Farzana Page 21

  Meanwhile, the Sardhana Brigade had also been mobilized, not to confront the Rajputs but to defend Delhi. Its duty, as so often, was to protect the city in Scindia’s absence, especially from the north where the Rohilla threat had been replaced by a resurgence of Sikh activity. This was an assignment tailor-made for the brigade. Defending the city meant defending the emperor, a task that Farzana considered peculiarly her own. Rebuffing the Sikhs was as much in the interests of Sardhana’s security as Delhi’s. And any kind of military action accorded perfectly with the plans of George Thomas in Tappal.

  By now more a town than a village, Sardhana had almost doubled in size in the fifteen years since Reinhardt and Farzana had first arrived there. Many of her officers, including Thomas, had built bungalows in the vicinity of the palace, which had itself expanded to accommodate Farzana’s growing household of secretaries, clerks, servants and dependants. Among the last, mostly military pensioners, was Bara Bibi, Reinhardt’s deranged widow, who also had her own house in the compound. Visitors to Sardhana paid close attention to the jagir’s fine livestock, especially its buffaloes and cattle, but had less to say about what was growing in the fields. Indigo and opium, the cash crops most favoured in British Bengal at the time, did not flourish in Sardhana’s rich alluvial soil, though cereals certainly did, and sugar cane, its stockades soon to be ubiquitous in the region, may well have been one of Farzana’s most successful introductions. Pasture or arable, the farms were flourishing, Farzana’s fortune had continued to grow, and the general air of prosperity could not but attract the attention of opportunistic and rapacious neighbours like the Sikhs.

  Thomas in Tappal, though less vulnerable to the Sikh threat, nevertheless chose to take it just as seriously. For here too the benefits of active management were being felt. Establishing his headquarters in the fort he had so recently shared with Farzana, his first priority had been to secure the borders of the jagir. He recruited the startled but ultimately willing townsfolk to help rid the district of bandits, and then charmed the farmers into restoring their neglected irrigation systems and replanting their fields. The tradesmen of Tappal expanded their businesses on the assurance that, while he was there to protect them, they had nothing to fear. ‘One would surmise that of all men to manage a civil government, however petty, this uneducated sailor would have been the least suitable,’ says the military historian Charles Grey. ‘But he displayed administrative powers of a high order, and by a judicious combination of force and conciliation, brought his turbulent and almost depopulated district to repopulation and prosperity.’ 13

  Officially he was still in Farzana’s employ, but here in his dusty domain there was no one to give him orders and no jealous Frenchmen to provoke his ire. In a minor way, he had his own kingdom. The suppression of ‘bandits’ (professional robbers, assassin fraternities, the destitute and the dispossessed) kept his soldiers busy and his swordsmanship up to scratch. There were deer to stalk and ‘pigs’ (actually wild boar) to ‘stick’ (that is, impale). And there was at last the prospect, dear to every mercenary’s heart, of making his name and accruing a fortune.

  The legitimate revenue of the estate in the form of rents and taxes was remitted to Farzana. But revenue acquired from beyond its borders, by whatever means, was his. When a party of Sikhs did venture a raid on Tappal, the Irishman saw his chance. ‘Not only did he repel the Sikhs, but knowing that against such raiders attack was the best defence, pursued them into their own country, where he plundered indiscriminately, as they had done, and levied a heavy toll before withdrawal.’14

  Initially he obeyed Farzana’s order to report back to her at frequent intervals. Then, as he dug himself ever deeper into the pleasures and responsibilities of his command, Thomas’s absences from Sardhana became longer and his visits to his mistress less frequent. This played right into the hands of her French officers, who had been busy plotting his complete exclusion from Sardhana and his replacement by one of their own. Indeed it was at their instigation that the newly arrived gun founder Pierre Antoine Levassoult started to pay court to Farzana.

