The British writer who found inspiration in India and the Great Game

Rattray Carington knew something was off as soon as Albert Mueller stood up from the hammock chair. In Mueller’s salutation there was a distinct “stamp of birth and breeding” that did not match his surroundings. In that moment Carrington, the superintendent of police of Nymoorie, decided to investigate.

Mueller had moved to India from Austria seven years earlier, making “the free British Government” the ruler of his choice. He found a job in the government headquarters in Nymoorie and, foregoing a promotion, took a post in a department that happened to be right adjacent to the British Intelligence Department.

Carington followed his instincts and clues over the next few days. In the end, a trap was laid and Mueller walked right into it. It turned out Mueller was a spy plotting to steal a map that marked the terrain that could give Britain guaranteed access to the northern lands: Tibet and China.

Carington had many such adventures in the short stories of Mayne Lindsay, the nom de plume of Rosina Margaret Hopkins, who had spent years in the early 1890s in India’s North-Western Provinces. His quick actions, intuition and understanding of the Indian milieu helped him speedily resolve many messy situations, exposing diabolical criminals and the rebels who, in this period of the Great Game, threatened the very stability of British India.

Inspiration source

In the 1890s, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were all hungry for colonies and the regions they had their eyes on were Central and West Asia. It so happened that the British were interested in the same areas as well. The result of this rivalry was the Great Game or, as the Russians called it, the Tournament of Shadows, during which the global powers used military overtures, diplomatic exchanges and espionage to win influence in the regions.

For writers, this intrigue was an endless source of inspiration. In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, the protagonist is a young spy who travels to the Himalayas and beyond while shadowing a Russian and a French spy who have important maps and notes in their possession. Kipling’s contemporary Edmund Candler wrote The Unveiling of Lhasa while travelling to Lhasa in 1904 as part of Francis Younghusband’s historic expedition. Years later, Scottish writer George MacDonald Fraser wrote several novels in which the anti-hero Harry Flashman ends up upholding British interests.

In contrast, Mayne Lindsay’s stories occupied a more limited canvas. Her Carington stories are set in the fictitious hill stations of Lalpura, Kakora, and most often, Nymoorie, “a summer resort [in the United Provinces] perched sufficiently high above a valley” with a view of “the flash of two great rivers and the shimmer of the plains”. Nymoorie is “remote and unhackneyed, better known to big grey apes and forest rangers than to the travelling Englishman”. It is where Carington cracks the mystery of Albert Mueller in the story Carington and the Boundary Map.

Several of Lindsay’s early stories, including the Carington stories, appeared in popular magazines such as The Idler, Pall Mall, The Windsor Magazine and Chambers’s Journal. A collection of the Carington stories was published in 1905 under the title The Byways of Empire.

Rising star

Rosina Margaret Hopkins was born on March 11, 1873, in Surrey, England. Her father David, a consular official in West Africa, died when she was six. The youngest of six siblings, Hopkins lived with her mother, Harriet Cropp, before moving abroad at age 18 to stay with her brothers. In India, she lived with her brother Henry Mayne Reid Hopkins, who was an officer in the Imperial Civil Service, and in Australia, with her oldest brother, David Lyndsay Hopkins, who served in the Royal Navy. She had another brother, Walter, who was a colonial official in Fiji, but it was the other two whose middle names she chose for her pen name.

By age 14, Hopkins had published her first stories. While in India, her stories Masters of the Art and A Toss for a Wife appeared in the newspapers The Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette. The themes in these stories focused on the novel customs, codes of honour, and values – noble and already outdated – that she saw around her. Robert Louis Stevenson was a formative influence on her.

In 1897, she was described by The Windsor Magazine as a “rising star”. The same year, she married Arthur Wellesley Clarke, a naval official with the Royal Orient Lines, in Hampshire. Thereafter she lived mostly in England, although her stories continued to be set largely in India, Australia and the East Indies.

Prolific years

In later years, newspaper articles began referring to her as “Mr. Lindsay”. In William Prideaux Courtney’s The Secrets of Our National Literature (1908), Hopkins acknowledged that the name “concealed her gender, and her stories were attributed to some dashing man who was usually the hero in most of them”. But she appeared fine with this. Thanks to the pen name, she said, she could “do things the more familiar ‘I’ could never accomplish”.

Hopkins’s most memorable character, Rattray Carington, made his first appearance in The Dying of Lord Oudenarde (1899), as a young, wide-eyed, even awkward police officer. A more assured Carington appeared years later in 1904-’05 in the stories published in The Idler. In one of these, Carington and the Scotch Cousin, he uncovers a devious scheme to bury alive an indigo planter. In another, titled Carington and the Kidnappers, he foils the plot by a ruler deprived of his kingdom to kidnap a provincial governor after the 1857 Revolt. He knows that, in the aftermath of the rebellion, “if the Upper Provinces rose as one man and demanded self-government, and Russia stepped down to Kabul simultaneously, things would not run smoothly for the British Raj”.

Carington and the Demon Ruby refers to the caste system as well as the mystique of precious stones – a familiar writerly trope that appears in other writings of Hopkins – with its story of a disgraced officer driven to recover a stolen ruby by intruding into a temple’s inner sanctum. Carington and Miss Hebrand’s Romance is startlingly different for its depiction of an Englishman who finds happiness marrying a local woman.

Hopkins’s most prolific years were between 1895 and 1908. Her novel The Whirligig (1901) was a romance adventure between an Englishman and a woman in “temporary disguise” in South East Europe. Her The Antipodeans (1904) was described as a “fine, imperial novel” and The King of Kerisal (1907), in which an Englishman rules a kingdom beyond Singapore as a benevolent tyrant, received praise as well.

She died in 1955 in Hampshire, not far from where she was born.

Local colour

Hopkins’s writings on India are often compared to the works of her contemporaries: other British women writers who lived in India, such as Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929), Maud Diver (1867-1945) and Alice Perrin (1867-1934). Like them, her stories evoke the familiar colonial tropes of the British as rational, heroic beings in contrast to the superstitious and conniving “Oriental”.

Her women and non-Western characters sound dated, but her stories, especially those about Carington, are vivid, detailed and atmospheric. The Daily Mail, reviewing The Whirligig, wrote that her “descriptions of local colour” show “touches of positive genius”. In The Green Fakir, she described a Kumbh Mela-like festival thus:

“(The) stream of humanity…surged past the booths, dazzling in its silver bangles and many-coloured tinselled finery…There were the tones of thirty thousand babbling voices, the cries of sweetmeat vendors and cloth and brassware merchants, the laughter of men and women making holiday, and occasionally the drone and the minor chords of some native musicians, or the peremptory thud of a snake charmer’s drum. A spray of human beings tossed upon the edge of the river, bathing, drinking, sousing naked brown babies, filling, in a thousand picturesque attitudes under a brilliant sun, their lotahs or their water-pots. Here was a forest of bullock gharries gay with crimson trappings; there a sea of ekkas, (pony carts) more fantastic in shape and equally gaudy. A lute twanged inside the mustard-coloured screen that hid a company of mummers; the outskirts of the Fair were busy with the unlading of camels, and the scuffle of little mouse-coloured ponies, tripping in with bundles on their backs.”