Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  The parched, cracked earth itself seemed to hold its breath as the clouds closed in on the merciless sun. Then, in a dreamlike moment of arrested time, the Hot Weather kept its yearly promise, and culminated in cataclysm.

  Bṛṣṭi āsā.

  The rains come.

  He marveled at the economy of the native tongue, and approved of it. What use was a word like “torrential” when it proved so inadequate to its descriptive task? The rains fell with the force of projectiles, the weight of heavy elements. The rains fell relentlessly, for several hours each day; they fell noisily, clattering on the roof above and hissing in the leaves outside. They fell, he was tempted to say, with a vengeance.

  And yet.

  The rains were the lifeblood of the paddy, the companion of the plow. The rains fed India, and just a few days’ delay in their onset in any given province could mean famine there later, after they went away.

  And yet.

  Like Lord Shiva, who embodied both creation and destruction, what the rains gave with the one hand they took with the other. The rains only quickened the frequency of the somber processions on Park Street. The Hot Weather assaulted the body, enervating and dehydrating; the rainy season invaded it, and proved deadlier still. It was in the stinking water tanks of Calcutta that Robert Koch would isolate the bacillus that causes cholera. It was during the rains in Calcutta that Ronald Ross would identify the mosquito as the vector for malaria.

  Neither of these pioneers in bacteriology and pathology had yet been born when Nigel wrote home anxiously of cholera in Calcutta. He had reason to worry. Cholera, according to a report published earlier that year in The Lancet, had killed 18,115 people in Calcutta in the years 1832–1838. Options for treatment were limited. Bloodletting had fallen out of favor as “deadly.” Patients at the city’s General Hospital were subjected instead to “unceasing exhibition of ammonia,” combined with doses of calomel and opium. But whether this “stimulating plan” qualified as a medical advance was debatable. “The majority of them die now,” admitted one surgeon, “as they did in our earlier experience.”

  Smallpox was another serial killer. Tens of thousands had died in the epidemics of the 1830s, and the virus would return to Calcutta in 1843. Brucellosis, then called “gastric remittent fever,” periodically reached epidemic proportions, as did bronchitis; both proved “extensively fatal.” Amoebic and bacillary dysentery afflicted almost everyone at one time or another, weakening the young and strong and killing the old and weak.

  “Two monsoons is the age of a man.”

  Nigel quoted the proverb to the munshi, who told him not to worry.

  Those who succumbed so promptly were the married men, who brought out their wives and lived too softly.

  “Too many servants, too much sickness coming into house.”

  What killed so many British, said the munshi, was not keeping to themselves.

  6

  * * *

  Ghazipur

  1975

  IT TOOK MY classmate and me a week to get from Lahore to Benares, a distance of seven hundred miles. Just crossing into India from Pakistan consumed most of a day. There was no through bus service. Along the border was a no-man’s-land a mile wide, which travelers were obliged to negotiate on foot. It was the height of the pre-monsoon Hot Weather. I shouldered my fifty-five-pound backpack and reflected on the absurdity of hauling a mountaineering ice axe and crampons across the featureless Punjab Plain, with the air temperature well above the century mark and the relative humidity just below it. Weedy marijuana plants lined the path to India. “Do you have any narcotics?” was the first thing we were asked when we staggered into Indian passport control.

  Rudyard Kipling called the Grand Trunk Road that we followed to Benares “a river of life.” But that was for natives. For sahibs and memsahibs, it was closer to a via dolorosa. Fatalities from heatstroke were so common when the British rebuilt and extended the road across the breadth of India that they constructed adjacent cemeteries for the interment of Europeans, at twelve-mile intervals for fifteen hundred miles. As we sweated our way eastward, it occurred to me that Nigel might conceivably be buried in any one of them. I did the math, and plumbed for the first time—but not the last—the depths of my regret for that easy promise to my mother.

  At Benares, the old highway veered south, and our route to Nepal followed the course of the Ganges eastward to Patna. We decided to splurge on a few hours’ relief from the heat and asked the clerk at the railway station if there were two seats available in air-conditioned class on the Vibhuti Express.

