by Anand, Anita
In September 1861, Duleep once again wrote to Sir John Login. This time he expressed himself in an Indian voice which may have been entirely alien, and indeed possibly hurtful, to the man who had done so much to anglicise the young Maharajah. ‘My mother begs to send her best salaam to the kind Doctor Sahib,’ he began, before going on to ask who he might commission to achieve ‘a good likeness of my mother in oils’.21 Through gritted teeth, and ignoring the provocative, traditional Indian salutation, Sir John now made arrangements for George Richmond, a renowned court painter of the day, to capture the ailing Maharani’s image for her son. The portrait shows a frail but proud woman, seated on the ground, draped in heavy silks and jewellery, with a hawkish gleam yet in her eye.
Duleep’s former guardian was becoming more and more unsettled by what he saw as his former charge’s increasing infatuation with his mother. His discomfort was expressed in letters to the Palace, in which he advised immediate action. Queen Victoria had just lost her beloved Prince Albert, in December 1861, and was in no fit state to challenge Jindan’s passionate play for Duleep’s heart. Deep in mourning, the British Queen had lost all interest in that which had brought her joy in the past; even concern for Duleep could not rouse her. Instead it was left to her close adviser and Keeper of the Privy Purse, Sir Charles Phipps, to deal with Login’s concerns: ‘I am very sorry to hear what you say about the Maharajah – nothing could be so destructive to him as that he should succumb to his mother’s, or any other native influence. He is too good to be lost; and, if I were in your place, I should certainly not, at such a moment, forsake any position which gave me any influence over him, or could possibly tend to prevent him doing anything foolish.’22
Apart from urging Login to reassume his role as Duleep’s de facto father, Phipps suggested two other strategies. The first involved having the Maharajah married off as soon as possible, giving him a wife and children of his own to worry about. To that end a suitable bride was sought, and Elveden estate, a country house on the Norfolk–Suffolk borders, was suggested as a possible home in which the Maharajah might put down uncorrupted roots. The second strategy involved putting some distance between Duleep and his mother. Arguments raged in the India Office about whether it would be prudent to send Jindan back to India, taking her far away from the Maharajah, but closer to those who might be inspired by her to rebel. It was a difficult decision, and letters went back and forth on the matter. In the end, just as she had done so many years before at Chunar Fort, Rani Jindan took the decision out of the hands of the British. On 1 August 1863, she died at her home in London. Though she looked decades older, she was only forty-six years old.
Even in death, Jindan caused the British a great deal of inconvenience. They had made careful plans to have her discreetly buried in London at a dignified ceremony at which her son and a few select guests could bid a quiet farewell. However, when two of her Sikh former servants found out what was to happen to their mistress, they wrote a letter of protest to The Times in which they insisted that the Maharani’s body must not be desecrated in the dirt.23 She must have a Sikh cremation, officiated by a Sikh holy man. Fearing the Indian response if they were perceived to have dishonoured her, the British authorities acted quickly to remedy the situation. Two days later, Jindan was removed from her home and laid in the Dissenter’s Chapel, an unconsecrated vault in Kensal Green cemetery, until her remains could be transported back to India to be burnt with all relevant ceremony. There was one stringent condition: neither her body nor her ashes would be permitted to enter the Punjab. Even though, as tradition dictated, her remains would be scattered in a river, the fear was that the very river bank might become a place of pilgrimage for those Indians entertaining thoughts of rebellion.
Forbidden from taking his mother home to Lahore, or indeed anywhere within the state of Punjab, Duleep instead took her body to Nasik in the Bombay Presidency for cremation. Although Duleep did not know it when he departed for India on 16 February 1864, this would be his last voyage to his homeland.
