In 1926, Gladys Pearce, fresh from America, was new to routines in British India. Although she admired the tailor, she let the cook know she was not as naive as he’d hoped.
In my previous post, A Reluctant Memsahib, I shared a little about Gladys being thrust into her new role. She was expected to have servants, as wife of Ken (American forester for the Indian government) even when she preferred to do things herself. Here are a few more fun notes from her diary, revealing what that was like for her.
1926, Gladys Pearce
Today a dhurzee (tailor) came to sew, bringing his hand-model Singer sewing machine. He spread a sheet on the floor of the veranda and sat cross-legged on it, his machine before him.
He made slip-covers for the naked sofa and chair. The machine hummed busily as he turned the wheel with his right hand while guiding the work with his left hand and toes. As for the rest of my help, including the cook:
In 1920s British Raj India, independent, hardworking American Gladys was expected to have servants — whether she wanted them or not.
As I write Gladys’s biography of her years in 1920s to 1930s India, I strive to put in context her role at that time as a memsahib. This was a century ago. She and Ken (Americans) had been thrust into the British Raj system, which they didn’t entirely embrace.
Yet they didn’t entirely reject it, either. As master-servant relationships in general (especially between races and economic statuses) make me uncomfortable, here’s my attempt to look at Ken and Gladys’s roles as objectively as I can.
Definitions of memsahib vary. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a white foreign woman of high social status living in India especially: the wife of a British official”. (The word “white” is rather telling about attitudes in the time of the Raj. Ugh.)
The Collins Dictionary has a simpler definition: “title for a woman in a position of authority and/or the wife of a Sahib”. That, I think, more accurately applied to Gladys, being American.
Eventually the term encompassed Indian upper class women as well. In Economic and Political Weekly, Memsahib: Who Are You?, Swastika Hore points out: “A time would come when the upper classes of Indians would be addressed as sahibs and their wives memsahibs by people lower down the social scale–evidently a colonial hangover.”
As I include diary entries in blog posts that include references to Ken and Gladys managing servants, readers incorrectly may assume that where there are servants, there must be masters who feel entitled. Conversely, Ken and Gladys were genuinely hard working people who had not grown up with servants nor expected to have them.
A Forester and a Teacher as Sahib and Memsahib
Ken, at age sixteen (in 1915) graduated from high school and worked in logging camps. He studied forestry in college, then worked as an assistant professor before being hired by the British Indian government in 1923 at 25 years old.
In my post Ken in the Raj, he describes his arrival in India, when he obviously enjoyed getting elevated attention and honor. Yet during his following ten years in India, Ken worked tirelessly, often from sunup to sundown, in Indian logging camps and mills. He never expected more work from others than he did himself. His clothes grew so sweaty he sometimes changed his work clothes three times in a day.
As for Gladys, she’d been a working woman before moving to India: a self-supporting junior high school teacher. She also was her own cook and housekeeper. However, in India as memsahib of Ken (an important government appointee) Gladys was suddenly expected to have servants do all her household chores. She was often annoyed at not being able to simply do them herself and her own way.
Once, when expecting guests, Gladys wanted to sweep cigar ashes off her veranda. However, her butler (main servant) Freddy was horrified at the thought of Gladys doing it herself, so refused to find her a broom. He also refused to do it himself, considering it below his caste and dignity to sweep. He insisted he must instead fetch a “sweeper” from another village.
In 1926 British India, the Adyar Club in Madras (Chennai) had an unusual resident.
Here’s yet another of Gladys’s funny experiences in 1920s India, seeing yet more things unfamiliar to her in America! First, a quick note:
Note: Subscribers to my Sell Your Nonfiction & Parenting by Faith blogs (with email addresses from my old blogs merging with my new this week) may wonder about these history-related posts! Future writing and parenting articles will post here at CrossConnectMedia.com. I hope you’ll also enjoy these quirky excerpts from my nonfiction book in progress based on near-100-year-old letters.
Now back to our Seattle gal, Gladys, and her adventures:
Gladys Gose Pearce, October, 1926
Adyar Club, founded in 1832, is our favorite club. We get to see old friends, new friends, and other people’s romances in the making. We love playing golf there on its mild course with the smooth grounds, kept in perfect condition as a laborer whisks them to perfection after each player departs.
