Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  I know, I said.

  But the Englishman—he died there?

  What was his name?

  He had no idea.

  But yes, he died there, a long time ago.

  He said that upkeep of the chautara was among the couple’s duties, so they were mindful of the story, which they had heard from the previous caretaker.

  And there was a remembrance, with English writing.

  The first photograph he passed me was an image of the shrine itself, a bas-relief, black with antiquity, worn almost smooth from devotion, depicting the scene played out in that spot by a Buddha of the past, feeding his own arm to the starving cubs of a tigress killed by a hunter.

  The second showed the chautara from a distance, built up around the massive trunk of the grand old tree that shaded it. The third was a close-up of two roots of the tree, exposed beneath the platform, with a star-shaped mosaic tile inset between them. It was chipped and weathered, and at first I discerned no English in the stylized calligraphy. It took a while to puzzle out what remained legible:

  stars of tears . . .

  night remains dark . . .

  shining stars . . .

  It seemed to be a fragment of a poem.

  “I know this poem,” I said.

  I couldn’t place it, though.

  There was something about the tile, too.

  It looked foreign—and not just the lettering. You saw faience mosaic like that on the Mughal monuments of India and Pakistan. You saw it on the mosques and tombs and madrassas of Iran and Afghanistan. You didn’t see it in Nepal, which in those days qualified as the world’s only Hindu kingdom. When I lived in Kathmandu, I had been told that the only Muslims in the city had been imported from India to serve as butchers.

  It looked foreign, but also familiar. Star-shaped mosaic tiles like that were unusual, but I was sure that I had seen one before.

  It would take some time to remember where.

  EVEN AS I dodged cycle rickshaws and cow patties after leaving the Unity that day, wondering if the memorial could be Nigel’s, I saw how susceptible the story was to reversal. How readily, in retelling over the years, the tigress killed by the hunter became the hunter killed by the tigress. No surprise there. By then I had learned enough about Nigel’s life in India to doubt the particulars of most of the stories about him. But it always seemed clear to me that something definite was responsible for his exile.

  Something had to be. He had gone East at twenty—the same age as me. He was the dutiful son of a respectable family in provincial England who assured his parents after he arrived in Calcutta that he would keep his distance from the alluring, beguiling, enveloping East. He would confine his circle of acquaintance to gentlemen like himself, and, whatever the obstacles posed by the climate and his official responsibilities, he would read a chapter from the Holy Bible every day. Ten years later, he was happily ensconced as the permanent houseguest of a highborn Hindu in a kingdom where a young girl was worshiped as a living goddess, and each October, on a date determined by the phase of the moon, the streets ran ankle-deep with blood from buffalo, goats, pigeons, and ducks, sacrificed by the hundreds of thousands to propitiate Kali, “the black one.”

  Even if Namobuddha answered the question of Nigel’s death, what brought him to Nepal in the first place—and kept him there—remained a mystery. My struggle to solve it became this book. Nigel dominates the stage, with a supporting cast worthy of Shakespeare. There is the fugitive queen mother of the boy king of the Sikhs, described by another Englishman who knew her as “a strange blend of the prostitute, the tigress, and Machiavelli’s Prince.” There is a dispossessed Afghan prince, whose father poisoned his grandfather and maintained a pride of lions to which he fed his enemies alive. There is the maharaja of Nepal, a cavalry officer who came to power by way of imprisoning the king and slaughtering the aristocracy, then held on to it by making nice to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.

  And then there are the British. Before his break with the East India Company, Nigel cast his professional lot with a cadre of officials whose enlightened approach to governance went against the imperial grain. Some of their names endure today, on plinths of heroic statuary in England and chiseled into monuments astride the Khyber Pass. Men such as Henry Lawrence and John Nicholson are counted among the greats of British India. Yet Nigel went on to abandon them, just as their policies began to pay off.

  The first great question, then, is why Nigel turned his back on the empire, and his story begins with the man who forced it on his countrymen to begin with, whether they wanted it or not.

  PART I

  1

  * * *

  An Empire

  AT THE DAWN of the nineteenth century, in the second year of his reign over more of humanity than any Englishman had ever ruled before him, Richard Wellesley decided to found a school for imperialists. It was the forerunner of the institution that prepared Nigel for his career in India.

  None of Wellesley’s predecessors as governors general of India would have thought of such a thing. They contented themselves with shoring up “John Company’s” trade monopolies in tea and silk and opium—attaining sovereignty over Bengal and the Carnatic region, surrounding Madras, through smooth talk, bribery, and, when all else failed, force of arms. For forty years, since the Company’s army defeated the troops of the last nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey, its territorial holdings had fluctuated. But the trend, when Wellesley took up residence at Government House in Calcutta in 1798, was toward contraction. It seemed likely that the British footprint in India would be reduced to the environs of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.

