Farzana Read online

  Jealousy was not in his nature. If his mistress preferred the company of the supercilious Frenchman, so be it. For someone who had made such a success of her professional life, Farzana was making heavy weather of her private life. Wounded by Thomas’s indifference, she hurled stinging insults after him as he left for Tappal. He was an illiterate Irish peasant; surely, he could never have imagined himself as a suitable companion for the chatelaine of Sardhana. But her spite only made things worse. Swinging himself into the saddle, Thomas rode off without backward glance.

  As if to give a final blow to her hopes of winning him back, she reacted to this humiliation by ‘venting her wrath on Thomas’s wife’. There is no reliable record of exactly how she aggravated Maria. Some accounts say she kidnapped her, but since Maria and her two small sons were still living in Thomas’s Sardhana bungalow it is hard to see what kidnapping would have involved. Others just say she ‘mistreated’ them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the consequences were disastrous. Maria managed to get word to her husband; Thomas rode straight back to Sardhana, rescued his family and carried them off to Tappal; and there he immediately ‘erected the standard of rebellion’, declaring that Tappal was now an independent state and he its independent ruler.

  Her French officers, jubilant at having their predictions so comprehensively confirmed, were all for revenge. An ‘overpowering force’ from the Sardhana Brigade, led by Captain Saleur and with or without Farzana’s authority, marched against George Thomas. Vastly outnumbered and apparently with little wish to fight his former comrades-in-arms, Thomas surrendered and was escorted back to Sardhana in chains. Under normal circumstances such a brazen act of rebellion would have been punishable by death. ‘But the Begum, with a magnanimity which could hardly have been expected of her, and had in it a touch of both inconsistency and tenderness, spared his life and permitted him to depart unmolested.’25

  Farzana thereby regained Tappal which, thanks to Thomas, was now producing a revenue of nearly £10,000 a year. Thomas, on the other hand, departed with an estimated fifty pounds to his name. Yet there is no doubt which was the happier. While Thomas embraced his impoverished freedom as a great adventure, Farzana was left to rue her lost companion and contemplate a lonely and joyless future.

  Thomas’s biographer William Francklin, who also wrote a life of Shah Alam, would very soon meet Farzana for the first time. ‘Her complexion is very fair,’ he wrote, ‘her eyes black, large and animated, and her dress perfectly Hindustani and of the most costly materials. She speaks the Persian and Hindustani languages with fluency and in her conversation is engaging, spirited and sensible.’26 But her reaction to Thomas’s disgrace and departure was anything but sensible. The only person she took into her confidence was Shah Alam. It seems that the blind and impoverished emperor had acquired a little wisdom in his declining years, for when Farzana told him what she was planning, he ‘strongly dissuaded her from a step in which he scrupled not to predict the total downfall of her authority’.27 Yet she paid no heed. The emperor’s ‘beloved daughter’ ignored the parental warning, ignored Thomas’s feelings, possibly ignored her own better judgement, and in the spring of 1793 married Pierre Antoine Levassoult.

  ____________________________

  * Palmer says six lakh, Francklin says nine.

  11

  A GATHERING STORM

  The wedding ceremony of Levassoult and Farzana was performed by the faithful Father Gregorio and took place within the palace at Sardhana on 1 May 1793. It was so discreet as to appear almost clandestine, the only witnesses being Jean-Rémy Saleur and Augustine Bernier, her two longest-serving officers. Revealingly, Farzana never took Levassoult’s name, her only concession to her new status being to style herself ‘Begum Joanna Nobilis’ in all subsequent documents. Presumably, the ‘Nobilis’ was a nod to notions of her quasi-royal rank rather than a sop to Pierre Antoine’s possibly aristocratic origins.

  The secrecy surrounding the ceremony was dictated by her apprehension over the emperor’s disapproval. Opposition in Delhi was expected, but she must have been taken aback by the level of hostility with which the news was greeted by the brigade. The sepoys were particularly disgusted. It was bad enough that Thomas, the man they knew and loved as Jehazi-sahib, ‘the sailor gent’, was no longer around to entertain them with his exploits on and off the battlefield. But it was far worse that he had apparently been replaced in Farzana’s affections by someone for whom they felt nothing but contempt. This one was not even a proper soldier, they muttered; he had probably taken up gun casting precisely because it meant he would never have to fight. Far from being a man whose military prowess they could admire, it was not clear that Levassoult had any combat skills at all.

