Farzana Page 16
By the time the emperor and the rajah of Jaipur were camped side by side at a place called Bharawas (near the border of the modern states of Haryana and Rajasthan) it was mid-February; and it was mid-March by the time they disengaged. In that month nothing had been achieved. The rajah had been penitent but adamant. He claimed incessant war had left the Jaipur coffers as empty as the emperor’s own; he could pay only a tiny fraction of what he owed.
Faced with the rajah’s intransigence, plus the serried ranks of Rajput cavalry lined up behind him, Shah Alam’s meagre measure of courage had failed him. He meekly accepted the 25,000 rupees that were offered – not even enough to cover the cost of his expedition – and then turned away. His gamble had failed. All hope of restoring his finances and reasserting imperial authority was shattered. His sole exercise in coercive display, described by Keene as providing ‘the last faint image of the once splendid operations of the great military monarchy of Akbar and of Aurangzeb’, had proved a flop.
Deprived of their anticipated share of what should have been a handsome tribute, the imperial troops started to desert. There was no open rebellion, no violent protest, just men slipping away under cover of darkness, a smaller contingent remaining to escort him every day. Fizzing with frustration at having been baulked of a satisfyingly bloody battle, the wild-eyed gosains were scaring even the horses with their oaths and imprecations. Only the Sardhana Brigade stood firm, acting with a discipline and restraint that would have had Walter Reinhardt gaping in astonishment.
If the presence of George Thomas held their normally riotous behaviour in check, it was the disapproval of Farzana, Zeb-un-Nissa, his loyal and spirited champion, that now shamed the emperor into one more effort. He had failed with the rajah of Jaipur, but there was still a chance of restoring some pride and recouping the expense of the venture. The one-time pretender to the position of Amir-ul-Umara, the opium-addicted Najaf Kuli Khan, was also in arrears with his tribute. And the road back to Delhi passed through the district of Rewari within a few miles of which lay Najaf Kuli Khan’s stronghold of Gokulgarh.
BELOVED DAUGHTER
As everyone knows, the best place for a fort is on top of a hill. Barring hills, a mound may serve or any knoll that gives the defender the advantage of commanding the terrain and being forewarned of approaching trouble. But there are no hills in Rewari. The countryside is so flat that nineteenth-century surveyors mapping the area would have to construct scaffolding towers from which to take their theodolite sightings. So Mirza Najaf, Najaf Kuli Khan’s adoptive father, had built the fort of Gokulgarh on the plain.
There was no craggy glacis, no unscaleable rock face, not even a moat as at Bharatpur or Dig. Rather was there an elegant little ‘palace’, three storeys high to give at least the suggestion of a view, with an airy, many-pillared audience hall on the rooftop, gracious living accommodation below, and service quarters, storerooms and stables for horses and elephants underneath. The only protection afforded this unlikely gem was a man-made rampart, 30 feet high, enclosing an area of about 50 acres, and comprised of fifty-two stumpy towers, all mud-built and circular, connected by a rough wall of sand.
The tiny drama that was about to be played out around this bucket-and-spade fortress would give Gokulgarh its only moment in the spotlight of history. Abandoned soon after the death of Najaf Kuli Khan in 1791, both fort and palace have since fallen into sad decay. Goats nibble at thistles among the rubble of the elephant stables and snakes rustle the dry leaf litter in the wreckage of the courtyard. The towers and wall have been raided for building materials for the village that once lay outside them but which has since expanded to engulf the entire compound and is poised to swallow up what remains of the ruined ‘palace’. Although their homes rub shoulders with its crumbling walls, no one in Gokulgarh today remembers who built the ‘palace’ or why or when.
It was from Gokulgarh that Najaf Kuli Khan had travelled to Delhi in tardy response to Shah Alam’s desperate plea for someone to save him from the mad Rohilla, Ghulam Qadir. This had served to tip the balance against Ghulam Qadir and surely deserved some reward. When Farzana’s heroics in defence of the emperor were acknowledged with the title of Zeb-un-Nissa, Najaf Kuli Khan had angled for something equally gratifying. Indeed, as the adopted son of the late Mirza Najaf, he considered it no more than his right that he be appointed to the still vacant office of Amir-ul-Umara.
