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Balliol has a web of connections with the Indian subcontinent
which go back well into the nineteenth century. Jowett as Master
nurtured Indian students in Oxford in and outside the college.
The number of Indian students at the college was of course one
of the bones of the contention with neighbouring Trinity. Less
well known is the extraordinary care he took of a Somerville student
and brother of a Balliol man, Cornelia Sorabji, who became India’s
first woman lawyer. In her autobiography she recounted his “marvellous
kindnesses”.1 He would take her for walks (when
she had great difficulty matching her steps to his little ones),
invited her to his weekend parties at the Lodge, and at these
introduced her to many of the political and intellectual luminaries
of the day, including Gladstone and Balfour, Max Muller, the historians,
Froude and Freeman, and many churchmen of different persuasions.
She would sometimes dine on Sundays in Full Term and would attend
the concerts he had established, walking on his arm up the Hall
steps and sitting beside him during the concert. Jowett was also
deeply involved in the provision of training for ICS “probationers”
in between their entrance examination and their first posting
in India, welcoming as many of them as possible to Balliol. Another
Balliol Fellow and Bursar at the end of the nineteenth century,
Sir William Markby, who is commemorated in the ante-chapel, was
a former Judge of the Calcutta High Court and Vice-Chancellor
of Calcutta University. On leaving India in 1878 he had become
Reader in Indian Law and supervisor to all the ICS probationers.
Cornelia Sorabji also attended his lectures.
One of Jowett’s successors as Master, 1907-16, J.L. Strachan
Davidson, was at the heart of discussions to reform the ICS entrance
examinations so that it strengthened and favoured those in the
Greats School. Balliol, not surprisingly, took the lion’s
share of Indian appointments compared with other Oxford colleges,
with 50% of its matriculates known to have worked outside the
UK within the Empire between 1874/5 and 1913/14 working in an
official capacity in India, though this figure dropped to just
under 14% between the two World Wars. The only college to come
near it was Corpus Christi.2 There were also Anglican connections
between Balliol and India. For example, E.J. Palmer, the Bishop
of Bombay for twenty years in the early twentieth century (1908-1928),
had been Chaplain-Fellow of the college. He was the son and nephew
of two former Balliol Fellows.3 India’s place in the destinies
of Balliol men was very strong. Taking all types of work, nearly
60% of all Balliol matriculates known to have worked outside the
UK within the Empire between 1874/5 and 1913/14 worked in India,
and even between the Wars that figure was still just over 22%.4
Yet a further Balliol Indian dimension was Master A.D. Lindsay’s
welcome to M.K. Gandhi, the celebrated Indian nationalist leader
and proponent of non-violent civil resistance. In the autumn of
1931 he came to England to participate in one of a series of Round
Table Conferences in London to discuss constitutional reform intended
to set India on the path to dominion status. Gandhi alone represented
the Indian National Congress, the premier nationalist organization
of the time. He stayed in an East End settlement, unlike other
Indian participants, and at weekends got away to meet people interested
in India, and to speak about his country to those who could mould
attitudes towards India. Two of these weekends were spent in Balliol,
giving him time to think and speak informally with intellectuals
and politicians – among them Lord Lothian, who was then
Under-Secretary of State for Indian and the then Beit Professor
of Colonial History, Sir Reginald Coupland. Gandhi’s signature
and those of his entourage are to be seen in the Master’s
visitors’ book, and it is thought that his own room is the
ground floor one currently used by the Senior Tutor.5
To hand this year are two very different but equally fascinating
pieces of evidence of these diverse threads which bind the college
and the subcontinent. One is a collection of photo albums belonging
to the family of F.F. Sladen, Balliol 1894-9. Now in the college
archive they are also preserved on CD-Rom, to protect their increasingly
frail bindings dating from the turn of the century. They contain
much material which would be present in any family album of that
period and social standing – photos of Oxford, college teams,
Ball participants, home, family and holidays. But Sladen joined
the United Provinces cadre of the ICS in 1899 and retired in 1925.
He married in India and his son was born in India. Consequently
the albums contain some very important visual records of his time
in India. These include many “social” pictures of
family and friends, including British weddings in India and also
the earliest pictures of his baby son. But there are also many
which are profoundly evocative of the life of a district officer.
