Impressions of a Memsahib
My great-grandmother May Stokes. Vallum, Madras, Tamil Nadu. Circa 1895 Image and Narrative contributed by Teresa Stokes, Ireland My great grandmother, May Forence Stokes (nee Fuller) was born in Sneem, Ireland in 1862. Her father James Franklin Fuller was an actor, novelist and a renowned architect of the time. In 1889, she married her cousin Gabriel Stokes, whom she fondly called ‘Jack’. She was his second wife; his first wife had died of puerperal fever, five days after the birth of their son, Hugh. May’s notes are not dated, but I estimate it to have been written in 1895-96. Gabriel was the Collector of Tanjore (now Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu), and they lived at the Collector’s bungalow in Vallam with their three small sons, Adrian, Terence and Herbert, and their pug-dogs Punch and Judy. She never lived to undergo what she writes of with dread in the last paragraph –which was to take the children back to Europe and return to India without them – as she died of an abscess of the liver on January 15 ,1897. Gabriel was left with four motherless boys, who were sent back to Ireland and were raised by relatives. He continued to work in India and became a member of the Executive Council of the Government of Madras, and even served as acting Governor for a few months in 1906. Eventually he received a Knighthood. The following edited excerpts are from May's long notes that she wrote for the family titled “Impressions of a Memsahib". Her notes tell us a lot about the British mindset of the time; in particular where she implies that Indians are by nature too idle to govern themselves, is…