Farzana Read online

  Relations with her ‘stepson’ had remained strained. Farzana had made it perfectly clear to him that, although he could stay in the Delhi house for as long as he pleased, he was not welcome in Sardhana. In recent years though he had started to ignore the ban, appearing unannounced and strolling around the estate with what Farzana took to be an acquisitive glint in his eye. Possibly to distract his attention, and certainly as a way of asserting her authority, she had met his designs just as she had Thomas’s – by arranging for Louis Balthazar to marry. Juliana Lefevre, the mixed-race daughter of one of her French officers, had been chosen and had soon borne him a son. But of late Juliana and her baby (another Aloysius) had also begun paying frequent visits to Sardhana. Farzana’s efforts to buy off her stepson’s attentions seemed to be backfiring. Disliking him as much as ever and trusting him not at all, she resolved to avoid any contact with him in Delhi. She therefore ordered her servants to clear a room among the wreckage of the fort and settled in as best she could.

  The spineless courtiers who had fled the palace on the arrival of Ghulam Qadir and who now returned to reclaim their positions were not pleased to see her back. She ignored them. She spent every waking moment with Shah Alam, trying to engage his interest in news of the Maratha pursuit of Ghulam Qadir and of the blockade of Meerut Fort, while reassuring him over the fate of Akbar Shah who was still held hostage by the Rohilla. The emperor did not seem unduly concerned about his son, and her own fears were more for the fate of George Thomas, still involved in the action. But she listened dutifully to the flowery verses the emperor spent most of his time composing and, like Francklin his biographer, she was impressed by the old man’s dignity. Physically he seemed barely changed. Of his ordeal ‘nothing was perceptible but a depression of the eyelids’ – and of course the other-worldly introspection of the suddenly sightless.

  Even the news of Ghulam Qadir’s capture at first failed to provoke much reaction. But when the emperor learned that Mahadji Scindia was contemplating keeping the Rohilla alive until he revealed the whereabouts of his plunder, he became unexpectedly animated. He decreed that his tormentor must die, soon and horribly, and he commanded his munshi to write to Scindia in Mathura accordingly. This was not the action of someone who had renounced his own authority. Shah Alam was re-engaging with the world; Farzana was encouraged. The imperial interest endured long enough for him to decree the same fate for the unfortunate Bidar Bakht, the nephew whose only crime had been to sit briefly on the imperial throne on the instructions of Ghulam Qadir. Then, as so often before, the burst of directives petered out. With the return from captivity in Meerut of his preferred heir Akbar Shah, the emperor once again began to talk of abdication. Fortunately for Farzana’s peace of mind, Akbar Shah’s return was followed almost immediately by the reappearance, at long last, of Mahadji Scindia.

  Scindia’s illness had manifested itself as an extreme and debilitating attack of boils. It had been so severe that at one point he had looked unlikely to survive. William Palmer, the East India Company’s agent at Scindia’s court, had been so alarmed that he ventured some thoughts on what effect the slipper-bearer’s death would have on the balance of power in north India.

  In the case of his demise [he reported] the Maratha power and influence in Hindustan would probably be almost instantly annihilated. He would leave no successor to the possessions and authority which he holds in the Deccan, nor to the command of his troops depending on them.3

  Obviously some other power would then have to step into the breach; and for Palmer, an Englishman, it went without saying that that power would be British.

  Although Scindia had in fact weathered the boils crisis, he had not fully recovered. He had nevertheless heaved himself out of his sickbed, limped to a palanquin and endured the journey back to Delhi cushioned on pillows. Like Farzana, he was determined that Shah Alam should not abdicate, and unlike Farzana he knew how to dissuade him. As Mughal emperor (in name at least) for nearly thirty years, Shah Alam had been a docile and amenable sovereign who had rarely asserted his authority or initiated an intrigue and was now too old and vulnerable to do either. But a younger man, even one as unthreatening as Akbar Shah, was unlikely to be so tractable and would certainly be more expensive to maintain.

