Farzana Read online

  For some unaccountable – and probably masculine – reason, all these writers assume that the obstacles to formalizing her relationship with George Thomas were of Farzana’s making. Quite unaccountably, they also overlook the fact that Thomas already had a wife. On 29 April 1787, not long after he had joined the Sardhana Brigade, he had married a girl whose name is given only as ‘Maria’ and who has been variously described as Farzana’s ‘god-daughter’, her ‘handmaiden’ and her ‘slave’. The marriage contract is a strange document, sprinkled with caveats, committing George Thomas to love and cherish Maria ‘as much as circumstances will permit’ and to ‘guard her person and honour with all the respect that in my power layes for a military man in my conditions’.19 Less ambivalent is his pledge in the same document to acknowledge ‘the honourable Joanna Begum’ as his superior and ‘not to leave the Camp without motive and liberty from the aforesaid Joanna Begum’.

  So in effect, Farzana had already precluded the possibility of marrying Thomas. She had recognized him as an inspirational officer as soon as he had joined the brigade and had herself arranged his wedding to Maria as a way of encouraging, even obliging, him to stay in her service. She was also a witness at the actual ceremony, which was conducted by Father Gregorio, the priest who had officiated at Farzana’s baptism. This further implies that (pace H.G. Keene) either Thomas had never been a Protestant or that he was somehow persuaded, maybe by Farzana herself, to convert to Catholicism. Solemnizing Thomas’s marriage with Christian vows ruled out a formal relationship with anyone else; and even if Farzana’s Catholicism had not precluded bigamy, it is inconceivable that she would again have accepted the role of ‘second wife’. It is of course possible that she later regretted her hasty promotion of Thomas’s marriage to Maria. She certainly never let it interfere with her own dalliance with him. But then sexual fidelity was a different matter. It had not invariably been her own choice, nor was it of those around her.

  THE ROHILLA RETURNS

  The Sardhana sepoys had been well rewarded for their crucial intervention at Gokulgarh, and the fact that both their leader and the Irishman they idolized had been publicly honoured by the emperor had only added to their jubilation. But Thomas’s recognition had done nothing to improve the mood of the brigade’s French officers, whose jealous mutterings were becoming harder for Farzana to ignore. To escape the tension, and by way of postponing her decision over whether or not to post Thomas to the military governorship of Tappal, she decided on a personal visit to the new jagir, escorted by a small detachment of troops under Thomas’s command.

  In defence of such temporary dereliction of her duty to Shah Alam it has been pointed out that the man who really should have been guarding the emperor, the ageing Mahadji Scindia, was supposed at the time to be hastening back to Delhi. That he was in fact detained in Agra was hardly foreseeable; nor were the dire consequences – those atrocities ‘almost without example in the annals of the world’ – that would afflict the emperor as a result of his being left without a protector.

  Mahadji Scindia had been forced to retreat when his Mughal troops had defected at Lalsot in 1787 and had then been detained in Gwalior for nearly a year. He had struggled to raise more troops and he had agonized over his route north to Delhi being blocked by opponents who were laying siege to the fort of Agra (held by the Marathas on behalf of the emperor). These opponents were familiar – Ismael Beg, the Mughal defector who now styled himself ‘Champion of Muslim rule in Hindustan’, and Ghulam Qadir, the unpredictable Rohilla from whom Farzana had rescued the emperor a year earlier. To disperse them and their forces and so raise the Agra siege, Scindia needed an ally; and he turned, not without misgivings, to other old adversaries, namely Reinhardt’s one-time employers, the Jats of Bharatpur. The Jats were promised the return of their fortress and palace at Dig in return for helping to dislodge the forces besieging Agra. Thus it was that the combined Maratha and Jat armies had marched to the relief of Agra in April 1788, just when Shah Alam and Farzana were investing Gokulgarh.

  If Gokulgarh had been swiftly concluded, Agra was not. Warned of Scindia’s plans and spoiling for a fight, ‘the champion of Muslim rule’ and the volatile Rohilla chief sallied forth to meet the Maratha– Jat allies. They encountered them 15 miles east of Bharatpur and immediately engaged in a bout of that horse-trading that made a mockery of every battle. Before a shot had been fired, one of the Jat commanders (who was, probably not coincidentally, a Muslim) deserted Scindia and took his three battalions over to join Ismael Beg. Despite this crippling blow, Scindia’s new model army under Benoit de Boigne stood firm. Suffering heavy losses, they and the Maratha Horse might even have prevailed had nightfall not intervened. Under cover of darkness Ismael Beg and Ghulam Qadir withdrew to Agra to resume their siege, the Marathas likewise withdrew to Bharatpur, and a battle that had wasted hundreds of lives was airily declared ‘inconclusive’.

