Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

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  Having got a grip of Nepal, Jang’s interest turned to the British Empire. He had grown up during a period when British influence in Kathmandu had grown from marginal presence to major influence on court politics. He knew threats to cure the elite’s greed and dissatisfaction with an invasion of India would likely end in catastrophe. Better to placate his gigantic neighbour than provoke violence. But his fascination was more than political. What kind of world did the foreigners inhabit? How had they achieved such power?

  To answer his own curiosity, on 15 January 1850, seven years before the Indian rebellion and his offer of assistance to Lord Canning, Jang Bahadur left Kathmandu for Britain, or Belait as it is in Nepali, like the Hindustani source for ‘Blighty’. Leaving his brother Bam Bahadur in charge, Jang took with him a retinue of around twenty-five, including his two youngest and favourite brothers, an artist, a singer, a doctor – ayurvedic, naturally – and someone to write down the group’s impressions of their travels, a document known as the Belait Yatra. Accompanying them was Captain Cavenagh of the Bengal Army, who later wrote his own account, and a British Calcutta lawyer called Macleod, who acted as interpreter and private secretary.

  First they travelled to Patna, tiger-hunting en route, where the pervasiveness of British influence was faithfully recorded. ‘Toasting,’ wrote their chronicler, ‘is a custom at British banquets.’ The Nepalis toured Calcutta, inspecting sewage works and weaving machines, bottle manufacturers and the mint where India’s rupees were fashioned. The governor general greeted them with a nineteen-gun salute, not quite the full twenty-one, but more than for other Indian princes. Jang and his retinue, like all good Hindus facing a voyage across the kala pani, or ‘black water’, made a pilgrimage to Puri to prepare their souls for the journey ahead. Then they embarked on the P&O ship Haddington. Jang had the boat to himself, which was fortunate given that he became violently seasick. He was quoted as complaining: ‘The waves rose high like mountains and people sleeping on the bedsteads were in danger of being rolled down.’ The chronicler, whose identity is uncertain, recorded Nepali bewilderment at how efficiently the ship was managed, apparently without violence. And, of course, for a writer who had never seen the ocean, unbroken views of water were compelling. ‘There was no mountain, no tree, no bush, no land to be seen. The sun rose out of the water and sank back into it.’

  The crew were equally bemused with their illustrious passenger. What was he? A king? A prime minister? Or an ambassador? And what to make of a man wearing clothes of the very finest silks and jewels worth a fortune who nevertheless liked to milk the cows on board ship and strip to his dhoti in public to wash himself. Most intriguingly, he ate alone, to avoid the spiritual pollution of eating with non-Hindus. At Suez the group disembarked and travelled overland to Cairo, where a riverboat took them to Alexandria and the SS Ripon whose fore-cabins and saloons had been reserved for Jang and his retinue. Steaming past Gibraltar, which became ‘Jivapur’ to Jang’s chronicler, they reached Southampton – ‘Sautanghat’ – on 26 May 1850.

  Both hosts and visitors were transfixed by each other. The chronicler was overwhelmed by the comparative wealth of ordinary people. ‘Not one bad-looking or undernourished individual was to be seen.’ There was none of the smallpox victims or disfigured lepers so common in the streets of Kathmandu. Meanwhile British writers were both intrigued and appalled by what they saw. ‘The servants of the embassy were evidently of the lowest caste,’ observed the Morning Post. ‘Some were meanly and miserably clad, many of them without shoes, and their clothing formed a striking contrast to the magnificent costume of the chiefs.’ The gifts Jang had brought were worth more than £17 million and yet his servants were shabby.

