Farzana Read online

  A stalemate ensued until, with the onset of the hot weather, conditions within the fort became unbearable. The food ran out, the wells dried up, and the defenders began to abscond. By the end of April it was all over. Surrender was duly arranged, its terms being promptly broken as the victors poured across the moat’s only bridge and immediately started looting. ‘There was a terrible tumult,’ wrote Modave, whose first-hand account is no less vivid for disparaging everyone involved.

  Much blood was spilt and even women and children had their throats cut. The Muslims [i.e., the Mughal forces] took their revenge on the infidels’ defilement of their mosque in Agra by filling their temples with the guts, carcases and bones of sacred cows. Women were raped and three widows of the former rajah committed suicide rather than endure this fate. Then the pillagers set fire to the town; fire spread to the powder store, on three consecutive days there were terrible explosions, and the conquerors suffered as much as the conquered. Najaf tried to stop the plundering, but it took three days to bring his troops under control.9

  Given the intense rivalry among the Europeans, it was a wonder that Mirza Najaf had managed to keep his troops from deserting, never mind under control. But the spoils must have been worth it. While the Jats watched as their villages were razed, their households plundered and their state reduced to just Bharatpur town and its immediate hinterland, the Mughal forces handsomely rewarded themselves.

  Thanks to his share of this bonanza, René Madec would be the first freelance to live the Indian dream to its logical conclusion. Retiring from active service after Dig, he converted what Modave called a ‘colossal fortune accumulated at the expense of the Indian people’ into gold and precious stones, then sailed for France. There with the devoted Begum Babette at his side, he would live the opulent life of France’s first ‘nabob’ until his death in 1784.

  Others would not be so lucky. Modave, disappointed in his expectations of succeeding to the command of Madec’s brigade, also withdrew from Mughal service after Dig. Bitter and disillusioned, he drifted south to Hyderabad in search of the elusive career to which his talents self-evidently – it was evident to himself – entitled him. There his four-year and 600-page Voyage en Inde ended. A failed adventurer but a gifted chronicler, he died of a fever and probably dysentery in Macchlipatnam in late 1777.

  As for Reinhardt, if Modave was right, he too was tempted to cut and run. His begum might yet have been prised away from Sardhana and together they could have lived the freelancer’s fantasy to its fairy-tale conclusion, happy ever after in a castle on the Rhine. But first they had somehow to run the gauntlet of British justice in India, a task nigh impossible without imperial protection; and even in Europe they would need to cover their tracks under new identities and find new protectors. It was all too risky. Instead, Reinhardt stayed on with the emperor and in late 1777 was rewarded with one of the most powerful positions in his gift, no less than the civil and military governorship of Agra. There Reinhardt re-established his household and there Farzana joined him. Through the winter of 1777–78 they ruled the city, reigned even, as the unlikely successors of Shah Jahan and his beloved Mumtaz Mahal.

  The British were apoplectic. It was bad enough that the butcher of Patna was still at large. That he was as rich as Clive and his equal in the imperial hierarchy as governor of the Mughal’s second city simply beggared belief. Nor was that the worst of it. For in what the British took to be a final act of defiance, Reinhardt now contrived to evade British justice once and for all. In April 1778 he took to his bed; ‘he is very ill and I fear for him,’ reported his surgeon. Two weeks later, with Farzana by his side, the fifty-eight-year-old Reinhardt/Somers/ Sombre/Sumru died of natural causes. He was buried in the garden of his Agra house. ‘It is somewhat shocking to our modern notions of historical justice, to have to relate this peaceful and honourable conclusion to the career of such a blood-stained and faithless condottiere,’ notes the historian of India’s freelances.10

  Sombre died on the sixth of this month* of a neglected head-cold [wrote Surgeon-Major Visage to Madec, his Breton countryman]. The Nawab [Mirza Najaf] has given Sombre’s titles to his son and preserved the force. It is Pauli [a German] who commands it, until the younger Reynard [i.e., Reinhardt] is of an age to command it himself. Sombre flatly refused to make his confession, nor would he put his affairs in any order. The only thing I could get him to do was send for his son, who came two days before his death.11

  In what amounted to Reinhardt’s last recorded disposition, there was no mention of Farzana, no role for her in the brigade, no position for her at Sardhana and no provision whatsoever for her future upkeep. The twenty-eight-year-old begum was now effectively a widow – and worse. By a chilling coincidence, she was in exactly the same position as her mother had been twenty-two years before. She too was the junior of two concubines; the senior, Reinhardt’s ‘first wife’ Bara Bibi, was still alive; and so too was the dotty Bara Bibi’s son, the supposedly retarded Louis Balthazar. In fact it was this younger ‘Reynard’ who, when ‘of an age’, was to step into his father’s boots. One can only assume that, in taking to his bed, ‘the grizzled old warrior’ had taken leave of his senses. Refusing to make his confession was as out of character as his failure to leave a will.

