Though it was 1200 miles from Calcutta, Simla was considered ideally located. The Government of India was preoccupied with events along the North-West Frontier. Russia was seen as the main threat to the security of the Empire, and Simla was next to the Punjab which was identified as the main invasion route. It was also close to the Tibetan frontier, another potential weak spot in Britain’s security.
Kipling, however, poured scorn on Simla for being 100 miles from the nearest railway, ‘on the wrong side of an irresponsible river’ and liable, after a heavy monsoon or a mild earthquake, to be cut off from the land it ruled over as effectively ‘as if separated by a month’s sea voyage’. He was more at home in the yard-wide lanes of Lahore ‘into which the moonlight cannot struggle’ than in the ‘Mall-abiding, open-windowed, purdah-less’ confines of British India5. To him, Simla was populated with ‘queer, bewildered, old people, who lived in an atmosphere of “manifestations” running around their houses’.6
It is likely that Kipling also attended one of the many tea and dinner parties at Jacob’s mansion, Belvedere. In its oak-panelled dining room, Jacob entertained his diners with tales from ancient Arabic texts, seances and sleights of hand. ‘He fairly scintillates,’ such was the wealth of his anecdotes, one of his guests reminisced. ‘Stories of the highest oriental court life, the under-threads of famous mysteries, marvels of occult phenomena.’ His performances had earned him a reputation for being a master magician, someone who knew ‘more of the mystic secrets of India than any other man’.7
Whether it was at Belvedere or at the shop on the Mall, it was inevitable that the curious young writer and the charismatic wonder worker would meet. Going to Simla without calling on Jacob, it was said, was like visiting India without seeing the Taj Mahal.8
‘He was something more than a jeweller, he was a personality,’ his friend the British author and critic Frederick Heath wrote years later. ‘The man himself, much more than the precious stones he sold, attracted attention. Notable Anglo-Indians would come to his place of business and talk to him, and they always found that Mr Jacob had something interesting to say.’9
Outwardly, Jacob behaved like an ascetic. He never drank alcohol, was a strict vegetarian, shunned ostentation and never married. Apart from amulets to ward off evil spirits, he wore no jewellery. He once boasted that he preferred to keep his money in an old box rather than in a bank. One Viceroy compared him to a ‘skeleton in a jewel room’.
Owning a shop on the lower side of the Mall gave him certain advantages. From the showroom, a steep flight of stairs went down to a second entrance that opened on the lower, or native, bazaar, with its conglomeration of old wooden shanties and ramshackle dwellings, spreading like a sombre crust down the hillside.
A local writer described the native bazaar as ‘an eyesore’, but a necessary one. ‘If you are a student of oriental life and in search of local colour, you must negotiate the bazaar with its evil smells, for they are inseparable. Visit it in the spirit of Haroun al-Rashid, and you will meet all the characters of the Arabian Nights and Tales of the Caliphs, and more. You may read their character in the faces as they brush past you.’10
The native bazaar was also a rendezvous point for ‘politicians and plotters anxious to swap the least little bit of information that manages to leak out of the great Imperial Secretariat above—any that might be turned to their profit and advantage’, an early guide book to Simla stated. ‘For the student of human nature, the lower Simla bazaar provides an inexhaustible field for investigation.’11
More often than not, huddling together with the denizens of the netherworld was Jacob. Just as European Simla, with its dainty bungalows, busy hotels, and endless social gatherings, ensured a steady flow of customers to his shop, the native bazaar was the source for his other passion—gathering intelligence on the private world of the Princely courts and the workings of the British Raj. Like Lurgan’s school for spies, Jacob’s shop was a clearing house for a range of transactions, most of which had little to do with the normal business of buying and selling. For him, the value of the exchange was measured not by monetary profit, but what his customers could tell him about conditions on the Afghan frontier or the innermost secrets of a Prince’s harem.
‘Who shall say that jewels were all that they bought from him, and that money was all he took from them in return?’ speculated one writer about what went on behind the entrance to Jacob’s shop. ‘Who, too, could be better placed to carry information by word of mouth than the trusted scouts who brought choice pieces to Jacob from the remotest corners of Asia?’12
Kipling was also fascinated by Simla’s colourful underbelly. ‘A man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India’s summer capital; so cunningly does verandah communicate with verandah, alley-way with alley-way, and bolt-hole with bolt-hole’,13 he wrote in Kim. ‘Here live those who minister the wants of the glad city—jhampanis to pull the pretty ladies’ rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn; grocers, oil sellers; curio-vendors, firewood dealers, priests, pickpockets and native employees of the Government. Here are discussed by courtesans the things which are supposed to be the profoundest secrets of the Indian Council; and here gather all the sub-agents of half the Native states.’
Jacob’s customers fell into two broad categories. There were those who came to buy—Viceroys and Vicereines, field marshals and foreign secretaries, Hindu Princes and Muslim Nawabs, European royalty, and lesser civil servants.
Then there were traders carrying their precious cargos of pearls and prayer wheels, uncut diamonds and devil masks, ivory crucifixes and Persian carpets with their tightly woven patterns of rosettes, medallions, stars and Arabesques. After entering the shop, they spilled their wares on to his table, the only part of the room clear of clutter. From hidden leather pouches came uncut amethysts, pieces of lapis lazuli, the occasional turquoise-encrusted dagger and dusty ancient statues.
Jacob’s stock, drawn from the collections of Indian royalty and the courts of Central Asia, was of superior quality. He had an uncanny knack for matching buyers and sellers. A large part of his turnover came from auctions that always attracted what one writer described as a ‘large, and one might say, fashionable attendance’. A typical offering included ‘jewellery, unset gems, quaint arms, tapestries, Cashmere shawls and innumerable specimens of Asiatic arts’.14 The same writer noted how he objected to his establishment being called a ‘shop’, and how he preferred to be known as a ‘jeweller in private practice’. In the early 1880s, he wrote a guide for buyers called Exchange Made Easy.
Jacob had no compunctions about whom he did business with or what he traded. He pressed into the open palms of young subalterns tiger’s-claw pendants, ivory lockets, filigree necklaces in silver or gold to buy for their wives and sweethearts, peppering his sales talk with anecdotes pulled from Emanuel’s and Streeter’s works. A Maharaja might walk out of his shop with a gramophone or an automaton, a Viceroy, with a bowl made out of jade that had once adorned the altar of an ancient Tibetan monastery.
His regular customers included retiring army officers and civil servants wanting to invest their savings in gems and jewellery which were easy to transport and could reap handsome returns in England. If the profits failed to match expectations, there was always a tension on the North-West Frontier or a sudden oversupply of rubies from Burma to blame.
But by far his best clients were the Princes. Royal India occupied almost a third of the subcontinent and controlled the lives of a quarter of its population. Its 560-odd states ranged in area from pint-sized fiefdoms not much bigger than a football pitch to giants like Hyderabad which was the size of France. Hindus and Muslims, the Princes took a variety of titles: Rajas, Maharajas, Ranas, Gaekwars, Nawabs and Nizams. India’s Hindu potentates traced their genealogies back thousands of years and claimed descent from the sun and the moon. Muslim rulers were often the remnants of the old Mughal Empire.
Feudal in nature, they dotted the countryside with their forts and
palaces, some built in the style of Versailles, others meant to dwarf Buckingham Palace. By inclination, they ranged from the enlightened to the despotic. They were as famous for their luxuries as they were for their depravities, their decadence and their gallantry. They extracted what they could from their hard-working subjects who looked up to them as gods. Some used the spoils for public works for the greater good, others wasted their wealth on their extravagant lifestyles. Some maintained harems the size of small armies, others had armies that were the envy of the British. Most shared a passion for hunting and carpeted the marble floors of their palaces with tiger skins and deer hides.
Though they kept their own rules and traditions, the Princes were independent in name only. The larger states had British Residents or Political Agents serving as a reminder of the power behind the throne. To help place them in the Imperial scheme of things, the British devised a complicated system of gun salutes graded according to their wealth and status. The lowliest received nine while the Nizam of Hyderabad and four Maharajas were elevated to 21. But even that was paltry compared with the Viceroy who received 31 guns and the King-Emperor who was greeted with a 100-strong volley.
Few writers summed up their world better than Kipling who wrote in The Man Who Would Be King that Providence had created the Princely states ‘to supply picturesque scenery, tigers and tall-writing. They are dark places of the Earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Haroun-al-Rashid.’15 In Simla, Jacob had a front row seat.
As it grew, the hill station became a rendezvous point for Princes coming to pay their respects to the British suzerain. Social intercourse with the native rulers was seen as desirable. Not only were they permitted to buy property but they were encouraged to do so. By the end of the 1880s, one in every seven of the larger houses in Simla was owned by royalty, some of whom stayed there during the summer months and, for the remainder of the year, rented out the properties at exorbitant prices. Not all were motivated by the desire to get closer to the seat of British power. The more exotic and libidinous Princes were attracted by the flirtatious ‘grass widows’ who had left their civil service husbands to sweat it out on the plains, and young girls fresh from England whom they tried to seduce with stories of their chivalry and might.
The annual rush of potentates proved a boon for Jacob. Instead of his having to go from one state to another in the hot season, the Princes now came to him. After making their obligatory call on the Viceroy, they sought out his shop or an invitation to one of his soirées at Belvedere.
Looking out over the eternal snow of the Himalayas, the two-storey mansion was considered to be one of the most wonderful houses in India, lavishly furnished and filled with priceless ornaments. ‘Nothing outside the palace of a Native Prince could for a moment compare with it’, 16 wrote one admiring visitor. Another spoke of its being more richly appointed than the residences and palaces of the Viceroy, the Maharaja of Patiala and India’s richest ruler, the Nizam of Hyderabad. It had a vast garden with deodars, oaks, chestnuts and rhododendrons as well as a small pond. There were stables for his horses, the finest Arabs and small mountain ponies that were better suited to the steep paths that criss-crossed the hill station. There were also kennels for Jacob’s dogs.
A summons to Belvedere was as sought after as an invitation to the Viceregal Lodge. From the most menial servant of the Raj to the Viceroy, anybody who was anyone in Simla vied to attend his dinners, seances and magic shows. ‘The seances became a fashion, the “miracles” he performed the sole topic of conversation, not only in Simla but in many distant parts of India,’ wrote Frederick Heath, who had testimonials corroborating the integrity of his performances.17
Magic and superstition were at odds with notions of progress and the forces of science and technology in the Victorian age. The publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species had given birth to a new age of rationalism. But a strong undercurrent of mysticism had begun to invade this space in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A fascination with the occult filled a spiritual void. Stories of flying carpets, levitating fakirs, holy men who could die and come back to life, and of boys climbing ropes that rose mysteriously into the sky fired the Western imagination. Edward Lane’s translation of the Arabian Nights, which first appeared in 1838, introduced the public to jinns who could open up treasures, change shape, fly in the air, construct elixirs and unlock talismans. The tales took their readers to the Caliph’s voluptuous harem and secret chambers piled high with jewels and precious metals, and trinkets guarded by automatons that moved using quicksilver piped through tubes of copper, and sliced off the heads of thieves.
As a practitioner of the magic arts, purveyor of exotic treasures and source of inventions, Jacob tapped into this milieu. He sparred with the bulbous-eyed Russian mystic, Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, to determine who was the superior medium. He inspired occult thrillers and opened the public’s eyes to the magical pathways of India. ‘Jacob’s performances were but new mysteries in a land which will always be mysterious,’18 observed an associate.
By the time he had crossed paths with Kipling, Jacob was already being referred to as the ‘uncrowned king of Simla’. He was considered a philosopher, a font of wisdom on the political and the practical, a source for the latest gossip and strategic intelligence. He was the man to go to when seeking out the rarest treasures of the Orient, the finest jewellery, the most valuable gem stones.
He lived a life of unimaginable grandeur that was the envy of his contemporaries—a life far removed from the poverty and despair that had greeted him when he landed in Bombay a mere decade and a half earlier.
CHAPTER TWO
BLACK AMIDA
PROPELLED by the monsoon winds, the double-masted Arab dhow, its deck laden with bags of coffee, made its way slowly across the Gulf of Cambay. For a young boy of fifteen who had never been to sea, it had been a difficult journey. Alexander Jacob had talked his way on board as the dhow was preparing to leave Jeddah. Already overcrowded with cargo and crew, the captain reluctantly agreed to take him provided he worked for his passage. ‘As I had no experience of the sea, save in the caiques of the Golden Horn, you will readily conceive that the captain of the vessel had plenty of fault to find,’ Jacob recalled. ‘But my agility and quick comprehension stood me in good stead, and in a few days I had learned enough to haul on a rope or to reef the great lateen sails as well as any of them.’1
Jacob’s first glimpse of the country that would be his home for the rest of his life was of a low rocky coastline flanked by the solid green wall of the Western Ghats. A traveller writing in the Asiatic Journal described the scene as one of the ‘most splendid landscapes imaginable’. The setting of Bombay harbour was a ‘superb amphitheatre, whose wood-crowned heights and rocky terraces, bright promontories and gem-like islands, are reflected in the broad blue sea … A heavy line of hills forms a beautiful outline upon the bright and sunny sky; foliage of the richest hues clothing the sides and summits of these towering eminences, while below, the fortress, intermingled with fine trees, and the wharfs running out into the sea, present, altogether, an imposing spectacle, on which the eye delights to dwell.’2
When the boat berthed at Apollo Bunder, Jacob and his fellow crew members were immediately surrounded by dozens of half-naked coolies pressing forward to seize and convey whatever worldly goods they were carrying. The authors of a contemporary travel guide warned of these gangs of touts ‘who live by cheating and robbing new comers, as well as palkee-bearers, and shigram-wallahs, or cab-drivers’. New arrivals were urged to ignore them, walk straight to the first empty conveyance, jump in, and cry out to the driver ‘Pooch Ghur! Hotel!’3
Jacob, however, was soon left alone. Once the touts realized he had no money or possessions they moved on to more promising customers. ‘I had in all about three pence money in small copper coins, carefully hoarded against a rainy day. I could not speak a word of
the Indian dialects, still less of English, and I knew no one save the crew of the vessel I had come in, as poor as I, but saved from starvation by the slender pittance allowed them on land.’
In 1865, the year of Jacob’s arrival, the city was a dynamic and diverse trading centre of almost half a million inhabitants. Its markets were filled with spices, indigo, sandalwood and opium. Its jewellers traded in diamonds from Golconda, rubies from Ceylon and pearls from Hormuz. Banks, insurance firms, trading companies and shipping firms were setting up offices. When the American Civil War broke out in the 1860s, Lancashire turned to India for its cotton supplies, prompting a boom in exports and wealth.
To Jacob, however, Bombay was an unfamiliar and terrifying place, full of people speaking strange languages and dressed in costumes he had never seen. It was a city of perpetual immigration, attracting labourers, itinerant peddlers, traders, mendicants from as far away as Europe. The American journalist William Eleroy Curtis noted that, in Bombay, could be found ‘specimens of every race and nation of the East’.4 Jostling their way past Jacob through the crowded bazaars, were ‘Arabs from Muscat, Persians from the Gulf, Afghans from the Northern Frontier, black shaggy Biluchis, Negroes of Zanzibar, islanders from the Maldives and Laccadives, Malagashes, Malays, and Chinese throng and jostle with Parsees in their sloping hats, with Jews, Lascars, fishermen, Rajpoots, Fakirs, Europeans, Sepoys, and Sahibs.’
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 2