Shah Alam, shaken by his close brush with Ghulam Qadir and anxious to avoid more trouble, might have acceded to this demand. But the eunuch Mansur Ali had had other ideas. It was Najaf Kuli Khan’s misfortune that he had been born a Hindu (although he had converted to Islam on adoption by Mirza Najaf) and thus, in the eyes of the Muslim eunuch, was not to be trusted. Still in favour of the claims of his co-conspirator Ghulam Qadir, the eunuch had warned the emperor that Najaf Kuli Khan was ‘a man void of honour or principle, who, once installed in high office, would treat his sovereign with insolence and disrespect’.7 Swayed by these counsels, Shah Alam had dismissed Najaf Kuli Khan’s representations, whereupon the latter had retired to Gokulgarh in high dudgeon and sought consolation in his opium and his harem. The only gesture of defiance left to him had been to withhold his imperial tribute.
On 5 April 1788 Shah Alam entered Rewari district and ordered what remained of his army to lay siege to the Gokulgarh fort. Trenches were dug in the sandy soil to protect the imperial camp, tents were erected for the emperor and his immediate entourage, and pickets planted for the horses and elephants. Meanwhile the ‘walking city’ of camp followers established itself as best it could among the surrounding rocks and scrub. The Mughal artillery was detailed to erect batteries against the nearby village, with the honour of investing the fort itself going to Himmat Bahadur’s fanatical gosains. As the sepoys from Sardhana set up camp to the right of the line – they were being held in reserve – the emperor settled down to what he expected would be a textbook siege.
His expectations were confounded. Najaf Kuli Khan was known to savour his comforts, but he could also fight when he had to. On the second night of the siege, he made his point. ‘An unfortunate accident occurred which brought the king’s person into the most imminent peril,’ says Francklin. The mistake had been to put the gosains in the front line. Irked by hours of forced inactivity, the fighting friars had plunged into a drug-fuelled orgy; ‘abandoning themselves to the most licentious excess, they passed the whole night in riot and debauchery’. Soldiers of the imperial army joined in the orgy, and by dawn the entire force lay sunk in disorderly slumber. Alerted by his spies to this opportune state of affairs, Najaf Kuli burst from his fortress at the head of a strong detachment of cavalry and, just as the sun rose, stormed the imperial camp.
With lance, sabre, matchlock and musket, Najaf Kuli’s warriors hurled themselves on the sleeping gosains, slashing and trampling and slaughtering without mercy or discrimination. So unexpected was the assault that ‘the main body of the king’s army was thrown into disorder and began to prepare for flight’. Once the front line was broken, another detachment of troops from Najaf Kuli’s garrison surged through the gap and were soon streaming towards the centre of the camp where the red-and-gold standard of the Mughal Empire floated high above the emperor’s tent. Meanwhile a detachment of Najaf Kuli’s artillery, which had been holed up in the village, scouted round behind the royal camp and started to bombard it with grapeshot from their cannon.
Everything was uproar, disorder and dismay. The king himself was exposed to the greatest personal danger, and the royal tents being within range of the shot, many persons about his majesty were killed and wounded.8
The terrified emperor was in danger not just of being shot but of being trampled underfoot – by fleeing soldiers, stampeding horses and elephants driven to frenzy by the tumult. When a detail of Sardhana sepoys was sent to rescue him, they found the emperor stumbling around in a daze. They swiftly escorted him away from the battlefield and into Farzana’s camp. There, under the orders of George Thom
as, a phalanx of 200 sienna-uniformed sepoys had been drawn up in a defensive square. The emperor was ushered into the heart of this sanctuary and was formally received by the brigade’s commander-in-chief.
