetons or Britzskas, with uncouth and undressed native grooms hanging on lazily behind. The houses are not often elegantly furnished; there is seldom much taste and seldom any keeping, but still there is an enormous expenditure of costly furniture; and every week, in the cold season, sees some two or three announcements of “superb household property to be sold.” The women, it is true, are rarely well-dressed; but the immense investments of rich satins and gorgeous velvets—the latter rarely sold at less than a guinea a yard—which pass into the hands of consumers every cold weather, is altogether incommensurate with the number of ladies, whose means and position would, in English society, entitle them to the use of such costly attire. The truth is that ​in India very little money is spent upon what is not seen. There are no taxes and tithes to be paid, and no expenditure in the Servants’ Hall. Thirty servants may be retained as cheaply in India, as three—the eternal Footman, House-maid and Cook—can be kept in dear-grained England; and where there are no taxes, and no rates of any kind to be paid, a man may afford to dress his wife in satin and velvet; to give her a Britzska to ride in; and to cover her drawing-room couches and ottomans with the finest tabaret ever manufactured. Money, to use a homely expression, goes much further in India than in England. Though many articles of consumption are dearer, the expenses of house-keeping are, on the whole, smaller, and money spent produces some certain and palpable advantage. We are not called upon to fritter away anything upon intangible benefits—a church establishment, a poor law, and the like. In mercy, we are spared the tax-gatherer. With an almost universal predisposition to febrile and bilious disorders, and a sort of general irritability of the system, the visitations of this periodical pestilence would be more than we could bear up against. Kind nature is equable in her dispensation of favors. We have the cholera; but we have no taxes.
We have shown, that shortly before the black-hole affair and the battle of Plassey, the Governor and some few other high functionaries drove out in their carriages or buggies—but that the junior servants of Government were forbidden even to employ a chattah-wallah. The battle of Plassey wrought a vast number of very important changes; and the British in India soon began to assume a local habitation and a name. Before this, they scarcely existed as a class. Soon, however, they waxed into some amount of importance; and though Pondicherry, in some respects, had advantages not possessed by Calcutta, we soon began to put forth our spreading leaves and branches, and to overgrow our worthy neighbours, the French. It was not, however, till some years after the battle of Plassey, that carriages came generally into use. It was a charge brought against Mr. Kiernander, the missionary, who ​built the “Old Church,” in 1770, that he drove a carriage and four; but his last biographer informs us, that this was altogether untrue; for that at the time referred to, the only people in the settlement, who sported carriages, were “the Governor and Mr. Watts.” They must have come into general use not very long after this. “Conveyance by the palanquin is in use at Bengal,” wrote M. Grandpré in 1790, “but Calcutta, exclusively of this mode, abounds with all sorts of carriages, chariots, whiskies, and phaetons, which occasion in the evening as great a bustle as in one of the principal towns of Europe. There are also a great number of saddle horses, some of the Persian breed, of exquisite beauty, but no Arabians, except a small sort called Pooni, which are very much in vogue for phaetons”—“The usual mode of travelling is by palanquin,” says Lord Valentia; “but most gentlemen have carriages adapted to the climate, and horses, of which the breed is much improved of late years. It is universally the custom to drive out between sunset and dinner. The Mussaulchees, when it grows dark, go out to meet their masters on their return, and run before them at the rate of full eight miles an hour; and the numerous lights moving along the Esplanade produce a singular and pleasing effect.” This custom, which has been long since exploded in Calcutta, still, we believe, exists at Madras, where the beach, on which the inhabitants enjoy the evening air—sea-air, oh! how delicious—is at a considerable distance from the majority of the garden-houses. The Mussaulchee of Calcutta has ceased to be a torch-bearer, or even a Jack-o’-lanthorn; the race has degenerated into a race of scullions. It will astonish many of our friends in England, who think that the palanquin is one of the greatest luxuries of the East, and envy us the possession of such a delightful conveyance, to learn, that few Europeans, unless they are driven to it by hard necessity, ever put themselves inside so extremely uncomfortable a machine. Palanquins are used by the upper classes of society almost exclusively for dawk journeys. To use one as an ordinary conveyance—to be seen moving in one about the streets of Calcutta, would be, many think, to lose caste. This feeling is sufficiently absurd, and there is no sort of occasion to display it; but it is perfectly intelligible, that people who can afford to keep carriages should utterly discard the palanquin. As a carriage is both a faster and cooler vehicle than a palanquin, no ​one is likely to prefer the latter. Palanquins are principally employed in Calcutta, as hackney-coaches and cabs are in London; their best patrons being sailors and cadets. A few Mofussil residents may keep these portable ovens; but at the Presidency the use of them is almost entirely confined to strangers; for even the poorer classes—the clerks and others—travel to their offices in some sort of a wheeled carriage, which, if drawn by a single pony, as many of these vehicles are, is a cheaper thing to keep than a palanquin. As an article of luxury, it may have held a high place in those days, when only the governor and senior member of council sported wheel-carriages; for a ride in a palanquin is a degree or two better than a walk in the sun; but now it is regarded as a sort of refuge for the destitute, into which a man ventures, on extraordinary occasions, such as the breaking-down of his carriage in the streets, or any other untoward accident befalling him. Such things may happen once or twice to a Calcutta resident, in a period of half-a-dozen years. There are many who have not even within that space of time deposited themselves inside a palanquin—and we cannot but acknowledge, that the less frequently a man indulges in this species of Oriental luxury, the better for his bodily comfort.
