Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess,
and the Bibi
M. A. S C H E R E R
Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842-1929) was one of the outstanding oriental scholars of
the early twentieth century. The work which established her reputation is her translation of
the Bdbur-ndma, the autobiographical memoir of the first Mughal emperor, published in
1922 by the Royal Asiatic Society. It was the first English translation from the Chaghatai
Turki in which Babur wrote his famous account. A monumental work of scholarship, it is
all the more remarkable for having been completed at a time when Chaghatai language
studies were in their infancy. The translation is characterized by utter reliability and
precision, exhaustive footnotes and numerous appendices: Western and Asian scholars
continue to consult it as the standard translation of this classic Timurid text. Yet, despite the
stature of her work, little is known about Beveridge herself, an unusual figure in the British
orientalist landscape if only because she was a woman who raised four children and learned
oriental languages when she was past the age of 50.
Perhaps it is a kind of poetic justice that such unusual achievement in a woman of this
period grew out of her woman's fate, an all too common one in the nineteenth century:
the death of two of her children in a short period. Initially Beveridge took up Persian as a
diversion in a difficult time - knowing her talent for languages, her husband, himself an
Indian scholar, had suggested it. But what began as an anodyne for a mother's sorrows
soon led to oriental translations. By happenstance, Beveridge's first projects were of
Persian works written by women: the Humdyun-ndma, a life of Humayun (1508-56), the
second Mughal emperor, and The Key of the Hearts of Beginners, a set of Hindu tales for
children. The coincidence of female authorship, combined with her personal circumstances, allowed Beveridge unusual insight into the works, but it also led her to reveal
much about herself- her ideas on women's duties, education, and role in society. These
ideas have direct relevance for how and why she pursued her subsequent research on
Babur.
To understand Beveridge's outlook and predispositions, it is essential to have a brief
sketch of her life before she took up scholarship. It is obvious that marriage to Henry
Beveridge (1837-1929), a judge in the Indian Civil Service best known for his translation
of the Akbar-ndma, was an important factor in exposing Annette to the possibilities of
Indian scholarship. But the factors which ultimately account for the work she produced are
her Unitarian intellectual background and a sturdy Victorian temperament inherited from
her father.
IRAS, Series i. 6. 2 (1996). pp. 197-220
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198
M. A. Scherer
Annette Akroyd Beveridge
Born Annette Akroyd in Stourbridge, a small town just west of Birmingham, Annette was
the daughter of a self-made man of England's rising middle class, a father whom she adored
and from whom she took her life-long commitment to duty and work. Having been
brought up Unitarian in religion and Radical in politics, she was a very progressive young
lady and so, in 1862, she enrolled at the Unitarian-sponsored Bedford College in London.
Founded in 1849, Bedford was one of the first two colleges for women in England. The
other was Queen's College, which had been founded by Anglicans. Unlike that school,
Bedford was committed to secular education. Annette believed as strongly in non-sectarian
education as she did in education for women, especially for the middle-class women she
knew so well. Many of them were frustrated in their ambition to do serious work by their
unsystematic education. Boarding schools of the period ran the gamut from shamelessly
superficial to merely chaotic - rote memorization of random passages was the chief
pedagogical tool. Bedford College set out to change all this.
As progressive Unitarians, the Bedford set were heterodox in many ways, mixing with
Theists and a variety of free-thinkers, vegetarians, and even Indian gentlemen residing in
London to pursue the law. Through her Bedford and Unitarian connections, Annette
found a worthy mission in the idea of providing a solid and secular education to Hindu
girls. Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-84), the leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu
group with long-established ties to Unitarians, had toured England in 1870 promoting this
very cause and urging Englishwomen to come to India to help their Indian sisters.
Annette sailed to Calcutta in late 1872 but once there she found that, despite what Sen
had said, there was precious little audience for secular education for girls and women.
Worse, she became the object of sectarian attacks because, in the 1870s, the efforts of the
Brahmo Samaj to educate women were very contentious. The issue was part and parcel of
debates over Westernization and incipient nationalism. So within a short time, Annette's
life took a more conventional turn: she gave up the school she had founded and married
Henry Beveridge.
It was her marriage to Beveridge that eventually drew her into oriental scholarship.
Given her talents, Annette might have eventually taken up intellectual work under any
circumstances, but there was a strong activist side to her, too - after all, she had gone out to
India as a reformer. But her experiences in India had not been particularly happy. First there
had been the school fiasco. Later, in 1883, there was more conflict surrounding her
opposition to the Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Indian judges jurisdiction in
criminal trials of Englishmen. Annette publicly opposed it on grounds that any society
which treated its women as Indian society did was not advanced enough to arbitrate fairly.
Her stance, common enough in India, put her in very bad odour with her Liberal friends in
England, giving her more private anguish: she was too liberal for Indians on women's
education, and too conservative for the English at home. Finally, there was her growing
deafness. A childhood illness was the original cause of a hearing loss, but her hearing was
reasonably good until her early 40s. Then it took a marked turn for the worse and by her
60s, she was nearly totally deaf. By nature, Annette was far from reclusive, but her deafness
handicapped her socially and this intensified her commitment to a scholarly life. In her
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
199
more famous work, the Bdbur-ndma, that total and really quite personal commitment was
expressed in a remarkable thoroughness and exactitude. In the Humdyun-ndma and The Key
of the Hearts of Beginners, it was expressed in a personal response to the women authors,
women like herself who in writing were stepping outside their central social roles.
Like many other amateur scholars of India, Annette was first intrigued by Akbar and in
the mid-i88os, she began a translation from German of his life by Count Noer. The project
was unusually time-consuming because it had been complicated by the author's death in
mid-work and an intervening editor and translator. Family life had its obligations too, and
it was fully five years before her translation of Noer's Emperor Akbar (1890) appeared. Not
until she was almost 50 and the Beveridge family had resettled in England did she begin her
real career as an oriental scholar. In the early 1890s, she learned Persian; Chaghatai Turki,
Babur's native tongue, followed several years later.
The Humayun-nama
The Humdyun-ndma, the project Annette tackled after Emperor Akbar, was written by
Babur's daughter, Gulbadan Begam, or Princess or Lady Rosebody, as Annette often called
her. Annette appears to have begun to learn Persian about 1892 or 1893, but it is not clear
when she began work on the Humdyun-ndma. The only really solid date is April, 1898,
when she published a long article on the princess in the Calcutta Review. The translation
itself appeared in early 1902, with a somewhat revised version of the article now serving as
an introduction. It was published by the Royal Asiatic Society as volume XIII of the new
series of the Oriental Translation Fund.
The original Oriental Translation series, founded in 1828 under the patronage of King
George IV, flourished for fifty years, then foundered. It was revived in 1891 by the
strenuous efforts of F. F. Arbuthnot, a long-time member of the RAS Council who
poured considerable energy and money into the project.1 Arbuthnot visited the Beveridges
in the fall of 1900 and wrote to Annette soon after to offer a contract on the generous terms
usually offered for such scholarship: she would be paid nothing by the RAS, though the
Society would pay for publication and present her with 50 copies when the book came out.
She must have already had the translation itself pretty well in hand as he expected
manuscript, proof corrections, index and preface to be completed in six months.2 From
these few bits of information, and from the fact that the article on Gulbadan had to be
written after the account was translated, one might hazard the guess that translating began
in 1895.
Annette knew about the Humdyun-ndma through Henry, who apparently came across it
while working at the British Museum. She mentions Henry's bringing it to her attention in
the Calcutta Review article on Gulbadan,3 though she does not do so in the revised version
which became the book's introduction. This is somewhat intriguing in terms of the
1
See F. F. Arbuthnot obituary, journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, N.S., XXXIII (1901), p. 641.
William Beveridge Papers, British Library of Political Science, la 20-2, letter of Arbuthnot to A. S.
Beveridge, October 29, 1900.
3
Annette S. Beveridge, "Life and writings of Gulbadan Begam (Lady Rosebody)", Calcutta Review (April
1898), p. 345. Henry "wished me to attempt its translation", she wrote.
2
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200
M. A. Scherer
Beveridge's marital-professional relations since the discovery of the manuscript was notable
and Annette usually mentioned her husband's assistance at every opportunity; for that
matter she regularly thanked everyone, even the British Museum as an institution.4 Perhaps
her failure to highlight Henry's discovery of the manuscript signified her desire to regard
the Humdyun-ndma as her very own.
Before Annette translated the Humdyiin-ndma, no one had done so — in fact, few
Westerners had known about it at all for almost two centuries. It was a "literary
parda-nishin",5 Annette wrote metaphorically in her preface, indulging her new familiarity
with Persian - that is, the book had been like a veiled woman, a woman in purdah, until it
was catalogued in the 1870s. Renowned and thorough scholars like William Erskine
(1793-1852) and Heinrich Blochmann were apparently unaware of its existence. Since no
second manuscript had been found, and since no mention was made of it in other works,
Annette concluded that few copies had ever existed.
