White Mughals (10 page)

The ease with which so many Company servants continued to take on Indian ways is in part a reflection of the receptive age at which so many of them arrived in India: according to the statutes of the East India Company no one was allowed to join after the age of sixteen, so that any official who had reached the age of thirty had usually spent at least half his life in India. As the disapproving British missionary the Rev. Claudius Buchanan put it, expressing the fears and anxieties of many generations of Imperial and religious officials in Britain: ‘What was to be looked for in a remote and extensive Empire, administered in all its parts by men, who came out boys, without the plenitude of instruction of English youth in learning, morals, or religion; and who were let loose on their arrival amidst native licentiousness, and educated amidst conflicting superstitions?’
⁵²

Yet for all this an important distinction was beginning to develop between the British who lived in the increasingly European ambience of the three coastal cities and those who lived in—and to varying extents became part of—the real Indian India beyond the walls of the Presidency towns. The degree to which an individual was exposed to this very different and initially very foreign world depended increasingly on where he was posted, just as the extent to which he reacted to such influences was determined by his individual sympathies and temperament.

As before, the greatest transformations took place amongst those completely cut off from European society, notably those East India Company officials who were posted to the more distant Indian courts. James Kirkpatrick’s counterpart as British Resident in Delhi was the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, an old friend of Kirkpatrick’s elder brother William. Ochterlony was a man already well used to walking the cultural faultlines between different worlds. His father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, the family fled to Canada, and thence to London where David entered the Company’s army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and having made India his home vowed never to leave.

When in the Indian capital, Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman: every evening all thirteen of his consorts used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.
⁵³
With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a ‘
choga
and
pagri
’ while being fanned by servants holding peacock-feather
punkhas.
To one side of Ochterlony’s own tent was the red silk harem tent where his women slept, and on the other side the encampment of his daughters, all, according to the Bishop, ‘hung around with red cloth and thus fenced in from the eyes of the profane’.

Ochterlony’s cortège, which the Bishop later spotted on the move through the country of Rajputana, was equally remarkable: ‘There was a considerable number of horses, elephants, palanquins and covered [harem] carriages,’ wrote Heber. ‘[long lines of regular army sepoys], and I should guess forty or fifty irregulars, on horse and foot, armed with spears and matchlocks of all possible forms; the string of camels [and elephants] was a very long one … [it might have been] an Eastern prince travelling. Sir David himself was in a carriage and four. He is a tall and pleasing looking old man, but was so wrapped up in shawls, Kincob fur and a Mogul furred cap, that his face was all that was visible … He has been absent from his home country about 54 years; he has there neither friends nor relations, and he has been for many years habituated to Eastern habits and parade. And if he shows no sign of retiring and returning to Britain who can wonder that he clings to the only country in the world where he can feel himself at home?’
⁵⁴

Every bit as assimilated into their Indian surroundings were those European mercenaries who fought for Indian rulers. A pair of Irish mercenaries who both came out to India in the mid-eighteenth century as common seamen, and who separately jumped ship and worked their way across India training the sepoys of Indian rulers, show how far these transformations could go.

Thomas Legge, from Donaghadee in Ulster, developed an interest in Indian alchemy and divination and ended his days as a fakir living naked in an empty tomb in the deserts of Rajasthan outside Jaipur. He had travelled through central India and Hindustan to Sindh, occasionally taking up work as a cavalry officer and cannon-maker, before heading on again up the Indus into the Pamirs and exploring Kabul and Badakshan. At some point he returned to India where he married a granddaughter of Favier de Silva, a celebrated Portuguese astrologer who was sent out to India by the King of Portugal to advise Maharajah Jai Singh of Jaipur—builder of the great Delhi observatory, the Jantar Mantar—on matters astrological.

At one point Legge met James Tod, the author of the
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan
whose almost complete absorption into Rajasthani culture led even the Indophile Ochterlony to complain that Tod was ‘too much of a Rajpoot himself to deal with Rajpoots’. Tod, who clearly recognised in Legge a kindred spirit, was fascinated by the ragged visionary who appeared at this camp, and the two men talked deep into the night as the Irishman told Tod of his studies in Indian alchemy and divination, and revealed that in his travels he believed he had discovered the Garden of Eden deep in the Hindu Kush—giving Tod a Hibernian version of one the most ancient legends of central Asia: ‘Deep down in the heart of a mountain,’ Legge told Tod, ‘was situated a beautiful garden, filled with delicious fruit, with piles of gold bricks at one end, and of silver at the other.’ At length Tod delivered Legge back to his deserted tomb, where he resumed his life as a fakir.

He died not long afterwards, in 1808, and was buried in the tomb in which he had lived.
⁵⁵

Another of Legge’s contemporaries, George Thomas, had his roots in the opposite end of Ireland, but like Legge took service among the rajahs of the north of India. In due course, at the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas succeeded in carving out his own state in the Mewatti badlands west of Delhi, and was a possible model for Peachey Carnehan in Kipling’s
The Man Who Would be King.
‘The Rajah from Tipperary’, as he was known back home, was referred to in India as ‘Jehaz Sahib’—a name which may have derived from an Indian mangling of George, or be a reference to his naval past,
jehaz
being Urdu for ship.

