Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  One afternoon, after random shots were fired on a British cavalry column from a fortified village near Ghazni, on the road to Kabul, a company of foot soldiers was sent to investigate; as a result, noted one of them in his diary, about a hundred of the village’s men were “butchered.” Only the evacuation of Ghazni—Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city—prevented the “Army of Retribution” from putting its population to the sword. Its commanding general, Brigadier William Nott, instead consulted his engineer officer and directed him to destroy “the city of Ghuznee with its citadel and the whole of its works.”

  Spared from the flames was a famous piece of loot. Eight hundred years before, an Afghan force led by Mahmud of Ghazni had plundered and desecrated the Hindu temple of Somnath, on the southwest coast of India. Tradition held that the invaders had removed the ornate sandalwood gates of the shrine and carried them back to Ghazni, where they were hung on Mahmud’s tomb. Nott had recovered the gates, acting on orders from Ellenborough, who conceived of their triumphant return to India as a potent symbol for the Hindu majority of the defeat of the Afghan Muslims. When word reached the governor that they had been secured, he issued instructions that the gates be paraded through the cities of the Punjab in a special ceremonial car and brought by an honor guard to the old Mughal capital of Delhi. There, he announced in a proclamation to “all the Princes and Chiefs and the People of India,” he would personally restore them to the keeping of the Indians themselves:

  “My brethren and friends, our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnath in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Mahmood looks on the ruins of Guzni. The insult of eight hundred years is avenged. To you . . . I shall commit this glorious trophy of successful warfare. You will yourselves, with all honour, transmit these gates of sandal wood to the restored temple of Somnath.”

  J—— could scarcely contain his fury. What was one to make of such a proclamation? Did it not elevate “Brahminical superstition” to a status denied time and again by the East India Company to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

  Nigel knew that it was no use defending the Company’s record in religious matters to someone like J—— . Though the law forbidding missionary work had changed, the Court of Directors still believed that preaching to poor Indians that the meek should inherit the earth was tantamount to sedition. Missionaries were subject to onerous limits on the scope of their activities—religious discussions with native women, for example, were forbidden—and their freedom to travel was severely restricted. J—— had waited eighteen months for permission to visit Dacca, even though he had no plans to proselytize there.

  “I could only convey to him that criticism of the Governor’s regard for the relics retrieved from Afghanistan was general in Calcutta, where I heard it expressed in the strongest terms and lately with increasing frequency,” Nigel wrote. “Residing in Benares himself, he was naturally ill-acquainted with the sentiments of the capital, and glad to know that they accorded with his own.”

  Half the truth, Nigel seems to have decided, was better than none. The East India Company’s rank and file had indeed questioned the wisdom of Ellenborough’s proclamation. What concerned them, though, was not his insult to Christianity but his disregard for the feelings of Muslims. Everyone knew that British control of the subcontinent depended on alliances with the Muslim princely states, whose rulers revered Mahmud of Ghazni as the founder of their power in India. They were bound to take offense at the affront to his memory. Among the Hindu princes, who were minor figures by comparison, there was general bewilderment. Almost to a man, they first learned of the “insult of eight hundred years” when the governor general proclaimed it avenged.

  (The whole affair turned farcical when Hindu scholars called in to examine the gates rejected the idea that they were the originals taken from Somnath. As it turned out, they were not even made of sandalwood. It subsequently emerged that the mullahs of Ghazni had clung to the fiction as a means of extracting offerings from the faithful who visited the old conqueror’s tomb. “The guardians of the tomb wept bitterly,” wrote Major Henry Rawlinson, an Orientalist who had supervised the gates’ removal in Afghanistan even as he concluded from their inscriptions that they were modern forgeries. “But the sensation was less than what might have been expected.”)

  Nigel, for his part, was less interested in the controversy than in the relics themselves, which he hoped to one day see for himself. He had never paid much attention to news of military adventure. But the uproar over the Gates of Somnath had drawn him into the reports filed by correspondents who met the avenging army on its triumphant return.

