India (64 page)

Train and ship and train to Paris; train to Marseilles; steamer to Malta and Alexandria; train to Cairo and Suez; three weeks in a steamer to Ceylon and Calcutta. And then by cart and rail and cart to the front.

Russell was thirty-six. He was the only correspondent who had been sent out by a British newspaper to report on the Mutiny ‘and the revolt which followed it’. The ‘letters’ he sent back to
The Times
were duly published in the paper. Then the diary, which supplied the letters, was prepared for the press, 800 pages in all, with yellow-tinted lithographs and an engraved map. It was published in 1860 in two volumes by the firm of Routledge, Warne, and Routledge: Victorian energy making a great effort – a hard journey, and a sustained literary labour – appear effortless.

The Russell of the Crimea was famous enough to enter the history books. I learned about him at school in Trinidad; he was the first foreign correspondent I ever knew about. The Russell of
the Indian Mutiny I didn’t know; I had never heard of his Indian book until I saw the two volumes in the antiquarian bookshop. They would have been handsome, authoritative-looking volumes when they were new, with an angular decorative pattern stamped on the hard covers bound in purple cloth. Light had bleached the purple colour to a pale brown on the back of both volumes, had caused a fade at the top edge and the bottom edge of the covers, had cracked the purple cloth down one hinge of the binding, and had nibbled away at the brittle top.

I found the book hard to read. I thought the writer took too long to get to India; and what engaged him on the way didn’t seem very interesting. When I looked at the later pages I found the tactical military details hard to follow. At the time of the writing those details would have been the hot news from India; they didn’t hold me now. There were other things in India in 1858 and 1859 that I found myself looking for.

But after this trip to India, and especially after my walks in Lucknow with Rashid, the
Diary
became a different book. The long journey to India that Russell described was in fact a journey to the battle for Lucknow. The engraved fold-out map at the beginning of the text was labelled ‘Plan of the Operations against Lucknow March 1858’. On that map I saw a number of the places Rashid had shown me.

The British army had encamped in the Dilkusha park, the park of ‘Heart’s Delight’. The hunting lodge of the Nawabs, not yet in ruin, and to Russell’s eye like a French château, was the British commander-in-chief’s headquarters. It was annoyed by one of the Nawab’s cannon at La Martinière. Among the people firing on the British positions from La Martinière were some of the Nawab’s African eunuchs – strange that such people still existed in India in 1858. I wonder what Rashid would have made of that detail in Russell’s book. Perhaps the detail would have been obliterated by the rage and grief he would have felt at the defeat, and by the sacking of the Kaiserbagh Palace afterwards – in the surviving wing of which I had met and talked to Amir, whose ancestors had been given the palace by the British nine years after that sacking.

One of the yellow-tinted lithographs was entitled ‘The Plunder of the Kaiserbagh’. It had been done later in England, and was an illustration of Russell’s text: ‘It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting … Imagine
courts as large as the Temple Gardens, surrounded with ranges of palaces, or at least buildings well stuccoed and gilded, with fresco-paintings on the blind windows … From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder. Shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms, splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold – literally drunk with plunder … I had often heard the phrase, but never saw the thing itself before. They smashed to pieces the fowling-pieces and pistols to get at the gold mountings and the stones set in the stocks. They burned in a fire, which they made in a centre of the court, brocades and embroidered shawls for the sake of the gold and the silver … Oh, the toil of that day! It was horrid enough to have to stumble through endless courts, which were like vapour baths, amid dead bodies, through sights worthy of the Inferno … suffocated by deadly smells of rotting corpses, of rotten ghee, or vile native scents; but the seething crowd of camp followers into which we emerged in Huzrutgunj was something worse. As ravenous, and almost as foul, as vultures …’

Two days before, Russell had got ‘a small bit of loot of very little value’: a portrait of the King of Oude, which he had cut out of its frame. He had taken the portrait from a room in the Badshahbagh, ‘a large walled garden and enclosure, amid one of the finest of the King of Oude’s summer palaces’. A small piece of loot, after horrors: the protective ditch around the Badhshahbagh ‘was filled with the bodies of sepoys, which the coolies were dragging from the inside and throwing topsy-turvy, by command of the soldiers; stiffened by death, with outstretched legs and arms, burning slowly in their cotton tunics … We crossed literally a ramp of dead bodies loosely covered with earth.’ More dead soldiers were being burned in the rooms inside. ‘It was before breakfast, and I could not stand the smell.’

