Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  The doorkeeper had noticed at once that Nigel was different.

  To begin with, he arrived by himself, on foot. Then he took his time to reach the shaded portal of the prayer hall. For long minutes he surveyed the facade from different vantage points around the forecourt fountain, squinting in the sun. After that he wandered along the arcade, examining the mosaic tiles, with their motif of vases with flowers on the spandrels of the arches.

  And then, finally standing at the entrance, he knelt to remove his shoes; in Egypt he had learned to mimic Muslim behavior. The doorkeeper stared:

  He was much surprised that I followed the usage of the Mohammedans. Before entering the house of prayer it is usual for them to remove their shoes, for which a species of cupboard is provided for orderly storage and retrieval. This, despite the contrary appearance in our own eyes, has nought to do with religious observance . . . [T]heir own Prophet prayed with his shoes on, and even recommended the practice, as it set his adherents apart from the Jews. Nowadays, with the tradition of fine silk carpets having since been established within their prayer halls, the congregation naturally takes care not to soil them. For this reason, they consign their footwear to the door porter for safekeeping. It is no more than good manners for the Christian to follow suit.

  In his stocking feet, Nigel crossed the threshold. Conscious of the doorkeeper’s gaze, he took care to enter with his right foot first. Again, it was only good manners—or so he supposed. He seems not to have known that it was etiquette recommended by the Prophet only to true believers. He was baffled by the sudden change in the demeanor of the taciturn porter, who leaped to his side with unsuspected grace, “giving voice to salutations in rapid local dialect.”

  When Nigel recognized his welcome as a coreligionist, he struggled to explain himself. But he lacked the vocabulary, and finally made the main point with earnest gestures. He drew a cross in the air, then made a “low salaam.” The doorkeeper retreated to his post, stroking his hennaed beard reflectively.

  From the outside, the Tara Masjid had summoned yet another memory of Venice. The bulb cupolas that surmounted its trio of domes faintly suggested the Byzantine roofline of the Basilica of Saint Mark. Padding into the prayer hall, he harbored no illusions that the interior would sustain the resemblance. Saint Mark’s was the most opulent church in Christendom, golden with mosaics and gleaming with treasure. He held out hope, though, that the mosque might prove worthy of comparison with a lesser church he admired in Venice, Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

  The Tara Masjid was no Miracoli. Inside the prayer hall, everything failed to impress. Instead of painstaking ceramic tile work, he found “broken bits of teacups, carelessly emplaced without symmetry or sense, as if their arrangement had depended on the whims of inattentive schoolboys.” One wall, entirely devoid of embellishment (save a thin coat of whitewash, badly applied), was visibly out of plumb. He was no engineer, but he recognized the frailty of the squinches supporting the domes. He was no tile setter, but he knew the missed trick in the mosaic stars overhead—they would have caught the light and seemed to twinkle if only the planes of their pieces had been carefully offset.

  Deeply disappointed, he pronounced himself surprised as well, “for the standard of Mohammedan structures is usually high.” His expectations, admittedly, were probably “over-coloured” by the reputation of the zamindar who endowed the mosque, who was “very rich, of that type of Indian who spares no expense in erecting monuments to his own good fortune.” Moreover, the Tara Masjid had been highly recommended to him by “two of our Native clerks, who are well educated by Asiatic standards and not, I should think, entirely without discernment.”

  He lingered inside, wondering. The place really was frightfully ill-made. Then it hit him: there were very good reasons—practical ones—for the sorry state of the Tara Masjid. Even in Dacca, depopulated as it was, laborers could always be found. The same could not be said for artisans, carpenters, and masons. Some, he presumed, had moved on to Calcutta, ever booming, ever building. Others would have grown old and died, without apprentices to follow in their trade. In a city with no buildings to erect, who would enter such a trade?

