Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  The cluelessness of newcomers about everyday life in India was exacerbated by a tacit conspiracy of silence before they got there. The reluctance of those in the know to enlighten those outside it dated back to the freewheeling era of the buccaneers who had established the Company in India, when it was generally thought best that what happened in Calcutta should stay in Calcutta. In the days when nearly all of the city’s British inhabitants had come East to amass a fortune as quickly as possible, few, wrote the social historian William Dalrymple, “had much interest in either the mores of the country they were engaged in plundering, or in the social niceties of that which they had left behind.”

  Nor did the nominal pillars of colonial morality go out of their way to set a higher tone. One curate was described as a “drunken toss-pot.” Another, an army chaplain in Calcutta called Mr. Blunt, was condemned as “an incomprehensible young man” by an attorney under the chief justice of Bengal, who reported that Blunt “got abominably drunk and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs, so as to render himself a common laughing stock.”

  Griffins—most of them freed from adult supervision for the first time in their lives—had long been regarded by common consent as the most debauched of a dissolute lot. Even on their best behavior, in what passed for polite society, they amused themselves at dinner by throwing half-eaten chickens across the table. (That Calcutta’s Englishwomen tended to throw only bread and pastry—and then “only after a little cherry brandy,” noted one observer—was judged “the highest refinement of wit and breeding.”) Another traveler complained about the “difficulties and embarrassments” that “generally involve the young Writers,” with special reference to “the keeping of race horses” and “extravagant parties and entertainments.” Still another, more nostalgically, recalled that “the costly champagne suppers of the Writers Building were famous, and long did the old walls echo to the joyous songs and loud rehearsing tally-hoes.”

  By the time Nigel took up residence in Calcutta, new arrivals had more time on their hands than ever. Thanks to the continuing tension between the Court of Directors in London and its governors general on the other side of the world, all incoming civil servants found themselves in the same illogical boat—Company-certified in England as masters of three Asiatic languages, Company-compelled in India to demonstrate mastery of one in twelve months’ time. Griffins were technically unemployed. During the year allotted them for attaining fluency in Bengali, Hindustani, or Persian, they received a monthly stipend of three hundred rupees—roughly £30 in the sterling of the day—and a small sum for a munshi, or tutor. They had no official duties, and could be assigned none.

  There were, however, moderating influences. Stricter Victorian morality had begun to take hold. The governor general, Lord Ellenborough, was something of a new broom. A distant relative of George Washington, and no friend of the Company, he wanted the Crown to take over the administration of India for the Indians’ own good. In the meantime, he meant to put the Company’s own house in order from a moral standpoint, setting an example for impressionable natives. Acting on a matter that was painfully close to home—his wife had deserted him to live in a Bedouin harem—he subjected to stricture for the first time sexual liaisons with Indians, long tolerated on grounds that, as one army officer put it, “allowances are to be made for the ungovernable passions . . . which absolutely must have vent in this stimulating climate.”

  Among the more prodigious “venters” was Sir David Ochterlony, appointed British resident to the Mughal court at Delhi in 1803, who kept thirteen concubines. Another Company servant, mentioned in a popular guide to life in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, showed less restraint and maintained sixteen. Provisions for native mistresses, or bibis, featured in at least one out of every four of the wills filed in India by European men until well into the nineteenth century, and many more Indian women were undoubtedly kept by sahibs who left no official paper trail behind them. Nor, in the aftermath of Ellenborough’s condemnation of such attachments as “unnatural,” did the bibis themselves disappear, though recorded bequests to them all but ceased by 1850.

  Another long shadow over the tradition of unbridled revelry was cast by the Company’s withdrawal from trade. The typical griffin no longer debarked in Calcutta with the expectation of riches to come. He simply expected to do better than he would have done at home, where the economy reeled from the movement of rural labor into towns. More than one in ten of the British people were paupers. Industrialization had so far created all manner of ill-paid factory jobs but little in the way of opportunities for educated young men. The siren song of India for most was security, not serendipity. Once they arrived, wrote Company historian Brian Gardner, life quickly became a “sapping battle against debt, gout, and the heat, with the prospect of the English counties and a pension far ahead.”

