a cheroot as ‘being the real cheese’ (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the ‘best goont in Tibet’ (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.
Half of Hobson Jobson is filled with these dead phrases: linguistic relics of a world so distant and strange that it is difficult to believe that these words were still current in our own century. Yet clearly, in 1903, if a Jack (sepoy) did anything wrong he could expect to receive some pretty foul galee (abuse); if he were unlucky his chopper (thatched hut) might fall down in the mangoes (April showers); and if he forgot his goglet (water bottle) on parade he might well have been thrown out of the regiment for good.
To us, the vocabulary of the Raj now seems absurd, distant and comical, like the pretensions of the rotting statues in Coronation Park. Yet many who actually spoke this language are still alive in England. For them, the world of Hobson Jobson is less linguistic archaeology than the stuff of fraying memory.
Before I went to India I went to Cambridge to see a friend of my grandmother. Between the twenties and the forties, Iris Portal’s youth had been spent in that colonial Delhi that now seemed so impossibly dated. I wanted to hear what she remembered.
It was the last weekend of summer. Over the flat steppe of East Anglia tractors were beginning to plough the great wide plains of fenland stubble. A sharp wind gusted in from the coast; cloud-shadows drifted fast over the fields. On the Backs, the trees were just beginning to turn.
‘Welcome to my rabbit hutch,’ said Iris. ‘It’s not very big, but I flatter myself that it’s quite colourful.’
She was an alert and well-preserved old lady: owlish and intelligent. Her grey hair was fashionably cut and her voice was attractively dry and husky. Iris’s family had been Cambridge dons and although she had broken out and married into the army, there was still something residually academic in her measured gaze.
She sat deep in an armchair in her over-heated flat in a sheltered housing complex off the M11. Outside, beyond the car park, you could see the pavements and housing estates of suburban Girton. But inside, a small fragment of another world had been faithfully recreated. All around, the bookshelves were full of the great Imperial classics—Todd, Kipling, Fanny Parkes and Emily Eden—some riddled with the boreholes of bookish white ants. On one wall hung a small oil of houseboats on the Dal Lake; on another, a print of the Mughal Emperor Muhammed Shah Rangilla in the Red Fort. Beside it was an old map of 1930s Delhi.
Somehow the pictures and the books—and especially the dusty, old-buckram, yellow-paged library-scent of the books—succeeded in giving the thoroughly modern flat a faint whiff of the Edwardian, a distant hint of the hill-station bungalow.
‘You must give my love to dear old Delhi,’ said Iris. ‘Ah! Even now when I close my eyes I see …’ For a minute she left the sentence incomplete, then: ‘Pots of chrysanthemums!’ she said quite suddenly. ‘Rows and rows of chrysanthemums in little red pots! That’s what I remember best. Those and the ruins: riding out through the bazaars and out into the country. The Qutab Minar and moonlight picnics in Hauz Khas—a place we all thought was madly romantic. The tombs everywhere all tumbling down and black buck and peacocks and monkeys … Is it still like that?’
‘Up to a point,’ I said.
‘Dear, dear, dear old Delhi,’ she said. ‘How I envy you living there.’
She smiled a contented smile and rearranged herself in the armchair.
‘So,’ I ventured. ‘You were born in Delhi?’
‘No, no, no.’ Iris closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘Certainly not. I was born in Simla in 1905 in a house called Newstead. It was immediately behind Snowdon, the Commander-in-Chief’s house. Curzon was then the Viceroy and Kitchener the Commander-in-Chief.’
Now she had mentioned Simla, I remembered that in the biography of Iris’s brother, the great Rab Butler, I had seen a sepia photograph of the two of them at a children’s party in the Simla Viceregal Lodge. In the image you could clearly see Iris’s plump little face peeping out from a Victorian cocoon of taffeta and white silk.
‘So you spent your childhood in Simla?’
‘No. I only spent the first five summers of my life in Simla,’ she said, correcting me again. ‘Then I was brought back to England. I went to school in a madhouse on the beach of Sandgate under the Folkestone cliffs. It was a sort of avant-garde Bedales-type place. Perfectly horrible. We were supposed to be a Greek Republic. We made our own rules, wore aesthetic uniforms and I don’t know what else.’
‘Did you miss India?’
‘I thought of nothing else. India was home.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All I wanted was India, a horse of my own and a dashing cavalry escort. When my mother and I arrived back in Bombay we immediately caught the train up to Delhi. I remember vividly the joy of coming in the driveway and seeing all those rows and rows of chrysanthemums in their pots and thinking: "Ah! I’m back!"
‘Everything was as I remembered it. My father’s bearer, Gokhul, was a little fatter than before. He had been with my father since he was a boy and was now a rather grand figure: he used to walk around with a great brass badge on his front. Otherwise everything was unchanged.’
Iris spoke slowly and precisely as if making a mental effort to relay her memories with absolute accuracy.
‘It was … 1922, I suppose. The Government of India was in Delhi by that time, waiting for New Delhi to be completed. We were all living in the Civil Lines [of Old Delhi]. There was no Secretariat and all the Government offices were in Nissen huts. But the officials’ bungalows were all in beautiful gardens. You know how things grow in Delhi. The jacarandas …’
‘Had you come out to work?’ I asked.
‘No, no. My life was extremely frivolous. I had been very highbrow at school. No one ever talked about anything except Browning. But in Delhi people would have been horrified if they discovered you read poetry. The English in India were not a very cultured lot. The atmosphere was too giddy: it was all riding, picnics, clubs, dances, dashing young men and beautiful polo players …’ She smiled. ‘Looking back of course, the whole set-up was very odd. There was such snobbery. Everyone was graded off into sections. One would never have dreamt of going anywhere with someone from the Public Works Department …’ She blinked with mock horror.
‘The most snobbish event of all was the polo, though the Delhi Hunt was rather wonderful in its own way. All the Viceregal staff—who were usually rather interesting and attractive—came out in their Ratcatcher—black coats and so on: in Ooty everyone wore pink, but in Delhi it was only the whippers-in and the master who were allowed to. It was taken very seriously. The hounds—rather dapper ones—were imported from England. I used to get up before dawn and motor down to the Qutab Minar in my father’s T-model Ford. A syce would have been sent down the night before with the pony. Then, as soon as the sun rose, we would gallop about this dry countryside chasing after the jackals.
‘But much more worthwhile than hunting the poor old jackal was going hawking with Umer Hyat Khan of the Tiwana clan. I expect you know all about him. He was a big landowner from the Northern Punjab: rather like a Highland laird. Umer Hyat was a member of the first legislative assembly and whenever the Assembly was in session he would
