White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  When Hickey is ill ‘my kind hearted and interesting favourite … sat by my side anxiously watching my varying countenances as the agonizing pain I endured increased or diminished’.76 When he is better, they buy a ‘large and commodious Residence in Garden Reach, about seven miles and a half from Calcutta, beautifully situated within a few yards of the river, affording us the advantage of water as well as land carriage’. Here Hickey takes four apartments ‘for my sole use, that Jemdanee and her female attendants might be sufficiently private and retired … Jemdanee was so pleased with the novelty of the thing that nothing would satisfy her but remaining there entirely. She therefore sent for her establishment and settled herself in our upper rooms.’77

  After a while Jemdanee became pregnant, ‘regularly increasing in bulk … expressing her earnest desire that it might prove “a chuta William Saheb” ’.

  She remained in uninterrupted health and the highest flow of spirits until the 4th of August when having laughed and chatted with her after my breakfast, I went to the Court House to attend a case of considerable importance. I had not been there more than an hour when several of my servants in the utmost alarm ran over to tell me that the Bibee Sahib was dying. Instantly going home, I found my poor girl in a state of insensibility, apparently with a locked jaw, her teeth being so far clenched together that no force could separate them. She had just been delivered of a fine healthy looking child which was remarkably fair.

  Hickey discovered that Jemdanee had become terrified when ‘after an hour in violent agony’ she gave birth to a child, only to be told by the Bengali midwife—Hickey’s European doctor Dr Hare then being absent on business—that she should lie still for she was going to have twins ‘and another child was coming. This so terrified the poor suffering girl, that giving a violent screech, she instantly went into strong convulsions … ’

  Doctor Hare arrived in five minutes after I got home, and was greatly surprised and alarmed at the state in which he found her, for which he could in no way account. By the application of powerful drugs which the Doctor administered, she, in half an hour, recovered her senses and speech, appeared very solicitous to encourage and comfort me, saying she had no doubt she should do very well. Doctor Hare also gave me his assurances that the dangerous paroxysm was past and all would be as we could wish. With this comfortable assurance I again went to attend my business in Court, from whence I was once more hastily summoned to attend to my dying favourite, who had been suddenly attacked by a second fit from which she never recovered, but lay in a state of confirmed apoplexy until nine o’clock at night when she, without a pang, expired.

  ‘Thus,’ wrote a heartbroken Hickey, ‘did I lose as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever a man was blessed with.’78 It was several months before he had recovered sufficiently from the death to resume his work in the Calcutta courts.

  Hinduism, and Hindu culture in general, proved less accessible to the British than Islam, at least partly because many Hindus regarded the British as untouchable, refusing to eat with them, so restricting somewhat the possibilities for social intercourse. Yet this did not put off many of Hinduism’s more ardent British admirers, and as a subject for intellectual study, Hinduism took precedence over Islam amongst the early British in Calcutta.

  In March 1775 a twenty-three-year-old Company official, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, published his translation of A Code of Gentoo Laws.79 The response in Britain to this first revelation of ‘the wisdom of the Hindoos’ was electric. As the reviewer in the Critical Review put it:This is a most sublime performance … [we] are persuaded that even this enlightened quarter of the globe [i.e. Europe] cannot boast anything which soars so completely above the narrow, vulgar sphere of prejudice and priestcraft. The most amiable part of modern philosophy is hardly upon a level with the extensive charity, the comprehensive benevolence, of a few rude, untutored Hindoo Bramins … Mr Halhed has rendered more real service to his country, to the world in general, by this performance, than ever flowed from all the wealth of all the nabobs by whom the country of these poor people has been plundered … Wealth is not the only, nor the most valuable commodity, which Britain might import from India.80

  Edmund Burke agreed. He read Halhed’s book and, according to Charles James Fox, thereafter ‘spoke of the piety of the Hindoos with admiration, and of their holy religion and sacred functions with an awe bordering on devotion’; in Parliament Burke declared that ‘Wherever the Hindu religion has been established, that country has been flourishing.’81 This was still the Age of Reason, and loss of faith in the more intolerant and narrow aspects of Christianity combined with a growing interest in non-European civilisations to create an intellectual climate deeply receptive to the sort of ideas Halhed claimed lay at the heart of Hinduism.