  This made for a new air of seriousness about the Writers Building, a three-story redbrick block of identical apartments near Government House. Each of its residents knew that he would face a board of examiners at the end of his freshman year in India. If he failed to display the requisite fluency in an Oriental language, he returned to his studies for six weeks. If he failed a second time, he was deprived of his appointment and shipped back to England.

  Nigel’s two rooms in the Writers Building led one into the other. The walls were painted white, with green-shuttered windows. A low bookcase divided the space. Pride of place in his library, he assured his parents, belonged to the Bible they had presented him as a parting gift on the quay at Southampton. More well-thumbed, perhaps, judging from the enthusiastic references in his correspondence, was Les Six Voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, first published in 1676. Written by a goldsmith and dealer in precious gems, it riveted readers until the end of the nineteenth century with the sumptuousness of its narrative. Tavernier’s India was a land of both fabulous riches—“We turn over in our hands Koh-i-Noors and play with trays full of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires”—and everyday plenty, where “even in the smallest villages rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and sweetmeats can be procured in abundance.” It was a vision that whetted Nigel’s appetite from the very beginning for what he imagined as the “real India.”

  His first order of business, though, was to establish himself in Calcutta society. Ideally, he would have possessed a letter of introduction to Lord Ellenborough, and his reception at Government House would certify his status as a young gentleman of promise and distinction. Afterwards, socially speaking, everything would fall into place—invitations to the best houses and early entrée into the sporting circles of the Bengal Jockey Club and the Calcutta Hunt. The letters he had managed to procure, however, were addressed to less grand households, none of them blood relations and only one with a connection to his family at all, through a distant relative of his father’s partner in law. Deeply conscious that he was neither wealthy nor titled, he called on each in turn, expecting no better than a perfunctory welcome.

  To his relief, he discovered that Calcutta was no London. The elasticity of its snobbery reflected the circumstances of what remained a commercially minded elite, enjoying a style of living that few could have managed in England. Outside of none-too-onerous working hours, which began after elevenses and ended at four or five in the afternoon, they were attended by retinues of servants—ten or twelve for bachelors, upwards of fifty for socially prominent families. Their beautiful detached houses, stuccoed on the outside to resemble stone and surrounded by gardens, earned Calcutta the sobriquet “City of Palaces.” The rooms were large and windowed to the floors, with lofty ceilings, fine Persian carpets, marble tables, Venetian mirrors, luxurious couches. To every bedroom was attached a “bathing room,” and French doors opened onto deep, columned verandas that ran the length of each floor and protected the interior from the heat of the sun.

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bsp; Some kept racehorses. Many hunted: leopards, hyenas, hogs, antelope, deer of all descriptions, hares, partridges, snipe, quail. But for all their manner of privilege, they were most of them conscious they were not to it born. Nigel’s origins in an old family of some provincial distinction served him well enough after all. Within a few weeks of his arrival, the honor of his presence was requested at two dinner parties. Those led in turn to the promise of mingling with “the beauty and fashion of Calcutta” at the weekly race meetings on the course beside Fort William.

  Next on the agenda was hiring a munshi. Mindful of his embarrassment with the bearers on the quay, he decided that, since he was living in Bengal, he had better learn Bengali. He persisted in his decision even after discovering that nearly all fledgling civil servants received appointments in outlying areas where Urdu was more commonly spoken. He regarded it, he told his parents, as a challenge:

  “I am advised that proficiency in Sanskrit is of great benefit in attempting mastery of the Bengali Language—you will remember that such proficiency as I can boast in Oriental Languages is limited to the Persian and to a lesser extent the Urdu, with my marks in Sanskrit only just barely ‘up to snuff.’ I should not be surprised that you wonder at my recklessness, but given this opportunity I think it is worthwhile to remediate a weakness if possible rather than accept it as a limiter on the course of my ambitions in the future.”

