The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  Venereal disease notwithstanding, as the years passed, Clive achieved considerable martial distinction—battles were won in Arcot, Kaveripakkam, Arni and elsewhere that allowed the man, even in his thirties, a special kind of celebrity. He was embroiled in the politics of the Carnatic, just as he was involved in the training of Indian troops for Western-style military practice. He cultivated spies, including an ill-fated prostitute, and began, at last, to earn an income that allowed him to indulge his love for an elaborate wardrobe (on one occasion alone he ordered 200 shirts along with other items, insisting that they ‘must be of the best and finest you can get for love or money’). Marriage to a woman above his station followed, one who enjoyed being carried in palanquins and playing the harpsichord when she wasn’t handling an unhappy series of pregnancies. When he returned to India in 1756 after a brief stint at home, he was senior enough to enjoy a gun salute, his victory at Plassey thereafter only confirming his importance in the order of precedence the Company established in India.

  Laurels won here were not, however, the ones Clive wanted—India could be milked for cash, which like so many others he hoped, then, to invest in the pursuit of ambitions at home. By the time he went back in 1760, he had become enough of a personality to receive an audience with the king, and purchase more than one mansion for his use. But the hero of Plassey, despite his fame, was seen as a mere upstart, even if the Mughal Emperor titled him ‘Flower of the Empire’. As Horace Walpole sniggered, ‘General Clive is arrived, all over estates and diamonds. If a beggar asks charity, he says, “Friend, I have no small brilliants about me.”’ It was not an exaggeration. There is evidence that he purchased £25,000 worth of diamonds in Madras at one time, and remitted £180,000 home through the Dutch East India Company, £40,000 through his own English Company, besides a whole lot more with private bankers and friends. But new money gleamed a little too brightly, and there were quite a few men in London who lost no opportunity to look upon Clive and rub in their contempt with so many sniggers.

  In 1764, confronting internal politics in the Company (it hardly helped that the mercurial Clive referred once to the chairman as ‘this mushroom of a man’), he left for a third stint in India. To later biographers, this was a phase of great importance. As Lord Macaulay wrote, Bengal, which was seen by Company men simply as a land of endless riches to exploit, was placed on a sound administrative system, as Clive made ‘dauntless and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corruption’. Even as he conveniently overlooked his own corruption and avarice in the previous decade, he replaced ‘that gang of public robbers’ who governed the province for selfish gain with ‘a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by ability and diligence than by integrity, disinterestedness and public spirit’. The result was that while his name came to stand ‘high on the roll of conquerors’, it was also fit for another list—that ‘of those who have done and suffered much for the happiness of mankind.’ What the Indians thought of Macaulay’s generous estimation was, of course, irrelevant.

  His 1773 trial—provoked by parliamentary horror at the Company’s depredations, of which Clive was the principal mascot—saw the man defend himself vigorously. Thanks to his work, he had argued earlier, the Company ‘acquired an empire more extensive than any kingdom in Europe, France and Russia excepted’. They had ‘acquired a revenue of four millions sterling and a trade in proportion’. Now he reiterated that he ‘was never guilty of any acts of violence or oppression … such an idea never entered into my mind’. His defence was later reinforced by sympathetic minds like Macaulay. If at all Clive was cruel, this nineteenth-century imperialist wrote, it was because he knew ‘he had to deal with men destitute of what in Europe is called honour … men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, forgery, to compass their ends’. And so he had no option but to become ‘himself an Indian intriguer’. In other words, if there was a hint of evil in Clive and his designs, it was because he was in a land of evil, surrounded by men much worse. ‘There never, perhaps,’ concluded Macaulay, ‘existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.’ And as the man who fastened that yoke on Bengal and India, what Clive rendered was public service.