  OF SPIRIT, INTELLIGENCE AND TALENT

  Levassoult remains an enigma. Because so little is known about his background and because his arrival in Sardhana coincided with the terrors of the French Revolution, it has been widely assumed that Pierre Antoine Levassoult was a minor aristocrat on the run from the guillotine; and it is possible the French officers of the Sardhana Brigade presented him to Farzana in that guise to enhance his prospects. The Revolution had confronted the French community in India with a dilemma. If they disowned their fellow citoyens, they prejudiced their patriotism and forfeited Paris’s diplomatic protection. Yet if they openly endorsed the Revolution, they risked being suspected of egalitarian ideals and regicidal tendencies that were anathema to almost every shade of Indian opinion and every prospective Indian employer.

  Levassoult certainly looked and played the part of a redundant aristocrat. Slender to the point of effeminacy and highly strung to the point of neurosis, he was the least likely of military blacksmiths. His fastidious habits and air of inborn superiority may have intrigued Farzana but they merely infuriated her troops. It is easy to understand why George Thomas hated him on sight.

  Yet scattered references in the invaluable works of the Comte de Modave and the historian Jadunath Sarkar reveal a different story. Far from fleeing revolutionary Paris, Levassoult had in fact been in India for nearly twenty years. He first appears in 1771 as a cartographer for the ‘Knight Commandant of the French Colonies in Bengal’. Modave came across him four years later when they were both part of the mass exodus of freelances from Awadh, and he met him again when they were both looking for employment in Delhi. Apparently no more successful in this quest than was Modave, Levassoult had moved on to Rajasthan in 1776.

  The rajah of Kotah had been looking to employ European mercenaries, and Modave, mysteriously accompanied by ‘a woman, some children and some things’15 that belonged to Levassoult, followed him there under the impression that he was well established and gainfully employed. He was neither. ‘Initially [Levassoult] had been welcomed, but then they made a mockery of him, offering him such a pittance that he could not stay.’ Bitterly disappointed, both Modave and Levassoult had returned to Agra by different routes and seem not to have met again.

  Modave described Levassoult as ‘a Frenchman of spirit, intelligence and talent’16 but considered him ill-equipped to cope with the rigours of mercenary life. Yet he evidently persevered, for he resurfaces in Jadunath Sarkar’s Fall of the Mughal Empire working as a gun founder for Najaf Khan in 1782 and again in 1787 when he was similarly employed by the Marathas. By the time he joined the Sardhana Brigade in 1790, he had acquired considerable skill in the casting of cannon, although he had apparently divested himself of ‘the woman, some children and some things’.

  Whether or not of noble birth, he deployed more in the way of social graces than any of the other French officers in the Sardhana Brigade. Along with the fact that he was their compatriot, this seems to have convinced them he was qualified to replace George Thomas in Farzana’s favour – if she could be persuaded to take him. But she of course heeded her own counsel in such matters and Levassoult’s suit did not immediately prosper.

  For one thing she was reluctant to do anything that would irrevocably alienate Thomas. Giving the future of the brigade precedence over her personal inclinations had been one of the hardest decisions of her life. She undoubtedly missed Thomas, probably more than she cared to admit, and she may still have been tempted to change her mind, to cast wisdom to the wind and follow him to Tappal. She was certainly in no mood to be courted. Instead, she seemed intent on proving, to herself as much as anyone else, that her sacrifice had not been in vain and that the brigade still had a remunerative future in the service of the tottering empire.

  These hopes would be realized in an improbable fashion, for it was not only the emperor and Scindia who would have need of her. In a first for Farzana,
she was about to come into direct contact with the British. The encounter, so fortuitous and eventually fortunate, would further detain her in Delhi and so frustrate Levassoult’s advances as effectively as her ambivalent feelings about George Thomas.

