White Mughals (11 page)

At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap.
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Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’.
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A few Calcutta men were known to have had themselves circumcised to satisfy the hygienic—and presumably religious—requirements of their Indian wives and companions.
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As a result of similar influence, some East India Company servants were even persuaded to become vegetarians. A novel of the period paints an intriguing portrait of a returned Calcutta nabob
^x
tormented by depression following the premature death of his Hindu bride. He had become ‘a person neither English nor Indian, Christian nor Hindu. In diet he was a rigid disciple of Brama’, eating rice, fruit, potatoes and other vegetables while ‘looking upon the slaughter of a cow as only next to the murder of a human being’.
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That this tendency was not restricted to fiction is clear from the writings of several vegetarian nabobs from the period, including the Mayor of Calcutta and survivor of the Black Hole, John Zephania Holwell, as well as the enigmatic Irish General whose collection of sculptures forms the core of the British Museum Indian Collection, Major General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart. Stuart, who travelled around the country with his Indian
bibi
beside him, his buggy followed by a cavalcade of children’s carriages ‘and a palkee load of little babes’,
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went as far as employing a group of Brahmins whose ritual purity he regarded as essential for properly dressing his Hindu family’s food.
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Not all the relationships recorded in the wills of the period make such happy reading, and there are many in which Indian
bibis
are treated with a chilling carelessness: Alexander Crawford, writing his will in Chittagong in 1782, goes into extravagant details as to how he wants his executors to care for his dogs and horses. After several pages of this sort of thing he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘To my girl I desire that two thousand rupees may be given for her care of my children provided that she places them under your charge without any further trouble.’ Unlike the animals, no name is given for her, and there are certainly no last endearments recorded.
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Judging by the wills they left, many Englishmen were serial monogamists, moving on from one partner to another, sometimes at speed, and a substantial number kept two
bibis
simultaneously. A few indeed had large harems, even by contemporary Indian standards. Such a case is recorded by Thomas Williamson, whose
East India Vade Mecum
was the standard guide to life in Calcutta for young Company officials coming out to India, and which was to the eighteenth-century Company servant what the
Lonely Planet
guide is to the modern backpacker. Williamson writes of the case of one Company servant who kept no fewer than sixteen concubines. When asked what he did with them all, he merely muttered: ‘Oh I just give them a little rice and let them run around.’
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William Hickey’s relationship with his Bengali
bibi
Jemdanee is a good example of the sort of relationship a Calcutta nabob might form with an Indian woman at this time. The relationship started as one of simple concubinage. Hickey makes no bones about the way he inherited Jemdanee after a neighbour returned home to England: ‘I had often admired a lovely Hindustani girl who sometimes visited Carter at my house,’ he writes in his
Memoirs.
‘[She] was very lively and clever. Upon Carter’s leaving Bengal I invited her to become an intimate with me, which she consented to do.’
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Yet the relationship quickly developed into something deeper: ‘From that day to the day of her death Jemdanee lived with me, respected and admired by all my friends for her extraordinary sprightliness and good humour. Unlike many of the women of Asia she never secluded herself from the sight of strangers; on the contrary she delighted in joining my male parties, cordially joining in the mirth though never touching wine or spirits of any kind.’

Jemdanee was also a great favourite with one of Hickey’s best friends, Ben Mee: ‘My love and good wishes to the gentle and every way amiable Jemdanee,’ Mee wrote in one letter. ‘Would that her good natured countenance and sweet temper were here … [We would share] some nice highly peppered curries.’
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Hickey’s
Memoirs
are interspersed with these occasional letters from Mee, who soon absconds to Europe on the run from his debtors, from where he sends presents to Jemdanee. From Paris he writes: ‘I lately met with some ornaments, fresh from Paris, which from being so I think likely she will admire and cry ‘Wah! Wah!’ [Hurrah! Hurrah!] at; they consist of bracelets, necklace and earrings. My best love to her and I beg her to wear them for my sake.’
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When Hickey is ill ‘my kind hearted and interesting favourite … sat by my side anxiously watching my varying countenances as the agonizing pain I endured increased or diminished’.
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When he is better, they buy a ‘large and commodious Residence in Garden Reach, about seven miles and a half from Calcutta, beautifully situated within a few yards of the river, affording us the advantage of water as well as land carriage’. Here Hickey takes four apartments ‘for my sole use, that Jemdanee and her female attendants might be sufficiently private and retired … Jemdanee was so pleased with the novelty of the thing that nothing would satisfy her but remaining there entirely. She therefore sent for her establishment and settled herself in our upper rooms.’
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After a while Jemdanee became pregnant, ‘regularly increasing in bulk … expressing her earnest desire that it might prove “a chuta William Saheb” ’.