  In any case, the trial, which attracted a great deal of press, wound to an end and Clive was cleared soon enough. Peace and true respectability evaded him, however, for the rest of his lifetime. In 1774, a year after these embarrassing proceedings in parliament, he died suddenly, rumoured to have stuck a knife down his throat, though it may well have been an opium overdose. It was suicide, either way, and that ‘audacity of his spirit’ which so marked his youth had patently snapped, making way for something darker. In great secrecy, then, the man who inaugurated the Raj in India was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, his name associated forever since with greed, tragedy and scandal. And there his ghost would languish for generations before the Victorians resurrected his memory and invested it with respect. ‘Clive committed great faults,’ admitted Macaulay. ‘But his faults, when weighed against his merits … do not appear to us to deprive him of his right to an honourable place in the estimation of posterity.’ Of course, as usual, what the Indians thought of Clive hardly mattered.

  THE BLOODY MONSOON OF VELLORE

  On 17 July 1806, British authorities in colonial Madras rescinded a four-month-old order that had bathed the countryside in a monsoon of blood. A week earlier, soon after the moon rose on the night of 9 July, serving sepoys had mutinied in nearby Vellore. Over a hundred British officers were put to death, including the commander, as he emerged in his bedclothes to check what the noise was all about. The few Westerners who survived managed either by playing dead or hiding in a gatehouse. Even as a lone officer raced to Arcot for reinforcements, the mutineers forgot their principal purpose and succumbed to the attractions of plunder. When the Arcot troops arrived at eight o’clock, they discovered that rebels of this so-called first war of independence (long before the Great Rebellion of 1857) had forgotten to even lock the gates of the fort they had only hours before triumphantly ‘taken’.

  Retribution was swift—of the 1,500 Indian troops present, about 400 were killed immediately, some of them blown out of cannons, presumably to transmit the message far and wide. But the British themselves were terrified. Power in India was tenuously held to begin with, and if even their own troops could not be counted on, the Raj was on less than solid foundations. By the time news of the mutiny reached England, months had passed, and the horror of the Madras authorities was matched by dread in London at this ‘disastrous event’. A commission of enquiry had already been constituted. As one officer later said, ‘The natives of Hindostan are meek and submissive beyond any other example in national character.’ What then caused these spineless men to stand up to the white master? The answer, the officer offered, lay in an old saying: ‘If you prick them, they will bleed; if you insult them, they will revenge.’

  But the provocation was, on the face of it, bewildering—it was a simple matter of uniform. In March that year, the Madras authorities had issued new dress regulations for consistency. Beards were banned, and moustaches standardised. A new turban was designed, with a feather, a leather cockade and a flat top. Superficially, these were simple innovations, but, as the British discovered belatedly, in India costume had much to do with custom, and dress was not merely an issue of dressing up. Appearance signified caste, and in a veritable whirlpool of identities, sartorial conventions were a matter of honour. As the enquiry concluded, ‘Nothing could appear more trivial to the public interests than the length of the hair on the upper lip of a sepoy.’ But to the sepoy himself, ‘the shape and fashion of the whisker is a badge of his caste, and an article of his religion’.

  This ought not to have been a surprise to the East India Company. As soon as the new turban (which was especially resented for resembling European hats) was introduced, some soldiers had raised objections. For their pains, they were rewarded with 500–900 lashes. Som
e sensible commanding officers on the ground knew the risks—in Hyderabad, where rumour already presented Christians as requiring the heads of 100 natives to consecrate their churches, the officer in charge refused to execute the dress regulations. In Vellore, however, the orders were firmly enforced. The result was a conspiracy so outlandish in its initial rumblings that even when alerted on multiple occasions, the British pooh-poohed it instead of allaying the concerns that led, in the end, to tragedy and violence.

  As London put it, 1806 became the first example of ‘the Native troops rising upon the European, barbarously attacking them when defenceless and asleep, and massacreing [sic] them in cold blood’. Of course, admitting that this bloodbath was due to a misunderstanding about moustaches and turbans felt a little awkward, so a number of other instigations were paraded—there were arrears of pay, so there must have been resentment. Though there were no Christian missions nearby, missionary polemics must surely have provoked the sepoys, it was added. And most important of all, the real conspirators—despite lack of corresponding evidence—were the family of the dead, fearsome ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99), housed in Vellore fort.