Annette worked on the only known copy, an imperfect one at the British Museum, part
of a collection of 352 manuscripts gathered by a Col. Hamilton from the Lucknow and
Delhi areas. His widow left the collection to the British Museum in 1868, where it
remained unknown until listed in a standard catalogue completed by the famous Swissborn oriental scholar, Charles Rieu (1820—1902) in 1871. (Rieu, first "Keeper of Oriental
Manuscripts" at the British Museum, joined the Museum staff in the 1840s.)
Henry must have found a reference to the Humdyun-ndma while perusing Rieu's
catalogue at the British Library. Since he had been commissioned by the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, probably around 1894, to translate Abu'l-Fazl's Akbar-ndma, he was no doubt busy
at the Museum. In any case, the find was fortuitous since the project was so apt for Annette.
The princess was something of a soulmate for Annette because she too appreciated learning
and even collected books; Annette draws out this fact from one small clue and is alert to the
literary interests of the other royal women, too.6 And Gulbadan's special sympathy for the
personal and intimate side of life means that her work offers unique insights into the
Mughal period.
Gulbadan Begam had been asked by Akbar to write down her memories of her father,
Babur, and of her brother Humayun, Akbar's own father. This was part of a general effort
to help Abu'1-Fazl, the court historian, to compile his official history: "Everyone of the
attendants of our court who is gifted with the talent for writing history should write one",
Akbar had commanded.7 In her polite way, Annette hints that Abu'1-Fazl did not think
highly of Gulbadan's work at the same time that he borrowed from it: He "does not
mention it, but the Akbar-nama is not without indication of its use".8
Gulbadan's long life from 1523 to 1603 made her a valuable witness to that crucial time
when the Mughals were establishing their rule in India. Ever since Annette translated it,
4
See A.S.B, "Notes on the MSS. of the Turki text of Babar's Memoirs" JRAS, N.S., XXXII (1900), p. 440.
Annette S. Beveridge, tr., Humayun-nama (London, 1902, reprint 1974), p. 77.
6
Humayiin-nama, p. 76. One of the nine copies of Bayazid's memoirs of Humayun was given to Gulbadan;
three other princesses received copies. In reading Bayazid, Annette noted a passage which told "something
'bookish'" about one of the princesses wishing to get her book back from the author because she could not get
another source "from the library".
7
Cited in Ishwari Prasad, The Life and Times of Humayun (Bombay, 1955), p. 383.
8
Humdyun-nama, pp. 77-8.
5
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
201
Gulbadan's memoir has been celebrated for the intimate picture it gives of domestic life.
Gulbadan was not so different from Victorian women of three centuries later who often
kept busy writing memoirs that centred on domestic and personal life. In her concern with
traditional women's interests, such as marriages and births, Gulbadan told about many of
the women - wives, daughters, sisters, and in-laws - of Babur's descendants who are passed
over entirely in other sources. Descriptions of the delicate negotiations of a royal courtship
or of a wedding feast add vivid colour to Mughal history. A typically intimate picture is
found in Gulbadan's description of an outing the Emperor agreed to make with the palace
women when he was in the midst of his campaign against the Uzbeks at Balkh. It was early
spring, his princesses pleaded, and the riwaj, a rhubarb-like plant, would be up and ripe for
the picking. As Gulbadan recounts the story, though Humayun had agreed to go, he
quickly became impatient with the trouble of taking a large party of women up a high hill
- and showed it: "some vexation now showed itself in his blessed countenance. . . ."
Humayun, who had a soft but not a stout heart, told the ladies to go on, saying, "I will
follow when I have taken some opium and got over my annoyance."9
Gulbadan's work did not dwell only on women's interests, however. She was wellplaced to hear details of battles and political disputes from the mouths of those directly
involved. Thus her account has proved valuable for filling in gaps in other sources, or for
verifying or challenging them, even if it has been only by supplying a missing date or a
family relationship.
Besides its woman's point of view, the Humdyun-ndma is often celebrated for its simple
and direct language, a rare thing in most surviving Mughal writing. There was some
academic dispute about exactly what accounted for the princess's language: was it a Persian
peculiar to India, or was it the colloquial Persian spoken in the Iran of her day, conveyed
through a munshi? Annette took the latter position, agreeing with the great lexicographer
Steingass.10 The linguistic waters may have been muddied by the fact that Gulbadan used
some Turki words too, a consequence of that being her native language as it was Babur's,
while Persian was acquired. In what is a clue to Annette's blossoming interest in Turki, she
noted that these words were not always written accurately and that some were "laboured in
the writing, as though care had to be taken in the copying or original orthography".11 A
Persian scribe or Gulbadan herself, Annette suggested, would account for less facility in the
writing of Turki words and phrases.
Bibi Brooke and her Key of the Hearts of Beginners
Annette's translation of Bibi Brooke's The Key of the Hearts of Beginners was something of a
trifle compared to the Humdyun-ndma. Annette had been looking for something to increase
her facility with colloquial Persian in the library of her friend, E. H. Whinfield — probably
her search was connected to her efforts to deal with Gulbadan's idiosyncratic Persian.12
9
12
Ibid., pp. 188-9.
'" Ibid., p. 127, footnote 4.
" Ibid., p. 79.
Bibi Brooke, The Key of the Hearts of Beginners: A Set of Tales written down in Persian by Bibi Brooke, translated
by Annette S. Beveridge (London, 1908). Annette mentioned how she came upon the work in her preface, but did
not say when this was, which is important in terms of her language skills. Although the book was not published
until 1908, a letter to her son in early 1903 mentioned that the book had gone to press. (William Beveridge Papers,
BLPS, Hai9, Jan. 9, 1903.)
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202
M. A. Scherer
Although Bibi's tales did not end up meeting this utilitarian function, Annette found them
charming all the same. In her preface, she was apologetic about their being mere wayside
flowers of Persian literature, but their sentiment and moral lessons appealed to her. Their
interest for us lies in the fact that Bibi Brooke was a woman whose character and
circumstances prompted Annette to reveal important facets of her thinking.
The author was a Hindustani woman who married William Brooke (1752?—1833), an
East India Company man who ended his career as a judge in Benares. Brooke followed the
career line of many early Company men: he went to India when he was barely more than a
boy, he married an Indian woman, and he made India his permanent home.
Bibi Brooke's life reflects concerns common to women in many times and places: a
hunger for serious education, the belief that women find their duty and their happiness in
service to others, and the sorrows of motherhood. All of these concerns resonated strongly
with Annette, as we will see. The first of these concerns, education, accounts for why the
Bibi came to write her little tales at all. As a "well-born Musalmani", the Bibi was
accustomed to a daily teacher in the home, but as a woman she was not taught Persian, the
language of high literature. At first when she told her husband that she wanted to be better
educated, he let her take lessons from a "pious and well-born begam" — perhaps the Bibi
got a kind of ladies' education with religion and morality at its core, but in very cultured
dress. The Bibi wanted more, however: she wanted to learn Persian. Her husband arranged
lessons for her with his own munshi, a man she described reverentially as "of mild temper
and angelic disposition".13
The Bibi gained some ground in the language, but when her first translation from a
written Persian text, the Mi'rdj-ndma, turned out rather lame, the munshi had another
pedagogical trick up his sleeve: to increase her facility, she was to write simple stories she
knew into Persian. The result was her collection of morality tales for children. If the munshi
guided her to children's tales, he must have known the Bibi's interests very well. The tone
throughout is gentle humour at human foibles and follies - the Bibi hoped children reading
them would "smile and want to read more". 14
Annette at middle-age: bereavement and a new beginning
Annette's personal circumstances in the years she worked on the works of the Princess and
the Bibi coloured the way she presented them to a twentieth-century audience and that is
reason enough to explore her life. But doing so also makes it possible to understand how
Annette developed along such an improbable path at middle-age, a budding career in
oriental scholarship.
Perhaps the first thought that comes to mind in examining these years is how decisive
children can be in a mother's life, for, in fact, she took up Persian to cure the depression that
followed her daughter's death. Certainly the years between 1890 and 1894 w e r e v e r Y sa<i
ones for her. In September, 1890, her youngest child, five-year-old Herman, died; then in
April, 1893, her oldest daughter, Letty, died at the age of 15. Both deaths came suddenly,
although that of Herman was less of a shock: he had been subject to seizures ever since an
13
The Key, p. xiv.
14
Ibid., p. xv.
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
203
episode of high fever in India. Letty, a sweet and talented girl, had succumbed after a
five-day bout with influenza. On her tombstone, Letty was commemorated in words
which remind us that her parents were unusual among the British in India in giving their
daughter an Indian name: "In loving memory of Laetitia Santamini: She fulfilled the
promise of her name and was for fifteen years our Joy and Jewel of Peace."15
Ever since Annette's Bedford College days in the early 1860s, she had turned to the "stiff
work" of books when emotions threatened to overwhelm her. If there was ever a time she
needed such work, it was after Letty's death. In his biography of his parents, William
Beveridge, the famous economist and author of the 1942 Beveridge Report, said it was his
father who suggested Annette take up Persian to distract herself.16 Henry knew his wife
well, knew her absorbing interest in languages. When she was still at Bedford she was quite
proficient in German, French and Latin and she had learned Bengali before going to India.
