Farzana Read online

  But his main business seemed to be to demolish Najaf Khan’s power and influence. He was perpetually on the watch to hurt him, like a serpent rolled upon itself.14

  The serpent hissed insinuations about Najaf Khan’s disloyalty, even treachery, and urged the emperor to take precautions. Raising a new army as a counter-force to Najaf Khan’s, and entrusting it to someone of unquestioned loyalty like Abdul Ahad himself, was deemed especially desirable. Arguing and cajoling, Abdul Ahad set to work on Shah Alam, tightening his coils around the emperor while preparing to strike at the absent Najaf Khan. ‘A courtier after the emperor’s heart, with the smooth polish, perfect suavity of temper and false bewitching tongue of a typical Kashmiri Muslim’,15 Abdul Ahad finally overcame the emperor’s doubts and was authorized to raise his own imperial corps.

  Though derided by his numerous enemies, Abdul Ahad despatched his recruiting agents. And despite a complete lack of military experience, he did have some success, his blandishments even winning him the support of one of Shah Alam’s numerous sons. But honeyed words made no impression on Farzana. She had pledged her loyalty to Mirza Najaf when he agreed to her command of the brigade; no amount of smooth-talking was going to make her switch her allegiance to Abdul Ahad. Indeed, she was quite prepared to risk defying him. When word arrived that the Sikhs were threatening another assault on the emperor’s territories, Farzana ignored Abdul Ahad’s call to arms, awaited instructions from the emperor and ordered Colonel Pauli to hold the brigade in Sardhana.

  Undaunted, the chief minister rode out of Delhi in the autumn of 1779 with an army of some 20,000 men, eager to prove that it was not just Mirza Najaf who could win battles. A few weeks later he was back. His troops had scattered before the first Sikh onslaught and their commander had panicked. Instead of rallying his forces and making a stand, he had turned tail and fled, ‘thereby leaving the whole country exposed in his rear, and the wretched inhabitants a prey to the ravages of the barbarous Sikhs’.16 For once Shah Alam was in no doubt what to do. He sent for Mirza Najaf.

  The debacle marked the end of Abdul Ahad’s career. ‘Bankrupt in finance, bankrupt in military strength and bankrupt in prestige’,17 he saw his property seized and his fortune confiscated and handed over to Mirza Najaf. No longer the chief minister, he must have been pleasantly surprised to escape with his life; instead of being executed he was escorted out of Delhi with orders never to return. As if all this was not galling enough, his newly enriched rival was appointed ‘Regent of the Empire’ by an appreciative and contrite emperor. Although the affair had ended in his acquisition of this grandiose new title (albeit a meaningless one, since Shah Alam did not retire), the episode brought home to Mirza Najaf the unwisdom of his long absences from court. He remained in Delhi for the next two years, and his unchallenged authority brought the city a spell of unaccustomed peace. In the words of the Mughal chronicler:

  There was now general happiness among all and sundry at the capital. Marriage and rejoicing were seen in every house; buying and selling went on in all quarters of the city; new houses were built or purchased. And all this, through the gracious and competent administration of Mirza Najaf Khan.18

  In Sardhana too the early 1780s were proving a constructive interlude. Farzana’s sound judgement in rejecting Abdul Ahad had greatly impressed both the emperor and Najaf Khan. Her loyalty was beyond question, her status at court was assured and, being momentarily free of military obligations, she revived her efforts to improve the Sardhana estate. She had already divided its 800 square miles into five parganas or districts. Now she stationed a detachment of troops in each district, and made their commanders responsible for their protection. Unlike the majority of jagirdars who used violence and intimidation to extract revenue from their tenants, Farzana had the sense to realize that if she billeted her army so as to protect the cultivators, the yield in terms of produce and taxation would greatly exceed whatever could be extracted at gunpoint.

  Showing extraordinary acumen for one with little experience of land management, she encouraged her sepoys to settle on smallholdings on the estate, and welcomed volunteers into her army from among the predominantly Hindu cultivators already resident there. From being mutually hostile, peasants and soldiers discovered a common interest in local security and bumper harvests. Cash crops like cotton, sugar cane and tobacco supplemented the income of the estate, as did the tolls and transit duties on travellers and traders who increasingly opted for the thoroughfares of law-abiding Sardhana.

  One such contemporary traveller was William Francklin. Later the dry-as-dust and insufferably pompous biographer of both Shah Alam and the irresistible George Thomas, Francklin was a noted stickler for facts who seldom expressed a personal opinion about anything. Yet he was so impressed by both Farzana and her estate that, not without a painful show of reluctance, he decided to make an exception. ‘While the surrounding lands exhibit the effects of desolation and distress,’ he wrote, ‘the flourishing appearance of this jagir impresses the mind of the traveller with sensations most gratifying.’ He was so very impressed indeed ‘that, deviating from the rigid line of historical precision, we embrace the opportunity of paying a tribute deservedly due to the spirit, activity, and talents of this noble lady’.19

  Most jagirdars did not reside on their estates; many never even visited them. But to such a model proprietress, absentee landlordism was anathema. Although Reinhardt’s house in Delhi was occupied by Louis Balthazar, Reinhardt’s rooms in the Red Fort were still at Farzana’s disposal and she used them frequently. But her real home was the single-storey palace, without architectural pretensions, that she and Reinhardt had built when they first arrived in Sardhana. Here she reigned as sovereign of what was more a state than an estate and as commandant of what was more an army than a parti.

  Tented cantonments and picket lines radiated from beyond the palace gardens; parades and bugle calls punctuated the daylight hours. The book-keeping peons, letter writers, heralds, all-purpose chaprasis and various advisors and ‘ministers’ were as numerous as the domestic staff. In the regimental forge blacksmiths and carpenters hammered over the repair of gun carriages; on a makeshift firing range flintlocks crackled and cannon were test-fired, no doubt prompting an eruption of barking, whinnying and screeching from Sardhana’s assorted livestock. As was the case at other courts, neither peace nor privacy was the Indian ruler’s lot. From dawn till dusk petitioners queued to seek the begum’s favour, while servants huddled at a distance to receive her orders. Tours of inspection drew crowds wherever she rode. In the still of the evening the scent of jasmine that hung about the palace’s deep verandah was under constant threat from the tang of cordite and whiffs of steaming horse dung.

  Nowadays home to the St John’s Seminary, this ‘old palace’ still nestles in a copse of mango trees and is less than half a mile from Farzana’s later basilica. The church would be built on the site that in the 1780s is said to have been occupied by a small fort used by Reinhardt to house the brigade’s armoury and treasury. In troubled times, security mattered much more than display or devotion. But with Najaf Khan in control in Delhi and Farzana confident of her jagir, this was now to change. In what was surely the most bizarre and least likely of her many transformations Farzana was about to reinvent herself, this time as a daughter of the Church.

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  During most of his mercenary career Reinhardt had evinced signs of remorse but precious few of piety. Yet by the time he and Farzana took up residence at Sardhana, he had grown, according to the Comte de Modave, ‘devout, superstitious and credulous’. Modave had been struck by the intensity of this religious obsession, though not entirely surprised. Passing through Agra on his way to Delhi he had visited a ‘pretty chapel’ that had been rescued from ruin and restored by the Jesuit Father Francis Xavier Wendel. As Modave must have known, and as a plaque on the wall confirms, the entire cost of the restoration, completed in 1772, had been borne by Walter Reinhardt Sombre. British writers have na
turally interpreted this as evidence of a still troublesome conscience.

  ‘He actually took to religion,’ says an incredulous Cecil Burns, ‘either as a thank-offering for the loot he had acquired or as a propitiary gift for heaven in mitigation of sentence for his villainies. He restored the ruined Chapel of the old Roman Catholic Mission at Agra, founded in Akbar’s reign. Furthermore he endowed the priesthood and became quite the bright ornament of the Christian congregation, thus hoping that the odour of sanctity would camouflage the horrid exhalations of a life of crime.’

  Father Wendel, a busy cleric who in his spare time had gathered military and geographical intelligence for Warren Hastings and written copiously on the Sikhs and Jats, had been withdrawn from Agra in 1773 when the Jesuit order was suppressed and the Roman Catholic mission closed. Five years later, there was still no priest in Agra when Reinhardt died, which was no doubt why the ‘grizzled old warrior’ had been buried in the garden of his own house. But in 1781 word reached Farzana that the Agra Mission had been re-established, this time by the Carmelite order. She immediately contacted the new incumbent, a Father Gregorio, to arrange a proper burial for the man to whom she owed everything.