  This setback detained Mahadji Scindia for another six weeks. As the summer heat intensified, he must have been reluctant to leave the shady gardens of the Jat oases at Dig and Bharatpur, but he knew he had to make one more attempt to relieve the siege of Agra before the monsoon rains swelled the rivers and turned the parched countryside into an impassable quagmire. The opposing forces met again on 18 June 1788 on the plain beneath the walls of Agra Fort. As his contribution to the rescue effort, the fort’s beleaguered Maratha commander managed to lure Ghulam Qadir away from the battlefield with a false report that his stronghold of Ghausghar was once again being threatened by the Sikhs.

  Ismael Beg fought on, but a body of Maratha cavalry attacked his base camp and blew up his reserves of ammunition. Already twice wounded, Ismael managed to escape by plunging his horse into the Jumna and crossing the river carrying, it is said, his favourite mistress while his less fortunate wife, following on behind, fell off her elephant and drowned. The following day Mahadji Scindia made a triumphal entry into Agra’s Red Fort, bringing to an end a siege that had lasted upwards of a year.

  Perhaps detained by the celebrations, certainly daunted by the prospect of travelling on to Delhi in the intense heat and looming rains, and probably assuming that Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg no longer posed any threat, Mahadji Scindia made no attempt to follow them. This was a mistake of monumental proportions. Ghulam Qadir had always been dangerously unpredictable. Now the chagrin of yet another humiliating defeat and the mortification of discovering that he had once again been duped over the danger to Ghausghar deprived him of all power of rational thought.

  It was at this period Gholaum Caudir [sic] first formed his resolution to strike a decisive blow. He saw the supineness of the Maratha army, and the defenceless state of the capital, and being totally void of principle, and heedless of consequences, he formed the bold design of plundering the imperial palace, and dethroning his sovereign.20

  Waiting only for the injured (but recovering) Ismael Beg to catch up with him, the Rohilla marched his 2,000-strong army straight to Delhi for a second bite at the imperial cherry.

  9

  VIOLENCE, RAPINE AND BARBARITY

  The departure for Tappal of Farzana and George Thomas had not left the emperor totally undefended. The gosain Himmat Bahadur was still hanging around Delhi hoping for some recompense for his endeavours at Gokulgarh and had meantime been charged with using his shambolic army of ‘holy men’ to patrol the city walls. More than 2,000 Mughal troops also remained in the city, some of whom were in the pay of the conniving eunuch Mansur Ali. There was too a small detachment of the imperial guard stationed inside the Red Fort to protect the imperial apartments.

  Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg reached the outskirts of the city at the beginning of July 1788. Since the city gates had been closed on the emperor’s orders, the Rohilla established his camp just outside the walls, while Ismael Beg preferred a site to the south, in and around the magnificent tomb of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya. Having replenished their supplies by a little local plundering, the two comm
anders mustered their troops at the city gates and demanded entry. Their demands were rejected and the gates remained closed.

  But inside the city Mansur Ali had been scheming on his own account. In pursuit of his long-standing ambition to supplant the Hindu Mahadji Scindia with the Muslim Ghulam Qadir, he had already arranged for 200 ox carts loaded with powder and shot from the stores in the fort to be delivered to his private quarters. Having thus depleted the garrison’s offensive capability, he bribed the sentries to open the city gates and admit the rebels.

  From his vantage point among the battlements Himmat Bahadur witnessed the arrival of Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg, saw them first being turned away and then admitted, and noted their columns of cavalry and infantry pouring in through the gates. He watched the citizens of Delhi flee in terror at the prospect of yet another round of pillage, rape and murder at the hands of yet another invading army. And because he had no wish to be blamed for the ugly consequences that were sure to follow, the artful gosain decided that this was his moment to leave. By the time the gates had been closed behind the stragglers at the rear of the column, Himmat Bahadur and his ashen cohorts had vanished. ‘This disgraceful and precipitate retreat from his post,’ sniffs Francklin, ‘sullied his reputation as a soldier, and his loyalty as a subject.’1

  Of the two rebellious commanders, Ismael Beg was much the less vindictive and erratic. ‘An indefatigable warrior of boundless arrogance, proved valour and high birth’,2 he had accompanied Ghulam Qadir to Delhi for two reasons. The first was his fervent desire, shared with Mansur Ali, to end the domination of the Hindu Marathas and re-establish Muslim control over what little remained of the Mughal Empire. The second was the vast hoard of treasure that according to Ghulam Qadir was hidden somewhere in the imperial palace and to a portion of which Ismael Beg felt he was entitled by way of recompense for his campaigning.