  The mosque was exactly what it resembled: the project of amateurs. Its claim to fame was that it was built at all; what enthused his clerks was the simple fact of its existence. They were as proud of their city and the glories of its past as their contemporaries in Venice, impoverished by foreign rule after a millennium of freedom. Whatever the defects of the Tara Masjid, he wrote, for natives it could only seem precious indeed. Like a leafy shoot taking root in waste ground, it symbolized renewal.

  He ought not to have sneered at the faulty stars in the vaults above. Viewed through the prism of Dacca’s recent history, they twinkled after all.

  “Crude as it was, the stellar canopy radiated Hope.”

  He stayed for a while, content with his surroundings, enjoying the “cool solemnity” that was typical of all the mosques he had visited. The same quality, he realized, characterized Santa Maria dei Miracoli, which pleased the eye with patterns of natural materials rather than figurative art.

  So there was a connection after all. Perhaps such an environment was even better suited to “religious musing” in the hectic East. The Muslims did well, it seemed to him, to rely on abstract ornament and calligraphic script as focal points for the gathered faithful:

  “In England, where life is good and the many prosper, no church is without its reminder of suffering in the form of the Cross, a reminder both necessary and beneficial. In India, where life is hard and the many starve, such are the circumstances of everyday life that suffering is not to be avoided. What is wanted is a refuge from its awful face.”

  Four months after his arrival in Dacca, Nigel stood in his stocking feet in the Tara Masjid, reborn as the rarest of his countrymen in India, a realist. Four months after he contrasted the downtrodden Venetians with the festive Bengalis, he could only lament their common poverty under foreign rule. Four months into his longed-for acquaintance with “the real India,” he knew its essentials all too well.

  Life was hard, and many starved.

  It was no exaggeration. Annual reports by the East India Company estimated that two-thirds of the Indian population was undernourished, with the percentage in Bengal rising to four-fifths. Forty-odd years into the nineteenth century, seven famines had led to a million and a half deaths. (Readers who noticed that the Company’s export of food grains from India to Britain continued even during famine years were left to draw their own conclusions about the practice.) It was commonly believed in England that Indians had lived in a state of perpetual want for millennia. But accounts by European travelers of Indian life prior to colonization suggested otherwise. J. B. Tavernier’s Les Six Voyages—avidly read by Nigel—chronicled the abundance of foodstuffs found in even the smallest villages during the mid-seventeenth century. Tavernier’s contemporary Niccolò Manucci, a Venetian, reported of Bengal that “all things are in great plenty here, fruits, pulse, grain, muslins, cloths of gold and silk,” and declared it the equal of Egypt—a judgment later disputed by a Frenchman, François Bernier:

  “The knowledge I have acquired of Bengal in two visits inclines me to believe that it is richer than Egypt. It exports in abundance cottons and silks, rice, sugar, and butter. It produces amply for its own consumption of wheat, vegetables, grains, fowls, ducks and geese. It has immense herds of pigs and flocks of sheep and goats. Fish of every kind it has in profusion.”

  Times had changed. With its peasantry enslaved by the zamindars and its economy destroyed so that Lancashire’s might thrive, Bengal was a tragedy.

  Nigel didn’t say so, not in so many words, not to his family. The truth he shared with them was sunny, even though it shone upon a devastated land. Hope was the beauty in the imperfect mosaics of the Tara Masjid, and hope sprang eternal.

  The truth he spared them was a wintry one. He could see for himself that British “help” in Bengal had succeeded only
in making most people poorer.

  He took off his shoes, he started looking around, and entered uncharted territory for a sahib. Not for the last time in India, he stepped entirely out of his sturdy English self and saw the opposite of what was there before he set his Englishness aside.

