Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah
Page 23
By the 1870s, the three original houses purchased for the king, each in their own large compound, had been so adapted, added to and joined up that they were no longer free-standing buildings, but a new version of Qaisarbagh—with animals. Sharar listed fifteen separate houses that formed the heart of Garden Reach, but admitted there were ‘several other houses’ too, the names of which he had forgotten. British officials had counted ‘nineteen distinct properties’.49 Six of these houses had been built on the eastern side of Garden Reach Road, so they had no river frontage. All were given stirring or poetical Persian names more suited to a Mughal estate of the seventeenth century, rather than the suburb of a rapidly industrialising city. There was the Victory House, the Court House, the House of the Sun, the Jewel-studded House, the House of Prosperity and the Asmani and Badami Kothis, a pair of houses, painted pale blue and almond-hued respectively. More prosaically, and in order to collect ground rent and house rates, the Calcutta Municipality numbered them 63 Garden Reach Road (Tahniyat Manzil), 64 Garden Reach Road (Shams Manzil) and so on.
Quite apart from questions of jurisdiction and lawlessness, the estate was not without other problems too. The disastrous fire of 1860 has already been mentioned, and four years later there was another, smaller outbreak that luckily did not cause so much damage. The real calamity came on 5 October 1864 when Calcutta was struck by a devastating cyclone, which is estimated to have killed 60,000 people in and around the city. Many of the king’s Garden Reach houses were damaged, and valuable furnishings lost, although there is no report of loss of life on the estate. Another cyclone three years later was less traumatic. These were physical events, over which Wajid ‘Ali Shah had no control, but Mowbray Thomson thought that even more damage had been done by the king’s own staff. Former ‘faithless servants having practised fraud by constructing buildings with bad and inadequate materials’, the roofs of the houses simply collapsed within six or seven years of construction.50 This meant that while new houses were being built, others were under repair, or being expensively refurbished.
A six-year rebuilding programme began in 1868, a year after the second cyclone had struck. Amir ‘Ali had negotiated a government loan of 3 lakhs for the work, which was deposited in the Bank of Bengal. Although the original loan agreement has not been found, an ‘Abstract of Works’ does exist which adds considerably to our knowledge of what the estate looked like.51 Marble fountains erected on masonry bases played in front of the houses and each fountain was named in fanciful fashion as ‘Fairy Spring’, ‘Example of the Sun’, ‘Specially noted’ and so on. A small creek flowing by the newly constructed Shahinshah Manzil had been elaborately bridged with gate-pillars at either end. Sultan Khana, as the principal house, had an iron gate, an outdoor sitting platform, an adjoining bungalow and, importantly, proper brick-built drains. Within the ‘Verdant Garden’ were numerous ‘flower tube pillars’, dovecotes, fountains, two small pavilions named the ‘Diamond’ and the ‘Special’, as well as two tiger enclosures. Nearly every house seemed to have a dovecote or pigeon-house attached to it. The House of the Crescent Moon had four pigeon-houses, as well as a large marble fountain and a brick-walled garden. There was a vine-trellis (in imitation of the Great Vine at Qaisarbagh), a parrot-house, a splendid brass gate for the Shining House (Taban Manzil) and iron railings around nearly everything else.
Proper roads had been laid between the houses, and were lined at intervals with black pillar bases for statues and white marble pillars for gas lamps. It may seem strange that someone so firmly wedded to the past as the king was should employ modern technology for lighting the estate, but the picturesque effect of lights reflected in water and shining through the splashing fountains would have appealed to his theatrical instincts. Gas lamps had first appeared in Calcutta in July 1857, lighting up the main street of Chowringhee, and a year later the first pavements were built to accommodate the lamps. The Oriental Gas Company had supplied the municipality with lighting, and the Garden Reach lamps were ‘a reproduction on a smaller scale’. Unfortunately, Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s imaginative idea of lighting the estate with gas soon ran into problems. The contract was first given to Messrs Hubbard & Co., who went bankrupt after the king had advanced them over £1,000.52 The work was then taken on by the trader Mr Lackerstein, who left it uncompleted on his death, and it was subsequently handed over to two of the king’s servants, each on a very handsome salary. By 1880 the work was ‘still far from being finished’, although it had been going on for several years at an annual cost of nearly £7,000. Running the fountains was less of a problem because they were powered by steam-engines, as they had been in Lucknow.