Once established in his Haryana kingdom, Jehaz Sahib built himself a palace, minted his own coins and collected about him a harem, but in the process totally forgot how to speak English; when asked at the end of his career to dictate his autobiography, he said he would be happy to do so as long as he could speak in Persian, ‘as from constant use it was become more familiar than his native tongue’.
⁵⁶
William Franklin, who eventually took down Thomas’s dictated memoirs, said that though Thomas was uneducated ‘he spoke, wrote and read the Hindoostany and Persian languages with uncommon fluency and precision’; indeed his Anglo-Indian son, Jan Thomas, became a celebrated Urdu poet in the
mohallas
of Old Delhi, and is depicted in miniatures of the period wearing the extravagant dress and raffish haircut of a late Mughal
banka
or gallant.
⁵⁷

Such transformations might still have been common in the interior, but by the 1780s if an East India Company official stayed in Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, or indeed one of the big Bengal cantonments, his exposure to Indian customs could sometimes be very limited indeed. Eighteenth-century Calcutta in particular struck visitors as a dislocated outpost of Europe, as if Regency Bath had been relocated to the Bay of Bengal.

‘Calcutta,’ wrote Robert Clive, ‘is one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond conception.’
⁵⁸
If it was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, it was also one where it could be lost in minutes in a wager, or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his horses and buggies.

At the centre of Calcutta lay the Writers’ Building, where the young Company officials were lodged while they underwent their initial training. In form it was little different from the British public schools from which most of the Writers had recently been drawn, and its inhabitants continued to behave as if the building occupied a loop of the Thames rather than a bend in the Hoogly. The favourite after-dinner toast was to turn the traditional ditty ‘Alas and Alack-the-Day’ into ‘A Lass and a Lakh
^t
a Day’—a succinct comment on the motives that led most of these Writers to come out to India in the first place.

In time, almost all of these Calcutta-based Writers would take on a few superficial glosses of Indianness. These might include riding in a palanquin, attending nautches (Indian dance displays) or smoking a hookah: indeed in the 1780s hookah-smoking became the height of fashion, even for the very few British women resident in Calcutta.
^u
Nevertheless in this insular world the only way that a Briton in Calcutta could come into close or intimate contact with Indians and Indian society was if he took an Indian
bibi,
or companion. In the second half of the eighteenth century the majority of Company servants still seem to have done this: of the Bengal Wills from 1780 to 1785 preserved in the India Office, one in three contains a bequest to Indian wives or companions or their natural children.
⁵⁹
It can safely be assumed that many more kept Indian mistresses without wishing to leave a formal legal record of the fact.

The practice became so common that the Urdu poets in Lucknow began abandoning the old time-honoured formula of Hindustani romantic poetry—Muslim boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences—and began composing
masnavi
where Hindu girls fell for English men, though with the same time-honoured dénouement. In Rajab Ali Beg Suroor’s
The Story of Wonders,
the love-struck Englishman (‘a handsome youth of noble lineage and high rank; in his head the ardour of love; in his heart the fire of passion …’) falls so deeply in love with the beautiful daughter of a Hindu shopkeeper that he lapses into love-induced insanity before dying of heartbreak when the girl’s parents forbid the romance (‘he dropped on the bed of dust, crying in anguish …’). The story ends with a scene reminiscentof a modern Bollywood movie when his Hindu lady-love throws herself onto his coffin from a second-floor window as the funeral procession winds its way past her door, leaving her mortally injured. Suroor concludes:

Many wills from the period rather touchingly confirm the impression of Suroor’s
masnavi
in suggesting that ties of great affection and loyalty on both sides were not uncommon at this time. Certainly many contain clauses where British men ask their close friends and family to care for their Indian partners, referring to them as ‘well beloved’, ‘worthy friend’ or ‘this amiable and distinguished lady’. The wills also show that in many cases the
bibis
achieved a surprising degree of empowerment. A few refer to contracts—something like eighteenth-century prenuptial agreements—and many women inherited considerable sums and households full of slaves from their English partners on their death. When Major Thomas Naylor died in 1782, for example, he bequeathed to his companion Muckmul Patna forty thousand rupees,
^v
a bungalow and a garden at Berhampore, a hackery, bullocks, jewels, clothes and all their male and female slaves.
⁶¹
Another East India Company merchant, Matthew Leslie, left each of his four wives a house and twenty thousand rupees, a very considerable bequest.
⁶²

Having an Indian concubine did not of course lead to any automatic sympathy with India or Indian culture on the part of a Company servant—far from it. But it was recognised at the time that in practice cohabitation often did lead to a degree of transculturation, even in the transplanted Englishness of Calcutta. Thomas Williamson for one was quite clear as to the effect that taking a
bibi
had on a newly arrived Englishman: ‘… in the early part of their career’, he wrote, ‘young men attach themselves to the women of this country; and acquire a liking, or taste, for their society and customs, which soon supersedes every other attraction’.
⁶³
The explorer Richard Burton echoed a similar idea a little later: an Indian mistress taught her companion, he wrote, ‘not only Hindustani grammer, but the syntaxes of native Life’.
^64
w