City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  The entire archive had been rediscovered by Malcolm a few years earlier languishing in the Moniack cellar; it lay inside a trunk marked, in large letters:THE PAPERS IN THIS BOX

  ARE TO BE STORED AS CAREFULLY AS POSSIBLE.

  THEY ARE OF GREAT INTEREST.

  Beneath the letters lay the book subsequently known as the Fraser Album. The album contained a series of superb Company paintings - vignettes of early nineteenth-century Delhi life, and portraits of the Frasers’ staff, soldiers and friends. The pictures were drawn by Delhi artists to commissions from William and his elder brother James. Malcolm Fraser later sold most of these paintings at Sotheby‘s, and after their importance had become clear, the art historians Toby Falk and Mildred Archer had worked through much of the Moniack archive looking for material relating to the pictures. But as a historical source for Twilight Delhi the Moniack letters were still virgin material. I had spent three summer holidays in the house, yet it was only by an accident that I found the treasure trove that had been sitting all the time less than ten yards from my bedroom.

  That same afternoon I postponed my flight to India and got Malcolm’s permission to trawl methodically through his great-great-great-uncle’s letters. I spent the following fortnight cloistered in the Moniack library, holding in my hands letters written in the British Residency in Shahjehanabad at a time when Delhi was the Empire’s North-West Frontier - a remote and dangerous outpost, flying the only Union Jack between Bengal and the British Embassy in Moscow. The letters were all addressed to William’s father, Edward Satchwell Fraser. As I read, I pictured him sitting down to read them at the same old desk in the same dark Moniack library where I was sitting, 183 years later.

  In the late eighteenth century, Northern Scotland was still suffering from the pillage of the Highlands that followed the defeat of Bonny Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1745. Moniack lay only a few miles away from the site of the battle, and the Frasers had fought in it on the losing side. Their lands lay on poor and marshy ground (Moniack actually means ‘little bog’ in Gaelic). There was no prospect for industry in the area. Like many Scots landowners the Frasers found that if they were to pay off their debts and maintain themselves in their cold, echoing houses there was no alternative but to send the younger sons out to make their fortunes in the colonies.

  William Fraser’s grandfather, James Fraser, had worked in India as a young man and on his return had sat in the Moniack library writing the first history in English of the Persian marauder, Nadir Shah. Forty years later, as the debts at Moniack mounted, Edward Satchwell Fraser was forced to revive his father’s Indian connections. One by one William and his four brothers all received postings in the subcontinent; one by one they caught a ship to Edinburgh, where they had their portraits painted by Raeburn, before continuing their journey on to London and the waiting ship in East India Dock. Of the five who left for the subcontinent, only one ever made it back to Moniack.

  After leaving Calcutta in June 1805, William’s steamer up the Ganges finally terminated at Allahabad, a last British outpost. The remaining stretch of the journey to Delhi was overland through some 400 miles of the most anarchic country in India. ‘On the road I passed several parties of armed men whom I knew to be plunderers,’ William later wrote to his father. ‘I always passed any who I met at a very quick pace ... They generally keep about 100 yards [away] and fire with their matchlocks and are so expert that your only chance is in moving about to avoid their fire or riding straight upon them with your pistol. I talk of them when mounted; footmen robbers never show themselves but fire from some ambush.’

  Nights were worse. The servants were kept constantly on the alert until dawn for fear of losing both horses and baggage to footpads and thugs. It was a ragged and exhausted party which, several weeks later, entered the Turkman Gate of Shahjehanabad and headed for the Residency. William rode into the compound, mounted the steps, and breakfasted with Ochterlony, ‘six months and a day since I left Calcutta’.

  Delhi cannot have been very different from the grand but crumbling slum described by Forbes and Franklin; yet for all its decay the city soon cast its spell on William. Its remoteness must have been perfectly familiar to anyone brought up in eighteenth-century Inverness, while its literary and historical associations must have appealed to the prize-winning Orientalist. ‘My situation is as desirable as any one I could hold,’ William wrote in his first letter home, ‘nor should I care if I lived here during the whole period of my sojournment in India.’