  To those who thought that an unmarked grave in unsanctified ground was entirely appropriate for a ‘base renegade’, the tomb in Agra’s Catholic cemetery that Farzana commissioned for Reinhardt would seem disagreeably ostentatious. But the octagonal white pavilion with its deep stone cornice and onion-shaped dome is hardly excessive. Indeed it seems quite modest by comparison with other mausolea in the same cemetery. John Hessing, for example, a Dutch-born mercenary who died in 1803 while ‘in the service of Maharaji Daulat Rao Scindia’ (one of the Maratha confederates) lies beneath a towering sandstone replica of the Taj Mahal – a palace to Reinhardt’s cottage. Inside the latter an elaborately carved plinth topped by a stone slab contains ‘the butcher’s’ body and carries an inscription in Portuguese. Showing his name as ‘Sumroo Sabah’, that is ‘Colonel Samru’, the Portuguese is followed by a flowery epitaph in Persian that roughly translates as:

  The death of Sumroo Sabah – leader of virtuous disposition – roasted the bosom of the universe with the fire of sorrow. From the date of the Messiah’s ascension to the heavens, the Zodiac declared the date of his death. From the perfume of the floor of the Garden of Paradise, 1778.20

  The tomb was probably designed by Farzana and certainly paid for by her. Whether she had a say in the picturesque, if doctrinally fuzzy, imagery of its epitaph is not known. But something about the jumbling together of the Zodiac’s influence, the scented parterres of Paradise and the Messiah’s ascension hints as much at her own wavering beliefs as Reinhardt’s.

  For as if to consummate this act of piety, just a few days after Reinhardt had been laid in his final resting place, Farzana took a most improbable decision and one for which not even she would volunteer an explanation. On 7 May 1781 she was herself received into the Roman Catholic faith. The Carmelite Father Gregorio performed the baptism and, as per her own later epitaph, the convert took the Christian name of Joanna.

  Various ingenious theories have been advanced as to what lay behind this improbable conversion. One suggestion is that she undertook it for Reinhardt’s sake and in his honour, a contention that is given weight by the fact that she somehow managed to persuade Louis Balthazar to be baptized at the same time. But this begs the question of why she waited so long – not just until Reinhardt had died but until his remains had been reburied in consecrated ground. If her conversion meant so much to him, she would surely have announced it while he was still alive.

  Another theory has it that she was pressured into baptism by her Christian, mainly Catholic, European officers who sought proof of her solidarity with them and the Sardhana Brigade. But since they had shown no more Christian tendencies than had Reinhardt, and since their number included far more Indian non-Christians than European Christians, this seems improbable. Moreover Farzana was not one to be pressured into anything. John Lall has suggested that, having a predilection for European men (true) and a passionate longing for children of her own (possible), she saw conversion at the age of thirty as a way of maximizing her chances of acquiring both. Others have concluded that, like Reinhardt, she cherished the idea of forgiveness for past crimes and redemption for transgressions yet to come.

  Though mocked by the cynics (of whom there have been many), the possibility that she had undergone a genuine spiritual conversion cannot entirely be discarded. She would remain a practising, even devout, Catholic for the rest of her life; she employed a personal chaplain, made generous donations to the Church in Rome as well as to Catholic, Anglican and Baptist churches in India, and she eventually built her gleaming basilica in Sardhana, all of which would seem to indicate that there was more to her conversion than expediency. Yet the sceptics remain unconvinced. One Catholic priest would report to the Vatican’s College of Propaganda that ‘it is true that this princess is a Christian because she has been baptised, but to all intents and purposes she is still a true Mohammedan’;21 another expressed his dismay at her unorthodoxy, complaining that she insisted on having the sacrament of communion presented to her ‘dressed up as a flower bouquet’; and several protested that a fervent Catholic would not have been so profligate with her favours to other churches.

  Perhaps too, there was indeed some professional advantage in espousing Catholicism. By the time of her baptism Farzana had been ‘an independent ruling princess with an army of her own’ for two years. To maintain this position she had to engage in the politics of the Mughal court, to consult with other jagirdars and military commanders, and to negotiate with some of the highest officials in the land, men like Mirza Najaf and Abdul Ahad. Yet as a woman, and more particularly as a Muslim woman, she must have found her freedom of manoeuvre constantly challenged by those who shared the view, as prevalent at the Mughal court as in Indian society in general, that a woman performing a ‘man’s role’ was a cultural aberration. Why, it would have been asked, did she not observe purdah? Why did she insist on keeping mixed company? What was she doing meddling in politics? Why, in other words, did she not display the docility and decorum expected of her gender? To a woman of Farzana’s independent spirit, whose conduct had never before been subjected to such scrutiny and who, through all her years with Reinhardt, had been at liberty to behave much as she chose, these restraints may have been enough to prompt a potentially liberating change of faith.

