Bombay Anna

Bombay Anna
By Susan Morgan

This is a thought-provoking, well-researched biography with several interesting themes. It is set in Bombay, Singapore, Siam, Britain, the US and Canada and recounts the life of Anna Leonowens, (1831-1915) the one-time governess of the children of King Mongkut, the king of Siam.
The book opens with Anna’s ancestors in Bombay and paints a startling picture of the harshness of life in India for low-ranking employees of the East India Company. Even more sobering is the revelation that this life was an improvement over conditions in England at the time. We realize that our middle-class comfort is an invention of the twentieth century.
The first two chapters are so full of research and references that I found it hard to become engaged with the thread of the story. Once Anna is born, the story and characters are easier to follow, and later, as we read about Anna’s marvellous accomplishments, knowledge of her background makes her achievements all the more remarkable. But in the first two chapters I had the impression that Morgan was having difficulty marshalling her extensive research.
Anna was born into poverty. Until her father died and her mother remarried a slightly richer stepfather, home was a small curtained-off section in an army barracks. Life in Bombay was tough, but life in England at the time was tougher. Anna received a better education in Bombay than she would have had in England where the strong class structure would have meant she would be a farm labourer. Classism in England leads us to an interesting reflection on the caste system in India which the British disdained.
Morgan has done so much research that she clearly became engrossed and passionate, developing strong opinions as her knowledge grew. She has no respect for British colonialism and snobbery, and the class system that prevented talent from developing. She despised the British opium trade in China. Nor does she respect the American double standard which condemned slavery in Thailand while waging a civil war at home over the same issue. She has no time for missionaries who do not respect the values and traditions of other world religions. She has great admiration for Anna who used her strength of character and formidable intelligence to create a life filled with achievements and adventure. In fact, her bias towards Anna allows her to excuse some questionable behaviour. To achieve what she did, Anna had to have been a tough character, but Morgan never condemns her.
In recounting Anna’s early life, Morgan focuses on its cultural richness rather than its economic poverty. Morgan is looking for the source of Anna’s later achievements and she finds them in the diversity of cultures that made up the population at the lowest stratum of the Indo-European community in Bombay. Anna grew up on an equal basis with Hindus, Moslems and Christians, and learned to speak and read Sanskrit and Marathi as well as English. The lack of racial prejudice that she learned at an early age helped her to adapt to the many places where she lived throughout her life and especially endeared her to the Siamese. It was interesting to read that her great-nephew was also able to turn his background to his advantage. He also assumed a new name: Boris Karloff.
The story of Anna’s five years as governess to the 60 children and the harem of the King of Siam is known by all. But what was not known at the time was that the “British lady” in Singapore who received this posting was actually a mixed- blood army brat from Bombay. After her husband died, Anna moved her young family to Singapore, opened a little school, and completely reinvented herself. She cut off all contact with her family back in India, including her sister, cultivated her relationship with her husband’s family in Britain, and her children and grandchildren grew up believing her to have cultured British origins.
Anna’s reinvention of herself is one of the interesting themes of the book. Yes, she was duplicitous, but in a world where everything except her own intelligence was stacked against her, can she be blamed for making her own way? Anna was a survivor, and Morgan clearly supports her. Anna’s response to her sister seems unnatural, but if she was to maintain her new persona, she had to make a clean break with her past. Morgan is interested in the effect that such a reinvention has on one’s new life and discusses others who have similarly made their own name. It is an interesting question and we see how, once the first break is made, other barriers can also fall away. The idea is compelling: that of taking control of one’s life and completely reinventing it, building on one’s own knowledge and talent and not accepting artificial limitations.
Morgan’s research revealed Anna to her as a real person. I think that the reason Morgan forgives and rationalizes some of Anna’s actions is that she came to like her as a friend. We judge people by their friendships, and Anna evidently made many loyal friends with smart and influential people who found her to be a lively and intelligent conversationalist with exciting experiences and aspirations. Because of her own background, she must have been refreshingly non-judgmental and able to mix with people of many different beliefs and circumstances. Her friends ranged from harem women to her husband’s British relations, her daughter’s British headmistress, the literary set in New England, and a missionary couple in Siam. Her opinions were strong, but she seems to have been able to focus on the positive qualities of those she called friends. In Siam, for instance, she became lifelong friends with an American missionary doctor and his wife, although she disapproved of missionary activity. She says, (p.126) “Many have missed seeing what is true and wise in the doctrine of Buddha because they preferred to observe it from the standpoint and in the attitude of an antagonist rather than an enquirer.” This attitude set her apart from much of the ex-pat community in Siam, yet she was able to overlook differences of opinion when she met people that she connected with on other levels, probably focusing on what was good about them rather than their differences.
Anna seems to have made friends easily, and Morgan does not give the impression that she used them. But the advantages of having influential friends is another interesting theme in this book. From her initial referral to the King of Siam to the publishing of her books and the commencement of her lecture circuit, Anna was helped by the recommendations of well-connected friends. Margaret Langdon, Anna’s first biographer, also benefitted from her connections. And the practice continued: the man who made the costumes for The King and I was a friend of Margaret’s husband, Ken Langdon!
Morgan’s extensive research gave her insight into Anna’s thinking, giving her perceptions based on knowledge and reflection. For instance, she sees that Anna fit into the culture of the Siamese court because she was in the same situation as the palace women: they were all bringing up children without a male partner. Morgan makes interesting reflections on Anna’s personal growth while she was in Siam. She sees that Anna came to respect her own intellect as she saw it being respected there. For the first time, Anna experienced power and this enlarged her horizons. When she left Siam, Anna was ready for a new adventure.
Morgan’s research extended to another theme: slavery. The period of Anna’s service to King Mongkut coincided with the American Civil War. Morgan read contemporary Asian newspapers and discovered that interest was high in this distant war. Morgan knows that Anna and her friends would have been following the news, and judging from Anna’s later published condemnation of slavery, Morgan can imagine the tenor of Anna’s conversations at the time. Many of the American missionaries in Siam came from the South, and there must have been contradictions in their teaching. Slavery was then practised in Siam and many of the palace women owned slaves. Morgan also discovered that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was printed in instalments in the Singapore newspaper in 1852-53. Anna was a lifetime admirer of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Morgan discovered where she must have first read her work. It was interesting for me to read that the US Civil War was followed with such interest as far away as South-East Asia. Another interesting suggestion was the connection between the institution of the harem, and Thailand’s present-day sex trade.
As Morgan herself wrote, “For a biographer there is nothing simple about telling Anna’s life.” The biggest controversy surrounding Anna is the inaccurate and sensational picture she painted of King Mongkut and the Siamese court in her two books: The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem.(1873) Her critics say that she slandered the king. The books were banned in Siam, and years later, Mongkut’s successor, whom Anna had taught, asked her why she had written lies about his father. Morgan admits that the accounts are, “embellished and embroidered,” but never lays blame. She writes, (P130) “Leonowens’ two books about what she saw inside the royal harem are without question heavily fictionalized.” She admits, (p133) “The general claim that Leonowens’ accounts ….are slander.” and asks, “Why did Anna so often give us the fabulous, yet use actual historical people and label the whole combination real?’