  The Nepalis were given digs on Richmond Terrace, or ‘Rijavant Karij’ as the chronicler transcribed it, a neoclassical block of eight houses completed in 1825 between Downing Street and the Thames. Jang made himself at home, although the Nepalis’ habit of slaughtering goats on the premises was met with alarm from their British attendants. Billeted close to the Palace of Westminster, Jang witnessed London approaching the zenith of its imperial splendour. Piped water, hot-air balloons, the theatre, steam engines, parks, railways, ironworks: all of it impressed. Jang said: ‘The English have made fire, water and wind their slaves.’ The chronicler noticed how everyone in Belait wore a watch. ‘Getting dressed, eating, keeping appointments, sleeping, getting up or going out – everything is determined by the clock.’ The Nepalis had become explorers in a previously undiscovered land. And as the chronicler observed, it was a land on which Laksmi, the goddess of wealth, had smiled.

  Most compelling was the system of government. ‘The sovereign,’ the chronicler wrote with, you sense, an attitude of incredulity,

  cannot confiscate anybody’s property, punish anyone, resort to violence or insult, nor hand out and cancel appointments at his own pleasure, as if he were absolute master of his own resources.

  Instead, there was a parliament that could dismiss the prime minister should he fail in his duties. Most tellingly, the sovereign was subordinate to the will of the same parliament. That must have pleased Jang. ‘A man’s rank is of no account if he does wrong,’ wrote the chronicler, but he recorded too how the common people had responsibilities to wider society.

  For their part, Londoners were enthralled watching the first high-caste Hindu to visit Europe being driven down Piccadilly. The press tried to outdo each other with descriptions of Jang’s exoticism. The Times noted how sleek he appeared alongside his ‘two short, or rather, fat brothers, who accompany him. His features are of the Tartar cast.’ He learned the polka; one enterprising London music publisher was soon selling scores to a dance entitled ‘Long Live Jang Bahadur!’ Thackeray wrote a ditty about Jang’s impact on London society (‘Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat / All bleez’d with precious minerals . . . ’) published in the new satirical magazine Punch. Jang and his brothers hated the opera – all that screeching, they complained – but they clapped anyway, so hard in fact, that Queen Victoria, whose box they were sharing, asked why they should be applauding so hard when they hadn’t understood a word of it. Jang responded prettily: ‘No, Madam, nor do I understand what the nightingales sing.’

  The Times also reported that Jang was attempting to pick up a little English, although one writer who met him later in Kathmandu noted he had only three phrases: ‘How d’you do?’ ‘Very well, thank you,’ and: ‘You are very pretty.’ Jang’s roving eye and his obvious appeal to English women followed its inevitable if discreet course. The Kunwars adored Cremorne Gardens, with its gigantic dancing platform, modern gaslights and quiet corners where gentlemen could meet the brightly dressed prostitutes. Jang preferred whores and adventurers to noble-born women, because talking them into bed took less effort and had fewer consequences. A shop girl called Laura Bell, born on Lord Hertford’s Irish estates and recently arrived from Belfast, caught Jang’s eye and he lavished gifts on her, mostly valuable jewellery. Alarmed that adventurous young women were fleecing an honoured guest, ministers of state, anxious to maintain good relations, authorised reimbursement.

  When Jang first arrived in Paris on the way home to Nepal, the French rather mocked him for standing off from female company, but his usual habit was soon restored. Jang and his brothers adored the girls at the ballet; after the performance they would nip backstage to spread some jewellery around. Jang especially wanted to meet a dancer named on the programme as Mme Fanny Cerito, better known in London as Lola Montez and in the narrow lanes of Simla as Eliza James. She had not long been forced out of Bavaria, during Europe’s tumultuous summer of revolutions in 1848, after the people of Munich besieged her house, fed up with her fleecing Ludwig, their ‘old, adulterous, idiot sovereign’. Now she was dancing again, although she had little skill at it. Her charms lay elsewhere. Having grown up in India she could converse freely with Jang in Hindustani. Neither could believe their luck. The newspaper L’Illustration reported how ‘there will l
ong be talk of those two splendid diamond bracelets, offered, as they say, from hand to hand by the great Indian prince.’

