Farzana Page 2
Although few of those who met Farzana could boast more than a passing acquaintance, her fame seems to have been reason enough to mention her in their letters. Encounters with ‘the old witch’ of her later years evidently made just as lasting an impression as brushes with the petite temptress of her youth. She was not someone you forgot. Like the bejewelled elephants and the endless court intrigues, she neatly embodied the contrasts that characterized India in the chaotic years between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the coming of the British Raj. Viscount Combermere, the British commander-in-chief in India during 1825–30, hailed her as a living relic of this extraordinary period, indeed ‘a kind of Taj Mahal whom no foreign visitor could afford to miss’.
Nor did they. Invitations to her soirées in the heart of what is now Old Delhi were eagerly solicited and never, ever, turned down. Governors General and garrison commanders, judges and adjutants – some with bonneted wives, all with uniformed retainers – would pile into their carriages, swords clanking, stays creaking, to be driven off to her city palace. Set in an elegantly lit Mughal garden just outside the main Lahori Gate of the emperor’s Red Fort, here they were entertained in regal style, dining on the begum’s celebrated pilaus, downing her finest clarets and listening politely as her orchestra played a medley of God Save the King and the Marseillaise from an alcove in the corner. She never ate in the presence of her guests, and accounts vary as to whether she ever touched the wine, but unfailingly, when the memsahibs withdrew, Farzana gestured to a servant to bring her hookah and then settled down to a companionable smoke amid the men and their cheroots.
Awed by her apparent age (‘she must be a hundred years old’, wrote the French naturalist Victor Jacquemont in 1834,1 ‘she is bent in two and her face is shrivelled like dried raisins’), they yet marvelled at her ‘naturally quick understanding’, were charmed by her ‘delightful wit and wonderful memory’ and were much intrigued by what little they could glean of her exotic past. A Christian by then, and so not forced to live in the seclusion imposed on Muslim and Hindu women, she was the only emancipated Indian female most of these foreign acolytes would ever meet. They hung on her every word as she told of an age few could recall, of armies and atrocities, gallantry and treachery, and of an India more bitterly divided than at any stage in its history.
Equally sought-after were invitations to visit Farzana at her country estate in the nearby Doab (the land between the ‘two rivers’, the Jumna and the Ganges). This was at Sardhana, a township forty miles north-east of Delhi and so too far for an evening excursion. Only by having fresh horses posted at frequent intervals along the way could even the most dare-devil rider make the journey in less than three hours. Necessarily, then, there was the added pleasure of being allocated one of her well-appointed guest houses and savouring Indian hospitality at its princely best. Dancers and firework displays entertained the visitors; iced sherbets revived them. The curious could seldom resist the chance to inspect the choice bloodstock in her stables or the formidable weaponry displayed in her armoury.
In the brakes of her estate there were snipe to shoot, pigs to stick and peacocks to pamper. For the impecunious guest there was also the added attraction of exploiting the amiable naivety of her feckless heir and relieving him of a few gold mohurs at the card table or inveigling him into some dubious investment. For everyone there was the added attraction of catching up with old friends stationed at the British military base in nearby Meerut who seemed to have an open invitation to visit Sardhana as often as they liked. Guests might also, if they chose, attend the incense-heavy services in her personally commissioned church. And without fail, after they dispersed in a flurry of carriages, they all filled their letters and diaries with reminiscences of a decidedly unusual lady, once harem Jezebel, then warrior queen and latterly a less than likely candidate for Papal canonization.
Farzana’s neoclassical palace in Old Delhi is still standing, though it is scarcely intact, very hard to find and without its elegant garden. Instead of parterres of oleanders, a maze of scruffy lanes and alleyways crowd its every approach, while Delhi’s new metro burrows beneath. Known today as Bhagirath Palace after one of its twentieth-century proprietors, the building’s imposing façade is barely discernible through the forest of dilapidation. Festooned with electricity cables, trussed with ties and braced with joists, guyed by the poles and awnings of market stalls and defaced by scrawls of graffiti, its columns blackened and chipped and its cornices crumbling into the warren below, the palace is being devoured piecemeal by an insatiable commerce. Its once gracious interior now hosts a gloomy labyrinth, partitioned, divided and subdivided into ever smaller retail units. With the exception of a savings bank, which occupies part of the ground floor, all these cubicles and compartments sell electrical components – condensers and capacitors, bushes and brushes, microchips and circuit boards, the hard currency of a booming economy’s latest reincarnation. A waft of hookah smoke or a blast of filmi music might just trigger some dim memory of a more glorious past. Then, plummeting to what might once have been a bit of the dance floor, a boxed refrigeration unit hurtles from its unseen roost into the waiting embrace of a turbaned porter. No trace of grace or hint of favour here.