It was a moment to savour. For a second time the Emperor of Hindustan, the ‘king of the world’, the monarch she had sworn to defend, owed his life to the lowly nautch girl from the Chauri Bazaar. And for a second time the diminutive Begum visibly rose to the occasion. She welcomed the shaken old man with her customary deference, requested him to remain in the protection of her encircling sepoys, and assured him of her determination to punish Najaf Kuli Khan or perish in the attempt. She then stepped into her palanquin and, with George Thomas by her side and 100 volunteer sharpshooters and a six-pounder gun in close attendance, was carried at the head of her brigade towards the pandemonium of the battlefield. She ordered the palanquin set down close to the action. The six-pounder was charged with grapeshot, the sepoys primed their muskets, and Thomas bellowed the word of command. ‘Astonished at this sudden and unexpected check’, Najaf Kuli Khan’s forces found themselves bombarded by a lethal barrage of well-directed shot accompanied by volley after volley of small-arms fire from the sepoys. This timely intervention by the Sardhana Brigade gave the scattered Mughal troops time to regroup. Himmat Bahadur rallied his befuddled gosains; and a desperate battle ensued. The plain around Gokulgarh became littered with the dead and dying, including the commander of the Mughal army who ‘fell pierced by a musket ball’. More than 200 gosains also fell. But thanks to the relentless onslaught from the Sardhana Brigade, the enemy suffered far greater losses. The tide of the battle slowly turned and Najaf Kuli Khan’s forces ebbed back into the fortress.
When, ten years later, William Francklin sat down to write his biography of Shah Alam, Farzana’s exploits at the siege of Gokulgarh inspired him to new heights of grandiloquence.
It was indeed by all acknowledged that the intrepidity manifested by the gallant female on so trying an occasion merited the most honourable reward; to her courage and resolution was owing, not only the safety of the army, but her sovereign’s life.9
And, once again, her much relieved sovereign was indeed grateful. It took several days for order to be restored in the battered camp. The enemy dead were stripped of everything worth taking and their bodies left to the vultures and jackals; the imperial dead were cremated or buried according to the appropriate rites. The injured were tended; elephants and horses were rounded up; scattered belongings were reclaimed, and the royal tents were repaired and re-erected. By the time these tasks were complete, Shah Alam had recovered his composure enough to announce an impromptu durbar at which the guests of honour were to be his rescuer and her Irish commander.
In the presence of the surviving members of his entourage, including several of his sons and many of his senior courtiers, Shah Alam lauded Farzana’s courage and thanked her for the service she had rendered. He announced that he was granting her, in perpetuity, the pargana (or district) of Badshahpur, a valuable fief some 30 miles south-east of Rewari. He also granted her the jagir (revenue-yielding estate) of Tappal, an even larger tract on the east bank of the Jumna, with the suggestion that she appoint George Thomas as its military governor. Finally he clothed Farzana in a ceremonial robe and awarded her another title, that of Farzand-i-Azizi, ‘most beloved daughter’.
If her arrival at the imperial court as Reinhardt’s consort had been a triumph, her elevation to ‘most beloved daughter’ of the emperor was nothing less than an apotheosis. ‘By chance, good fortune, and above all, resolution and her native shrewdness,’ writes John Lall, ‘the unknown young woman had risen to the pinnacle of power in the worst of the gardi ka waqt [time of troubles] that preceded the establishment of British supremacy in Hindustan.’
There was one more scene in the drama of Gokulgarh to be played out before the armies could disperse. Although Najaf Kuli Khan had retreated into his fort, he had not surrendered, nor had he paid his imperial tribute. But then neither, according to a Mughal official who was present at the time, was he preparing another assault. ‘Dispirited by his late defeat,’ wrote Fakir Khair-ud-din Mohammed, ‘and being well aware of the influence of Begum Sumru, Najaf Kuli Khan endeavoured to avail himself of her good offices to plead his pardon with the king.’10 Unsurprisingly, Shah Alam had also lost such appetite for battle as he had been able to muster.
So, with Farzana acting as mediator, the emperor and the rebel courtier negotiated an agreement: Najaf Kuli Khan would pay his imperial tribute and swear eternal fidelity in return for Shah Alam’s forgiveness for ‘his late intemperate conduct’. To seal the bargain, Farzana then led Najaf Kuli Khan into the emperor’s presence, his wrists tied with a silk handkerchief in token of surrender. The agreed sum of money changed hands, the handkerchief was untied and the royal pardon was issued. With his pride thus a little assuaged and his coffers just a little less empty, Shah Alam announced his return to Delhi.