  Despite his devotions, the blind and enfeebled Shah Alam was struggling. Mahadji Scindia had undertaken to provide him with a generous allowance, but the official that Scindia had appointed to govern Delhi on his behalf had reneged on the promise. ‘Shah Nizam-ud-din was an unfit man to be entrusted with the uncontrolled management of such a sum;’ writes Keene, ‘and during [Mahadji’s] frequent and protracted absences, the royal family were often reduced to absolute indigence.’ Far from receiving his six lakh, the emperor was being forced to support his numerous kinsfolk and retainers on less than a tenth of that sum ‘and that frequently ill paid’. William Palmer, the Company’s eyes and ears on Maratha affairs, wrote disgustedly to his superiors in Calcutta:

  It is very discreditable to Scindia to leave the Shah [i.e., the emperor] and his family so long without any person in proper authority to transact the cash business of the court and the city. You can hardly imagine how indigent and degraded the emperor’s position is.17

  Although Farzana did not see her way to making good the shortfall in the imperial coffers, she placed half the Sardhana Brigade at Shah Alam’s personal disposal and spent much of 1790–91 in the emperor’s company. Thanks to these prolonged stays in Delhi, she was on hand when Palmer, the East India Company’s agent, was presented with a diplomatic task of great delicacy.

  The Company, at peace with the Marathas since the signing of the Treaty of Salbai in 1782 and generally on good terms with Mahadji Scindia, had kept a close eye on the feud between Scindia and Holkar but had not intervened. Bengal was the Company’s heartland and its cash cow; engagements in the rest of India were aimed at protecting the Company’s interests in Madras and Bombay while foiling any attempts by revolutionary France to regain the influence once exercised by the Compagnie des Indes. Further expansion was not part of the English Company’s plans at the time. It had political agents – like Palmer – stationed at the various Indian courts to report on the machinations and manoeuvrings of the Indian rulers, and it had a string of military posts in the buffer state of Awadh, between Bengal and Hindustan. Ostensibly for the protection of the Awadh nawab’s territories, such establishments also served ‘to keep out the Marathas and any other restless warlords capable of threatening Bengal’s tranquillity’.18

  The most westerly of these military posts was at Anupshahr, a small fortified town that guarded a bridge of boats across the Ganges on the principal trade route from Company territory to Delhi. At the beginning of 1791 the commander of the Company garrison there, a Colonel Robert Stewart, had been surprised while out on his morning ride by a Sikh raiding party. In a feat of sublime horsemanship, the Sikh leader Bhanga Singh had managed to separate the Colonel from his escort and take him prisoner. Thereafter, for five months nothing was heard of the colonel or his captors until, during one of Farzana’s summer visits to Shah Alam in Delhi, a message from Bhanga Singh was delivered to William Palmer. It advised that Stewart was being held hostage in the Sikh’s ancestral village of Thanesar and that he would be released only on payment of a ransom of 100,000 rupees (£10,000).

  Farzana and Bhanga Singh were old adversaries. Thanesar lay north of Sardhana on the road to Patiala, and the Sardhana Brigade had frequently been called upon to intercept and disperse raiding parties from there heading for Delhi. As soon as she heard of Bhanga Singh’s ransom demand, Farzana sensed an opportunity. She contacted Palmer and volunteered to handle the negotiations for Colonel Stewart’s release. Palmer had not yet been introduced to Sardhana’s begum, but he knew her by reputation and was easily persuaded to accept her services.

  Farzana never revealed how she managed to persuade Bhanga Singh to release his hostage, nor what induced the Sikh chieftain to accept a ransom of 15,000 rupees instead of the 100,000 he had originally demanded. She paid the sum out of her own pocket and within three weeks was able to welcome a much relieved Colonel Stewart to the palace in Sardhana. Accommodating him in style, she ‘treated him with every consideration and provided him with every comfort’; and as soon as he had recovered from his five months as ‘a sharer in the extraordinary events of the predatory life of Bhanga Singh’19 she ordered a detachment of Sardhana troops to escort him back to Anupshahr. Effusive in his thanks, Palmer presented her with ‘a clock, a pistol and a length of cloth’.20 Her endeavours were also ‘mentioned in despatches’ to Governor General Cornwallis in Calcutta, though it would be a long time before she received a refund of the ransom money. In fact many years later her heir would insist that it never was repaid.21

  For all her closeness to the Mughal emperor, and for all her intimate acquaintance with the convoluted politics of Hindustan, Farzana’s world was small and circumscribed. She had never travelled outside Hindustan, probably never further than Agra, and she had certainly never seen the sea. At best she was only semi-literate; she can barely have conceived of the wider world beyond India. Until she was introduced to Palmer, the only Europeans she had met were the freelance military adventurers of her own and other mercenary armies, plus a few Catholic priests.

