The British Empire, in all its arrogance and mercantile plunder, was vividly evoked by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel Vanity Fair. Published in 1847-8, it offers a glittery panorama of sugar impresarios, East India Company heiresses and remittance men who have died (or are about to die) of drink or yellow fever in India and the Caribbean. Miss Schwarz, the novel’s egregious “West Indian” (as white planters were then known), wears “earrings like chandeliers” and is consumed by wayward appetites. When not boozing, she haunts London’s “Tapioca Coffee-House” for news of her financial investments overseas.
Real-life Schwarzes populate the diaries kept by memsahibs and army officers in India during the heyday of empire. East India Company employees were often ignorant, limited men who wanted only to make money fast and spend it faster. Their wives, many of them, suffered a divan-bound inertia while reading trashy novels sent out from England. But, as Ferdinand Mount argues convincingly in The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 (Simon & Schuster), the British Empire in India was at heart “the creation of merchants” and thrived as a “commercial enterprise”. (As head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, Mount understands well the lure of capital.)
Mount’s book, an exploration of his ancestors’ role in British India from 1805-1905, is Thackeray-like in its social scope and the brilliance of its writing. At over 750 pages it is heavy on the wrists but somehow the pages keep turning. Mount tells the story through the fortunes of three intermarried families – the Lows, the Shakespears and the Thackerays – who kept high office in 19th century India. His grandmother was a Low with, presumably, a tincture of Thackeray blood. The Thackerays themselves had made their fortune in India through the East India Company, but the future novelist William Makepeace was typically sent “home” from Calcutta at the age of five for an education in London.
The Lows, Presbyterian Scots, came from Fife and embodied a very Scottish industriousness and sense of duty. David Cameron happens to be related to the Lows while Mount happens to be the prime minister’s cousin. Talk about a family affair. Quite a few of us have a family member who served in the Raj at some level. My Presbyterian grandfather, himself a Fife-born Scot, worked as a marine engineer in 1930s Bombay and Rangoon for the sonorously named Scindia Steam Navigation Shipping Company. From Mount’s book I gather that Scindia (or “Sindia”, as he spells it) was a Hindu dynasty which ruled over a large part of India until independence in 1947.
A photograph of Engineer John Wilson Thomson, taken in 1935, shows him standing barefoot outside a Buddhist temple in Rangoon. In his trilby hat, white flannel trousers and pipe in one hand, he looks every inch the European abroad. His alienation from the stockyards and steamship industries of Glasgow could not have been more complete. Rangoon’s dry temple air might have been a relief to him after the humidity and damp of dockside Bombay. What made him so ill in the East was never recorded in family history, but a shadow cast by an unknown person in the photograph is like the presentiment of something bad. Two months after the photograph was taken, my grandfather was dead.
At the heart of Mount’s book is General Sir John Low, whose exceptionally long life spanned over ninety years between 1788 and 1880. Having left Scotland for India in 1805 as a 15-year-old army officer, he fought in battles against the Scindia dynasty and, later, played a vital role in crushing the anti-British uprising of 1857. Some of his extended clan lie buried in Calcutta’s South Park Street Cemetery (in Mount’s view, the “most atmospheric of graveyards anywhere in the world”). Among the draped marble urns and keening angels moulder such eminences as Richmond Makepeace Thackeray, father of the novelist, as well as members of the Shakespear family, who served in India in the military and were tied to the Thackerays by marriage and patronage. Their lavish neo-Palladian memorials are expressive of East India Company power but, above all, of death as an occasion for mercantile display.