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.