  None of this blunted her appetite for those connections that led to wealth, rank, independence and all the other attributes denied to her at birth. Her officers and secretaries kept her well informed and she learned fast. Opponents respected her acumen and energy, admirers praised her ‘uncommon ability and discretion, and her masculine firmness and intrepidity’.22 But detractors, while admitting that she was by far the most delectable of the freelance fraternity, placed her in the same bracket as all the other ‘scheming, bloodthirsty and nauseating scoundrels on the Delhi stage in the last years of its terminal decline’.23 Shajahanabad and its Red Fort were indeed her stage, Hindustan and its warring princes her theatre. Her every move was designed to ensure that she remained among the brightest stars in this murky firmament. She rarely looked beyond it. But if only from Reinhardt’s reminiscing, she must have been aware of the increasing strength of the British to the east, just as she must have been aware of the threat to Delhi from the resurgent Afghans under Timur Shah (son of the late and unlamented Ahmed Shah Abdali) from the north. These two looming presences made every resident of the capital feel they were ‘living between two grumbling volcanoes’.

  But to suggest, as some writers have, that she intervened on Stewart’s behalf to ingratiate herself with the British in anticipation of their ruling Hindustan is surely to overestimate her prescience. Few contemporary observers would have predicted such a development with any confidence more than a decade before it became a reality. She had common sense, a quick brain and an eye for the main chance; she would have ingratiated herself with anyone if she thought it in her interests to do so. But she took over the negotiations to rescue Colonel Stewart simply because she relished being in a position of influence. And if she then brandished her success, this was to impress on all concerned that, whatever became of the emperor, she would remain centre stage.

  A WOMAN SCORNED

  While Farzana was engrossed in her dealings with Bhanga Singh, her French officers pressed on with their campaign of vilification against George Thomas. At every opportunity they warned that the Irishman was disobeying her orders, he was ‘scheming to rob her of her possessions’, or he was planning to break with the Sardhana Brigade and turn Tappal into his own private fiefdom. As they poured their poison into one ear, Pierre Antoine Levassoult dripped honeyed compliments into the other.

  Meanwhile, Thomas’s behaviour was doing nothing to help his cause. He ignored her orders to return to Sardhana, and when he did appear, brimming with tall tales of his latest raid into Sikh territory, he showed not the least sign of contrition and never stayed long. None of Farzana’s biographers have had any difficulty understanding George Thomas’s behaviour; he was feathering his nest at her expense. Bu
t Farzana’s reaction to it has had them stumped. She had sent him away, now she wanted him back; she had chosen to put the brigade first, but she expected him to put her first; what on earth was she thinking?

  Struggling to interpret her contrariness, James Skinner, one of the most rational and perceptive of her contemporaries, supposed that it had something to do with her advancing years. ‘Those inclinations which ought to have ceased their sway in the heart of a well advanced and sound-headed woman, as she certainly was on most occasions, betrayed her,’ he confided in his memoirs.24 Farzana was approaching, or had possibly reached, forty, an age which Skinner, her junior by eighteen years, no doubt considered ‘well advanced’. But, while as responsive to the flattery of Levassoult as she was to the slights of George Thomas, Farzana may have been less a victim of her years than of her considerable pride. Gathering all her dignity, she set out to prove two completely contradictory things. She would show Thomas’s detractors that she still commanded his complete loyalty by bringing him to heel; and she would prove to Thomas himself how little she needed him by flaunting her new admirer.

  Now every time Thomas came to Sardhana he found himself tripping over the languid Levassoult. Instead of busying himself in his armoury, the gun founder was dancing attendance on Farzana, lounging in her apartments, strolling in her garden, paying her ridiculous compliments and gazing at her like a love-struck idiot. And Farzana was obviously giving him every encouragement. But her ploy – if that it was – was scarcely succeeding. Instead of provoking Thomas into a jealous desire to sweep her into his arms, her blatant flirtation seems to have been met with a shrug of his broad shoulders as he strode away.