The sun shone, the water ran.
“Oh, Ganga,” sang the deckhands.
Saplings rose tentatively from the cheerless bank of the nearing shore. Few places in India were as holy as Sagar Island. Guano stained the pockmarked plaster of the ruined dome of the temple of Kapil Muni. On a plinth beside the entrance was an idol, thickly daubed with carmine. Its left hand held a small pot of water. In its right hand was a rosary.
Kapil Muni marked the site where Lord Vishnu had agreed to end a severe drought by permitting the waters of the celestial river Ganga to flow out of the heavens, issuing from his big toe. Since the force of the cascading waters would split the earth if left unchecked, Lord Shiva consented in turn to break their fall in the labyrinth of matted hair piled high atop his head.
On Sagar Island, too, were long enacted the rites of Ganga Sagar, intended to propitiate the forces of nature. Each January, when the sun made its transition from Capricorn to Sagittarius, as many as two hundred thousand pilgrims watched hundreds of mothers throw unconscious infants to the crocodiles and sharks lurking in the shallows. Thirty-eight years before Nigel’s voyage upriver, the practice had been outlawed by the British. In a decree titled “A Regulation for Preventing the Sacrifice of Children at Saugur and other places,” Governor General Richard Wellesley declared it to be murder, punishable by death. Never before had the East India Company interfered in the religious affairs of Indians.
The steamer breasted the current, barely progressing upstream. The slowness suited Nigel. He had never been nautically minded. He was Coventry-born and Coventry-bred, and no place in England was farther from tidewater than Coventry. En route to his tour of Europe before he entered Haileybury, he had been seasick before the Calais packet left the Pool of London, on the river Thames. As the river widened into its estuary, he felt better. He spent two shillings on a breakfast of cold meat, eggs, and coffee. He might as well have tossed the money into the Thames. If he successfully graduated from college, he would have to get to India, and the prospect filled him with dread. The Suez Canal was thirty years in the future. An iron vessel fitted with a screw propeller had yet to cross an ocean. The voyage by sail around the Cape of Good Hope lasted five months, sometimes six.
Seas were rough, cabins cramped and verminous. Crew members grew surly as the weeks wore on; officers responded with lashes of the cat. Much of the food was carried on the hoof, and none of it was suited to the conditions or the climate. In equatorial waters with air temperatures well above a hundred degrees, passengers in formal dress sat down nightly to roast beef, port wine, and plum pudding.
But by the time he graduated, it was possible to avoid the tedium and prolonged discomfort of the Atlantic passage. Beginning in 1835, mail for England was carried from Bombay to Suez on a small steamer built in India, then dispatched overland to ports on the Mediterranean. After coastal steamers extended the mail service to Calcutta, the next step was passenger service on the same route with a pair of paddle steamers. They rarely maintained their timetables, and the connection to Cairo involved a bone-shaking sixty-hour journey across the desert in horse-drawn wagons. Travelers continued on to Alexandria via the Nile and the Mahmoudieh Canal, on vessels that lacked the most basic amenities. In 1841, this new “steam route” was still in its infancy, and it cost more than the sea voyage. But it reduced the average travel time between India and Britain to two months, and Nigel persuaded his father to finance his fare on the packet boat operated by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, from Portsmouth to Alexandria by way of Lisbon, Gibraltar, and Malta.
Like many passengers, he broke his journey in Egypt. But instead of visiting the Pyramids, he set his sights on a more exotic destination. Siwa, in the Western Desert, was a vast oasis 150 miles from Alexandria, site of a temple renowned in classical antiquity for the infallibility of the oracle within. In 334 B.C., Alexander of Macedon had crossed the slim blue mirror of the Nile and sought out the oracle to confirm his divinity and proclaim his destiny as master of the world.