Hickey discovered that Jemdanee had become terrified when ‘after an hour in violent agony’ she gave birth to a child, only to be told by the Bengali midwife—Hickey’s European doctor Dr Hare then being absent on business—that she should lie still for she was going to have twins ‘and another child was coming. This so terrified the poor suffering girl, that giving a violent screech, she instantly went into strong convulsions … ’

‘Thus,’ wrote a heartbroken Hickey, ‘did I lose as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever a man was blessed with.’
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It was several months before he had recovered sufficiently from the death to resume his work in the Calcutta courts.

Hinduism, and Hindu culture in general, proved less accessible to the British than Islam, at least partly because many Hindus regarded the British as untouchable, refusing to eat with them, so restricting somewhat the possibilities for social intercourse. Yet this did not put off many of Hinduism’s more ardent British admirers, and as a subject for intellectual study, Hinduism took precedence over Islam amongst the early British in Calcutta.

In March 1775 a twenty-three-year-old Company official, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, published his translation of
A Code of Gentoo Laws.
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The response in Britain to this first revelation of ‘the wisdom of the Hindoos’ was electric. As the reviewer in the
Critical Review
put it:

Edmund Burke agreed. He read Halhed’s book and, according to Charles James Fox, thereafter ‘spoke of the piety of the Hindoos with admiration, and of their holy religion and sacred functions with an awe bordering on devotion’; in Parliament Burke declared that ‘Wherever the Hindu religion has been established, that country has been flourishing.’
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This was still the Age of Reason, and loss of faith in the more intolerant and narrow aspects of Christianity combined with a growing interest in non-European civilisations to create an intellectual climate deeply receptive to the sort of ideas Halhed claimed lay at the heart of Hinduism.

Into this arena of intellectual excitement sailed, on 15 January 1784, the Justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta, Sir William Jones. Less than six weeks after he had landed, Jones had gathered together a group of thirty kindred spirits, to institute ‘a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. Its patron was the most enlightened of all the British Governors General, Warren Hastings, who shared the new enthusiasm for Hinduism and who declared: ‘in truth I love India a little more than my own country’.
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Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society of Bengal quickly became the catalyst for a sudden explosion of interest in Hinduism, as it formed enduring relations with the local Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In this way it was hoped to educate Europe about this relatively unknown civilisation; as Hastings put it, ‘such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment … [after all, the Indian classics] will survive when British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance’.
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Before long Jones had decamped to Krishnagar, sixty miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, where he adopted the local Indian dress of loose white cotton and rented a bungalow built ‘entirely of vegetable materials’. Here he surrounded himself with Brahmins who helped him learn Sanskrit, a language which he soon realised was ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. As for Sanskrit literature, Jones was agog at the wonders he daily uncovered: ‘I am in love with the
gopis,
’ he wrote soon after his arrival, ‘charmed with Krishna and an enthusiastic admirer of Rama. Arjun, Bhima and the warriors of the
Mahabharata
appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the
Iliad.
’

Many of Jones’s letters seem to have been written from here. ‘I concur with you,’ he writes to one friend, ‘in paying adoration to springs and rivers; and I am going soon up the great stream Ma Gunga and towards the Holy banks of the God Jumna.’ He congratulates one correspondent on finding a well-preserved copy of the Gita, another on the way he has learned to sing ‘Hindoostanee airs’. One day he is sending letters up country requesting information from the Pundits of Benares on the different names and avatars of a particular god, on the next recommending the Calcutta doctors to try out various ayurvedic cures. In India, Jones wrote that he had discovered Arcadia.
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Valmiki was the new Homer, the
Ramayana
the new
Odyssey.
The possibilities seemed endless.