Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  Beyond these areas again were the stables, barns and coach houses which together with the servants’ quarters and elephant houses formed a small village of their own. In addition, I was to discover as time went on that this village included workshops for carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and tinsmiths engaged on work for the indigo factory and the estate, and that Hassanganj was almost totally self-sufficient where both supplies and services were concerned.

  So much I discovered during my first few days, though the world beyond the high mud wall of the park remained a mystery. It was enough, at that time, for me to wander through the gardens and park in the mellow sun of the winter’s afternoons and reflect on the man who had conceived the idea of Hassanganj and then brought it to fruition over many years and with much toil. Everything about the place spoke of the energy, intelligence and inventiveness of old Adam Erskine. Often, as we sat in the long drawing-room before dinner, I would glance up at his portrait and think, ‘I know now why you were so uncomfortable in your finery. You had too many things going on in your mind, too many plans and ideas, ever to be happy dressed up like a dandy in a ladies’ drawing-room. I can see you better, Mr Erskine, tough as a navvy, your unremarkable face shining with health and good spirits, clad in sensible clothes, working out your active, productive destiny here in this strange land with the utmost satisfaction. I believe, Mr Erskine, that you lived and died that rare, rare thing—a happy man!’ And the ruddy face with the cocked eyebrow seemed to smile a little more broadly.

  Of all our party, Charles seemed the least content with Hassanganj. Comfort is the easiest thing in the world to become accustomed to, so he had soon given up muttering about the ‘vulgar luxury’ of our surroundings. Mr Erskine provided him with a horse, a groom and a shikari or gun-boy, and he spent a large part of each day shooting. But this could not occupy his entire time, and when in the house he was bored and often ill-tempered. One afternoon I realized why. He was not seeing enough of his brother; not being given an opportunity to know him better or to take his interests to heart as his mother had exhorted him to do.

  ‘I say, Oliver,’ he said one day at tiffin, ‘would it be possible for me to accompany you sometimes when you ride on your rounds to the villages and the factory and so on? Be deuced pleased to have something to do, and see how you manage things out here.’

  Mr Erskine regarded his brother silently for a moment, leaning back comfortably in his chair.

  ‘Why?’

  Charles flushed at the tone of the question.

  ‘As I said, I would like to know how you go about administering this place, what sort of problems you face, how you contrive to solve them, and so on. Your system here must be very different to anything I’m accustomed to at home.’

  ‘No doubt!’

  ‘For instance—the factory. I’ve never even seen indigo grown, let alone processed. Could I not have a look around the factory to begin with?’

  ‘Certainly—if you wish it. Benarsi Das will take you over tomorrow, after Miss Hewitt’s lesson.’

  ‘I … I didn’t mean just a guided tour. Is there not anything useful I could do—to assist you, I mean?’

  ‘Scarcely, my dear Charles! I use only the language of the country—or rather the languages. I believe I am right in assuming that you are not acquainted with Urdu, nor interested enough to learn it, as Miss Hewitt here is?’

  ‘Oh! I thought perhaps—well—what about accounting?’

  ‘Also done entirely in Urdu.’

  ‘I see.’

  Charles returned to his plate with a crestfallen air.

  ‘However,’ Mr Erskine continued after a pause, ‘when I am visiting any point of interest, you may certainly accompany me. My rounds at the moment are purely routine. Dull. But in the New Year I will be going up to the saw-mills and collecting outlying rents. You may find those expeditions entertaining, and are welcome to come along. Provided you are prepared to ride thirty or forty miles a day and don’t mind sleeping in a tent in the cold. And it will be cold, I can promise you!’

  And that was the best that Charles could do for himself on that occasion. Privately, I felt that he would not pursue the matter further, but would content himself with early-morning rides in the vicinity of the park.

  Almost as though he had read my thoughts, Mr Erskine turned to me and asked, ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘Yes, I am fond of riding,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, what would you say to taking a ride each morning with Charles and myself?’

  ‘I think I would enjoy it very much,’ I answered truthfully.

  ‘Good! There will be a horse ready for you tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp.’

  The next morning I donned my long-unused habit and was waiting when the men came downstairs. I knew I looked well—perhaps as well as I ever could with my lack of height. The habit was a deep ruby-coloured cloth, cut simply but well. The tight bodice, mannish collar and close-fitting sleeves, together with the straight lines of the sweeping skirt, lent my form a proportion which it normally lacked. I felt elegant and feminine, and the undisguised approval in Charles’s eyes brought a flush of needed colour to my cheeks.

  ‘You look charming!’ he said, though he had seen me thus dressed a hundred times at home.

  Mr Erskine said nothing, but smiled. Then his eyes turned on Charles for a moment, reflectively.

  My mount, a fine roan mare, stood waiting for us in the porch with the other horses. There was a mounting block but, before I could make use of it, Charles had clasped his hands for my foot. I hesitated, remembering that perceptive glance turning from me to Charles, but then accepted his help and swung to the saddle.

  ‘Good! Quite good!’ said Mr Erskine, standing back to survey my hands. ‘I think you will manage her all right, but she is a trifle fresh, so don’t use the whip.’