Not much sign, either, of the dusty, rutted track along which Farzana’s guests would be driven out from Delhi to her country palace in Sardhana. Although the journey is certainly quicker now and possibly safer – the fear is no longer of bandits on wild wiry horses, but of gung-ho Jehus gunning the engines of overloaded trucks – the route is nothing like as scenic. The four lanes of National Highway 58 are so choked with traffic and the air so heavy with fumes that drivers mask their faces with their handkerchiefs. Pedestrians plod along in shrouds, like upright corpses. Persevere, though, and the congestion eventually eases. The air starts to clear; gaps appear between the factories and apartment blocks; there are workshops and tea-stalls and patches of waste ground. Mango and banyan trees outnumber electricity poles; sugar cane grows tall in the fields, goats rummage in the bushes and water buffalo wallow in muddy ponds. A left turn at Meerut and the road shrinks to a single track of patched tarmac. Shrubby hedges obscure the view, hiding landmarks.
‘Sardhana?’
‘That way.’
Two hours from the high-rise heart of modern Delhi, a sprightly Sardhana seems comfortable with its unassuming profile. Though now merely ‘in the district of Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh’, the little town was once the hub of its own mini-state. Guidebooks unkindly describe it as ‘decayed’, and the surrounding countryside is undoubtedly flat and featureless. But there have been high points in its history, none more so than in the early nineteenth century. The soil is rich, the air fresh and the pace of life reassuringly slow. Sleek cows chew the cud on the roadside, flea-blown dogs sleep in the shade and a group of schoolchildren dawdle by a food-stall.
‘Anyone know where the church is?’ A dozen small thumbs point south. ‘That way.’
The road winds on, skirting high walls and petering out in a large empty car park. Through the swirls of a wrought-iron gate, the first sight of Farzana’s place of worship is nothing less than astonishing.
Painted in pastel yellow and a white so white that it verges on the ultraviolet, the Basilica of Our Lady of Graces merits its tag of ‘an architectural wonder’. Set in a well-tended rose garden surrounded by mango trees, it is approached along a wide path of sharp gravel (believed a deterrent to snakes) lined with gleaming plaster tableaux of the Stations of the Cross. An Italian military engineer, Major Antonio Reghelini, designed and built the church between 1820 and 1828, but not without some input from its proprietor. Farzana had her own ideas of what constituted a place of worship. The skyline boasts two lofty steeples, three domes, all of them surmounted by gilded crosses, a great octagonal lantern of chiselled slate and, like the Delhi palace, are entered via a stately Palladian portico with eighteen paired pillars. Here welcoming nuns hand visitors into the care of an elderly man whose henna-ed
hair hints more at the Muslim hajji than the Christian sacristan.
The mixed signals given out by the architecture and the personnel are echoed in the interior. The huge main altar of white Makrana marble is inlaid with floral motifs like those of the Taj Mahal, while the image of the Virgin and Child in the niche above is draped with multicoloured fairy lights and festooned with garlands of jasmine and marigold. The flowers, on closer inspection, turn out to be plastic; but the chequerboard floor is certainly marble, as is the towering memorial that almost fills a side chapel.
Carved in Rome from the finest white Carrara by Canova’s protégé Adamo Tadolini, this eighteen-foot-high stalagmite of statuary was shipped out to India in sections, reassembled on site and installed and dedicated in 1848. The lower tiers incorporate eleven life-size figures plus three bas-relief panels portraying scenes and personalities from Farzana’s past, while seated aloft on her musnud or throne is the sculpted figure of the church’s founder and patron herself. More panels on the sides bear the dedicatory inscription in Latin and English:
Sacred to the memory of Her Highness Joanna Zeb-ul-nisa,
the Begam Sombre,
styled the Distinguished of Nobles and Beloved Daughter of
the State, who quitted a transitory Court for an eternal world, revered
and lamented by thousands of her devoted subjects,
at her palace of Sardhana, on the 27th of January 1836, aged
ninety years.