Duleep was twenty-five when his mother died. Two months later, his guardian John Login also passed away. Despite Jindan’s efforts to poison her son against the British, Duleep Singh was heartbroken at the loss. As Lena Login recounted in her memoirs the young Maharajah’s ‘grief at my husband’s death was indeed most sincere and unaffected, and many at the graveside spoke afterward of the touching eloquence of his outburst there, when he gave vent to the words, “Oh I have lost my father! For indeed he was that – and more – to me!”’24
With Jindan and Login gone, an isolated and lonely Duleep found he could no longer ignore Queen Victoria’s pleas to settle down. Victoria had tried over the years to arrange a marriage, much as Jindan would have had she been allowed to have a say in his life. Victoria had even handpicked another of her Indian favourites, a princess who, like Duleep, had been brought to England as a child after the forfeiture of her own father’s kingdom. Princess Victoria Gourama of Coorg was the only other Indian in England who had enjoyed the personal patronage of the Queen. Victoria had become her godmother upon the insistence of the Raja of Coorg, who had hoped – mistakenly as it turned out – that the relationship might restore him to his lands and fortune. Like Duleep, Gourama had also converted to Christianity, and knew the etiquette of court life. They were the only two people of their kind in all England and it seemed logical to Queen Victoria that they should marry. Small-boned, light-skinned and with pretty round cheeks and even rounder hips, there was a sensual quality to Gourama’s beauty which it was thought might appeal to the pleasure-seeking Maharajah.
However, Duleep would have none of it. He politely advised the Palace that he found Gourama too flighty and flirtatious for a wife. He assured royal courtiers that he would find his own match in his own time.
In spring 1864, on his way back from his mother’s cremation, Duleep approached Presbyterian missionaries in Cairo and asked them to help him. The city was a stop-off point on voyages between India and England, and he had visited some of the mission schools and churches almost a decade before, when he had first left his homeland. Duleep begged them to help him find a wife: he wanted an unsophisticated young woman who was pretty, virginal, knew her Bible, and would be an outsider like him. The missionaries were surprised by his overture but admitted that they knew of just such a girl.
Aged just sixteen, Bamba Muller was young, devout, unspoiled and malleable. She was also beautiful, with skin the colour of honey, large dark brown eyes and jet black hair that flowed all the way down her back. But there were obvious drawbacks to the union. The girl was the ‘bastard’ child of a wealthy German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. She had been left in Cairo by her father to be brought up by Christian missionaries behind the high walls of the cloister. Her father, Ludwig Muller, was not a heartless man, and had paid an annual sum to the church to take care of his indiscretion. He also paid for her mother, Sofia, to be taken in by the missionaries. The girl had grown to be a valued part of mission life, studying her Bible with such zeal that she became a teacher at the church school when she was barely more than a child herself. The Reverend Dr John Hogg, who was the head of the mission in Cairo, had grown particularly attached to his young ward, describing Bamba as ‘extremely winning in all her ways, and graceful, even queenly, in her movements’.25
The more he heard about her, the keener Duleep was to meet the girl and pressed for an introduction. Even though they had suggested the match, the missionaries arranged it with some trepidation, worried in case they bore responsibility ‘of being in any way instrumental in transplanting a young, tender flower from its native soil, in which it was growing in vigour and beauty every day, to a region and climate where it might pine away and die from withering blasts’.26
After just one brief meeting Duleep was besotted. He assured Dr Hogg that he would treasure their ward, and then wrote to Bamba’s father asking if he might legally acknowledge his daughter, granting her legitimacy before the wedding and therefore
lessening the shock he was about to deliver to Queen Victoria. Herr Muller was delighted to do so, and with his blessing Duleep and Bamba were married less than four months later, on 9 June 1864, in an understated ceremony in Cairo. The bride needed an interpreter since she spoke not one word of English and Duleep no Arabic at all. She was one month away from her seventeenth birthday but looked even younger.
After a short honeymoon in Cairo, the couple sailed to England on 25 July 1864, and were immediately plunged into the potentially scalding scrutiny of Queen Victoria’s court. Confounding all expectations, Duleep’s young wife was well received and instantly liked. Word of the Maharani’s delicate good looks spread quickly, as did the existence of an additional, disarming characteristic: attention made her blush deeply. It was a childhood trait that had earned her the name ‘Bamba’, the Arabic word for pink. Nobody knew her by any other name. Although Duleep had been nervous about the Queen’s response to his unusual choice of bride, she too was charmed by the pious, shy girl at his side.
