Victorian scholar Annette S Beveridge’s long road to translating Gulbadan Begum’s ‘Humayun Nama’

While aboard a ship, Annette Susannah Beveridge (née Akroyd) met Mrs Goldie, a Scottish woman travelling to see her recently widowed son-in-law, Henry Beveridge. After studying at Edinburgh Academy, the University of Glasgow and Queen’s College, Belfast, Henry passed the public exams for the Indian Civil Service (ICS). He left for India in 1857. Allotted to the Bengal cadre, he served as a judge in many of its districts.

Determined to work with Keshab Chandra Sen, Annette arrived in Calcutta in mid-December 1872, a few days after her thirtieth birthday. Teaching girls in India was on her mind. She stayed initially with Manmohan Ghose, a well-known lawyer. She met Henry Beveridge, courtesy of Mrs Goldie, but she would have met him even without the latter’s involvement, as he was a close associate of her Bengali tutor, Krishna Kumar Gupta. Henry quickly became a supporter of Annette’s teaching venture. Among the first on her list of contributors, he gave a large donation for the school she wanted to establish – Rs 100 and an additional Rs 10 per month, though he had some family responsibilities and not much discretionary income.

As the months passed, Annette sensed a chasm between Sen’s public positions on the status of women and his private life. Sen’s life story was extraordinary. Born into a Vaishnava vaidya (physician) caste in Calcutta, he had a Westernised education. In 1858, he joined the Brahmo Samaj. In 1862, Debendranath Tagore, a Brahmin, initiated Sen as the organisation’s first non-Brahmin teacher. Subsequently, a group of more radical thinking Brahmos, as they were called, aligned with Sen and rejected traditional Hindu practices such as caste hierarchy and distinctions. While rejecting missionary Christianity, Sen experimented with religious practices (a personal synthesis of Christian and Hindu elements) and became increasingly indifferent to social reform. In 1878, he married his thirteen-year-old daughter to the fifteen-year-old crown prince of a British princely state in a traditional Hindu marriage ceremony. This apparent approval of child marriage, and what his comrades regarded as idolatry, led to Sen’s abandonment by many of his followers.

Annette was surprised when she met Mrs Sen, the “wife of the great apostle of women’s emancipation in India … ignorant of English and covered with a barbaric display of jewels, playing with them…. like a foolish petted child.” In a public meeting addressed by Sen, there were only three women among the 2,000 attendees. In 1873, amidst a host of administrative and funding problems, Annette opened one of the earliest all-female boarding schools for girls, the Hindu Mahila Vidyalaya. Sen joined the committee formed to launch her school, but soon resigned. Newspapers aligned with him criticised Annette for her intervention in women’s education. Her critiques of India mounted, and she moved away from the idea of working closely with Sen. “For the first time I realised how uncivilised are their notions about women,” she observed.

What Sen embodied was typical of the visionary men of his time: experimental, politically radical and socially conservative. This was a vital historical detail that Annette had missed. Henry urged her to try to understand a reformer’s complex sociopolitical situation. “I fancy Keshub is a good man but the leader of a party is always to a certain extent its slave…. I venture to suggest to you as a matter of policy that you should keep in as far as possible with Keshub and his party.” But Annette and Sen parted ways.

Annette continued her work with the help of Henry and her other Indian allies: reformer Durga Manmohan Das and Maharani Swarnamoyee, the great philanthropist and queen of Cossimbazar. Friends, including High Court judge Mr John Budd Phear and his wife Mrs Phear, helped her, too, with the latter serving on her school board. Yet, it remained an uphill task. Back home in East Worcestershire, the local paper, the Brierly Hill Advertiser, celebrated her work: “Among the most hopeful plans for societal regeneration in India … the education of the women … has been projected by Miss Annette Akroyd … throwing herself into the work with all the characteristic energy and self-devotedness of her father …”

Meanwhile, Annette and Henry grew close. They exchanged courteous letters when he was on judicial assignments and other related travels. He was concerned about her school and the ongoing difficulties. They wrote about the social reform movement in India, about Mrs Goldie and about Henry’s memories of Scotland. Yet they often disagreed on politics, reform and colonial rule.