  This prospect delighted the Company’s Court of Directors. They had always seen their business as business, not empire building. Looming over them when they met round a horseshoe table at their headquarters in the City of London was an ornate marble chimneypiece adorned with a bas-relief panel, Britannia Receiving the Riches of the East. Yet territorial conquest had brought the Company to the verge of bankruptcy. A loan of £1.5 million from the Treasury kept it afloat, but by no means would it suffice to finance further military adventure. Before Wellesley set sail for India, he was told in no uncertain terms that he must hew most strictly to a policy of non-intervention.

  Wellesley, a great-great-great-grandfather of Elizabeth II whose portrait hangs today in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, had other ideas. With the tacit support of Henry Dundas, war secretary under Prime Minister William Pitt, his goal was nothing less than subjection of the entire subcontinent. It was a daunting task, to be sure, one that had proved the undoing of no less a personage than Alexander the Great. But Wellesley seems never to have doubted that he was up to it. He was a haughty Old Etonian whose excessive vanity caused him to wear his medals and decorations even in bed.

  History, moreover, proved that unification of India into one state was possible. Chandragupta Maurya, a native of Patna on the river Ganges, had managed it in 322 B.C., founding an empire that lasted for five hundred years and extended beyond the Indus to encompass much of what is now Afghanistan and southeast Iran. A millennium and change later, a Turko-Mongol named Babur—who claimed descent from Genghis Khan on his father’s side and Tamerlane on his mother’s—swept down from Central Asia to pick up the pieces; though his Mughal Empire had largely disintegrated by 1750, it lived on in the vicinity of Delhi under an emperor looking for British protection to preserve his dynasty.

  Less than two years after Wellesley’s arrival, he was well on his way to emulating his imperial predecessors. He had already waged three wars on his own initiative, destroying the last pockets of French influence in Mysore and Hyderabad. Most of the subcontinent south of the fifteenth parallel was in British hands, along with Bengal, the lower Ganges, and Bombay.

  Much of the rest was ripe for the taking. It was largely a matter of securing the loyalty of native princes, who were promised protection from their enemies. Once British troops were stationed near their seats of pow
er, Wellesley bullied the nobles into adopting policies of provincial administration dictated by Calcutta. The East India Company became ruler in all but name.

  As word of his conquests filtered back to London, the outraged directors issued orders forbidding further expansion. Since these directives were transmitted by sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope and took as long as four months to reach Government House, they tended to arrive in the afterglow of highly successful campaigns, and Wellesley felt safe in dismissing them as moot. With his brother Arthur—later created Duke of Wellington after commanding the armies that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815—he plotted the subjugation of the Maratha Confederacy, a network of Hindu chiefs who had taken advantage of Mughal weakness to gain control of a wide swath of central India, from near Goa, on the Arabian Sea, to Delhi, on the Gangetic Plain. At the same time, in an end run around the Court of Directors, he dispatched another brother, Henry, to London to explain his policies and lobby Parliament for a free hand in pursuing them.

  For the first time at Westminster, the British presence in India was referred to as “the empire.” Among those who liked the sound of it was Prime Minister Pitt, who had come to power in the aftermath of the American War of Independence and saw an opportunity to offset the loss of the thirteen colonies. Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, also voiced support for Wellesley. But the Court of Directors had friends in high places, too. One was the Prince of Wales, certain to be empowered sooner or later as prince regent, owing to the mental incapacity of his father, George III. He endorsed the Company’s position that Wellesley’s ambitions could not be realized without the astronomical expense of maintaining what would necessarily constitute the world’s largest standing army. Given Bonaparte’s seizure of power in France in November 1799, the future king located the more pressing need for military expenditure closer to home.

  On paper, Henry Wellesley’s mission failed. As a matter of form, it was bound to—under the terms of the Company’s charter, the governor general answered to the Court of Directors, not Parliament. The directors dispatched to Calcutta what Richard Wellesley bitterly termed “a peremptory order to reduce the military strength of the empire.” Complaining that he had authorized the buildup of the Company’s army only “after consulting all the most experienced officers in India,” he threatened to resign.

  Pure bluster. He had made an empire; he had no intention of letting it go. His Indian campaigns ultimately would annex more territory than all of Napoleon’s conquests in Europe. Wellesley was no merchant. He was an aristocrat, and money barely interested him at all. What he wanted was power—for himself and for Britain.

  Acquiring and maintaining power over so many by so few required impressive shows of force. But Wellesley understood the need for effective civil administration as the everyday instrument of power’s exercise. As long as the British saw themselves primarily as traders, they had little vested interest in the functioning of law courts or the assessment and collection of taxes or the suppression of religious practices that created unrest in a multi-ethnic society. Once they made the transition to rulers, those things mattered. After deeming “mercantile knowledge” an unnecessary qualification for Company service, Wellesley outlined the enormity of the task ahead:

  “To dispense justice to millions of people of various languages, manners, usages, and religions; to administer a vast and complicated system of revenue throughout districts equal in extent to some of the most considerable kingdoms in Europe; to maintain civil order in one of the most populous and litigious regions of the world; to discharge the functions of magistrates, judges, ambassadors, and governors of provinces; these are now the duties of the larger proportion of the civil servants of the Company.”