Her husband became her first Persian teacher, or, as she wrote in her dedication to the
Humdyun-ndma, it was he who "set my feet upon the Persian way".
It is difficult from surviving letters to know more about how or even exactly when
Annette had Persian and Turki under her command. Her son reported prosaically that she
learned Persian "in her fifties" when she had resettled in England and then "proceeded to
learn yet another Oriental language- Turki" in order to make a "fresh translation" of the
Bdbux-ndmaP
Interestingly, Will's comment does not suggest he realized that her "fresh" translation
was the very first English translation from the language in which Babur wrote. Generally,
his biography of his parents gives the main stage to Henry. While recognizing his mother's
scholarly activities, he presents them rather casually. Annette helped this impression along.
In her introduction to a profile of Count Noer, for example, she referred to taking up her
study to fill the hours left by her children's absence. Once she told Will that as a young
woman, she, like him, had wanted an active role in the world:
I do books because I am shut off by my fate from living work and I do it, or began it, because I
thought it would bring me nearer in interest to my husband. But it is not my true life. . . .' 8
Annette would have had her son believe she was an orientalist in spite of herself. Some of
this can be discounted as old-age regret for missed opportunities. What is significant is that
she always slighted her intellectual work, even while continuing doggedly and daily at it.
Women of her era did not often conceive of their own interests and projects in the same
way as men. If they did serious work outside marriage, it was justified easily only if it was
altruistic: a social reformer, teacher, or nurse was acceptable because she was viewed as
functioning very much like a nurturing wife and mother to the broader society. Annette
had been on this altruistic career path in her London teaching and in her work with Hindu
girls. But this acceptable traditional path to meaningful work had not proved successful;
the Indian context had proved contentious and temperamentally Annette was not fitted to
be a handmaiden to the ideas of others if she did not agree with them.
Over the years, this experience and perhaps her isolation through deafness as well
15
16
17
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ha32. Annette to Will, date uncertain.
William Beveridge, India Called Them (London, 1947), p. 351.
W. Beveridge, op. cit., p. 351.
'* William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIai9, A. to W., Jan. 28, 1903.
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204
M. A. Scherer
coloured Annette's ideas about women and their public role. Years later, the subject came
up when Will was beginning his work at the famed Toynbec Hall, a community centre for
the poor of East London. She told him her experience with the Brahmo Samaj had given
her "an ingrained habit of 'doing good' (a comprehensive word) only as secondary to
duties that come of marriage and motherhood and housewifely duty". 19
From this passage, it is clear she did not view translating as her prime career, but that of
wife and mother. Perhaps this was natural to a degree, since translating was done at home
and alongside Henry. But such work! Her self-deprecation should by no means lead us to
view her work as avocational in the sense of being half-serious or half-baked. Her
achievement in these years was nothing short of remarkable: learning two new oriental
languages in a period of 10 years in order to translate major works of the Mughal period is
not the kind of intellectual labour one expects a person to begin in her 50s. Languages are
notoriously difficult for older people to learn. Mountstuart Elphinstone, for example,
turned to writing his great history of India only because he decided he could not possibly
master Sanskrit in middle age.
It is certain that Annette was studying Persian by November, 1894, perhaps was well
into it, because her daughter Jeannette, or Tutu as she was called, asked her then whether
her Persian was "flourishing".20 The novelty of a new language was a distraction from the
pain of missing her daughter. A bright student, especially in languages and mathematics
like her mother, Letty had been a tenderhearted girl, the kind who was nice to the classmate
everyone else picked on.21 She had been a mother's helper, too, as oldest daughters often
become when there is a special family problem, such as Annette's progressive deafness.
When Henry was still in India and Annette was trying to decide on their permanent home,
she took Letty with her on expeditions to consider Bristol and Eastbourne. At 13, Letty had
helped her interview servants too, serving perhaps as a sort of interpreter.22 Letty was
curious enough to make an effort to read Annette's Emperor Akbar when it arrived from the
printers and altogether was a companion to her mother, one all the more cherished because
of Annette's deafness.
Only a few letters to Annette contain poignant reminders of the loss that first impelled
Annette's Persian study. After Letty's death, Tutu and Will were looked after by others,
while Annette went away for a while, staying with close friends or relatives. Tutu wrote to
her mother to say that Letty's tombstone had been put up. Though only 13, Tutu was
called upon to write regularly about the care of the grave - Tutu was still in school in
Eastbourne where Letty was buried. A letter of May 22, probably just five weeks after her
sister's death, reported that "nurse went up to the cemetery today and said that the flowers
looked very pretty. I gathered fresh flowers this morning to put some upstairs where you
asked me to". 23 Flowers were brought often; two weeks later, the dutiful Tutu wrote that
it was white marguerites they were carrying to the cemetery.24 In yet another graveside
visit a year later, Tutu and Maud, perhaps a family friend or governess, had encountered
19
21
22
23
24
2<l
Ibid., Ilazo, A. t o W . Dec. 18, 1903.
Ibid., T . to A., N o v . 18, 1894.
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/27, A. to H., Feb. 9, 1891.
Ibid., E U R M S S C176/27, A. to H., Sept. 3, 1890.
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ila33, Tutu t o A., M a y 22, 1893.
William Beveridge Papers, BPLES, IIa83, T u t u to A., July 22, 1894.
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
205
the girls from the nearby Upwich Vale Home. "Just as Maud had put the ring on the
grave", they all came up and admired the sweet peas surrounding it. It is a sobering vision: a
flock of blooming young girls exchanging adult pleasantries over grave decor for a
15-year-old. "One of the matrons wished you could have seen it and hoped you were
better being away."25
Annette seems to have been away off and on for six months or more. When she returned
home, the memories must have been painful enough to drive her out again, for she and
Henry soon decided to abandon Eastbourne. In the spring of 1894, the lease was conveniently up for renewal and a house came up for sale in Haslemere, which they liked.
"Pitfold" was a 12-acre property near the sea; nearly 700 feet above sea level, it had
wonderful views. There was a large old garden, which suited Annette, for she was a
talented gardener in a land of gardeners.26 The house had begun as a cottage and been
dressed up and expanded to include a more imposing front-cum-turret. In happier times to
come, the years when Annette was working on the Bdbur-ndma, Annette was able at long
last to have the kind of family life she had always wanted - to watch the family mongrel
scamper up and down the long lawn with a visitor's hat, chased by the laughing victim, and
to entertain young visitors of Will and Tutu, even holding dances for them in an old barn
on the property.
In the fall of 1894, however, Annette lived quietly in her new home - her surviving
children were away at school. She studied her Persian and kept company with her
half-sister Kate, who would have been 39; Annette was 52.27 Both women had their
sorrows; in Kate's case, it was a pending divorce from a Mr North, which was final by
December, 1894.28 In nineteenth-century English society, divorce was more than a legal
nightmare. In the opinion of much of respectable society, divorce made one a virtual
outcast. In fact, Kate's divorce became one more cause of contention between Annette and
her conventional older sister, Fanny. Fanny and her husband James would not come
"haphazardly" to visit Annette and Henry in case Mrs North should be there: Fanny did
not want to risk association with someone "who had to do with the divorce court" because
if they did, others would not want to visit them.29 Fanny and Annette exchanged bitter
words which awakened old quarrels and normal relations were brought to an end.
Altogether, it was not a pleasant time of life.
It is difficult to judge when Annette actually began to translate the Humdyun-ndma. We
have only Tutu's 1894 reference to Annette's Persian study and then the fact that by April,
1898, her long article on Gulbadan had appeared in the Calcutta Review. By that date, she
would have to have completed at least a rough translation of the manuscript, since the
Gulbadan profile was based on the memoir. In May, 1898, she was working with
characteristic doggedness, presumably scrutinizing and refining the translation - Henry
25
Ibid., Ha33, Tutu to A . J u l y 8, 1894.
This is inferred from Will's mentioning her gardening skills prominently in the obituary he wrote for his
mother in The Times.
27
Ibid., T u t u to A., Letters of Oct. 14, 21, N o v . 14, 1894, March 24, 1895 all send love t o Aunt Kate, so her
stay there was extended.
28
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/161,1 have been unable to establish the divorce date, but it
was final by December, 1894 since Aunt Em wrote to Annette on Dec. 24, 1894, referring t o the " N o r t h divorce".
29
Ibid., E U R MSS C176/167, Fanny to A., July 13, 1894.
26
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206
M. A. Scherer
reported to Tutu that she was ill from working too hard.30 In the fall, she was working
avidly still, but now it was on the deck of a boat she and Henry took down the Rhine.31
Although the Humdyun-ndma was ultimately published by the Royal Asiatic Society,
Annette had written to another publisher, Sampson Low, about the project and its editor
had responded in the spring, expressing interest and suggesting that the Persian be set along
with the translation.32 It was probably Sampson Low's enthusiasm which stimulated
Annette's intense work at this period.
