The wittiest letters to come out of British India, written by a governor-general’s sister who would much have preferred to be at home
Twelve Thousand People and a Spaniel: Emily Eden Goes Up the Country
I have a new favorite person and she has been dead since 1869. I stayed up until two last night reading her letters with a flashlight, because my roommate has an eight o’clock class, and I kept having to put the pillow over my face. She is funnier than anybody I know. She is also, I realized at about one-thirty, sitting inside one of the great disasters of the British empire and making jokes about the luggage. I have been thinking about that combination all day.
Her name was Emily Eden. This was the reading for my course on British and Indian writing of the 1800s, and I had expected a dull Victorian lady. I owe her an apology.
Who She Was
She was born in 1797 into a grand English political family, one of fourteen children. She never married. Neither did her favorite brother, George, and the two of them and another sister kept house together in London, at the center of the governing set. She knew every prime minister of her day. One of them is said to have wanted to marry her. She found him tiresome.
In 1835 her brother, by then Lord Auckland, was appointed governor-general of India, the ruler of the whole British territory there. He needed a hostess. So Emily, who was thirty-eight, who loved her garden, her friends and her own sofa, was packed onto a ship for a five-month voyage round Africa to a country she had no wish to see. She stayed six years. She wrote home constantly. In 1866, long after, she published a selection of the letters under the title Up the Country.
The Journey
The book covers a single enormous trip. In October 1837 the governor-general set out from Calcutta to tour the northern provinces and meet the great Sikh ruler of the Punjab. It took two and a half years. They went by river steamer up the Ganges and then overland, in tents, a thousand miles to the hills.
And they did not travel light. The camp, she writes, contained about twelve thousand people. There were eight hundred and fifty camels, a hundred and forty elephants, hundreds of horses, and bullock carts beyond counting. Every morning the entire city was struck before dawn and moved ten miles down the road, where a duplicate set of tents had been sent ahead and was waiting. Her own tent had rooms. Her spaniel, Chance, had his own servant.
She found it ridiculous and said so. She describes the governor-general of India processing through the dust on an elephant, and looking, to his sister, exactly like a man in a play. She describes dinners with local princes at which neither side can speak to the other and everyone exchanges trays of shawls that must afterward be handed in to the government. She describes a durbar where a small boy raja, weighed down with emeralds the size of eggs, falls fast asleep. She says that she and her sister have had to give up trying to look dignified in a howdah, because of the motion.
She is very good on the English. The bored young officers. The wives stranded in tiny stations with nothing to do, who drive forty miles to look at a new bonnet. The clergyman who preaches against dancing to a congregation of eleven. She says of one remote outpost that the inhabitants have not seen a new face in so long that they greet the viceregal party like shipwrecked sailors sighting a sail.
The Homesickness
Under the wit there is a steady ache. She counts the months. She dreams of rain on an English lawn. She writes that she would give all the elephants in India for a walk in a wet lane. Letters from home take five months and she rations them. When she finally reaches the hills, at a place called Simla, with pine trees and cool air, she is so happy she can hardly write straight, and it is because it looks a little like Scotland.
My professor says that is the key to the whole literature of the British in India: it is written by people who are looking somewhere else. They are in one of the most extraordinary countries on earth and they are thinking about hedgerows.
What She Saw and Did Not Stop
Then there are the pages I read at one-thirty. In the winter of 1837 the camp passed through a region in the grip of famine. The rains had failed. She describes it plainly, and it is unbearable: the starving crowding round the tents, children like skeletons, the dead by the road. She and her sister had food cooked and handed out. She adopted, for a while, an orphaned baby. She writes that the sights are so dreadful one does not know how to go on eating one’s dinner.
And they went on. Twelve thousand people, a hundred and forty elephants, moving through a starving country at ten miles a day, on a tour whose purpose was ceremony. She saw it. She was sickened. She was the sister of the one man in India with the power to turn the whole procession into a relief column. The camp moved on.
I do not think she was heartless. I think she could not see any connection between the elephants and the famine, because nobody around her could. It was simply how a governor-general traveled.
The Brother
And all through the letters, in the background, her brother is making a decision. He was a mild, decent, conscientious man, by every account, and not strong. His advisers had persuaded him that Russia was creeping toward India through Afghanistan, and that the ruler in Kabul could not be trusted. In 1838, from that cool hill station where Emily was so happy, he issued the order to invade, depose the Afghan king and put a more obliging one in his place.
She mentions it lightly. The army is assembling. So-and-so has gone with the force. There is a grand review. She paints the Sikh maharajah, a tiny one-eyed old man like a mouse, she says, with grey whiskers, who drinks a terrifying liquor and asks very sharp questions.
What happened is in every history. The invasion succeeded at first. Then, in the winter of 1841, the country rose. The British garrison at Kabul, some four and a half thousand soldiers and twelve thousand followers, tried to retreat through the snow to India. Almost none arrived. It was the worst British military catastrophe of the century. Her brother was recalled. He never held high office again.
She does not write about that. The published letters stop before it.
What I Make of Her
I have gone back and forth all day. I adore her voice. I would have followed her anywhere. She could see through every piece of pomp in front of her, starting with her own family. And the one thing she could not see through was the thing itself: the right of all those tents to be there.
My professor put it this way in class. Emily Eden is a satirist of manners inside a system she never questions. She laughs at how the empire looks and not at what it does. And that, she said, looking at me, because she knows where I write, is the most comfortable kind of satire there is, and the most common.
I took that personally, which I think I was meant to. The house essay at The London Prat, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says the same thing less politely: mocking the hats while leaving the power alone is entertainment for the people in the hats.
For the Paper
So this week’s piece tries to do what she did not. A senior official, it reports, has completed a two-year tour of the regions with a staff of twelve thousand, in order to gain a better understanding of local conditions. Local conditions were described as starving. The official’s sister said the scenery had been tiring and the elephants uneven. A decision to invade a neighboring country was taken on the veranda, between luncheon and a nap, and is expected to go well.
It will go on the English satirical news page and in Bohiney. Her book is free at Project Gutenberg. Read it for the spaniel. Stay for the winter of 1837. More of what I write is here.