  Even the French officers were dismayed. They had encouraged Levassoult’s amatory advances in the hopes of his supplanting George Thomas. It seems not to have crossed their minds that Farzana might actually marry him. Since Pauli’s death she had been content to remain a widow. She may have still longed for an heir, if only to dent Louis Balthazar’s expectations, but the chances of a forty-year-old former nautch girl actually bearing a child must have been slight. Possibly she married Levassoult to deter other suitors; more probably it was simply to spite Thomas. But married they were, and as a result, all the objections raised over her liaison with Thomas came down to roost on the narrow shoulders of Pierre Antoine.

  He had been with the brigade less than two years and was junior in rank to all her other officers. Yet by wedding their commander-in-chief he had leapfrogged into a position of unassailable influence. He had never mixed freely with either officers or sepoys. He made it clear that he thought them his inferiors in both birth and culture. Now, as the mistress’s master, he would most surely become insufferable.

  The rumblings of discontent were temporarily silenced when in 1793, within days of the wedding, the brigade received a new call to arms from Mahadji Scindia. Ever since his success – or rather de Boigne’s – in breaking the power of the Rajput princes, Scindia had been waiting for an excuse to deal a similarly decisive blow to his old Maratha rival, Tukoji Holkar. Tortuous negotiations with the Rajputs over their arrears of tribute and over the indemnity demanded by Scindia had dragged on throughout 1792. Eventually, word got out that it was Tukoji Holkar who was sabotaging the talks by breaking ranks and offering the rajah of Jaipur a deal: he, Holkar, would forsake Scindia and lend his support to the Rajputs in return for the tribute arrears being redirected to him.

  This was just the evidence of treachery Scindia had been waiting for. But a showdown between the Maratha leaders had then been delayed in order to give de Boigne time to recover from what he himself described as ‘a dreadful dysentery’. By April 1793 the dysentery had eased. Word reached Scindia that the Savoyard was once more fit for action. It remained only to summon other loyal units. The Sardhana Brigade was directed to make all speed to Rajputana.

  Under the command of Major Evans (or possibly Colonel Evans – the ranking system within the brigade seems to have been somewhat arbitrary), and minus only a skeleton force left with Farzana and Levassoult in Sardhana, the brigade marched past Delhi and by the end of May had joined de Boigne’s Army of Hindustan in the country south of Jaipur. Anticipating this advance, Tukoji Holkar had assembled an army of 30,000 cavalry and four new infantry battalions, the latter raised and trained in imitation of de Boigne’s disciplined units by Farzana’s former officer, the Chevalier Dudrenac. Not for the first time, the Sardhana Brigade was taking the field against a former comrade-in-arms. And not for the first time Marathas and Frenchmen were pitted against Marathas and Frenchmen, all of them supposedly acting on behalf of their Maratha overlord, the Peshwa in Poona, in defence of his Mughal overlord, the emperor in Delhi.

  Grant Duff, the historian of the Marathas, would witness the effect of a vast Indian army on the march. Although the scene he described was set in a different part of India and ten years later, the army in question was again that of the house of Scindi
a and the season again that of the dog-days before the monsoon.

  It was towards the afternoon of a very sultry day, there was a dead calm, and no sound was heard except the rushing, the trampling, and the neighing of horses and rumbling of gun-wheels. The effect was heightened by the peaceful peasantry flying from their work in the fields, the bullocks breaking from their yoke, the wild antelopes, startled from sleep, bounding off, and then turning for a moment to gaze on this tremendous inundation which swept all before it, levelled the hedges and standing corn and completely overwhelmed every ordinary barrier as it moved.1

