Farzana Page 28
The seal was set on Mrs Deane’s approval when Farzana ‘condescendingly offered to introduce me to the royal family’, an invitation which ‘much excited my curiosity as, being a lady, I knew that I should be admitted into the private apartments’. And, being a lady, so she was. The expedition proved a tremendous success. Carried through the outer courtyards of the imperial palace in their palanquins, the visitors were set down in front of the white marble Diwan-i-Am where they were greeted by ‘an ugly shrivelled old woman whom the Begum embraced’. It was in fact the emperor’s mother and one of Shah Alam’s many widows. This ‘good lady’, as Mrs Deane now called her, escorted them to the Diwan-i-Khas,
a similar hall to the other except that it was covered by a carpet, at the edge of which the Begum left her shoes. Determined to follow her example on all points of etiquette, I was preparing to do the same when I heard someone say, in Persian, ‘the Engish lady is excused’. On looking up I perceived the Emperor of Delhi, seated under a colonnade, surrounded by his family, to the number, as I afterwards learned, of two hundred.14
From the shock of this tableau comprising the entire imperial family, and then the thrill of a somewhat stilted conversation with the emperor himself, Mrs Deane emerged deeply beholden to Farzana and determined to do her justice. Her ‘abduction’ by Walter Reinhardt was now the stuff of romance, untainted by mention of the butchery in Patna. Her hair-raising exploits on the battlefield, the drama of the Sardhana mutiny and the aplomb with which she had disposed of ‘her timid French husband to whom she had taken an inveterate dislike’, brought the colonel’s wife to the emphatic conclusion that ‘this woman has an uncommon share of natural abilities, with a strength of mind rarely met with, particularly in a female’.
Just as impressed was Mrs Deane’s friend Lady Maria Nugent. The America-born wife of the commander-in-chief of British forces in India, Lady Nugent met Farzana in 1813 during an official visit to the new British garrison in Meerut. ‘Before we were up this morning,’ she wrote, ‘a salute was fired for the Begum Sumru who arrived in her coach and six with an immense cavalcade to meet us here.’ The day included an hour-long tête à tête with the begum, (a ‘little, lady-like looking old woman with an intelligent countenance’), a mess dinner with the officers of the horse artillery, (‘the Begum was quite astonished to see all the ladies retire in a body from the drawing room’) and an evening ball (‘the Begum made good remarks upon the dancing and was surprised at their taking so much trouble and dancing with all their strength’). Finally, the princess and Lady Nugent ‘exchanged rings in token of friendship and are now sisters’.15 The only fault Lady Nugent could find in her new ‘sister’ was that ‘she smoked her hookah almost the whole time and seemed to enjoy it very much. I cannot yet reconcile myself to seeing women smoke.’
Farzana was now almost as well connected with the British elite as she was with the imperial family, which gave government officials something of a problem. Soon after the death of Shah Alam in 1806 she had written to the acting Governor General Sir George Barlow seeking assurances as to whether, since she and her brigade were now in the Company’s service, the Company would continue to support ‘those of her dependents who might be rendered helpless by her death’.16 Barlow, who was about to be replaced by a permanent appointee, had stalled, promising to refer the request to his successor; and there, for a while, the matter had stood.
The idea that the East India Company would undertake to support her numerous entourage was wildly optimistic, even preposterous. As Barlow no doubt realized, her personal fortune was more than adequate. But by the time the issue was drawn to the attention of his successor, Lord Minto, Farzana had so cultivated her circle of British acquaintances, and so charmed their wives, that they considered her indispensable. It would be a great mistake, Archibald Seton told Lord Minto, to antagonize the one person who could be trusted to mediate between the British authorities and the Mughal court; he should placate her if he could. Whether it was Seton or Minto who came up with the perfect solution is not known, but the outcome of their exchange was a letter from the Governor General to the Princess of Sardhana.
Deeming this application to be in all respects just and reasonable, [wrote Lord Minto], and the general tenor of your conduct to merit every practicable degree of favour and indulgence on the part of the British Government, I have great satisfaction in communicating to you my compliance with your wishes.17
On the face of it Farzana had triumphed once again. But it was a hollow victory. As she must have suspected, and as Minto certainly did, neither of them was likely, come the day, to be in any position to enforce this arrangement. Farzana would be dead and Minto no longer Governor General. In other words the British had no intention of complying with her wishes, while Farzana seemed content with their flattery.