  Although Farzana was known to everyone from the emperor downwards as ‘Begum Sumru’, she had no legal title even to Reinhardt’s name. Nor, since she and Reinhardt had no surviving children, was there a minor on whose behalf she could legitimately claim a share of his inheritance. Courtesy of Mirza Najaf Khan, the most powerful man in Hindustan, Bara Bibi’s ‘feeble-minded’ Louis Balthazar had not only been granted his father’s titles; he had been promised command of his brigade. Farzana was facing the near certainty of losing everything – the troops that were her nearest thing to family, the Sardhana estate that was her first real home, and the title that was her only claim to social standing. A Mumtaz Mahal one minute, she was little better than an ageing nautch girl the next.

  ____________________________

  * Modave was mistaken about Reinhardt’s age – he was probably about fifty-six.

  * The inscription on Reinhardt’s grave states that he died on 4 May.

  PART TWO

  DAUGHTER OF THE EMPEROR

  1778–1802

  6

  STEEL BENEATH THE MUSLIN

  Reinhardt’s sudden death changed everything. As of 1778 Farzana was on her own. She could well, like her mother, have simply accepted her fate and faded into oblivion, a victim of the capricious times that had plucked her from obscurity in the first place. But just as training as a nautch girl had taught her never to scorn an overture, so her induction into the world of freelancing had given her a decided taste for adventure. Opportunities were there to be grasped, adversities to be defied. For such a consummate operator, there was no going back. Still young, still bewitching, and now as confident in European company as among the scheming dignitaries that surrounded the emperor, Farzana spun into action.

  Bara Bibi posed no threat. Permanently disorientated by her mental breakdown, the mother of Reinhardt’s only child would spend the rest of her extremely long life in a state of harmless and untroubled distraction. Louis Balthazar himself, at twenty-two only six years Farzana’s junior, was potentially much more of a problem. Although frequently described as ‘feeble-minded’, he was not a certifiable imbecile. Rather was he quite plausibly the slow-witted monster of later conjecture, ‘a detestable compound of ignorance, weakness, debauchery and cruelty’1 and ‘a feckless, headstrong gambler of dissolute disposition and dubious integrity’.2 Unpleasant and unpredictable, he nevertheless had a claim on Reinhardt’s vast fortune and might well be happy to pass his days merely squandering that fortune. Just as easily he might take it into his head to claim the brigade and to dismiss any objectors, not least his father’s junior concubine. He had to be sidelined. Fortunately, he was too delighted with his unexpected promotion to ‘Zafaryab Khan’ to give any immedia
te thought either to Farzana or the brigade. In fact he was celebrating his aggrandisement with a prolonged debauch. Farzana was thus at liberty to pre-empt his future prospects by cultivating the brigade’s stand-in commander, the enigmatic Colonel Pauli.

  Dogged and unimaginative, the German-born Pauli (whose first name is unknown and whose second is sometimes given as Pauly or Paoli) had been Reinhardt’s second-in-command since before the siege of Dig. He was the obvious person for Farzana to turn to in this moment of crisis and she could probably have won him over with a simple appeal to his chivalry. But she needed something more durable than chivalry and was not prepared to gamble on a ‘probably’. Better the only bond a former nautch girl knew. Her relationship with Reinhardt had been sparked by the latter’s infatuation; the same would serve with Pauli. Nothing if not consistent, she would, as if from habit as much as design, take him as her lover.

  Pauli was easy prey, and Farzana had lost none of her skills. Her brains as much as her charms seduced him; had she asked him to ride into the fires of hell he would have leapt into the saddle. Instead she asked him merely to listen and consider. Mirza Najaf, she pointed out, had confirmed him as commander of the Sardhana Brigade until such time as Louis Balthazar was ‘of an age to command it himself’. But what then? Could the seasoned warrior, veteran of the siege of Dig and other hard-fought battles, really see himself playing second fiddle to a depraved and callow youth? Even if Mirza Najaf realized that Louis Balthazar was never going to be fit to lead what was, despite its unruly reputation, a valuable fighting force, there was no guarantee he would confirm Pauli in the command. On the contrary, he was likely to replace him with someone of his own choosing. If, on the other hand, Pauli would support her own claim to the brigade’s loyalty, then not only could she guarantee his continuing to command in the field, but by working together, they could preserve their own and the brigade’s most treasured asset – their independence.

  The besotted Pauli took little convincing – either of the force of her argument or of the need to move quickly. Mirza Najaf’s decision about their future had not been well-received either by the Europeans of Reinhardt’s brigade or by the native sepoys; they had no intention of accepting Louis Balthazar as their leader and were already debating other options; unless something was done to placate them, they might well start to disperse. When Pauli called them together and suggested that Farzana herself should take over the direction of the brigade, their response was immediate and unanimous. According to Major General Sir William Sleeman, who interviewed some surviving members of the brigade all of fifty years later, ‘the Begum was requested to take command of the force by all the Europeans and natives that composed it’; it was ‘the only possible mode of keeping them together, since the son was known to be altogether unfit’.3 A petition to this effect was duly signed by those members of the brigade who could write and attested by all who could not. Accompanied by Pauli, Farzana then took the priceless document to Delhi and submitted it to Emperor Shah Alam. Ever susceptible to the entreaties of the lively Farzana, and relishing the rare opportunity to override his domineering commander-in-chief, Shah Alam received her, granted the petition and ‘formally confirmed Begum Sumru in the charge of the Sardhana Brigade’.

