In White Mughals, William Dalrymple reveals the history of the early East India Company scholars and linguists who ventured to India. Due to their education and intelligence they were able to mix well with society and the royal courts.
Some became "Indianized," adopting local dress and customs, intermarrying. Some adopted polygamy and local religion.
As things became more on conquest and war footing and British soldiers arrived in quantity. They were not the scholars and intellectuals who had first arrived. The soldiers discovered they could live high with servants and large homes and sent for their wives. Once the British wives arrived intermarriage became unacceptable.
Sir David Ochterlony (1758-1825) and William Fraser were interesting early characters arriving in India and taking on local ways.
The Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony was twice British Resident (or ambassador) at the Mughal court in Delhi, and liaised with the Emperors Shah Alam and Akbar II. He was born in Boston, where his family fought with the losing British loyalists, and moved to India in 1777 after the Patriot victory at Yorktown.
With his fondness for huqqas, nautch girls, and Indian costumes, Ochterlony cut a lively figure, amazing Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a Hindustani jama and a turban, all the while being fanned by servants holding a peacock-feather fan (pankha). To one side of Ochterlony’s own tent, wrote Heber, was the red silk harem (shamiana) where his women slept. Ochterlony’s cortege, which the bishop later spotted on the move through the country of Rajputana, was equally remarkable: “There was a considerable number of horses, elephants, palanquins and covered carriages,” wrote Heber. According to Delhi gossip, Ochterlony had no fewer than thirteen Indian wives; every evening during his years in Delhi he was said to have taken all thirteen on a promenade between the walls of the Red Fort and the river bank, each wife on her own elephant.
"With his fondness for huqqas, nautch girls, and Indian costumes, Ochterlony cut a lively figure, amazing Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a Hindustani jama and a turban, all the while being fanned by servants holding a peacock-feather fan (pankha)."
They weren't Peacock feathers, they were Ostrich feathers. I.P. Daily, author of "The Yellow Stream" his legendary treatise on the subject, refuted this and many other parts of Dalrymple's book in addition to criticizing the weak flow of the work and Dalrymple's tendency to withhold some key details that might provide a counterpoint to the desired narrative, what Daily describes as the "holding it in" fallacy It's fascinating reading really.
^ Before it became a river, it was a stream. I was referring to the rarely cited first edition, not the popular reprint and rip off that came out later.
Tell me, do you go to discussion boards on Southeast Asian History and start threads about who the Tony nominees for Best Original Musical will be. If you don't, I really think you should.