  9

  * * *

  An Asiatic Rome

  NIGEL RETURNED TO Calcutta two months later, in September 1843. He expected to be posted shortly to a humbler locale. Nearly all fledgling civil servants received appointments to the hinterlands of British territory, where they served as underlings to collectors, judges, and magistrates. Settled at remote stations with only a handful of European colleagues, under skies too hot to be blue, they saw to the payments of taxes and land rents and administered justice, exercising authority over districts that in size and population dwarfed the largest English counties. For the most part, they followed an effortless path to promotion as their superiors retired. (Or succumbed—by the end of British rule, two million Europeans lay buried on the subcontinent, in more than thirteen hundred cemeteries.) The more they distinguished themselves—by resisting, principally, the temptation to ease their exile with drink and dissipation—the likelier the trajectory of their careers would one day return them to the concentrated wealth and power of the capital.

  When he learned of his assignment instead to a plum job at Government House, in the Accountant General’s Office, he wrote to his parents that he could scarcely believe his good fortune. He assured them that “many” benefits would accrue to him by remaining in “the Asiatic Rome,” without elaborating on what they were. But one of his contemporaries, Fanny Parkes, the wife of a junior official in charge of ice making in Allahabad, would sum them up in her Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, published in 1850:

  “The advantages of a residence in Calcutta are these: you are under the eye of the Government, not likely to be overlooked, and are ready for any appointment falling vacant; you get the latest news from England, and have the best medical attendance.”

  In the stratified society of colonial India, the unlikelihood of being overlooked was a pearl without price. The European population was divided into three classes. The first, covenanted servants, comprised the civil and military officers, typically graduates of Haileybury or its sister college, Addiscombe Military Seminary, for candidates seeking commissions in the Company army. In the second, commonly called “commercial men,” were the managers of the large trading houses and financial agencies established by British merchants and banks in the aftermath of the Company’s withdrawal from trade. Members of the third (and, by 1840, the most numerous) class, the uncovenanted, included clerks in the private agency houses, assistants to the clerks in government offices, tradesmen, and various others, ranging from itinerant merchant seamen to missionaries.

  With rare exceptions, uncovenanted Europeans were denied entrée to functions at Government House, which set the controlling precedent for all British India. This effectively placed them on the same social footing as natives. For the others, society revolved around activities and organizations that demarcated the ruling elite and fostered a sense of community within it. It was a closed society, in which everybody knew everybody else and all were conscious that making the right impression constituted an investment in one’s future prospects in India. And no stage on the subcontinent came close to Calcutta’s as a showcase for a turn in the spotlight.

  As in England, blood sports were the first resort of young gentlemen with an eye on impressing their elders. Nigel found little to recommend in the popular pursuit of “pig sticking.” But he shot snipe in the bush across the Hooghly, and parrots in the jungle that crowded its waters farther upstream. Upon first payment of his salary, he subscribed to the Calcutta Hunt, founded in 1774, whose kennels were replenished annually with thirty pairs of hounds imported from England. Standing in for the English fox as the object of the chase was the native jackal, larger in size but equally speedy. And, despite initial doubts about his dexterity with a five-iron, Nigel began to patronize the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the world’s oldest outside Britain. Since its members were notorious for spending more time over drinks at the “19th hole” than on the links themselves, it was probably no exaggeration when he assured his parents that his outings there were “always jolly.”

  About his attention to the non-sporting side of the colonial social calendar—the balls and fancy-dress parties of the Calcutta “season”—he had less to say. For many they were occasions to be endured, not enjoyed. These insular affairs were little more than ill-disguised auctions of what a subaltern in the Company army called the “marketable commodity” of matrimony, where a young officer might “pick up as partner some artless creature . . . who at the conclusion of the dance receive[d] from her haughty maternal” the stern admonition that the poor fellow was only an ensign, not yet even passed in the languages.

  “The young man gets a withering scowl from a yellow-faced, over-dressed, spiteful, dowager,” reported the subaltern, “and, rushing out of the first door, registers a hasty vow never to enter into female society again—a vow too frequently kept.”