  Arriving at the Red Fort exhausted after nearly a week on the road, Mahadji Scindia had not even bothered to broach the matter with Shah Alam. Rather did he proclaim, and immediately set in hand preparations for, a lavish ceremony at which the deposed emperor would be reinstated on the throne of his ancestors. Scindia was confident that the pomp of the investiture and the prospect of once more being not only the centre of attention and the object of devotion but the recipient of a handsome stipend would lure the old man away from any thought of abdication. And he was right. Palmer, reporting to his old friend Warren Hastings who was now in retirement in England, noted that as soon as Shah Alam was told of the investiture he became ‘as tenacious of royalty as if it was attended by all the power and renown of Akbar and Aurangzeb’.4

  The fallen Emperor was restored to his throne, in spite of his own reluctance, [and] ‘in spite of his blindness,’ as the native historian [Sayyid Raza Khan] says, who knew that no blind man could be a Sultan; and at the enthronement, to which all possible pomp was lent, the agency of the Peshwa [of Poona], with Scindia for his deputy, was solemnly renewed and firmly established.5

  But the effort of travelling to Delhi and supervising the ceremony had done nothing to improve Mahadji Scindia’s health. The boils returned and spread. He could barely move. He was also running a high fever. Pausing long enough only to announce an allowance of six lakh rupees* a year for Shah Alam’s personal expenses, to secure the emperor’s confirmation of all existing jagirs (Farzana’s included) and to appoint one of his senior officials to govern Delhi on his behalf, he headed painfully back to Mathura and the care of his priestly physicians.

  Farzana, with her fears about the future of Sardhana dispelled by the emperor’s formal reinstatement, also prepared to take her leave. But now it was Shah Alam who detained her. He would not let her go before he had performed a small ceremony of his own. Surrounded by glowering courtiers, he rewarded his ‘beloved daughter’ for her support and attention during the dark days of uncertainty by conferring on her yet another title. Already Zeb-un-Nissa and Farzand-i-Azizi, she was now authorized to style herself Umdat-al-Arakin, ‘Pillar of the State’.

  ALL CHANGE

  Relieved of all guilt and anxiety, and confident once more of the emperor’s favour, Farzana headed for Sardhana in high good humour. An enthusiastic reception from her household could be expected along with the congratulations of the brigade and a long-awaited reunion with her lover. October, the best of months in the Doab, found the ponds abrim and the fields a dazzling green. Cattle grazed in knee-deep pastures and blossom crowned the branches of trees.6 The estate had been spared the attentions of Ghulam Qadir and seemed more prosperous than ever. There would be much to celebrate.

  A crowd had indeed gathered to greet the new ‘Pillar of the State’, but its welcome was strangely muted. It was the lugubrious Captain Jean-Rémy Saleur who broke the news: though the brigade had arrived safely back from Delhi and Meerut, it had come without its military commander. Worn down by years of disregard and petty insubordination, the enigmatic Major (now Colonel) Baours had been lured away by an offer from de Boigne to command one of his crack battalions. The question of his Sardhana successor was therefore urgent, and once again it would prove highly contentious. As after the deaths of Reinhardt and Pauli, the brigade itself would expect a say in the matter, and this time divisions in their ranks would lead to a fateful parting of the ways.

  The obvious candidate was George Thomas. In his two years with the brigade Thomas had proved himself an expert soldier, a born leader and as firm a favourite with the sepoys as with Farzana. But during her absence in Delhi his relationship with her French officers had deteriorated still further. Captain Saleur, speaking on their behalf,
now warned in no uncertain terms that they would pack up and leave if she tried to appoint the Irishman as their commander.

  Thomas would probably have felt the same about the promotion of a Frenchman. In the privacy of the palace he had welcomed his mistress back to Sardhana with a bruising embrace and, despite the fact that his wife Maria had recently given birth to their second son, had been as eager as she to resume their relationship. But command of the brigade was a different matter.

  Farzana braced herself for his request knowing that Thomas’s enemies would suspect him of using her bed as a springboard to promotion and perhaps fearing they could be right. Yet intimate relations with the brigade’s commander had not in the past been problematic. On the contrary, her liaisons with Reinhardt and then Pauli had turned out to be sound investments. The trouble with Thomas was that he meant so much to her. His appeal was overwhelming, his energy unpredictable, his ardour dangerous. He was too great a distraction. Raziya, the thirteenth-century sultana, had famously risked her throne for her African paramour, and had lost it. Farzana was not about to make the same mistake. Always more resolute than headstrong, she braced herself to refuse his request. But in the event, it never materialized. Thomas gave no sign of wanting or expecting her to make him her military commander. He was with her, he assured her, because he wanted to be.