  In the late 1770s only two of what Captain Lewis Ferdinand Smith would call Hindustan’s ‘regular corps’ of mercenaries (by which he meant freelance and European-led) were in existence – that formed by Walter Reinhardt and that by René Madec. But following the 1775 death of Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, the number of Europeans in both brigades had significantly increased thanks to Governor General Warren Hastings ordering Shuja’s weak-willed successor to dismiss all the Frenchmen in his service if he wanted good relations with the English. With Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa) already under Company control and therefore off-limits for French mercenaries, this diaspora – which included the Comte de Modave – had headed west from Awadh in search of employment. Some, like Modave, had joined Madec’s brigade; many others had ended up in Reinhardt’s. The European contingent in both brigades had always been comprised predominantly of men who had once served under French colours, though many were in fact of English, Scottish, Irish, Swiss, Italian, German, Dutch and Armenian descent as well as of mixed race. Now, as a result of this influx, in the Sardhana Brigade the 200 or so Europeans were overwhelmingly French by birth.

  That such veterans and their sepoys were so keen to have Farzana as their leader is persuasive evidence that she had become far more than a regimental mascot. Old-timers like the taciturn Captain Saleur and the charismatic Major Bernier, or the dashing Chevalier Dudrenac and the ‘destructive imbecile’4 Louis Bourquien (a former cook whose ‘craft in culinary matters was superior to his skill in military ones’5) had served with the brigade since its foundation. They had known Farzana as a girl and she had grown up in their midst. For a decade she had been Reinhardt’s inspiration and their own good-luck charm. Her formative life had been spent in their company and they could vouch for her sharp tongue and incorrigible spirit – just as she could for their many weaknesses and dark secrets. Her courage and loyalty were beyond question and her concern for their well-being was reciprocated. It is hardly surprising they were willing to endorse her leadership.

  But the support of the newcomers was less predictable, and she must have been relieved that they gave it so willingly. Some, no doubt, had designs on Farzana herself, some might even have had designs on the brigade, and all must have anticipated that such a young and inexperienced leader would be a more lenient taskmaster than Reinhardt. But to veteran and newcomer alike her most persuasive credential was the fact that she was on excellent terms with the emperor. This promised the brigade the prospect of many more years of lucrative employment and conferred on it a degree of respectability, even nobility. With their professional and material needs as well covered as was possible in such dangerous and unpredictable times, service under Farzana looked to be their best option.

  This is not to say that her troubles were over. Even with Pauli’s support she would have her hands full controlling a force of 3,000 men, most of them, according to Modave, ‘drunken scoundrels capable of the most vile excesses’. By way of example, Modave had cited ‘a German soldier in Sombre’s camp’ whom he had once heard boasting of ‘the most atrocious and unnatural act one could imagine’. This monster was accompanied by a native woman whom he had married and with whom he had had two children. Irritated by their crying and fed up with having to support them, he threw all three of them down a well.6

  The Frenchman’s disgust at such barbarity had led him to declare that ‘the people of this country would be doing Europe a service if they purged [Reinhardt’s brigade] from the earth’. ‘Alas,’ he regretted, ‘they are too gentle and humane to do so.’

  This affair had come to light before Reinhardt’s death. But all too familiar with her subordinates’ ways, Farzana braced herself for more such trouble. There were bound to be those who would try and take advantage of their new leader, and with any hint of weakness on her part sure to be exploited, a show of ruthlessness may have been positively desirable. Though affection had won her the support of the brigade, controlling such ‘drunken scoundrels’ required an element of awe, even fear. Silken skills beguiled, but severity bought respect. A new Farzana, and by no means the last, was about to be revealed.

  The only known portrait of Farzana as a young woman appears in munshi Gokul Chand’s Zeb-un-Tavarikh. Dwarf-like, she sits demurely in a European-style chair wearing a most un-demure, indeed almost transparent, muslin shawl and resting her slippered feet on a footstool. The undated painting is not a great work of art, and there is no way of knowing how true a likeness it is; but with enigmatic smile, dangling earrings and impossibly long eyelashes, she could hardly look less like a military commander. Now, just confirmed in the command of the brigade, she had a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to her men and anyone else who was wondering – jealous courtiers, rival commanders or t
he free-spending Louis Balthazar – that the frailty was misleading and that beneath the muslin lurked stays of steel.

  An old Persian merchant, whose widowed mother had been a member of Farzana’s household and who had himself been present as a child at the time, would describe the incident to the dependable William Sleeman. Sleeman would in turn incorporate it in his memoirs, prefacing it merely with the observation that ‘the Begum had decided to make a strong impression upon the turbulent spirit of her troops by a severe example’. Sleeman then retold the merchant’s story in his own words: