The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy

by John Zubrzycki

  Disheartened but not quite beaten, I continued down the Mall, past the new Assembly building. The further down the road I went, the older the shops became. Some looked like they had been abandoned for decades. One of the few businesses that predate Independence, and proudly so, is Bindra Studio ‘Artist and Photographers: Portraits in Black and White, Sepia a Speciality’. The inside of the shop felt like a film set out of the 1930s. On the sea blue painted walls hung hand-coloured photographs of Indian royalty, stage actors from old Bollywood movies, Sikhs in magnificently tied turbans, and couples on their wedding day—the men with Brylcreamed hair, the shy looking women wearing jewel-studded nose rings. The original ‘spotmatic’ photo booth built in 1884 with its bulb flashlights stood in the corner. Godwin Bindra, the shop owner, probably has the last remaining stocks of gold chloride emulsifier and old Agfa photographic paper east of Suez. The shop was slated for demolition by the Oberoi Hotel group who wanted to redevelop the site. Bindra fought a fourteen-year court battle to save the building which has now been put on the heritage list.

  Built in 1904, this could not have been Jacob’s shop, but Bindra had a huge stock of old photographs. I had checked the archives in London and the impressive Alkazi collection in New Delhi without finding the name of A.M. Jacob in any of the scenes taken along the Mall. I had gone religiously through old albums in antique shops, perused old postcards, scoured the Internet, but had never found anything other than the photograph in the Kipling Journal—and that, too, could not be verified.

  I also drew a blank from Bindra’s collection, impressive though it was, but what he did have was a photograph taken from the Ridge looking north towards Auckland House and Chapslee. There, on a saddle between the Lakkar Bazaar and Elysium Hill was Belvedere, the house Jacob lived in from the early 1880s. I had visited the house a day earlier but my entry was barred by an officious chowkidar because the structure was considered unsafe. No one could tell me whether the house was the original building Jacob had lived in or whether it had been demolished and rebuilt early in the twentieth century. Godwin’s photograph which, he said, was taken in the 1880s, clearly showed it hadn’t.

  The following morning, I made my way down the road that runs through Lakkar Bazaar, named after the Punjabi wood-carvers who once lived here, and on to Belvedere. It was remarkable that Jacob’s house should have survived when so many other nineteenth-century dwellings had collapsed through neglect or been demolished. Its days, however, looked numbered. As I approached, the sound of jackhammers filled the air. A road tunnel was being excavated next to the house and the cutting had gone right up to the southern wall. Part of the front porch had disappeared into a 20 foot-deep hole. An old house on the other side of the cutting had already collapsed partially, its verandah hanging on to the gutted structure like a loose piece of skin.

  After Jacob moved out in 1902, Belvedere became the residence of Dr H.C. Menkel, a Seventh Day Adventist, who called it ‘The Hydro’ and used it as a sanatorium for the treatment of ‘digestive disorders, nervous conditions, rheumatism, goitre, etc, etc.’12 It then became an annexe to Auckland House School in 1960, before being abandoned in 2006.

  Having obtained permission from the school manager, I made my way back to Belvedere. The house takes up most of the saddle between Lakkar Bazaar and Elysium Hill. The front looks towards the Ridge and Prospect Hill. From the back, the view takes in valley after valley, culminating in the great snow-clad Himalayan range. The building has been modified over the years. A large porch has been added to the front and a new wing has been built to the left of the entrance way, but the original shell is intact. In its day, it would have been large even by Simla standards.