  It was a prophetic letter. In the course of a career lasting thirty years, William refused all appointments which would take him away from the city. Like many other Britons after him, William had become completely hypnotized by the great capital.

  His early letters gave detailed descriptions of the court of Shah Alam and the palaces of the preceding dynasties which lay scattered among the ruins to the south of the city. William’s duties — attending the Mughal court, hearing petitions at the Residency, establishing the Delhi criminal courts - seem to have been flexible enough to allow him to pursue his growing interest in Delhi’s history.

  ‘The business of my situation generally takes up five hours [a day],’ he explained to his parents. ‘[Afterwards] I read and study with pleasure the [local] languages. They are the chief source of my amusement, [although] Delhi affords much [other] food besides. Learned natives there are a few, and [they] in poverty, but those I have met with are real treasures. I am also making a collection of good oriental manuscripts.’

  The miniatures William gathered in Delhi are probably the group now known as the Emperor’s (or Kevorkian) Album which today forms the core of the oriental manuscript collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The bound book which contained these miniatures was discovered in a Scottish antique shop in 1929 by Jack Rolfe, an American tourist. He bought the book for less than £100 and resold it in Sotheby’s a few months later for £10,500. The album is now recognized as one of the finest collections of Imperial Mughal manuscripts in existence and today each leaf from its folios would be worth at least a six-figure sum.

  Whether or not the Emperor’s Album is his collection, William’s artistic interests went far beyond the stockpiling of manuscripts. ‘I wish to ascertain historically,’ he wrote, ‘the account of every remarkable place or monument of antiquity, or building erected in commemoration of singular acts of whatever nature. The traditional accounts I receive from natives are generally absurd or contradictory. I must first know how they obtained credence, and then search for the origins of the story ...’

  In later years, few would deny that Fraser knew the people and country in and around Delhi better than any other Briton. According to the French botanist Victor Jacquemont, ‘his mode of life has made him more familiar, perhaps than any other European, with the customs and ideas of the native inhabitants. He has, I think, a real and profound understanding of their inner life.’ Even Fraser’s enemy, the resident Charles Metcalfe, admitted that William had no ‘difficulty dealing with the highest order of natives, with some of [whom] he has been more intimate than most Europeans.’

  Yet it was less his intellectual and linguistic gifts than his devil-may-care bravery which moulded William’s career. A few years after his arrival, Fraser was forced to abandon his sedentary pursuits in the city in favour of a nomadic life-style around its periphery. Since Mughal authority had collapsed, the hinterland of the capital had become the refuge of robbers and brigands who occupied the crumbling tombs to the south and the decaying Mughal gardens to the north. They made the city unsafe after dark and travel outside the walls impossible, even in broad daylight, without a large armed escort. Fraser had suffered from the brigands on his ride from Allahabad; now he was given the job of flushing them out from their nests and replacing their terror with his own.

  William raised and trained a force of irregular cavalry. There are several pictures of his men in the Fraser Album. They are shown both as recruits fresh from the villages with their nak
ed torsos and homespun dhotis and later as fully equipped cavalrymen in Fraser’s service. He dressed them not in contemporary Company red coats, but in a theatrical uniform of old-fashioned Napoleonic inspiration, with gleaming cavalry boots, brocaded doublets, and cummerbunds striped gold and scarlet; the uniform was topped with a tall brown busby. Strapped across the chest of each man is a silver plate bearing a hart’s head, the Fraser crest.

  Fraser’s force often faced serious opposition — squadrons of Mahratta cavalry were still at large in the Delhi plains - and soon William’s letters home had begun to assume a tone of chilling nonchalance. ‘I never saw a Mahratta yet whom I would dread to meet single handed,’ he wrote in June 1806:The other day I had an opportunity of seeing how they would fight. Two or three rebellious villages within the district of Dehli we were obliged to cut up, and besides storming the villages, we had to disperse parties [of Mahratta cavalry] who came to their assistance. They advance gradually, firing their matchlocks till within one hundred yards, when they sling them over their shoulder with a belt and take to the sword and spear. If you have a pistol the matter is easily settled, and you shoot them just when within the length of their spears.