  This theory conveniently suited an old British prejudice that the ‘main instrument of mischief were Mahomedans’—a point that would be made even more forcefully decades down the line, after the sensational events of 1857. Behind the smokescreen of offensive uniforms, the Muslim sepoys had wanted, the authorities claimed, to restore Tipu’s line to power. As in 1857, when the rebels would resurrect the emaciated Mughal emperor, in 1806, too, during the few hours Vellore was in their control, the soldiers had named Tipu’s son their leader. The wedding of Tipu’s daughter, Noor-al-Nissa, the previous day had allowed them to set the rebellion in motion behind the general noise and activity. An old flag of the Lion of Mysore (purchased, incidentally, from a Parsi merchant in the local market) was also unfurled that fateful night—all this construed as ‘proof’ that the Mysore exiles were architects of the uprising.

  As it happened, the Mysore party did have a role to play, but only insofar as stoking the fire in 1806 went—attendants in service with the princes had goaded already upset sepoys by calling them unmanly ‘topiwallas’ who had sacrificed their honour for firangi coins. The result was a combination of caste and religious pride, political vendetta and accumulated resentment against British haughtiness culminating in spectacular slaughter. Just deserts awaited: The Mysore men were packed into twelve ships and exported to Bengal, the women following by land in an arduous journey. Punishments were handed out to those mutineers who had not already been chopped to pieces. But even as the facade of control returned, the monsoon of 1806 in Vellore sent the first jolting intimation to the founders of the Raj that they were not, ultimately, welcome in India—and that what would become the jewel in the empire’s crown came soaked in an ocean of blood, and in ferocious anger.

  WILLIAM JONES INDIA’S BRIDGE TO THE WEST

  Not many in India today remember Sir William Jones, though at the time of his death in 1794, he enjoyed what a biographer calls ‘one of the most phenomenal reputations of all time’. To some he was Persian Jones, the translator of the Tariq-i-Nadiri , while others, after he founded the Asiatic Society in today’s Kolkata, called him, predictably, Asiatic Jones. To one not entirely enraptured crowd, he was Republican Jones, what with his ‘seditious, treasonable, and diabolical’ ideas about popular education and universal (male) suffrage. But as far as India was concerned, it was in his avatar as Oriental Jones that he became one of the sincerest interpreters of this land in the West. As Gentleman’s Magazine reported soon after his death, ‘Sir William Jones by unwearied industry, aided by superior genius, successfully explored the hidden sources of oriental science and literature and his attainments in this interesting branch of learning’ made him ‘the most eminent oriental scholar in this or perhaps any other age’.

  To be sure, Jones was not devoid of imperial prejudice. ‘I shall certainly not preach democracy to the Indians, who must and will,’ he argued, ‘be governed by absolute power.’ As a British judge, he scoffed at any political conception of Indianness; it was only India’s historical accomplishments he thought profoundly admirable, not its grimy, politically emasculated present. Like his contemporary, Warren Hastings, he agreed that it was essential that the British rule India, though this should be done, he argued, through India’s own laws and customs and not by engrafting a Western system in this eastern land. For all that, in the end, India came to mean more than just business to him. ‘I never was unhappy in England,’ he once wrote, ‘but I never was happy till I settled in India.’ Part of it, admittedly, had to do with the splendid £6,000 salary that had attracted him here in the first place—Jones calculated that a decade in India promised stately retirement when finally, unencumbered by financial distress, he could pursue assorted intellectual interests.

