Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  Rasheed supposed that what had shocked and offended the Englishmen at first ceased, finally, to trouble them. Did they not let it be known time and again that they liked and admired the Pashtuns above all other natives? They could not, of course, permit their liking for a Pashtun to become an attraction—there was too much risk of lowering their status. If they lowered their status, they weakened their authority. For men in their position, there was always the color bar.

  But what was to stop the physical expression of their attraction to one another?

  So far from home, so remote even from their countrymen in India, so needy in their loneliness.

  Surely they would have been tempted to follow the Pashtun example.

  If they needed one.

  Perhaps they did not.

  But if they did, what, after all, had provided it?

  What had placed temptation in their way?

  What, indeed, had promised privacy if it proved irresistible, by posting them to the farthest fringes of its back of beyond?

  There was no better label for what happened between them than the words stamped into the handle of the battered tin kettle that hung from a tripod over our cooking fire.

  He flashed his million-rupee smile and read them out:

  EMPIRE MADE.

  32

  * * *

  Lal Durbar

  1982

  ONLY NINETY YEARS separated the Indian Mutiny from Indian Independence. In the rebellion’s aftermath, racial attitudes hardened and the British isolated themselves more than ever from contact with their subjects. Sahibs and memsahibs settled into a routine that a Victorian critic summed up as “duty and red tape, tempered with picnics and adultery.” Evangelism fell out of favor as the notion took hold that the spiritual progress of natives would follow naturally from material progress. Public works eclipsed social reform as the professed objective of empire. Among them were the universities founded in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras that taught the principles and practices of Western democracy to a new class of anglicized Indians. The political parties they formed and the strikes they organized not only undermined the Raj but convinced the British that its demise was only a matter of time—and not so much of it, either.

  Neither party politics nor protest movements would flourish in Nepal until well into the second half of the twentieth century. Jang Bahadur founded no universities. And his staunchness during the Mutiny removed any possibility of British interference in the ongoing plunder of the mountain kingdom by the maharaja and his family. Most unusual for a ruler of Nepal, Jang Bahadur lived past the age of sixty and died of natural causes in February 1877, at the same hunting camp in the Terai where he had entertained Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, the year before.

  The staunchness of the Pashtuns, on the other hand, served only to postpone for a generation another round of bloodletting and barbarism on the North-West Frontier. Forty thousand British and Indian troops invaded Afghanistan again in the fall of 1878, after the Barakzai emir welcomed Russian envoys to Kabul but turned their British counterparts away. As before, the Forward Policy demanded action. As before, the British swiftly occupied key Afghan cities. As before, the Afghans signed a treaty that ended the fighting, accepted a British resident, and relinquished control of foreign affairs to Calcutta. And as before, an uprising in Kabul a year later led to the slaughter of the resident and his staff, which ushered in a second and crueler phase of the conflict.

  The British, reprising a practice employed against the Indian mutineers, took to blowing their prisoners from guns. The victim was tied to the mouth of a cannon with the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun was fired, the birds of prey that circled above the killing ground swooped down to catch pieces of flesh in the air. (More than once, witnesses who failed to sufficiently withdraw were injured by whizzing fragments of bone.) Afghans, for their part, had a tradition of bleeding captured soldiers to death by castrating them—the fate of young Alexander Nicholson during the First Anglo-Afghan War. Now they sought to further humiliate their British prisoners by turning the task over to women, who also served as instruments of vengeance in another method of execution. After British captives were spread-eagled on the ground, with sticks inserted in their mouths to prevent swallowing, Pashtun women took turns squatting over the prisoners and urinating into their open mouths until they drowned.

  You will find no mention of the historical antecedents of waterboarding in Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, a report prepared by the RAND Corporation for the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2008. You will read of the need to improve the quality of local governance. You will read of the need to focus American resources on developing indigenous security forces that are “competent and legitimate.” And you will read of the need to come to terms with the prevailing culture of the tribal areas that straddle both sides of the boundary with the North-West Frontier Territories of Pakistan.

  Settle the country.

  Make the people happy.

  Take care there are no rows.

  Henry Lawrence had yet to be recognized as the father of counterinsurgency in those parts when I floated down the Indus with Rasheed in 1982. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan three years before. It was too early to foresee the consequences of American support for the mujahideen who opposed them, too early to anticipate the founding of Al Qaeda and the rise of the Taliban, too early to understand that the British in the middle of the nineteenth century engaged with the inhabitants of India’s western frontier for the same selfish reason that Americans would take on some of their descendants at the beginning of the twenty-first. They feared an external threat to their power and their people. Their motives were anything but humanitarian. But they got to know the leading troublemakers, and worked with them to improve both the quality of their leadership and the conditions of everyday life for those they led.

  Boris Lissanevitch, however, thought it was high time to recognize another side of Henry Lawrence. When I visited him in Kathmandu after I left Pakistan, we sat in the music room at Lal Durbar and I ran down what I had learned since I last saw him about the details of Nigel’s life in India and Nepal. He listened intently, then connected sundry dots with his habitual gusto and identified Lawrence as a consummate player in the politics of Nepal long after the kingdom had ceased officially to concern him, working his will and England’s through the clandestine agency of my ancestor.