When her Gulbadan piece appeared, Annette received a relished compliment from an
old and respected acquaintance, John Budd Phear. She was so proud she wrote to Tutu in
Lausanne immediately to tell her about it.33 Phear had been the High Court judge in
Calcutta whom Annette had known in her early days there. In fact, he had advised her
how to handle sticky relations with members of the Brahmo Samaj. Both he and Lady
Phear had been on the board of Annette's school, and as local notables of liberal persuasion,
supported many efforts at social reform. Henry too commented to Tutu about Annette's
pleasure over Phear's compliment.34 Her husband might have taken a lesson, especially
since on another occasion, Annette was overjoyed that Henry had congratulated her on a
piece of work — apparently, a very rare thing for him.35 Both instances suggest how
solitary Annette's labours were and generally how little recognition she must have
received.
In June, 1898, the Editor of the Calcutta Review wrote to say that the Gulbadan article
was "the best thing which has appeared in the (journal) for a long time".36 Shortly
thereafter she received her payment, £ 5 , with which she bought herself a bracelet and had
it inscribed "Gulbadan, 1898" — it seems noteworthy that it was the princess's name that
Annette commemorated, not "The Humayun-nama" - and just beneath that, "W and J,
1897", perhaps a kind of talisman to protect her two remaining children.37
Judging from the shape of Annette's life in the 1890s and from publication dates, she
must have acquired Persian and been fairly well along with the Humdyun-ndma in the four
years between 1894 and 1898 - an impressive achievement. It is much harder to establish
when she learned Chaghatai Turkish, also known as Eastern Turkish or Turki - all these
names are used in the literature. The language is related to but not identical to modern
Turkish: Uzbek is the closest equivalent today. Chaghatai uses the same script as Persian,
but is a totally different language, indeed is from a different family of languages and quite
difficult to learn. While her son wrote that she took up Chaghatai after finishing the
Humdyun-ndma, she may have been working on it before that: there is a hint in the
30
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/143, H . t o T u t u , M a y 8, 1898.
Ibid., E U R MSS 176/143, H . t o T u t u , autumn, 1898 (not clearly dated).
32
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ha 17, A. t o W . , M a y 27, 1898. She was enthusiastic both about the
Sampson L o w response and that she was getting good response on her article.
33
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/143, A. to T u t u , Feb. 8, 1898. Until the fall of 1898, when
she entered Bedford College, T u t u was attending a Swiss school, possibly only for a semester. Since the letter to
T u t u was written before the article appeared, Annette must have sent Phear a pre-publication version.
34
Beveridge Papers, India Office, Mss E U R 176/143, H . B . t o T u t u , Feb. 6, 1898.
35
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIa25, A. t o W., Feb. 15, 1917. " Y o u r father praised m e ! " she wrote when
Henry told her she had accomplished a good deal in making an appendix for a collection of Babur's poems.
3(1
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/143, A. t o T u t u , June 13, 1898.
37
Ibid., A. to T u t u , June 18, 1898.
31
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
207
Humdyun-ndma introduction to this effect where she compares the Persian and Turki
versions of Babur's memoirs to Gulbadan's account.38
There is also a reference in her correspondence that is probably to Turki. In the spring of
1901, she wrote to her son from London: "Then I got my lesson and then we went to 1
Gordon Square." (Probably this was the address of an old college friend.) They had had a
"carnival of friends and acquaintances" there - Annette's delight in company was sometimes almost palpable. A few days later, there was another lesson, and again a week later:
I am getting on, but it is very difficult. Pere [Annette's word of choice for Henry when she wrote to
the children in later years] is most kind and I have to learn to follow him and this is really often
difficult because, as is natural, he is not trained to form the letters quite clearly. However, we are
getting on - he reads me poetry now of which I had some [sic] knowledge already and I follow him
and we repeat difficulties. Mr. [illegible] says he usually does not give this to be done till after the 24th
lesson.39
There is one confusing element in the picture and that is that Annette also mentions
lip-reading during this period.40 The references to poetry, however, seem to clinch the case
for Turki lessons; after all, why would one choose poetry to learn how to lip-read? And
then Henry is in the picture, too. There is no other evidence that he knew Turki, so the
reference to "following" him may imply that he was learning with her, or simply that he
was there as an intermediary between his deaf wife and the teacher. The timing is right for
Annette's advancing in Turki, but not for beginning it, since she published an article on the
Turki manuscripts of the Bdbur-ndma in 1901.41 In cases like this, the biographer wishes
Annette had been more given to discussing her trials than simply doing the work at hand.
If there were more certain evidence about Annette's interest in Turki, it would be clearer
when she first thought about translating the Bdbur-ndma. She was reading Babur's Memoirs
as early as March, 1892, presumably Erskine and Leyden's English translation from the
Persian.42 Was she already thinking about oriental scholarship before Letty's death? Or was
it a case of one thing leading to another? One possible hint that her professional commitment came later rather than sooner lies in the fact that she joined the Royal Asiatic Society
in 1898 whereas Henry had joined immediately upon returning from India in 1893. It is
clear that based on the Noer and the Gulbadan article, she had achieved some scholarly
reputation by 1900. That year, in the fashion of the time, the famed Russian orientalist
Nicholas Katanoff of Kazan University sent her a postcard-photo of himself.43
In July, 1899, Henry was off to India again. Digging up a second manuscript of the
38
Hiuniyun-nama, pp. 2—3: she notes Babur did not mention Gulbadan's mother in the Persian translation, but
did in the T u r k i where he styled her aghacha, a lady. Here she m a y have been relying o n Erskine's translation of
Babur. Erskine had incorporated as much of the w o r k of John Leyden as he could — Leyden had been working
from the T u r k i before his premature death. Still Annette did not cite Erskine on the point, which would have been
more in character.
39
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Hai8, A. to W., M a y 8, 1901. T h e t w o earlier lessons were mentioned in
letters of April 30 and M a y 2.
40
Ibid., M a y 8, 1901. She wrote that n o w she was able to lip-read better.
41
A. S. Beveridge, "Notes on the MSS. of the Turki text of Babar's Memoirs", JRAS, N.S., XXXIII (1901),
pp. 439-4942
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/190, Alice Allen t o Annette, Mar. 20, 1892. "Father quite
shares our liking for Babur's Memoirs. W e n o w have Bernier's Travels. Those old Moguls were a murdering lot
and so horribly cruel". Alice, w h o had been a friend of the Beveridge children, was writing from India.
43
Ibid., E U R MSS C176/143C-144. Postmarked Oct. 17, 1900.
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208
M. A. Scherer
Humdyun-ndma and more material on Akbar was the officially stated reason for the trip.
But it was also Henry's late-life wanderjahr. He relished bumbling around in his own
Colonel Newcome fashion — Will liked to compare his father to that kindhearted and
humble Thackeray character. For Henry this meant making do in modest quarters and
being kind to natives he would never see again, but also examining old manuscripts and
grilling their owners about their provenance. This was Henry's second trip back to India, a
reminder that Anglo-Indians often had trouble adapting to life in England. Elphinstone had
expressed the problem long ago of men whose return to England made them feel like
strangers in their own land: they looked back to India affectionately "like the ghosts of
Homer's heroes, who prefer the exertions of a labourer on the earth to all the listless
enjoyment of Elysium".44 Novels and popular culture have often presented a less lofty
image: the retired Anglo-Indian soldier or ICS man who was simply a bore telling stories
of India to puff himself up. Boring others is often the fate of the old, anywhere and
anytime, but someone whose career had been in India had no way of connecting his
experiences to most of his peers — when it came down to it, most Britons were not very
interested in India. Some of the mockery of retired Anglo-Indians was also designed to put
them in their place: they might pass for aristocrats among the natives, but men of middling
origins could not expect to do so at home.
In terms of the stated purpose of his journey, the search for a second Humdyun-ndma
manuscript, Henry toured "the chief towns of Upper India and corresponded with and
interviewed many native scholars and booksellers". He searched for seven months, but to
no avail:
No one in India seemed to have seen a copy and very few had ever heard of it. Shams-ul-Ulama Azad
refers to it on p. 737, top line, of his Darbari Akbari, but when I saw him he denied all knowledge of
it, and said that the only Tarikh Humayun he had ever possessed was Jauhar's and that he had given it
to Mr. Tolbort. I looked over his shelves and could not find it and I suspect that the remark in his
book is only hearsay. Had he really seen the book, which he terms a monument of Gulbadan
Begam's abilities, he would not have made some mistakes which occur in his work.45
At Hyderabad in central India, Sir Salar Jung's private library had the best manuscript
collection. Jung (alternately Jang), a great lover of history and literature, died in 1883 after
serving as Prime Minister to the Nizam. Jung was one of those Indian noblemen who sided
with the British in 1857. It was in Jung's library that the "Haiderabad Codex" of Babur's
memoirs was re-discovered and subsequently lent to Annette: this was a copy of Babur's
autograph manuscript made probably in the first half of the seventeenth century in the
library of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, and which proved to be a key source for
Annette's collation of the various versions of the Bdbur-ndma — a "veritable trouvaille", she
called it.46
But in 1899, Jung's library yielded no second Humdyun-ndma manuscript. Henry's
further correspondence with the librarian turned up nothing. At Calcutta, the result was
the same and the library itelf very discouraging. Henry thought the Asiatic Society was
44
Mountstuart Elphinstone Papers, cited in J. S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India (Calcutta, 1970), p. 132.
