Farzana Read online

  News was one day brought to her that two slave girls had set fire to her houses at Agra in order that they might make off with their paramours, two soldiers of the guard she had left in charge. These houses had thatched roofs, and contained all her valuables, and the widows, wives, and children of her principal officers. The fire had been put out with much difficulty and great loss of property; and the two slave girls were soon after discovered in the bazaar at Agra, and brought to the Begum’s camp. She had the affair investigated in the usual summary form; and their guilt being proved to the satisfaction of all present, she had them flogged till they were senseless, and then thrown into a pit dug in front of her tent for the purpose, and buried alive. I had heard the story related in different ways, and I now took pains to ascertain the truth; and this short narrative may, I believe, be relied upon.7

  This merciless treatment of the two slave girls would lead Farzana’s later detractors to label her a murderer. At the time, though, it was accepted without question as fair and just punishment for a crime that might well have turned into a tragedy. ‘There were’, the Persian merchant had explained, ‘besides my mother and sisters, many respectable females that would have rather perished in the flames than come out [of purdah] to expose themselves to the crowd that assembled to see the fire. Had the flames not been extinguished, many lives would have been lost.’ Her ruthlessness also had the desired effect on any members of the brigade who might have been under the illusion that youth and gender would make her easy to exploit. ‘For some years after,’ recalled the merchant, ‘her orders were implicitly obeyed.’

  But a trained nautch girl could of course cajole as effectively as she could terrorize. Mercenary leaders, Reinhardt included, were so notorious for failing to pay their troops that each brigade had developed its own method of forcing them to do so. Modave told of one group of sepoys who had resorted to taking their leader hostage, ‘seizing all the brigade’s artillery and ammunition, surrounding the tent of their general, getting rid of all his servants and telling him that he would neither drink, eat or smoke until they had been paid everything they were owed’. In its earlier days the Sardhana Brigade had perfected a different technique: holding Reinhardt at gunpoint and relieving him of his trousers, they had tied him astride a cannon that had been left in the sun, rightly confident that the searing heat of the gunmetal would guarantee his hasty submission to their demands. Possibly fearful of similar treatment, and not entirely confident that her brigade contained enough ‘gentlemen’ to protect her from such an indignity, Farzana now solemnly gave a guarantee that wages would be paid promptly, regularly and in full. And she was as good as her word. Save only the sepoys of the English Company, the Begum’s may have been the only properly remunerated troops in India.

  The drama of the Agra fire and the rough justice of its aftermath made Farzana mindful of her responsibilities as Reinhardt’s ‘widow’. His first wife Bara Bibi and her son Louis Balthazar had been living in one of the houses that had been damaged by the flames. Farzana now took the ‘Old Lady’ (as everyone called her) into her safe keeping and made arrangements for her to live in security at Sardhana. There, confounding all expectations, Bara Bibi would continue to bide in mindless seclusion as part of Farzana’s household until just short of her 100th birthday, so outlasting even Farzana herself. The begum was similarly considerate to her awful ‘stepson’ Louis Balthazar. Although she disliked him as much as she distrusted him, she installed him in a house in Delhi that had belonged to Reinhardt and gave him a generous living allowance. Whether or not this was his due, his only thanks after several years of indulging himself and his equally dissipated cronies at Farzana’s expense would be to bite the hand that fed him and make a bid to oust her from Sardhana.

  Having made arrangements for Reinhardt’s dependants, Farzana turned her attention to the future of the brigade. She had gone over Mirza Najaf’s beturbanned head and appealed directly to Shah Alam to obtain her command. Now she had to effect a rapprochement with that powerful commander-in-chief. Only with his approval and favour could the brigade be confident of gainful employment in the emperor’s service. Happily, she found the wily Mirza in forgiving mood. He had by now discovered that Louis Balthazar was indeed a wastrel; he continued to have considerable confidence in Pauli; and, most crucially, with his authority under threat from the devious machinations of his old rival, the chief minister Abdul Ahad, Mirza Najaf needed the backing of the Sardhana Brigade almost as much as the brigade needed him. He therefore confirmed the Begum’s position as its leader without demur.

