Ramlochan had asked little in return. The salary that the Englishman provided was good, but it wasn’t money that he was after. It was something else—something that the Krishnagar Brahmans could only see as hollow pride and a shameful hankering for firingi applause. But he had brushed aside such mumblings and headshakings because he had hoped Jones would repay him properly one day.
He may not have told William his wish in so many words, but he had wanted to go to England and show his knowledge and expertise to an eager and appreciative people. He had hinted at this desire quite early on in their longstanding partnership by inquiring about life in London, its weather, its people and its scholars.
He had gained his own bits and pieces of information about England through his old friend I’tisam al-Din, who had, with his manservant and Captain Archibald Swindon, the representative of King George III in Bengal, sailed to England twenty-eight years ago. Like Ramlochan, I’tisam had also known all along that Nadia, with all its pitiful projections as the leading centre of culture and scholarship in the province, was a regurgitating cesspool, where the noise of constantly escaping gaseous bubbles was mistaken to be the chant of knowledge. He had trained as a scholar-official in the courts of the Nawab, rising to become Emperor Shah Alam’s official liaison with the British monarch. It was from I’tisam that Ramlochan first got to know about courtly life in Allahabad, including the Emperor’s wish to seek King George’s help to return to his capital in Shahjahanabad. It was also while listening to his old friend during one of his visits to Krishnagar that Ramlochan realized that there was little point in seeking the favour of the Nawab’s court. Instead, his future—and that of real scholarship in the country—lay with the firingis.
I’tisam returned to the country after spending three years in London. He was still wearing the same turban and shawl and robe and sticking to the same routine of daily Persian scholarship and nocturnal visits to his favourite ladies’ quarters in Calcutta. But there was a new spring to his step. During his first meeting with Ramlochan after his return from England, he spoke enthusiastically about the hunger of the firingi to know more about Hindustan. He had been fêted several times in London as a Persian scholar of great renown, taking part in debates with Christian scholars, and the star of more than a couple of soireés in the university town of Oxford. It was from I’tisam that Ramlochan had first heard the name of William Jones—‘his Persian grammar is weak, he has no clue of the phonetic structure of the language but he is a hungry learner’.
But what Ramlochan had tucked away in his head, not even daring to bring up the subject with himself except in moments of complete privacy and partial weakness, was his friend’s detailed description of women in England.
‘They are sexually depraved,’ I’tisam had snorted out while sitting on the same porch that Ramlochan and Panchanan were now sitting on. ‘Some of them don’t even bother to cover their breasts while they’re selling vegetables and meat. And they make kissing sounds and lewd gestures in their markets!’
Ramlochan remembered thinking that even Shabitri, Paramesh Brahman’s daughter-in-law, would billow her breasts out each time she stretched to unfurl and rinse her hair while bathing in the Amrapara pond. Also, the middle-aged Tori, the physician Gangaram’s wife, never bothered to cover herself properly each time her sari got hitched up, exposing her shuddering thighs as she husked the rice on their courtyard. But it was unthinkable for firingi women to behave this way. The Pandit knew that they danced with men in the halls and houses in Calcutta and even in the mansion parties thrown by the Bengali babus and zamindars. But that was different, it wasn’t showcasing flesh. However, now, from what I’tisam had told him, about men and women kissing and groping each other in the open in England, it did sound like an invitation of flesh.
It was with I’tisam that Ramlochan had picked up the English language. While it was necessary for him, as the Nawab’s emissary to the firingis and then as an employee of the firingis, to have a firm knowledge of the tongue, he saw it also as a window to escape from the mousetrap world of Krishnagar.
‘So where did you learn English?’ William had asked him during one of their first meetings. ‘I have learnt English from my friends in Calcutta who know Englishmen at Fort William,’ Ramlochan had answered in William’s tongue. He had decided against mentioning I’tisam’s name, considering that his opinion of William in Oxford had not been too kind. He also hadn’t mentioned the written material—some printed, some copied—that he had collected over the years to help him learn the firingi’s language. These were mostly translations, made by Englishmen before William, of Sanskrit slokas and poems.
One item in Ramlochan’s collection stood apart from all the rest. It was an almanac that he had gathered from I’tisam. It was stuck inside a thick pile of notes about I’tisam’s stay in England that would much later be used for his Shigrif-namah-i Wilayat, or The Wonder Book of Europe, which he had wanted the Pandit to translate into Bengali. (Ramlochan never did translate it, partly because it was tedious, and partly because he had hoped to write such a work himself one day.)
Right from the moment he had extricated the dog-eared pamphlet from the other papers, Ramlochan knew that it was special. On the cover was an illustration of a woman in a flowing European dress, not unlike the Hindustani ghagras worn by dancing girls but much more expansive. She was carrying a parasol and next to her there stood an Englishman, smiling at her. She was smiling back. Ramlochan would learn, by his own diligence, what the printed words on the cover said. It was the title of the pamphlet: Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, 1767.
There were other illustrations inside. His eagerness to unlock the secrets that accompanied these pictures made his progress in mastering the firingi’s language much swifter. It was less than six months after Harris’s List came his way that he hungrily read:
‘Miss Smith, of Duke’s Court in Bow Street … A well made lass, something under the middle-size, with dark, brown hair and a good complexion.’