H e n r y Beveridge, " N o t e s o n Persian M S S . in Indian libraries", JRAS, N . S . , X X X I I I (1901), p p . 83-4.
46
A. S. Beveridge, "Further notes on the MSS of the T u r k i text of Babar's M e m o i r s " JRAS, N.S., X X X I V
(1902), pp. 657.
45
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
209
doing a poor job of seeing to its care, none of the staff knew Persian, and several valuable
manuscripts were missing. On his return to England, Henry reflected on the sad state of
things when the study of Persian in India was in such decline. Towns once rumoured to be
the "abodes of learned men" now contained "neither Maulvis nor manuscripts".47 There
were probably more Persian manuscripts in Europe than in India, he noted, without
alluding to why this should be so: people like himself had been taking them hence for many
years. (Perhaps scholars deserved the prize: it was said the prodigy-scholar John Leyden
"caught his death from a manuscript hunt" at the age of 36.48) Entreprising Indians helped
the process along by gathering and selling manuscripts to Europeans, both in India and in
Europe. Annette had lunch with one Muslim in London who claimed to have 400 in his
possession.49 Knowing the ins and outs of the manuscript trade was a mark of the
sophisticated scholar; scholarly "shop talk" sometimes turned on anecdotes about its
sharper practices. In a visit to the Beveridges in Italy, the famous Persian scholar, E. G.
Browne, illustrated his ideas about the morals of native entrepreneurs with a joke which
turned on two rival beetle collectors who steal specimens from one another.50 The climate
was yet another threat to manuscripts the British often decried.
Annette must have been disappointed that Henry found no second manuscript, but it
made her job less arduous since there was no need to collate the first with a second
manuscript. By late 1900, she had her Royal Asiatic Society contract, and two years later,
the book was published. A favourable review ran in the Spectator. "The slightly sentimental
tone of the comments is not inappropriate in a woman editing another woman's memoirs",
it noted, while praising Annette's full historical introduction and biographical appendix.51
In India, the Pioneer of Allahabad reviewed her book favourably, a fact noted at the RAS
annual meeting, but Annette imagined the reviewer was not a Persian (sic) "or he would
have taken up some of the language points".52 There was also a "flattering notice" in
Lahore's Civil and Military Gazette.53
On January 22, 1901, as Queen Victoria was dying at the age of 82, Annette's intellectual
life was picking up pace — Annette had turned 58 the month before. In many ways, her
early sixties were the happiest and the most optimistic time of her life. Her sense of
well-being spilled over into spiritual optimism as well. These were the years of her interest
in Christian Science, the years when she dared to hope that her hearing could be partially
restored. Her hope was short-lived, but there was a physical benefit in these years related to
her increasing deafness: she no longer heard that irritating buzzing in her head associated
with an earlier stage of her hearing loss.54 Annette was still vigorous, her children were
grown but in close touch, and they often brought lively young friends home for weekends.
And the gardens and meadows of Pitfold were flourishing:
Of news bucolic: there is the nice item that six squab have taken theirfirstflightsfrom the pigeon
house & are amusing us, also that ten piglets have appeared; that the erroneous path in thefieldis
47
49
50
51
52
53
54
4a
H . Beveridge, op. cit., p . 85.
Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 29, 1921, review of Emperor Babur.
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Hai9, A. to W . , J u n . 11, 1902.
Ibid., IIai9, A. t o W . , Jan. 2, 1903.
Spectator, M a y 30, 1903, p. 863-4.
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIai9, A. to W., May 19, 1902.
Ibid., Hai9, A. t o W., June, 1903. (Date uncertain.)
Ibid., Hai9, A. t o W., N o v . 16, 1902. "I have lost the ill company of so many years".
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210
M. A. Scherer
being rectified well; that there is due preparation made in clipped hedges, painted glass-houses &
general tidyness for the annual miracle which is already stirring in the Garden. Yesterday Pere & I
walked down to Portsmouth Road to the dip & back by the common; never were the views more
lovely; the sun shone; all was thankfulness & joy. Gorse is coming on & in a week everything will
shew something of the future.55
If nature was flourishing, so was her work and her own sunny mood was not kept for
one sunny spring day. In 1901, Annette had Noer behind her and the Humdyun-ndma
translation almost behind her — she was finishing up her lengthy appendix for it. She was
learning Turki and had published her first article on the Babur project in 1900, her second
in 1902. In the mature years of her career, i.e., when she was in her 70s and 80s, Babur
would take all her time. Now she had the energy for more than one thing at a time —
indeed, was eager to move in several directions. "My Bibi book has gone to Constable. I
feel very idle," she wrote to Will in January, 1903; and in the following January, she
rejoiced at her "release from dots" — a significant occupational hazard for every Persianist
and especially for someone dealing with old manuscripts - and thought about the future:
I have finished once going through the long Mss, i.e., the first proofs. Now I breathe and bring up
some arrears and push out a few feelers to the future. It has always been amongst my ambitions to
write a Quarterly Review article. . . . I also want to record somewhere all I have gathered about the
Babumama. So I shall ask the Q's editor if in about a year's time, he would like an article reviewing the
various versions.56
It is odd she thought of the Quarterly Review rather than the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society for a piece on Babur. Was she ambitious to be known as a writer by a broader
audience? Did she believe Babur should be known by more than a specialized audience?
Annette's translations of the works of Gulbadan and the Bibi
The Humdyun-ndma
Annette's point of view as a woman and mother shows up often and again in the
Humdyun-ndma. For examples, one can dip into her introductory article or her footnotes on
any number of pages. Abu'1-Fazl might dilate upon the prescience of the 14-month-old
Akbar for instantly recognizing his father, Humayun, when they were reunited, but
Annette commented that the child must have had help "from the smile which he had
known as one of the first happy things of life" - Akbar's mother, Hamida, of course.57 The
rigours of pregnancy deserved comment too, as when Annette noted that a seven-months
pregnant Hamida would have been especially glad to rest at a little desert town when
Humayun and his forces were retreating from Shir Khan.58 A mother who loved her son
but hardly ever got to see him might make an effort to delay his departure, Annette
suggested.59 A mother's sensitivity is apparent when Annette commented in a footnote on
the protocol lesson Gulbadan received from her father's old friend: "He treated her like a
grown-up and she tried to act one."60 Other modern writers before Annette have expanded
55
56
57
Ibid., A. to W., Mar. 4, 1905.
Ibid., IIai8, A. to W., Jan. 9, 1903, and IIa20, A. to W., Jan. 28, 1904.
5(t
59
Humdyun-ndma, p. 39.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid., p. 5.
*° Ibid., p. 102.
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
211
upon the era's boy-kings, but only a mother would dwell as she did on Babur's gifts to his
son Askari, the gifts of command, including horses, ten elephants, mules and camels:
The small boy's mind is clear to us about the horses, for where is the child of twelve whom they
would not delight? But what was in it about the elephants? And how did he look when he inspected
their bulky line?
It was no doubt passages such as these that inspired the Spectator reviewer to comment on
Annette's "slightly sentimental tone".61 Apparently Annette had not maintained the proper
"male" voice; possibly her effort to do so accounts to some degree for a stiffness in her style
not found in her personal letters. The same reviewer complained of Annette's "bald
literalness" in translating Gulbadan as "Rose-body", arguing for Rose-bud. Annette was
indeed a literal translator, but the reviewer does not seem to have been aware of all the
"rose" names conferred on princesses — the Rosy-cheeked princess, the Rose-leaf princess,
the Rose princess, the Rose-hued princess - or perhaps he would have understood the
difficulty.
Annette was naturally more alive to dress, household operations and etiquette than one
of her male contemporaries would have been since Victorians had entrusted these areas to
women's supervision. Certainly it is hard to imagine anyone writing this footnote who had
not lifted needle and thread:
Tukma (dar), usually translated buttons; but the button is so associated with the button-hole as to
suggest a fastening. A dressmaker might say 'ball-trimming'. Globular buttons were and are placed
round the neck and hem of a bodice. The vazir of Lonkuran ordered a jacket with garniture of
twenty-four gold buttons, smaller than a hen's and larger than a pigeon's. Vests trimmed with
'buttons' (Memoirs) are repeatedly named by Babar as gifts.62
Virile as he was, Babur apparently shared Annette's interest in buttons, which is only to say
that Mughal royalty liked to be properly bedecked for the occasion.