It took Nigel three visits to the British legation at Alexandria to locate someone who even knew where Siwa was. He was finally referred to civil authorities at the labyrinthine Italianate palace of Muhammad Ali Pasha. There, at least, the oasis and its inhabitants enjoyed fair renown, though not for attributes that tended to encourage visitation. Debilitating fevers were mentioned, and religious fanaticism, and a wild, harlequin sort of people, immoderate in their habits. The Temple of Ammon, which housed the oracle itself, was thought to have been reduced to rubble by Bonaparte’s French, expelled from Egypt forty years before by British and Ottoman forces. Another rumor held that it remained in use, the secret of its exact location guarded by its pagan keepers.
Nigel went away bemused. “So fantastic were the tales told,” he wrote afterwards, that he suspected that the invention of responses to his questions had enlivened the tedium of a dull afternoon for the pasha’s bureaucrats. But their well-intentioned warnings only piqued his curiosity:
“After so many stories about the place, I naturally wondered what the truth might be, and desired more than ever to see it for myself.”
As far as anyone knew, the only Englishman to have visited Siwa was William George Browne. Fresh out of Oxford, he arrived in Egypt in 1792 and set out from Alexandria without asking advice or making any special preparation, apart from disguising himself as a Muslim. Though he survived the violent uproar that ensued when his imposture was discovered on the fringes of the oasis, he was sent packing without so much as having glimpsed the Temple of Ammon. Nigel nonetheless felt that he had found his cicerone when he located a copy of Browne’s Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798, published in London in 1799. He supposed that he might manage the same journey, and with a happier outcome, simply by learning from Browne’s mistakes. (The sort of mistakes, sad to say, that Browne himself continued to make; he subsequently set off with similar abandon for the land of the Tartars and was murdered by robbers between Tabriz and Teheran.)
Above all, Nigel deemed it unwise to set out for Siwa until he could question someone who actually knew the place. His inquiries led him to a Frenchman who supervised irrigation projects for the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. Louis Linant de Bellefonds told Nigel that Siwa had been safe for travel for the past five or six years. The oasis now contained a government office; archaeological work, he understood, was under way. Far from being ruined, the Temple of Ammon was relatively well preserved. As for the journey itself, date caravans left Memphis for Siwa at regular intervals. It was necessary only to secure a place in one, and hire a reliable interpreter. The expense, by English standards, was minuscule.
Linant offered his assistance in making the arrangements and procuring a firman, or passport. He advised Nigel to dress as a Bedouin—not as a disguise, but for comfort’s sake, and to better blend in with his surroundings—and dictated a brief shopping list. It included fish-skin sandals, a striped brown woolen coat, a canvas shirt secured by a leather belt, and a kaffiyeh scarf, kept on by a cord of camel’s hair. Sleeping arrangements were simplicity itself. There was no need for a tent, which was useful only in the rainy season. The sheepskin that covered the camel’s saddle by day became a mattress at night. Food bags served as pillows, coats as a blanket. The journey might take ten days.
What happened next is unknown. A gap in Nigel’s correspondence shrouds the rest of his stay in Egypt. No published works place him in Siwa. Nor do his surviving letters mention his presence there—though one, posted from India in 1846, compares a British official to “M. Linant, whose assistance proved so valuable in Egypt.”
Whether he made it to the oasis or not, what really mattered was Nigel’s decision to see it for himself. It transformed a gesture into a commitment, the romantic fantasy of following in Alexander’s footsteps into a shopping list for fish-skin sandals and a red-and-yellow-striped kaffiyeh. His decision was also a declaration, for a man who chose to see for himself was
a man who meant to think for himself.
Such a man could look forward to a complicated career in British India.
SAGAR ISLAND WAS once the home of ten thousand people. In 1832, thirty years after Richard Wellesley put an end to the sacrifices that preserved it from the ravages of nature, the entire island was inundated by floodwaters twelve feet deep. Seven thousand people drowned. In the aftermath, crops failed in the salt-saturated soil. The starving survivors, many of whom contracted typhoid fever, crowded into Calcutta, where parents “were at last reduced to the necessity of supporting their lives by the sale of their children, the most emaciated of whom sold at last for one rupee only,” according to a report in the London medical journal The Lancet on the epidemic that struck the city after the refugees arrived.
