White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  William’s letters are invariably written with great grace and beauty, and with numerous classical and Oriental literary allusions: with Kennaway in particular he frequently discusses Persian literature, the rival translations of Hafiz, and the beauties of the Shahnama. He worked hard at perfecting his Persian, Bengali and Hindustani; but throughout the entire correspondence, and despite all his Orientalist learning, there is little feeling for India evident in William’s letters.ai

  Indeed, in some quarters William Kirkpatrick had already got a reputation for haughtiness towards Indians. The Indophile General William Palmer, who had been Warren Hastings’ Military Secretary, then Resident in Lucknow, was alarmed when he heard in November 1786 that William Kirkpatrick had been made Resident at the camp of the Maratha leader, Mahadji Scindia. ‘I am suprized that Kirkpatrick should have sought that Station,’ wrote Palmer. ‘His mind is strongly prejudiced against India.’18

  As General Palmer had predicted, William Kirkpatrick’s tenure as Resident at the court of Scindia was not a success, and for exactly the reasons he had foreseen. Kirkpatrick’s childhood made him especially sensitive to anything that might appear a slight. In a letter written by the then Resident, James Anderson, to William when the news of his posting was made public, William was warned that the Maratha’s Hindu peasant manners were very different from those of the courtly Muslim Mughals with whom he had been used to dealing:in an early period of my residence in this camp I could not help thinking that Scindia was sometimes guilty of petty neglects and inattention towards me, which as experience has since warned me were to be ascribed only to the difference of the Maratha modes and customs from those of the Musalmens to which I had been accustomed … [Scindia] appeared to be deficient in the minutiae of attention, such as in frequent messages and enquiries and other little intercourses of civility which are so rigidly practiced by the politer Mussalmen … 19

  The warning, however, fell on deaf ears. Within a month of his arrival at Delhi, where Scindia was then encamped, William was complaining to the Governor General Lord Cornwallis that Scindia and his court were rude and neglectful: ‘his general object [is to subject] the English Resident at his Durbar [court] to humiliating situations’. Scindia in turn formally complained to Calcutta of William’s arrogance and haughtiness.

  Cornwallis was planning a war against Tipu Sultan, and had no wish at that moment to see any sort of hostilities break out between the Company and the Marathas; rather he wished to conclude some sort of defensive alliance with them. So he wrote back to William saying that he was ‘exceedingly sorry to hear of a coldness between you and Scindia’, and instructed him to live ‘on a footing of friendship and good humour’ with the Maratha durbar. At the end of the letter he made his position even more frank: ‘Your good sense will immediately point out to you the substance and the intention of this dispatch. I wish to avoid a public breach with Scindia, and therefore should he, from any motives whatever, continue the slights and inattentions of which you complain … you will treat them as much as possible as matters of personal offence only.’20

  The letter could not have been more clearly expressed; but it was already too late. Things had reached a head on 24 January 1787. One of William’s escort had gone to swim in the Jumna, where he met a dhobi (a laundryman) who was cleaning the clothes of Scindia’s son-in-law on the ghats. The sepoy demanded that the washerman—an untouchable—move away while he took his swim. The washerman refused to do so. He was promptly attacked by the sepoy, who beat him over the head with a lathi (truncheon or stick). A troop of Marathas happened to be passing by and joined in on the side of the dhobi, leaving the sepoy badly wounded. The incident escalated, and by the afternoon, after several soldiers on either side had been severely wounded, William was forced to leave his quarters in a crumbling palace in Old Delhi for his own safety. From a temporary camp in the garden of Safdarjung’s tomb, six miles outside the city, he demanded that the offenders should be arrested and that there should be a formal apology. None was forthcoming.

  In October, after an impasse lasting ten months, William wrote to Kennaway: ‘Finding it impossible to live on terms of good humour with Scindia without taking certain measures not agreeable to the policy thought necessary by Ld Cornwallis, I have come to the resolution of resigning from my present office.’ He duly did so, in a rather tentative way, and was surprised to find it immediately accepted by the Governor General. His surprise turned to alarm when, once he had left his position and set off towards Calcutta, it became increasingly clear that Cornwallis blamed William, not Scindia, for what he regarded as a wholly unnecessary breach in relations with a powerful neighbour.

  A year later, Kirkpatrick still had no new appointment, and the full scale of the disaster that had overtaken his career began to sink in. When Kennaway was appointed Resident at Hyderabad, William wrote to congratulate him, adding: ‘the disgraceful and mortifying situation in which I at present stand must operate to the ruin of both my character and fortunes. ’21

  From his new appointment in Hyderabad, Kennaway replied sympathetically. To his brother William, however, he confided that he thought Kirkpatrick’s behaviour honourable, but suicidal: ‘Kirk’s prospects in this country are now very unpromising,’ he wrote in December 1788.