Although he initially addressed her as “my dear Miss Akroyd,” Henry gradually began to use more intimate forms of address, such as “My dearest….” He began concluding his letters with “yours affectionately.” In proposing marriage to Annette on March 13, 1875, he wrote a candid message saying that he could not promise her “a brilliant future … I don’t think I will ever get much higher in the service than I am now … I fear [I shall] be at daggers drawn with some of my superiors … [and] always be looked upon as an unsafe man ... I am also resolved to stick to India, and probably the most unpopular part of it – Eastern Bengal …”

They married soon thereafter, on April 6, 1875, in a Calcutta registration office under a new law, the Act of 1872, which provided the option of civil marriage, as Henry objected to a church marriage. Annette closed her school and began a new role as the wife of a district officer in Bengal, attending to her duties at home and raising children amidst long separations from Henry. Annette valued her new role as wife and mother – very much in keeping with 19th-century Victorian family values. The epistolary was to be a form of communication the couple would never leave. Stacked in boxes, nearly 200 of their letters, including many to their children, close friends and literary colleagues, are housed in the British Library in London.

Theirs was a household of books. Henry’s The District of Bákarganj: Its History and Statistics, a gazetteer-cum-history that he was working on at the time, was the subject of extended discussion, as were books by William Makepeace Thackeray, Indian dailies such as the Brahmo Public Opinion, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems, Plutarch’s Marcus Cato and Seneca’s De Constantia Sapientis.

Their daughter, Laetitia Santamani, was born in Rangpur in July 1877, in a house frequented by cobras. In the same house, their son William Henry was born two years later. He was called bhaiya or bhai (“brother”), an affectionate form of address for a son in many parts of eastern India. In 1880, when Henry moved to Bankipur near Patna, an easier-to-access station compared to his earlier posts, their daughter, Annette Jeanie, or Tutu, was born. Annette would later give birth to Herman, her fourth child.

Amidst long separations, Annette brought up her children: in Rangpur, on the banks of the Ghangot and the Teesta River (now in Bangladesh); in Bankipur; in Darjeeling; in Mussoorie in the Himalayas; and in Shillong in the Assam Hills. She would travel with her children on treacherous journeys to see Henry, feeling embittered at being apart from him. The trip from Rangpur to Darjeeling, for example, took five days. Rangpur was not on a railway line. They started their journey on a palki (a palanquin or cushioned and covered carriage) and continued it on a horse-drawn tonga. Their servants had been sent ahead of them. “Rain, rain, rain,” she wrote on September 6, 1877.

Strong of character, Annette and Henry both held firm opinions. Henry was not ambitious, as he had indicated to Annette. Part of this had to do with his holding views that were unpopular among the high and mighty of the colonial regime. His sympathy for Indians was clear. He travelled a great deal, was a dedicated worker and read voraciously. He never focused on promotions or attractive postings. A year into his marriage with Annette, he completed The District of Bákarganj. A decade later, while Annette was busy with their home and children, Henry published The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar, Narrative of a Judicial Murder, in which he dove into a century-old dispute about an East India Company-appointed tax collector, Nand Kumar, who levelled corruption charges against Governor General Warren Hastings. Henry’s possibilities dwindled even further. His postings were tough. There were two furloughs during which he spent time in England, while Annette stayed on in India with the children.

He loved his children and was keenly interested in their lives. He argued with Annette against Sunday school but agreed in the end with her view that it would give the children another community. But the management and expenses of their home and the sicknesses and challenges of nurturing children were Annette’s business. Civil disagreement always remained central in their relationship, a rare feature in a nineteenth-century colonial marriage. Yet, as their son William later wrote: “… it may be surprising to learn from her letters how submissive she was to my father in India, how she trembled at his frown, and sat up all night to answer his reproof.”