The noise levels at Garden Reach were considerable, with the steam-engines chugging away, the thump of the antique printing press and the constant hammering from workmen. Competition came from screeching peacocks roaming through the gardens and the sound of wild animals including monkeys, tigers and bears confined in their iron cages. From the domestic animals came the lowing of cattle kept for their milk, the cackling of the geese and overall the cooing of thousands of pigeons. At night there were firework displays and ‘noisy processions’, with musicians celebrating marriages or solemn religious festivals. In short, it was a small but exotic town, a miniature Lucknow, which provided a home to the king and a steady irritant to the government of India for thirty years. Relations between Wajid ‘Ali Shah and British officials have been closely examined in this chapter, but there were other inhabitants of Garden Reach too, both animal and human, whose stories are worth telling.
The king lost no time in adapting the English villas at Garden Reach to his own tastes and convenience. This involved spending huge sums of money on construction and furnishing, with the inevitable result that Wajid ‘Ali Shah was soon living way beyond his resources and was also being defrauded by his staff. The government brought in legislation to curb the king’s debtors, which had a limited effect. The appointment of Amir ‘Ali as accountant and manager proved more beneficial. Questions of jurisdiction within Garden Reach, along with policing and sanitation, were never really settled, and although undoubtedly a handsome estate in parts, it remained an irritant to the government.
6
A TIGRESS ESCAPES FROM THE MENAGERIE
As Wajid ‘Ali Shah grew older, his animals became increasingly important to him. The significance of royal menageries is examined, as are the British attempts to manage Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s collection, and thus to manage the king himself. At the same time, some of the king’s wives and children become dissatisfied with the claustrophobic life at Garden Reach. The escape of the tigress is a metaphor for their own unfulfilled dreams.
Early on the morning of 6 January 1879 a large group of coolies (labourers) was lined up in the Royal Botanic Garden at Howrah ready to start work.1 The Botanic Garden had been established nearly a century earlier, under the direction of Colonel Robert Kyd, military secretary to the government of Bengal, and a keen botanist. Over the years the Garden had expanded until it covered 270 acres, slightly less than the Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London. In the lush Bengal climate all kinds of plants and trees flourished, some native and others brought from abroad in experiments to increase profits for the East India Company. Cinnamon trees from Ceylon were found to do well, and tea bushes from China were cultivated. The Garden lay on the north bank of the Hugli, with a river frontage of a mile, and was also exactly opposite Garden Reach. From the king’s own gardens and palaces, the Botanic Garden looked like a particularly fertile stretch of jungle, but closer inspection would have shown carefully laid out paths, groves, nurseries, plantations and a herbarium, with a few staff houses dotted among the trees.
As the coolies waited to be detailed off to various parts of the Garden, some of them, standing near the landing steps, ‘observed a tiger swimming in the river a few yards from the shore’.2 Both the Garden’s superintendent, Dr George King, and its curator, Herr Adolph Biermann, were standing nearby, and within a minute of the alarm being ra
ised they saw a fully grown tiger bounding across the riverbank path no more than twenty yards ahead of them. The animal ran through the nursery near the curator’s house, across the Ribben Walk and through the mango grove towards the teak avenue. ‘Guided by the excited chattering of the monkeys in the mango grove’, the two men were ‘led to infer that the tiger had gone into cover somewhere’. Dr King acted promptly: he sent coolies to warn Mr Scott, the curator of the herbarium; he told Biermann to keep everyone together in the nursery area; he ran to his own house to warn a friend who was staying with him; and he sent a messenger by boat to the Howrah Magistrate asking for help. Dr King also sent an urgent note to the commissioner of police, Mr Soutter.