There are few so poor, in these days, as not to be able to keep a carriage. The keeping a carriage in England is a very magnificent thing. There is an unctuous smack in the very mention of it, redolent of no small amount of well-to-doishness; even though the carriage be nothing higher than that cockney-sounding thing—an one-horse-shay. But here the difficulty is to find a man, who does not, in some form, “keep a carriage.” It may be a very sorry affair, but still it is a carriage, with as good a right to the name, as the best appointed Britzska that ever went rolling and swinging and plunging out of a coach-maker’s yard. If any one be curious in this matter of carriages—and books have been written on the subject—let him come to Calcutta. He will here find carriages of every degree, from the highest to the lowest; of every conceivabie form and fashion; and many besides of which it has never entered into his imagination to conceive. An Englishman in India may aptly be described as a riding animal. Let the curious in such matters station himself at one of the corners of Tank-Square, between ten and eleven in the morning, and again about six o’clock in the evening: and count, not the number of carriages, but the number of varieties of carriages that pass—Britzskas, Barouches, Landaulets, Chariots, Phaetons, Buggies, Palanquins, Palki-gharries, Brown-berries, Crahanchys (some of these unknown genera to the ​English reader) and then let him post himself, towards sunset, on the saluting battery of Fort William, and view all these varieties en masse. If Clive, or Admiral Watson were to revisit, in this year of grace, 1844, the banks of that river, which, nearly a century before, they passed up with the few ships and small handful of fighting men which paved the way for the conquests of Hindostan, they would out-do Dominie Sampson in their hearty exclamations of “Prodigious!” Where erst were to be seen a few Bengallee fishermen or boat-men, mending their nets or cleaning their cooking-pots, on the jungly banks of the river, is now a broad and level road, covered, at evening tide, by hundreds of carriages and horse-men. No sooner does the setting sun tinge the western horizon, than all the English residents in Calcutta throw open their doors and windows, make a hasty toilet, and sally forth, in carriage or on horse-back, to enjoy the evening air. Before the sun has disappeared behind the western bank of the river, the strand is crowded with vehicles of every description—a concourse as dense as that which may be seen on the Epsom Road during the race-week, with even more entanglements and embarrasments; for there is a stream setting both ways. One marvels who all these people are that own these hundreds of carriages. The first impression made upon the mind of the stranger is, that there must be an enormous number of wealthy inhabitants in Calcutta. But the equipage is, in reality, no sort of index to the worldly possessions of the owner. It may let you, perhaps, into the secret of a man’s vanity—certainly not of his income. Some of the most pretending equipages on the course are sported by people belonging to the second class of society—uncovenanted Government servants, petty East Indian or European traders—respectable personages enough in their way, and, peradventure, not much given to show; but the wife and the daughters must have their britzska or barouche, though they do pinch a little at home to maintain it; and on the course, at least, the wife of the uncovenanted subordinate may jostle the lady of the head of the office. When we consider how much is often sacrificed to support the dignity of the carriage and pair—how much substantial comfort is thrown aside to make room for this little bit of ostentation—that the equipage is with many, the thing, from which they derive much of their importance—we soon cease to wonder at the formidable array of assuming conveyances, which throng the course every evening, at sunset, and present a scene, which, as one of daily recurrence, has not, perhaps, its parallel in the world.
