White Mughals (92 page)

The India Office Library originally comprised the library and records of the East India Company. It later became the library of the British government’s India Office, and is now a separate annexe of the British Library in London.

It is one of the quirks of modern Indian historiography that the Deccan remains still largely unstudied: little serious work has been done on any of the Deccani courts, and this remains especially true of its cultural history: Deccani paintings are still routinely misattributed to the Mughal or Rajput
ateliers
. In an age when every minute contour of the landscape of history appears to be rigorously mapped out by a gridiron of scholarly Ph.D.s, this huge gap is all the more remarkable. The history of Hyderabad and the wider Deccan remains a major lacuna: for every book on the Deccan sultanates, there are a hundred on the Mughals; for every book on Hyderabad there is a shelf on Lucknow. As the historian George Michell recently noted in the introduction to a Deccani volume of
The New Cambridge History of India
, ‘few scholars, Indian or foreign, have worked extensively in the Deccan, which remains little visited and surprisingly unexplored’. See George Michell and Mark Zebrowski,
The New Cambridge History of India 1.7: Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates
(Cambridge, 1999).

On a smaller scale the same is true of France. As early as 1761 Anquetil-Duperron mentions the Indian wife of a French officer accompanying her husband back to Europe, after which many others followed, such as Bannou Pan Dei Allard, who settled with her mercenary husband at Saint-Tropez, and Fezli Azam Joo Court with hers at Marseilles.

Before 1800, Richard Colley Wellesley was known as Lord Mornington. For the purpose of clarity and continuity, he will be referred to throughout as Lord Wellesley.

Hence the story told by one traveller, that when he was dining with a Goan host a messenger arrived from the Inquisition with a note for the householder. The man ‘blanched, and with great foreboding and trembling opened the letter’, expecting to be summoned to prison. But in fact the Inquisitor merely wished for some mangoes from the man’s orchard. The mangoes were duly picked and sent without delay; ‘and that very evening the man chopped down his trees to make sure that nothing in his house ever again brought him to the attention of the Inquisition’. For a Hindu nationalist view of the Inquisition see A.K. Priolkar,
The Goa Inquisition
(Bombay, 1961). See also, as a balance, Sanjay Subrahmaniyam,
The Portuguese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History
(London, 1993), pp.83-4.

Though this was not necessarily true of the poorer white soldiers, who often had little desire (or even opportunity) of returning home.

There are also, of course, numerous examples of crossing cultures and ‘going native’ at this period outside the Islamic world: Sir William Johnson, ‘the Mohawk Baronet’, and his two Iroquois wives in New York State; various dubious Scots setting themselves up as rulers in Honduras; ‘Samurai William’ Adams’s life in the service of the Shogun in seventeenth-century Japan; and the ‘White Rajah’ James Brooke in Sarawak. See J.T. Flexner,
Mohawk Baronet: Sir William Johnson of New York
(New York, 1959); Kirk Swineheart,
Molly’s War
(forthcoming, 2003); Giles Milton,
Samurai William
(London, 2002); Steven Runciman,
The White Rajahs: A History of Sarawak from 1841 to 1946
(Cambridge, 1960); also John Demos’s gripping
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(New York, 1994).

An interpreter and guide in Ottoman lands.

When Charles II sent one Captain Hamilton to ransom a group who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast his mission was unsuccessful, as they all refused to return: the men had converted to Islam, risen in the ranks, and were now ‘partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks’, living in a style to which they could not possibly have aspired back home, in a society they found to be every bit as sophisticated as their own, and a great deal more tolerant. The frustrated Captain Hamilton was forced to return empty-handed: ‘They are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women,’ he wrote in his official report. ‘Such ladies are,’ he added, ‘generally very beautiful.’ Nabil Matar,
Islam in Britain 1583-1685
(Cambridge, 1998), p.37.

All this, of course, went down very badly at home, and the treacherous ‘renegade’ soon became a stock character on the English stage. Indeed, jibes about circumcision and men who converted to Islam expecting harems and who instead ended up as eunuchs became something of a Jacobean equivalent of the mother-in-law joke; see e.g. Daniel J. Vitkus (ed.),
Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England
(New York, 2000). It also caused a problem for the Church authorities when former apostates began returning home in large numbers, some wishing readmission to the Church, others apparently wishing to keep to their new faith. In 1637 the matter was the subject of a full-scale parliamentary debate when Archbishop Laud presented to the House
A Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turcism
; see Matar,
Islam in Britain 1558-1685
, p.69.

At this period the English called their trading posts ‘factories’, though little or no manufacturing ever went on there.

Indeed much of it is in print in a massive set of thirteen huge volumes (ed. William Foster) called
The English Factories in India 1618-1669
(London, 1906-27).

The first ever reference to a love affair between an Englishman and an Indian girl is in a letter of 20 February 1626: ‘John Leachland having for some years past privately kept a woman of this country and refusing to put her away, in spite of all persuasions, it is debated whether to dismiss him from the Company’s service; but as this would only lead to his marrying her and forsaking his country and friends, it is resolved not to adopt this extreme course, in the hope that time will reclaim him, “being otherwise a man of fayre demeanour, sufficient abilities, and clear of accounts with the Honourable Company in India”.’
The English Factories in India 1618-1669
, Vol. 3, p.119; see also Vol. 5, pp.35, 39, 61.