Had Minto come clean and turned her down, there is no doubt that she would have continued to fight for the future welfare of her dependents for as long as anyone would listen. As it was, the subterfuge dispelled any doubts that they would not be provided for, and allowed her to sit back and make the most of her celebrity as ‘a kind of Taj Mahal whom no foreign visitor could afford to miss’. As with the Taj, few sounded a note of disapproval, and only young Lieutenant Thomas Bacon of the Bengal Horse Artillery saw anything incongruous in the warmth of Farzana’s welcome into the higher echelons of British Indian society:
When we recollect who the Begum originally was, the diabolical character of her husband, his perpetration of the massacre at Patna and the many acts of crime and tyranny which she herself has committed, it is strange thus to find an enlightened British community, the victors of the soil, doing homage and seeking favour at her footstool, or even condescending to partake of her hospitality.18
PILLAR OF THE CHURCH
It was her old friend Father Gregorio who urged Farzana to build a church. The only two Catholic churches in Delhi had been destroyed by the Persian invader Nadir Shah in 1739; and although some desultory attempts had been made to restore them, the capital’s Catholic congregation was too small to merit the appointment of a resident priest. Thus for nearly thirty years the ageing Gregorio had been making regular journeys all the way from Agra to minister to the spiritual needs of his wealthiest and most demanding communicant in Sardhana.
But he was finding the travel increasingly arduous and had been trying for some time to convince her of the benefits of having her own church and her own priest. At the time of his death in 1807, Farzana had taken this advice to the point of engaging Father Giulio Caesario Scotti (known to the English as ‘Julius Caesar’ or ‘Padre sahib’) as her private chaplain. But it was not until an Italian military engineer, Major Antonio Reghelini, entered her service in 1816 that she started seriously to consider the building of a church.
Reghelini was ‘a funny, pinched unsoldierly-like little figure’19 who specialized in erecting batteries, earthworks, redoubts and other such warlike structures. He had never before designed a church. But since most churches in India, both British and Portuguese, had been the work of military engineers, and since Reghelini was a devout Catholic, he rose bravely to the challenge. Taking James Gibbs’s church of St Martin-in-the-Fields as his prototype and Gibbs’s 1728 Book of Architecture as his guide (as did the architect of almost every other British church in India), Reghelini embellished Gibbs’s designs with salutes to his own Italian origins and to Sardhana’s north Indian setting.
To towers modelled on that of London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields he added spires copied from St Mary’s Church in Madras’s Fort St George; he modelled the domes and cupolas on those of the twin churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto in Rome; he deepened the portico into a shady verandah to protect the congregation from the Indian sun, and he betrayed his engineer’s training by supporting the heavy porch with reassuringly sturdy pillars too short and fat to be classically correct. Inside and out he garnished the structure with Italian baroque detail and introduced Indo-Saracenic
motifs in the friezes round the central dome.
At every stage Farzana urged him on. There must be more marble, more crucifixes, more statues, more candles; the precious stones laid into the altar must be as beautiful as those on the Taj Mahal; the painting of ‘Our Lady the Madonna del Monte’ that Reghelini’s brother had brought from Rome, must be given pride of place in a pillared and pedimented reredos above the altar; in fact everything possible must be done to make Sardhana the most comprehensive and impressive church in all India.
Work started on the Sardhana church in 1820 and was still in progress four years later when the Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, attended the consecration of the recently completed garrison church in nearby Meerut. A modest churchman who insisted on pitching his tent in the compound of Reverend Henry Fisher’s house for the duration of his stay, Heber had heard of ‘this woman who calls herself a Christian’ and persuaded Fisher to introduce him.
She is a very little, queer-looking woman [wrote Heber], with brilliant but wicked eyes and the remains of beauty in her features. Her soldiers and people, and the generality of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood, pay her much respect on account both of her supposed wisdom and courage; she having, during the Maratha wars, led, after her husband’s death, his regiment very gallantly into action, herself riding at their head into a heavy fire of the enemy.20
Because he was on an extended tour of his diocese – which included southern Africa and Australia as well as the whole of India – Bishop Heber did not have time to accept Farzana’s invitation to visit Sardhana. So he missed seeing her ‘very large and handsome church’ which, he had heard, ‘will rival if not excel that of Meerut in size and architectural beauty’. He also just missed an encounter with another bishop, indeed the papal legate Lodovico Miscara di Frato, who had been sent from Rome to Sardhana by Pope Leo XII.