  Although such skirmishing earned him ‘two fine sabre cuts on the arms, a wound in the back from a pike, and an arrow in the neck which almost killed him’ such warfare seems to have greatly excited William. According to his friend Jacquemont, ’to him the most keenly pleasurable emotion is that aroused by danger: such is the explanation of what people call his madness.‘ Certainly his letters of 1806-7 are full of remarks about his well-being and contentment : ’My health is robust and uninterruptedly good, which I owe to constant exercise and stout temperance. I seldom have but one meal in the day and never exceed two glasses of Madeira. For occasional recreation I keep horses & hawks and borrow an elephant when I wish to shoot.‘

  Fraser had taken on the customs and dress of the Indians from the very beginning of his residence in the subcontinent. An early picture shows him sitting in a long Indian robe, a sash around his waist, while on his head he sports a curious Scottish tam o‘shanter. One of his first notes home thanks his parents for a letter, using a turn of phrase that could rarely have been heard before on the Beauly Firth - ’to use a Persian hyperbole,‘ he wrote, ’was [your letter] divided into a thousand parts, my double tongued pen could not obey my heart in expressing and writing one of them.‘ But now, isolated in the wilds of Haryana, controlling an area the size of Wales with only his Mewatti bodyguards for company, Fraser began to ’go native’ with a vengeance.

  In eighteenth-century India such behaviour was the norm among the more intelligent and open-minded of the Company’s servants. But by 1810, the days of the Brahminized Englishmen had long passed and in the more severe and self-righteous atmosphere of nineteenth-century Calcutta such eccentricities had become far from fashionable. When Lady Nugent, the wife of the British Commander-in-Chief, visited Delhi, she was genuinely shocked to discover that Fraser had given up eating pork and beef and had grown a thick Rajput beard. She thought Fraser was as much ‘Hindoo as Christian’ and felt it necessary to remind him sharply ’of the religion [he] was brought up to‘.

  Rumours about William’s strange ways soon reached Bengal, where his younger brother Aleck was studying at Fort William College. ‘I have heard several funny stories of William’s whimsical disposition,’ Aleck wrote home towards the end of 1808. ‘In the district of Mewat [immediately west of Delhi], which he was stationed in, to civilize it, he built a fort and called it “Fraser Ghur” in which he maintained 1000 seypoys of his own raising and disciplining. There he lived like a Nawab, being [as] absolute in his domain as Bonaparte in France. [It is said that] long residence so distant from the principal European stations has made William half a Hindoostanee.’

  Later, when Aleck was sent to join his brother in Delhi, he found William unrecognizable: ‘His countenance is certainly materially altered. He is [now] iron in constitution and bodily force ... his chest is wonderfully broad and round, his limbs full and well-turned ...’ Nor was the change merely physical. At the time, Aleck’s letters home were full of cheerful remarks about how well he and his brother were getting on. There are only occasional hints that William had become ‘proud, fiery and impetuous’ and ’too fond of exposing himself to danger‘. Only much later, in the private confession that Aleck wrote as he was dying, did he tell the truth. William, he wrote, had become wild, manic and obsessive, a different man to the brother he had known in Scotland: ’He would not either talk, or shoot or read with me ... this hurt my pride so much that a considerable coldness took place between us.‘

  Elsewhere in his letters Aleck complains of William’s ‘excessive rashness’: ‘frequently he has ridden, unarmed saving a sword, into crowds of desperadoes whose only chance was to fight to the last - and this although he had plenty of soldiers with him,’ and also of his ‘too great attachment to, and trust in, the natives of this country; and a fondness for their customs’.

