In 1890, Mary Thorn Carpenter, an American writer in her late twenties, decided to spend a winter in India. Travelling and living in luxury, she took a distinct liking to the country, marvelling at the diversity of its cities and the people who inhabited them.
Her 1892 book, A Girl’s Winter in India, offers a rare American woman’s perspective on the subcontinent at a time when the British Empire had an almost complete grip over it. The daughter of the liberal politician Jacob B Carpenter, who served in the Electoral College during the Abraham Lincoln era, she was nonetheless not free of the colonial biases of her time. Today, even liberals in the US would find her casual appreciation of “punkahwallahs” – men who swung a fan all night in ship cabins so their masters could sleep comfortably – deeply problematic.
Her first port of call in India was Bombay, a city she liked from the very beginning.
“Through these streets sweep a variety of types and races, which outrival in colour and brilliancy anything of the kind in the East,” she wrote. “Here and there a European in civilized clothes may be seen, who soon disappears in the ocean of colour, which seems as if the kaleidoscope had been broken by some giant hand and the colours scattered over everything.”
Carpenter observed as many shades of colour “in complexion as in costume”, describing “Mahomettans, with enormous turbans of green or white, and long beards dyed a brilliant red, as proof they have made the pilgrimage to Mecca”. She also wrote of “rich Chinese in gorgeously embroidered pantaloons and long black cues, with silk vests under white silk redingotes, their pleated umbrellas inevitably raised above their heads”.
She was impressed by the Fort area, with its public edifices, government offices, cottages and churches, which she felt made it not greatly different from “any finely laid out city”.
Like many Western travellers to Bombay in the 19th century, Carpenter was struck by the Parsis, whom she described as “that strange Eastern sect of fire-worshippers” who came from Persia.
“The Parsees are the Jews of Bombay, its richest merchants, its greatest bankers, most honoured citizens,” she wrote. “Like the Hebrews, they are generous and charitable, and a beggar among them is entirely unknown. Many of them have amassed colossal fortunes; and, it must be confessed, have employed them to the benefit of the entire population of Bombay – Hindus and Europeans, as well as their own people.”
Carpenter stayed at Watson’s Esplanade Hotel, which she described as “a high brown caravansary, with many verandas, looking across the large open square encircled by great public buildings and government offices, which remind you very much of an English city”.
She found the hotel reminiscent of military barracks. “One must indeed learn to do without luxurious surroundings during a trip to India,” she wrote. “There are no carpets anywhere to be seen, and our bedrooms are furnished with severe simplicity. The bed is without springs, with a couple of quilted arrangements thrown over the bare slats; and I have not seen anything that resembled a table in my room, unless it is a wooden bench slatted like a chicken-coop.” The only real comfort, she noted, was the en-suite bathroom.
She also wrote of what she called Bombay’s suburbs, such as Byculla and Matheran, though she clarified that the latter lay far from the city.
By then, Malabar Hill was already considered Bombay’s most prestigious residential area, and Carpenter seemed especially fond of it. “In the afternoons the drives on Malabar Hill are lined with Europeans and natives, walking, driving and sitting about the gardens of roses under the high, flowering trees, which border the roadway, and overlook the great stretch of sea, and the sunlit water of the beautiful Bay of Bombay,” she wrote. “The residents drive in beautiful carriages, with footmen in gorgeous Eastern liveries; and we add our due share of colour to the scene with a luxurious open barouche, two men on the box in green turbans – fifty yards of fine silk in each – white jackets, and trousers to the bare knee, black legs and feet, gold and green sashes about their waists, and two more of these extraordinary natives, standing behind and continuously dismounting to clear the way for our carriage to pass.”
Carpenter was even permitted to enter the Tower of Silence, where she witnessed a funeral. “No Parsee woman ever goes to the burial-place until her last journey,” she noted.
As a privileged traveller, she experienced the best of the city, including a ball at the Royal Yacht Club that lasted into the early hours. “The company were principally Europeans in uniforms, with their wives and daughters in French ball-dresses, who danced with all the vivacity possible,” she observed. “It only takes a few years of the trying climate, however, to change the ruddiest English beauty into a pale-complexioned Anglo-Indian.” She added pointedly that “there was scarcely a woman who had the slightest claim to good looks”.
‘Beautiful’ town
From Bombay, Carpenter travelled by first-class train to Allahabad before proceeding to Calcutta. She enjoyed the “leisurely twenty miles an hour” pace, with 30-minute stops for tea and meals at stations.