A more substantial piece of loot came to Russell from the Kaiserbagh: ‘a nose-ring of small rubies and pearls, with a single stone diamond drop.’ He had a chance that time of getting an armlet of emeralds and diamonds and pearls as well, but the soldier who had looted it wanted 100 rupees in ready cash, there and then, and – ‘Oh, wretched fate!’ – all Russell’s money was with his Indian Christian servant, Simon, who was in the camp. Russell heard later that a jeweller – whether in England or India is not said – had
bought the armlet from an officer for £7,500, a very large sum in 1860.

The ruins of the Residency still had the power to enrage Rashid; he would have found it hard to bear this account of the looting of his beloved Lucknow. And harder perhaps to bear Russell’s accounts of Lucknow before its destruction, ‘more extensive than Paris and more brilliant’. From the top of the hunting lodge in the Dilkusha, this was the view: ‘A vision of palaces, minars, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long façades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rising up amid a calm still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads … Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this …’

Of the Kaiserbagh, which even in that ‘wilderness of fair architecture’ Russell saw as ‘vast … a blaze of gilding, spires, cupolas, domes’, there remained only the wing where Amir and his mother lived with their establishments. Rashid had told me more than once that in the old days there were no streets around the palace, only gardens, and it was only from Russell’s book that I began to understand to what an extent royal Lucknow had been a city of palaces and gardens.

Across the river from my hotel – beyond the higher dry shelf in the channel with the huts now of the swimming clubs, the black buffaloes on some mornings, the sheets and the many-coloured clothes spread out by the washermen to dry, where I had seen the deep perspective views of an aquatint by the Daniells – on that bank there would have been the Badshahbagh, the Royal Garden.

‘Such forests of orange-trees, such trickling fountains, shady walks, beds of flowers, grand alleys, dark retreats and summer-houses … in which were now revelling some of the Welch Fusileers.’

There was a similar – perhaps French-inspired – elegance in the many courtyards of the Kaiserbagh, the main palace.

‘Statues, lines of lamp-posts, fountains, orange-groves, aqueducts, and kiosks with burnished domes of metal … Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood. Leaning against a smiling Venus is a British soldier shot through the neck, gasping … Court after court the scene is still the same. These courts open one to the other
by lofty gateways, ornamented with the double fish of the royal family of Oude, or by arched passageways, in which lie the dead sepoys, their clothes smouldering on their flesh.’

It is ironical that – as with Bernai Díaz del Castillo’s account of Montezuma’s city of Mexico in 1520 – the first account of the splendours of 19th-century Lucknow should also be an account of its destruction. It is ironical, yet not unexpected: the history of old India was written by its conquerors.

What was pain for Rashid was also pain for me. I couldn’t read with detachment of the history of this part of India. My emotions ran congruent for a while with those of Rashid; but we grieved for different things. Rashid grieved for the wholeness of the Lucknow world he had been born into, the world before partition. This world would have had elements of old Muslim glory: the glory of the Kings or Nawabs of Oude, and before them the glory of the Moguls. There was no such glory in my past. Russell’s journey from Calcutta to Lucknow lay in part through the districts from which, about 20 or 25 years later, my ancestors migrated to Trinidad, to work on the plantations there.

That was the lesser India I was looking for in Russell’s book. It was the India only glancingly referred to, always assumed: the India that, in Russell’s pages, went on working during this time of war, working in the fields, constructing fortifications, clearing away corpses, looking for positions as servants: an India engaged, without ever knowing it, in subduing itself. On the Grand Trunk Road near Benares long lines of cotton-laden country carts creaked one after the other to Calcutta: trade and business going on in the British-run city. The human groups on the road, indifferent to the terrible war, gave the impression of being at a fair. The people who worked the fields were separate from the war; they took no part in the wars of the rulers.