A few words now on the subject of Dress. When those sumptuary regulations were sent out against gold-laced coats, ​there were very few English ladies in India. Of those few we have but little account. When they began to increase in numbers, whatever may have been the general taste before, they very soon fell into the too-prevailing folly of over-dressing.—Munro, in one of his familiar epistles, which we candidly confess, have more charm for us than all his political letters, observes with his usual sly satire—“I have myself so vulgar a taste, that I see more beauty in a plain dress, than in one tricked out with the most elegant pattern, that ever fashionable painter feigned. This unhappy depravity of taste has been occasioned, perhaps, by my having been so long accustomed to view the Brahmin women, who are in this country, both the first in rank and in personal charms, almost always arrayed in nothing but simple pieces of dark blue cotton cloth, which they throw on with a decent art, and a careless grace, which in Europe I am afraid is only to be found in the drapery of Antiques. The few solitary English ladies that I meet with only serve to strengthen my prejudices. I met with one, the other day, all bedizened and huddled into a new habit, different from any thing I had ever seen before. On asking her what name it went by, she was surprised that I did not know the a la Grécque. It looked, for all the world, like a large petticoat thrown over her shoulders, and drawn together close under her arms. I could not help smiling to think how Ganganelli and the Abbé Winkelman and the King of Naples would have stared had they dug such a Greek as this out of Herculaneum.” Nor do the gentlemen escape; there were fops, it seems, in those days, standing greatly in need of the sumptuary regulations. “The fashions of the gentlemen,” he says, “are probably as fantastical as those of the ladies, though from having them continually before my eyes, the absurdity of them does not strike me so much. We have black and white hats; thunder and lightning coats, stockings of seven colours, and tamboured waistcoats bedaubed with flowers, aud more tawdry finery than was ever exhibited on old tapestry.” A more recent ​writer, Colonel Campbell, has given us a picture of the Bombay fashionables, not much more complimentary than that which Munro has recorded of Madras—“I was induced,” he writes, “to go to a ball given here by some gentlemen to Mrs. ———, the wife of an officer of rank, about to proceed to assume a command in the interior. But in truth, I cannot pretend even to be an admirer of those, who, in Bombay, are looked upon as fashionables; yet I am by no means, nor had I any reason to be, prejudiced against them. * * * I saw nothing at that grand ball, to induce me to change the opinion I had previously formed; or to make me imagine that they could ever have moved in any other world of fashion than their own. With few exceptions, the ladies were either badly or over-dressed; or I should rather say, that their very expensive dresses were ill-made and generally worse put on, and the profusion of ornaments, which many of them wore, had a very different effect from what was intended, and I could not but think what a Parisian belle would have thought of most of them.” It grieves us to add, that much of this is in a degree applicable even to Calcutta, in the present civilized times. We by no means assert, that a well-dressed woman is not occasionally to be found; but the number of smart dressers is out of all proportion to the number of ladies who dress well. The vice of over-dressing is but too common. The quiet and lady-like is rarely attained. More money is spent on dress by ladies, whose husbands enjoy a given income, in this country, than in England—but the result is singularly unfortunate. We know not how it might be, if our society were blessed with any leaders of ton endowed with a small modicum of taste; but, for some years past, those who have aspired to lead the fashionable world—whose position, derived from the official rank of their husbands, has placed them in the highest grades of our local aristocracy, have certainly done nothing to create a taste for the quiet and the subdued. Simple elegance has been, for years past, at a discount. The obtrusive and the overpowering have carried every thing before them. This, in manners, too, as much as in dress. We have sometimes had our attention directed, in a large (and by courtesy fashionable) assemblage, to “that nice English-looking person on the other side of the room”; and we have looked and beheld a young girl, or a young married woman, seemingly fresh from England, and looking, in the inornate good taste of her attire, and in her simply curled or braided hair very much unlike the rest of the room; and we ​need not add, very much better. It is difficult to persuade people who can afford to be extravagant, that extravagance is not elegance; and that the finest investment of satins and velvets that ever reached Calcutta will go no way to make a lady. We think it would be well if sumptuary regulations were to be sent out against our feminine aristocracy. Simplicity is a virtue of such high repute, that the legislature would do well to encourage it.
As to the men—we are not aware that the temperature of Calcutta has been reduced within the last few years. We believe it to be as hot now, as it was in the memorable year of the Black-Hole. In those and in later times, strenuous efforts were made by the European inhabitants to counteract, in some small measure, the severity of the climate by wearing the lightest possible apparel. One would imagine that there had recently been a very extraordinary atmospherical revolution; for within the last five or six years, we have noticed a progressive tendency towards heavy vestments, especially in crowded assemblies, at large dinner parties, and on all other occasions where the heat is more than usually intense. To see a man sit down to dinner in the month of May, dressed from head to foot in black broad-cloth, is a spectacle calculated to teach a lesson in Martyrology not easily to be forgotten. Formerly, white jackets were frequently—white trowsers universally—worn at dinner-parties, in the hot weather. Now one’s eyes are seldom gladdened with a scrap of white, unless it be a wrist-band or a shirt collar. We have a lively recollection of the oppressive heat, at a large dinner party in August, where the only gentleman out of uniform, who had the good sense to appear in white trowsers, was the Governor-General. We do not know who may have been the originators of this broad-cloth infatuation; but we are not sure, that if we were to see them in a modern Black-Hole, we should exhibit more mercy towards them, than the Subadar’s guards exhibited towards Mr. Holwell and his ill-fated companions. A few years ago, when a man left home to dine with a friend, he put himself into a white jacket; when he went to a formal party, he put himself into his coat and his white jacket into his carriage; or he sent the latter article of apparel by one of his servants to meet him at his hosts. On arriving he was immediately invited to discard the coat and substitute the jacket. In Calcutta this good custom has fallen, of late years, into abeyance. It would seem as though the object were to render a Calcutta dinner-party—always bad enough—the most detestable thing ever invented for the punishment of civilized man. In the hottest weather now, the fashion is to appear at a burra-khana dressed in broad cloth from head to foot. These entertainments ​scarcely needed such an aggravation to render them capable of affording the least attractive means of passing a sultry evening that human ingenuity could devise.