Duleep’s friends could not help but notice that Bamba was unlike any of the women he had been drawn to before. She spoke quietly with a heavy Arabic accent and showed a halting lack of self-confidence. He revelled in her beauty, however, parading her around in outfits designed by his own hand: colourfully outlandish full skirts, or ballooning culottes, with heavily embroidered short jackets. He also made his new wife wear her long black hair in numerous thin plaits, like Cleopatra. As if such costume were not dramatic enough, he topped every creation with a jaunty pearl-encrusted Turkish cap, from which long jewelled tassels hung down upon her shoulders.
Most were enthralled by Bamba’s exotic appearance, but some took pity on the vulnerable young woman. Lady Leven, a Scottish aristocrat, begged her dear friend Duleep to tone down his costume ideas for his wife. Writing to a friend, Lady Leven complained that the Maharajah was beyond reason: ‘[he] will interfere with everything concerning his wife’s attire, and has the most absurd notions about the matter . . . You can fancy how it is now, with two dressmakers in the house, and he finding fault if she does not look like other people, and yet insisting on her dresses being cut short, and no trimmings of any kind, and choosing colours irrespective of the becoming!’27
All would share Lady Leven’s sense of pity towards the blushing Maharani in the years that followed.
3
The Suffolk Mahal
Having remodelled his young wife, the Maharajah spent the first decade of his marriage on a relentless mission to refashion his country estate. Purchased in 1863, the year his mother died, Elveden was a sprawling and expensive affair near the market town of Thetford. Comprising 17,000 acres of East Anglian flatlands, interspersed with windbreak plantations of Scots pine, oak and larch, the estate had long been celebrated for its abundance of game.1 Duleep raised the purchase price of £105,000 (more than £11.5 million today) through a government loan of £110,000, plus interest at four per cent.2 But he would need much more than the surplus £5,000 for his vision. He wanted the hall and the estate to be the talk of the realm, and there was much competition.
The year before, Duleep’s friend Bertie, the Prince of Wales, had purchased Sandringham, half a day’s ride to the north. The Earl of Leicester, Lord Albemarle and the de Grey family, all notable members of the British aristocracy, owned vast estates within thirty miles of the Maharajah’s new home, placing him exactly where he most liked to be: at the centre of great influence and wealth. Although the geography and calibre of his neighbours pleased him, the bricks and mortar of his new home did not. Elveden’s original house dated back to the early fifteenth century, when it had been appropriated by Bury St Edmunds abbey, one of the richest Benedictine monasteries in all England. It was large, solid, square and grey. In the 1500s, when the Church failed to grant Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the King seized Elveden and presented it to the Duke of Norfolk, uncle to Anne Boleyn.
The duke did not have it for long, falling out of favour after the execution of his niece. Two centuries later, the estate became the property of Augustus Keppel,3 first Lord of the Admiralty. Keppel had fought during the Seven Years War and the American War of Independence. He adored Elveden Hall and the clear flat landscape which surrounded it. Having constructed special gangways on the rooftops, he would stride high above his property, telescope in hand, surveying the estate as if he were on the deck of one of his battleships. It was said that even death could not part him from his beloved home, and for many years locals spoke of a spectral figure hovering above the house with spyglass pressed to an empty socket.
Yet neither history nor a resident phantom could stop Duleep ripping the place to pieces. In place of the grey sobriety of old Elveden Hall, he ordered his builders to create a modern design in red brick and white stone. Arranged over three storeys, the front of the house was dominated by forty windows which stretched from ceiling to floor. In the evenings, when the lamps were lit, the mansion gleamed in the darkness like a jewel. A white ornamental balustrade ran around the top of the house, skirting the ostentatious bay windows. As a result, Elveden Hall had the appearance of an intricately iced cake.