  Perceptions of India had changed dramatically in the few years that separated William’s and Aleck’s respective training in Calcutta, and on his arrival in Delhi, Aleck brought with him the new set of more imperious racial prejudices. From his point of view, William and his friend, Charles Seton, were both ‘romantically fond of pleasing the natives’ and he was ’offended by the concessions in respect, and almost servility’ that he was expected to pay to the Mughal princes. No less odd, to Aleck’s eyes, was the strange retinue with which his brother went about. It was very different from anything that had ever been seen in Inverness - and yet there were some lingering similarities. ‘He is surrounded by Goojurs,’ wrote Aleck,formerly Barbarians, now like [Scottish] Highlanders; independent to equals, fiery and impetuous, but faithful and obedient ... When Willie civilized the wild inhabitants of the region [around] Dehlie, he took hostages from the chief inhabitants of the most turbulent districts as security for the good conduct of the rest.

  The most ferocious have become the most faithful. These men - formerly robbers and perhaps murderers, certainly the relations of such - now sleep by our couches and would at any time risk their lives for us.

  Aleck went on to list William’s staff. Apart from the Mewatti bodyguards, there was a set of Muslim table servants, ten palanquin bearers (who also cleaned William’s shoes), four tent-men, a dog keeper, three water carriers, an elephant driver and his assistants, the cook and his staff, two washermen, two tailors, two errand boys and a barber; in addition there was a groom and a grass cutter attached to each of William’s five horses and seven camels. The total must have added up to about seventy household servants. William’s irregular cavalry may have numbered ten or twenty times this many again.

  One thing neither Aleck nor William wrote home about was the latter’s harem. According to Jacquemont, Fraser had ‘six or seven legitimate wives’ who all lived together ’some 50 leagues from Delhi and do as they like‘. His children were without number but were all ’Hindus and Muslims according to the religion and caste of their mamas and are shepherds, peasants, mountaineers etc, according to the occupation of their mother’s families.‘

  A picture of William’s chief wife survives in the Fraser Album. It shows a tall and exquisite Indian woman, dressed in a slight close-fitting bodice and a long pleated Rajasthani skirt. Her torso is swathed in a jamevar shawl, her hair is worn loose, and her arms are steeled with torcs and tribal bracelets. Her slippers have up-curled toes. Beside her stands a single boy, aged perhaps six years old. Although he is dressed in Mughal court pyjamas, there is a distinctly European look to his features. The inscription, in Persian, reads simply: ‘Amiban, a Jat woman of Rania, the chosen one of Fraser Sahib, whose delicate beauty was beyond compare ...’

  While William Fraser was touring the area around Delhi, the British Residency in Shahjehanabad was his base and headquarters. Here, on his return from his expeditions he would dine with the Resident, catch up on the political news and watch p
erformances by Delhi’s celebrated dancing girls. The building, I had been told, still survived in Old Delhi as a warehouse for the Archaeological Survey of India. One day in early December, as a foggy winter morning turned into an unexpectedly bright afternoon, Olivia and I decided to go out and see for ourselves what was left of the building.

  The Residency stands today in one of the most depressing and impoverished parts of Old Delhi. Even sixty years ago, Lothian Road had been a smart shopping area, but the flight of the middle class to Lutyens’s New Delhi had left the area to the cycle rickshaw men and the beggars. Now, while we wandered around trying to establish the whereabouts of the Residency, we passed on the pavement the sad detritus of Delhi’s development: huddled couples crouching on sackcloth beneath the railway arches; rag-pickers bringing in their bulging hessian bags of rubbish for weighing; long lines of donkey-jacketed cobblers and filthy roadside shoe-blacks.

  Amid the squalor, the old ochre-coloured mansion was immediately recognizable. It lay behind a high wall, surrounded by a windbreak of ancient neem and ashok trees. Its front was formed by a flat colonnade of Ionic pillars which supported a partly-collapsed architrave. Wickerwork slats were fitted between the pillars, and a small flight of steps led up, through a shady veranda, to the front door.

  Although the mansion has survived virtually in its entirety, it has fallen on hard times. Rubbish and dirt spilled into the Residency compound from the fly-blown streets outside. Scaffolding propped up one side of the main faqade. The space in front of the mansion - the place where Fraser’s troops would have paraded, where the Resident’s carriage would have jolted to a halt after audiences in the Red Fort - was left neglected by the civil servants who now occupied the building.