In spite of his commendable efforts, Dr King was soon to receive the awful message that his deputy, Biermann, had been attacked by the tiger and had suffered severe head wounds, with ‘about a fourth part of his scalp hanging in shreds over the left ear—and two less serious wounds in the face’. Biermann, a German citizen working in Calcutta, was attended to by the Civil Surgeon, Dr Pilcher, but for some reason was not admitted to Howrah Hospital until the following day. It was later found that Biermann had not followed the superintendent’s careful instructions, but had gone instead to find Mr Scott. The two men, Biermann and Scott, both unarmed, then went looking for the tiger. In this they were successful, for ‘the animal, suddenly springing out below a bush, struck Mr Biermann down and quietly returned to the bush from which it had jumped. Mr Biermann was stunned by the blow and remained insensible for a little.’ All the coolies had wisely taken themselves off to safety, so it was left to Scott to drag the wounded man to the nearest house, which happened to be that of the superintendent.
A police party arrived, with beaters, who managed to get the animal out of the Garden and into a neighbouring sugarcane field, but there it attacked Lance Corporal Shaik Azeem, wounding him severely. It was not until two days later, and after having killed two cows, that the tiger was shot dead by the Howrah Magistrate, Mr Wace, who stood on the roof of a house in Paddapukur village.
Initially Adolph Biermann had seemed to make good progress in hospital, but then he developed a fever and the Civil Surgeon advised him to return to Europe for at least a year in order to recover. ‘There will be’, he added, ‘permanent disfigurement.’3 Almost immediately the question of compensation was raised. Biermann was on a modest salary of 375 rupees a month and, as a European, had to pay for a private room and a nurse at the Howrah Hospital. The German Consul thought 15,000 rupees would be a suitable sum. It was quite clear who was to blame. Not the tiger, which turned out to be a tigress, but Wajid ‘Ali Shah, his large menagerie and his ‘insane ideas’. Members of the German community in Calcutta sent a memorial to the superintendent, Dr King, pressing for compensation and summing up the general feeling: ‘We … wish to record our indignation at the criminal carelessness which has obtained within the ex-King of Oudh’s enclosure, and which has almost in the centre of a densely populated town, the capital of the empire, exposed the public to dangers otherwise only to be encountered in the wildest jungles.’4 It was an extreme case of rus in urbe, the countryside in the town, and perhaps something more fundamental too—old India in modern Bengal.
A long report of the incident was sent to the government of Bengal because it was deemed to be a local rather than a national matter, which would have been put up to the governor general. Mr Soutter said that the escape of two tigers, a male and a female, from the Garden Reach menagerie had been reported to him early on the morning of 6 January. He sent his superintendent, Mr Hill, to deal with it. Armed with a single-barrelled smooth-bore gun, ‘the only weapon to hand’, Hill hurried off to Garden Reach ‘and brought down the tiger with a single shot as the animal was making its escape out of the enclosure’. But the second animal, ‘a large tigress, had taken to the river and made good its way across to the Botanic Garden’, with tragic consequences. Unlike most other members of the cat family, the Bengal tiger is a good swimmer, and the short journey of less than half a mile across the Hugli between Garden Reach and the Botanic Garden would not have been difficult, particularly with the tempting jungle-like greenery beckoning the beast.5 Dr King blamed Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s servants, both for allowing the animals to escape, and then for not taking any measures to warn the staff in the Garden about the escape. In his report to the lieutenant governor, he wrote:
‘The river at the point where the tiger crossed … is sufficiently narrow to allow a voice to be heard distinctly from the opposite bank by simply calling to the manjees [the master or steersman of a boat]. The river is nevertheless so wide that it must have taken the tiger a considerable time to swim across.’ He added that more than a hundred coolies were on the river bank at the time, together with durwans [guards or porters], himself and Biermann. It would have been ‘perfectly easy for the ex-King’s servants to have attracted our attention to the tiger, while it was still in the water. And had this been done some attempt to kill it, or to prevent it from landing might have been successfully made.’