  In quitting a similar rather more lucrative situation than that which I at present hold and sacrificing his interest to the rigidity of his principles, he gave up a certainty of a handsome independency [i.e. sufficient capital to allow him to retire to England on the interest] in the course of four or five years … In a single and unencumbered state I certainly should not have acted in the same manner. Perhaps I should have been wrong in not doing so, but I think I could have preserved my virtue without sacrificing my interest.22

  What made matters worse was that William Kirkpatrick was now very far from ‘single and unencumbered’. Three years earlier, on 26 September 1785, only a few months after his return from England and after a very brief courtship, he had married Maria Pawson, whom Lady Strachey describes as ‘being of the Yorkshire gentry’. A portrait of Maria by Romney shows a pretty, sensual woman with full lips, long reddish hair and an intelligent, knowing expression. She and Kirkpatrick quickly had four children in as many years; but the marriage was not a success.

  Maria had initially accompanied her husband to Scindia’s Delhi camp, but soon departed to Agra where she tried, without success, to pull strings with the Mughal court in order to get permission to live in Taj Gunj, immediately beside the Taj Mahal. When her request was formally turned down she became angry at what she regarded as a humiliating rebuff, and headed off with her infants towards Calcutta. Kirkpatrick was forced to admit to John Shore, Cornwallis’s deputyaj (and eventual successor), that ‘by personal argument and insistence I may possibly be able to get her consent [to return]’, but that he could not guarantee it. He then promised that ‘I should take care that nothing of an embarrassing nature should arise,’ perhaps implying that public rows were already a feature of the marriage.23 By the end of 1788 it was decided that Maria should return to England with the children, and settle in Bath.

  The marriage struggled on, with William continuing to write affectionate letters to his wife for a further nine years; but her replies became shorter and increasingly perfunctory. By 1794 William was complaining that Maria’s letters were ‘wholly inadequate … scribbled in haste, often illegible, very inaccurate and what is worst of all (with regard to the feelings of a husband and a father) extremely deficient in those details which it is so easy for you to furnish, and which I must naturally wish for. Let me entreat you, therefore, my dear girl, to discontinue this hurry-scurry mode of conducting your correspondence with me, and to recollect that you are not writing by the penny post but by a conveyance that seldom offers, and to a husband at some thousand miles distance from you.’24 The following year Maria ceased to reply to his letters at all. By 1797 a legal separation was agreed to, due to Maria’s ‘misconduct’.25 The four girls from th
e marriage were packed off to live with their various cousins at the Handsome Colonel’s. There is no evidence that William and Maria ever met again; certainly William’s grandchildren were all told that Maria had died after the birth of her youngest child, and after his death were astonished to discover a bequest to her in William’s will, which she duly received.26 Ironically, she turned out to be living in India, apparently with a new lover.

  For five years, from 1787 until 1792, during Maria’s absence in Bath, William Kirkpatrick’s career languished, and he wrote irregularly to Kennaway, explaining that he had not put pen to paper more often as ‘my disappointments were so near my heart that I could have handled no other subject, and as you could give me no relief, I determined to give you no pain’.27 Depressed and dejected, he returned to badly-paid regimental duties.

  William’s linguistic talents brought him a second break, however, in 1792, when he was appointed to head a mission to Nepal. Travelling through previously unexplored parts of the Himalayas, he was the first European to reach Nayakote, where the Nepalese rajahs then held court. Though the mission yielded no diplomatic results, it was regarded as an important sortie into new territory, and William later produced a book on his travels—A Description of the Kingdom of Nepaul—which was widely applauded. The expedition moreover brought about his reconciliation with Cornwallis, who went on record saying of William that ‘no one could have acquitted himself with more ability, prudence and circumspection’.28

  The expedition returned Kirkpatrick to favour, and in March 1793 he was able to write an excited note to Maria in England revealing that ‘my friend Kennaway’ was retiring due to ill-health in December, and that if ‘my friend Mr Shore’ got appointed Governor General to replace Cornwallis, as looked likely, ‘there can be little doubt of my succeeding [Kennaway] at the Residency at Hyderabad. God bless you my dearest girl. I am not allowed to add more.’29 By November both appointments had come through, and Kirkpatrick wrote to Bath that his prospects had suddenly dramatically changed. His income would now be substantial, and ‘I am hopeful by the practice of a proper economy to be in a few years in possession of what I consider a competency.’ It would also now be possible to give the girls ‘a private education’.

  He saved for last the news that he was due to set off overland down the east coast of India from Calcutta the following week, and that ‘the place where my brother James commands lies on my route to Hyderabad. It is my wish he should proceed thither with me, to fill an appointment the succession to which has been secured for him by Sir John Kennaway … With his talents and the chance before him of getting the assistantship under me sooner or later it will introduce him with great advantages into the diplomatic line. I am strongly of the opinion he ought not to decline the offer.’30

  In 1793 James Achilles Kirkpatrick appeared at first sight to be a very different figure from his tortured, complex half-brother. Easy-going and generous, with an effortless gift for friendship, James was blessed with his father’s good looks, though with his mother’s much fairer Scottish colouring. He had full lips, startling blue eyes and a mop of straw-coloured hair which he swept back foppishly over his forehead and wore rather longer than was usual at the period. He was considered by his contemporaries to be tall and well proportioned as well as unusually handsome. But he was a sensitive man and, like his brother, he felt the need for continual reassurance; indeed his letters are full of expressions of affection for his correspondents which sometimes read like cries for reciprocation.