However, nothing on the outside could prepare visitors for what lay within. The house brimmed with jewelled ornaments, exquisite rugs, marble carvings and the finest works of art from both India and Western Europe. Once through the grand entrance, guests were ushered through lines of liveried footman into an imposing hall, where decorous arches and elaborate carved columns soared high above their heads. They were confronted by a magnificent newly installed marble staircase which twisted up to the top of the house, each hard white step engraved with the Maharajah’s monogram and that of his Maharani. The whole space was lit by sunlight which came in through a huge glass dome above the stairs; Elveden had a luminous quality that was altogether alien to the age. As with many of the house’s architectural flourishes, Duleep had personally designed the staircase at a rumoured cost of £3,000.4 (The sum was wildly extravagant, in an age when a good family home cost £10 a year to rent.5) The staircase accounted for a tenth of the total cost of the redesign, not including the bill for his highly extravagant drapes and furnishings.6
The Field magazine, a publication which often filled its pages with breathless descriptions of stately homes around Britain, could barely contain itself: ‘the large drawing room with its silken hangings and mirrors, its gilded ceiling inlaid with stars and Crescents of silvered glass, was divided by an elaborate screen in gold and silver tracery, and its windows opened onto an enclosed lawn on which dozens of peacocks, gold and silver pheasants and other rare birds strutted about as if quite conscious of the gorgeous effect their colours added to the scene’.7 Dinner guests – frequently royalty and the most powerful members of British imperial society – were entertained in a room in which gold leaf covered the walls. Overhead a ceiling with 400 or so convex mirrors inlaid in raised reliefs of green foliage caught the sun, making the room dazzle both in the daylight and by the reflection of lamps in the evening. Throughout the house, gilded French candlesticks stood in front of heavy embroidered Indian cloth. On the walls hung paintings by the Hungarian artist August Schoefft, who had spent time in Duleep’s homeland and painted scenes of his father, the Lion of the Punjab, and his court at Lahore.
Elveden was a collision of Eastern and Western decadence, and the man tasked with realising Duleep’s eccentric and eclectic dream was the celebrated English architect John Norton. The Maharajah had sent Norton to study the contents of the India Museum – one of London’s greatest attractions – for inspiration. The museum’s most famous exhibit was Tipu’s Tiger, an eighteenth-century mechanical toy created for the much-feared Sultan of Mysore. It comprised a carved and painted life-size tiger crouching over a supine figure. Dwarfing the unfortunate victim with its heavy paws pinning his chest, the tiger’s jaws clamped onto the man’s throat; concealed mechanisms in the creature’s wooden body enabled the beast to chew the life out of its prey – a uniform
ed white-skinned soldier, who cried out in pain as the mechanical tiger grunted with satisfaction.8
Elveden itself had no need of clever toys to remind the Maharajah of Indian wildlife. He built large pens in his grounds which housed real leopards and cheetahs.9 Positioned just beneath the nursery, their low growls were the first thing Duleep’s growing family heard every morning; that and the tramp of numerous workmen who were constantly revising the estate, turning it into a peculiar Mogul palace in the heart of the English countryside. Duleep Singh’s desire to spend money on improvement extended to Elveden’s little parish church to which he donated a small fortune for much needed renovations and expansion.
For the first ten years of her marriage Maharani Bamba was almost constantly pregnant. Her first child, a son, died only a few days after he was born, but the other five princes and princesses – Victor, born in July 1866; Frederick, born in January 1868; the namesake Princess Bamba, born in September 1869; and Catherine, born in October 1871 – were strong and healthy. With every birth, however, Bamba grew weaker and more agitated. The constant squabbles in the nursery did not help her nerves. With so small an age gap between the siblings, they all developed uncompromising personalities. Victor was imperious, Freddie obstinate, Catherine secretive, and Princess Bamba had the worst temper of all and was prone to fits of fury. By the time of Sophia’s birth the Maharani had enjoyed five pregnancy-free years and felt stronger and more rested than she had during her entire marriage. Luckily, Sophia was a very easy baby. Plump and pretty, she fed and slept peacefully, showing no sign of the independent and headstrong young woman she would one day become. Bamba was finally free to enjoy motherhood in tranquillity. Even though she had numerous staff to look after her children in London and Suffolk, the Maharani was able to tend to Sophia. In a letter to her closest confidante, Mrs Lansing, the wife of an American Presbyterian missionary based in Alexandria, she confessed her delight at being able to breastfeed her youngest daughter instead of resorting to a wet nurse: ‘the baby is a dear little pet . . . She is a healthy little thing, you will be glad to hear that I have been able to nurse her. I enclose some photographs that were taken here last October.’10