  I nodded and he mounted his great bay gelding with the sort of casual ease that could only come of a lifetime’s acquaintance with horses. Charles, I had to admit, rode well—but consciously. Mr Erskine rode superbly.

  ‘We’ll skirt the village this morning,’ said Mr Erskine as we clattered out of the porch with Toddy-Bob, inevitably, bringing up the rear of the little cavalcade. ‘That mare doesn’t care for pi-dogs and naked babies playing in the dust. We’ll keep to the fields.’

  He kept me beside him as we rode down the long jarmin avenue, then edged around the sprawling mud huts of the village and took a track that led us past the vats, tanks and peopled activity of the indigo factory, where the coolies were already at work stamping rhythmically and remorselessly at the shaggy fronds to separate the juices from the fibre of the evil-smelling plant.

  The morning was delectably fresh and pure. Shreds of mist still clung about the hollows, and dew glinted on the furry silver leaves of the young gram. Even the faded flowers of the lantana bushes looked less played-out and dusty than usual.

  Then, as the village and factory dropped behind us, the mountains reared up to the north, a great dramatic background to the humble but lovely scene. The mustard was in bloom—acres of it, miles of it, stretching all around us, yellow as a canary, pale and bright in the pale bright sunshine, scenting the air with honeyed sweetness, a carpet of light reaching up to the dark line of the forest, the mountains and the soft blue of the early sky. And against that pure sky the snow peaks gleamed in morning glory. Here and there topes of sombre mangoes stood knee-deep among the fragrant gold, or a line of feathery sheeshums shimmered delicately along a watercourse. Smoke rose from distant villages smudging the blue. In the sugar cane, partridge called, and quails. A dog yelped far away; a flight of emerald parrots screamed across the blue, and a waterwheel squeaked shrilly as its owner yelled his bullocks into greater activity on seeing the approach of the zemindar.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ I exclaimed, as we drew up to take in the scene. ‘So tranquil. So calm. Such fresh purity of colour—and the scent!’

  ‘The best time of year here,’ said Mr Erskine. ‘
Doesn’t last long either, so make the most of it.’

  ‘And this is still all Hassanganj?’ Charles asked. ‘All this that we see?’

  ‘All of it, right up to the forest there. Plus a lot to the south that you cannot see, of course.’

  He dismounted and led his horse up a little rise where a tumbled wall under a thorn tree provided a slight eminence from which we could better view the entire prospect. Charles and I followed his example.

  ‘By Jove,’ exclaimed Charles admiringly, as he took off his hat and sat down on the wall. ‘It’s splendid. Your grandfather certainly picked a good position, Oliver.’

  ‘Yet this is not the land he chose, and when he came here it looked very different to what it does today. Have you heard the story of how he came by Hassanganj? Did my mother ever mention it to you?’

  ‘Only that it was a reward for some service he had done the Nawab of the time. Is that so?’

  ‘Yes. He was a young writer with the Company then. They had sent him up from Calcutta to do some job or other for the Resident in Lucknow, and in the course of his peregrinations around the city he came by some information of great interest to the Nawab—a plot to kill that gentleman in fact. The plot was foiled, my grandfather received the Resident’s commendation, and Mohammedan punctilio being what it is, the Nawab, Asaf-ad-Doula, felt called upon to make a handsome gesture of gratitude. In the first flush of his relief at being alive, he made old Adam a gift of a hunting lodge that stood where the house now stands, and, as the story goes, as much land as could be covered by the ball of my grandfather’s thumb on an inch-scale map. At the last moment, however, as my grandfather was placing his thumb on the map, the Nawab’s natural rapacity proved too much for him. He jogged old Adam’s arm, with the result that his thumb, instead of landing squarely on the cultivated lands to the south of the lodge, covered mostly the fringe of the forest and the scrublands that led up to it. All this!’

  ‘But this is not scrubland,’ I said.

  ‘Not now—but it was then. My grandfather realized he had been cheated and that there was no redress. Being a young man of some character, he decided to make the most of the gift the gods had deposited in his lap, and set to work. He left the Company, and with only his wits and the dubious support of the Nawab, came out here to work his land. Over the years he pushed back the forest, irrigated the scrubland to bear crops and put in rough roads. Then from the next province, which was suffering a famine, he brought in settlers, laid out villages and apportioned his reclaimed land. He experimented with crops and stock and, as his revenues began to flow in, started to build the house. It was just a bungalow, quite a small place, to begin with. However, when he met the girl who was to become his wife, he was so overcome by her acceptance of him that he determined she should live in a palace. The result of that determination is the house as it now is.’ Mr Erskine laughed.

  ‘And so they lived happily ever after!’ I ended the story.

  ‘As a matter of fact I believe they did, for all the unsuitability of the match. He was an unconnected and impecunious young man, at least when he arrived in India; she came from one of the great French families, ruined by the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, but none the less aristocratic for that. I have sometimes wondered what she saw in him—a strange colonial gentleman from the other side of the earth.’

  ‘Vision. Imagination. Determination. Very attractive qualities in a man. But she must have had intelligence and perception herself to recognize those qualities in him. Perhaps that was why the match was successful.’