From Russell’s book I learned that the British name for the Indian sepoy, the soldier of the British East India Company who was now the mutineer, was ‘Pandy’. ‘Why Pandy? Well, because it is a very common name among the sepoys – like Smith of London …’ It is in fact a brahmin name from this part of India. Brahmins here formed a substantial part of the Hindu population, and the British army in northern India was to some extent a
brahmin army. The Indians who were now being used to put down ‘Pandy’ were Sikhs, whom the British had defeated less than 10 years before.

With that British army marching to Lucknow to put down the mutineers was a host of Indian camp-followers. Russell said they were mostly Hindu. The Muslims among them were domestic servants; the Afghans sold dried fruit. Among the Hindu camp-followers were merchants and their wives and families, travelling with their store-tents. There were drovers, looking after the sheep and goats and turkeys for the army; and there were any number of porters, ‘whole regiments of sinewy, hollow-thighed, lanky coolies’ carrying chairs and tables, ‘hampers of beer and wine, bazaar stores, or boxes slung from bamboo poles’.

Russell, as special correspondent of
The Times
, was attached to the staff mess of the British headquarters, and the mass of army servants ensured that dinner on the march was as formal as ever.

‘It was about 5 o’clock P.M., when a wheeling multitude of kites and vultures soaring above the dust, announced that we were near an encampment, and very soon the joyful sight of a plain full of tents met our eyes … Our servants came out to meet us, and I alighted at my tent door … On entering everything was in its place just as I left it. Our mess-dinner was precisely the same as at Cawnpore; and it was hard to believe we were in an enemy’s country.’

Russell noted the ‘high delight’ with which these Indian camp-followers – making life so comfortable for the British army – ‘were pouring towards Lucknow, to aid the Feringhee’ – the foreigner – ‘to overcome their brethren’. He saw a parallel with the spread of ancient Roman power. Even the mixed speech of the camp-followers he saw as a symbol of conquest.

None of this was easy for me to read. I had had trouble with
My Diary in India
when I had first tried to read it. I had trouble with it now. I made three or four attempts at it, and found myself rejecting it, for literary reasons. I found it Victorian and wordy. I thought the writer too much of an imperial figure, travelling too easily through a world made safe, and taking that world for granted, almost as much concerned with himself and his dignity and his character as a special correspondent as with the country he had travelled to see, and the people he found himself among.

But these judgements, arrived at from scattered readings, always foundered on the quality of Russell’s descriptive writing. The trouble I had with Russell’s book was like the trouble I used to have, when I was a reviewer, with good books with which I was nonetheless out of sympathy. Such books were hard to write about; they could make one twist and turn, until one acknowledged their quality. So it took time for me to yield to the Russell book, to take it at its own pace, to accept its purpose; and then I found it very good. His aim, he said, was ‘to give an account of the military operations’, and also ‘to describe the impressions made on my senses by the externals of things, without pretending to say whether I was right or wrong’.

The trouble I had with the book was a trouble with history, a trouble with the externals of things he described so well. There was such a difference between the writer and the people of the country he was writing about, such a difference between the writer’s country and the country he had travelled to. The correspondent’s job for
The Times;
the British army telegraph, which he used to send his ‘letters’ to the paper; the talk of railways and steamers – Russell’s world is already quite modern.

He had been on
The Times
since 1843, when he was twenty-one; and the first war he had gone to have a look at was the Danish War of 1848. Now – calm, experienced, going out to this Indian war – on the steamer from Marseilles to Malta he finds himself among English people going to many places. ‘To trace their destinations from Malta would be to cover the East with a wide-spreading fan. There were men for Australia, for China, the dominions of the Rajah of Sarawak, for Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Java, Lahore, Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Ceylon, Pondicherry …’ For these people much of the world had already been organized; and many of them were equipped, like Russell himself, to understand and to move into new parts of the world.