Even the tigers had abandoned the island, a crewman on the steamer told Nigel.
Even the snakes had slithered away.
He left it for Nigel to draw his own conclusions about cause and effect. The natives, plainly, had reached their own.
Nigel, for his part, thought it only natural that Indians would blame the actions of outsiders when misfortune struck the island. He saw the simple sense in it for superstitious minds, the day-and-night contrast of before and after.
The few died, so the many lived.
All died, and nothing lived.
The sun shone, the water ran.
“Oh, Ganga,” sang the deckhands.
He imagined Shiva’s tangled tresses. He pictured Vishnu’s big toe. Two hours past Sagar Island, there was still no sign of Calcutta. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing to see, nothing but low flat leached-out lonely country that nothing but a fallen meteor would ever plow.
He wondered if the river was really the Hooghly.
He wondered if it really led anywhere.
Then the steamer rounded the great muddy bend called Garden Reach, and there it was.
Newer than New York, richer than Rome, more populous than either, revealing itself in a sweeping panorama that took your breath away.
There was Government House, with its dome and Palladian front. There were the pediments and colonnades of Town Hall, its noble complement. There was Bishop’s College, with its pointed Gothic arches and slender, elegant clock tower. There were the houses like palaces, rising in their shining stucco masses from flowerbeds filled with imported English blooms on the undulating riverbank, their verandas spacious, their pillars lofty, their profiles Athenian.
There was broad Chowringhee Road, with its mansions on one side and the vast lawns of the Maidan on the other, and beyond the Maidan—large as Phoenix Park in Dublin—loomed the colossal brick octagon of the citadel, Fort William. Judged impregnable by engineers, it contained sufficient provisions and stores to withstand a siege as long as that of Troy. Beneath its ramparts, from quays jutting into the river, rose the stately masts of tall ships, crowded at their moorings by a thousand less imposing craft of every size and description, from the bulbous green budgerow barges to the delicate little bauleahs, pleasure boats for two, with private cabins discreetly screened by wooden blinds.
“There cannot be a scene more beautiful, connected with the bustle and business of life; and the heart of the traveller feels light within him as he views it,” wrote Nigel’s contemporary Joachim Stocqueler, in a passage that might serve as a prophecy for the wide-eyed young gentleman from Coventry:
“He experiences undefinable emotions of joy, and he imagines he is in a country in which he could dwell unrepiningly for ever, voluntarily debarred from the prospect of ever again beholding the gloomier shores of England.”
5
* * *
A Griffin
NIGEL TOOK A deep breath and stepped onto the landing ghat, joining the pageant of jostling humanity.
Enrobed and beturbaned, barefoot and beseeching.
Umbrella bearers and parakeet vendors.
Tall, stern sentinels, black as midnight; spindle-shanked Brahmins, fair as Finns.
Slender, supple women, jars balanced on their heads, children astride their hips, swinging up the tide-washed steps past wizened water carriers in loincloths, filling goatskin bags with the turbid flow, seasoned with mango peels and coconut husks, fouled with bilge water and the carcasses of dogs.
The sun, the smoke, the laughter.
The chattering and salaaming.
“Sahib!”
“Sahib!”
“Sahib!”
It took a moment for him to realize that the clamor of the palanquin bearers competing for a fare was directed at him. As a foreigner, he existed in a state of ritual impurity, outside India’s complex system of hereditary castes and subcastes. But his place in the social order was as fixed as any Hindu’s. In a society based on knowing one’s place, he could no more choose his own than the lowest sweeper could choose to be a Brahmin priest. A sahib—the respectful term used by natives to address Englishmen, corresponding to “sir” but more freighted with obeisance—was born, not made. And he was born, above all, to command natives. He was a ruler, but also a prisoner—of expectations, good and bad. A sahib had to act like a sahib. He was resolute in his actions, definite in his prejudices, dignified in his manner.