A mile to the north, ‘her palace of Sardhana’ is easier to find, although harder to explore. On the flagged verandah at the top of the wide fan of steps, and beneath another massively pillared portico, an anxious watchman stands guard, his finger to his lips. Through the open windows row upon row of teenage boys can be seen, elbows on desks and heads down, writing feverishly. They are in the middle of their Higher Secondary Certificate Examinations – ‘please not to disturb; but yes, it is permitted to walk around outside.’
Now housing the St Charles Inter College, a Hindi-medium school run by the Catholic Church, Sardhana Palace remains impressive when seen from ground level, although the roof apparently collapsed in the 1990s and has been replaced by sheets of corrugated iron pending yet-to-be-completed fund-raising. Like the church, it was designed by Antonio Reghelini, who also doubled as one of Farzana’s senior officers. She had two other palaces (a less ostentatious mansion in Sardhana and the city palace in Delhi) and several other substantial properties, but this was the nerve centre of her fiefdom, the headquarters of her army and her final home. It remains the most impressive surviving relic of her quasi-royal status.
The palace compound must originally have been far bigger. Now there is room only for a few ancillary school buildings and the fragments of a formal garden. In Farzana’s day it was spacious enough to contain bungalows for her European officers, barracks for her troops, stabling for hundreds of horses, a hospital, a school, and accommodation for the horde of political advisers, lawyers, letter writers, doctors, clerics, cooks, grooms, gardeners and domestic servants that comprised her personal household. Nearby, there were more bungalows for her guests and a jumble of low hutments for her nearly 700 pensioners. Of these last, more than 500 were either retired soldiers and their families or the widows and orphans of those who had died in her service. The remainder were listed in the palace ledgers as ‘old and lame’, ‘old and blind’, ‘old and insane’, ‘insane’, ‘lepers’ and ‘paupers’. Maintaining a vast establishment was all part of being a begum, as was constructing palaces and places of worship. It advertised one’s status and confirmed one’s legitimacy. But it was also a heavy burden. The Begum arranged for this thousand-strong community to be housed, clothed, fed, educated and nursed at her own expense; and in truly regal, not to say despotic, fashion, she ruled every aspect of their lives.
Here, then, presided Farzana in her declining years. To one who was honoured as ‘distinguished of Nobles and the Beloved Daughter of the State’, who consorted with the powerful, befriended the poor and patronized every faith, it was a worthy setting. Her wealth and fame, no less than her charitable works, her lavish parties and caustic wit, seduced a generation. Foreigners often referred to her simply as ‘Her Highness’. As India’s only Christian princess, they were happy to claim her as their own.
But what of the other Farzana, the sometime slave, the aspiring courtesan, fiery campaigner, ruthless murderer and power-hungry virago? What of the seductress who possibly married a German, certainly married a Frenchman and enjoyed a tempestuous twenty-year relationship with the legendary ‘Rajah from Tipperary’? What, too, of the warrior queen who skilfully manoeuvred her 3,000-strong army through more than twenty-five years of anarchy and war without, it was said, ever losing a battle or surrendering a gun? These other Farzanas are no more hinted at in the hushed sanctity of her church or the faded grandeur of her Sardhana estate than among the capacitors and transistors that cram her Delhi palace. Yet her popularity owed not a little to all these incarnations. In their mystery lay the key to her mystique.
PART ONE
MARRIED TO THE REGIMENT
1750–1778
1
WHERE PASSIONS RAGE
Though infamous in her prime and celebrated in her declining years, Farzana’s childhood went unnoticed and has taxed her biographers sorely ever since. By common consent she was born into such impoverished obscurity that no one had reason to record the circumstances, least of all herself. Rather, she drew a veil of silence over anything to do with her origins. It was only in the last years of her life, when recent memories grew dim and the long-distant past drifted back into a hazy focus, that her grip on this veil of secrecy slackened and a few tantalizing details began to slip out.
