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        During British rule, thousands of British women went out to India to live, work and to die, as wives, mothers and sisters and later as teachers, doctors and missionaries. Many were wives of army men, following their husbands to a land, which became for them a second home. Many social historians of the Raj have blamed these Memsahibs for exacerbating racial prejudices and dividing Indian society by their failure to understand Indian society. One of the spectacular exceptions to this rule was a woman called Maria Graham (1788-1842) who came to India with her father Rear-Admiral George Dundas of the Royal Navy. She married Capt Thomas Graham of the Royal Navy. Later she became Lady Calcott by her second marriage. Her 'Journal of a Residence in India', dealing with her experiences mainly in the coastal areas of India during the period from 1809 to 1811 was first published in England in 1812.

        Mrs Graham (Lady Calcott) was born at Papcastle, near Cockermouth in England, in 1788. She married Capt Thomas Graham of the Royal Navy at the age of 20. She accompanied her husband to India towards the close of 1808, arriving in Bombay on 26 May, 1809. There was then only one 'tavern' or 'inn' in Bombay and it was unsuitable for the stay of ladies. She and her husband became the guests of Sir James Mackintosh and Lady Mackintosh, who lived at Tarola, about 3 miles from the Port of Bombay, in a house that was noted for its best library in Asia.

        Early in February 1810, she took a short voyage to Ceylon. After staying for a month in Ceylon, she embarked on board the Cruiser Prince of Wales for Bombay. She had a distant view of Cape Comorin on the way. At Calicut she attempted to 'trace the scenes of the first landing of Europeans in India, the meeting of the Zamorin and Vasco da Gama, the treachery of the Prince, and the bravery and presence of mind of the Admiral'. She lamented that Calicut had been invaded by a wave of alien invaders for centuries and that it had passed so often 'through the hands of conquerors that every trace of former grandeur and importance is swept away'.

On 1 June 1810, she embarked from Bombay in HMS Hecate for the city of Madras on the East Cost. She reached Madras Harbour on 23 June 1810. About the panoramic view while approaching the harbour of Madras, she wrote in her Journal: 'I do not know anything more striking than the first approach to Madras. The low flat sandy shore extending for miles to the north and south, for the few hills there are appear far inland, seems to promise nothing but barren nakedness, when, on arriving in the Roads, the Madras town and Fort St George, are like a vision of enchantment. The beach is crowded with people of all colours, whose busy motions at that distance make the earth itself seem alive. The public offices and store-houses which line the beach are fine buildings, with colonnades to the upper storeys, supported by rustic bases arched, all of the fine Madras Choonam, smooth, hard and polished as marble. At a short distance Fort St George with its lines and bastions, the government house and gardens, backed by St Thomas Mount, form an interesting part of the picture, while here and there in the distance minarets and pagodas are seen rising from among the gardens'.        From her ship HMS Hecate, she went ashore in the sailing 'accommodation boat'. She was thrilled by the 'wild and plaintive' cry and the dexterity of the boatmen, attired in a turban and 'a half-handkerchief fastened to the waist by a packthread'. On landing she was surrounded by more than 100 Dubashes who clamoured for employment.

Lady Calcott (1788 - 1842)

        She later went to the garden-house of one of her friends which was near the point where Cutchery Road takes off from Santhome High Road, Mylapore today and enjoyed her stay there. She went to the Naval Hospital in the Madras Port premises. She described this building as 'a large, handsome, well-appointed building with an excellent garden. On the top is a large platform, where the patients take exercise and enjoy fresh air, with an excellent view over all Madras, its Pettah or Blacktown, and garden-houses, to the shipping in the Roads'.