  The blarney can have lost nothing in translation. The plausible Irishman had breezed through the defences of the tough little dancer from the Chauri Bazaar as if they were gossamer and she had done nothing to discourage him. His presence exhilarated her; his companionship fascinated her. She summoned him for no reason, then banished him – only the more to savour his return. His attentions offered that confirmation precious to a woman nearing forty that she was still highly desirable company. The prospect of running Sardhana and its brigade in tandem with such a man must have been great, yet it was too risky. She had allowed herself to be distracted by Thomas during their carefree weeks in Tappal and it had nearly cost her her jagir. She would not tempt fate again.

  Postponing the inevitable for as long as she dared, she eventually announced the appointment of a Major Evans as military commandant of the brigade. He was presumably of either English or Welsh descent yet acceptable to Saleur and his French colleagues. Apart from his name, nothing is known of him. Then she summoned George Thomas and announced that in belated obedience to the emperor’s instructions she was appointing him military governor of her jagir of Tappal. Between Sardhana and Tappal lay some 200 miles of Hindustan, including the city of Delhi. For all practical purposes the romance was in abeyance.

  Foreign mercenaries were so constantly on the move that ‘footloose’ has become their standard sobriquet. Embracing any opportunity for advancement, they would move on at the first sniff of higher rank or more remunerative prospects. Loyalty was rarely a consideration. Some, whose luck held out, worked for as many as a dozen different employers during their careers in India. Changes in personnel within every brigade were also frequent and unsurprising. Baours had already left to join de Boigne and would shortly die in the Savoyard’s service. The resourceful Chevalier Dudrenac had likewise resigned his commission in the Sardhana Brigade and accepted one with Tukoji Holkar, Scindia’s bitter rival within the Maratha confederation. George Thomas’s posting to Tappal was therefore normal procedure and no more noteworthy than the arrival at Sardhana of Pierre Antoine Levassoult, a French gun founder who had previously served under de Boigne. But with these two moves coinciding so closely, and more especially in the light of what followed, opinion within the Sardhana ranks would see Thomas’s departure and Levassoult’s arrival as intimately related.

  A courtly gun founder of cultured tastes, Levassoult was the complete antithesis of Thomas. His foppish air and the flourish with which he greeted Farzana raised a predictable chorus of mirth and mockery from the sepoys of the brigade. Nor did it go unnoticed that Levassoult and George Thomas took an instant dislike to each other. But while the arrival of the new armourer occasioned little other comment, the news that Thomas was leaving for Tappal proved highly divisive. Sepoys scrambled to join the detail that would accompany him, while the Europeans indulged in fevered speculation as to whether his departure signalled the end of his relationship with Farzana. Some asserted they had seen it coming, others predicted that it would not be long before she followed him to their former love nest, yet others were convinced it was just a temporary appointment and that Thomas would soon be back.

  As for the French officers, they rejoiced in his departure and swore to do everything in their power to make sure he never returned. And as for Farzana, she must have bitten her lip. If Thomas’s eager acceptance of the appointment and the enthusiasm with which he recruited sepoys and rode off on his new assignment were painful to her, she could not afford to show it.

  These Sardhana comings and goings of early 1789 were mirrored across Hindustan. For within days of Thomas’s departure there came unexpected news from Delhi: the Marathas were in trouble; Benoit de Boigne had resigned from the service of Mahadji Scindia. The Savoyard who had been so crucial to restoring Maratha fortunes and raising Scindia to a position of unparalleled power had had enough. After four years in the Maratha’s employ de Boigne’s command remained precisely as it had been when he was first appointed. Increasingly frustrated by Scindia’s refusal to allow him to expand his force and by what he himself described as ‘the avarice and parsimony of the Hindoo Cast[e] in general and the Marathas in particular’,7 he had handed in his resignation.