After golf, I like to take a refreshing bath, change for dinner, and have time for a rubber of bridge on the veranda with a favorite drink. Twilight deepens, a brief sunset, short twilight, then it is night. Sometimes a tea and dance at the end of the day is pleasant.
At the club I saw a strange creature with a long tail dart across the veranda, followed by several small ones.
In 1926, Kerala India, Gladys and Ken finish their honeymoon hiking in Silent Valley. (How silent? Can screams still be heard?)
Photo by J. Kenneth Pearce of their group in Silent Valley with Gladys on the chair.
1926, Gladys Gose Pearce, Kerala India
Dear Diary,
Today we finished up our honeymoon with a trip to Silent Valley, where few white men and fewer women have ever been. There was no road. We had to hike in with our camping necessities carried on coolie’s heads.
NOTE: In this context nearly one hundred years ago, coolie meant laborer. I‘m aware this term is considered insensitive now in many countries. Since this is an excerpt from an actual diary from 1926, to alter it would be to alter historical context. Gladys and Ken simply went by terms they were told to use back then, and in their minds the term simply meant a hired laborer.
I had been looking forward to some needed exercise on this trip. But word had gone ahead that Ken, the Chief Engineer Sahib, was bringing his Memsahib, so when had we arrived at the end of the road to meet the coolies, we found that the Indian Ranger had arranged to have a chair provided to carry me. Two long bamboo poles had been lashed to an office chair and four husky coolies stood by.
“Imagine me in a chair!” I snorted to Ken. “I don’t need or want a chair!”
I, Laurie, must interrupt here to note that Gladys was very athletic –a former swimmer and basketball player, and a physical education teacher (and yes, that was unusual, even in America, in the early 1900s.) She was also a very independent woman, so felt no need to have others carry her.)Now, back to Gladys:
Ken told me, “The coolies are hired and I’ll have to pay for them anyway. We might as well take them, and use the chair for crossing streams. The ranger thought he was being considerate of you.”
The servants and peons we left behind bid us a rather anxious farewell because they thought going into Silent Valley wasn’t such a good idea. Only Freddy our butler accompanied us. Ken’s Shikaris (gun-bearers and trackers) led the way, followed by Ken, me on foot, chair coolies and porter coolies, all strung out single file.
As we climbed the steep trail, the sun grew hotter. Although Ken reduced his usual long stride to that of the rest of the party, I was hot and tired. I glanced back at the chair but pride forbade my mentioning that I no longer felt it to be useless. Ken seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. He called a halt and said casually, “You might as well use the chair.”
Such welcome words! I took my place on the seat. The coolies lifted the chair poles to their shoulders and set off at a steady gate. It was not unalloyed pleasure, however. One coolie seemed a little shorter than the others, so I felt at any time I might slip from the chair and down the precipice at the edge of the path. A shift of coolies made no difference, for the path itself sloped to the outside bank. Thus the coolies on that side were lower than the two on the inside near the bank.
From Laurie: This made me giggle a bit, imagining Gladys hanging on for dear life, when she was supposed to be resting!
A Respite on a Veranda
Once we reached the summit, I was delighted to walk again, then as we next hiked downhill the going was easy. The place where we’d stay that night was a welcome sight: a little square one-room house, perched up on four iron-wood posts. The stairs led to a diminutive serambai veranda where we sat to gaze across the valley. As we rested, Freddy brought us a refreshing drink of fresh green coconut milk.
But then… (creepy crawly warning!)
The next day I made the acquaintance of the most detested denizen of the jungle, the leech. Looking like a small animated rubber band, it crawls like an inchworm up your legs or through the eyelets of your shoes, seeking a spot where the vein lies just under the skin. You do not feel it bite the tiny triangular hole through which is sucks your blood. You’re not aware of its presence until the leech drops off, distended with blood to the size of your little finger, while the hole left behind continues to ooze. For days after, whenever you bathe, the bleeding starts again.
The Indian Forest Guard who accompanied us through the deep jungle carried a little bag of damp salt on the end of stick. Whenever he spied a leech he touched it with the salt so it curled up and dropped, yet while one was being routed, another would crawl on, undetected.
I asked, “Are the leeches always this bad?”
“Oh, no, Madam; in the dry season the ticks come.”