  “Of course,” said Boris admiringly. “Of course.”

  His own role in ending Rana rule had heightened his interest in its advent, and there were things about it, he said, that had never been adequately explained. He greeted the intelligence that Nigel had sailed to England at the same time as Jang Bahadur with compliments on my detective work.

  It was certainly an interesting coincidence.

  If that was what it was.

  Perhaps Nigel had only pretended to throw over his career with the East India Company.

  Perhaps he was some sort of secret agent.

  Perhaps he was working for Henry Lawrence.

  Lawrence, Boris pointed out, was posted to Nepal in the aftermath of the Afghan War, ostensibly charged with doing nothing. But with benefit of hindsight, his mission was obvious: to curb the expansionist ambitions of the ruling Shah dynasty. Before Lawrence could finish the job, he was called to the taming of the Punjab. Yet the job had got done. It had got done so well that by 1850 an obscure artillery captain with British sympathies had consolidated all power in his own hands as prime minister, installed his own candidate on the throne, appointed his brothers and cronies to all important administrative posts, and eliminated all his major rivals. It had got done so well that in April of that year, Jang Bahadur made his boldest move yet and set out for England to make the case for his ongoing rule to Queen Victoria herself.

  Upon his return, Jang Bahadur made an unexpected concession to Calcutta. As the sole exception to his policy of strict isolation for ordinary Nepalese, he permitted
a vast expansion in the recruitment of Gurkha mercenaries to serve in the East India Company army. It was a bold—and risky—departure from past practice, but also a brilliant one. In the first place, pensions and remittances sent home provided a country that exported nothing with foreign exchange. In the second, it created opportunities to escape a closed society that amounted to a safety valve, releasing pressure that otherwise might have posed a threat to Rana rule.

  It seemed to Boris that Jang Bahadur’s flexibility on that point was curious indeed. He had an obsessive interest in all things British, but he harbored deep misgivings about the men who succeeded Lawrence as resident, whom he deigned to receive only when diplomatic protocol required it. They were hardly in a position to influence his thinking. But someone clearly had—someone, perhaps, whose undercover assignment was to ensure above all that the “martial race” of the Gurkhas fought for the British interest instead of against it. If there was such a someone with such an assignment, the history of the Mutiny amounted to proof that he had carried it out. In decisive engagements with the rebels at Lucknow and Delhi, Nepalese troops helped carry the day for the British. Afterwards, when mutineers fleeing retribution sought sanctuary in the Terai, kukri-wielding Gurkhas led by Jang Bahadur himself cut them to pieces, sparing no one.

  There was something else he had always wondered about. The provisions of the Nepalese legal code promulgated in the 1850s reflected sympathies not usually associated with despots like Jang Bahadur. It abolished torture and corporal punishment, reduced the number of capital crimes from hundreds to a handful, empowered the peasantry with economic rights, and raised women to a status that, though less than coequal with men, was closer to it than in India and indeed parts of Europe. For the time and the place, it was really quite astonishing.

  It might have been drafted by Lawrence himself—or someone in a position to exert the sort of influence on Jang Bahadur that Lawrence undoubtedly exercised when he was resident.

  Someone like the residency surgeon James Login, to begin with.

  Someone like Nigel, after Login died.

  It certainly would explain things, would it not?

  It all made so much better sense when you saw the hand of Nigel in the improbable outcome of Jang Bahadur’s ambition, so beneficial for so long to both England and the Ranas.

  And then there was the curious coincidence of Nigel’s arrival in Kathmandu just three months before Jang Bahadur packed up for his sojourn abroad, just weeks after Login’s death.

  I refrained from rolling my eyes, but Boris caught my skepticism and laughed.

  Everyone in Kathmandu, of course, thought that he was a spy.

  The Russians thought he spied for the Americans. The Americans thought he spied for the Russians. The Indians thought he spied for both. In one of the framed photographs on the music room wall, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a banquet. To his left sat Queen Ratna of Nepal. Behind Nehru, with one hand resting on the back of his chair, stood Boris in black tie, dominating the tableau.

  In another, the commanding figure was a husky blonde—Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Beside her was her husband, Andrian Nikolayev, also a cosmonaut. They had honeymooned in Kathmandu in 1963. When the Soviet embassy asked him to arrange a reception, he naturally complied.

  That, one might say, was the extent of his perfidy. Communism was decidedly not his cup of tea. He was born in a palace on his mother’s ancestral estate in Odessa. He joined the Imperial Cadets before he was ten, and when he was wounded five years later fighting the Bolsheviks, it steeled his resolve to cover himself in glory in those days that shook the world. His greatest ambition was to join his great-grandfather Grigory Ivanovich, a general whose portrait hung in the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace.