  One was the saga of two hundred Europeans taken hostage at the outset of the fateful retreat from Kabul, who overthrew their captors in short order and turned their prison fortress in the mountain wilderness of the Hindu Kush into a defensive position. Within days the former prisoners had recruited an armed group of Afghans, run up a Union flag, and imposed a system of taxation on the local community. When they received word that a detachment of British troops had reached the vicinity, they marched out smartly to meet their would-be rescuers. All Calcutta delighted in the tale of their pluck, but what fascinated Nigel was passing mention of the backdrop to their valor: colossal stone Buddhas carved into alcoves in the mountainside.

  Another was a darker story out of Kohistan, a district northwest of Kabul whose inhabitants were thought to have played a part in fomenting the uprising that forced the British to abandon the Afghan capital. Buried in the account of its righteous pillage was an aside about a scouting party who found themselves in a forested enclave of the Kafir, pagan tribesmen with European features. It seemed probable that their ancestors were deserters from another army that had once passed through those parts, led by Alexander.

  The news did more than pique Nigel’s curiosity about what lay beyond the boundaries of British jurisdiction: It also changed his thinking about the Company’s army. To his surprise, there were learned men among the rough and ready soldiery. One was a player in the saga of the spurious gates, Henry Rawlinson. While helping reorganize the Persian army in the 1830s, he had located in the mountains between Hamadan and Baghdad ancient cuneiform inscriptions, which he went on to decipher after copying them at great risk to his life. It was a breakthrough that led to important insights into Babylonian and Assyrian languages and culture. Another officer, Lieutenant Robert Carey, was a botanist. Still another, Major Warwick Ball, was trained in archaeology.

  It impressed Nigel that even as such men went about their military duties, they took scholarly stock of their exotic surroundings. War was destructive, he wrote. Yet warriors could also be agents for the advancement of knowledge: “Without war we should know almost nothing of Afghanistan, or suspect the existence there of that worth knowing.”

  The two army officers on board the mail boat were cut from different cloth than the likes of Henry Rawlinson. Though their regiment had seen action in Afghanistan, they had little to say about the country or its customs. They were en route to the princely state of Cooch Behar, an enclave south of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. There they hoped to bag their share of big game while stepping up the pace of native recruitment.

  Their principal contribution to Nigel’s personal store of knowledge was the revelation that a group of tigers was called an “ambush.” But he enjoyed their company, and relished the novelty of talking “mostly of India and Indians” with other Englishmen. It was a welcome change from Calcutta, where conversation revolved around England and the race meetings of the local Jockey Club, held at dawn to avoid the heat. Even the lectures and debates that Nigel attended were confined to such Occidental topics as iron suspension bridges, antique musketry, and the merits of meteorology—the last a protracted affair at Metcalfe Hall that left him wondering whether the venue had been selected on account of its architecture, borrowed from the Athenian Tower of the Winds.

  On their third day out of Calcutta, they left the dark, primeval world of the Su
ndarbans behind. The jungle thinned into isolated stands of mangrove on sandbars surrounded by mud flats, and the first mate pointed out a species of smooth-coated otter domesticated by fishermen and used to drive fish into their nets.

  Fishermen themselves were nowhere to be seen, even as signs of habitation appeared on lush Bhola Island, where the route veered northward up the Buriganga River. Dacca was just a hundred miles away. But crocodiles seemingly outnumbered people, and the island’s paddy fields turned out to be abandoned.

  Nigel remembered Sagar Island, at the mouth of the Hooghly, and asked if the islanders had been flooded out.

  No, said the first mate.

  They went away.

  Went where? Nigel wondered. Most Indians lived out their lives within a few miles of their birthplace. The rigid social structure discouraged mobility of any sort.

  To other lands, said the boatman.

  All those lands were the zamindar’s.

  The zamindar decided.