Etiquette in Mughal royal society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an
all-encompassing concept; it had material substance. It signified formal relationships, and it
actively communicated messages. As a Victorian, Annette also knew a society where
etiquette was highly important, even though the dynamics of her society were worlds apart
from Babur's. In the swiftly changing industrial age, one did not rise by income and
education alone, but by mastering forms of social intercourse. And Victorian etiquette was
well enough developed to register with barometric exactitude when a person fell in the
social hierarchy for whatever reason - divorce, bankruptcy or a declaration of atheism. All
of this sensitized Annette to the meaningfulness of the ritualized etiquette in Babur's
society.
Annette's many comments on children and mothers do sometimes have a "sentimental
tone", but the reviewer who characterized Annette's article that way was not quite
accurate. Many another woman would have had only sentiment to offer - and then only
the sentiment appropriate to tender family scenes. Annette's feelings were roused by more
than the domestic and even with "womanly" topics, she could be rigorous in her
assessments: she accuses Gulbadan's ladies of the court of "romancing a little" in their
61
Spectator, op. cit., p. 864.
62
Humayun-ndma, p. 127.
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212
M. A. Scherer
description of Humayun's courtship of Hamida.63 And while Annette sometimes adopted
the traditional feminine point of view on war, namely, to regret its violence and the toll it
took on family life, she understood political realities quite well, not flinching at all over sixteenth-century blood and gore: it was only a "dreary waste of good nature" for Humayun
to delay blinding his brother Kamran, a punishment demanded by "common sense".64
Her approach to Gulbadan combined a feminine sensitivity and an interest in personal
relationships with a masculine vigour, logic and political awareness. Her "masculine" side,
if one may call it that, was marked and had been fed by two sources, one historical and one
personal: the no-nonsense style of Utilitarianism and the unyielding individualism of the
early Victorian period; and on the personal side, not only her father's temperament, but a
steely courage she developed over time, especially as she grew more isolated through
deafness.
This particular blending of traits which made certain women personally intrepid yet
conventional with respect to women's roles and women's rights, is not so unusual among
early feminists of a particular stamp. Women like George Eliot and Harriet Martineau
come immediately to mind, and Beatrice Webb and Gertrude Bell, though their dates are
much later, are other famous examples. (Like Annette, Webb and Martineau came from a
Unitarian background.) Women like these had a strong need to join men in serious work,
but they pleaded for women to retain their femininity as they mastered men's work and
men's standards. They were also singular enough in their talents and motivations to stand
apart from most women contemporary with them, in fact were impatient with the fledgling efforts of many of their sisters at self-realization. In a famous essay, Eliot deplored the
character of most of her contemporaries, whose highest ambitions encompassed only
writing "silly novels". She claimed that she wanted women's special experience and
insights to be expressed and valued, but she would not excuse "feminine fantasy" or "selfindulgence". Women needed to substitute "the hard drudgery of real practice".65 Drudgery is an Annette word if ever there was one; there was no cheap way to achievement, or
virtue. In the Humdyun-ndma she showed her tender side by the feeling and reverence she
held for women's work, but at the same time she imaginatively entered into the battles and
victories, negotiations and strategies of Humayun's times.
It was this temperament that is relevant to her opposition to women's suffrage in her
later years. Ironically, despite having views on women that are unprogressive by some standards, Annette made a pioneering contribution to women's history in the Humdyun-ndma.
In an extensive appendix of almost ioo pages, she wrote biographical notices of 203 women
who were prominent in Gulbadan's era. Annette introduced the appendix modestly as
incomplete, merely the "gathering in" of details from general work on the translation. As
far as possible, Annette included all the women mentioned by Gulbadan, by Babur and by
Mirza Haidar Dughlat in his Tdrikh-i-Rashidi, a valuable history of the Mughals and Turks
of Central Asia. (Haidar, Babur's cousin, was a soldier and politician of the era.)66
63
M
Ibid., p. 151.
Ibid., p . 145.
Cited in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing
(Princeton, 1977), p . 97.
66
Given that Annette was one of the first w o m e n to toil in the vineyard of Mughal scholarship, it is ironic that
another w o m a n , Winifred Holmes, writing on Gulbadan in the 1950s, failed to credit Annette's work, and seems
to have come very near plagiarizing it - certainly William Beveridge thought so. H e challenged Holmes in the
65
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
213
In Annette's vignettes of these Mughal women, she is unimpeachably systematic, with
the ostensible object of clarifying identities and factual details; this is all very much in
character with the kind of work she would do on the Bdbur-ndma. The tedium of the
project can best be appreciated by those who have struggled with the complex familial
relationships that arise in a society where men had children by several wives, where
children were reared by women other than their mothers, and where bonds of affection
were described as "brotherly" between those not brothers. Women's identities were
especially hard to pin down in this society, and so they were often lost to history. A clue to
the problem may be taken from one small difficulty Annette faced in her effort to describe
Akbar's mother. Her father's identity was unclear, and in weighing the possibilities Annette
noted that one source used the Persian for full-brother, while another translated the same
phrase as "uterine brother", which should have correctly been used only for those with the
same mother but not the same father.67
In clarifying identities and relationships, Annette's biographical notices have great
historical value since confused identities lead to mistaken interpretations. This is especially
true for the sixteenth century where even the basic chronology of events often has to be
inferred. But history benefited also because in relating all the interesting details she found,
Annette has allowed us to see many social and cultural features clearly: how long women
lived and the likely age for marriage; whether they re-married and to whom; how they
entered into political affairs, sometimes in the gift of marriage, sometimes directly in
plotting to depose a son's rival; how influential a familial relationship could be, as for
example when Haidar was saved from a massacre through the intercession of his brotherin-law; what men and women expected of one another, and what they believed was
honourable or despicable in a man and in a woman. These lessons are all there for the
taking. And had Annette not been consumed in the brain-breaking factual work, she would
have had more time to wax at length on such subjects - today's scholars write long books
on the same or less information. In any case, since no end of fallacious interpretations can
follow from confused identities, as she herself demonstrated in an early article,68 Annette's
playbill of historical players made a crucial contribution to Mughal historiography.
Another facet of the Humdyun-ndma which prompted Annette to reveal something of
herself was Gulbadan's language. Annette's comments here presage an important aspect of
her approach to the Bdbur-ndma. The Humdyun-ndma has often been noted for the
unaffected and spontaneous style in which the princess wrote. This accorded very well with
Annette's ideas. Even at college, she had been known for her preference for plain language,
but in her, it was not merely a stylistic preference. It was founded on her belief that a simple
and direct style was a sign of straightforwardness and integrity - a sign of a man, like her
father, who stood ready to act on exactly what he said.69 Because of her convictions, she
matter in an extensive m e m o r a n d u m comparing passages, demonstrating that Holmes's article and essay were
simply a retelling of Annette's work. Holmes backed off, blaming her publishers. See Winifred Holmes, " T h e
Arwhale-e-Humayun b y Gulbadan B e g u m " , Islamic Quarterly, I/3 (1954-5); and her Crescent and Cross (London,
1955). Chapter 8; and William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ia2O-22, M e m o r a n d u m of Dec. 10, 1956.
67
A separate Persian phrase, "uterine brother", applied to just such a relationship: Humayun-nima, pp. 237-8.
68
A. S. Beveridge, " A suggestion for the second edition of Mr. Blochmann's Ain", Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal, LX1V, Part 1, N o . 2 (1895), pp. 163-5.
m
This is a theme I develop in the life of Beveridge I am writing.
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214
M. A. Scherer
made a conscious effort to preserve Gulbadan's style. Annette allowed herself an affectionate note on the princess's language:
So ends the long life of a good and clever woman . . . brought so near us by her sincerity of speech
and by her truth of feeling that she becomes a friend even across the bars of time and creed and
death.70
Perhaps Annette's solitude led her to value the written word more than ever, led her to
make a friend of a dead princess.
From the broadest perspective, Annette's work on the Humdyun-ndma played well into
her subsequent work on Babur's autobiography. She got to know Babur through the eyes
of his adoring daughter, and this may have fed Annette's devotion for the years of effort it
took to translate Babur's autobiography. Is it fanciful to reflect that Annette's love for her
own father made her especially receptive to Gulbadan's view of Babur? Consider this
passage Annette wrote to describe the reunion of the child-princess and her father in 1529
outside Agra:
Happy child! And happy father too! who recovered such a clever and attractive little daughter. . . . It
is not only her book that lets us know she had a lively mind, but the fact of its composition at an age
when wits are apt to be rusted by domestic peace. Only a light that was strong in childhood would
have burned so long to guide her unaccustomed pen after half a century of life, and only a youth of
happy thoughts and quick perceptions have buoyed her, still gay and vivacious, across the worries
and troubles of Humayun's time.71
In these gratuitous comments, Annette showed her empathy with Gulbadan on more
than one score: not only love for a father, but also the memory of a happy childhood to
carry her through troubled times and through the effort of taking up the unaccustomed
work of a pen at an age "when wits are apt to be rusted".