  As if this was not triumph enough, towards the end of 1779 came the news that Farzana would consider among the most significant of her whole life. Apparently on his own initiative, Shah Alam confirmed her in the possession of the jagir of Sardhana. ‘She had thus attained the dignity and power of an independent ruling princess with an army of her own.’8 No doubt the emperor had his reasons, and just as certainly they were more political than romantic. A loyal dependant with an army of her own was as valuable to him as imperial patronage was to her. Moreover, neither would be disappointed in the other. The emperor’s favour would never waver; and the nameless, homeless, penniless waif who had been plucked from the gutter by ‘a morose and ill-conditioned ruffian’ from the Rhineland would stand by her sovereign with a wit and energy that surpassed all expectations.

  SAINTS AND SINNERS

  Though unversed in history, Farzana was well aware that in Indian tradition gender never entirely precluded advancement. Women might exercise considerable influence even in affairs of state, though they usually did so through or on behalf of their husbands. Farzana was far from unique. She was, for a start, one of several Indian ‘wives’ who were married (or otherwise) to distinguished foreign adventurers. It was common practice in Mughal India for European men, whatever their nationality or occupation, to take at least one Indian bibi; some enthusiastically embraced local practice by taking several. By the middle of the eighteenth century all of the East India Company’s dozen or so factories were said to be ‘surrounded by a ring of native substitutes for English wives and a swarm of Eurasian children’.9 Some of these ‘native substitutes’ were given European names in recognition of their accepted status, like ‘Babette’ Madec, ‘Hélène’ de Boigne and even ‘Lucy’ Reinhardt (as Bara Bibi had once been known).

  A select few enjoyed the dubious distinction of accompanying their husbands back to Europe. Though this was not always a happy experience, ‘Babette’ Madec apparently passed five years of connubial bliss in Brittany with her René, followed by fifty years of contented widowhood after his fatal riding accident in 1784. ‘Hélène’ de Boigne was less fortunate. Of the three Indian ‘wives’ of Benoit de Boigne, the great Savoyard who would make freelance adventuring almost respectable, she alone would accompany de Boigne to Europe on his retirement, only to find herself parked in a house in Enfield on the northern outskirts of London. There she was left with their two young children while the much-decorated general sauntered off to marry the daughter of a French Marquis. Hélène never complained about this cavalier treatment – but then it was no part of an Indian wife’s role to complain. ‘You have in your Lady a Treasure, my good friend,’ a colleague had written admiringly to de Boigne when he first met the nineteen-year-old Hélène in Lucknow. ‘She has no will of her own and I never heard a woman be contented with so little.’ Indian wives were expected to remain docile, submissive and in the background. And, with a few notable exceptions like Farzana, the vast majority did.

  Yet female rulers, even female Muslim rulers, were not unknown. In the thirteenth century the Delhi sultanate had devolved on Raziya, the spirited sultana whose tomb enclosure in Delhi’s Chauri Bazaar may well have served the young Farzana as a playpen. Like Farzana, Raziya had been barely twenty when she embarked on her career of military exploits and amatory entanglements; and as with Farzana, although contemporary chroniclers were explicit enough, later writers have seemed uncomfortable with th
e part she personally played in her curious history. Historians to a man (gender studies have yet to catch up with Raziya) portray her as a victim of circumstance or a product of wishful romance. Exploits that would surely win approval in the case of a dashing young sultan evidently tax academic credulity when their agent is a gritty young sultana. ‘Not born of the right sex,’ as the chronicler had prophetically put it, ‘in the estimation of men all [her] virtues were useless.’10 Farzana has suffered in similar fashion. In fact when scrutinized by those armchair authorities who would interpret the exploits of India’s freelancers to later generations, her reputation has nosedived. Mostly British, such authorities confidently discern the tactical logic behind any battlefield manoeuvre and can name every nut on a field gun. Bayonets flash and musketry rattles in their pounding narratives. But a petticoat on the battlefield finds them profoundly distrustful. There is no question that, as well as managing the brigade’s Sardhana headquarters and being responsible for the employment and supply of the troops, Farzana frequently rode by their side and commanded them in battle.