  Most of the garden, once filled with flower beds and fruit trees, has been turned into concrete-covered playgrounds and basketball courts. The author, Alice Elizabeth Dracott, who lived in Simla at the same time as Jacob, remembers seeing scores of butterflies surrounding the house every time she went past it on her way to school. Now, there are just flies. Where stables for his stud of Arab horses and shaggy mountain ponies once stood, a manager’s bungalow has been erected. Gone, too, is the deep pond where Jacob is reputed to have walked on water. Crowds of people came to see him do it, swore one writer. ‘They endeavoured to find out the trick of the performance; but in the end they were forced to admit themselves baffled.’13

  In Jacob’s day, Belvedere was considered to be one of the most wonderful houses in India. ‘Though he is single, he has hundreds of servants and grooms who live with him in his bungalow,’ wrote the correspondent in early 1897 for the Lahore-based Urdu daily, Akbhari-I-Am. ‘To guard his valuable property, he always keeps a police guard to serve him, consisting of about twenty constables and one “sergeant”, the expenses of which are paid for by himself.’14

  I somewhat doubted the description of Akbhari-I-Am’s reporter and whether he had even seen the house. The article was riddled with exaggerations, such as, Jacob’s habit of reserving a whole steamer for himself whenever he travelled abroad and that he intended to spend the rest of his life in Tartary.

  Despite the wealth that surrounded him, Jacob was widely reported as living a simple life, adhering to a set of strict rules. Frederick Heath described how ‘Anglo-Indian hedonists marvelled at Mr Jacob’s asceticism, laughed at his refusal to eat meat, drink wine or smoke, but in reality admired him as a man quite different from his fellows. His philosophy of life has in it a splendid scorn of material things.’ The treasures that filled his Simla house ‘were to him less than the dust upon the Mall’.15

  Jacob’s asceticism—which presumably included a vow of celibacy—extended to his personal life. He once told Dracott that he had loved a woman in Simla called Florrie P. They were engaged, but when Jacob told her that their marriage could be in name only, they parted. He kept her photograph in a frame studded with diamonds until she got married. ‘Then I gave it, frame and all, to them, for what did I want with another man’s wife?’16 He told the traveller William Stone, who met him in the mid-1890s a slightly different version of the story. That his fiancée left him after the publication of Mr Isaacs, because the book portrayed his character as a Muslim who already had three wives.

  Whatever the truth, his bachelorhood didn’t go unnoticed. In Kim, Kipling gave his character a homoerotic tinge. Hidden in the shadows of the Wonder House was a ‘soft-eyed Hindu child’ with scarlet lips who waits on Lurgan Sahib while he sits at his table, threading pearls. The relationship between the two is kept deliberately vague, but when Kim arrives, the boy becomes so jealous he threatens to kill him. The boy’s attitude changes once he understands Kim is not there to come between him and his master but to be inducted as a pupil in Lurgan’s School for Spies.

  Jacob’s friends, however, testified to his ability to talk endlessly on the subject of love and femininity. Although women never featured in discussions about his life—apart from the whispers concerning his relationship with Harriet Tytler—his views on the subject of matrimony were very specific. ‘The woman who feels that there is no reverence for her in her lover, the man who feels no submission, no self-surrender in the woman who professes to love, may rest assured that their true love is not true,’ he told Edmund Russell.17

  Jacob clearly preferred Frenchwomen who kept the interest of their men alive with their ‘pretty, bustling, fluttering ways’. The way in which a woman from Paris modestly and gracefully lifted her dress as she crossed a muddy street had no ‘equal in the world’. The constant aim of the Frenchwoman, he informed Russell, was to be her husband’s ‘confidante, his partner in business, his chum and, may I use the word in its best and refined sense—his mistress’. A middle-class English wife, in contrast, was ‘rather more repulsive, except on moral grounds’. After producing ‘six wholesome-looking children at regular intervals’, she spent most of her time ‘frittering over their nursery arrangements’. As for the Viceroy’s wife, Lady Curzon, Jacob concluded that she would have been more beautiful ‘had she been bor
n Oriental. Her face is spoiled by her American ambition.’18

  Even for a man who never had a matrimonial home and who scorned material things, seeing Belvedere in its present condition would have been heartbreaking. Piles of mouldy school books, broken chairs, upturned student benches, old metal beds and posters in broken frames extolling girls to ‘keep on believing your dreams will come true’ were tossed haphazardly in various rooms. Someone had knocked part of a wall down at the top of the staircase for no apparent reason. Rusty pipes, broken plaster, slabs of concrete and scraps of metal littered the wooden floors. Pictures of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus were plastered on the door of a cupboard that might once have held Jacob’s most prized possessions.