And this leads us naturally enough to consider the manner in which an Indian day is spent—We differ from our fathers in nothing more remarkably, than in the distribution of our time. We have been gradually getting into later and later hours; lengthening out the day for purposes of business, and assimilating our customs to those which obtain at home. “The writers,” says Mr. Forbes in his Memoirs, “at the period of my arrival at Bombay, (1765) and during the whole time of my officiating in that capacity, were fully engaged from nine o’clock to twelve, when they retired from their respective offices to dinner, which was then at one o’clock in every class of English society. At two, the writers returned to their employment until five; when after a dish of tea, a social walk on a fine sandy beach, open to the salubrious western breeze, gave us a keener appetite for supper than our scanty pittance of thirty rupees per month could furnish. Such was our constant practice six days in the week.” Writing in 1780, Mrs. Fay, the wife of a barrister, in an amusing series of letters, published many years afterwards, says: “The dinner hour, as I mentioned before, is two, and it is customary to sit a long while at table; particularly during the cold weather. * * * During dinner a good deal of wine is drank, but very little after the cloth is removed, except in Bachelors’ parties, as they are called; for the custom of reposing, if not of sleeping, after dinner, is so general, that the streets of Calcutta are from four to five in the afternoon almost as empty of Europeans as if it were midnight. * * * * Next come the evening airings on the course, where every one goes, though sure of being half suffocated with dust. On returning from thence, tea is served, and universally drunk here even during the extreme heats. After tea, either cards or music fill up the space ’till ten, when supper is usually announced. * * * Formal visits are paid in the evening; they are generally very short, as perhaps each lady has a dozen to make, and a party waiting for her at home besides. Gentlemen also call to offer their respects, and if asked to put down their hat, it is considered as an invitation to supper.” “You will naturally wish to know my mode of life in Bengal,” writes Mr. Shore, in 1787. “I rise early, ride seven to ten miles, and breakfast by eight o’clock: after that, business occupies my time till the hour of dinner, which is three. Our meals here are short; and in the evening, when the weather permits, which at this season of the year (January) is daily, I walk ​out. The remaining time between that and ten o'clock, which is my hour to rest, I spend with my friends; as I make it a rule not to attend to business of an evening. Suppers are by no means agreeable to me. At present we have balls every week; but I am not fond of them; and, indeed, have been at one private ball only, which was given by Lord Cornwallis; nor have I yet attended one play.”
Sir James Mackintosh, writing from Bombay in the year 1805, says; “The regular course of our idle and disengaged day is as follows: We often are, and always ought to be, on horse-back before six (soon it will be five.) We return from our ride to breakfast at eight; when, to shew the enervating effects of climate, I eat only two eggs and a large plate of fish and rice, called kedgeree; not to mention two cups of coffee and three of tea. During the forenoon there is no exertion, nor going out, except for necessity. We then write, read, &c. At four, when alone, we dine; and from half past five to seven, walk; which, for the last four months, we could do with great pleasure. At seven we drink tea, and from tea to bed time, I read to our whole family party.” Tiffins seem to have come into Calcutta with the present century—and the dinner hour, which had been growing later and later in the day, to have been thrown back, about the same time, suddenly to the evening. Lord Valentia, who visited Calcutta about the date of the preceding extract, says; “It is usual in Calcutta to rise early, in order to enjoy the cool air of the morning, which is particularly pleasant before sunrise. At twelve they take a hot meal, which they call tiffing, and then generally go to bed for two or three hours. The dinner hour is commonly between seven and eight; which is certainly too late in this hot climate, as it prevents an evening ride at the proper time, and keeps them up till midnight or later.” A later writer, Capt. T. Williamson, whose brief remarks on Anglo-Indian manners were published in 1813, says; “Those who take exercise on horse-back are usually up as soon as the day begins to dawn, and return before the sun is well up. The hour for breakfast is as various with us as in England.—Tea, coffee, eggs, toast, and fish form the oriental dejeuné. * * * * The forenoon is dedicated to business, or to reading, writing, &c., and among the idle, the hookah, or eventually cards fill the vacuum. Those who have to attend their offices repair to them in their palankeens; and when their ​duties are performed, which generally occupy four or five hours, return to their homes, or visit some friend; and after partaking of a tiffing, undress and sleep ’till near sunset; when they again put on clean clothes of every description, and repair to dinner, which by that time is generally ready. Coffee and tea are served about 8 or 9 o’clock. Suppers are not usual, except among families in Calcutta, and some out-stations of Civil Servants. Among the Military early hours are much attended to, and it is rare, in cantonments, to find any one out of bed at 10 o’clock at night, or in bed after 5 in the morning. Their profession, no doubt, is the principal cause of this regularity, which is, however, greatly increased by the want of female society; there being very few European ladies in India. I should probably far exceed their numbers were I to estimate all living under the Bengal Government at three hundred.”