        She paid a visit to the botanical garden where the late Dr Anderson had planted several beautiful trees. There she was shown the 'Saguerus rhumphii, a kind of palm from which an excellent sago is made'. In July 1810 she spent one week at Ennore village, 8 miles north of Madras, 'where a small salt water lake, with abundance of fine fish and excellent oysters were attractions which had induced a party of gentlemen to build a house by subscription on the edge of the lake. At this spot, there is a meeting every week to eat fish, play cards and sail about on the lake in two little pleasure boats'. This very building later called 'The Club House' on the edge of the lake was purchased for purposes of a tourist resort by VGP and Co of Madras about 30 years ago and later acquired by the Tamilnadu Electricity Board for locating their thermal plant. Was not the great poet Tennyson right in his beautiful lines of poetry?

        'The old order changeth

        Yielding place to new

        Lest one good custom

        Should corrupt the world!'

        Referring to the social life of the English in Madras town in 1810, Lady Calcott said that their life had 'a great deal more of external elegance than that of the English at Bombay'.

        In her Journal she states that she attended a public Ball at the Pantheon on Pantheon Road in Egmore and that it was well-conducted. She described the Pantheon as a handsome building. It contained a Ball-room, a very pretty theatre, card-room and verandas and it was used as a 'Masonic Lodge'. In her Journal she also touched upon other habits of local beauty and fashion in 1810.

        She went to Mahabalipuram along with a Brahmin servant of Col Colin Mackenzie and stayed there for three days. The Oriental Manuscripts Library in Madras today contains all the manuscripts collected by Col Mackenzie between 1792 and 1815. Lady Calcott gave a beautiful description of Mahabalipuram and its environs in her Journal.

        She was culturally very different from most of the English Ladies who came to India along with their husbands. She was a great lover of India and clearly stated in her Journal that one of her purposes was 'to exhibit a sketch of India's former grandeur and refinement so that I could restore India to that place in the scale of ancient nations, which European historians have in general unaccountably neglected to assign to it'. About the glory and greatness of Sanskrit language she wrote with great passion as follows: 'Were all other monuments swept away from the face of Hindustan, were all its inhabitants destroyed, and its name forgotten, the existence of the Sanskrit language would prove that it once contained a race who had reached a high degree of refinement, and who must have been blessed with many rare advantages before such a language could have been formed and polished. Amidst the wreck of nations where it flourished, and superior to the havoc of war and conquest, it remains a venerable monument of the splendour of other times, as the solid Pyramid in the deserts of Egypt'. This was written eight years before the birth of Maxmueller and almost half a century before he published the first volume of his famous series 'Sacred Books of the East'.

        The centenary year of the Madras Sanskrit College in Mylapore founded by V Krishnaswamy Iyer in 1906 is being celebrated on a grand scale this year. Krishnaswamy Iyer in heaven, his grand children and great grandchildren today and above all the enthusiasts of Sanskrit and Oriental learning should all be delighted to note that an English woman called Lady Calcott came to Mylapore in 1810 and wrote eloquently about the grandeur of Sanskrit language and literature, its majesty of thought and loftiness of expression.

        She returned to England in June 1811. The record of her travels in India with special focus on Madras was published in 1812 by Constable, in Edinburgh and Longmens in London, illustrated by good steel engravings from her excellent sketches. She had drawn beautiful sketches on the spot of several scenes in India and they all found their way into her Journal. In 1822, her first husband Capt Thomas Graham died in a ship going along the coast of South America. In 1827 she married Augustus Calcott, a well-known landscape painter, who was knighted by Queen Victoria in the year of her accession to the throne in 1837. Lady Calcott died at her husband's house at Kensington in 1842.

        The Athenaeum, a well-known Journal from London, paid the following tribute to Lady Calcott: 'She was an artist both in feeling and in practice, an excellent linguist, and her memory was extremely accurate and tenacious. Few women had seen so much of the world, or travelled so much, and none, perhaps, have turned the results of their activity to more benevolent account. Noble, direct, generous, forgiving, quick, sensitive, kind, sympathetic and religious, all that gave her charm and dignity will hold her memory in affectionate remembrance'.