  The mail boat turned up the Buriganga. Dolphins leaped from the mottled brown water. They were not the storied pink variety of the Indus and the upper Ganges. But they were nacreous and lovely in the low-angle light of late afternoon.

  In Nigel’s letter home about hiring a munshi, he had explained to his parents that zamindars were the hereditary tax collectors of the Mughal Empire, “who have always held rank in society but have only come to prosper through acting in concert with our larger interests.” But he failed to elaborate on how that prosperity had come about. Under the Permanent Settlement of 1793, promulgated by Charles Cornwallis, zamindars were transformed into British-style landlords, and the vast territories from which they collected revenue became their private estates. With a stroke of his pen, Cornwallis reduced the entire peasantry of Bengal to tenants with no enumerated rights, not even of occupancy to the land they cultivated.

  Nor did Nigel specify just what those larger interests might be. The avowed purpose of the settlement was to fix land tax revenues in perpetuity. But its unspoken strategic object was the creation of a new propertied class that would be both loyal to and dependent on British rule.

  The effect, for the dispossessed, was something close to slavery. Crop failures forced cultivators to borrow at usurious rates from moneylenders, often the zamindars themselves. When they failed to meet the terms of repayment, they became bonded laborers for the zamindars. Many proved unable to work off the compounding interest of their debt, let alone the principal, a circumstance that justified the servitude of their children to the zamindar after the death of the initial borrower.

  It is unclear how much Nigel then understood about the effects of the Permanent Settlement. But a year had passed since he hired the munshi, and he would have known at least a little more about the zamindars. They were objects of ridicule in Calcutta society, which reserved its most withering scorn for the pretensions of the native parvenus. In the munshi himself he would have recognized another stereotype: the Bengali babu. The more powerful the British became, the more they relied upon the urbane, educated Indians of the emerging babu class. But the more the British relied upon the babu, the more they pretended that the babu was not to be relied upon at all.

  All his knowledge of India was filtered through the conventional wisdom of Calcutta. It was a self-absorbed teenager of a city, obsessed with the dazzle of its own reflection in the gleaming windows of Chowringhee mansions. The zamindars were next to invisible; only their vulgar display was likely to intrude upon the field of view. Babus were seen for the most part as figures of fun. Even of the natives with the closest ties to the British, he knew almost nothing.

  But that was about to change. Every churn of the paddle wheel closed the distance to a pair of Indias. One was the “real India” that Nigel longed to see. The other was the British India that he was forced to see, by the ghost city of Dacca.

  8

  * * *

  A Mosque

  WHEN NIGEL DEBARKED in Dacca in February 1843, its population numbered around thirty thousand. Less than a century before, after the British deposed the nawab of Bengal, as many as a million people lived there. A contemporary account described the city as “extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London.” It owed its prosperity to India’s status as the world’s main producer of cotton textiles, with the export trade centered in Dacca. No printed cotton could compare to the poetically named textiles of the city, called shabnam and abrawan, after morning dew and flowing water. Those muslins, stretched on the grass and drenched with dew, become invisible due to their fragile transparency. Their perfection was prized by the Roman emperors, who paid fabulous sums to procure them. A millennium later, they were among the wares first brought to England by the East India Company. But by the 1840s it was Britain that dominated global textile production, exporting even to Dacca. The Company, through interference and regulation, had systematically destroyed Bengal’s textile industry.

  To observers in England, the need for such measures had been clear enough. Without them, wrote Horace Wilson in his History of British India, “the mills of Paisley and Manchester would have been stopped in their outset, and could scarcely have been again set in motion, even by the power of steam. They were created by the sacrifice of Indian manufacturers.”

  The extent of the sacrifice became evident to Nigel only gradually. At first he persisted in seeing Dacca through the romantic lens of its reputed likeness to Venice. The physical resemblance, he learned to his dismay, depended on the seasonal flooding of the principal streets, still months in the future. There was some consolation, though, in the city’s frontage on the Buriganga. Stately buildings rose directly from its banks. The water reflected their picturesque decay in a manner he found “decidedly Venetian,” at once melancholy and charming.