AFFAIRS OF THE HEART
As the emperor’s ‘most beloved daughter’, Farzana was now an honorary member of the imperial family. Her elevation brought her unparalleled access at court and gave her precedence over even its senior nobles. Naturally, this was provocative. The sight of a low-born female wheedling her way so successfully into imperial favour sent the emperor’s courtiers into a frenzy of jealousy and resentment. Collectively despised by the Comte de Modave as ‘a crowd of worthless, bankrupt fools with pompous titles’,11 they spread tales of her addiction to opium and her ravenous appetite for men half her age; they called her a vindictive megalomaniac, a murderer and the mother of several illegitimate offspring, and they muttered darkly that she had been seen casting spells and was almost certainly a witch. ‘No means were neglected by the traitorous persons who surrounded the throne to neutralize her interference.’12
But Farzana paid no heed. Indeed she was not there to hear them. In the weeks that followed the siege of Gokulgarh she stayed away from court. She turned her back on Delhi, ignored her new privileges and, for the first time in ten years, left Shah Alam to his own devices. The consequences for the emperor would be so dire that James Grant Duff would describe them as ‘almost without example in the annals of the world’.13 But the reasons for her absence had nothing to do with power or jealousy or resentment; they were personal.
At the hastily convened durbar at Gokulgarh, Shah Alam had suggested that she appoint George Thomas as military governor of her new jagir at Tappal. An imperial suggestion was tantamount to a command; but to obey that command would be to send Thomas away from Sardhana, which may have been the emperor’s intention but did not at all accord with her inclination. She needed him to command her army, she needed his encouragement, and she just needed him. As her protégé, champion and lover, Thomas had become indispensable.
It has been suggested that Farzana tried to keep her relationship with George Thomas secret ‘for fear of the disapproval it might cause among her soldiers’.14 But in truth it was not a very well-kept secret and the disapproval she feared was exclusively that of her French officers. As far as everyone else was concerned, the liaison between their employer and their de facto commander was significant only in that it boded well for the future of the brigade. According to French historian Maurice Besson, ‘there was fierce competition between the European adventurers of the Sardhana Brigade for the position of prince-consort’, with the winner being granted ‘everything on offer in the Palace including a place in the princess’s bed’.15 First Reinhardt and then Pauli had enjoyed her favours without a murmur of objection from the brigade. So why might the thought of Thomas, a man most of them liked and admired, enjoying the same privileges suddenly incur their disapproval? Farzana was now a Christian and therefore subject to a moral code even other Christians might have found hard to define; she had no husband to offend or to shame; and she was the emperor’s ‘most beloved daughter’. In the eyes of the brigade, as long as the alliance did not threaten their livelihoods, Farzana and Thomas cou
ld do as they pleased.
But her French officers thought otherwise and were in no doubt that the arrogant and ambitious Irish sailor had seduced Farzana in order to usurp command of her army. Military historian Charles Grey thought it more likely to have been the other way round and that, as had been the case with Pauli, it was Farzana who did the seducing. ‘The Begum had a keen eye for a fine man,’ he wrote admiringly, ‘and having commenced life as a slave girl, a situation not easily compatible with stern morals, was not likely to let him pass, though quite averse to any fixed connection’.16 Crediting Farzana with no motives higher than her personal gratification, Grey based his assertion that she was ‘averse to any fixed connection’ on the memoirs of a Roman Catholic priest. In his Sardhana and its Begum published in 1879, Father William Keegan of the Diocese of Agra revealed that he had been reliably informed of Farzana’s wishes in the matter by her own padre. ‘Thomas aspired to her hand’, he was told, but she rejected the proposal on the grounds that Thomas was not sufficiently well born to be the husband of a princess.
Grey, though happy to take Father Keegan’s word that it was Thomas who solicited marriage, prefers a different explanation for Farzana’s refusal. Bombarded by the claims of so many lovers, she was reluctant to accept one for fear of alienating all the others. On the other hand, one of her Indian biographers quotes Maratha reports to the effect that it was George Thomas who had so many lovers and the begum who refused to marry him on account of his ‘loose morals’.17 Cecil Burns chimes in with sentiments common to most of these reports – namely that, whatever the obstacles, she should have married him. ‘Had the Begum taken this “broth of a boy” for her second husband and added her astuteness and intelligence to his driving force and military genius,’ writes Burns, ‘there is no saying to what heights of power this combination might have risen.’18