  This quest for financial stability was a consequence of Jones’s background. He was born in 1746 to the daughter of a cabinetmaker and a seventy-one-year-old mathematician, whose peers included Sir Isaac Newton. His father died but the cabinetmaker’s daughter gave him a good education—a worthwhile investment, given his prodigious appetite for learning. By thirteen, Jones was not only already familiar with Shakespeare but had also written his first poem, and by the time of his death knew, in varying degrees of fluency, a grand total of twenty-eight languages, starting with Greek, Latin, French and Italian. A desire to read the Bible in the original drew him to Hebrew, and an interest in Confucius led him to Chinese in due course. He thought Greek poetry ‘sublime’ but when he ‘tasted Arabic and Persian poetry’, his enthusiasm for Greek ‘began to dry up’. Incidentally, one of the languages he knew ‘least perfectly’ was his native Welsh.

  By his mid-twenties, Jones had authored several books and was recognised as an authority on the East—when the King of Denmark came on a visit to Britain, among those he specifically asked to meet was young William. But while accolades and a knighthood arrived in steady succession, the want of a dependable income brought inescapable pressures. Fresh out of his teens, he had served as tutor to the son of an English aristocrat, earning also some money working as a translator. But with the passage of years, and the creeping up of attendant pressures, demands for greater stability came to press against this Oxford man. ‘I was surrounded by friends, acquaintances and relatives who encouraged me to expel from my way of life … poetry and Asian literature.’ They wanted him to ‘become a barrister and be devoted to ambition’. He agreed, but managed to orient his legal interests towards the East, producing the forbiddingly named Mahomedan Law of Succession to the Property of Intestates .

  Before he was thirty, it was becoming clear that Jones was leaning towards republicanism. He was close to Benjamin Franklin, then living in Paris, and it was in his house that he composed a controversial pamphlet innocuously named The Principles of Government . Through an imagined dialogue between a scholar and a peasant, the latter is educated (somewhat paternally) about constitutionalism through relatable parallels and told that he too can participate in affairs of the nation. The result was that Jones’s publisher was sued for libel by the government. The scholar was not pushed into fear, though—where the first print was published anonymously, it was now printed again with his name clearly mentioned. Writing in 1782 to Franklin, Jones noted gloomily but not less idealistically that he had ‘no wish to grow old in England; for, believe me, I would rather be a peasant with freedom than a prince in an enslaved country’. Naturally, any political ambitions he had in Britain now floundered.

  It was in 1783, when not yet thirty-seven, that he came to India. He had applied for a post with the British Supreme Court in Calcutta as early as 1777, but his political leanings meant he was hardly in the good books of the government. Now, however, his name was confirmed—and this despite the scandal about his pamphlet—and so it was that Jones set out for India, aboard a frigate called Crocodile . But, in his typical fashion, he connected
his pursuit of money with a pursuit of intellectual stimulation also. He drew up a list of sixteen subjects, ranging from the Mughal and Maratha political systems to the ‘Music of the Eastern Nations’ and ‘Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery and Anatomy of the Indians’, to investigate. And it took only a year-long glance at India’s cultural riches, for him to constitute the Asiatic Society—the body that through the researches of a generation of Orientalists, reminded Indians of a figure we ourselves had forgotten: Emperor Ashoka.

  But what struck Jones with the greatest intensity was language. ‘Sanskrit,’ Jawaharlal Nehru would later write, ‘fascinated him … It was through his writings and translations that Europe first had a glimpse of some of the treasures of Sanskrit literature.’ It began with professional demands—Jones could interpret Islamic law without translators given his knowledge of Arabic and Persian, but Hindu codes of justice evaded him. To rectify this, a pandit was hired on a princely retainer of hundred rupees to give him lessons. Given his outcaste position, however, lessons with the brahmin had a prescribed protocol: they were conducted in a ‘pure’ room with white marble floors, cleaned every day with water from the Ganga, lest the pandit be defiled by his constant intercourse with a mlechcha . The student also had to sit for his lessons on an empty stomach, though occasionally a little tea could be consumed in the presence of the high-caste tutor. These efforts paid off and soon Jones built up a vocabulary of 10,000 words. And when brahmins in Benares refused to translate the Manusmriti for him, he simply produced his own The Ordinances of Manu, relied upon for generations thereafter as a classic.