  Wellesley despised Indians. At his direction, natives were excluded for the first time from all social occasions at Government House. But his ill favor extended beyond the color bar to encompass most of his own countrymen in India. In an era when the regular British army was aptly described by his brother Arthur as “the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink,” the East India Company’s army was even worse. Its motley ranks harbored criminals, deserters, and various other scoundrels who felt obliged to put Blighty behind them sooner rather than later, when they might well end up at the penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia.

  Though the Company’s public servants cut more respectable figures, Wellesley found them wanting in both caliber and manners. To his wife, Hyacinthe, who remained in England, he wrote that “the men are stupid, are coxcombs, are uneducated; the women are bitches, are badly dressed, are dull.” Their society, he complained, was so “vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar, and stupid as to be disgusting and intolerable; especially the ladies, not one of whom, by-the-bye, is even decently good-looking.”

  Wellesley always had an eye for the ladies. He lived for years in Paris with Hyacinthe, an actress at the Palais Royal, with whom he fathered five children before they married in 1794. It was an indiscretion that his friends worried might ruin his career, and upon his appointment as governor they urged him to leave his family behind to spare himself embarrassment in Calcutta. To the dismay of his wife, who was scorned by London society, he took their advice. But he regretted his decision almost as soon as he arrived. Without the companionship of his beloved, he wrote, he feared he lacked the “fortitude to remain here long enough to accomplish all my grand financial, political, military, naval, commercial, architectural, [and] judicial reforms.”

  But Wellesley persevered, bucked up by the presence of his brothers and, in the matter of public administration, inspired by the example of Britain’s greatest enemy. During his romantic idyll, he had acquainted himself with the French approach to conducting the nation’s affairs abroad, which upheld fluency in foreign tongues as a qualification for diplomats and colonial officials. The “distinguished encouragement” of the French government to the study of Eastern languages in particular led one contemporary observer to note that Paris “abounds in proficiency in Persian, Arabic, Turkish and even Sanskrit,” while London was said “not to contain an Englishman capable of carrying on conversation, much less correspondence, in Arabic or Turkish, and the Mameluke Chief, who was lately [t]here, sought in vain for an assistant to write his letters to the other chiefs.”

  Owing to his recent conquests, Wellesley felt the time was ripe for the British to emulate their rivals across the Channel. He announced that he meant to ensure a regular supply of qualified civil servants by training them at a residential college in Calcutta. Everyone nominated to the Company’s service would spend three years there, completing a systematic course of studies in Indian languages, history, and law. The wheat would be winnowed from the chaff through rigorous examinations, administered twice yearly. At the end of the third year, successful candidates would be awarded degrees and certificates of proficiency. They would then be competitively assigned to positions on the basis of demonstrated merit.

  It was a far cry from the status quo, under which novices appointed as “Writers”—Company parlance for clerks—took up their duties without undergoing a period of probation or training. Some were as young as fifteen when they arrived in India. Without informing the Company directors of his plans, Wellesley chartered the College of Fort William in July 1800. In a symbolic nod to the imperial responsibilities that compelled him to act, he backdated its establishment to May 4, the first anniversary of the Battle of Seringapatam, which had delivered the kingdom of Mysore into British hands after he took personal charge of planning a breach in the city’s walls.

  In a gesture that signaled a further change in the colonial mind-set, he appointed Anglican clergymen to oversee the college as provost and vice provost. Ability, he decreed, would not suffice to qualify candidates for official positions. The religious and moral character of every prospect would be ascertained before he could be declared eligible for service or fit for higher office.

  The idea that the East India Company ought to involve itself in maintaining a
nd upholding Christianity had never before gained traction among the men it sent to India. Piety was not their strong suit. In the “presidency” ports of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, they wandered the streets, from punch house—“punch,” derived from the Urdu panch (“five”), referred to the concoction’s number of ingredients—to whorehouse, drinking themselves silly in the former and contracting in the latter a severe venereal disease called atashak, which caused a monumental swelling of the scrotum and testicles. Job Charnock, the seventeenth-century trader who founded Calcutta, took a Hindu widow as his common-law wife; “but instead of converting her to Christianity,” wrote an Englishman who knew him, “she made him a Proselyte to Paganism.” After she died, Charnock “kept the anniversary Day of her Death by sacrificing a Cock on her Tomb, after the Pagan Manner.” Then there was W. C. Blaquiere, the “startlingly effeminate” police magistrate of Calcutta in the late eighteenth century, a noted cross-dresser who took every opportunity to don female attire in public.

  Wellesley’s decision to call time on this rollicking state of affairs, though nominally based on reverence for the Anglican Communion, was compelled more than anything by his abiding fear of the Gallic menace. To counteract the corrosive concepts of liberté, égalité, fraternité, he prescribed for Company employees a strong dose of religion. All administrators, professors, and lecturers at the new college were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the king and declare that they would not “teach or maintain publicly or privately any doctrines or opinions contrary to the Christian religion, or the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England, as by law established.” By functioning as a moral and spiritual bulwark as well as an educational institution, the College of Fort William would thus amount, wrote Wellesley, to “the best security” that could be provided for “the stability of the British power in India.”