ABSTRACT
As noted earlier in this volume (in Experiences of Courtship and Marriage, 12.), Robert Waterfield was a soldier in the 32nd Foot, who kept a diary during his eleven years in India from 1846 to 1857. In these excerpts, Waterfield, who seems to have been rather a judgemental person, as well as a respectable one, confirms the army’s drinking problem in India, and further indicates that wives were not immune to the lure of alcohol either. He then goes on to offer some pointed, and rather bitter comments about the behaviour of soldiers’ wives. Clearly, not all soldiers approved of marriage in the ranks, although given the anger of the second excerpt, one also wonders what kind of disagreement might have lain behind it. A hackery was a two-wheeled bullock cart used to transport goods or people. A nullah was a stream in a steep, narrow valley. In India, soldiers’ wives could afford not to do regimental laundry, and in the first half of the nineteenth century not engaging in various kinds of physical labour seems to have been a status marker used to claim superiority for Europeans over indigenous Indians.
