by Ed Douglas
Nine years after his return to Kathmandu and thirteen years since he first saw the city, Hodgson feared he was drifting in a backwater with no influence or importance. Despite being confirmed as resident in 1833, he told his sister: ‘I am 33 – the last thirteen years passed in the wilderness without wife, children or the presence of a female. No change, no society!’ When his brother Will died, not long after his younger brother Edward, Hodgson told his sister that at least their brothers were spared the disappointments and disillusion of middle age. ‘Happy, thrice happy they who quit this troubled scene ere the bloom of their virtuous feelings has been rubbed off!’ Hodgson was left to pay off his brother’s debts. Despite his growing reputation as an academic, Hodgson felt disappointed, duty-bound to support his ageing parents with no chance of further advancement. It was at this point, just as he had begun to think of his pension, that Hodgson was plunged into the most demanding period of his career.
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While the Nepali king Rajendra had been a minor, under the regency of Tripura Sundari, her uncle Bhimsen Thapa was able to maintain his tight grip on the army, shutting out the Thapa family’s great rivals, the Pandes. Then in 1832 Tripura died of cholera and Rajendra came of age, a man Hodgson described as ‘mad, cruel, violent, mean, pusillanimous and weak’. Slowly at first, but then with increasing speed, Nepal’s elite imploded in violence and intrigue. Bhimsen was now in his sixties and relied increasingly on his forceful young nephew Mathabar Singh. Hodgson could see his old adversary weakening and took advantage, proposing a new trade agreement. Bhimsen was sympathetic in principle and wasn’t strong enough to antagonise Hodgson. Equally he couldn’t appear too close to the British in front of the court. So he sent his nephew Mathabar to Calcutta in the winter of 1835 to ask permission to travel to London with letters for William IV, seeking international recognition for his regime. Hodgson blocked that move, which dented Bhimsen’s prestige. The stage was being set for Bhimsen’s downfall.
Nepal’s king Rajendra had two wives, both called Laksmi Devi. The senior queen, Samrajya Laksmi Devi, was a Pande, mother of the crown prince Surendra; the junior queen, Rajya Laksmi Devi, was a Thapa. The king fretted between them, alternately screamed at or ignored. When Samrajya’s young infant son Devendra died, rumours spread he had been poisoned. The doctor who attended him was tortured horribly and gave up Bhimsen Thapa as a conspirator, shortly before being crucified. Bhimsen was imprisoned and his nephew Mathabar fled to India.
Bhimsen’s replacement was Ranjang Pande, son of Damodar, who had been beheaded in 1804 as Bhimsen came to power. Virulently anti-British and determined to restore his family’s fortunes, his rise to power coincided with a worsening political situation for the East India Company which was now embroiling itself in Afghanistan, alarmed at the rise of Russian influence in that region. Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire, was also becoming a threat and had established diplomatic links with Kathmandu. Tension between the British and the Gorkha regime grew so great that the governor general Lord Auckland sent sixteen thousand troops in 1838 to Nepal’s southern border. Despite the military presence, Hodgson was horribly exposed.
Luckily for the Company’s resident, Ranjang overplayed his hand. Assuming the king would sanction a lucrative war, he had ordered an expensive refit of the military: new cannon, musket balls and gunpowder. But as he raised taxes to pay for it all, opinion in the aristocracy turned against him. So, to secure his position, Ranjang decided to remove once and for all the latent threat posed by Bhimsen and Mathabar. Assassins were sent to India to poison the latter, now living in Simla, albeit uncessfully, while Bhimsen was charged with murdering the previous king Rajendra’s father, Girvan Yuddha, an old rumour that was wholly false. More doctors were tortured for information, including a Newari who was impaled in front of the king before having his heart torn out. No evidence was forthcoming, but Bhimsen was thrown back in jail anyway. Exhausted and threatened with torture, Bhimsen was told, falsely, that his wife had been paraded naked through the streets of the city. The old man, burning with shame, committed suicide. At the death of his longstanding adversary, Hodgson told his superiors that apart from Ranjit Singh, there had been no greater native statesman of recent times.
For much of 1840 the situation hung in the balance. The East India Company was stretched, fighting the First Opium War in China while simultaneously occupying Kabul. Rajendra approached the Chinese, on the hunt for allies. In April, a Nepali force seized several villages across the border in India. Hodgson’s personal safety was threatened and he sent the residency’s head munshi (interpreter) to the palace, warning Rajendra of swift and terrible consequences if he was murdered. The Gorkhali army was on the brink of mutiny, infuriated at cuts in pay and itching to loot Lucknow and Patna across the border. ‘True, the English government is great,’ a general told Rajendra, who had been summoned to the parade ground to hear the army’s grievances, ‘but care the wild dogs of Nepal how large is the herd they attack?’ They wanted Nepal’s old colonies east and west of Nepal’s imposed borders returned, and with it Gorkha prestige.
Alerted by Hodgson’s warnings, the governor general Lord Auckland promised troops and Hodgson issued an ultimatum, demanding the Nepalis withdraw their forces. As the crisis reached its climax in September he wrote to his parents: ‘I steal a moment from official writing to tell you I am well, and that you need entertain no fears for me though war ensue with Nepal, as it probably will immediately.’ Instead, the Gorkha show of strength evaporated to nothing. Seventy-five years after Prithvi Narayan Shah consolidated a mosaic of small Himalayan states into a new nation, fear, greed and jealousy had hollowed out its elite and left the economy moribund. Nepal’s vaunted martial threat had been shown to be little more than posturing. Nepal paid the East India Company compensation, Ranjang was fired and a chief minister more congenial to the British interest was appointed. Auckland heaped praise on Hodgson’s handling of the crisis.
Never again would Nepal pose a serious threat to the British in India. The senior queen Samrajya, outraged by the change in government, continued to resist the East India Company’s influence but she died in late 1841, aged just twenty-three. That winter the British army suffered its worst humiliation of the nineteenth century when more than sixteen thousand troops and civilians perished during their retreat from Kabul. Yet Nepal’s elite, fatally weakened by court factionalism, was no longer able to take advantage of British vulnerability. In May 1845, Sir Henry Lawrence, Hodgson’s successor as resident, could write to Calcutta in reference to this infighting: ‘So much blood has been shed in Nepaul, that it must now continue to flow.’ He called the rising tide of assassinations and savagery ‘sanguinary proceedings’, and concluded that because there was ‘no chance of domestic peace . . .
I do not therefore augur danger to the British Government. There is not a soldier in Nepaul, scarcely a single man, that has seen a shot fired; and not one that could head an army.
The East India Company judged that only insurrection within India could make Nepal a threat again, a prediction that would come back to haunt them.
Hodgson himself had left Kathmandu in December 1843, evicted by the new governor general Lord Ellenborough, who disliked Hodgson’s influence on Nepal’s domestic affairs as much as Auckland had been grateful for it. The king Rajendra was distraught. He had known Hodgson for most of his life and at their final audience burst into tears, calling the departing resident, a man he had often wanted dead, the ‘saviour of Nepal’. Taking a jewel from his turban, he turned to the new resident, Sir Henry Lawrence, and begged that Hodgson be allowed to accept the gift, for the debt he owed ‘Mr Hodgson’s prudence and patience under many and great provocations’. The jewel was declined. Ellenborough was not so grateful. He had instructed Lawrence to offer Hodgson the job of sub-commissioner in Simla, a humiliating demotion designed to provoke Hodgson’s resignation, which promptly followed.
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The darbar was now split between three factions:
the feeble Rajendra, the psychopathic teenage crown prince Surendra, a man who took pleasure in watching torture, and the previously junior queen Laksmi Devi, a woman no less manipulative and determined than the senior queen Samrajya had been in promoting the interests of her own son. As Lawrence put it: ‘Mr Nepal, Master Nepal and Mrs Nepal’. Lawrence stayed in Kathmandu for barely two years, but that was long enough to witness the return, rise and brutal murder of Mathabar Singh, Rajendra’s latest mukhtiyar, or chief minister, and his replacement by Jang Bahadur: the potentate whose offer of assistance to the British Hodgson would present to Canning over billiards some fourteen years later, in 1857.
Laksmi Devi had tempted Mathabar home from Simla, where he had been living on a British pension following his uncle Bhimsen Thapa’s suicide and the attempt on his own life. To reassure him, Laksmi sent Mathabar’s nephew to fetch him: this was Jang Bahadur.
Jang’s father was Bal Narsingh Kunwar, a soldier in the bodyguard of Rajendra’s grandfather Rana Bahadur. When in 1806 Rana Bahadur was murdered, it had been Bal Narsingh who struck the killer down, earning the gratitude of Bhimsen Thapa. After Bhimsen’s putsch, in which he became chief minister and many of his enemies were murdered, Bal Narsingh was promoted to kazi, or minister, and later governor of Jumla. Jang’s mother was Bhimsen’s niece, Ganesh Kumari. When their first son was born, Bal Narsingh wanted to name the boy Bir Narsingh, but the Thapas put their foot down and changed his name to Jang Bahadur: ‘brave in war’.
With the Thapas the pre-eminent family in Nepal, Jang’s childhood was privileged, but when the queen Samrajya Laksmi Devi sent Bhimsen to prison, Jang, then aged eighteen, disappeared from view. For a time he was quite literally in the wilderness, working as an elephant-tamer in the jungles of the terai to pay off his gambling debts. After a spell in Benares, the family fortunes began to rise again and in 1839, Jang returned to Kathmandu. He came to the attention of Rajendra during an elephant hunt in early 1840. A wild elephant was surrounded but no one could get near it until Jang strode up and lassoed the creature’s rear legs. Rajendra was so impressed he promoted Jang to be a captain in the artillery. Later that year, the biggest elephant in the royal stables went wild, trampling its keeper to death. Once again, it was Jang who brought the animal under control. A notorious womaniser, he had to be fetched from a nearby brothel. (Jang claimed to have slept with 1,400 women over the course of his life. His descendants claim he offered any woman twenty thousand rupees if she could make him ejaculate before he was ready. No one ever claimed the prize; it was said Jang’s opium addiction was responsible. He also freely admitted to making up stories about himself.)
Once he had been fetched back from Simla at queen Laksmi Devi’s behest, Jang’s uncle Mathabar was appointed chief minister in late 1843 but soon had cause to regret his homecoming. Jang owed much to Mathabar, but increasingly the pair clashed. Mathabar was a genuinely impressive man; Lawrence called him ‘a hero compared with the best of them’. Jang, although twenty years younger, was from the same cloth, only shrewder and more ruthless. Mathabar decided to take his nephew down a peg or two, transferring him from the bharadari, or council of nobles, to prince Surendra’s bodyguard, which Jang resented. Meanwhile, Rajendra, Surendra and Laksmi Devi bickered incessantly. In contrast to Hodgson’s day, the East India Company maintained a position of icy indifference and with no lead from the British, Mathabar preferred Surendra as the element of that trio he could manipulate most easily. This alienated the queen and, when Laksmi Devi extracted permission from her husband Rajendra to assassinate Mathabar, it was Jang who was ordered to carry it out.
Summoned to the palace late at night and leaving his bodyguard behind, Mathabar came before the king and queen, both already in bed. Jang then stepped out from behind a screen and shot his uncle. Once he was sure Mathabar was dead, Rajendra leaped out of bed, kicked Mathabar’s corpse and claimed responsibility for the killing. No one believed him. As the crown prince Surendra observed, Rajendra couldn’t kill a rat, let alone a man like Mathabar. Lawrence told his superiors: ‘The Maharaja may have mangled the corpse; but I must doubt His Highness having the courage to fire a gun, much more to face his late Minister.’ Even so, he discounted rumours of Jang’s involvement. ‘Poor as is my opinion of Jang’s moral character, I do believe him guiltless.’ And yet guilty he was.
The crime weighed on Jang, on his conscience and in the knowledge that if he could do that to his own uncle then Jang would never be safe himself from anyone, even his own family. Years later, while showing the colonial official and author Laurence Oliphant around his house in Kathmandu, he paused before some portraits.
Jang called our attention to one of these; it was . . . of a strikingly handsome man, whose keen eye and lofty brow seemed almost to entitle him to the position he held between the Duke of Wellington and the Queen [Victoria]. ‘See,’ said Jang, enthusiastically, ‘here is the Queen of England; and she has not got a more loyal subject than I am.’ Then turning to the picture of the man with the keen eyes and high forehead, he remarked, ‘That is my poor uncle Mahtiber [sic] Singh, whom I shot; it is very like him.’
The murder of Mathabar Singh prompted a lull, during which the East India Company went to war with the Sikh Empire and Sir Henry Lawrence was recalled from Kathmandu to take up a new post, first assisting the governor general Sir Henry Hardinge and then as agent at Lahore. At Sagauli in January 1846, on their way back to Calcutta, Lawrence’s wife Honoria, an adroit and witty observer of Nepali life and politics, wrote to their friend George Clerk, a member of the East India Company’s board of directors in London. Likening the factions at court to Kilkenny cats, she was certain the calm mood could not continue:
Jang Bahadoor, Mathbur’s nephew, is likewise a general and called commander-in-chief. He takes no very prominent part just now, and seems to spend his energies in devising uniforms. But he is active and intelligent, and if (perhaps it would be more correct to say, when) there is another slaughter in the Durbar, the struggle will probably be between Jang Bahadur and Guggur [Gagan] Singh.
Honoria Lawrence was right. In September that year, late in the evening, the queen’s favourite and presumed lover Gagan Singh was ‘shot in a chamber of his house’, according to the acting resident Captain Ottley, ‘while in the performance of his devotions [prayers]’. His son hurried to the palace to tell Laksmi Devi. Incandescent with fury, Laksmi Devi hurried on foot to Gagan’s house. When she saw the body she broke down and wept, and for a moment couldn’t continue with the rituals she had come to perform, placing gold and basil, and drops of Ganges water, in Gagan’s mouth. Then, in a moment of female solidarity, she turned to Gagan’s three widows and forbade them to commit sati on their husband’s funeral pyre. That mercy done, she acted.
Taking a sword from her attendants, Laksmi marched back to the palace and told Jang to summon the bharadari to the kot, or armoury. While she waited, she cried over and over, as Ottley reported, that ‘until the man who had assassinated so faithful a Minister should be discovered and put to death, she would neither take food nor taste water.’ Jang complied with her order but took the precaution of bringing three regiments loyal to him to wait outside. He smelt danger but also opportunity. When the courtiers were gathered, Laksmi Devi pointed the finger at the wrong man and ordered him killed. The courtier charged with this task, Abhiman Singh, refused. He knew the man was innocent because he had in fact been one of the conspirators; he said he would kill no one without authorisation from the chief minister, a relative of the king called Fateh Jang Shah. The king Rajendra was sent to fetch him. Night wore on; tempers frayed.
Having fulfilled his mission and told Fateh Jang to go to the kot, Rajendra decided to visit the British residency and seek its help. Captain Ottley, a young man uncertain what to do, sent his munshi to temporise. And so it was that the king of Nepal waited at the gates of a foreign power to complain to a man who wouldn’t listen about the murder of his wife’s lover. The munshi gently suggested Rajendra go home
; the king returned to the kot. When he got there, the gutters were running with blood and crowds were thronging the entrance, preventing him from entering. He gratefully rushed home and did what he had done before in times of crisis: hid in bed. Rajendra’s reign was almost over.
When Fateh Jang Shah had finally arrived that night, Jang had told him they should back the queen and execute Abhiman Singh. Though Fateh refused, Abhiman now feared a plot. He told his bodyguards to load their muskets. Seeing this, Jang climbed up the narrow stairs to warn the queen who was watching from above. She descended to the courtyard, again demanding the man she had accused be killed. When that didn’t happen she tried to assault him herself. Fateh Jang Shah and Abhiman restrained her, but while following her back up the stairs, someone, probably one of Jang Bahadur’s brothers, opened fire. Given the numbers of troops gathered near the kot supporting various parties inside, a massacre was now inevitable and when the sun rose on 15 September, bodies of soldiers and bharadari alike were piled in the courtyard. Fifty-five were judged ‘worth having their names preserved’, but the true death toll was higher. Jang had his men dig a vast square pit and then shouted up to prince Surendra, who was watching from above: ‘Whatever they could do for you, I can do.’
Even before the night was over, the queen had declared Jang prime minister but if she thought she could manage him as she had others, it was a bad miscalculation. Jang had no intention of replacing the malleable Surendra with the queen’s son, as she wished. When she replaced him as chief minister, Jang killed his replacement and sent the queen into exile at Benares. Rajendra meekly followed. Although they continued to plot Jang’s downfall, there was little loyalty left for them to draw on. Rajendra attempted an invasion but was easily defeated and placed under house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life, outliving Jang Bahadur by four years. Surendra became king, but was also kept in isolation. Laksmi Devi remained in exile at Benares; a photograph taken years later shows a debauched and prematurely old woman living on a tiny British pension; the date of her death is unknown. The crown of Nepal was now wholly the puppet of Jang Bahadur. With his brothers at his side, Jang felt comparatively secure. He had himself promoted to pradhan mantri, a direct translation of the British term ‘prime minister’. In time, his family’s origins were also massaged. Plain Jang Bahadur Kunwar became Jang Bahadur Kunwar Ranaji. The ‘Rana’ suffix gave him a princely air, a touch of Mughal swagger with a hint of Rajput class. He even had Surendra ‘confirm’ the Kunwar’s noble Rajasthani origins. Jang Bahadur’s Rana clan would dominate Nepal for the next hundred years.