  Into this arena of intellectual excitement sailed, on 15 January 1784, the Justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta, Sir William Jones. Less than six weeks after he had landed, Jones had gathered together a group of thirty kindred spirits, to institute ‘a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. Its patron was the most enlightened of all the British Governors General, Warren Hastings, who shared the new enthusiasm for Hinduism and who declared: ‘in truth I love India a little more than my own country’. 82 Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society of Bengal quickly became the catalyst for a sudden explosion of interest in Hinduism, as it formed enduring relations with the local Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In this way it was hoped to educate Europe about this relatively unknown civilisation; as Hastings put it, ‘such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment … [after all, the Indian classics] will survive when British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance’.83

  Before long Jones had decamped to Krishnagar, sixty miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, where he adopted the local Indian dress of loose white cotton and rented a bungalow built ‘entirely of vegetable materials’. Here he surrounded himself with Brahmins who helped him learn Sanskrit, a language which he soon realised was ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. As for Sanskrit literature, Jones was agog at the wonders he daily uncovered: ‘I am in love with the gopis,’ he wrote soon after his arrival, ‘charmed with Krishna and an enthusiastic admirer of Rama. Arjun, Bhima and the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’

  Many of Jones’s letters seem to have been written from here. ‘I concur with you,’ he writes to one friend, ‘in paying adoration to springs and rivers; and I am going soon up the great stream Ma Gunga and towards the Holy banks of the God Jumna.’ He congratulates one correspondent on finding a well-preserved copy of the Gita, another on the way he has learned to sing ‘Hindoostanee airs’. One day he is sending letters up country requesting information from the Pundits of Benares on the different names and avatars of a particular god, on the next recommending the Calcutta doctors to try out various ayurvedic cures. In India, Jones wrote that he had discovered Arcadia.84 Valmiki was the new Homer, the Ramayana the new Odyssey. The possibilities seemed endless.

  Nevertheless, despite their enthusiasm, few of the Calcutta Sanskritists let their interest in Hinduism stray far beyond the intellectual. Jones himself remained a practising member of the Church of England, albeit one who showed an attachment to the idea of reincarnation: ‘I am no Hindu,’ he wrote, ‘but I hold the doctrines of the Hindus concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end.’85 But there were some others who went further. Technically it is impossible to convert to Hinduism: as much a social system as a religion, to be a Hindu you must be born a Hindu; tra
ditionally there was no ceremony for conversion. No one, however, seems to have told this to ‘Hindoo Stuart’.

  Not much is known about this strange Irishman who in the 1780s came out to India while still in his teens; but he seems to have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism, and within a year of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice—which he continued to his death—of walking every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges according to Hindu custom. As his obituary in the Asiatic Journal put it: ‘General Stuart had studied the language, manners and customs of the natives of this country with so much enthusiasm, that his intimacy with them, and his toleration of, or rather apparent conformity to their ideas and prejudices, obtained for him the name Hindoo Stuart, by which, we believe, he is well known to our readers.’86 In his writings he explicitly refers to himself as a ‘convert’ to Hinduism.y

  Stuart’s military contemporaries, even those who were enthusiastic Indophiles themselves, never quite knew what to make of their General. At one point Hindoo Stuart was given command of the largest cavalry cantonment in central India, where he found that his deputy was an old acquaintance of James Kirkpatrick’s, William Linnaeus Gardner, who like Kirkpatrick himself was almost certainly a convert to Islam. Gardner’s letters to a cousin give a flavour of life in this bizarre outpost of the East India Company military establishment commanded by a pair of converts to India’s two rival religions.

  The first reference to Hindoo Stuart in his deputy’s letters occurs just as the previous General is leaving and it has been announced that Stuart is to take over. ‘General Watson left us this morning,’ wrote Gardner, ‘and, good and kind as he is, I am happy he is off for the farewell dinners are most appalling events, particularly where a Man’s loyalty is measured by the number of Bottles he can gulp down. General Stuart, his successor, I suppose does not pride himself on the capacity of his stomach or the strength of his head as he regularly performs his pooja and avoids the sight of Beef.’

  From this point Stuart features regularly in the Gardner correspondence, under the pet name ‘General Pundit’ or ‘Pundit Stuart’. On one occasion Gardner remarks: ‘The General is an odd fish. He wrote to me to come to him at Chukla Ghat where the Hindoos bathe—particularly the women! He has the Itch beyond any man I ever knew. On this spot he is going to build a pagoda [temple]! Every Hindu he salutes with Jey Sittaramjee!’ On another occasion Gardner says he is going to have to take command as the General is planning to go off for a week to bathe at the Kumb Mela. On another he reports how a friend had just returned from the weekly horse fair held at Saugor. In the midst of it he found Stuart sitting ‘surrounded by a dozen naked faqueers who, joining their hands over his head, gave him Benediction’.87

  Stuart was not just an admirer of the Indian religions, he was also an enthusiastic devotee of Hindu women and their dress sense. In the early years of the nineteenth century he wrote a series of improbable articles in the Calcutta Telegraph in which he tried to persuade the European women of the city to adopt the sari, on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary European fashions, and warning that otherwise Englishwomen had no hope of competing with the beauty of the women of India:The majority of Hindoo women are comparatively small, yet there is much voluptuousness of appearance:—a fulness that delights the eye; a firmness that enchants the sense; a sleekness and purity of skin; an expression of countenance, a grace, and a modesty of demeanour, that renders them universally attractive … The new-mown hay is not sweeter than their breath … I have seen ladies of the Gentoo cast, so exquisitely formed, with limbs so divinely turned, and such expression in their eyes, that you must acknowledge them not inferior to the most celebrated beauties of Europe. For my own part, I already begin to think the dazzling brightness of a copper coloured face, infinitely preferable to the pallid and sickly hue of the European fair.z