  Among the very best experiences, for the Kunwar boys, was the shopping. They had never seen so much stuff in their lives and they wanted to take home as much as they could manage: jewels from New Burlington Street; guns and rifles from James Purdey & Sons in Mayfair; pianos from Broadwoods, just as good as the one recently supplied to Chopin. Violins. Flutes. Billiard tables. Wolfhounds. An eighteen-foot chandelier. ‘The Nepalese Princes,’ said The Times,

  continue to form one of the most brilliant cynosures of the day. They are, certainly, going through London in style: while, as for diamonds, the brilliant eruption appears to take new forms and still more glittering features every time they appear in public.

  Jang and his brothers delighted in clothes. They ordered suits from Savile Row, which they liked to wear as ineffectual disguises at the more risqué venues they visited. But they were also free, in ways that Englishmen were not, to flaunt their wealth in outlandish clothes. At one party, the Edinburgh News reported, Jang wore

  a superb oriental costume consisting of a robe or tunic of rich blue cloth or velvet, trimmed with gold lace. His cap, which fitted closely, was of white silk and glittered with pearls and diamonds, loops of emerald coloured stones hanging in front, while a long feather of the Bird of Paradise waved in the air.

  The chronicler, however, looked on with distaste at the mixture and familiarity of different classes at the parties the Nepalis attended.

  ‘Some officials and their wives danced,’ he recorded, ‘some walked about and others remained seated. They paid no attention to differences of rank, ignoring all questions of precedence. Such was the entertainment.’

  Most important of all, for Jang’s future as ruler of Nepal, were his encounters with Queen Victoria and her ministers. Victoria, aged thirty to Jang’s thirty-three, had given birth to Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, shortly before the Nepali ambassador’s arrival. So, for the first few days of his visit, he had to make do with her confidante and adviser, the Duke of Wellington, who was now eighty-one. The Iron Duke was very much the Nepali ruler’s kind of man: direct, authoritarian, a soldier, not an intellectual and an isolationist in terms of foreign policy. When Wellington died two years later, Jang ordered an eighty-three-gun salute to be fired from Kathmandu’s Tundhikel parade ground: one shot for each year of his life.

  When Queen Victoria had sufficiently recovered, she received Jang at an official audience with her family and government officials in attendance. He was as impressed with Victoria as he had been by Wellington. Monarchs, for Jang, had been exclusively querulous, hot-tempered, inconsistent, venal and mad. Queen Victoria was an astonishing contrast. He sat beside her in her drawing room surrounded by her seven children and marvelled that this slight woman should be ruler of such a vast empire. She rewarded him with the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, which caused gossip in Kathmandu, where the court assumed that Order of the Bath meant a level of intimacy.

  Jang’s visits to London and Paris had profound repercussions for his own country. Nepal soon had a modern legal system, the Muluki Ain, or ‘law of the country’, based on the Napoleonic Code, covering in 1,400 pages the administration of the state, revenue collection, criminal and civil law. Unlike the old religious-based system, which had allowed execution or bodily mutilation for a wide range of offenses, the Muluki Ain limited corporal punishment. Yet it was Britain’s industrial might that impressed Jang the most. When he returned to Kathmandu, he was a changed man. He found his home provincial and dull, his subjects narrow and ill educated. ‘Why should I attempt to tell these poor ignorant people what I have seen? It is as ridiculous to suppose that they would believe it as it is hopeless to attempt to make them understand it.’

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  After his return to Nepal, Jang fought a brief war against Tibet, winning new trade concessions from Lhasa, then stepped down as prime minister in favour of his brother, having the king declare him a maharaja. Retirement did not suit him. When his brother died a year later, Jang took up the reins once more, in time for the Indian rebellion. He tightened his family’s grip on power, marrying his children into the king’s family, including his daughter to the crown prince. The future of his dynasty seemed secure, but Jang was now outwitting opponents he deemed backward and unworthy. The hallmark of his family’s rule was indifference to the people they governed. In 1950, when the Ranas finally lost power, the level of public education and health care was pitiful, while the sons of Nepal’s elite were being educated in English public schools or their Indian equivalent. In the mid 1960s, when Jang’s regime was still fresh in the memory and the artless palaces he built still dominated the city, the Newari scholar Kamal P Malla wrote how the Ranas

  refused to communicate with the rest of society except for money and cheap labour. They turned their backs on the traditional Nepalese arts, crafts and architecture. There is not a single building which shows the regime’s patronage of the homespun style. A Rana palace is not only a depressive monument to Western mimicry: it is also convincing evidence of a collective schizophrenia. After all, the Ranas were the rulers; they ought to feel different from the ruled; they must live differently in dream-castles inaccessible to the vulgar herd. But is not all mimicry vulgar particularly the mimicry of a culture only imperfectly understood?