  No doubt she bowed to the experience of Pauli and others in technical matters like siege craft and ballistics; and certainly she was mindful of Reinhardt’s dictum about withdrawing whenever defeat threatened. But as the brigade’s commander, all decisions were ultimately hers. She took parades, settled disputes and dispensed rough justice. Fines were levied, and prize money was divided, on her authority. She was responsible for all promotions within the brigade and all dismissals from it. In short she was as active and engaged as any other commander-in-chief. Yet by the latter-day daredevils11 in their armchairs her military role is habitually diminished, often by reference to her association with ‘the butcher of Patna’ and innuendoes about her supposed prowess as a sexual predator. By assuming ‘once a prostitute always a prostitute’, they infer that she devoured suitors for breakfast and had worked her way through most of Reinhardt’s European officers by the time she was twenty. Her ‘command’, in other words, was no more convincing than a bedroom farce. Yet no evidence is offered for such slurs; nor has any been found; nor, if it were, would it necessarily detract from her military abilities.

  Farzana’s grasp of Sultana Raziya’s role in the bloody sultanate of Delhi was probably hazy but she certainly knew of the enormous influence exercised by the imperial consorts of the Great Mughals. Agra’s Taj served to remind her of the dazzling example of devotion set by Shah Jahan’s Mumtaz Mahal, while the power wielded by Nur Jahan, the consort of Shah Jahan’s father, Jahangir, was positively legendary. As with Raziya’s story, Nur Jahan’s had somewhat anticipated that of Farzana. Of Persian descent, she too had been widowed and apparently discarded before, at the comparatively late age of thirty, she caught the emperor’s eye and quickly became not only his favourite wife but, as Jahangir slumped into alcohol dependency, his all-powerful regent. Silver rupees were ‘struck in the name of the Queen Begum, Nur Jahan’ (as the wording on their obverse read), ships sailed under her colours and imperial rescripts were issued under her direction. For eleven years (1611–22) she ruled the empire not just in name but in official reality.

  Only generalship was not among Nur Jahan’s myriad accomplishments. That was left to Raziya and, much later, Lakshmi Bai, the celebrated Rani of Jhansi who would prove perhaps the ablest of all those national heroes who opposed the British in the Great Rebellion (or ‘Mutiny’) of 1857–59. But five centuries separated Raziya and Lakshmi Bai; as lady warriors they were notable simply because they were so exceptional.

  Gender was just as crushing a professional handicap in India as anywhere. It was thus something of a coincidence that Farzana Begum’s rule happened to coincide with that of another remarkable princess, albeit one who ruled in her own right. Comparisons would inevitably be made between the two, and they were not often to Farzana’s advantage; for this near-contemporary was the saintly Ahalyabai Holkar of Malwa, a paragon among rulers and the most revered princess in Indian history.

  Malwa lies in the rugged western uplands of what is now Madhya Pradesh in central India. It formed one of the four great states that comprised the Maratha confederacy (the others being Baroda, Gwalior and Nagpur). The first ruler of Malwa, Malhar Rao Holkar, had chosen the eight-year-old Ahalyabai as a bride for his only son, Khande Rao, and as the provider of a future heir. In the event it was she who would preserve the kingdom, outlasting three generations of Holkars and becoming the mainstay of both the family and the state. When the young Ahalyabai’s husband turned out to be a hopeless drunk, she handled the administration of Malwa for her warring father-in-law; when the father-in-law died, she ruled the state by proxy while her husband idled away his days in further ‘acts of dissipation’; when he in turn fell in battle, she continued to rule as regent for their son; and when the son, as ‘hot-tempered, fickle-minded and worthless’ as Louis Balthazar, died within a year of his investiture, the by then thirty-nine-year-old Ahalyabai was recognized by the Peshwa, the titular supremo of the Maratha clans, as ruler of Malwa in her own right.