And here a few words may be bestowed—and not thrown away—upon our style of living, past and present. By living we mean to signify the process by which life is sustained—in other words, our style of feeding. M. Grandpré, in his time, looked with contempt upon the fare of the English in Calcutta. We doubt not that they managed these things better in the French settlement. “With respect to living,” says the Frenchman, “the fare is but indifferent in Calcutta. Provisions for the table are confined to butcher’s meat, a fowl now and then, but little or no game, and scarcely a greater quantity of fish, Mutton is almost universally the standing dish.” Mrs. Fay, alluding to an earlier period, after her own amusing (but not very elegant) fashion, says that provisions of every kind were, in her times, abundant and cheap. In one of her letters she writes: “We were frequently told in England, you know, that the heat in Bengal destroyed the appetite. I must own, that I never yet saw any proof of that; on the contrary, I cannot help thinking, that I never saw an equal quantity of victuals consumed. We dine, too, at two o’clock, in the very heat of the day. At this moment Mr. F——— is looking out with a hawk’s eye for his dinner; and though still much of an invalid, I have no doubt of being able to pick a bit myself. I will give you our bill of fare, and the general prices of things:—A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a fore-quarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread, excellent madeira (that is expensive, but eatables are very cheap:)—a whole sheep costs but two rupees; a lamb one rupee; six good fowls or ducks, ditto; twelve pigeons, ditto; twelve pounds of bread, ditto; two pounds of butter, ditto; ​and a joint of veal, ditto.” In a later letter, she gives us a picture of a two o'clock burra khana, at Bombay, which, she says, was in the old style: “We dined, one day, at Mr. Nesbit’s, chief of the Marine, who gave us a repast in the true old Indian style. ‘The tables, they groaned with the weight of the feast.’ We had every joint of a calf on the table at once; nearly half a Bengal sheep; several large dishes of fishes; boiled and roast turkeys, a ham, a kid, tongue, fowls, and a long train of et-ceteras. The heat was excessive, the hour two, and we were thirty in company, in a lower-roomed house; so you may conceive what sensations such a prodigious dinner would produce.” Mr. Tennant, the author of those interesting volumes entitled Indian Recreations, to which we have already referred, writing in 1798 from the Mofussil, says; “The mode of living in this part of India (Cawnpore) has, within the last ten or fifteen years, undergone a very great alteration. Before that period, the civil and military servants of the Company of the first rank were lodged in bungalows worse than those of a subaltern of the present day; as the practice of feeding beef, mutton, pork, and poultry was not then introduced, their tables were very poorly supplied; even vegetables were not to be had, though an article indispensibly necessary to the climate.” Mr. Cordener, who arrived at Madras in this same year, and who apparently alludes to the state of affairs in 1799, though, perhaps, to a later period, observes that “all classes of European society here live sumptuously, and many individuals expend from two to ten thousand pounds each annually in maintaining their households. The economy of their tables is entrusted entirely to native servants, who load them with dishes of solid ​meat, estimating the goodness of the dinner by the quantity which they crowd upon the board; and in most houses there is but a scanty supply of vegetables. Even rice and curry, the staple food of the country, are often omitted, probably because they are common; but they are the best and most wholesome nourishment which India affords.” Here we see, in all these accounts, the same reference to the mis-placed solidity of an Indian meal. In respect of our fare generally, there seems to have been a progressive improvement. In 1790, as we have already seen, M. Grandpré, an officer in the French army, thought it “indifferent.” In 1805, Lord Valentia, an English nobleman, thought it “excellent:”—“The viands are excellent, and served in great profusion, to the no small satisfaction of the birds and beasts of prey, to whose share a considerable proportion of the remains fall; for the lower orders of Portuguese, to whom alone they would be serviceable, cannot consume the whole.” An intelligent writer who visited Calcutta about the same time—a gentleman of the Madras Bar, bears similar high testimony to the excellence of the dinner, and speaks with rapture of the delights of the loll shrab. “I had ample specimens of Bengal hospitality,” he writes, “and of the luxury of Bengal dinners in particular. But although the dinner-hour is late, and the most skilful variety of viands solicits your appetite, Calcutta dinners are but a languid sort of thing. You have stomach, perhaps, to pick the bone of a floriken, or may get through a fine delicious snipe; but you cannot grapple with a slice of beef or of Bengal mutton. The tiffin, a meal at two o’clock, defrauds the dinner of its homage due. But the luxury of the first glass of cool claret (loll shraub) that salutes your lips! Skilfully refrigerated, it is a celestial draught. The icy nectar courses down the whole system, with the rapidity of lightning; the spirits are set free as from the torpor of enchantment, and the whole being undergoes a refreshing transformation.”