Through the winter of 1835 she had taken to her bed in one of the upstairs rooms of the Sardhana Palace. Her adopted son David attended her, and her loyal munshi, or secretary, Lallah Gokul Chand, squatted on the floor by her side. Swathed in shawls of the finest pashmina, propped on cushions of silk and brocade, the frail old lady mumbled unnecessary orders for the management of her estates, muttered the ‘Hail Mary’, fretted about members of her household, drifted between sleep and daydreams, and just occasionally reminisced. Disjointedly and sometimes incoherently, snippets from her childhood tumbled forth. Both son and scribe took note. The latter then worked some of his notes into a flowery Persian panegyric.
Lallah Gokul Chand’s illustrated verse narrative Zeb-un-Tavarikh, or ‘The Ornament of History’ (a play on Zeb-un-Nissa, another of Farzana’s titles and meaning something like ‘Ornament of Women’) is the earliest attempt at a ‘biography’ of Farzana. First composed in 1822 but later revised and then reissued in 1850 after both subject and author had died, it contains a lot more ornament than history and touches only lightly on her early years. But from its pages, from the adopted son David’s endearingly naïve diaries, and from rumour, legend, the mining of memoirs and archives and not a little fanciful reconstruction, some consensus about Farzana’s origins has been reached.
Her given name, if she had one, is unknown. As was usual with female Muslim infants, her parents would simply have called her by a stock term of endearment. To all others she would have been the more formal ‘daughter of Latafat [or Lutf] Khan’; for according to unsourced research conducted by Cecil Burns,1 sometime dean of the Bombay College of Architecture, that was indeed her father’s name. Dean Burns says nothing of Latafat Khan’s occupation or circumstances but asserts that he had left his ‘native deserts of Arabia’ and settled in the town of Kutana, about 30 miles west of Sardhana, in the early years of the eighteenth century. As was customary, Latafat Khan had several concubines or wives (in those days there was little distinction). By the first of these he had a son, and by the second – a Kashmiri dancing girl called Zeldah – he had a daughter. This was Farzana.
Though Burns chose to keep his sources to himself, it seems unlikely that he invented all this. The dearth of circumstantial detail is even more c
onvincing than the few facts. Possibly he was drawing on some oral tradition, possibly on some no longer extant memoir. And there was more. Again, according to Burns’s anonymous source, Latafat Khan died in 1756 when Farzana was about six years old (making her year of birth 1749–50 rather than the 1745–46 implied by her epitaph). ‘The scanty property he [Latafat Khan] left behind him was at once appropriated by the son of his senior wife, [and] the superfluous junior wife with her offspring [was] promptly turned adrift.’2 In reality the now ‘superfluous’ Zeldah, knowing no alternative, turned to her roots. She had originally been discovered by Latafat Khan in a kotha, a salon or brothel, in Delhi’s Chauri Bazaar, and it was to there that she now returned with her disinherited daughter in tow. It must have been about ten years since she had last seen the city.
More properly, the great walled city into which mother and daughter straggled was that called Shahjahanabad. One of at least seven cities to have occupied the sprawling site of modern-day Delhi, Shahjahanabad is now known as ‘Old Delhi’ to distinguish it from the ‘New Delhi’ laid out by the British. It had been built during the years 1639 to 1648 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to supersede Agra as his imperial capital. A planned city, unparalleled for magnificence in its late seventeenth-century heyday, its 8 miles of crenellated wall embraced elegant streets and wide carriageways, tree-lined maidans and shaded waterways. There were grand mosques and inconspicuous temples, vast bazaars and gardens. The palatial residences of the imperial staff and nobility sat in walled compounds, gated and guarded by club-wielding sentries in long-tailed turbans and matching liveries, while the many-balconied mansions known as havelis housed the merchants whose entrepreneurial skills had turned the city into the greatest trading centre in Asia. Between and behind the main thoroughfares, and spilling beyond the great walls, acres of one- and two-storey housing, mostly of mud and wattle construction, lined a maze of tight alleyways and was home to the teeming population of half a million.