  If Stuart’s extreme passion for all things Hindu was definitely unusual, showing respect for Hinduism and participating in its rituals was not, and there are frequent references in the sources of the period to Company officials attending pujas, presenting gifts in temples and participating in sacrifices. James Grant, for example, gave a bell to the Durga temple in Benares after the priests there had prayed for his safety when he and his wife and children were caught in a whirlpool in the Ganges immediately opposite the temple.88 About the same time the British celebrated the Treaty of Amiens by marching with military bands to the Temple of Kali.89

  Hindu texts confirm this open-minded attitude. At the suggestion of some Brahmins, General Richard Matthews is recorded in a Tamil history of the period as praying to a Hindu deity at a temple in Takkolam in order to be cured of some crippling stomach aches. According to the anonymous author of the history, Matthews was successfully cured of his pains and thereafter gave generously to the temple. The story opens with the General camped near the temple, where his troops hope to make use of the water from the temple spring. But after his ‘pariahs and lower [caste] attendants’ have entered the temple, the water supply which ‘usually fell through the Cows Mouth [in a jet] the size of an elephant’s trunk with great noise’ mysteriously fails:The general then promised money to defray the expenses of Homa [fire ceremonies for the purification] that water might fall from the Cow’s Mouth as before; but the Brahmins replied that they could not make the water to fall as before, whereupon the Gentleman was angry at the Brahmins, & gave them leave to return to their Houses and he returned to his tent—

  That night the gentleman was seized with a terrible pain in his bowels, which threatened to endanger his life, and believing that it was owing to his forcibly entering into the pagoda & looking into every place, he sent for the Poojaries and questioned them. They recommended him to pray to the God, thro’ whom he would be cured. Next morning General Matthews came & stood in the Pagoda in the presence of the God, and there prayed to the God; he then returned to his tents & in that same moment he recovered from his pain; therefore that gentleman presented a bag of 1000 pagodas to the God and ordered them still to continue to worship; he also added some villages to the allowances of the God. Thereupon the Poojaries brought a number of cows into the pagoda & performed the Pooniacharum, or ceremony of purification; and they assembled the Brahmins & entertained them all for the sake of the God; whereupon the water which before fell from the Cows Mouth in a stream of the size of an elephants trunk, fell again.

  ‘General Matthews,’ adds the author, ‘remained six months in that place; and he used to have the water that fell from the cows mouth brought to him for his own drinking … When the general went away he left his concubine at this place.’90

  Not all Company officials shared the enthusiasm of Generals Stuart and Matthews either for India in general, or for Hinduism in particular.

  Most powerful of the critics was one of the Company’s Directors, Charles Grant. Grant was among the first of the new breed of Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company boardroom. Writing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, he proposed in 1787 to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.91 Within a few decades the missionaries—initially based at the Danish settlement of Serampore—were beginning fundamentally to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom, as Jones and Hastings believed, but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

  The Rev. R. Ainslie was typical of Grant’s missionaries. In British Idolatry in India, a sermon printed and disseminated to the Evangelical faithful back home, the excitable Ainslie wrote of his visit to a temple in Orissa: ‘I have visited the Valley of Death!’ he tol
d a hushed congregation. ‘I have seen the Den of Darkness!’ The sermon goes on for nearly twenty pages, describing the ‘sinful and disgusting scenes’ the Rev. Ainslie had witnessed. These ‘sinful scenes’, rather disappointingly, turn out to be nothing more than Company officials assisting the Hindus in their rites. Of the great Juggernaut procession in Orissa, Ainslie comments: ‘The cloths and mantles are furnished for the idol pageantry by British servants. The horrors are unutterable … Do not European gentlemen encourage these ceremonies, and make presents to the idol, and often fall down and worship?’92

  One of the most outspoken of the missionaries was the Rev. Alexander Thompson, who after a lifetime of denouncing the evils of Hinduism devoted his retirement to writing a long and intemperate tract entitled The Government Connection with Idolatry in India.93 According to Thompson, the enthusiasm of Company officials of the late eighteenth century had become one of the main causes of a major Hindu revival. Looking back to the 1790s, he reminds his readers that

  the chief officers of the Government [at that time] belonged to a peculiar class. Those who between 1790 and 1820 possessed the greatest experience, and held the highest offices in India, were on the whole an irreligious body of men; who approved of Hinduism much more than Christianity, and favoured the Koran more than the Bible. Some hated Missions from their dread of sedition; and others because their hearts ‘seduced by fair idolatresses, had fallen to idols foul’.aa