White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  The ‘Brahminised’ British—as they came to be known—did not go down before the missionary onslaught without a fight. It was to combat the intolerance of these Evangelicals that Hindoo Stuart anonymously published a pamphlet called A Vindication of the Hindoos.94 In this text he tried to discourage any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing that, as he put it, ‘on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’. On the subject of Hindu mythology, which the missionaries ridiculed at every turn, Stuart wrote: ‘Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced.’ He also pointed out that the Vedas were ‘written at that remote period in which our savage ancestors of the forest were perhaps unconscious of a God; and were, doubtless, strangers to the glorious doctrine of the immortality of the soul, first revealed in Hindostan’.

  The reaction that Stuart generated by writing his defence of Hinduism is a measure of how attitudes were beginning to change at the close of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. A full-scale pamphlet war broke out, with furious attacks made on the anonymous ‘Bengal Officer’ who produced the work, denouncing him as an ‘infidel’ and a ‘pagan’.95

  Nor was it just missionaries who took against Stuart: his own colleagues were becoming equally scathing. ‘Incredible as it may sound reader,’ wrote one horrified officer, ‘there is at this moment a British general in the Company’s service, who observes all the customs of the Hindoos, makes offerings at their temples, carries about their idols with him, and is accompanied by fakirs who dress his food. He is not treated as a madman, but would not perhaps be misplaced if he had his idols, fakirs, bedas, and shasters, in some corner of Bedlam, removed from its more rational and unfortunate inmates.’96

  Even passing travellers began to take potshots at the increasingly isolated Stuart: ‘There was one circumstance which staggered my incredulity, ’ wrote Elizabeth Fenton in her journal. ‘There was here an Englishman, born and educated in a Christian land, who has become the wretched and degraded partaker of this heathen worship, a General S—who has for some years adopted the habits and religion, if religion it be named, of these people; and he is generally believed to be in a sane mind, rather a man of ability.’ Pausing in her horror only to add a second semi-colon to her breathless rant, she continued; ‘it makes you pause and in vain attempt to account for such delusion. Those whom it is the will of God to be born in Darkness are not accountable, but that any who ever lived in the light of Christianity should voluntarily renounce its hopes is truly awful.’97

  Hindoo Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.

  David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker who founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, was actually denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian. 98 Many others found their Indianised ways led to a block on their promotion. When Francis Gillanders, a British tax-collector stationed in Bihar, was found to be involving himself too closely in the temple at Bodh Gaya, to which he donated a bell in 1798, the Directors of the Company back in London wrote to the Governor General expressing their horror that Christians should be, as they put it, administering ‘heathen’ rites.99 A little later Frederick Shore found that his adoption of native dress so enraged the increasingly self-righteous officials of Calcutta that a government order was issued explicitly forbidding Company servants from wearing anything except European dress. The following year the army issued similar orders forbidding European officers from taking part in the festival of Holi. ‘Pagan festivals’, along with gambling, concubinage, peculation and drunkenness, were all things to be firmly discouraged in this new climate. The shutters were beginning to come down.

  Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were also beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1780s, and it was the burgeoning mixed-blood Anglo-Indian community which felt the brunt of the new intolerance. From 1786, under the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, a whole raft of legislation was brought in excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives from employment by the Company. Cornwallis arrived in India fresh from his defeat by George Washington at York-town. He was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America.

  With this in mind, in 1786 an order was passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from travelling to England to be educated, so qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the civil, military or marine branches of the Company. In 1795, further legislation was issued, explicitly disqualifying anyone not descended from European parents on both sides from serving in the Company’s armies except as ‘pipers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’. Yet, like their British fathers, the Anglo-Indians were also banned from owning land. Thus excluded from all the most obvious sources of lucrative employment, the Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale. This would continue until, a century later, they had been reduced to a community of minor clerks and train drivers.100

  Faced with limited prospects in India, those Company servants rich enough to send their Anglo-Indian children home tended to do so, and many mixed-blood children were successfully absorbed into the British upper classes, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-nineteenth-century Prime Minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.101 Much, however, depended on skin colour. As the Calcutta agent John Palmer wrote to Warren Hastings, when discussing what to do with his three orphaned Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: ‘the two eldest [who] are almost as fair as European children … should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at Home, it is become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child’ to proceed to England. It was decided in the end that the ‘dark’ child should stay in India and try to make his way as a clerk, while the others were shipped to Britain to try their luck there.102ab

