Strange Men Strange Places

by Ruskin Bond

  Tom Legge remained in the lower Indus districts for five or six years, and then began a long series of wanderings: to Multan in the Punjab, and from there through the desert to Jaipur. After a short period as a gunsmith in the service of the Jat Rana of Gohad, Legge was on his way again, eventually reaching Kabul, where his knowledge of guns gained him a job on a salary of three rupees a day.

  He remained several years at Kabul, where he was both useful and popular; but the wanderlust returned, and slipping out of Kabul, he journeyed north, over the Hindu Kush, to Bokhara. He visited Herat and Kandahar, and spent twenty years "serving almost every power between the Indus and the Caspian". Eventually tiring of a nomadic existence, he decided to return to Jaipur, where he meant to settle down permanently.

  At Jaipur, Tom Legge married a daughter of the celebrated Favier de Silva, who had been sent to India by the King of Portugal to assist Jai Singh, the ruler of Jaipur, in his astrological studies. Later, at Delhi and at Jaipur, the prince built his famous observatories.

  Through this marriage, Thomas Legge obtained command of a battalion in the Jaipur army, but his first command was his last. While storming the fort of a rebel chief, he was twice wounded, and after the battle was over and the vultures were settling down, he found his way to Colonel Tod's camp, where he hoped to obtain medical assistance.

  "I was poked down with a pike, and shot through my thigh, and I've come to your honour's camp to get cured, for they can make no hand at it at Jaipur," were his words to Colonel Tod.

  He stayed at the British camp for some months, and during his stay told the Colonel many stories connected with his travels.

  Tom Legge was an unusual and unconventional man. He practised alchemy and divination, and his wonderful memory was a fount for the legends of Central Asia. He also suffered from a delusion that during his wanderings he had discovered the Garden of Eden. It was approached by a road leading through dark caverns, and guarded by an angel with flaming wings. The garden lay deep in the heart of a mountain; it was filled with delicious fruit and piles of gold and silver bricks. This fantasy of Legge's illustrated the two sides to his character: the garden, the angels and the fruit showed him to be a gentle visionary, the gold and silver bricks were what all adventurers dreamed of. Tom Legge insisted that he had found the Garden of Eden somewhere in the Hindu Kush. And who can refute him? It may, indeed, be there.

  His wound did not heal, and he began to waste away.

  "I fear not death," he told Colonel Tod, "and could I get my life written and my boy sent to Calcutta, I should die contented."

  He decided to return to Jaipur, but had not gone far from the camp when he was overcome by a mood of deep despair and, throwing away his clothes, entered a deserted tomb, where he began to live like a fakir. Here he was discovered by the wife of Sindhia's general, Jean Baptiste Filoze. She tried to help him, but it was too late, and Tom Legge died soon after he was removed from the tomb in which he had made his abode.

  That was in the year 1808. His son did indeed go to Calcutta, but what became of him there is not known. The story of Tom Legge's life was never written, and we would not have heard of him at all had he not stumbled into the tent of a great historian on a hot, windy afternoon in the desert, one hundred and fifty years ago.

  THE COMPANY'S WINES

  HERE IS HISTORICAL precedent for relaxing the prohibition laws for at least some people in parts of the country. While doing some reading the other day, I made the interesting discovery that the Emperor Akbar published a decree permitting intoxicating spirits to be sold to Europeans because, he said, "they are born in the element of wine, as fish are produced in that of water ... and to prohibit them the use of it is to deprive them of life".

  Akbar's son and successor, Jehangir, was by his heavy drinking to prove conclusively that it was not only Europeans who took to wine as fish do to water. But it is true that when the East India Company first obtained a foothold in India the Englishman's appetite for food and drink was enormous. The traveller, Albert de Mandelslo, who visited Surat in 1638, tells us that at dinner, which was taken at midday, fifteen or sixteen dishes of meat, besides dessert, appeared on the table. At that period the usual cold beverages were Spanish sack, Persian wines, English beer and pale punch.