“The Indian stations are the prettiest in the world, the station-master being stimulated by a prize offered yearly by a railway company for the most beautiful grounds and surroundings; the natives fill every space with flowers and shrubbery, and plant vines to creep over the buildings themselves,” she wrote. “Up and down the station paces the bhistie (water-carrier), who supplies water in brass lotas to thirsty travellers, replenishing his pouch, the tanned hide of a bullock, at a station well.”
In Allahabad, she wandered through the bazaars and became acquainted with a Brahmin family. During her brief stay, she heard of an American Presbyterian missionary known as “Miss S.”, who had lived in the city for 23 years and was said to be the niece of a former distinguished American statesman. Carpenter sought her out and found the woman the locals called “Miss Saheb”.
“In a pretty compound, rose-garlanded and vine-twisted, stands the thatched-roof bungalow, where we find the little American lady,” she wrote. “Here she lived sixteen years, her only companion, an English assistant, a nurse and doctor all in one.” Carpenter found her compatriot’s life dull, though she thought Allahabad pleasant enough.
She was deeply impressed by the “Great Melah”. “The melah is a high feast, which takes place once every year at a point where the yellow Ganges flows into the blue Jumna river,” Carpenter wrote. “What a sight! Thousands of pilgrims from all over India and the great Thibetan table-land come here to bathe in the Ganges – old and lame, young and beautiful, rajahs and beggars – camping in their bamboo huts on the plain by the riverside, among the mud-covered holy men; for bathing in the Ganges will destroy all sins, past, present and future.”
Calling Allahabad a “beautiful, regular town”, Carpenter noted that European bungalows were “surrounded by gardens, tastefully laid out, with vines falling like a curtain in a shower of purple blossoms over the porte cochère”.
Royal visitor
When Carpenter arrived in Calcutta in January 1891, the city was preparing for a visit by Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia.
She shared the city’s excitement at welcoming the man who would be the last Tsar. “From a balcony, in a clear warm sunshine, under an Eastern sky, with noble figures of Arabians, Persians and Indians, in brilliant cashmeres, thronging the streets, we witnessed the entrée of the Czarowitch,” she wrote. “All day the excitement was intense, for the Indian people dearly love a ‘tomasha,’ and were formerly ruled by pageants. Only the East can one witness such a glorious spectacle.”
She described Nicholas in detail, noting his “his silver Russian helmet, on the front of which is a silver white aigrette twelve inches high, a blue and silver-embroidered uniform, and a braided white-cloth jacket edged with sable thrown over one shoulder”. His expression, she felt, was “unexpected and dignified”.
-2.jpg "Nicholas II. Credit: Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain].")
The city’s police chief appeared visibly anxious under the responsibility of protecting the visiting royal. “Woe unto England if any nihilistic attempt should succeed here,” Carpenter wrote. Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, had been assassinated in St Petersburg, and the crown prince himself would survive an assassination attempt in Japan during his Asian tour.
Carpenter was more impressed by the people of Calcutta than by the city itself, which she found neither pretty nor picturesque.
“What wonderful people these Bengalis are,” she wrote. “There are fifteen thousand learned university graduates in Calcutta alone – among them high caste Brahmin students, who have first studied and learned English, and then their own language, besides Sanskrit, which is the language of their books, the literary language of India.”
She repeatedly praised the local reverence for education. “Calcutta is certainly the Oxford of India – a great university centre,” she wrote. “The Bengalis learn English very readily, and their study of the language is far more profound and earnest than that of college boys in England.”
As in Bombay, Carpenter stayed at one of the city’s finest hotels, the Great Eastern, though she complained that it was “greatly behind the times in every modern invention”. Once again, she moved among the elite, attending a reception held in honour of Nicholas and meeting rulers from princely states such as Cooch Behar and Mysore. “Native princes, maharajahs and chieftains sparkle and glitter with gems and embroideries,” she wrote.
During her winter in India, Carpenter also visited Benares, Agra, Lucknow, Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad. Travelling in utmost luxury and enjoying some of the finest hospitality in the country, she seemed to fall in love with India, but didn’t get enough of the country.
She summed up her feelings at the end of her book:
“How hurried and imperfect are these impressions – the faintest hint of real feeling. Shall I ever be able to trace the subtle poetry and magic of India from a bit of writing, a scrap of an hour here, or a day there, when all is left unsaid that could make it a reality? And, above all, shall anything in these pages induce you to go to the East? If not, what have you gained from ‘A Girl’s Winter in India’?”
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.