  It was not just Anglo-Indians who suffered from the new and quickly-growing prejudices in Calcutta. Under Cornwallis, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the increasingly arrogant officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William. In 1786, John Palmer’s father, General William Palmer,ac who later became one of Kirkpatrick’s closest friends and allies, wrote to his friend David Anderson expressing his dismay at the new etiquette regarding Indian dignitaries introduced to Calcutta by the recently-arrived Cornwallis. They were received, he wrote, ‘in the most cold and disgusting stile, and I can assure you that they observe and feel it, and no doubt they will resent it whenever they can’.103

  These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The Bengal Wills show that it was at this time that the number of Indian bibis being mentioned in wills and inventories began to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in 1780 and 1785, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805 and 1810, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared. The second edition of Thomas Will
iamson’s East India Vade Mecum, published in 1825, had all references to bibis completely removed from it,104 while biographies and memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the early nineteenth century so that the consorts were removed from later editions: for example John Collins, known as ‘King Collins’, who was the Resident at the court of the Marathas’ leader Scindia, was deprived of the harem mentioned in the first edition of Major Blackiston’s Twelve Years Military Adventures in Hindustan.105

  Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs likewise began to be objects of surprise—even, on occasions, of derision—in Calcutta. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of men ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Mussulmans’.106 Curries were no longer acceptable dishes at parties: ‘the delicacies of an entertainment consist of hermetically sealed salmon, red-herrings, cheese, smoked sprats, raspberry jam, and dried fruits; these articles coming from Europe, and being sometimes very difficult to procure, are prized accordingly’.107 Pyjamas, for the first time, became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. By 1813, Thomas Williamson was writing in The European in India how ‘The hookah, or pipe … was very nearly universally retained among Europeans. Time, however, has retrenched this luxury so much, that not one in three now smokes.’108 Soon the European use of the hookah was to go the way of the bibi: into extinction.

  Yet what was true of Calcutta was not necessarily true of Company servants who lived outside the walls of the three Presidency towns. If a young Writer was bright, learned the languages and did well in his exams, he might still be posted to one of the Residencies attached to the various independent Indian courts. There he could find himself the only educated European for several hundred miles. In that case—and especially if he found himself in a centre of hybrid Indo-Islamic culture such as Hyderabad or Lucknow, or one of the more lively Rajput courts like Udaipur—he would by necessity be forced to draw his closest friends, his ways of speaking and thinking, and his sexual partners, from his Indian surroundings.109

  Wearing Indian costume, marrying Indian wives and living a hybrid Anglo-Mughal lifestyle had always been more popular, and the transformations more dramatic, in these great centres of Mughal culture than they were in the insular world of the Presidency towns. From the 1790s until the 1830s, however, a division grew up between what was considered acceptable and proper in Calcutta, and the ways of behaviour that were still thought perfectly appropriate in the Residencies attached to the different Indian courts: for example, when the formidable Lady Maria Nugent, wife of the British Commander-in-Chief in India, visited Delhi she was horrified by what she saw there. It was not just the Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, who had ‘gone native’, she reported, his Assistants William Fraser and Edward Gardner were even worse. ‘I shall now say a few words of Messrs. Gardner and Fraser who are still of our party,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘They both wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians, if not more; they are both of them clever and intelligent, but eccentric; and, having come to this country early, they have formed opinions and prejudices, that make them almost natives. In our conversations together, I endeavour to insinuate every thing that I think will have any weight with them. I talk of the religion they were brought up in, and of their friends, who would be astonished and shocked at their whiskers, beards, &c. &c. All this we generally debated between us,’ concluded Lady Nugent, ‘and I still hope they will think of it.’110

  Two worlds were growing apart—and it was into that growing chasm of cultural misunderstanding that James Achilles Kirkpatrick fell. If that gap widened into an abyss during the first years of the nineteenth century, it was largely due to the influence of one man.