  When northern India ignited in rebellion in May 1857, Jang Bahadur had put his entire military at the disposal of the British. And when the governor general hesitated over Jang’s offer, he had recruited as advocate Brian Houghton Hodgson, who travelled that autumn to Calcutta to lobby Lord Canning. ‘I urged the great value, negative and positive,’ Hodgson wrote after their meeting, ‘of the proffered aid of Nepal for putting down the Mutiny.’ Hodgson was well aware of the suspicion Calcutta felt towards the Nepali maharaja but if Jang

  were fairly trusted and put into the hands of a representative of his Lordship having tact, experience and a liking for the Gurkhas, good faith would be kept with us, some useful military service done for us, and above all in importance at such a moment, the spectacle exhibited of the Hindu State par excellence in alliance and co-operation with us.

  Historians have pored over the reasons for Jang’s offer, but it was not done out of loyalty to Queen Victoria. Material advantage and adventure seem the likeliest explanations: boredom and greed. Hodgson advised Canning to offer Jang territory in the western terai that Nepal had lost at the Treaty of Sagauli, the conclusion of its war with the East India Company, in 1816. Canning reflected and agreed, appointing Hodgson’s friend Sir George MacGregor as Jang’s British attaché. In March of 1858, Jang marched at the head of an army seventeen thousand strong to help Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell in the relief of Lucknow, telling the general that ‘had he not visited England he would now have been fighting against us instead of with us’. Apart from the land on the terai, Jang’s service to the British earned him four thousand cartloads of loot from Lucknow, ten thousand modern British rifles, the promise of military training, as well as a substantial financial pay-off and honours from the British crown.

  A few weeks after Lucknow, in the summer of 1858, Brian Houghton Hodgson left India forever. Aged fifty-seven, he would live another thirty-six years, dying at his home in Dover Street, London, in 1894. Jang Bahadur spent his later years living in the ersatz European splendour of his palace in the Kathmandu district of Thapathali. He was determined to visit Europe for a second time but the British were at first reluctant; later, in 1874 and with a visit finally arranged, he got as far as Bombay only to fall from his horse, forcing his return home. In 1876 he entertained the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, with a fortnight’s tiger hunting on the terai. But despite his fascination with European power, or perhaps because of it, Jang did his best to keep the British out, resolutely refusing them recruitment of Gurkhas inside Nepal and stymieing trade between India and Tibet. Almost exactly a year after the
royal visit, in February 1877, Jang Bahadur died, aged fifty-nine, of cholera.

  12

  Crossing Borders

  The Indian village of Milam sits high in the Johar valley, a few kilometres south of the border with Tibet and close to the Milam glacier, from where the headwaters of the Gori Ganga, the ‘white river’, begin their journey south. These days Milam is a place of ruins. There are roughly four hundred houses in the village but only a dozen are still inhabited. In India’s 1901 census, there was a population here of almost eighteen hundred. Now it is down to a handful of shepherds, old men and women who bring their animals north each spring for the rich summer grazing. During winter, bears plunder the surviving homes, ransacking them for anything edible while the bitter wind tears at roofless walls. Look closely, though, and you’ll find those walls studded with exquisite hand-carved wooden window frames dating back to the eighteenth century. Milam has been here for a long time and these works of craftsmanship are evidence of more prosperous times. Some of the architecture shows a similar cultural confidence. Ask the locals, and they will show you the bada ghar, the ‘big house’ where their ancestors hid from Gorkha invaders who had heard rumours of the region’s wealth. All this decay among the mountains provokes an obvious and overwhelming question: what happened?