  The layout of the original house was simple. The front entrance led into a hallway with a staircase leading to the floor above, where four large bedrooms were located. To the right of the entrance was a grand-looking room with a generous fireplace and a mirror framed in teak wood located above it. Two columns built into the wall divided it in half. Large bay windows looked south towards the Ridge and Prospect Hill. Corrugated iron blocked the doorways at the end. Cracks in the walls were starting to show where the ground next to the cutting was beginning to subside.

  It was in this now-filthy, rubbish-strewn dining room that Jacob had talked politics with Lord Lytton, given Persian lessons to Lord Dufferin, quarrelled over the price of diamonds with the Rana of Dholpur and was briefed by his buyers on the market for pearls. It was also in the drawing room with its stucco ceilings, cedar panelling and parquet floor that Jacob had sat at the head of a long dining table, entertaining the cream of Simla society with seances, sleights of hand and feats of magic.

  And it was here that Roslyn D’Onston claimed to have been pierced through the upper torso by one of Jacob’s damascened swords before watching him produce a grape vine bearing black Hamburgs from the walking stick of a veteran of the Crimean War. It was D’Onston who started the legend of Jacob walking on water and of his ability to produce clouds of butterflies with the wave of his magic wand.

  A slightly smaller room to the left of the entrance had probably served as a place to display his extraordinary collection of curios and antiques. When the author Lillian Luker Ashby visited Belvedere with her companion in 1893, Jacob was not at home but they were welcomed inside by his butler who served iced drinks before ushering them through the mansion. ‘He proudly showed us the extensive displays of art objects and curios; delicately carved ivory and silver from India, priceless jade from China, beaten bronze from Tibet, rugs from Persia. It was a veritable museum of Asiatic art and handicraft.’ Of his reputation as a magician, Ashby’s companion remarked that Jacob was ‘unbelievably marvellous’. His ability to grow grapes out of a walking stick was ‘still the talk of the town’.19 The softly perfumed vapour of incense smoke that had once wafted through these corridors was now a haze of diesel fumes.

  Dracott remembers visiting Belvedere and being shown some of his most valuable pieces. There were dozens of old Indian miniatures, painted with colours mixed with precious stones, the finest carpets, cushions tinted in silk and gold, rare Persian manuscripts, a magic mirror, ivory and inlaid boxes worth their weight in gold—and a mysterious peacock made out of Damascus steel.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE DEVIL WORSHIPPERS

  RESPLENDENT in a glass cabinet in the Islamic Arts section of the British Museum is a statue of a steel peacock standing nearly a metre tall, its turquoise eyes staring inscrutably into space as if guarding some long-forgotten secret. In the centre of its profusely decorated tail is a faceless man. Two attendants stand on either side and around them swirls a profusion of creatures, mythical and real, winged dragons, deer, birds and lions, hunting dogs, snakes and monkeys. A band of Islamic calligraphy surrounds this inner circle. A label states that the piece was gifted to the museum in 1912 by ‘Mr Imre Schwaiger of Simla and Calcutta’ in memory of the Imperial Durbar.

  The statue is both beautiful and mysterious. It was originally claimed to be an image of Malik-i-Tawus, the peacock god of the Yezidis—a statue so rare and so sacred that it was made in separate parts to prevent its being stolen while it was being carried from place to place.

  The Yezidis are a sect of devil worshippers whose scattered communities can still be found in parts of Kurdistan, Armenia and the Caucus. They ‘regard the devil as creative agent of the Supreme God, a reinstated angel who is the author of evil’, declared the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘They avoid mentioning his name and represent him by the peacock.’ Treated as outcasts for their bewildering range of beliefs drawn from different religions and considered heretics by some Muslims, they have been persecuted for centuries.1

  In January 1912, the Illustrated London News carried an engraving showing King George V and the Queen Empress admiring ‘the steel peacock of Mesopotamian Lucifer worshippers’ in Schwaiger’s showroom near Kashmiri Gate in Delhi. The couple spent an hour inspecting the Hungarian’s collection of art treasures said to be the best in India. Moved by their admiration, Schwaiger decided to donate the peacock to the British Museum.