  ‘No doubt,’ he said, giving me a glance at once approving and surprised.

  ‘And so that is how the old gentleman became a talukhdar?’ said Charles.

  ‘No, a zemindar,’ his brother corrected him.

  ‘But are they not the same thing?’

  ‘Sometimes in effect. In fact, very different. A zemindar owns the land he works and administers, which may be only a few acres or a tract several times as large as Hassanganj. A taluka, on the other hand, is, well, a principality, or perhaps more correctly a barony—much in the way that feudal England was divided into baronies. The land itself belongs—too often only theoretically—to the village communities, but these communities are administered by, protected by, usually bullied by a talukhdar, or baron, appointed by the Nawab. Or were. As you probably know, the whole system of talukhdari has been suppressed since the annexation of the kingdom. I believe the measure to be a grave mistake but, for the moment at least, it is a fait accompli.’

  ‘But why is it a mistake? From all that I have heard, the talukhdars seem to have been a corrupt lot … robber barons, if barons at all.’

  Mr Erskine shrugged.

  ‘They knew what was expected of them from their people, and on the whole gave them what they wanted. Certainly their methods would not stand the scrutiny of modern Western democracy, but then neither would the demands made upon them. They were unscrupulous, extortionate and warlike; but the people they ruled were ignorant, importunate and badly in need of defence. The talukhdars at least gave them that and a sense of cohesion. Our government has chosen to defend the rights of the individual, forgetting that the individual himself is more concerned with the rights of the clan, for that is what we have to deal with in Oudh, a system of ancient and closely knit clans, be they Rajput, Mussalman or what you will. We are imposing on the kingdom a most unwelcome and unwise fragmentation, and I fear will before long be made to pay for our mistake.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Charles, as he and I both remembered many discussions on ‘trouble’ yet to come, I with Mr Roberts on the ship, and both of us on various occasions in Calcutta.

  Our host shrugged again. ‘This is India. The “hows” are as problematical as the “whys”. But—cause and effect. Mistakes must always be paid for, one way or another. Meanwhile the aristocracy of the kingdom, who are almost the only people of any education, whatever their virtues or lack of them, are dispossessed of their hereditary rights, their incomes and their quite legitimate pride of position. And we have made for ourselves three or four hundred most potent enemies.’

  ‘And how will the suppression of this system affect you?’ asked Charles in some anxiety.

  ‘In no way. I cannot be dispossessed of Hassanganj, except by death and if I leave no heir. As I have said, a zemindar owns the land he administers; the right of tenure is different to that of a talukhdar.’

  ‘And then of course, you are an Englishman,’ concluded Charles, unwisely wise.

  ‘My rents are paid to me as a zemindar, not as an Englishman!’ There was annoyance in his tone. ‘And I see my duties to my tenants as those of a zemindar, not an Englishman. It is my legitimate right to the land that is important; not my race. Were I blue, green or brindle, or my place of origin Holland or Hohenlohe, my rights would remain the same, and my responsibilities.’

  ‘I see that, but surely, Oliver, as an Englishman you must …’

  ‘Try harder. Not expect more. From anyone!’

  ‘Well!’ said Charles. And again, thoughtfully: ‘Well!’

  ‘It cannot be too difficult,’ I put in, to conciliate the one and silence the other. ‘It cannot be too difficult to “try harder” out here in these beautiful surroundings. I am sure you consider yourself a lucky man, Mr Erskine.’

  ‘I do. But as to the beauty, wait until June. Everything’s dry then, brown, the fields bone hard under the blistering heat. There’s a wind that blows up every day, straight from the hobs of hell, filled with hot dust that cuts the eyes out of you. There’s drought, to some extent, every second year. The cattle die, and then the people. Later the monsoon comes, the rivers overflow their banks and wash the fields away and the houses; and the floods and the famine are followed inevitably by disease. Sometimes …’ He rose, went to his gelding and tightened the girth. ‘Sometimes one wonders what the point is of trying at all. Let alone harder.’ He straightened up and turned to face me, one hand on the saddle.

  ‘A
nd yet you do.’

  ‘Hm, do I?’ The amber eyes met mine with uncommon seriousness. ‘I suppose, on the whole, I do. But I have come to that time in life when one begins to wonder how much of what one does is truly voluntary, really effortful. How much only the force of habit. I don’t know. All I do know is that …’ He paused and looked away from me, kicking at the dewy grass with one foot. Then he raised his head, and his gaze ranged over the serene and lovely scene before us. ‘This is to me, in good days and bad, Miss Hewitt, “jan se aziz”. Is your Urdu up to interpreting the phrase?’

  ‘Well, jan is life, I believe?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘… And aziz is … oh! something like “sweet”, is it not? But as a phrase it means nothing to me.’

  ‘Yes, sweetness, more in the sense of an endearment. An approximation of the phrase in English would be “dearer than life”. Or “sweeter than life”, if you will.’

  ‘And that is how you regard this land?’

  ‘I do. White Englishman that I may be!’ He laughed, almost in embarrassment at this self-revelation, then swung to the saddle and gestured to us to do the same.