  When he learned of a local ritual called bera bhashan, he discerned another parallel with the Most Serene Republic on the Adriatic. Every year after the rains, residents of Dacca sent rafts made with palm, plantain, and banana leaves out upon the Buriganga, to be carried out to sea and placate water spirits. It was comparable, enthused Nigel in a letter home, to the old Venetian ceremony on the feast day of the Ascension, when the doge embarked on his gilded Bucintoro galley to reaffirm the city’s marriage with the sea by tossing a ring into the Adriatic.

  It was an uncommon colonial who was capable of the imaginative leap that linked the humble rafts of the Buriganga with the majestic Bucintoro, processing down the Grand Canal. But in painting the larger picture, Nigel remained an Englishman of his time and place, supremely confident of the advantages of British rule:

  “In Venice this colourful pageant of a thousand years’ standing is now but a memory, lost to the strictures of Buonaparte. More happily for the populace of Bengal, their own rites of propitiation continue as before, with our full sanction in the lands under our control. Would be that the Corsican had extended to his foreign subjects the tolerance for tradition that we gladly show our own!”

  Nigel’s letters from Dacca say almost nothing about his professional or social life there. Unusually for an Englishman in the provinces, he lived and worked in the old central city. (To better ensure the separation of the rulers from the ruled, the British had taken to establishing civil and military cantonments on the periphery of urban areas.) His lodgings, which he expected to occupy for no more than six months before returning to Calcutta, were close to the quarter called Armanitola, which took its name from the Armenians who pioneered the jute trade, settled there now for a dozen generations. The commanding steeple of their Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection punctuated a skyline that was famed throughout South Asia long before the first rude huts of Calcutta rose upon the malodorous banks of the Hooghly.

  The most ancient landmark, a Hindu temple, Nigel found fascinating, if only for its ugliness. He thought it deserved the dilapidation into which it had fallen after India’s conquest by Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. To that “happy subjugation,” he wrote, Dacca owed its legac
y of splendid architecture, and much of its visible charm. The Mughal artisans, with their flair for proportion and line, transformed the city. The facades of their prayer walls, the domes of their prayer halls, the cool geometry of tile mosaic, and the rush and ripple of sinuous script—all brought serenity and order to the “fearful hotch-potch” of the full-throated, full-blooded East.

  Probably because Nigel was based in Old Dacca, it took him longer to notice the effects of the more recent subjugation by his own countrymen. But as his tours of the Mughal monuments took him farther from the city center, he realized that Dacca’s uncommon serenity owed less to architectural harmony than he had supposed. Entire quarters, he discovered, were overgrown and abandoned. Shocked by the silence, he traveled streets devoid of traffic, destitute of livestock, bereft of playing children. He passed deserted public fountains for bathing and laundering, slimed with algae.

  When he wrote of Dacca’s depopulation, he implied that the city had simply been eclipsed by Calcutta as the commercial and political capital of Bengal. Only in a passing reference to the decline of the beautiful Dacca muslins did he allude to the recent loss of the city’s main industry. (Their very fineness worked against them, he lamented, “in our robust Mechanical Age.”) But his detailed account of a visit to a mosque four months after he took up his post revealed that his understanding was deeper, and shadowed by a nascent unease.

  With its three petite domes and thirty feet of frontage, the Tara Masjid was far from grandiose. Nor was it venerable—it was, in fact, the newest mosque in Dacca. The decor, however, was unique. Inlaid star patterns formed from broken pieces of china dappled the domes with a blue firmament, attracting those few Europeans who ventured out to “do the mosques.” Foreign visitors typically arrived in groups of three or four, disgorged from horse-drawn carriages. They marched purposefully through the courtyard, cast sidelong glances at the shoe rack in the entrance arcade, and pressed coins upon the doorkeeper in extravagant baksheesh as they swept across the threshold.