  By the age of twenty-nine James had spent fourteen years in the Company’s Madras army without in any way distinguishing himself as a soldier; but he shared William’s gift for languages, and as well as having complete mastery of Persian and Hindustani, he seems to have spoken the languages of the south—notably Tamil and Telegu—with some fluency. If, as seems likely, James had been brought up by Indian ayahs after his mother’s death, it is quite possible that this fluency may have dated back to his Madras childhood; certainly there are frequent reports that many British children of the period alarmed their parents by speaking the Hindustani (or in this case, presumably, Tamil) of their ayahs as their first language.

  As with William, it was this linguistic ability that would in time be James’s escape route from the drudgery of the military line; but in contrast to William, whose Orientalist learning had not stopped him from adopting a straightforwardly John Bull attitude towards India, James from the beginning had a far more affectionate view of the country where he was born and where he had spent the early years of his childhood. In an anonymous autobiographical fragment which he submitted to the Madras Courier in 1792 he described himself as ‘an officer who from his proficiency in the Persian and Hindoostanee tongues, and conversancy in the manners and customs of the race of men by whom those languages are spoken, had contracted a certain degree of partiality towards them’.31

  One aspect of this ‘partiality’ was a relationship with an Indian bibi with whom he had lived for many years and by whom he fathered a son. In 1791 James brought the boy back to England during a year’s sick leave, after which the child joined the multi-ethnic household of children, legitimate and illegitimate, presided over by the Handsome Colonel in Kent, no doubt to the growing puzzlement of his country neighbours.

  As well as a ‘partiality’ towards Indians, James also had an overwhelming aesthetic feeling for the sheer beauty of India, something that is apparent throughout his correspondence. Again and again his letters praise the landscape through which he is passing, writing home soon after his return to the Deccan in February 1792 about the ‘charming verdure that cloathes the whole country and renders it so delightful to the eye … you may walk bare headed in the sun without inconvenience almost any hour of the day’. He particularly admired Tipu Sultan’s Mughal-style pleasure gardens near Bangalore: ‘They please me very much … and are laid out with taste and design, the numerous cypress trees that form the principal avenues are the tallest and most beautiful I ever saw.’

  A month later, when his regiment was involved in the siege of Tipu’s island capital Seringapatam during the Third Mysore War, even the ‘alarming mortality’ among the European troops and the ‘infectious exhalations from millions of putrid carcases that cover the whole surface of the earth for twenty miles around the capital’ could not blind James to the astonishing loveliness of the city he was engaged in besieging: ‘The palaces and gardens upon the island without the city far exceed the palace and gardens at Bangalore in extent, taste and magnificence, as they are said to fall short of the principal ones within the city. Of this last we have an exterior view from our trenches, and considering how much it overtops the lofty walls and battlements of the city, its height must be as considerable as its extent is great.’

  He had seen Tipu’s magnificent Mughal-style garden palace ‘Lall Baug [the Red Garden], in all its glory’ the day before: ‘Alas!’ he writes to his father, ‘it fell sacrifice to the emergencies of war.’ The palace was made hospital for the wounded and the garden ‘toppled to supply materials for the siege. The whole avenues of tall and majestic cypresses were in an instant laid low, nor was the orange, apple, sandal tree or even the fragrant bowers of rose and jasmine spared in this indiscriminate ruin. You might have seen in our batteries fascines of rose bushes, bound with jasmine and picketed with pickets of sandal wood. The very pioneers themselves became scented … ’

  He even dodged enemy shells to make a visit to the newly erected tomb of Tipu’s father Haidar Ali, which he greatly admired, though judging it ‘in every respect inferior to the Taj at Agra’. Intriguingly he adds: ‘I herewith enclose you some of the plaister I picked up, which had fallen from Hyder’s tomb stone. It is said to be composed with earth from Mecca, or as it is called, the Scrapings of the Dust from the Holy Tomb of the Prophet, and consequently must possess many rare and invaluable virtues.’32 In another writer these remarks might be taken as satirical; but it is clear from the context that James was being perfectly ser
ious, though ‘Scrapings of the Dust from the Holy Tomb of the Prophet’ was certainly a strange choice of gift for the Handsome Colonel, who throughout his career had shown little interest in religious matters, less still in Muslim relics.

  If, aesthetically and emotionally, James’s letters show a great love of India that remained fixed and constant throughout his life, his political views were at this stage less clearly formed. Later in life he would come to regard the East India Company as an untrustworthy and aggressive force in Indian politics. But in the early 1790s he still subscribed to the conventional English view which tended to see Indian rulers as ‘effeminate’ and ‘luxurious’ tyrants, whose ‘unorganised despotism’ sapped their countries of strength and the possibility of progress. This was perceived as a direct contrast to the Company, whose introduction of Western ways to India, protected by an army of ‘undaunted spirit and irresistible ardour’, was believed by most of the British in India to bring unambiguous blessings to the subcontinent.