  The freedoms enjoyed by her Malwa counterpart Ahalyabai Holkar can only have made these strictures harder to endure. ‘[Maratha women] have as much liberty as they can desire,’ observed Sir John Malcolm, ‘and seldom, if ever, wear a veil. The ladies of the families of Scindia and Holkar in particular…are free from the common restraints which the laws of society in India have imposed upon their sex.’22 As the ruler of a major state, Ahalyabai was an active and capable politician; she held daily durbars (public audiences) where she was accessible to anyone – male or female – who wished to speak to her, and she certainly never donned a veil. But whereas for Farzana it would have been impracticable and provocative, not to say downright bizarre, to adopt the customs of the Hindu Marathas, it was understandable, even laudable, that she should adopt the religion of her erstwhile ‘husband’.

  Becoming a Roman Catholic was thus the perfect way both of distancing herself from her disreputable upbringing and of exempting herself from ‘the common constraints imposed by the laws of society upon her sex’. While asserting her independence, she was demonstrating fidelity to Reinhardt and raising her own status with the soldiers of her brigade and with the world in which she would have to operate. She was careful not to parade her new affiliation. Like most Indian women she continued to cover her head, though not her face, in the presence of male strangers, and would conduct meetings with diehard traditionalists from behind a screen rather than risk their condemnation. The difference now was that her conduct was of her choice.

  She gave no ex
planation for her baptismal name of Joanna either. The French officers in her brigade could very plausibly have compared her to Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc), a comparison she would certainly have relished and which may well have prompted the choice of the Latinized ‘Joanna’. Although she would use the name whenever she needed to emphasize her sovereignty, particularly in her later dealings with the British, no European or Indian would ever refer to her as anything other than ‘Begum Sumru’. Like Louis Balthazar who clung determinedly to ‘Zafaryab Khan’ and never used his baptismal name at all – it was ‘Aloysius’ – Farzana was not prepared to betray her Mughal-conferred status, only to buttress it and hedge her bets against an uncertain future.

  THE LOSS OF A LOVER

  Although Mirza Najaf’s ascendancy afforded Delhi a period of relative prosperity, the same could not be said of other jagirs in the city’s hinterland. Away from his watchful eye, Najaf’s lieutenants imposed ever more stringent taxes and used ever more brutal methods to exact them. Farmers were driven by desperation to rebel and the rural unrest was compounded by the failure of the monsoon in successive years from 1780. Drought, then famine, followed. Hot winds parched the earth and sent dust devils swirling across a landscape peopled by skeletal figures cloaked in fluttering rags. Such crops as grew were laid waste by marauders; villages that were not abandoned were barricaded behind mud walls to keep out thieves and tax collectors.

  Yet while the rural population was facing death from deprivation, in political terms the enclave that constituted the Mughal Empire looked more secure than it had been for thirty years. ‘The Sikhs, Jats and Rohillas were broken,’ writes the historian Percival Spear, ‘the Afghan menace had disappeared, the Marathas were at a distance and the East India Company was preoccupied with Maratha and Mysore Wars.’23 Appearances though were deceptive. For ‘the whole edifice of power depended upon the personality of a single man’ – Mirza Najaf Khan. Its fragility was brutally exposed, and Farzana’s bucolic interlude in Sardhana brought to an abrupt end, when, in April 1782, Mirza Najaf died, probably of tuberculosis. His passing, according to Francklin, was ‘sincerely regretted by his sovereign, and lamented by the inhabitants of Delhi, who loved and revered him’. Sincerely regretted too, by both sovereign and subjects, was the fact that ‘the turbulent spirit of the Mughal nobles, restrained during Mirza Najaf’s lifetime, now broke forth with a fury which was totally ungovernable’.24 Emperor Shah Alam, sixty years old and still chronically ineffectual, could only wring his hands and pray for the miracle that would conjure up another Mirza Najaf.