  Equally motivated yet more conciliatory, Ismael Beg had no quarrel with the emperor or with his city, and it was entirely thanks to his restraining influence that Ghulam Qadir did not launch his troops on an immediate orgy of killing. Instead the two men led their forces along the battered boulevard that was Chandni Chowk, presented themselves at the Red Fort’s pepper-potted Lahori Gate, and under the pretext of tendering their allegiance, formally requested an audience with Shah Alam.

  Shah Alam had little choice other than to oblige. But reliving the nightmare of Ghulam Qadir’s last visit to the Red Fort, he desperately played for time. He had already dictated an order to Mahadji Scindia to return to the capital immediately. Scindia was making suspiciously slow progress from Agra and was now at Mathura, the holy city on the banks of the Jumna that was still a week’s hard march from Delhi. When the week passed with no response to the letter and no sign of Scindia himself, Mansur Ali prevailed on the emperor to relent. Unless he wanted his city destroyed and its inhabitants put to the sword, he must grant the audience requested by Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg.

  On 18 July 1788 the fort’s steel-studded Lahori Gate swung open. Ghulam Qadir and Ismael Beg entered and were followed, before anyone could stop them, by 2,000 of their men. While their leaders were conducted to the white marble pavilion of the Diwan-i-Khas (the Hall of Private Audience) to pay their respects to Shah Alam, the soldiers spread out around the colonnades and terraces. The courtyards and gardens were soon swarming with bearded Afghan Rohillas. Brandishing curved swords and long-barrelled muskets, and with daggers glinting in their sashes, they ‘penetrated in a tumultuous and disorderly manner into every part [of the palace]; nor were any steps taken by their chiefs to repel the outrages they committed’.3 Those soldiers of the Imperial Guard who were in the pay of Mansur Ali immediately joined forces with the Rohillas. Those who resisted the invaders were quickly overpowered. Within a matter of minutes (if Francklin is to be believed) the fort and palace, as well as the adjoining fortress of Salimgarh, were in the possession of the rebels. The connivance of the superintendent of the imperial household, Mansur Ali, had made their task ridiculously easy.

  Shah Alam’s sons, nineteen of whom were said to be in the fort at the time, were roughly escorted to the Moti Masjid, the emperor’s private ‘Pearl Mosque’, and held there under guard. As many of the fort’s estimated 1,800 inhabitants as could slip away unseen did so, escaping into the bazaars and alleys of the city. Sundry officials and courtiers were persuaded that it was in their best interests to follow. And the gates were then barred and bolted behind them. The king of the world was truly a prisoner in his own palace.

  With the fort secure and the emperor at his mercy, Ghulam Qadir was in no hurry. He strolled to the canopied dais which had once sheltered the Peacock Throne and where Shah Alam was now nervously slumped on a cushioned replacement. There, in a calculated but unthinkable breach of etiquette, he ‘sat down by his side, passed his arm familiarly round his neck and blew tobacco smoke into his sovereign’s face’.4 In tones no less insulting he confided to the emperor that he had awarded himself the title of Amir-ul-Umara and Ismael Beg that of Mir Bakshi (military commander of the imperial forces). Together these two champions of Islam were about to chase the infidel Marathas out of Hindustan, and in order to prosecute this holy war, they needed money. Where, enquired Ghulam Qadir, did His Imperial Majesty keep his treasure?

  Shah Alam replied that he had no treasure. The Rohilla, whether outraged or merely feigning impatience, then leapt to his feet and flourished the emperor’s letter to Mahadji Scindia. It had been intercepted before it had ever left the fort. Scindia was not hastening to the rescue; he was not even aware of the imperial plight. Taunting the emperor with this written proof of his betrayal of Islam and of his now helpless isolation, Ghulam Qadir swore to kill him with his bare hands if he did not instantly reveal the whereabouts of the imperial treasure.