  On 8 November 1797, Lord Wellesley, a minor Irish aristocrat, set out from England to take up his appointment as Governor General of Bengal and head of the Supreme Government of India. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. That process was now drawing to a close. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. It was a place to be changed and conquered, not a place to be changed or conquered by.

  This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.

  II

  When he stepped ashore at the Cape of Good Hope on a January day in 1798, Richard Wellesley was a short, self-possessed and ambitious young man of thirty-seven with a high forehead, thick, dark eyebrows and a straight Roman nose. He had compelling blue eyes and a firm chin, the prominence of which was emphasised by his three-quarter-length side-burns. There was a purposeful set to his small mouth and an owlish gleam in his expression that hinted at brilliance, and perhaps also at ruthlessness. But there was also a vulnerability and even a paranoia there too, apparent in all his portraits. It was a weakness that he increasingly came to disguise with a mask of arrogance.

  Wellesley’s perceptive host, Andrew Barnard, the Commander of the Cape garrison, spotted this flaw immediately and predicted to his wife Anne that there were ‘inconsistencies in his character, as he is clever but weak [and] proud … he will get thro’ the task of what is entrusted to him to the satisfaction of his employers, but that in doing it he will get himself more looked up to than beloved’.1 It was an accurate prophecy. Wellesley made no intimate friends in India, and his colleagues, including his younger brother Arthur, frequently found him impossible to deal with; but few ever doubted his genius or his abilities.

  Barnard was however wrong about one thing: Wellesley did not satisfy his nominal employers, the Directors of the East India Company. Indeed he did not even attempt to do so, and his private letters to the President of the Board of Control, the government body set up in 1784 to oversee the Company, make little secret of his ‘utter contempt’ for the opinions of ‘the most loathsome den of the India House’.2 Though he won the Directors an empire, Wellesley came within a whisker of bankrupting the Company to do so, and it was clear from the beginning that he had set his sights on far more ambitious goals than maintaining the profit margins of the Company he was supposed to serve, but whose mercantile spirit he actually abhorred.

  Unknown to the Company Directors, Richard Wellesley had come out East with two very clear goals in his mind. He was determined to secure India for British rule, and equally determined to oust the French from their last foothold on the subcontinent. In this he was following the bidding of Henry Dundas, the Board of Control’s President, whose Francophobe ideas were transmitted to a receptive Wellesley at a series of lengthy briefings before the new Governor General embarked for India. In particular Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy—all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone mercenaries and renegades, and all of whom could, potentially, be used against the British and in favour of the French.

  As his ship was being refitted and its sails remodelled—HM’s frigate La Virginie had ‘become dangerously overmasted before they were cut lower’3—Wellesley used his enforced leisure at the Cape to recover from the dreadful passage from England and to learn what he could about India. Every day began with a ‘Bengal levée’ of jaundic
ed old India hands, many of whom had come to the Cape to try to recover their health: Anne Barnard called them the ‘yellow generals’. They limped in one by one and competed with each other ‘to pour the riches of their knowledge and experience’ on the new Governor General. There were others passing through the Cape, too, who could bring Wellesley up to speed with the latest developments in Bengal. According to Anne Barnard’s Journal, as well as the yellow generals there were also ‘Captains from India with despatches to the Government [who] stop here and finding his Excellency at the Cape deliver up their official papers which he opens, peruses, and by such means will arrive instructed on the present position of affairs there, and will appear a prodigy of ability in being Master of all so soon after his arrival’.

  After these meetings and briefings were over, the evenings were occupied with a series of heavy dinners given in Wellesley’s honour by the local Dutch community. Their culinary abilities left much to be desired: ‘They begin their dinners piano, piano with stewed cows heel,’ wrote Barnard,a favourite dish [of theirs, eaten with] Tripe and Macaroni … But they increase the size and number of their dishes with every course, ending at last with enormous Joints … [One family] received us all with open countenances of gladness and hospitality … but the most resolute grin was born by a Calf’s head as large as that of an ox, which was boiled entire and served up with ears whole and a pair of gallant young horns … the teeth were more perfect than any dentist ever made … [The meal concluded with] a Tureen of Bird’s Nest Soup … a mess of the most aromatic nastiness I ever tasted.