  The two juggernauts met on 1 June at the Lakheri pass between Kanaund and Ajmer. In what would be described as ‘not exactly a masterpiece of the tactical art’, they in fact collided, so precluding both the usual feints and the usual defections.2 For while threading the narrow defile, one of de Boigne’s string of twelve-bullock ‘tumbrils’, or ammunition wagons, was hit by a shower of sparks from a random shot. It exploded, as did the rest of the wagons, decimating the close-packed ranks of infantry escorting them and incinerating the bullocks. Tukoji’s cavalry then ‘advanced with rapidity to profit by the disorder’ only to find themselves trapped like gorged vultures by the cavalry regiment that de Boigne had positioned on the hillside overlooking the pass.3

  Subjected to the withering fire of 6,000 muskets and eighty guns, Tukoji and his column scampered off as fast as their sturdy little horses could carry them, leaving Dudrenac and his infantry to their fate. De Boigne called on Dudrenac to surrender. ‘But the call was gallantly refused,’ says Sarkar, ‘and a fight to the finish ensued.’4 The once dashing Chevalier managed to escape with his life only by hiding under a heap of bodies and pretending to be dead. Disgusted at having been abandoned by Holkar, he later absconded at the first opportunity and joined de Boigne.

  Tukoji Holkar never recovered from the defeat at Lakheri. Pausing only to burn down Scindia’s home city of Ujjain, he retired to Indore a broken man. De Boigne was the man of the hour. ‘By the Grace of God,’ Scindia wrote to his Savoyard commander, ‘the long-cherished desire of my heart to punish the Holkars has been accomplished. Your attack was that of a hero … you are the only one capable of such an action…in truth, you are the help of my right arm.’5 Having already received almost every honour in Scindia’s gift, de Boigne was now appointed subahdar, or governor, over the imperial heartland of Hindustan, the highest position of power and influence that would ever be achieved by a freelance European soldier in India.

  But this promotion would be one of Scindia’s last official acts. Within a few weeks of de Boigne’s victory, almost as if his feud with Holkar had been holding his illness at bay, Mahadji Scindia suffered a relapse. He had travelled to Poona to effect a reconciliation with the Peshwa and to make a renewed attempt to unify the endlessly bickering Marathas under his standard. But he had barely achieved the first of these objectives before he once again took to his sickbed. In September 1793 his prayers for an heir having gone unanswered, he adopted his cousin’s fourteen-year-old son Daulat Rao. There would thus be another Scindia, another slipper-bearer. Four months later, on 12 February 1794, aged sixty-seven and at last the undisputed master of Hindustan, Mahadji Scindia breathed his last. With Daulat Rao a minor, Maratha-held Hindustan was facing a period of turmoil that would make the recent past seem almost tranquil.

  SOVEREIGNTY IN PERIL

  Imbued with the caution of its founder Walter Reinhardt, the Sardhana Brigade had returned from Lakheri having neither distinguished itself nor been decimated by exploding tumbrils. But any pleasure that there might have been in its safe homecoming was soon dispelled by the liberties being taken by Levassoult. Farzana had never hesitated to crack the whip if required – as when the unfortunate maidservants had set fire to her house in Agra – but she had always treated the brigade as family and its officers as friends. The feeling had been mutual and the friendship had been reinforced by her practice of dining in the company of her officers. But Levassoult had taken advantage of the brigade’s absence to establish a new regime.

  No doubt the palace furnishings that so impressed later visitors, from the buttoned chaise longues to the solid silver tableware, owed much to Levassoult’s good taste; the claret and madeira in the cellars certainly did. But Levassoult also had strong ideas on how his ‘Princess Nobilis’ should conduct herself and they did not include sucking at the mouthpiece of a hookah, being within range of a spittoon, wearing a trooper’s turban, or cutting a fine figure on the battlefield. The decision not to accompany the brigade to Rajputana had probably been Levassoult’s and so was the isolation in which Farzana increasingly found herself. For, while expressing ‘the profound contempt he felt for all her officers’, Levassoult announced that they were no longer welcome to dine in the palace and share what he now considered his own board.6 In the words of William Sleeman:

  the Begum tried in vain to persuade her husband to receive the officers of the corps at his table as gentlemen, urging that not only their domestic peace, but their safety among such a turbulent set, required that the character of these officers should be raised if possible, and their feelings conciliated. Nothing, he declared, should ever induce him to sit at table with men of such habits.7

  Having successfully alienated the entire officer corps, Levassoult then proceeded to alienate the Indian rank and file by ‘attempting to reform the character of the troops with stern severity’.8 Sepoys who would have walked into fire for either Farzana or George Thomas would have none of it. They made it clear that they were not prepared to take orders from Levassoult and referred his directives to Major Evans. Equally ‘determined that no man should command them who would not condescend to do so’, Evans and his officers gave the sepoys their backing. When Levassoult responded by announcing that since he was now Farzana’s husband he was taking over command of the brigade himself, Evans promptly resigned and went to join de Boigne. The Sardhana Brigade was left in complete disarray.