The Key of the Hearts of Beginners
In the Bibi's work, there are three themes that touched a chord with Annette: the Bibi's
devotion to home and humble duties, her interest in education, and the joys and sorrows of
motherhood.
With respect to her role as a woman, the Bibi's views first need some explication for the
modern reader. The Bibi clearly believed that her role as a woman was to serve her husband
with total devotion, and never to put herself forward in any way. This is abundantly
apparent in her preface, but it must also be added that for two reasons, many of the Bibi's
self-deprecating expressions must be taken with a grain of salt. First because they are
conventional in polite and formal Persian. When the Bibi writes phrases such as "the faulty
woman who is the author of this book", or "what can this writer, this headless, footless
thing, say of hope to correct mistakes", or "this babbler in unscholarly words", it is not
only because she sees herself as a subservient woman in a very hierarchical society. Among
well-bred Indian Muslims who had derived their high culture from Persia, it is courteous
for a speaker to refer to himself or herself as the servant or slave of another as a way of
70
Humayun-nama, p. 77.
71
Ibid., p. 22.
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
215
ascribing honour and affection to the person being addressed. The second reason for the
Bibi's spirit of devotion is that the Islamic literature of the pre-modern period, which the
Bibi would have been imitating, did not encourage the individual to express personal
feelings. It is for this very reason that Babur's autobiography is so valued, because he
expressed himself freshly and directly.72 It need hardly be added that a woman, above all,
would be unaccustomed to asserting her own ideas and feelings.
How did Annette respond to this aspect of the Bibi? Discounting some excesses of style,
the Bibi's expression of utter devotion to husband and family were rote-rhetoric for many
Victorian women. Novels of the period, especially after mid-century, turned on this very
issue: the heroine was the heroine because she was saucily independent, a woman who
wanted to step out of the mould, but in the end discovered that love and domestic duty
were the only path to happiness. Beyond that, however, as a Nonconformist woman of the
middle class, Annette was particularly comfortable with the Bibi. Nonconformists, being
descended from Puritans, hated arrogance and presumption. In fact by this point in history,
religious and secular modes had intermixed so thoroughly, that any showiness was
considered vulgar. Modesty and restraint were the way to demonstrate one's social
respectability: one earned it quietly with a good bank account and correct manners. Putting
one's self forward proved the opposite - that one did not belong in the upward-moving
middle class. This was a great point with Annette who believed that the proper mode was
quiet work and no deplorable showiness. When her son was offered a job as a Morning Post
columnist, she was especially glad it had come to him "in a fashion so much our own", i.e.,
without having asked for it.73 If one's refinement and delicacy were established by not
putting oneself forward, the Bibi had shown herself to be quite refined.
As to the educational theme in the Bibi's work, Annette does not comment directly, but
given her mission to Indian girls and women's education, she must have been strongly
sympathetic to the Bibi's efforts to learn. Interestingly, despite all the Bibi's humility and
self-obliteration, the one passage in her four-page preface where a hint of her own feelings
emerges has to do with education. The sentence sits so incongruously in the middle of
conventional humble rhetoric that it makes the modern reader smile. Here the Bibi refers
to herself in the third person:
In the six years of her lessons from the munshi-sahib, she missed many through his frequent illness; for
this reason her education has remained very imperfect, both in hand-writing and in other things
necessary to know. In all the six years, one and a few months only of real work was done with him. (italics
mine) At the end of this time, he fell into complete bad health and in A.H. 1202 moreover, his son died
after a few hours illness. Grief for this loss made him so much worse that in the following year, he
hastened from this transitory world to the eternal home. His departure set the seal of regret on his
pupil's lowly heart for he was a good teacher and an angel in disposition.74
It is not going too far, I think, to suggest that the Bibi was frustrated that the munshi's age
and health interfered with her education, especially when the italicized phrase is embedded
in standard phrases about his death being a trip from this transitory world, and the pupil's
72
Gustave E. von Grunebaum, cited in Stephen F. Dale, "Steppe humanism: the autobiographical writings of
Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 14.83—1530", International Journal of Middle East Studies, XXII (1990), pp. 37-8.
73
74
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIa20, A. to W., Oct. 27, 1905.
Brooke, op. cit., p. xv.
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216
M. A. Scherer
lowly heart. A rather more human impatience lurks beneath the words: had the Bibi not
wasted enough time already without having, at her age, to put up with a sick munshi? Since
Annette had run a school for Hindu girls, she was familiar with their poor education; she
believed she knew, too, about the unreliability and half-hearted commitment of munshis
and Brahmos to girls' education.
The third theme in the Bibi's work that Annette responded to strongly was a mother's
sorrows. In her preface, the Bibi alluded to these only indirectly: "After a while came
various misfortunes owing to which she could not go on." 75 From her own experience,
Annette knew quite well what it would take to incapacitate a mother who normally must
be so dependable: for some while, after Herman's death, she was unable to work, unable,
as she wrote Henry, to "have two ideas presented to me at once".76
That Annette was sensitive to this phrase is clear from the fact that she did additional
research to discover whether the cause of the Bibi's sorrows was what she suspected: in all
probability, Annette wrote in her preface, it was the death of the Bibi's young daughter,
Arabella. One of Annette's sources was a tombstone inscription in Suri in Birbhum where
the Brookes were stationed in the late 1780s: "Sacred to the memory of Arabella, the
daughter of Mr. William August Brooke, who died November 6, 1787."7? Annette also
managed to turn up confirming evidence in a work of Sir William Hunter, the wellknown oriental scholar and Indian civil servant.78 The evidence was a vivid image of the
Bibi, the recollection of an old servant which Hunter had written down:
Thefirstsahib I distinctly remember [in Suri] was Judge Brook(e) Sahib. My uncle was cook in his
house and my earliest remembrance is of Mem-sahiba Brook(e) walking up and down the verandah
and crying because her little daughter was dead. I do not remember what she died of but I remember
that my uncle carried me in his arms to see the Sahib and Mem-sahiba put the little girl in the ground.
The coffin was carried to the tamarind-tree at the end of the garden [graveyard] and put into the earth
and then they put a white stone over it and the stone is there to this day.79
Thus Annette and Bibi Brooke shared the death of a daughter. They also shared a thirst for
knowledge, shared even the struggle to learn Persian when they were no longer young.
Annette's sympathies were so strong that she used the Bibi to voice her own convictions
about women's role in her preface. The passage carries special significance because she
wrote it in 1908 when she was spearheading a campaign in her neighbourhood to oppose
women's suffrage. The Bibi's life illustrated, Annette argued:
. . . what some [sic] Western women know and gain happiness from practising; namely that there is
for the house-mother, perennial value in a citadel of work done within her home, but differing from
her home occupation, to which she may retire when children pass from her care or when sorrows
have assailed.
The stories have a yet wider interest and this is one they share with the book of the Bibi's comrade
in Faith, the Princess Gulbadan. It lies in their proof that not from one religious Faith only does there
75
Ibid., p. xv.
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R MSS C176/27, A. t o Henry, Oct. 15, 1890. This was a m o n t h after
Herman's death.
77
Just h o w Annette verified this, 1 do not k n o w - perhaps through a personal contact in India, or perhaps there
were records in India she could reach with the help of contacts at the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
78
Annette did not indicate what w o r k of Hunter's it was in; perhaps his Rural Annals of Bengal.
79
Brooke, op. cit., p. x.
76
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
217
radiate the inspiration to live the dutiful home-life, on which women may build up what they will of
personal culture and even of far-reaching power.80
In these few sentences Annette hits upon several cherished beliefs: that it was valuable for
women's happiness for them to have some work of their own; that work was a citadel,
where one could protect oneself from life's troubles or the hurt inflicted by others; that it
was in fulfilling her home duties that a woman's real power and influence lay; and, finally,
that devotion to home was in some sense sacred because the home was a moral citadel for
the family.
These premises are related to Annette's late-life opposition to women's suffrage. Since I
have found no coherent statement of her views on this topic, it is necessary to work at her
ideas a little to see how they came together in her mind and heart. Her opposition is rather
poignant when one remembers that when she was just out of Bedford College, she had
been a member of one of the earliest women's suffrage societies in Britain, the Kensington
Society. In those days, if a friend insisted it was not a woman's place to "intermeddle" in
government, she responded by saying, "but we have a woman at the head of our
government!"81
In Annette's little homily on the Bibi's life, one clue to her thinking lies in citadel, a word
which cropped up often in her writing. It is worth dwelling on as a clue to her personal
psychology, which is itself an important influence on her thinking about women. First it
must be noted that the word citadel is typical of that nineteenth-century vocabulary which
ennobled everything — the opposite of the twentieth-century disposition, which is to tear
everything down82 — in order to make it part of that great Christian battle for the Good. As
a woman, Annette was more given to fighting than yielding. But when she could not fight,
which as a woman she was often handicapped from doing, she usually washed her hands of
a situation, turning resolutely away from Brahmos, from her sister Fanny, or simply from a
boarding house busybody who told her she made noises with her teeth when she ate. Was a
citadel necessary because she did not like the terms women were given in the world? Was a
citadel important because her deafness made her less and less sure of herself in the
world-at-large, even susceptible to a degree of paranoia? Or was a citadel important simply
from the more general cause - her sharing in that anxious Evangelical belief that life was a
battle between good and evil, and where battles were waged, fortresses were essential.