In defence, Morgan historically contextualizes by pointing out that Anna’s critics were men, and that among Western men at the time, King Mongkut was admired because of his skilful diplomacy that had managed to keep Siam out of the grasp of colonial powers. Morgan says that we have no records of what went on in court, so we shouldn’t be too harsh. We are given Anna’s answer that she was being faithful to the women in the harem who were her close friends, rather than King Mongkut whom she saw as a tyrant and exploiter of women . Anna wanted to present the Siamese harem women to Americans as great heroines and dedicated her first book to them.
Personally, I think that Morgan is too sympathetic to Anna with statements like: ( P.131) “The claim of The Romance of the Harem is that it is offering ‘the truth,’ which is not the same as factual reportage.” I think that Anna’s motivation for her fictionalization lies in the influence of her new literati friends in New England who filled her head with literary trends then in vogue. The popular American genre at the time was called, ‘truthful romance.’ It held that, “the writer could, and often should, transform the mere facts, should ‘mingle the marvellous’ in order to present the truth.” The most famous of these writers was Nathaniel Hawthorne who said, “A romance may present the truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” I think that Anna sympathized strongly with the ladies she met in the Siamese harem, and she was influenced by her American literary friends to adopt the new style in order to attract sympathy for her faraway friends. Morgan acknowledges this but does not give it the weight I think it deserves. The Romance of the Harem belongs in the same literary genre as The House of the Seven Gables. (Chap 12, p.177)
Morgan creates a warm character from a figure who has been dismissed as an ungrateful social climber. The many excerpts from Anna’s loving letters to her daughter help to show the caring side of her nature. Although she cut off contact with her Bombay family, she was a loving matriarch to her offspring and spent her declining years living with her daughter and helping to care for her grandchildren, often preferring them to lecture opportunities. Morgan has created a rounded complex character, presented us with an intriguing look at the social climate of the 19th century, and left us admiring the achievements of an extraordinary woman.