  But it was not to be. His second-eldest brother, a naval officer, went down with his ship in the Baltic rather than face a revolutionary tribunal on shore. The eldest was condemned to death by a tribunal in St. Petersburg. His dispossessed parents required looking after. When Odessa fell to the Reds, he escaped retribution by obtaining a certificate that identified him as a member of the ballet troupe of the Odessa Opera. He never doubted where his duty lay. But he never forgot his chagrin at the charade that had damned him to ballet school.

  I told him that I saw a flaw in his theory about Nigel. His letters suggested that he wasn’t very patriotic, not by Victorian standards. The longer he worked for the East India Company, the more he questioned colonial rule. By the end of the 1840s his sympathies lay more with the natives than with his own countrymen. Why, then, would he dedicate himself to preserving the empire?

  He considered this.

  What was the primary motivation of any secret agent?

  Was it idealism, or self-interest?

  The same might be asked about a king. With Tribhuvan, for example, it was hard to say. He truly wanted to better the lives of his people by opening Nepal to the rest of the world. But he also wanted to wield power for its own sake—he considered it his birthright. With Tribhuvan’s son Mahendra, on the other hand, the answer was clear enough. Boris recalled that when I lived in Kathmandu, I had taken a minibus trip up the Chinese-built road to the Tibetan border with a Nepalese friend, a Sherpa I had met near Mount Everest. He wondered if I had noticed the bridges.

  No, I said, I had not.

  They certainly were massive, said Boris.

  Rather over-engineered for lorries, he thought.

  Had I seen any lorries on the road?

  No?

  Well, no surprise there. No trade, either, not between China and Nepal via that road, though that was why the road was said to have been built.

  He didn’t suppose that I had seen any tanks, either.

  Nor troop carriers.

  Not yet.

  He happened to know (and later I confirmed) that China’s offer to build the road had been accepted only after a deposit of $7 million into the London bank account of the late King Mahendra.

  Personal account, needless to say.

  He laughed again.

  As for Nigel, perhaps he simply wanted to live out his days in the lap of luxury. Men had betrayed their ideals for less. But what if Nigel saw a way to have his cake and eat it, too? What if he decided to become, in effect, a double agent? What if the last thing on his mind was exerting his influence on behalf of the empire? What if he exerted it on behalf of what he thought were the best interests of Nepal? What if he saw Jang Bahadur not as a native to manipulate but as a man with whom he shared a common cause—keeping the empire at bay? What if the price of saving Nepal from the British was saving India for them?

  If that was the bargain, Boris said, Jang Bahadur got the best of it. The British never challenged Nepalese sovereignty, and the kingdom remained in the hands of his family until 1951, almost five years after Indian Independence.

  He asked me what I thought.

  The idea of Nigel as a consummate player in the Great Game struck me as a large leap to make, if a predictable one from a self-conscious mover and shaker like Boris. The first time I spoke with him, he wondered why Nigel would have chosen the Company’s civil over its military service. He thought that a man who hunted Bengal tigers was, ipso facto, a man of action. He simply could not picture a man like that bent over a ledger in an opium warehouse. And I knew it pleased him to imagine that I shared his reckless temperament, simply because I climbed mountains.

  If Boris felt a superficial sense of kinship with me, the same had to be said about my own connection with Nigel. I liked him, because he threw down the white man’s burden and boldly went where he was not supposed to go. For no good reason—a misdemeanor here, a trespass there—I fancied a bit of outlaw in myself. It was easy to identify with a renegade sahib—especially one whose sensibility seemed so refreshingly modern. The veneer of Nigel’s dense Victorian diction camouflaged the same sort of free spirit that I admired in my favorite companions on climbing ropes and road trips. I didn’t have many—any, really—fr
iends among my relatives, but I felt sure that Nigel would have been one if we were contemporaries.

  What made him a renegade, though, was a tougher nut to crack. And I couldn’t help thinking that Boris was inclined to set a stage for Nigel to act as he himself would have done, or wished he might have done.

  But I didn’t say so.

  I said it sounded like something out of Kipling.

  I said I hoped it was true, and if it wasn’t it deserved to be.

  If only for poetic justice.

  If only because the Great Game, for the British, was always about the Russians.

  33

  * * *

  Now Is the Waiting

  1982

  A BAD DAY for an exorcism.

  Of that the seeress was certain. Every sign was inauspicious—the phase of the moon, the alignment of stars, the temper of Lord Pashupatinath in his temple on the Bagmati River on the far side of Kathmandu. To cast out the spirit of the ancestor who troubled me was beyond her capabilities, there and then.

  It was the end of May 1982, a few days after the conversation with Boris that turned out to be the last time I saw him. He died in Kathmandu three years later, aged eighty. When I told the friend with whom I was staying that Boris thought Nigel had been a secret agent for the British, I said that I was resigned to never sorting out what had really happened to him. Seven years into my search for an answer, I had run out of sources.

  Not necessarily, she said.

  Not if I stopped thinking like a Westerner.

  What about supernatural assistance?

  Had I thought of that?

  No, I said, and she asked why not. Kathmandu was the world capital of the occult, seething with sortilege and sorcery of the deepest dye in every hue of magic. It was like looking for a taxi in Manhattan and ignoring the yellow cabs.