  There were indeed, he beamed.

  The problem was that only one compartment in air-conditioned class on the Vibhuti Express was, in fact, air-conditioned.

  And it was fully booked. He had sold the tickets himself.

  He picked up the rubber stamp resting on its ink pad beside him and wielded it like a gavel.

  “Sold and stamped,” he said, and suggested that we take a minibus.

  The minibus, which turned out to be operated by his brother-in-law, made it fifty-odd miles to Ghazipur before it threw a rod. The driver assured us that we would reach our destination before dark; Patna was only a hundred miles farther down National Highways 19 and 84. Between ourselves we duly christened him Big Brother, and without much enthusiasm accepted his advice to make the most of the wait for a mechanic’s ministrations and see the sights.

  Of these there were two, on opposite banks of the Ganges. On the far side rose the redbrick facades of the Government Opium and Alkaloid Works, founded by the East India Company in 1820 and in continuously profitable operation ever since. Its grounds comprised more than forty acres; its employees numbered nearly a thousand. Its output served the global pharmaceutical industry and was whisked on special high-security trains to New Delhi and Bombay for export. According to the driver of the cycle rickshaw who conveyed us to the riverbank, it was the largest opium factory in the world.

  No tours, though.

  “No tastings?” I wondered.

  The driver laughed.

  No tastings for anyone but the monkeys who infested the grounds. They were all addicts, he said, from drinking the slurry that flowed from the factory in wastewater ditches.

  Hundreds of monkeys, stoned out of their minds.

  “Most comical,” said the driver.

  The attraction on our side of the river, decidedly more solemn, was open to the public. Sweeping immaculate lawns encircled an immense mausoleum, its heavy dome supported by a peristyle of twelve Doric columns. Flanking the sarcophagus within the rotunda stood generic figures of a Hindu, a Muslim, a British officer, and a native soldier, united in mourning the loss of the governor general interred there.

  CHARLES CORNWALLIS, 1ST MARQUESS CORNWALLIS

  1738–1805

  I recognized the surname of the general whose capitulation to the combined French-American forces under General George Washington at Yorktown in 1781 had effectively decided the American War of Independence. I supposed that this Charles was a relative. But the English inscription beneath the statuary made it clear that he was one and the same.

  “Great man,” the rickshaw driver had intoned.

  His regard was evidently shared by whoever replenished the bright fresh flowers that encircled the cenotaph. Natives, to be sure—sleepy, dusty Ghazipur seemed an unlikely locale for a colony of Cornwallis descendants.

  Cornwallis, read the monument’s inscription, had served two terms as governor general of India. He first took office in 1786, preceding Richard Wellesley. He returned in 1805, after the East India Company directors finally called time on Wellesley’s expansionist activities. I knew next to nothing about Cornwallis. But there was no telling how much mischief he had gotten up to, having taken charge of India not once but twice. The meticulous maintenance of his tomb surprised me. Such a place ought by rights to have long since fallen into wrack and ruin. Even his epitaph anticipated its decay:

  This monument, erected by t
he British inhabitants of Calcutta, attests their sense of those virtues which will live in the remembrance of grateful millions, long after it shall have mouldered into dust.

  The virtues in question were enumerated by the monument’s inscription, which also commemorated victories in battle against Americans in the Carolinas, Irish rebels in Connacht, and Indians under Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore. Chief among them was Cornwallis’ probity, which is conceded today by even the most censorious historians of colonial rule. His first term of office followed the governorships of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, both of whom amassed fortunes in India and returned home to face inquiries into the propriety of their conduct. Unlike his predecessors, Cornwallis shrank from the prospect of making money. He even declined to draw his full salary of £31,000, worth the equivalent of $750,000 today. He moreover held underlings to a standard that matched his own. For the first time, Company administrators were forbidden to engage in private trade or any other financial dealings. Transgressors were routinely sent home.