Intriguingly, Breton himself went on to be buried in an entirely Muslim-looking octagonal tomb, with a dome, Tughluk-style arches and a Mughlai filial on top. It survives today, surrounded by grim 1960s blocks of flats on the northern outskirts of Surat. A picture of it can be seen in Christopher Ridgeway and Robert Williams (ed.),
Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England
(London, 2000), p.126, plate 87. In a fascinating essay in this book, Robert Williams shows how Vanbrugh as a young Company factor in Surat admired and sketched Breton’s tomb, and is later thought to have used the ideas he collected in the Surat cemeteries when planning his domed mausolea at such quintessentially English country houses as Blenheim and Castle Howard.

‘Sister-fucker’.

‘Daughter-fucker’. Henry Yule, incidentally, includes both terms in
Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases
(London, 1903). He avoids giving direct translations of these still-popular Hindustani endearments, saying merely that ‘Banchoot and Beteechoot [are] terms of abuse which we should hesitate to print if their odious meanings were not obscure “to the general”. If it were known to the Englishmen who sometimes use the words we believe there are few who would not shrink from such brutality.’

Some sultans even took on Hindu customs: early in his reign, Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur adopted the
rudraksha
rosary of the Hindu sadhu, assuming the title of
Jagat Guru
, or Teacher of the World. In his writings the Sultan used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Sarasvati and the Prophet Muhammad, and at one point more or less described himself as a Hindu god: ‘He is robed in saffron coloured dress … Ibrahim whose father is God Ganesh, whose mother is Sarasvati, has an elephant as his vehicle.’ For Sultan Ibrahim Adil Shah see Richard Maxwell Eaton,
Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700
(Princeton, 1978), pp.95-106; also George Michell and Mark Zebrowski,
The New Cambridge History of India 1.7: Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates
(Cambridge, 1999), pp.162-7.

Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1753-99) was the most formidable enemy faced by the British in India in the late eighteenth century. He was the son of Haidar Ali, a former cavalry subaltern in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s forces, who had displaced the Hindu Wodiyar rulers of Mysore and seized their throne for his own. Tipu was an energetic ruler and a military genius, though the British tended to dismiss him as an ‘infamous tyrant’, a ‘usurper’, and ruler of ‘the most perfect despotism in the world’. After succeeding to the throne at his father’s death in 1782, Tipu twice defeated the British and seized Coorg, Canara, Malabar and great chunks of the Nizam’s dominions, before being slowly beaten back by the British under Cornwallis. He was finally killed during the storming of his river island fortress of Seringapatam in 1799 (see pp.192-3).

Certainly in eighteenth-century Madras idle young factors could still be found loafing around at midday ‘in long draws, a banian coat, and slippers’ and attending both church and the parade ground in ‘Moormen’s suits’, while as late as 1788 Eliza Davidson noted the growing fashion for turbans among the women of the colony, writing of ‘caps, Hats &c, &c, all now given away for this more convenient Asiatic head dress’. See Amin Jaffer,
Furniture from British India and Ceylon
(London, 2001), p.40. The Madras wills and inventories for the period show the quantity of such clothes in Britons’ wardrobes. Captain James Cope for example bequeathed ‘all my Moors clothes’ to his
dubash
. Captain d’Illens had ‘a pair of Moorman’s slippers, 3 ditto coats, and 3 tappets and a sash’, while Captain Callender had two complete ‘Moormens’ suits, and Achilles Preston five. Henry Dodwell,
The Nabobs of Madras
(London, 1926), p.184.

i.e. One hundred thousand rupees.

The diarist William Hickey records that he was told on arrival that ‘Here everyone uses a hookah, and it is impossible to get on without [it].’ He added: ‘I have frequently heard men declare that they would much rather be deprived of their dinner than their hookah.’ William Hickey (ed. A. Spencer),
The Memoirs of William Hickey
(4 vols, London, 1925), Vol. 2, p.136. Such was their popularity that special places had to be allotted for them in boxes at the theatre in Calcutta. Making little carpets for the hookahs to rest upon even came to be regarded as a suitable pastime for bored British memsahibs.

At least £240,000 in today’s currency.

Again, this was a two-way process. The few surviving wills of the
bibis
(Durba Ghosh, in her extensive search through archives in England and India, ‘Colonial Companions’, found only thirty-seven) indicate that just as their consorts were picking up Indian habits and Indian ways in this hybrid milieu, so the women were undergoing a similar journey in reverse, and picking up European manners and ways of living. According to Ghosh, many of them ‘wore European clothes, owned European furniture, ate European food, [but they also] had brass pots and pans, hookah implements, betel eating accessories and wore saris and shawls’; a few even converted to Christianity. As with the world inhabited by the Indo-Portuguese of Goa two centuries earlier, we are clearly in a hybrid environment of overlapping practices: a fecund multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious confusion of different ways and modes of living.