  Nigel—passed in the languages and appointed to Government House—was a better catch. He dutifully presented himself that fall at the round of balls that commenced with the arrival of the “Fishing Fleet,” the influx of unmarried daughters who joined their families in India for the Calcutta “season” in hopes of finding a husband. (At season’s end, those who met with disappointment went back to England, where they were unkindly known as the “Returned Empties.”) But his letters hinted that he was simply putting in appearances. His tenancy at the Writers Building was coming to an end, and he seemed to be too worried about the cost of setting up a household to even contemplate marriage. Rents in Calcutta compared unfavorably with those in most parts of England, and the likely annual outlay for something suitable to his position, without a stick of furniture, was considerable.

  Then there were the premiums to be paid for such necessities as glassware, imported from England at a markup of two or three hundred percent, and candles. The price of beeswax—scarce because Indians harbored ethical scruples about ending so many lives for the purpose of robbing honeycombs—was the despair of even the wealthiest households, but cheaper tallow tapers were too odoriferous for all but the poorest Europeans to abide.

  Even if Nigel could afford to take a wife, he was unimpressed by the spectacle of institutionalized spouse hunting. At best, it struck him as rather comical. In November, after accepting an invitation to the station ball at Dum Dum, a cantonment for the artillery corps eight miles outside Calcutta, he fled the ballroom for the adjacent library within minutes. The proceedings, which he later recalled as “frantic,” were worthy of a Restoration playwright. For all that, though, it was too “close and hot” to properly enjoy the show. His description jibed with Miss Emma Roberts’ account of a ball there that fall—possibly the same one. Thirty or forty young ladies, thronged by “all the beaux who have any hope of being noticed by them,” were obliged by custom to dance with each and every one of them.

  Nigel discovered that he was not the first wallflower to desert the ballroom for the reading room that evening. Lieutenant M—— and Captain Lieutenant C—— were both stationed at Barrackpore, another eight miles upriver, awaiting staff appointments after completing two years of service with their regiments of the Bengal Native Infantry. In the meantime, they were “chumming it,” sharing a bungalow and household expenses. When C—— rose from his armchair to shake Nigel’s hand, he laid aside a volume of Persian poetry. M—— , it turned out, was keen on Mughal architecture. Their shared interests overwhelmed their habitual English reserve, and the three men chatted like old friends for hours. When they parted, Nigel promised to call on the officers at Barrackpore, where the governor general kept a country residence with a fine park and a famous menagerie, noted for its tigers and cheetahs.

  Though no record survives of that visi
t, it must have gone well. Nigel returned to Barrackpore several times afterwards, riding with M—— and C—— in the broken wooded country beyond the cantonment boundaries and joining them for meals at their bungalow or the officers’ mess. Their friendship cut across the prevailing Company grain, which separated British civilians from British troops as a matter of policy. Fort William, in Calcutta proper, was garrisoned by a single regiment, with the forces actually considered necessary for the city’s defense stationed well outside its boundaries.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Nigel found himself wishing M—— and C—— Godspeed on their posting to Ferozepore, a thousand miles distant on the far western frontier of British India. Ferozepore, where Lord Ellenborough had personally greeted the returning “Army of Retribution” after its rampage through Afghanistan with an honor guard of 250 decorated elephants, was everything Calcutta was not. Rustic, tribal, and practically lawless, it was situated, as the young John Nicholson wrote home upon his posting there in 1840, in “a perfect wilderness: there is not a tree or a blade of grass within miles of us; and as to the tigers, there are two or three killed in the neighbouring jungle every day.”

  M—— and C—— were thrilled. Action in the field was the surest means of advancement in their military careers, and they had yet to see any. The previous fall, Ellenborough had promised that henceforth the government of India would devote all its efforts to “the establishment and maintenance of general peace.” In a magniloquent proclamation, he ordered a commemorative medal struck with the legend PAX ASIAE RESTITUTA (“Peace Restored to Asia”), and ambitious officers like M—— and C—— had to wonder if commands under fire might ever come their way.