A different perspective

When World War I began in 1914, sisters, Jon and Rumer Godden, aged six and seven respectively, left England to join their parents in a village in Bengal. There the sisters led an idyllic life, living in a house full of servants, staging plays, writing books and spending the hot summers holidaying in the hills.

Pre-Independent India through the eyes of little British girls

In a unique memoir, ‘Two Under the Indian Sun’, published by Speaking Tiger, the sisters describe their everyday lives in pre-independent Bengal. Written with a “child’s candour and wide-eyed sense of wonder” this narrative paints a vivid picture of life in India of the early 1900s. An excerpt from the book.

Hannah was the greatest possible contrast; she was an Ayah, middle-aged, dignified, and infinitely more stable than poor Nana. She came from South India and her home was near Madras in a village among coconut palms. None of the other servants could speak one word of Hannah’s native Tamil but it did not matter as she always spoke English to us in a comforting sing song voice.

Her skin was so dark it was almost black and she wore her grey hair in a chignon. She had the multiple ivory bangles that, in the South show a woman is married—‘But he dead, long long ago,’ said Hannah—silver rings on her toes, while her silver earrings were so heavy they had stretched the lobes of her ears. She always wore white saris with a wide red border and kept her keys tied in a knot that hung over her shoulder.

Hannah was Christian, a Roman Catholic Thomist, perhaps the oldest Christianity in the world, because Saint Thomas Didymus, the apostle, was supposed to have come to India teaching and preaching. ‘Did he really?’ we asked Mam. There had been no mention of this at St Augustine’s.

‘Did he?’
‘He might have. Nobody knows,’ said Mam, but Hannah knew.

‘He buried in Saint Thomas’s Mount, Madras,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Every year ten thousand peoples, hundreds of thousands, make pilgrimages there.’

Our own brand of Christianity seemed poor compared to this. Hannah was too gentle to say it but she obviously thought so too. Where for instance was our devotion?

Hannah got up at five o’clock every Sunday morning and took the train to Dacca where there was a Roman Catholic Church and convent of St Joseph. The nearest Church of England was in Dacca too but it was thought too far for us though we had a horse and trap.

Our Goanese cook was also a Catholic but he certainly did not go all the way to Dacca to church. When he was not cooking, he slept in the sun on a string bed outside the cookhouse, while his little ‘mate’ scoured the saucepans with ashes, sand and cold water; the cook seemed to know none of the prayers and Latin hymns Hannah knew, but all these were degrees in religion.

‘Hindus have them too,’ said Jon.

Just as Nitai, the sweeper, kept apart because he was so low, the gardeners kept apart because they were so high. They were Brahmins, the highest caste of Hindu, wearing the sacred three-stranded thread, three for the Hindu trinity, Brahma, the Creator, Visnu, the Preserver, Siva, the Destroyer.

If even our shadows fell on the gardeners’ food it was polluted and they could not eat it, nor did they eat anything but vegetables, rice and pulses, not even an egg. Govind, the head gardener, was especially strict and holy: he had a sacred little tulsi tree in front of his hut and burnt a saucer of incense there, pouring milk on the ground before it and strewing flowers. ‘Govind is doing his puja,’ Nancy told us, but often he sat still, meditating, and then he would not hear if anybody spoke to him.

Fa’s personal bearer, Jetta, seemed free from taboos, and much merrier than the other servants. He was a Lepcha from Sikkim, the independent small state on the borders of Tibet. His village, where he owned a mud-walled house and some terraced fields for growing maize, millet and sunflowers, was high in the Himalayas.

Jetta was quite different from anyone else in the house; he was flat-faced, with slit-cornered eyes and a golden skin, squat rather than short, bow-legged and immensely strong. He always wore white trousers and a white coat buttoned down the front and had a little round black hat embroidered in black.

When Jetta went with Fa to shooting camps he took his kukri, the wide flat-bladed and wickedly curved Nepali knife he wore in his belt, and he could have fought and beaten all the other servants single-handed; but Jetta only fought if he were drunk; he smelled abominable then because he drank rice toddy.

He was a Buddist of an unfervent kind; in Darjeeling, we were to see the Buddist stupas, the monks with their maroon robes, the prayer wheels that turned gently round and round and the prayer flags that sent prayers into the wind. There was always a mixture of mountain lustiness and gentleness about Jetta.

Then there was the Muslim contingent: our table servants and the masalchi whose work was rather the same as a tweeny’s in a once-upon-a-time English household; he washed the dishes, carried hot water for the baths, lit the braziers, ran to and from the kitchen with dishes, and made the servants’ tea.

He did not come into the front part of the house, except to blow up the brazier on toffee-making days, and he was not given white clothes like the other servants, but a plain khaki shirt.

Mustapha, the young khidmutgar—waiter—was a special friend of ours and handsome with his dark curly beard and melting dark eyes, whereas the nursery bearer, Abdul, was our enemy; in fact nobody liked him. Mustapha was an impeccably trained servant but Abdul was a nuisance, a know-all, perpetually in trouble.

He was seventeen and of a peculiar brown colour like pale liver, with oversized big toes. He was as ugly inside as out; he stole and lied, told tales and cheated and he was always being sent away yet always came back because Mam was sorry for him; Azad Ali, the butler, used to beat him.

(From Two Under The Indian Sun: A Memoir, by Jon and Rumer Godden; Published by Speaking Tiger; 299.)