  That was in 1766, roughly when Farzana was settling in with Reinhardt among the Jats of Bharatpur. Thirteen years later, when Farzana was granted the jagir of Sardhana, Ahalyabai’s reputation as an exemplary ruler had spread across the length and breadth of Hindustan. But though Malhar Rao had taken pains to instruct his daughter-in-law in military strategy, Ahalyabai had proved a less than willing warrior. Her first act as an independent ruler had therefore been to appoint Tukoji Holkar, commander of Malwa’s palace bodyguard and a distant relative, to take charge of military affairs. This enabled her to concentrate on the social responsibilities that really interested her – administering justice, beautifying the Malwa capital of Indore, building roads, encouraging artistic and industrial enterprise, and paying careful attention to the needs of her people. The novel and ingenious division of power between Ahalyabai and Tukoji lasted for three decades and resulted in what Sir John Malcolm, the great authority on central India, would describe as ‘one of the most stable reigns of the eighteenth century’.12

  While Farzana delighted all-comers with her looks and vivacity, Ahalyabai was universally celebrated for her patience and sanctity. Farzana would rule with gritty determination; Ahalyabai governed with dignity and compassion. Farzana’s name would be scurrilously linked with that of any man she favoured with a smile; Ahalyabai’s conduct ‘was marked by prayer, abstinence and work’. They could hardly have been more different. The bewitching Farzana would attract accusations of actual witchcraft, while Ahalyabai was known to her adoring subjects as ‘Devi’ (‘goddess’). ‘Her reputation in Malwa today’, writes Stewart Gordon, ‘is that of a saint.’13

  These differences of temperament were further compounded by those of circumstance. Farzana had none of Ahalyabai’s advantages of patriarchal support or education. Her ‘husband’ had been a foreigner, not the scion of an indigenous ruling dynasty, her origins were dubious and her background was anything but saintly. Tradition laid down strict conventions governing the circumstances under which women might succeed to ‘kingship’: a woman could rule as a wife if her husband was incapable, as a widow if there was no male heir, and as a regent if the heir was a minor. Ahalyabai qualified on all three counts, Farzana on none. It has often been suggested that in the absence of any other role model, Farzana must have done her best to emulate the incomparable Ahalyabai. She was certainly aware of her reputation and would soon have first-hand acquaintance of her Maratha brethren. But just as fighting would never be Ahalyabai’s forte so, try as she eventually would, sainthood would never come naturally to Farzana. To one so resourceful the cut and thrust of the campaign trail and the ups and downs of court intrigue proved infinitely more appealing.

  TROUBLE AND STRIFE

  Ahalyabai’s example of enlightened rule was all the more remarkable for having occurred during a period of intensified upheaval on the subcontinent. The British were on the move again. After a ten-year lull following victory at Buxar, the
Company had begun posting another string of sensational conquests, and this time it was not just Bengal or the extreme south that was affected. In 1773 Warren Hastings, the Company’s governor of Bengal, had been appointed its first Governor General with authority over all the Company’s territories, including Madras and Bombay. Abler and longer serving (1773–85) than any of his successors, Hastings found these far-flung subordinates involving him in war with the Marathas in western India and with the rulers of Mysore in the south. From Calcutta he despatched expeditionary forces overland to stiffen their resident troops, and thus for the first time Company armies began to criss-cross the Indian interior. The British were flexing their military muscle as never before. An all-out assault on the remaining independent power centres of India looked imminent.

  But as yet these developments, however ominous, did not directly affect Delhi and the north-west. There, as if intent on maximizing the mayhem while still at liberty to do so, the Mughal power brokers raised the level of their incessant intrigues to a crescendo of bloodletting and warmongering. For a young and untested participant hampered by gender and a dubious past, they were exciting if perilous times.

  The first crisis Farzana had to negotiate after securing command of the brigade developed from the hostility between Mirza Najaf Khan, the emperor’s military supremo, and Abdul Ahad, his chief minister. Though both Muslims, Mirza Najaf was a Shia from Persia and Abdul Ahad a Sunni from Kashmir; sectarian and cultural differences, as well as a lust for power, lay at the root of their rivalry which, having simmered for years, burst into the open in 1779 just after the emperor had granted Farzana tenure of the Sardhana jagir. As the emperor’s commander-in-chief, Mirza Najaf had been forced to spend long spells away from the capital, crushing rebellions, browbeating defaulters, recruiting allies, and collecting – by persuasion or force – the vast sums of money needed to maintain the imperial army. Increasingly he had based himself in Agra, leaving Abdul Ahad in Delhi to become, in the words of a contemporary, ‘so far master of the Emperor’s heart and mind that he governed the household and the court with a single nod of his head’.