Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  Less than six months later, the governor lifted their spirits with another proclamation, annexing the province of Sindh. A prosperous country south of Ferozepore, Sindh was ruled by independent emirs who cherished their control of the Indus River, the main artery to the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. Ellenborough’s proclamation meant war, and M—— and C—— were off to fight it.

  Nigel, for his part, was right where he needed to be to make his own career: ensconced in the Asiatic Rome. At the beginning of 1844, about the same time he said his goodbyes in Barrackpore, he received the surest confirmation possible that his star was on the rise. Bastions of the colonial elite though they were, Calcutta’s Hunt Club, Golf Club, and Jockey Club lacked the cachet of the gentlemen’s social clubs that were emerging as the pinnacle of refinement in the empire’s first cities. Patterned after the venerable upper-class institutions of White’s and Boodle’s, in the City of London, they aimed to reproduce the comfort and ambience of “home” in an alien land. Preeminent in Calcutta was the Bengal Club, founded in 1827 and well on its way to securing the reputation it would enjoy until the end of British rule as the premier haunt of the most pukka of India’s sahibs.

  Exclusivity, needless to say, was the watchword. When one of Nigel’s superiors offered to sponsor his candidacy for election, he rushed to put pen to paper, detailing for his parents the charms of the Hepplewhite, Chippendale, and Louis Quinze that graced the handsome rooms on Chowringhee Road. There was no finer setting in Calcutta, he wrote, for taking meals, reading newspapers, and playing cards or billiards. What appealed to him most about the Bengal Club, though, was the serviced apartments made available to members. Nearly as worrisome to him as the expense of renting and furnishing a house of his own, he confided, was the prospect of hiring and managing the necessary retinue of servants:

  I shall have to have a khansama, or butler, who does the marketing and supervises the kitchen, holding first precedence above the others, whose company is astonishingly numerous. To begin with there is the cook. Secondly, the khidmutgar, the boy who lays the table and waits upon it during meals. Thirdly, the musalchee, corresponding to the scullion of an English pantry. Having seen to the culinary necessaries, I must then employ a principal house servant or bearer, the sirdar, who acts as valet and prepares the evening lights, among other household duties. Since there cannot be a principal in this country without a subordinate, the sirdar naturally requires a bearer’s mate to assist him. Next must be engaged the essential trio of bheesty, or water bearer, mihtur, or sweeper, and dhobee, or washerman. Owing to the strenuous exertions of the latter, and the damages occasioned by his zeal, it is necessary to maintain a durzee or tailor on the premises as well, although I am assured that a half-time appointment should suffice in service to a bachelor. In this census I omit the outdoor servants . . . Does it surprise that one of my age and inexperience in all things domestic should be daunted by the prospect of administering such a surfeit of Native labour, cheap though it may be?

  In the long term, he calculated, he would save on living expenses by residing at the Bengal Club, where all customary services were included in the rent. The short term was complicated by the club’s requirement that its annual subscription fee be paid in one lump sum. Fortunately, he had saved enough during his sojourn in Dacca that he could just scrape by.

  “I am inclined to suffer the leanness of two or three months as the price of resolving my future in a manner that frees me from further anxiety about the arrangements of everyday life—anxiety which I fear would only assume another form upon establishment of an independent household.”

  His relief was palpable, and so, unusually for Nigel, was a note of self-satisfaction. “My thoughts, when I am sitting alone here in the evening,” he concluded, “now turn to the diversions of life, a pleasing realm to contemplate.”

  The message to Coventry was clear: The uncertainties and awkwardness of griffinhood were behind him. Now in the full tide of his life in India, he was swimming well.

  Three months later, however, seemingly out of the blue and much to the bemusement of his parents, he requested and received a transfer to Patna. Three hundred miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, it offered none of the capital’s advantages. But it was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

  10

  * * *

  Patna

  1975

  THE HUMIDITY IN Patna rose from the plain in extravagant whiffs, binding the damp gray ground to the billowing clouds that smothered the sky. The driver of the minibus who dropped us off at the Ganges Guest House didn’t know if Patna was the hottest place in India, but he was sure that it was one of the wettest. The abundance of moisture was a terrifying thing. It drenched you from within and deceived you from without, suppressing the spectrum and dissolving all you saw into a uniform, enigmatic gray. It might have been the color of the Ganges, which was more like a sea than a river there—three miles wide, swift and deep and dense with silt. But what was the color of the Ganges but the color of the mud-hut villages that ranged to the horizon, villages in their turn the color of the footpaths that linked them, and the fields that fed them, and the canals that watered the fields, opening into buffalo ponds with their sheen of tarnished pewter in the saturated light?

  The monotony seemed infinite. It almost was. There was drier country upstream. There was lusher country down. But the differences were as subtle as the rise of the Delhi Ridge that divides the basins of the Indus and the Ganges, without visible interruption of the one great plain. For the schoolgirl transported by tornado to its western marches in Pakistan, there would be no Dorothy moment, no not-in-Bihar-anymore. There would be the same heat, oppressive to the point of prostration, the same turbid water flowing everywhere, and the air would sweat and weep upon the rice fields and canals and villages and shriveled trees, endlessly repeating in their sameness and tameness.

  A wilder prospect greeted Gautama Buddha when he passed through Patna on his way to Kusinara in the last year of his life. Nigel Halleck saw it in the twenty-third year of his, before the internal combustion engine added its fumes to the sepia shroud of the atmosphere. In 1845, he wrote home to Coventry of crystalline fall mornings when the mist burned off the fields and the air turned holy blue, like the Virgin’s cloak in Titian’s Annunciation, and the only clouds were high and distant, knife-prowed and noble, a great white fleet afloat upon the northern sky.

  But those were no clouds. Those were the earthly abodes of the gods. Those were the Great Himalaya Range.

  Two months out of Istanbul, we were finally nearing Nepal. The distance by road to Kathmandu was less than 250 miles. If we were lucky, we would be there in a couple of days. Patna was actually a bit out of our way. But it was Nigel’s last address in India, and my mother thought it was one of the places where he might have been buried. Perhaps the Nepalese authorities had shipped his remains back to British territory; he was, after all, an Englishman. I had talked my classmate into making the detour with the promise of paying a visit to a local landmark, described by the contemporary British writer and diplomat Compton Mackenzie in a memoir of his postwar visit to India, just prior to Independence:

  “Just before we reached Patna, General Stable pointed out Mahatma Gandhi’s little house beside the river, that little house from which such an influence upon the course of history had emanated. The Mahatma himself was not there at the time.”

  “Gandhi’s house?” repeated the desk clerk when I asked for directions the next morning. “She lives in Delhi, you know.”

  Within a fortnight, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would suspend civil liberties, then rule by decree for the next twenty-one months.

  “Mahatma Gandhi,” I said.

  “Ah, Gandhiji!” he said. “Of course.”

  About the house, though, he knew nothing. In fact, he had never heard of it. Gandhi had visited Patna during the campaign for independence, there was an ashram where he rallied his followers, there might be one of hi
s spinning wheels in the museum . . .

  Perhaps there had been such a house, he said. But he thought it was probably gone.

  I showed him the passage in Mackenzie’s My Life and Times. He pondered it.

  Finally he asked when the author had visited the city.

  “Nineteen forty-seven.”

  He nodded.

  That would explain it.

  It was the time of Partition, he said gravely.

  A time of much confusion.

  And violence, he might have added. A million people dead. Millions more homeless. The British quit India, and acceded to the creation of Pakistan, with what came to be seen by many as indecent haste, almost criminal carelessness.

  “About Gandhiji’s house I think these Englishmen were mistaken.”

  There was, at any rate, a European cemetery. The desk clerk was delighted to tell me how to get there. He was genuinely sorry about the apocryphal abode of the mahatma.

  I went alone. A Toyota taxi took me to a quarter called Gulzarbagh. The driver stopped where a lofty dome rose above the Ionic portico of a Roman Catholic church. He directed my attention to a pair of iron gates, double-padlocked, and the thicket of tapering obelisks within.

  Two boys materialized beside me as I paid the fare. They gave me to understand that I must summon the chowkidar, or gatekeeper. I paid them half a rupee apiece to find him, and they ran off giggling. The driver told me not to worry.

  “They are good boys.”

  It was a long wait. I leaned against the gates and tried to sketch the scene in my notebook. Compton Mackenzie described Patna as “seething.” If there was a better word for the enervating heat, I couldn’t think of it. No more than a minute passed before my clothes were drenched with sweat. The point of my pen started going through the paper.

  What a place to live, I thought.

  What a place to die.

  The chowkidar was old and bent. He snapped open the padlocks, and I followed him through the gates. The grounds were the size of a softball diamond, surrounded by a lichen-stained wall topped with fangs of broken bottle glass. There might have been fifty monuments and markers, a dozen-odd tombs.

  They were not maintained to the standard of the Cornwallis memorial in Ghazipur. The inscriptions wanted cleaning. But I could read them.

  There was Thomas Amphlet and William Eaton and Marmaduke Collins.

  John Kinch, John Howit, John Johnston.

  Henry Harling, Henry Hutchinson, William Crawford.

  The sun beat down. Every name on every gravestone was that of an adult male who died in October 1763.

  Epidemic?

  Massacre?

  The chowkidar spoke no English.

  Nigel wasn’t there.

  11

  * * *

  A Folly

  PERHAPS IT WAS Barrackpore that changed Nigel’s mind about casting his lot with the colonial elite in Calcutta. Perhaps the craving for adventure of the young officers he befriended there proved contagious. Like their counterparts in the U.S. Cavalry during the same era, they were called to the taming of a Wild West. Once they brought Sindh to heel, they were sure to march on to the princely state of Gwalior, where a mutinous army, an eight-year-old maharaja, and factions in the Council of Ministers combined to make the country ripe for British intervention. Perhaps he could not resist the temptation to be three hundred miles closer to the action.

  Or perhaps he simply remained a creature of romantic impulse, beguiled by the charm of points unknown—the oasis of Siwa, the Venice of the East, the oldest inhabited city in the world. Perhaps the Nigel who set out by barge up the Ganges for Patna in April 1844 was consciously turning his back on the Nigel who was wont to satisfy his appetite for the “diversions of life” by rising at dawn for horse races on the Maidan and running down jackals with pedigreed hounds. Patna, he wrote in one of his last letters from Calcutta, was a rare and special place.

  Its history was glorious—Gautama Buddha himself had prophesied the city’s great future, even as he predicted its eventual ruin. When the Greek ambassador to the court of the emperor Chandragupta Maurya arrived there in the fourth century B.C., he was amazed. Even the splendor of the Persian capital at Susa, wrote Megasthenes, did not compare with Patna. The city stretched nine or ten miles along the banks of the Ganges. Palaces and pleasure gardens lined the river frontage. Under Maurya’s command were more than four hundred thousand men, with three thousand war elephants, and His Imperial Majesty traveled in state with a bodyguard of female warriors, Indian Amazons loyal only to him.

  If Megasthenes is to be trusted, Patna—then called Pataliputra—was the greatest city in the world, capital of an empire stretching from the Bay of Bengal to Afghanistan. For a millennium it held sway over South Asia. After the Maurya kings came the Shungas, after the Shungas the Guptas, after the Guptas the Palas. And then came the ruin foreseen by the Buddha, again and again and again.

  Ruin by flood. Ruin by fire. Ruin by feud. Ruin so complete, Nigel discovered to his dismay after he arrived, that it left no ruins. All that survived of imperial Patna, he learned, was “a pillar somewhere.”

  There were no temples or mosques of any importance.

  No splendid Mughal monuments.

  He was told that the want of stone in the vicinity prevented their construction. He was told that the only building material thereabouts was earth, so impregnated with saltpeter that bricks began to crumble as soon as they were formed. And he was told that Patna proper was so unsuited for habitation—so filthy and disorderly—that no Europeans had lived there for at least a generation.

  They lived, exclusively, in the outlying civil station, with its oval parade ground and leafy, reverential hush. In leaving Calcutta, Nigel discovered, he had traded the insular for the hermetic.

  “The new arrival in the capital is pressed for a personal accounting of the various affairs of the day, and must respond as best he can to feminine curiosity about the latest in fashionable attire,” he wrote in what was probably his first letter from Patna. “The new man here is subject to no such interrogation. The world outside the Station seems so distant as to be unworthy of sustained attention, or at any rate the appearance of energetic interest.”

  Any undue expenditure of energy amounted to a local taboo. Card parties—nightly amusements for his set in Calcutta—were maligned for running too long and too late to be countenanced by the man who valued his health. Upon dining at the home of the collector, he found that even after-dinner conversation was judged too taxing for prolonged indulgence. The company rose as one as the table was cleared, repaired to the cool air of a terrace to smoke in silence, and departed for their bungalows soon afterwards, with perfunctory expressions of gratitude. Host and guests were home in bed before eleven o’clock, he marveled, and that on a Saturday!

  For several weeks after his arrival, he tried to enlist one of his colleagues in the audit division of the revenue office to join him in ascending the beehive-shaped structure that loomed above the treetops on the edge of the station. It was only a short walk, and the view from the top was said to be the best in the district. On the clearest days could be seen the icy heights of the Himalayas, two hundred miles distant. But nobody wanted to go. Finally, on a sultry Sunday morning in May, he set out by himself, shielded from the sun by a sola topee, the cloth-covered helmet that was destined to be immortalized by Hollywood heroes from Errol Flynn to Harrison Ford.

  For ten or fifteen minutes he strolled past whitewashed bungalows housing civil servants like himself, shaded by toddy palms and neem trees. Each had its lush back garden and its broad veranda, furnished with reclining chairs whose arms extended to provide a footrest. Bent over one of these “planter’s long-sleevers” stood a turbaned manservant, shaving a sleepy Englishman. Even enlisted men in the Company army employed Indians to shave them in their barracks bunks. Nigel, however, preferred solitude during his morning toilet, and shaved himself.

  The Golghar was four hundred feet around
and a hundred feet high. Its design was patterned after the mound-like structures raised by Buddhists to house relics of the Enlightened One. Four portals at the base of the dome marked the cardinal directions. Passageways tunneled from each, through walls twelve feet thick, to massive doors that opened on the granary chamber. Affixed to the doors were commemorative plaques that recounted the story of the granary’s construction.

  The unlikely architect was Captain John Garstin, an engineer with the East India Company. He was sent to Patna in the aftermath of a famine that lasted from 1769 to 1773 and killed nearly ten million people in the lower Gangetic Plain. He conceived and built the Golghar to store 140,000 tons of grain—not for the local populace, but for the Company army. For efficiency in filling it, he designed two spiral staircases that climbed opposite sides of the dome and converged at the opening on top. Porters would carry grain bags up the shallow steps of one flight, empty them, then descend the steeper steps of the other to collect their next load.

  Nigel started up. Adjoining the ascending stairs at regular intervals were broad resting platforms. He ignored the first, stopped briefly at the second, and lingered at the third, panting in the oven-like heat reflected off the stucco and brick. A hundred yards away churned the Ganges. He wondered if there might be a breeze off the water when he reached the top.

  No such luck. Nor were the mountains visible in the haze. Thirsty and a little dizzy, hand cupped over the brim of his headwear to cut the glare, he searched out the local landmarks—such as they were, for the only imposing structure anywhere near Patna was the Golghar itself. Close by to the west, the square house built by Captain Garstin turned its back to the river. To the north there was nothing but the water’s muddy margin, which lacked even bathing steps; certain stretches of the Ganges, he was given to understand, were less copiously endowed with sanctity than others. Eastward, tangential to the parade ground, ranged the neat grid of bungalows, overlooked from a slight, almost imperceptible rise by the collectorate and the two- and three-story houses of government officials—the commercial resident, the district judge, the various revenue officers, the civil surgeon.