  When the statue first went on display in London six months later, it created a sensation among historians and art lovers. Speculation swirled about the identity of the faceless man and the meaning of the long lines of the calligraphy. The Manchester Guardian suggested that the central figure was John the Baptist whose worship in Mesopotamia ‘was a curious theological survival’. Others believed it to be a representation of the Prophet Muhammad. The statue itself was said to be one of only four in existence and worth thousands of pounds.2

  For twenty years, the peacock statue had graced Jacob’s mansion Belvedere in Simla, the repository of countless treasures he had collected from all parts of the world. But there was more to this object than the controversy about its iconography. The story of how the statue had travelled from south Persia along a branch of the old Silk Route through the passes of the Hindu Kush and then to Simla, before finding a permanent home in Bloomsbury, was also central to the story of Jacob’s steady decline.

  By the summer of 1899, Jacob was growing increasingly desperate. The hostile reception given to him in Hyderabad was only part of his problems. Whether as a result of taking ever greater risks, poor judgement or bad luck, he found himself increasingly embroiled in disputes with customers over money.

  In June of that year, he sent an urgent telegram to the Maharaj Rana of Dholpur, Nihal Singh. He had borrowed money from Nihal Singh to pay his legal costs during the Imperial Diamond Case and had suffered greatly, trying to repay his debt. Now, the tables were turned and it was the Rana who owed him the not inconsiderable sum of 42,000 rupees for jewellery he had purchased in the preceding few years.

  Nihal Singh told Jacob to meet him in Ootacamund, a hill station in the Nilgiri hills favoured by Indian royals. Jacob reached Ooty—as it was affectionately known—on June 7, but instead of repaying the money, the Rana stalled. Insisting that Jacob was the only person he could trust, he asked him through his servant to convey an important message to another Prince, hinting that if he did so, there might be a financial reward involved. The message was never given to Jacob, nor was he able to see the Rana.

  As he wrote in a memorial to the Viceroy Lord Curzon in October, he went to the Rana’s residence twice a day for nearly four months without being granted an audience. ‘I have lost my Simla business season where several Rajas spend large sums,’ he complained to Curzon before asking him to intervene. ‘I owe large sums to banks and they are pressing for payment. Had he not detained me on false promises or had he sent me away a week or so after my arrival here, I would have been able to attend to my business, earned my livelihood, and repaid part of my debts; whereas, now, I am a ruined man at jail’s door.’ The Rana, he said, was taking advantage of the fact that Princes could not be sued. ‘Therefore, I humbly and respectfully beg to appeal to Your Excellency’s justness to remedy injuries done to me, fo
r which I will ever pray.’3

  Jacob should have known better than to get involved with a Prince who had a reputation for fleecing his creditors. In a queue of complainants calling on the Government of India to do something about his debts, were the Rana’s fencing master, several jewellers, including Hamilton & Co., a Simla wine merchant and Symes & Co., chemists who claimed that he owed 6802 rupees for purchases going back to 1896.

  William Cuningham of the Foreign Department, who had been involuntarily dragged into yet another dispute involving Jacob, wrote to Curzon saying that the Rana had been making a genuine attempt to pay off his debts. However, anyone stupid enough to have done business with him deserved little sympathy. The Rana had divided claimants into those he considered ‘honest’ and those who were ‘touting tradesmen’. Jacob, Cuningham said, was ‘prosecuting his claim vindictively, possibly because the Rana will not give (him) a recommendation to the Nizam of Hyderabad’. He was also spreading false rumours about the Rana’s ‘habitual intoxication’.4

  A confidential cable from the Political Agent of the eastern state of Rajputana had a different explanation. ‘Mr Jacob’s real motive in making the complaint and persistently remaining in Ootacamund lay in his anxiety to be employed in the mission mentioned by the Maharaj Rana, in which he anticipated making large profits on his own account. The Maharaj Rana appears to have thought better of employing Mr Jacob in the manner indicated.’5