  The seventeenth century in India may be said to have been the age of punch. For almost a century punch was drunk by every European; to excess, by most of them. The factors of Surat favoured hot drinks rather than cold, and are said to have been the inventors of punch, the name being derived from the Hindustani "panch" (five), which stood for the drink's five ingredients — spirits, lemon-juice, spices, sugar and water. The spirit used was arrack — distilled in India from various things, such as the fermented sap of palm trees, sugarcane juice, rice, or even, according to one writer, from seaweed, so abundant on the island of Bombay. Arrack made from seaweed was known as Fool's Rack — for obvious reasons. . . . Another favourite hot drink was "burnt wine", made by boiling wine with spices. This was drunk in the morning, piping hot, to comfort the stomach.

  The mortality among the early English settlers was extremely high everywhere except at Surat (where, apparently, the climate favoured heavy drinking). At Harrapur, where the first English factory in Bengal was founded in 1638, five out of the six factors stationed there were dead within the year. This high mortality was attributed to the abundance of arrack at that place. In Bombay, two monsoons was the average life expectancy of an Englishman in the seventeenth century.

  The difficulty and expense of importing European wines led to the use of too much arrack, especially among the East India Company's young writers and soldiers. High prices, however, did not affect more wealthy members of society, and it was usual for a man to take his three bottles of claret after dinner every day, in addition to the Madeira which he took during the meal. A lady drank, on an average, one bottle of wine a day. Much of this wine had to be taken in honouring the many toasts which were constantly being proposed at dinners, tiffins and breakfasts. At private tables it was expected that the host and hostess would take wine with each guest, and that every guest would do the same with the others present. When all these toasts had been drunk, there were still a few other "sentiments" with which to conclude the drinking.

  Punch drinking was popular well into the eighteenth century. In 1707 there were seven licensed punch houses in the small settlement of Calcutta. These houses were often the scenes of brawls which occasionally ended in bloodshed: a sword was an indispensable part of a gentleman's dress. Punch houses continued to exist in India until the nineteenth century, although by that time people began to realise that punch and the Indian climate did not go well together. This did not make them teetotallers. Instead they took to drink that was milder than arrack, and the Wine Age in India had commenced.

  The prices of wine were cheap — Old Red Port being Rs 16 per dozen, and Fine Old Sherry Rs 14; whilst Burton Ale was Rs 10 a dozen, a Country Bottled Ale Rs 7 a dozen.

  Soda water was not introduced into Calcutta until 1812, its price being Rs 14 per dozen — the same as good sherry! When a cargo of ice from America arrived in 1833, it was sold at 4 annas (current twenty-five paise) per seer (pound).

  From the mid-nineteenth century beer began to replace wine; this was country beer, as English beer was considered too "liverish" for India. The age of brandy succeeded that of beer. Brandy's popularity was probably due to the introduction of ice and soda water: brandy with warm water was not considered a very inviting drink. In northern India the nights during the winter were sufficiently cold to cause ice to form in shallow trays of water; it was stored in pits for use in the hot weather. But Calcutta rarely saw ice before 1833, when a cargo of apples arrived there, packed in ice. It scalded the backs of the coolies who carried it ashore, and fetched a higher price than the apples.

  Soda water was introduced and manufactured in India in about 1835 (ice was first manufactured here a few years later) and was soon found in every Englishman's hous
e. Brandy and soda remained the most popular drink for thirty years. The era of the whisky-and-soda dates from the seventies. To quote Douglas Dewar, "Even as Bridge suddenly and completely ousted Whist, so has whisky supplanted brandy."

  For those who can afford it, whisky still reigns supreme. Rum, they say, is for soldiers, gin for women, and beer for schoolboys. But there is nothing to compare with the British soldier's condiment, "Fixed Bayonets" — a chicken stuffed with chillies and boiled in rum!

  SKINNER AND HIS YELLOW BOYS

  NE OF THE MOST historic churches in India is the church of St. James, near the Kashmere Gate, just within the walls of old Delhi. Few know that its builder, James Skinner, was a Eurasian who first served in the army of the Marathas, and later raised a famous cavalry corps, known as Skinner's Horse (or the "Yellow Boys", because of their canary-coloured uniforms) for the Company's army. But he was a man of many parts. Just across the road from St. James was a small mosque said to have been built by Skinner for Muslim members of his family; and it is said that he built a temple, too — his mother was a Hindu — but its whereabouts are not known today. Close behind the mosque, now hidden from the street by shops, is the decaying mansion that Skinner built as his Delhi residence.