  While Farzana had not endorsed her husband’s self-appointment, she must by now have realized that marrying Levassoult had been a serious miscalculation. But perhaps she was too proud to admit it; perhaps she was just too miserable to act. For, she did nothing. As if mesmerized by the sight of her mincing husband turning into an ill-tempered tyrant, she offered no protest over his having undermined the brigade’s loyalty, destroyed its cohesion and prejudiced its very existence.

  It was left to Jean-Rémy Saleur to make Levassoult listen to a modicum of reason. In deadly earnest he warned him that unless he stood down there would no longer be a brigade for anyone to command. Then, stressing that it was only a temporary measure, Saleur himself took command while Levassoult slunk off to Farzana’s apartments to vent his frustration on his dazed consort.

  The confusion and uncertainty in the Sardhana Brigade mirrored the gloom throughout northern India as the repercussions of Scindia’s death started to make themselves felt. ‘The history of north India after Mahadji Scindia’s exit from the political spectrum is almost melancholy,’ writes the historian Sailendra Nath Sen. ‘His death, and the absence of a powerful successor, unleashed the centrifugal forces.’9 The Rajputs flung off their dejection and prepared to reclaim the territory they had lost to the Marathas; the Sikhs grasped the opportunity to renew their raids in the north-west; Akbar Shah, Shah Alam’s son and heir, pondered the possibilities of exploiting for his own purposes the East India Company’s mounting concern; and the Marathas once more launched into bitter squabbles among themselves.

  Meanwhile de Boigne’s iron constitution was troubled by further dysentery. He was longing to retire and only reluctantly agreed to the Peshwa’s request that he stay on to support Mahadji’s heir. But at barely fifteen, Daulat Rao Scindia lacked both the experience and the character to be an effective leader; ‘an impetuous young man, [he] did not have the capacity to restrain the fissiparous tendencies and merely drifted along with the current of anarchy’.10 The only person in Hindustan who knew exactl
y what he was about – and was enjoying it – was George Thomas.

  Following his dismissal by Farzana in 1792, Thomas had invested his entire capital of £50 in enlisting a small band of desperadoes, and with them he had stormed and captured a village near Delhi. The raid yielded sufficient plunder and blackmail to allow him to increase his force of rough-riders to 250. Basing himself at Anupshahr on the frontier of British-controlled Awadh, he had then trained this ragamuffin troop until it had acquired a semblance of discipline and could be offered out for hire. In effect, ‘he was presenting himself to the nobility and gentry of the Upper Provinces [of Hindustan] as prepared to execute orders for reducing forts, cutting throats, or otherwise smoothing over administrative difficulties’.11 Forts and throats proved good business, and by the time Farzana married Levassoult in 1793, Thomas was under contract to a minor but ambitious Maratha chieftain named Appa Khande Rao.

  Previously one of Mahadji Scindia’s district governors, Appa Khande Rao had been dismissed from Scindia’s service for incompetence when his army had been all but wiped out during an illfated invasion of Bundelkhand (east of Agra). Determined to recoup his losses, Appa Khande Rao had engaged Thomas primarily as a revenue collector with instructions to regain control – by whatever means necessary – of those of Rao’s former districts that had taken advantage of his disgrace to withhold payment of their accustomed dues. He also ordered Thomas to raise a battalion of 1,000 infantry and 100 horse, for the maintenance of which he gave him the district of Jhajjar, 35 miles west of Delhi. ‘It does not appear,’ notes Keene dryly, ‘that this tract belonged to the donor by whom it was so lavishly bestowed.’