We see into the domestic interior of a European family bungalow
– a rare sight in these comparatively early days before
modern flash photography – and can begin to understand how
the inhabitants tried to replicate a late Victorian/Edwardian
interior four thousand miles from home. We see Sladen on holiday
in the Christmas cold weather of northern India, enjoying game
shoots on elephant-back, and we glimpse him with his fellow UP
ICS men gathered together in the provincial capital in an “ICS
week”. We also sense something of the diversity of his daily
work, from a photo of him sitting as a magistrate under a tree
trying suspected criminals; or from a photo of a severe railway
accident he had evidently had to investigate. When I showed them
to a small group of graduate students studying South Asian history
they were electrified by the immediacy of this pictorial record,
and the way it enabled them to visualise what it must have been
like to be a Balliol man in India a century ago.
Of more recent provenance is Ved Mehta’s The Red Letters.
My Father’s Enchanted Period (Sinclair-Stevenson, London,
2005). This is the last book in the series, ‘Continents
in Exile’, which includes Up at Oxford (1993), by one of
the college’s distinguished contemporary alumni in the literary
world, up between 1956 and 1959, sometime visiting Fellow and
Honorary Fellow. The autobiographical series describing the many
worlds where Mehta is both in exile and at home concludes with
a most unusual work of memoir and detection. In the 1960s he was
astounded to find his father weeping on his mother’s shoulder
during a dinner party in New York, and this was the starting point
for the discovery of a bundle of letters dating from the 1930s
which bore electrifying testimony to the fact that his upright
Father, devoted husband and family man and pillar of the medical
establishment in imperial India, had had a passionate if brief
love affair with a married Indian woman. She was an elegant presence
in the imperial summer capital, Simla, but this belied her origins
as a simple hill girl who had been abducted, raped and then rescued
by a Hindu philanthropist, and eventually married off to a rich
businessman. On being asked by her husband to treat her in Simla,
Dr. Mehta recognised from a tattoo on her upper arm the ravishing
hill girl who had once attracted him as a young medical student
when he was holidaying in the hills. Their subsequent reunion
led t o a deep and passionate affair. The account is wonderfully
told from the perspective of a son trying to piece together the
story his father evidently longs to tell but for which he cannot
find the language. It is at one level a universal love story.
But it is set in a particular time and place, in a particular
society, with its very specific meaning for one Indian family
and son anxious to understand his father and their father-son
relationship. So more prosaically to the historian it is a remarkable
testimony to the intimacies of Indian family life before the end
of the raj. Rarely is such a relationship outside marriage recorded,
given the sanctity of Hindu marriage and the need to safeguard
family honour. What is even more interesting is the fact that
the wife, Ved Mehta’s Mother, knew of the relationship with
a woman who became her own close friend. Yet this never broke
the marriage bond, for as Dr. Mehta insisted his family came first
in his life. Living over seventy years after these events we are
privileged to have insight into this Indian story, told with such
tenderness. Like the insights into the life of one European family
in India provided by the Sladen photographs, this book is yet
further testimony to the college’s myriad threads of connection
with India past and present.
Endnotes
1 See C. Sorabji, India Calling (first pub. London, 1934; new
ed. by C. Lokuge, OUP, Delhi, 2001). Chapter 2 describes her Oxford
experience and relationship with Jowett, including as description
of accompanying him to a Sunday Concert in hall.
2 See R. Symonds, Oxford And Empire. The Last Lost Cause? (paperback
ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991).
3 See the family tree of the Palmer Family in G. Studdert-Kennedy,
‘Theology and Authority, Constitution and Improvization:
The Colonial Church in India’, in Judith M. Brown &
R.E. Frykenberg (eds.), Christians, Cultural Interactions, and
India’s Religious Traditions (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids &
Cambridge UK and Routledge Curzon, London, 2002), p. 163.
4 Symonds, op.cit. p.308, Table A.3.
5 Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience. The Mahatma
in Indian Politics (CUP, 1977), p. 253. (At a brief visit to a
private home in Oxford at the very start of his stay in England
Gandhi was so exhausted that his hostess found him asleep over
his spinning wheel!)
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