Then came 1883. Annette and Henry differed openly on the Ilbert Bill proposal, which was to enable senior Indian officers of the ICS to try British people in criminal cases in their jurisdiction. Prior to this bill, Europeans and British people appeared before a British or White magistrate; if one was not available in the area, the case would be led where a British magistrate was present. The first Indian had qualified for the ICS in 1864, and by the 1880s, there were several senior Indian officers in the districts. The bill caused an uproar among Europeans, especially in Calcutta, the seat of the British government. Many British men and women protested, carrying out a campaign in the newspapers in India and in Britain.

To Annette, the problem with the proposed change was that it would allow British women to be tried by Indian magistrates. In a letter to The Englishman, she wrote that she was not afraid to assert that her feelings were shared by all English women in India. “It is not pride of race that dictates this feeling,” she wrote “but the pride of womanhood.” How could the government subject English women to the jurisdiction of those who, in her view, had not done much for their own women? To Henry, she wrote that as an Englishwoman, she would “call uncivilised a people which cares about stone idols, enjoys child marriage and secludes its women and where at every point the fact of sex is present in the mind.” Exposing English women to the jurisdiction of Indian judges was “an insult” not to “pride of race” but to “the pride of womanhood,” she declared.

Historians have reviewed Victorian as well as late colonial attitudes and the manner in which systems of power played out in the thinking of privileged white persons. Scholars have simultaneously considered the work of a panorama of women missionaries, social activists, theosophists, Orientalists, teachers, doctors and reformists, signalling a mixed and complex history of race, class and gender in colonial India and of the “burdens” that English women carried.

As to Annette’s response to the Ilbert Bill, her liberal friends, both in India and in England, were dismayed. Henry was a supporter of the Ilbert Bill – a minority among the British. He didn’t think it necessary to press Annette on her views even though he disagreed with them.

Scientism – with the added sanctity of domestic life that was at the heart of Annette’s views – infused the convictions of people of this era. The remarkable evolution of science from the sixteenth century through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution brought substantial economic, ideological and political changes in the nineteenth century. It marked a pivotal transformation in Western civilization, which its ideologues frequently contrasted against the earlier, more rudimentary phase of the so-called Dark Ages, and strengthened the belief that the Western world’s civilising mission alone could enlighten darker times, places and peoples. With the objective of uncovering new peoples and territories, scientists diligently gathered data, scrutinised and categorised various plant and animal species and human skulls as they sought to map the planet’s vast diversity. Botany, anthropology, hydrography, mapmaking and geology were tools in the exploration of foreign lands, keys to the representation of little-known people.

The other – non-white, different – appeared darkly in this triumphalist vision, in which the institutions, practices, traditions, belief systems and men and women of the West were seen as true, rational humans. Those of the non-Western world were perceived as backward and yet to be civilised. Annette Beveridge’s public opposition to the Ilbert Bill of 1883 and her views on Sen’s position on Indian women were in accord with these views. These robust contradictions, unquestioned stances and deep commitment to causes she thought urgent made Annette the person she was – forceful, clear-headed and determined.

In January 1893, at the end of Henry’s ICS tenure, the Beveridge family left India. Henry went home via Italy, where he had promised to see his brother. Annette went on her own with her son and two daughters. Her deafness was very advanced, and she was still grieving the loss of her youngest son, Herman. Henry cut short his time in Italy and joined his family in February, eager to be with them as they began a new life in England. Then, in April of 1893, Letty died.

Amidst layers of loss, the scholarly Annette gradually emerged – an “imperious lady,” strong-minded yet soft, as her contemporaries observed. She held on to her Victorian views, but other worlds now completely absorbed her. Curious and deeply observant about a bookish princess, she began to create another life for herself.

At that time, no one knew anything about Gulbadan or her chronicle of her times. Annette gradually uncovered her remarkable history.

Excerpted with permission from from Ruby Lal’s Introduction to The Humayun Nama, Gulbadan Begum, translated from Persian by Annette Susannah Beveridge, Juggernaut.