  Cornwallis also acted to prohibit outright child slavery, introduced legislation to protect native weavers from exploitation by Company employees, and founded a mint in Calcutta that benefited the poor by stabilizing Indian currency as cash replaced barter in the rural economy. Shortly after his return to India, he set out by barge up the Ganges to negotiate with chiefs of the Maratha Confederacy, who were astonished to be offered agreements that restored to them huge swaths of territory they had lost to the martial ardor of the Wellesley brothers. By the time Cornwallis reached Ghazipur, he had reduced British holdings in northern India to Delhi, the upper Ganges, and the basin of the Jumna. Calcutta still ruled more than half the subcontinent, and the Company remained the major power. But retrenchment was clearly the order of the day.

  As fate would have it, though, the day was nearly done. When Cornwallis debarked in Calcutta that summer, he had struck the diarist William Hickey as “a wreck of what he had been when formerly in Bengal”; the voyage upriver at the height of the Hot Weather hastened his decline. He was too ill to continue past Ghazipur. Letters posted there in his name were written by his secretaries, and there was talk that he had lost his mind before he finally succumbed to fever. He was a rather tubby fellow, with a pronounced squint, who wrote to a friend that he had accepted his appointment “much against my will, and with grief of heart.” Above all else in life, he preferred the homely pleasures of an English country house. Yet there he finally rested in the lee of an opium factory, on the banks of a river that issued from Vishnu’s big toe.

  After I discovered the passages about John Nicholson in the fragments of Nigel’s letters that I read in Lahore, I had made it a practice to scan them nightly for references to the locales we would pass through the following day. There weren’t many. My most recent find was an amusing story about J—— , a missionary he had met in 1843 who despaired of his posting to Benares, with its funeral pyres and its pilgrims and its chanting priests, the earthly abode of Lord Shiva and holiest city of the world’s oldest religion. After failing to secure a single conversion there, J—— was struck with inspiration when he learned of the thriving community of Christians in the Portuguese colony of Goa, south of Bombay. It was in Goa that the Jesuits responded in 1542 to a royal call from Lisbon to evangelize the Indies, and it was in the environs of Goa that J—— hoped to found a new mission. There he would commence the harvesting of souls from a field plowed already by the Society of Jesus. Thousands of Indian Catholics had already taken the first step toward salvation. All that remained was to free them from the yoke of Rome.

  Since Ghazipur was a detour from our intended route, it was not until I perused Nigel’s letters again in Patna that I recognized it as a place where he had spent some time himself, conducting official business. The nature of the business seemed almost deliberately opaque, as if he was concealing it from his parents. I wondered if opium had anything to do with it.

  7

  * * *

  A Safe and Prudent Distance

  “A TIGER DID THAT?”

  Nigel stared at the enormous scar on the arm of a dockhand shouldering mailbags on a ramshackle wharf on a tidal waterway just west of the main outflow of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. The dockhand repeated himself:

  “Shere, sahib.”

  He had been in a boat with his cousin on one of the narrow streams that threaded through the mangrove thickets of the river deltas. The tiger sprang from the densely packed trees along the bank, knocking his cousin into the water. To save his cousin, he jumped onto the tiger, pushing its head underwater. In the struggle, its claws raked his arm. But then it started to swim away, and they clambered back into their boat.

  The dockhand smiled. His teeth were stained a delicate pink from chewing betel leaf. Nigel had heard that there were Indian river dolphins of a similar color. He longed to see them.

  It was February 1843. After fourteen months in India, Nigel was on his first foray outside Calcutta, en route to a temporary posting in the revenue office at Dacca, the great metropolis of Bengal before the British seized control from the Mughal nawab and shifted the capital to Calcutta. He had passed his language examination barely a year after his arrival, twelve weeks ahead of schedule. Though he came up short in his effort to obtain a degree of honor in Persian, with its handsome prize of £160, he managed one in Urdu and received £80 instead.