  Besides, he added, he was sure enough of his Persian that he was considering reading for an honor in languages in the subject at the College of Fort William, which survived from the Wellesley era as a small language school. Should he pass, he would receive a gold medal, a substantial cash gratuity (£160, more than five times the amount of his first-year stipend), and immediate qualification for an appointment, regardless of how well he took to Bengali.

  Nigel’s interview with a prospective tutor introduced him for the first time to an educated Indian. The munshi was fat and voluble, with eyes like pools of obsidian. He produced a letter of reference, furred at the edges and dated 1839. During the previous year, it stated, the writer had employed Mr. C—— , a native of Howrah, as a tutor in the language and culture of Bengal. His performance was satisfactory and his habits were clean. At the conclusion of the writer’s studies, he had paid Mr. C—— ​ the customary bonus.

  Nigel handed back the letter. He pointed out that the reference was more than two years old. Had the munshi tutored any pupils since?

  Indeed he had.

  Not, however, English pupils.

  And not, he regretted to say, in Calcutta.

  He had taken a position at Gopalganj, in Bihar, hundreds of miles to the northwest. His employer and pupil was the local squire of those parts, called a zamindar, a very rich man who wished to learn English in order to become even richer. But Gopalganj had proved intolerable. It lacked books and newspapers and coffeehouses. One felt in Gopalganj the loneliness of living too close to the land.

  The conversation ended an hour later, after Nigel had satisfied the munshi’s curiosity about the differences between Frenchmen and Englishmen, the physiognomy of Queen Victoria, and the status of the Indians and Persians who taught at Haileybury. He had thought that he was interviewing the munshi, he wrote afterwards, but the munshi had interviewed him. He had intended to sleep on any offer of employment—one could not be rushed into a decision to share the company of a native for two hours a day, six days a week. But it was the munshi who continued to pose the questions even as he took his leave.

  Should they schedule their meeting time for eleven o’clock in the morning?

  Or would earlier suit?

  Half past ten perhaps?

  It remained for Nigel to settle it, then—even as he understood that it was already settled, that the transaction between them was governed by what he vaguely recognized as the “custom of the country,” that what finally settled the matter was the munshi’s unaffected certitude that it was settled.

  Loneliness, Nigel soon realized, was not limited to provincial towns like Gopalganj. For all Calcutta’s bustle and self-conscious grandeur, the number of permanent white residents was minuscule, less than one-tenth the population of Coventry. With most of the civil servants of Nigel’s generation stationed upcountry, and the young army officers in the vicinity isolated in the cantonments of Barrackpore and Dum Dum, some distance from the city, opportunities for friendship outside the circle of his fellow griffins at the Writers Building were limited to older Company officials and their wives. At times, he admitted to his parents, he suffered from the want of “congenial companionship.”

  Then there was the climate. “Two monsoons is the age of a man,” ran the Anglo-Indian proverb, and a shocking number of Englishmen never lived to see a third. Calcutta’s Park Street cemetery, which opened in 1809, was packed so tightly with monuments, columns, urns, and obelisks within a few years’ time that one observer reported that “on both sides of the road . . . you see nothing beyond it.”

  Nigel felt fortunate to be settling in during the Cold Weather—the healthiest time of year. It gave him a chance to acclimatize before the onset, in March, of the dreaded Hot Weather. But there was no seasonal respite that year from thoughts of death. The news out of Afghanistan saw to that.