Mowbray Thomson, the agent, went further with his speculation of what might have happened. If the tigress had not actually been seen entering the Garden, he told the superintendent, then ‘she might have lurked about for days in the dense cover in which this Garden abounds’. And had she landed later in the day, and ‘at a spot near one of the visitors’ pic-nic parties, which are so commonly held in this Garden during the cold season, the consequences might have been very much more serious’.6 Thomson knew that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had twenty-three tigers, lions and leopards in his menagerie, but as Europeans were not allowed into the gardens, he was unable to say whether or not the animals were enclosed in proper cages. He added dryly that it was possible ‘there is a defect in some part of the arrangements for their custody’, and given the awful scenario he had painted of a Victorian picnic interrupted by a tigress, he demanded that the government either persuade Wajid ‘Ali Shah to give up keeping such dangerous animals, or allow his menagerie to be ‘regularly inspected by some competent person’.
The commissioner of police asked whether Wajid ‘Ali Shah should be keeping animals in the first place, but added a curious caveat: ‘I am not sure that I can see that he has any special claim at all to keep dangerous carnivora about him as compared to anyone else, but there may be considerations with which I am unacquainted.’ He knew that the number of animals had greatly increased in recent years, and that the increase, as far as Soutter could establish, ‘is due more than anything to what may fairly be called the insane ideas of the ex-King’.7
In spite of the commissioner’s views, Thomson’s recommendations and the concerns of Calcutta’s German community, the government of Bengal was not at first inclined to take the matter very seriously. In particular, the lieutenant governor, Sir Ashley Eden, seemed quite relaxed about it and thought no action was necessary. He said that the public were admitted to the menagerie ‘from time to time’ and there had been no reports of animals not being properly secured. On 12 February the government’s view was that ‘The recent escape of a tigress from the ex-King’s gardens was an accidental and quite exceptional occurrence.’
But only five days later, on 17 February, a black leopard escaped from the menagerie and was shot dead in the Botanic Garden. Mr Hill, the police superintendent, perhaps hoping to repeat his success in shooting the tiger, went back to Garden Reach to search the premises, but learned shortly afterwards of the leopard’s death. Hill took the opportunity to inspect the menagerie and reported that some of the animals ‘are confined in very insecure cages’ and that better arrangements were needed. Sir Ashley Eden then had a sudden change of mind, no doubt prompted by concern from the government of India. By the beginning of March he was agreeing that Wajid ‘Ali Shah should be prohibited from keeping tigers, lions and leopards and ‘so many dangerous carnivores’ and that he ‘should content himself with harmless animals and animals he can keep under control. It cannot be pretended that the menagerie
is maintained for public instruction or for any purpose of public utility, as the public are only admitted on very rare occasions. It is kept up for the mere personal gratification of the ex-King; and though it is not right to interfere in any way with his amusements, so long as they are harmless, the interests of the public should … receive the first consideration.’8 And here was the crux of the matter, and the authentic voice of the British civic administrator in late nineteenth-century India. It was another collision between the medieval and the modern, the change from autocratic rule to the public good.
The word ‘menagerie’ is used loosely today to describe a collection of animals, and is almost interchangeable with ‘zoo’. But it had a specific origin from the French word ménage, which means ‘domestic’, and was first used to describe animals about a large household—carriage horses, dairy cattle, hens, working dogs and the like. The term then became associated with royal collections of exotic animals, kept for entertainment and prestige. The menagerie was generally private, to be shown only to favoured guests. If the public were occasionally admitted, it was only to emphasise the royal owner’s power, wealth and ability to collect unusual animals. Menageries date from at least the medieval period, the first in England being the royal menagerie in the Tower of London, which was started in the early thirteenth century with a pair of lions. Prestigious gifts of wild animals were exchanged between royal families and rulers throughout Europe, and as trade expanded, between Asia and Europe too. Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s uncle, the nawab Nasir ud-Din Haidar, had sent two horses, two elephants and a rhinoceros to William IV and Queen Adelaide, who had sensibly gifted them to the newly opened London Zoo.9