And now that we have shown how our countymen were wont, in times of old, to get through the Indian day, let us devote a few words to the present. Strange as it may appear, it is unquestionably true, that though we found it an easy task to exhibit the manners of our fore-fathers, we are almost inclined to turn aside from the difficulty of depicting our own. The work of sketching an Indian day, in these times, is by no means one of easy accomplishment. The general custom is, to follow ​the example of Sterne, and to “take a single captive.” Thus every perriwig-pated fellow gives a picture of his own, and crams into a single portrait all the most monstrous features he can collect from a community of many hundreds, producing, at last, a composite order of being, the like of which the world has never seen. Mr. George W. Johnson, “Advocate of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, Fellow of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India, &c.” who has lately written a book, the title of which we have printed at the head of this article, presents the world with a picture of a day in Calcutta, which is remarkable as representing neither the habits of a class, nor of any individual member of one. It is a collection of a great number of features, which may have existed somewhere, and some which have existed no-where out of Mr. Johnson’s imagination, all jumbled incongruously together, and kneaded into a monstrous whole. The truth is, that since the European population of India has so greatly increased, there is necessarily a greater variety in the style and manner of living. Our habits vary according to the tastes and the duties of individual members of society. Thus, a picture, sketched to the life, of which Thompson is the model, might be recognized in no feature by Jones. If we say, that the English in India rise before the sun—take a long ride—sleep for an hour or so—and then make a hearty breakfast, we might hit off the said Thompson’s morning avocations to a nicety; but Jones, at every single point, will incontinently put in his denials. One man rises before the sun, mounts his horse, and takes his gallop; another rises with the sun, saunters in his garden, paces his verandah, or betakes himself at once to his dressing room to luxuriate in pejammahs, tea, toast, and the morning papers; a third rises some time after the sun, bathes and dresses without any loss of time, and reads, or writes his letters, or devotes himself to business, an hour before breakfast. As a general rule, it may be said, that we are earlier risers in this country, than in England—but we should be sorry to pledge ourselves to the existence of any other general rules. Breakfast comes—some eat it, and some look at it. It may consist of fish, rice, eggs, cold meat, fruits and preserves; it may be nothing but a cup of tea and a single slice of dry toast; or, perchance, it lies midway somewhere between these two extremes. There is a thing called breakfast in most houses; it may be taken at nine o’clock or earlier; or at any time up to eleven; and after it, comes either the ​serious occupation, or the strenuous idleness of the day. Men of business then begin to work; idlers begin to amuse themselves. The Merchant, or the Civilian, or the Staff-officer at the Presidency, puts himself into his carriage, or hurries away to his office. In the military cantonment, the regimental officer, who has got through the principal business of the day, before many of his countrymen are out of their beds, betakes himself to the billiard table; or prepares for a round of visits; or lounges away his morning at home. Our ladies, too, spend their mornings after as many different fashions as the busier lords of the creation. One sits at home to receive morning visits; another goes out to pay them; a third gives orders, that her doors shall be closed (durwaseh bund is the Indian “Not at home”) and seats herself down quietly in her drawing-room or boudoir to write letters, or to read a new book, or to practice a new piece of music. One has many household duties to perform and thinks it is her duty to perform; another leaves all these things to her underlings, and wonders that the day is so long. Mrs. A. is busy with her children; Mrs. B. with her worsted-work; and Mrs. C. with a pattern of a dress for the Fancy-ball. There are as many different ways of spending the morning, as there are varieties, social and moral, of womankind. Habits vary according to taste, principle, physical health, social position, and the length of the purse, in India as much as in England. There is this difference, however; that here morning visits are paid in the morning; at home they are paid in the afternoon. We devote the time between breakfast and luncheon to these little social duties. The afternoon we consider entirely our own. As to the tiffin itself, our friends in England regard us en masse as tiffin-eating animals; but the epithet does not describe us.— Very few men of business eat tiffin at all; unless a biscuit and a glass of wine, or a few sandwiches are entitled to bear the name. Idlers may indulge themselves as they like; but the man of business, who leaves home at ten o’clock and returns not before five—the intermediate hours being thoroughly occupied— must content himself with what is called a snack. In most cases, it will be found, that he eats a satisfying breakfast, and gets through the day very well with the aid of a biscuit, or a few sandwiches, and a glass of Sherry. In these times, the day’s work is really a day’s work; men do not go home to tiffins or early dinners; nor can they afford to indulge in the afternoon siestas, which in former days, were so general. A true bill, we believe, may be found on this latter charge, against some ladies and some regimental officers; but the majority of European residents in India have too much to do, to think of sleeping ​before dinner. From ten or eleven o’clock to five or six, office-men are hard at work. Let no one suppose, that they lounge through their business, after an indolent, undress fashion—that they loll upon easy couches, hookah in hand, and lazily give instructions to their underlings, whilst they sip their delicious sherbet and puff out the fumes of the odoriferous chillum. The life of a man of business in India is anything but a luxurious one. In spite of heat, of languor, of oppression, of all the overpowering influences of the climate, he toils throughout the long day, in a comfortless counting house, perhaps in a room, the heated atmosphere of which is rendered more intolerable by the presence of a score of oily native clerks, and returns home, at sunset, jaded and exhausted, to take his evening drive, and afterwards, perhaps, to be dragged to a sultry dinner party. The drive refreshes him a little. He “eats” as much air as he can get, and with it more dust than he desires. He has not very much to say to his wife, who sits beside him in the britzska; for his head is crammed full of business, and he cannot empty it on the spur of the moment. Perhaps, he does not accompany his wife at all. He mounts his horse; or he remains at home lounging about the verandah. Judging by the number of ladies to be seen on the course without their husbands, neither of these contingencies would appear to be very uncommon. Well; the ride or the no-ride over, the time for dressing has arrived. Ten to one, that the gentleman, if he be engaged to dine abroad, says that it is “a confounded bore”—and it is possible that his wife may agree with him. Still they go—and go, again and again—grumbling all the time, but taking, however obvious the remedy, no steps to mitigate the evil of which they complain.