  This threat was countered by Ismael Beg. Taking pity on the trembling old man, the Mughal defector defused Ghulam Qadir’s rage and ordered that Shah Alam be taken away to join his sons in the mosque. Much to the alarm of the inmates of the imperial harem in the nearby zenana, the conspirators then settled themselves in the emperor’s private apartments for the night. The ladies, for now, were left unmolested.

  Next morning Shah Alam was brought back to the Diwan-i-Khas and Ghulam Qadir again demanded to know where the imperial hoard was hidden. Again Shah Alam swore that he had no treasure, whereupon Ghulam Qadir ordered one of his lieutenants to go to Salimgarh, the fort on a nearby island in the Jumna that served as a state prison, and bring out Bidar Bakht, the eldest surviving son of the previous emperor Ahmad Shah. The poor cringing creature who was duly fetched from his cell had spent most of his life as a prisoner in Salimgarh. Now, blinking in disbelief, he suddenly found himself enthroned as ‘Jahan Shah, Emperor of Hindustan’. The rightful king of the world had been deposed.

  To complete this charade, the now ex-emperor and his sons were themselves taken to Salimgarh and there imprisoned for three days and nights without food or water. Meanwhile the new emperor quickly adjusted to his role, strutting around the palace and shouting orders that no one obeyed. The Lahori Gate was briefly opened to admit the remainder of the invaders’ troops, and within the fort Ghulam Qadir ‘commenced a systematic train of violence, rapine and barbarity, almost without example in the annals of the world’.5 Every storeroom was emptied and every chest, casket and bundle was ransacked in search of the supposed treasure. The palace, the royal apartments, the private residences, the servants’ quarters and even the imperial kitchen were raided; so were the merchants’ warehouses, the artisans’ workshops and the stalls in the fort’s bazaar.

  Even the normally sacrosanct zenana was rummaged. Two loot-crazed old ladies, widows of another former emperor, volunteered to undertake the task in exchange for a share of the spoils. As with the personal possessions that Reinhardt had once purloined from the begums of Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh, the fruits of the widows’ search were considerable; ‘every Indian woman had her little treasure not only for adornment but also
as a means of keeping her savings and securities’; the ladies of the imperial harem were no exception.6

  Though deriding this not inconsiderable haul as mere baubles, Ghulam Qadir seized it anyway. He then turned the wailing widows out of the fort empty-handed and ordered the zenana to be searched for a second time, this time by Rohilla cut-throats using ‘such methods of persuasion as would occur to men of their cast of mind’.7 The fretted marble verandahs were soon echoing with shrieks of terror as the ladies of the harem and their maidservants were ‘dishonoured and degraded’ by their brutal persuaders. According to the official chronicler, this second raid was as productive as it was unprecedented.

  Neither [the Persian] Nadir Shah, [the Afghan] Ahmed Shah Abdali nor the [Maratha] Bhao had ever dreamed of plundering the ladies of the harem; but now all valuables, the accumulations of fifty or sixty years, were brought out.8

  The quantity and value of the booty ferreted from secret hiding places in the residences of an imperial court that had always pleaded abject poverty was impressive. Coins, gems, gold and silver plates and costly clothing were added to the ornaments, mirrors, oil lamps, fabrics, furniture and even, according to one source, ‘the pots of the kitchens’9 that were piling up under Rohilla guard in one of the palace storerooms. But Ghulam Qadir was obsessed with the idea that there must be more, that somewhere in the palace there was real treasure – bars of gold, ropes of pearls, chests overflowing with diamonds, rubies and emeralds. So he ordered the floors to be ripped up. Then he ordered the servants to be tortured. Then it was the turn of the emperor himself.

  Frail and fearful, Shah Alam was brought from his prison and forced to sit on the ground. The monsoon chose this moment to register its disapproval with a heavy downpour. Undeterred by the rain or the puddles, the new emperor savagely flogged the old, while Ghulam Qadir again demanded that the whereabouts of the secret wealth be disclosed. When this failed, Shah Alam’s daughters were brought out of their private apartments. Stripped of their veils, and then of all other covering, they were made to dance naked in front of their father for the delectation of the leering Rohillas. It was too much for some of the ladies. Eternally disgraced, dowager consorts and imperial princesses were said to have thrown themselves over the ramparts and drowned in the Jumna. Shah Alam held his head in grief and despair but still protested that he had no treasure.