  James Skinner was born in 1778. His father was a Scotsman, an officer in the Company's service, and his mother the daughter of a Rajput landholder from Mirzapur. She was taken prisoner by the British in a war with the Raja of Benares, and came under the protection of Ensign Skinner, to whom in due course she bore six children, three sons and three daughters. David, the eldest, went to sea; James, the second, became a military adventurer; and Robert, the youngest, was to follow in his footsteps.

  Skinner's mother committed suicide in 1790, because her daughters were sent to that dreaded institution, School. This, for her, was a violation of the sanctity of purdah, and her Rajput honour was sullied. After her death, the boys were sent to a charity school. The father was still only a lieutenant, and could not afford to give them an expensive education. But when he was promoted to a captaincy in 1793, he immediately sent his sons to a good boarding-school, where the fee was Rs. 30 a month; quite high for those days of cheap living, when the poor were very poor and the rich were very rich. Two years later James was apprenticed to a printer in Calcutta.

  Three days of the printing office were enough for the restless and high-spirited young Skinner. On the fourth day he ran away, with six annas in his pocket. It says something for the cost of living in eighteenth century Calcutta that, limiting himself to spending only one anna a day, Skinner managed to live on six annas for six days. His money finished, he wandered about the bazaars of Calcutta, working at anything that came his way.

  For a week he carried loads with the poorest of coolies; then he picked up a modest wage — three annas a day — by pulling the drill for an Indian carpenter. One day he was spotted by a servant of his elder sister, and dragged off to his brother-in-law's house, but an understanding godfather, Colonel Burn, gave the youngster Rs 300 and sent him to Kanpur where Skinner's father's regiment was stationed.

  A fortnight later Colonel Burn — godfathers once took their duties seriously — arrived at Kanpur, and gave Skinner a letter of introduction to no less a person than General de Boigne, who was at Aligarh. A commission under de Boigne could make the career and fortune of a young adventurer.

  De Boigne soon retired, and Skinner found himself serving under General Perron, another Frenchman. The first outstanding action in which he took part was the battle of Malpura, outside Jaipur. Skinner nearly lost his own life in repulsing the Rathor cavalry; his horse was killed under him, and he escaped by means of a rather undignified retreat under a tumbril.

  After the battle Skinner was the first to enter the Jaipur camp. Here he admits to having looted two golden idols with diamond eyes belonging to Raja Partap Singh, and trinkets to the value of Rs 2,000, amongst them "a brass fish, with two chowrees hanging down like moustachios." This turned out to be the Mahi Maratib, or the Fish of Dignities, a decoration conferred by Moghul Emperors on rajas of a very high rank, and "equivalent to the Three Horse Tails of the Turkish Empire, or the Button of the Chinese mandarin". Skinner did not keep these acquisitions for himself, but presented them to his Maratha general; and in return he was given the traditional khilat, or dress of honour.

  Skinner's most exciting and dangerous engagement took place when he was ordered to assist the Karaoli raja against his neighbour of Uniara. The Karaoli force consisted of six battalions of infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and twenty guns, but the only efficient troops were Skinner's.

  The two armies met somewhere between Tonk and the Chambal river, but before this the Karaoli chief's troops had mutinied because he had been unable to pay them. Skinner sent for reinforcements; but, before any could arrive, the Uniara raja, deciding to strike while the iron was hot — or better still, to make it hot by striking — moved out to give battle. The result was that the entire Karaoli infantry deserted to the enemy, and only Skinner's battalion was left to face them.

  Skinner immediately made a retreat towards a deserted village in his rear, driving off two of the enemy's battalions, which had charged. Then the entire Uniara cavalry and infantry, some 6,000 men, attacked him. Skinner realised that it was hopeless to try to hold the village. He decided to retreat to Tonk, about six miles distant; but before he could begin his retreat, he was attacked by the two battalions who had previously charged him and were now aided by their cavalry. In repulsing them, Skinner lost one of his five guns, and again his horse was killed under him. The rest of the enemy were now coming up fast, and further movement was impossible. Drawing up his men on the level plain, Skinner "made them a short but spirited speech, telling them they could die but once, and exhorting them to fight, and, if needs be, fall like good and brave soldiers".