There is nothing more easily regulated. You may dine out every night—or you may stay at home, with equal uniformity, if you will only come to the determination of shaping your measures accordingly. In India, as in all other societies, men and women are divided into two classes—the domestic and the undomestic. Your next door neighbour may be—like ours—the veriest gad-about in existence, and whilst you sit quietly at home every evening, the picture of domesticity, reading, like Sir James Mackintosh, to your wife and daughters, whilst they busily ply their needles, you may hear your neighbour’s carriage plunge out of his compound a little before eight and return a little after eleven, with the utmost regularity, six nights in the seven, whilst on the seventh, if curiously inclined, you might learn pretty nearly the number of his guests, by counting the strokes on the gong, which announces the arrival of the Sahib-logue. And these ​dinners,—what are they, for which so much is too frequently sacrificed? Not quite so intolerable, perhaps, as those two o’clock “daylight dinners,” round a table steaming with solid flesh, which Mrs. Fay has described; and yet, as we have already shown, regarding them not gastronomically but socially, evils of a magnitude not to be despised. The dinner is itself a passable dinner—good to look at, and not bad to eat; the wine is fair wine, and iced to a point preclusive of much criticism on the matter, if it be not fair—but neither glittering plate, nor dainty looking entremets, nor good wine iced to a deception, will go far to make a pleasant evening. There is for the most part a something wanting. One half of the party are worne out with the fatigues of the day; and the other half, if they have not that excuse, ought to have it—or a better one. And yet to these languor-ridden dinner-parties many betake themselves, night after night; grumbling each time at the dire necessity; yet well content to endure the same infliction on the morrow. He goes—Bachelor or Benedict; if the former, because he is assiduous as a visitor; if the latter, because he gives what he receives; and thereby brings down upon himself a deluge of invitations. He goes—and thus the day is concluded. It is his choice to go. Perhaps, it is his pleasure to grumble.
Still the diners-out form but a segment, though a large one, of our society. There are many who delight in the quiet evening at home, and rarely or never cross their threshold, to dinner, ball, play, or concert, after returning from their evening drive. The domestic virtues are cultivated as sedulously in India, as in England; and not, perhaps, by a smaller proportion of the gross amount of gentility. There are here, as at home, some who lead quiet domestic lives from necessity, and some from choice—and it will not appear upon enquiry now, whatever the case may have been in former days, that our standard of domestic morality is one degree below that of our brethren in the West.
* ↑ It is very, very rarely that an Overland Mail miscarries; the Memnon, Iron Steamer, with the Indian Mails, of July, 1843, was lost near Aden, and few of the boxes were saved; but a similar mischance had not occurred for many years.
* ↑ This had not been long written, when the sad tidings of Eldred Pottinger’s early death reached Calcutta. Strange that he should have been the first actor in the Affghan War and the last in the China War; that he should have been the prologue of the one and the epilogue of the other; that he should have defended Herat against the Persians, and that to him should have been entrusted, for conveyance to England the supplementary Chinese treaty. Sad, that he should haye escaped all the perils of the war in Affghanistan, to die from the effects of the accursed climate of one of our new Chinese Golgothas.
* ↑ We need scarcely add, that these portraits were, with few exceptions, remarkable failures. The Sketches of the Caubul Captives, said to be from the pencil of Lieut. Eyre, however commendable as works of art, bear no resemblance whatever to the parties indicated. The various prints of the murder of Sir W. McNaghten, of Lady McNaghten in the Passes, &c. &c. are still worse. The pictures represent men and women, but in no other respect do they represent the characters whose names they bear.
* ↑ Mr. Forbes, in his ''Oriental Memoirs'', says, “the Captains of the homeward-bound Indiamen demand eight thousand rupees (£1000) for the passage of a single person, and fifteen thousand for that of a gentleman and his wife.” He adds; “One gentleman distinguished for his liberality gave five thousand guineas for the accommodation of his wife and family, besides an ample supply of Madeira wine, provisions and delicacies for the table.’”’—This, however, was an extraordinary case even in those days,
* ↑ Voyage in the Indian Ocean and to Bengal, undertaken in the years 1789-90. Translated from the French of L. deGrandpré, an officer in the French army.
* ↑ We have a picture now before us in the Pictorial History of England—a work of no small merit—purporting to be a view of Calcutta in 1756. It contains both the Government House and the new Fort! The former was erected in 1804, and the earliest work of the latter (Lord Clive’s ravelin) in 1779.