Pages later:
‘Mrs Hamblin, No. 1 Naked-Boy Court in the Strand … The young lady in question is not above 56. We know she must be particularly helpful to elderly gentlemen who are very nice in having their linen got up.’
That was when Ramlochan Pandit of Krishnagar had realized that he simply had to go to England one day. But now, with the news that Panchanan had brought from Calcutta, it had finally become impossible.
Anna Maria Jones looked out to the shoreline and then at her husband’s placid, classical face. Standing next to her on the deck of the Crocodile, her husband of less than six months, William, was closer to her than ever before. And yet, he was already far away; much closer to the riverbank that the ship was now passing, than to the rustle of silk and the flutter of fans and the banter that had broken out on the deck all around them. He was already far from the courts of London, the corridors of Westminster, the halls of Oxford, and the long evening dinner discussions with other scholar gentlemen like Mr Gibbon and Mr Halhed. Even as the Crocodile entered the port of Calcutta, William Jones had the look of a man returning home.
‘So this is it,’ William said silently to himself. He clutched on to Anna’s hand, careful to shift his precious book of Hindoo law into the other. ‘This is the city that Mr Clive described as “one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion”.’
He couldn’t quite make out what those brown bodies swathed in white were doing on the riverbank. But he sensed a charge of excitation, not unlike the tingling photovoltaic exhibitions that had become the rage in fashionable circles in Manchester and London.
This excitation had its roots not so much in the leap he was about to make in his professional life, as in the blind, exhilarating jump that he was going to make elsewhere. Let there be no doubt that it was his appointment as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William that enabled him to cross the seas and come here. And his subsequent k
nighthood did open up many doors that would have been shut otherwise. But it was the prospect of uncovering, peeling off a civilization, one layer at a time with the blunt knife of language that made the pacific Sir William betray his excitement and squeeze his wife’s hand a little tighter than he would have done on ending any other sea journey.
The moment a stretch of white, flat-roofed mansions plotted by lines of tall trees came into view, the entire group of passengers out on the deck broke out in a loud hurrah and applause. No one, however, dared to throw his hat into the air. Who would retrieve it if it fell outside the ship?
‘Sir William, your residence should be somewhere out there,’ said Mr Rowland, the Company man with a bent smile. ‘Welcome to Calcutta.’
William smiled back, patiently interrupting his thoughts to engage with the world of pointless Englishmen just for a moment. Rowland, returning to his job after his vacation in England, thankfully clipped back to join the boisterous others. All that the future founder of the Asiatic Society and unlocker of history’s treasures could think of were lines from something he had committed to memory at the age of eleven:
‘Now does my project gather to a head;
My charms crack not, my spirits obey; and time
Goes upright with his carriage.’
With the Crocodile’s crew now cranking into activity and a few catamarans with people appearing near the ship, Anna said over the noise, ‘William, this is our new home then.’
Her husband looked at her lovingly. ‘Now does my project gather to a head,’ he said to himself silently not forgetting to squeeze Anna Maria’s hand lovingly again.
Five months ago, they had set sail from Portsmouth and while she loved William with all her heart and put on a good show about their departure, Anna Maria was wracked with unease at the prospect of not only leaving England, but leaving England for such distant shores. Were there enough people there whom she would be able to speak to? But how many people even among those who could speak English would there be not from the merchant class or worse? There was William, of course.
When she was fourteen, her parents had taken her along with her sister to Siena. After a few days, she had started to react badly to the climate and the people. Calcutta was even farther away from London than Siena. And as during that terrible return journey from Italy years ago, this time too she forcibly tamed her nerves that were making her think a hundred thoughts all at the same time.
When the Crocodile had landed in the southern port of Madras a few days earlier, Anna had successfully pretended that this new land was what everybody back home had always been dreaming of. The mastery over a continent, the lavish comforts of such a mastery, the thrill of tearing away from the grey skies and the white chill of London. And yet, she wasn’t always so confident about pulling off this game of self-deception.
After a fine evening of Drury Lane performance, William and she had been invited for dinner at Mr Jeremy Costwald’s residence. Costwald, a man in his late fifties, had been an India man, and his heavy tan and loud manners showed for his years in Calcutta and Madras. Most importantly though, he was a proud survivor of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.
‘Holwell’s a blighter! He was there to be sure and he should know better than to make us who came out of it believe what he’s written in the Register. Well of course we were all confined inside the Nabob’s prison. And of course some of us didn’t make it—twelve, to give you the exact number. But that was because of the musket injuries they suffered. The hakim—that’s Hindustani for the court physician—actually tended to the injured, and there were three wounded Englishmen who recovered. But Holwell, total blighter that he is, wrote his thundering account. And who’s going to say anything otherwise? Even the Crown has now taken his account seriously, some of His Majesty’s insiders are even talking about setting up an imperial India policy. And all because of Holwell’s rumbling prose!’
Sitting opposite Costwald, Anna Maria had tried to give her full attention to the splendid fowl she was enjoying. It was improper for the man to bring up a dark topic like the Black Hole at the dinner table. But Costwald, more than a few sherries down, was a horse that had burst through the stable gate.
