Just when one felt that the final misery had been reached and not another day nor another degree of heat could be borne, with the setting sun the rain came – in a torrential downpour which lasted for forty eight hours. Clad in the briefest, I rush out into the darkness to the still red hot brick chilboutra and let the deluge pour over me, while the thunder rumbled and the lightning played around the inky skies.

Indian Summer
A Mem-sahib in India and Sind
April Swayne – Thomas

Another time we meet
As strangers, friends or who knows
As lovers again
Turn, turn, turn to the rain again.
Strangertime – Pritish Nandy

I have always wondered about the colonial occupation of India during the late eighteen and early nineteenth century, a vast country with breakaway factions of Nawabs and Rajahs who changed their alliances with the changing of summers and the sweltering heat of Indian plains that the British endured during their reign, trying to keep the union jack flying. But most of all I was entranced by British women who stayed during those troubled times. British women who fell in love with ordinary Indian men or small time royalty and Indian women who loved and stayed with British Officers during the period of their tenure in India.

Some of them married and stayed back in India. They embraced the culture, could speak fluent Urdu and Hindi and brought a communion so unique which sowed the origins of Indo-English literature or Anglo-Indian creativity.

Kanpur or Cawnpore was one such garrison town. I went to a school which had British teachers, leaving me in awe with their accents and their Indian relatives. The fifties and sixties had a lot of British women who stayed back in India after the independence and partition. The rickshaw that took me to Lalimli Mills and beyond every day was a sojourn I remembered as we encountered British women walking or cycling to various schools in the vicinity.

Gwalior too had its own cluster of Sardars and Nawabs, each with its own palace and even flags. One of my close friends, a former royal still hoist the family colors every morning and lowers it down in the evening. I would have done the same thing as Rajasahab Konera does till today. Among the musty family heirlooms are photographs of beautiful British women married to jagirdars.

1978 was a great year. I became a qualified doctor, still loitering around Park Street in Kolkata, writing poetry and trying to find the ultimate woman who could make me move words closer to the Brahmaputra, Ganga and Thames, in the words of Pritish Nandy, ‘From the other banks…

And then came ‘Junoon’.

Everything changed since then.

Ruskin Bond’s novel ‘Flight of the Pigeons’ was adapted by Shyam Benegal and made into a film titled ‘Junoon’. The literal translation from Urdu into English would mean Obsession. But ‘Junoon’ was far more than obsession. The story haunted me, I knew every word was true. It was about a Mughal Nawab who mutinies against the British and falls in love with a British girl.

It is a love story set in Shahjahanpur a small town 250 miles east of Delhi in India, in the period of 1857. That was the time when the British-Indian revolution was in its most definitive phase. Times were changing, loyalties were changing, attitudes were changing, there was hopelessness, fear, despair and most of all obsession and insanity.

The main theme is about the forbidden love that blossoms amidst all this. Amir Khusru's poetry rendered in the form of a Qawali during the opening scenes gives a perfect summary of the story.

The events of 1857 were shocking in their violence, and neither the British nor the rebels showed themselves to be very honorable. The word "Junoon" (obsession) connotes a tinge of madness, and that kind of madness is a very appropriate way to view the period. The "love story" is also suffused with the same out-of-control emotion.

Govind Nihlani’s photography brought poetry to a movie which gripped me, I thought often about it.

But poetry is all I thought about.

I wondered about that period which was suffused with such memorable poetry, romanticism that was etched on common conversation in day to day lives. Awadh and Delhi lived on poetry and the British women who came close to the royalty were not untouched. Life was one long summer basked in poems with the beauty of English women who too wrote and spoke poetry, Urdu and English became one, it was only the poem that mattered.

Emma Roberts was one such poet

Emma Roberts was born about 1794 in Methley near Leeds. In the year her mother died and a decision was made to join her sister and her husband Captain Robert Adair McNaughten of the 61st Bengal Infantry to India. Her thoughts on moving to India were stated in one of her books. She stated that 'There cannot be a more wretched situation than that of a young woman in India who has been induced to follow the fortunes of her married sister under the delusive expectation that she will exchange the privations attached to limited means in England for the far-famed luxuries of the East' (DNB 1263). For two years, Roberts was based with her sister around various stations in upper India including Agra, Cawpore and Etawah.

Here she wrote of her experiences whilst in India which were published in the Asiatic Journal. These articles accumulated a vast amount of Roberts' work which was published in her Scenes and Characteristics of Hindoostan (London, 1835). The book was well received in England and, according to Elwood, 'Her readers trust her, and resign the rein of their imaginations into the author's hand' (Dibert-Himes, 1997: 3). The book 'relates her travels and observations, noting the capacity for making themselves hated; strongly defending Indian servants, especially their honesty, against prejudiced critics' (Blain et al, 1990: 909).

In 1831, Roberts moved to Calcutta after the death of her sister. Here she devoted herself to her literature and journalism and undertook a job at the local newspaper, The Oriental Observer, as the newspaper editor. Throughout her time in Calcutta she concentrated for the most part on her submissions for the newspaper. In 1832, suffering from overwork, Roberts was forced back to England where she stayed until 1839.

Before leaving India she dedicated a book of poems to her close friend Letitia Elezabeth Landon popularly known all over as L.E.L. called Oriental Scenes, Sketches and Tales (Calcutta 1832) which was rewritten in London in 1832. Whilst in London she wrote articles for the Asiatic Journal and edited the sixty-fourth edition of Mrs. Rundell's New System of Domestic Cookery (London, 1840. She also completed a biographical sketch of L.E.L., appearing as a memoir in Landon's collection of poetry called The Zenana and Minor Poems by L.E.L. (1840). The anguish of her return to England in 1832 due to ill health was captured in the final lines of poetry in Oriental Scenes, Sketches and Tales, which state:

The Ganges! The Ganges! Oh dearer far will be
That narrow winding rivulet, that humble brook to me!
Not all the wealth thy water bears could tempt me to remain,
Or cross the seas to gaze upon thy stately realms again

In September, 1839, Roberts started her second journey to India traveling via an overland route through Europe and Asia. Her record of the journey reveals the arduous nature of the adventure, especially for a lady of that era. By November of that year, Roberts and her traveling companions reached Bombay. Resting at the government house and later settling in the suburb of Parell, she described her experiences in An Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay (1841, posthumous).

Roberts also became the editor of The Bombay United Service Gazette. At the same time, she became interested in a scheme for providing native Indian women with suitable education and employment. In the same year that she returned to India she published The East India Voyage (1839), a book of travel advice. Soon after she made a visit to Colonel Ovan's residence at Sattara. In the April of that year she was taken ill and later died on the 16th of September 1840 after being taken to Poonah in order to regain her health. Her last days were spent with her friend Colonel Campbell. Roberts' adoration of the beauty of India and her enjoyment of her travels was always excited by the anticipation of finally returning to England.

Roberts died leaving the reputation of an extremely talented writer. It was reported by Elwood that Roberts' death evoked a great response of sorrow in England and a vast amount of tributes were written about her work. Although Emma Roberts work was not fully appreciated at the time, modern day study of the writer and her work reveals her talent and the extent of her skill at recording her observations of India.

One contemporary writer seems to sum up the literature of Roberts perfectly by saying that 'her business was with the surface of things; her skill consisted in a species of photography, presenting perfect facsimiles of objects, animate and inanimate in their natural forms and hues' (Dibert-Himes, 1997).

– Continued