* ↑ Quarterly Review—Forbes says in a passage, quoted a little further on, that his salary, shortly after he arrived, was 30 Rs. a month.
* ↑ Quarterly Review—Forbes says in a passage, quoted a little further on, that his salary, shortly after he arrived, was 30 Rs. a month.
* ↑ We must in all candour acknowledge, even at the present day, that Pondicherry is one of the very pleasantest places we have ever visited in India. The climate is extremely good; there is a delightful sea breeze; and the down itself is clean, regular, and more European in its aspect, than any locality in India. There is a nice open Place—the French must have a Place—and there are excellent roads in the outskirts of the Town—far better than in the suburbs of Calcutta. The gentry are eminently social and hospitable. The native soldiers have a sort of French air and a French twist of the moustache; and the poor seem happy and contented. There is an appearance of cleanliness and comfort, externally, about the native parts of Pondicherry, which cannot fail to strike the observer.
* ↑ Anglo-India—Vol 3. This biography, in respect of dates, is singularly deficient. At page 163, we are told that Kiernander was born in 1735. In 1795, therefore, he was sixty years old; and yet we are told that, at a period antecedent to this, he was in his 83d year.
* ↑ We have before us a volume printed in London in 1809, which contains a long and not very witty series of letters (originally published in a Calcutta Newspaper,) upon this very diverting subject. The book is entitled “The Ladies’ Monitor”, being a series of letters first published in Bengal on the subject of Female apparel, tending to favor a regulated adoption of Indian Costume; and a rejection of superfluous vesture by the ladies of this country, &c. &c, &c.” The work, like the title, is, rather long. It is nothing more than an amplification of the idea contained in the extract from Sir Thomas Munro’s letter, spun out to the length of 230 pages. Though some portions of it are amusing, we have not been able to find any detached passages, in illustration of our subject, which we could conveniently transfer to our pages.
* ↑ “Excursions, Adventures and Field-sports in Ceylon, &c. &c. by Col. James Campbell.” This is a recent work—but the period referred to is not recent.
* ↑ “The European in India, from a collection of drawings by Charles D’Oyley, with a preface and copious descriptions, by Capt. Thomas Williamson, &c. &c.” We refer the curious to this work, which contains numerous pictorial illustrations of Anglo Indian Life, thirty years ago.
* ↑ In this extract from Mrs. Fay’s letters, it will be seen what were the prices of the common articles of food in 1780. The Indian reader will at once perceive that they are much below the present standard. As time has advanced, and the influx of Europeans into India has increased, the ordinary provisions of the country have gradually become dearer and dearer, whilst the prices of all imported articles have fallen in an equal rate. Mr. Forbes referring to the earliest years of the present century, says; “The prices of most kinds of provisions were nearly doubled since I first knew Bombay (1765) but there appeared no deficiency of either European or Indian commodities. The shops in the bazaar were well stored with articles for luxury and comfort from all parts of the world; and every breeze wafted a fresh supply.”—Mrs. Fay mentions, that in her time, Claret was sold at sixty rupees a dozen. Lord Valentia tells us. that it was poor stuff, being highly “medicated” for the voyage. This was the English Claret, which, of late years has been almost driven out of the market. Fifty years ago, it was not unusual for wine to run short at the different settlements; and then the price kept pace with the scarcity. Mr. Cordener naively tells us, that when the ship, in which he sailed, reached Bombay, there was an immediate enquiry after Claret. “Among the first enquiries which were made of the Captain of the ship, was, how many chests of Claret he had on board? that favorite beverage being then scarce at the settlement.” A quantity of Claret, Burgundy and Hermitage, to the value of nearly three lakhs of rupees, now passes annually through the Calcutta Custom House.
* ↑ In a passage quoted above it will have been seen, that according to Lord Valentia, the tiffin hour was twelve—and yet the two writers refer to the same period.
* ↑ New Monthly Magazine.
* ↑ Mr. G. W. Johnson adds curry and ale as two of the components of an ordinary Calcutta breakfast., Our experience does not extend to any class of Calcutta society, at whose breakfast tables these delicacies are to be seen.
* ↑ Small parties, badly managed, are worse than large ones. At the latter you may, perhaps, stumble on some one, whom you wish to meet; and, by a little finesse, contrive to get through the evening with profit or with pleasure. At all events, your dulness and desespoir are less perceptible. At the former there is no hope for you if the company be ill assorted. In this country, however, where many gentlemen are engaged in business throughout the day, and many ladies, during several months of the year, are afraid to leave the house before sunset, a well regulated system of dinner-visiting is useful and may be agreeable; for without such visiting, social intercourse would often be brought to a dead lock. It is principally because so little regard is paid to the important point of the assortment of guests, that dinner-partics in Calcutta are so dull and unsocial. In the more limited society of a Mofussil station this evil does not exist; but it is replaced by another of equal magnitude. If one runs no risk of meeting a party of entire strangers at dinner, one soon begins to weary of seeing the same faces every night of one’s life.