  Mahadji Scindia was still too ill to do more than express regret, and in the summer of 1789, the incomparable de Boigne finally took his leave. He headed for Lucknow and there, in what was still Awadh’s capital though now under British protection, he took the advice of an old friend to invest in indigo. A dark-blue extract obtained from a species of pulse, indigo was in demand for dyeing uniforms. It was a good investment in a summer that, in Paris, saw the storming of the Bastille; armies, and uniforms, were about to swarm all over Europe. Thus the fortune that had eluded de Boigne on the battlefield was already accruing nicely when, out of the blue and within a year of his departure from Scindia’s service, he received an urgent summons to return. Scindia’s star was again in the ascendant, and true to his oath at Lalsot he was about to renew his vendetta against the Rajput princes. For this he needed de Boigne as well as Farzana.

  The Rajputs had brought the intervention on themselves. In 1789, weakened by bad health and de Boigne’s resignation, Scindia had looked vulnerable. Tukoji Holkar, the military man at the court of the estimable Ahalyabai of Indore, had challenged him for command of the Maratha forces and, like Scindia’s boils, ‘this open sore drained away the life and energy of the Maratha power in the Mughal dominions’.8 Not even Ahalyabhai could effect a reconciliation between Holkar and Scindia. ‘Her virtues counted for nothing in the manly game of war,’ says Jadunath Sarkar.9

  Observing these bitter Maratha squabbles from the safety of their desert kingdoms, the Rajput rajahs of Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Kotah had rubbed their bejewelled hands with delight. The diwan (chief minister) of Jaipur said it was as much fun as watching a fight between two wild elephants.10 Abandoning all pretence of being about to pay their outstanding tribute to the emperor, they taunted Scindia and then cast about for reinforcements. Their call was answered by Ismael Beg, the lately installed jagirdar of Gokulgarh. Originally a Mughal commander, then an ally of the Rajputs (twice), of Ghulam Qadir and the Rohillas (twice) and of Scindia and the Marathas (thrice), Ismael Beg had switched sides at least seven times in three years. It was a record that not even Walter Reinhardt could match. The pretence that, as a good Muslim, all he was trying to do was rid the Mughal dominions of the Hindu Marathas was wearing thin.

  Unfortunately for the desert princes, just as Ismael Beg and his army were riding into Rajputana to boost their defences, Mahadji Scindia had finally risen from his sickbed. His boils had subsided thanks, he believed, to the miraculous in
tervention of the gods. Invigorated by this divine cure, and hungry to avenge his earlier defeat at Lalsot, he now regretted the loss of de Boigne and had therefore sent an agent to Lucknow to plead for his return. He was not disappointed.

  The Savoyard general, though immersed in his indigo venture and living in contented domesticity with his nineteen-year-old ‘bibi’ (to whom he had given his mother’s name of Hélène), ‘was a soldier before everything else,’ says Sarkar, ‘and the call to arms fell upon willing ears’.11 More to the point, Scindia’s terms were irresistible. De Boigne was promoted to general on a salary of Rs 4,000 a month (£500). Additionally, he was given the wealthy jagir of Aligarh, worth Rs 16 lakh (£200,000) a year, part of which was for himself and the rest to be used to expand Scindia’s army to ten battalions. De Boigne was to raise and train the new recruits himself, and with their firepower Scindia hoped to crush first the Rajputs and then Tukoji Holkar.

  Within a year, de Boigne’s second model army had indeed vanquished the Rajputs. It took two attempts and two ferocious battles, one at Patan (north of Jaipur) in May 1790 and the other at Merta (between Jaipur and Jodhpur) in September; but the power of the Rajput princes was finally broken. ‘Scindia was fortunate,’ Sir John Malcolm would later write, ‘to have the aid of [de Boigne], a man of no ordinary description … [whose] military genius was to raise him [i.e., Mahadji Scindia] to a greater if not a more consolidated power than any Indian prince had obtained since the death of Aurangzeb.’12 Among de Boigne’s casualties at Patan was Colonel Baours, lately of the Sardhana Brigade; and among the 12,000 prisoners he took at Merta was Ismael Beg. Both Scindia and Shah Alam demanded that Ismael Beg be put to death. His crimes were so numerous they barely bore reciting. But de Boigne refused, and it is a measure of his standing in Hindustan that one of history’s most persistent turncoats lived out his natural span, albeit as a prisoner in Agra’s fort. Scindia was now master of all north-west India. And as for Tukoji Holkar – his time would come, but not for another four years.