  No one would call his future in Dacca an exciting one. Filling in for an assistant to the collector whose home leave had been extended, he would spend his days recalculating land tax rates based on reports from field inspectors. His impulse in volunteering to serve in Dacca was purely romantic. He had heard it described as the Venice of the East, and he wanted to see it for himself.

  As the vessel bobbed alongside the wharf, he was eager to get under way. Apart from two officers in the Native Infantry of the Company army and a clergyman affiliated with the London Missionary Society, his fellow passengers on the four-hundred-mile voyage via paddle steamer were Bengalis. For months he had chafed at his cloistered life in Calcutta. Now he was out at last in Asiatic society, a companion of crocodiles, a confidant of men who brawled with tigers. The dockhand had casually conferred on him the connection that he craved.

  Everything about the journey was intense. It was only February, but the air temperature reached ninety degrees by midmorning. They all stewed ceaselessly in a cauldron of heat, sweating by day beneath canvas awnings rigged on deck and tossing and turning in stifling cabins at night. The water itself was so hot that he marveled at the schools of slender, silver hilsa that shimmered in the steamer’s wake: “I should think they would be cooked alive.”

  The meals matched the climate: fiery curries of mutton and fish that left him gasping for water after every mouthful. At sunset, the nightly bombardment of insects began—thousands of moths, beetles, and dragonflies, attracted by the vessel’s lights. They flew unerringly into open mouths, making conversation impossible. It was no wonder, joked Nigel, that the voluble French had given up on colonizing India.

  The route to Dacca followed the fringes of a vast virgin littoral mangrove forest, where the muddy Himalayan runoff from the north met the tidal waters of the Bay of Bengal to the south. For five thousand years this tangled floodplain, the Sundarbans, had resisted the civilizing impulses of the Indians themselves, never mind their would-be conquerors. No one lived there. But the Sundarbans teemed with life. Its inhabitants included spotted deer, crocodiles, wild boar, snakes, clawless otters, dolphins, some 315 species of waterfowl, raptors and forest birds, and a population of Bengal tigers that would continue to number in the several hundreds even as the species neared extinction in the twenty-first century. With shooting glasses borrowed from the Portuguese first mate, Nigel peered into the jungle, catching glimpses of deer, a rhinoceros, and a magnificent nesting sea eagle.

  “Our noisy passage leaves them undisturbed, for these creatures have no fear of man,” he wrote afterwards. “It is man wh
o fears them, or rather the primeval state of their surroundings. They live in a vanished world whose dangers we have happily escaped, but which fascinates from a safe and prudent distance.”

  Talking with “J—— ,” the missionary who shared his cabin, Nigel ventured a religious parallel. No Christian could contemplate the gaudy pantheon of the Hindus without revulsion for the “pagan rituals” that lowered their faith to the level of black magic. But leaving aside the error of their ways, there was “much to ponder in the infinite variety of their sacred practices.”

  J—— , who had earlier regaled Nigel with his scheme to further Christianize the Roman Catholic converts of Goa, would have none of it. He replied sarcastically that few things seemed to serve the Company’s men better in advancing their careers than a well-developed capacity for setting aside the error of native ways.

  Had not Lord Ellenborough himself lately pledged to rebuild a heathen temple?

  Were not objects of idolatry on parade in some remote province at that very moment, offered for public adoration on the governor’s command and accompanied by a guard of honor selected from his personal bodyguard?

  The objects in question were the Gates of Somnath, spoils of war plundered from the Afghan city of Ghazni by the army Ellenborough had dispatched the previous summer to free British prisoners in Kabul. Though its troops were instructed to refrain from “vindictive” punishment of the recalcitrant Afghans, any pretense of taking those orders at face value disappeared after British troops reached Jagdalak, site of the desperate last stand by the Army of the Indus. The hills there, wrote one officer, were “literally covered with skeletons, most of them blanched by exposure to the rain and the sun, but many of them having hair of a color which enabled us to recognise the remains of our own countrymen.” Forced to trample the bones of the fallen for much of the difficult route, the men took revenge for the massacre on every Afghan they found.