Whatever the case, she used the term to refer to two things: work and the home. For her
divorced sister, Kate, Annette hoped that artistic interests would be a citadel.83 Some 40
years earlier, she had written to Henry: "Now my own dear husband, live in our citadel."
It was her answer to him after he unburdened himself late in their marriage about long-ago
dalliances with women before he married his first wife, Jeannette Goldie.84
Clearly one of the forces which shaped her views about women and the need for a citadel
was the failure of her school and her subsequent isolation in India. In going to India as an
m
Ibid., p. xi.
Beveridgc Papers, India Office, Eur MSS C176/177, Ellen Nichols to A., Dec. 11, 1865.
82
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modem Memory (London, 1975) addresses the subject of the war as a great
divide between the lexicons of lofty and low.
83
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIa28, A. to W., Aug. 8, 1922.
84
Beveridge Papers, India Office, E U R C176/17, A. to H., June 23, 1884.
81
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218
M. A. Scherer
independent woman with a personal mission, she had learned the folly of trying to break
the woman's mould. She may not have come to this conclusion right away. But as her life
moved on, a rationalization took shape that agreed with her own experience: in effect, it
said one must work within social strictures and structures to accomplish anything.
There is other evidence as well to support this interpretation. The opinions of her Bibi
preface in 1908 about women's influence stemming from their home duties is analogous to
sentiments of five years earlier on the subject of the best way to accomplish social good.
Annette had written to Will then after a Toynbee Hall reception, saying she believed she
could do good only as a mother and wife. Thus she could not quite understand their
modern philanthropy. She must have expressed herself rather critically at the reception
since she closed her letter with a sort of apology: she thought there might have been some
misunderstanding with a Mr Douglas about how he or she thought the young people
foolish.85 Fashions change in social problems and strategies as much as in anything else. So it
is not particularly surprising if Annette and a Mr Douglas somehow communicated a few
jibes between sips of punch about youth's misguided idealism, a favourite pastime of older
people of any era.
What is interesting is that Annette clearly maintained her serious interest in working for
society's improvement. She not only wrote to Will about the topic just after this event, but
returned to it several times. In May, 1905:
It seems more and more to me that to do direct good to people for whom one has not affection is a
most difficult and risky thing. There must be personal disappointment in the [execution?] of 'good'
done for the sake of doing good.s6
And in October, 1905, referring to one of Tutu's regular social functions for neighbouring
factory girls, Annette wrote: "It was most successful & adds weight to the view that it is
best to do the work nearest to home." 87 Will's work did bring Annette around a little to
the idea of working with strangers, for when a philanthropic friend of the family asked her
what she thought of Toynbee Hall, she told him she preferred its plan of bettering
circumstances to his of dealing with individuals.88
With respect to women, however, there was a special reason for keeping good works in
the home or neighbourhood. Annette believed that because of her gender, a woman's
dignity and virtue were under threat in the public sphere. How can we doubt that this was a
result of Annette's experience in India where she had been subjected to ad hominem attacks in
the Indian press? It is probable that Annette's opposition to women's suffrage was
compounded of many things: innate social conservatism; a belief that women could and
should prove themselves first in the field of work; perhaps a wish to support a more limited
franchise, which would argue against granting all women the vote. But this fear of the
public arena, her belief that it threatened a woman's dignity, was also a distinct element in
the amalgam. Based on her experience, she did not believe most men were capable of
treating a woman chivalrously and, at the same time, of treating her as an individual, with
an individual intellect.
85
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ihzo, A. to W., Dec. 18, 1903.
"6 Ibid., IIa20, A. to W., May 2, 1904.
87
m
Ibid., U220, A. to W., Oct. 30, 1905.
Ibid., IIa2O, A. to W., Oct. 30, 1905.
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Woman to Woman: Annette, the Princess, and the Bibi
219
Was Annette's indignation at sexual stereotyping merely an expression of Victorian
prudery? Who can say with certainty? She was prudish by our standards, but mostly she
seems to have been overwhelmingly sensible about sex. When Henry wrote her a
confession about a pre-marital dalliance, she told him, in so many words, not to worry
about it, to get on with life. Men and women were built differently, had different appetites,
and what was unacceptable in a woman's behaviour was forgivable in a man's. In other
words, Annette was quite aware of the Victorian double standard, and regarded it as a fact
of life, even if it was one she did not care for. She had an argument with Adelaide Manning,
a good Liberal and head of the National Indian Association, over interracial marriages.
Manning had insisted Indian "gentlemen" were equal to British. Annette was thinking in
other terms altogether: "How can she or anyone else know the character of the gentleman
in question!"89 Annette does not seem to have believed that men could ever be reformed to
an ideal which would permit women to enter the public sphere on equal terms and with
equal dignity.
All of this fits with her 1883 opposition to the Ilbert Bill, which has been alluded to
earlier: any society which viewed woman first as a sexual object was not a civilized society.
If Western society was not entirely safe for a woman's status, the Orient was definitely not.
A 1905 letter shows she had not changed her views in the 20 years since the Ilbert
controversy. Now she pointed out that the pernicious attitudes to women in Christianity
could be traced to its oriental beginnings. Referring to an article by a friend of Will's, she
wrote:
There seems to me to be justice in claimingforthe North [she is referring to Northern European] to
have given us something - much - and my notion of it is that we drew from the North some ideas
about women & Love which have nothing to do with the Oriental notions that certainly tinge what
the Christian Scriptures say about women. Not what Jesus says; his silence & the surprise of his
disciples that he should be seen speaking to a woman at Samaria are, I think, indications of his oriental
milieu. . . . It is not to that side of Christianity that women owe their release (so much as they have
attained) from oriental notions which smack of the purdah & its inventive motive; it is I think to the
purely spiritual centre of Christianity; the knowledge of Spirit & of One Spirit. This has allowed
women to range themselves as sharers in One & and Same Spirit. But it has come not through
Apostles but direct & from the silence real or attributed of Christ.90
It was like Annette, however, to credit "the East" where credit was due, even if the Orient
did manifest such bad attitudes toward women. Will's friend was wrong not to see that the
East had "produced some of the finest types of men governed by honour. The fanatical[!!]
Afghan having been put upon his honour to safeguard a guest will take him through
danger to the goal he had pledged himself to take him to & next day will fight against
him."91
Annette did not by any means believe that Eastern men had a monopoly of pernicious
attitudes about women, a point that came up in another letter to Will. Will had advised his
89
Beveridge Papers, India Office, EUR MSS C176/177, A. to H.,Jul. 5, 1884.
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, Ha20, A. to W., May 3, 1905. A recenc book on Mary Magdalen and how
her image evolved from early to later Christian times stresses the same point Annette made about Christ's having
treated women as equals. See Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York, 1994).
lJ0
91
Ibid.
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220
M. A. Scherer
sister that she could "certainly go alone at night by underground, etc." Will would know
better, Annette scolded, if he were a woman out at night in the streets of London.
You cannot have any idea of the insufferable annoyance to which girls are exposed who do go about
alone in respectable quarters of London. Jeannette is frequently "spoken to" or otherwise accosted. It
is quite a common experience as her girl friends testify. The only difference between what doubtless
you know of this odious evil is that of class in the offenders. Those who offend you are of a clear sinful
class and degraded from society. The men arc not so! Certainly Jeannette cannot go about alone at
night in London. It is most wounding to a girl to endure such things and she is too big and too fair to
escape notice.92
Thus Annette's seemingly perverse position on women's suffrage was a complex phenomenon, to which her Indian experiences had contributed. Quite possibly her growing
conservatism was fed by her deafness, which made it more difficult for her to negotiate the
public arena. At all events, her translations of the works of the Princess and the Bibi provide
important clues to her outlook.
Conclusion
Annette's entry into the world of oriental scholarship, launched with these lesser-known
translations, reflected an unusual convergence of factors: her Unitarian intellectualism
which was sufficient to propel even a woman to scholarly achievement; her Victorian
altruism, which sent her to India and resulted in her marriage to Henry Beveridge; her
empathy with authors whom she viewed as sharing her woman's values; the Victorian
commitment to work and duty, which never wavered even in the face of personal tragedy
— in fact, grew stronger when embattled by fate. For her, as for other Victorians, work was
a necessity, but it was also a reward. The success Annette experienced with the Humdyunndma and The Key of the Hearts of Beginners inspired her to undertake the Bdbur-ndma
translation, a project which was published in its entirety when she was 80. Like many
scholars who have studied Babur, Annette admired the man and the ruler. But she did not
forget Princess Rosebody. In her very last year of life, she was working on a revision of her
introduction to the Humdyun-ndma.
92
William Beveridge Papers, BLPS, IIa20, A. to W., Oct. 30, 1905.
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