Heat, rain and the Raj
By Manohar Malgonkar

A CURIOUS contradiction of the British Empire was that, while its drumbeaters boasted of the fact that the sun never set on it, the men in the field themselves were terrified of the sun. They loathed it. "The sun is a killer", the old hands warned newcomers.

Rosamond Lawrence and her husband, Henry, landed in Bombay by P & O steamer in early 1914, she for the first time, but he, an old India hand, after a period of home leave.

In fact Henry Lawrence belonged to the famous Lawrence clan which had given "their lives to the service of the Empire", which was Sahib-speak for their having opted for a life of glamour and romance and limitless opportunities for advancement — to say nothing of fat, padded salaries, platoons of servants and, above all, master-race privileges — to humdrum careers in their own land.

In Bombay, the Lawrences were staying at the Taj Mahal Hotel, in a room that overlooked the sea and the street below, and Rosamond Lawrence had craned her neck out of the window for a better look when Henry, "spoke sharply to her for hanging out of the window without her topi".

Topi. The sahib’s shield against the killer sun of the tropics. A thick hat made of pith and covered with khaki cloth, with overhangs at the front and back, to shade the eyes as well as the neck from the direct rays of the sun. It was the most essential item of the sahib’s and memsahib’s wardrobe. There were different topis for different activities and occasions, sport or grand public parades and in different shades of khaki for summer and winter. They were kept stacked, one on top of another, in dome-shaped tin boxes which had head-shaped oval frames to make sure that they did not lose their shapes.

No sahib ever appeared in public without a topi, so that the Marathas with whom they fought many wars invariably referred to them as topikars, the wearers of topies. They had to be kept on whenever you were outdoors, even if the sky was clouded over or when it was actually raining, except that, as Mrs Lawrence records in her diary, the prudent sahib had them enamelled, "which, I do realise, makes them waterproof, but also makes them terribly heavy".

A pith hat plastered with thick paint to render it waterproof. It must have been a heavy load, but a must all the same and Mrs Lawrence cites as an example, the ‘neglect’ of this rule by a flighty young lady who believed that "just because it was monsoon and raining" one could not get sunstroke, "and goes about without a topi".

And punished she was for her sauciness. One day she took ill, and the next she was dead. Not that it was sunstroke that killed her, but dysentery, but it, too was brought about by her own ‘neglect’ because, unlike the other memsahibs, "she did not herself see that the milk was boiled."

The young woman’s death brought out the truth of a popular saying of the earliest Empire builders: "Two monsoons are the life of man." They came to India only to die. It took them some 200 years to realise that it was not either the sun or the monsoon that killed them like flies, but sheer greed and intemperance. They ate enormous meals just because they did not have to cook them themselves and drank prodigiously. Amazingly enough, the prospect,the certainty, of a two-monsoon life span did not stop them coming. There just was no stopping them.

Anyhow, by the time Rosamond came to India, the death-rate for the white men was no worse than in England — provided you observed certain rules, and Henry, Rosamond’s husband, not only knew all the rules but invented some of his own. And Rosamond herself, like all good wives, always deferred to her husband because, after all ‘Henry knew best’.

Henry Lawrence was a member of that ‘heaven-born’ service, the I.C.S., and now in his mid-forties, one of its pillars. His first wife had died, in the service of India, as it were, by virtue of being married to an Indian Civil servant, and the widowed Henry had gone on home leave, during which he had found himself another wife, who was his first wife’s sister.

Rosamond Lawrence, then 33 years old belonged to the Napier family, which, too had contributed handsomely to the Empire’s building, and one of Rosamond’s most distinguished ancestor was Sir Charles Napier, something of a fire-eater and known for his unorthodox views. The conqueror of Sind, and the originator of that famous communication ‘paccavi’, ( I have sinned) to describe that achievement. He was denied a peerage and fobbed off with a commissionership, that of Sind, which he ruled like a despot.

On return from leave, Henry Lawrence had been posted to Belgaum as the Commissioner of the Southern Division of the Bombay Presidency which, as he proudly told his wife, "was twice the size of Wales". Of that division, Rosamond Lawrence was now the First Lady. She was made conscious of this fact upon their arrival at Belgaum’s railway station. The prominent citizens of the area as well as the senior-most civil military officers were assembled on the platform and a Guard of Honour drawn up in the yard. A band played. The couple, hung with garlands got into an open damni, or bullock cart and, led by an escort of mounted police, drove through streets lined with "cheering crowds", to the haven of the commissioner’s official residence, Hulme Park.

Approached by a long drive through shady trees, Hulme Park was a sprawling bungalow with a courtyard at the back, plenty of stables and rooms for servants. It had no doors in the main rooms, only arches, except that the bedrooms ‘dim and lofty’ had canvas half-doors.

Here Rosamond Lawrence had to host "at least three large dinner parties every week." The protocol was strict. The Commissioner dines only with the Judge, the General, and the Collector, and just once in the season," Mrs Lawrence records. At her own dinners boiled shirts for men and long gloves for the women were de rigueur, but because her hasband wanted to set the example of not living beyond his means, champagne was served only once a week; on other days they had to make do with claret and madeira.

The grand life-style of the sahibs had its downside, too. Hulme Park was not, alas, like the sahibs’ topies, waterproof, and "water came streaming down," during the monsoon. "In the drawing room are bowls, basins and saucers to catch the leaks, with crumpled newspaper stuffed in to deaden the drumming noise."

The bathrooms, mercifully, did have doors, but their facilities were rudimentary: green-painted zinc hip-baths or half-baths which had to be filled with hot water brought in by a bhisty, and thunder-boxes and lidded enamelled bowls for which, the Division’s First Lady did not know the correct name.

Hulme Park, knees buckling with old age even before World War I, still stands among even older banyans, patched-up, face-lifted, hair-dyed, its vast grounds surrendered to Belgaum’s urban sprawl, and still serves as the commissioner’s residence, a relic of the Raj’s India but, somehow also a memorial to the "curious spirit of make-believe"of its flagbearers who, even in their leaky abodes, dressed for dinner and drank Moet Chandon and lived by protocol. The ultimate irony of its sacredness is brought out in Rosamond Lawrence’s account of her times. The commissioner was on tour and camped under canvas, with a separate tent for the bathroom. Henry, rising at dawn and wrapping himself in a blanket because it was cold, was headed for the bathroom when he heard orders barked, and found that the guard had been formed up and was presenting arms.

"Clutching at his blanket, bare legs showing beneath, Henry stalked round the sepos criticising button or rifle."