‘But dear sir, surely, you and the fortunate others can expose his untruth and paint a truer picture?’ asked William, looking up from his plate.
‘And contradict the official account of the East India Company as well as the second most powerful man in Bengal? No thank you, sir. I’d rather be telling my own stories.’
That night in London after the dinner, Anna was still brooding about all those tales about Calcutta that she had heard at the table. After closing the pages of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents, or The Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, she had turned the lamp out and gone to the bedroom to sleep. William had, as was the case whenever he consumed even the smallest amount of alcohol, foregone his after-dinner hour in the library and was already asleep. All Anna could think of as she shut her eyes was the cruel brightness of a tropical sun suddenly blinking off in an overcrowded, swarmy prison cell.
The branches of the elm tree that cast striated shadows on the overlooking wall must have vanished at some point. Instead, there was a wild face wearing an enormous turban, exactly as described in a passage in Tavernier’s book of travel, staring maliciously at her. He was speaking in some low, long-vowelled language that she could, remarkably, understand.
‘Ah, Missus Jones, at last you can get what your heart desires, which is not too different from what your pretty, pale, smooth, blood-hiding body desires. Anna Poorna, you are not in London any more,’ the face cackled, with lines breaking out on either side of its mouth, seamlessly changing into the ruddy countenance of Jeremy Costwald in full Company Army red-and-white regalia.
This uneasy dream—and variations of it—had revisited her throughout the Crocodile’s sojourn as it approached and entered the Indian Ocean. But not once had Anna mentioned anything about these confounding night images that were projected in her head to her husband. And why would she? William was embarking upon what could be the finest period in any man’s life. In any case, the nightmares couldn’t have been that terrible. William had not noticed anything in his wife to worry or upset him.
So when the Crocodile churned foam at its base as it anchored in the waters of the Hugli, she smiled to herself, hoping that William would notice her smile.
‘So this is it,’ said William Jones to the woman who would be sharing his life in Bengal as they both unblushingly strapped their hands around a shiny, hard, dog’s-hair-brown torso. They were ferried across the shallows to the shore.
The light bathing the surroundings was very different from any other place William had ever been to. It wasn’t blatantly bright and eager to turn to colour as it was in Morocco where the reds and yellows were embarrassingly exhibitionist. Neither was it as proudly clear as it was in many of the seaports in Europe. And it was definitely not washed in a veil of grey as it was in London, screening objects in the distance with a faint blue sheen that was the true colour of shadows.
In the Calcutta before him, the colours were domesticated, with only hints of its wild, junglee ancestry in the green around. For Anna Maria, however, the brown of the ground beneath her white summer shoes, the green of the trees and dense shrubberies lining it, and the dark blue-green of the waters she had just left behind didn’t seem to be tame at all. Bengal lay there before them, a creature that was lazy and bearing some non-malignant, non-fatal disease. Both of them sensed it—one with hidden trepidation, the other with muffled excitement.
As they walked towards the carriage that was waiting for them—another had come only for their luggage—William couldn’t help but think how their sense of belonging was now no longer in the hands of the loud-mouthed Captain Kershaw and his crew, or that of any of the philistine passengers.
William had been careful to carry two of his most pr
ecious possessions on his body. Just before he had clasped his hands around a stranger’s neck, he had decided to move the two books by his friend Nathaniel Brassey Halhed—Bodhaprakasám sabdasastram … A Grammar of the Bengal Language and A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits—out of his spacious pockets into the safety of his own hands. He didn’t think that this manoeuvre would make his carrier’s task easier. But it was too great a risk to have either of the books fall out of his pockets and be damaged. Once inside the carriage, and after helping his wife into it, William placed the books on his lap and leant forward to quickly kiss Anna Maria on her cheek. When Mr Barker, the man who had come to receive the Joneses, joined them in the carriage, Anna was still emitting a blush. Mr Barker recognized it as the first effects of the Bengal heat on a just arrived English lady. He wasn’t too wide of the mark.
Jones had gone stark, raving mad listening to the man sitting on his right. He had been jabbering away from the very minute he had arrived and showed no signs of quietening down. And yet, sitting in their hastily whitewashed bungalow overlooking the Jalangi river in Krishnagar, Jones did not regret travelling here for some respite. And he had found respite from the monkey life of Calcutta. It was one thing to be a Judge at the Fort, and quite another to be in contact with bearable company, the sort that not only froths on about financial scams but woodpecks constantly about the latest sexual scandal.
Jones had started his job on a sure enough footing. In his first ruling, he had cleared the long-pending dispositions of the amount of 23,00,000 rupees that the Company had seized from Chait Singh, the former raja of Benares, who had framed a serious charge of looting against Warren Hastings. His colleagues on the bench had not been helpful. Robert Chambers, good man that he was, had ruled that the East India Company should have the prize money. John Hyde, whose grasp of the law was impeccable, had said that this transfer was not lawful. Which is when Jones had stepped in and decreed that the ‘plunder taken on the capitulation of besieged towns, belong to those who possess the power of making war and peace’.
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