  Allowing the enemy to come within his range of fifty yards, Skinner gave them a volley, then charged. The enemy gave way, and he captured their guns; "but their flanks wheeled into action and galled him terribly"; Skinner threw his men into a square and attempted to reach some ravines about a mile distant. But he was not given the chance. Encouraged by his retreat, the enemy charged time and again, captured three more of his guns, and killed so many of his men that he was left with only 300. Desperately he called on these few to make a final effort, but as he was leading them forward he was shot through the groin by a matchlock man, and fell unconscious. The remnants of his very gallant battalion were completely destroyed.

  He fell at three o'clock in the afternoon, and did not regain consciousness till next morning. He had been taken for dead, and robbed of everything except his pantaloons. "Around him," writes Herbert Compton in a graphic account of the battle, "were heaps of his dead and wounded native officers and soldiers, among them a Subahdar with his leg shot off below the knee, and a Jemadar with a pike thrust through his body. All were tortured with thirst, and unable to move; and thus they remained in helpless agony through the long hot day, praying for death. Night came at last, but neither relief from suffering nor assistance. The moon was full and clear, and about midnight it was very cold. So dreadful did the night appear that Skinner vowed to himself that if he survived it he. would never go soldiering again, and if he lived to recover, that he would build a church to the god of his white father. The wounded on all sides were moaning and crying out for water, and the jackals kept flitting about like four-legged ghouls, tearing the dead, and coming closer and closer to the living, and were only kept off by stones feebly thrown at them."

  On the second morning an old man and woman from a neighbouring village came to the battlefield with a basket and jar of water. The woman offered a piece of bread and a drink of water to every wounded man This was gratefully accepted by Skinner, but as the woman was a Chumarin (an untouchable) the Subahdar, a high-caste Rajput, would take nothing from her hands, saying that a little more suffering was nothing and that he preferred to die unpolluted.

  A party of the Uniara raja
's men eventually rescued Skinner and the other wounded. The stubborn Subahdar now received water from acceptable hands and, to Skinner's delight, recovered; and he and Skinner and the others "were lifted in sheets" and taken to the raja's camp.

  After a month, during which he was hospitably treated by the Uniara raja, Skinner was freed. Wars were then conducted in a gentlemanly fashion, though during the fighting itself no quarter was given. He did not forget the kindness of the Chumarin woman, and soon after sent her a present of a thousand rupees, together with the message that he considered her as his mother.

  A few months later — after a period of leave in Calcutta, where he stayed with his sister — Skinner was again on active service, this time against that swashbuckling Irishman, George Thomas, who had carved out a kingdom of his own over an area of some 200 square miles in the Hariana region of what is now the Punjab. He posed a threat to the power of Perron in Hindustan and, but for his fits of drunkenness, might well have gained control over Delhi.

  Both James and his younger brother Robert Skinner fought together in the battle of Georgegarh (Thomas's fortress, known today as Jhajgarh in the Rohtak District), where the Irishman held out gallantly against a numerically superior foe. An incident occurred during the fighting which showed the close des that bound Skinner to his brother.

  Baillie Fraser, Skinner's biographer and translator (James Skinner penned his memoirs in Persian), writes: "James and Robert Skinner were engaged at different parts of the field, so that neither knew how the other fared. The cannonade was so fierce and continuous, and the slaughter so great, that all was smoke and carnage and there was little communication between the different battalions engaged. When the battle ceased, a report came to James that his brother had been killed, whilst a similar one reached Robert as to James. Both, moved by one impulse, ran to the bloody field, without thinking of rest or refreshment, and sought all over for the body of the brother, but in the darkness, amidst the thousands of corpses, torn and mutilated by the cannon shot, neither found what he sought, and after a weary and fruitless search they returned to the tent of their commanding officer to make their report. By a singular chance they entered from opposite sides at the same moment, and the first thing that met their eyes was the object on which their thoughts were dwelling. They saw nothing else, but ran and embraced, calling out each other's names before the officers that filled the tent."