Gabbling unintelligible abuse to their competitors, the half-dozen bearers jostled before him, pushing one another on the slippery steps and banging their conveyances together in the struggle for his business. He wished that he might walk instead. He had ridden in a palanquin exactly once, on a stifling day in Aden, the British colony established in 1839 on the Arabian coast as a coaling station for vessels on the steam route. There he had been borne for two or three miles, lurching up and down steep slopes and peering out at the scenery through gaps in the dusty shutters that preserved his splendid isolation. After five days aboard the steamer out of Suez, he would have liked to stretch his legs. But one of the other passengers, a memsahib returning East with her husband after home leave, told him that such a thing simply “wasn’t done.” She clutched her parasol in the stiff, hot wind on the quay and told him that an Englishman never walked where he might be carried.
Dignity, she said, must never be sacrificed for comfort’s sake.
The natives had a word for it: pukka, meaning genuine—absolutely genuine—and in India one ever strived to present oneself as a pukka sahib.
It was the pukka sahib, she said, whom natives trusted and respected most. Indians set great store by predictability. Any deviation from the standard risked exciting their liveliest suspicions, and imperiled the prospect of their immediate help.
Well, he would need a lot of help in India; that was plain enough. And he supposed that she knew what she was talking about. On the journey out, she was one of the only passengers who spoke of India at all, albeit mostly on the finer points of colonial housekeeping. (To be confident of snake-free bedding, he was advised, one put the legs of the bed into saucers filled with carbolic powder.)
He swept his eyes across the phalanx of beseeching bearers and nodded decisively at a muscular pair with glossy oiled hair and dust in the creases of their elbows. Framing his words carefully in Urdu, he said that they looked like brothers.
They eyed him blankly.
He tried again in Persian, the language of the law courts and imperial decrees, but an unlikely lingua franca on the rough-and-tumble waterfront of Bengal’s first city.
Nothing.
“Brothers?” he said finally, in English.
“Yes, sahib,” said one.
“Very good, sahib,” said the other.
They bowed their heads respectfully, and he bent down to clamber inside.
He was a sahib, all right, but he was also a griffin.
No one seems to know how greenhorns in the East India Company’s service came to be called after the majestic creatures with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. It was true that griffins appeared in Greek mythology as guardians of treasure and priceless possessions, and that India for the British repres
ented both. It was true that the Persians regarded griffins as protectors of their bodily selves—from evil, witchcraft, and “secret slander”—and that the British prescribed their judicial system to cure identical Indian complaints.
It was also true that early Christians discerned in the union of a terrestrial beast and an aerial bird a symbol of Christ, who was both human and divine, and that British rule in India was routinely justified at home on religious grounds. But none of those noble associations fit the comical figure cut by the “griff” in his clumsy encounters with “the custom of the country.” A typical portrait was sketched by Francis John Bellew, who was posted to Calcutta a few years after Nigel:
A Griffin is the Johnny Newcome of the East,—one whose European manners and ideas stand out in ludicrous relief when contrasted with those, so essentially different in most respects, which appertain to the new country of his sojourn. The ordinary period of Griffinhood is a year, by which time the novus homo, if apt, is supposed to have acquired a sufficient familiarity with the language, habits, customs, and manners of the country, both Anglo-Indian and Native, so as to preclude his making himself supremely ridiculous by blunders, gaucheries, and the indiscriminate application of English standards to states of things to which those rules are not always exactly adapted. To illustrate by example:—a good-natured Englishman, who should present a Brahmin who worships the cow with a bottle of beef-steak sauce, would be decidedly “griffinish,” particularly if he could be made acquainted with the nature of the gift; nevertheless, beef-steak, per se, is an excellent thing in an Englishman’s estimation, and a better still with the addition of the before-mentioned condiment.
Empire Made Page 5