  What came to be known as the First Anglo-Afghan War had been started by the British two years before, with the intent of installing a client prince, called Shah Shuja, on the Kabul throne. The Company’s Army of the Indus had seen to Shuja’s installation, but its troops proved unable to secure his reign. Word of an uprising in Kabul and the murder of the British political agent there reached Government House in mid-December 1841, about the same time that Nigel arrived in Calcutta. The end of January brought the first reports of the army’s catastrophic retreat. Of the sixteen thousand troops and camp followers who left Kabul at the beginning of the year, only Dr. William Brydon survived the slaughter that ensued in the treacherous gorges and passes that led to the Afghan frontier. Grievously wounded, he appeared at the gates of the British fort outside Jalalabad on January 13, clinging to his exhausted, dying horse.

  News of England’s worst defeat since the Battle of Hastings shocked Calcutta profoundly. “No one talks of anything but Afghanistan,” Nigel wrote to his parents. “All speak with great authority on what the new governor [Lord Ellenborough] must do, and the obscurity of what he can do in no way detracts from the mystery of what he will do.”

  They would all be deep into the Hot Weather before Ellenborough ended the suspense. He was not a modest man, and though he had never served under arms, he suspected in himself a genius for military command. (It was a suspicion that Prime Minister Robert Peel did not share; before Ellenborough left London, Peel turned down his request for the old courtesy title of captain general in addition to that of governor general.) From the moment he reached India, however, he found reason for prudence in exercising his martial authority. On February 21, as his ship hove in sight of the fort at Madras, the captain informed him of the tragic message conveyed by the signals on its flagstaff. The Army of the Indus was no more.

  A fresh disaster occurred almost immediately. The garrison at the fortified city of Ghazni, whose capture in 1839 had ended native resistance to the initial British invasion, surrendered to the Afghans. Despite a guarantee of safe conduct, most of its Indian enlisted men​—​called sepoys—were promptly massacred; the rest were sold into slavery. Two large garrisons remained in Afghanistan. One held Kandahar, south of Ghazni. The other had fought off the besieging Afghans at Jalalabad, east of Kabul. Both commanders, whose dispatches emphasized their desire to secure the release of British officers taken prisoner at Ghazni, awaited instructions from the governor.

  Fearing further losses, Ellenborough finally issued an order that called for both forces to retreat to India. The prisoners, he implied, would be abandoned. He changed his mind in late June, after receiving a rousing dispatch from Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and a former Whig prime minister. Though the full
extent of the loss sustained on the Afghan frontier was not yet understood in England, Wellesley began by observing that Britain would not recover “for some time” from the blow to its moral authority, political power, and influence. It behooved Ellenborough, then, to seize the initiative:

  “It is impossible to impress upon you too strongly the Notion of the importance of the Restoration of Reputation in the East. Our enemies in France, the United States, and wherever found are now rejoicing in Triumph upon our Disasters and Degradation. You will teach them that their triumph is premature.”

  The dispatch carried the imprimatur of Queen Victoria. It seems likely that she personally prompted Wellesley to add, “There is not a Moslem heart from Pekin to Constantinople which will not vibrate when reflecting upon the fact that the European ladies and other females attached to the troops at Cabul were made over to the tender mercies of the Moslem Chief who had murdered the representative of the British Government at the Court of the Sovereign of Afghanistan.”

  Wellesley left it for Ellenborough to decide whether to act offensively and invade Afghanistan again, or to “carry on our operations with more caution.” Persuaded that he had underestimated the strength of feeling at home, but unwilling to risk the danger of a prolonged reoccupation, the governor issued amended orders on July 4. The garrisons would withdraw from Afghanistan by way of Kabul, in a pincer movement on the city that would permit them to free British prisoners while inflicting “just, but not vindictive punishment” on their tormentors.

  With this “Army of Retribution” on the march at last, the long wait for news of its exploits began. At the same time, to Nigel’s relief, another wait ended. The hard winds blew from the Bay of Bengal, and cloud castles loomed in the superheated sky. All Calcutta watched their nearing, darkening, lowering ramparts.

  “You can have no idea how the hotness strikes one like a blow,” he wrote home to Coventry. “There can be no honour in suffering the assault, only cowering before its awful brutality.”