Just as Father Gregorio had inspired Farzana to build a church, so it was Reghelini who suggested that his masterpiece warranted a more distinguished incumbent than Father Julius Caesar Scotti. A genial bon viveur ‘whose conversation is a mingling of superstition with double entendre and whose music is a combination of sacred chant and chansons a boire’,21 chaplain Julius Caesar would surely be an embarrassment as the parish priest of a veritable cathedral. Why, Reghelini asked Farzana, did she not write to the Pope and ask him to recommend a suitable reverend alternative? It was an inspired suggestion.
Nothing could have been more guaranteed to appeal to Farzana than a correspondence with His Holiness in Rome, and nothing seemed more probable than that His Holiness in Rome would be anxious to oblige the only Catholic ruler in India. Pope Leo exceeded her expectations; rather than just recommend a priest, he sent Bishop Lodovico as his papal legate to investigate Sardhana’s requirements. Tragically, though, within three days of his arrival the unfortunate legate died of ‘fever and convulsions’.22 The Pope declined to send another legate, and since no replacement priest had been found by the time the Sardhana church was completed, the disreputable Father Julius Caesar had the honour of officiating at the inaugural service, held on Christmas Eve 1824.*
ENERGY OF MIND
Farzana spent four lakh rupees on building her church (more than £1.5 million in today’s values), a sum that she could easily afford. Writing in 1835 the otherwise dismissive Thomas Bacon described the Sardhana estate as ‘rich and cultivated, yielding a revenue of 25 lakhs annually, or £250,000, leaving her perhaps a net income of one-half, having deducted her dues to the British government and the maintenance of her army’. From this residue, the equivalent of £5 million today, she had to house, feed, clothe and provide for the education and nuptials of a huge household and hundreds of pensioners. She also had to maintain the fabric of her properties – the two palaces, plus Reinhardt’s former house in Delhi and the ‘handsome’ house she had recently built in Meerut – and to pay the thousands of servants who looked after them. She had to fund the construction and maintenance of the state’s infrastructure and sustain her reputation as north India’s most generous and entertaining hostess by supporting herself in the manner expected of a sovereign princess.
Although surrounded with possessions of the finest quality, to the disappointment of some of her visitors, and no doubt of her subjects, she eschewed the personal ostentation of many of her princely peers. Where they paraded themselves in jewel-encrusted robes, ate off solid gold plate and festooned their children and elephants with strings of pearls, Farzana, like Reinhardt, favoured a simpler style. ‘She has little display of magnificence or wealth about her person,’ wrote Bacon. ‘We find her seated upon a dingy shabby couch in the cross-legged fashion of a tailor, her little person enveloped in a large yellow cashmere shawl of exquisite texture though by no means showy.’
It would have taken a more forceful and capable heir than David Ochterlony Dyce to prise her gnarled old fingers off the purse strings, let alone the levers of power in Sardhana. Her generosity was legendary, her philanthropy wide-ranging and her charitable donations unstinting, but ‘her love of command was insatiate’. Luckily, young Dyce harboured no desire to usurp her authority. His mother, Julia Anne, died when he was twelve and his father, the fortune-seeking George Alexander Dyce, had been dismissed from the Sardhana Brigade, apparently for plotting a coup, although he was still drifting around Meerut and would occasionally appear in Sardhana to ask his son for money. With Farzana frequently away in Delhi and permanently absorbed in the administration of the estate, David had enjoyed a carefree and untroubled youth in Sardhana. Although he had learned to speak good English under Reverend Henry Fisher’s tutelage, the rest of his education had passed him by. He was easy-going, kind-hearted, and generous to a fault, but he was not very bright.
Farzana had tried to interest him in a military career, and in 1825 had taken him to witness Lord Combermere’s siege of Bharatpur, the great Jat fortress in whose shadow she had spent her formative years with Walter Reinhardt. The rajahs of Bharatpur had supported the Marathas against the British, had foiled Lord Lake’s repeated attempts to capture their stronghold in 1804, and had been a thorn in the side of the British ever since. With her habitual aplomb, Farzana had pitched her tent right next to Lord Combermere’s to give David the best possible view of the action and had charmed the British commander-in-chief into a close and lasting friendship. The exhilarating campaign and the ultimately successful siege had revived piquant memories in Farzana but had failed to excite her heir, who found camp life uncomfortable and battlefield tactics boring. He wanted nothing more than to return to the dissolute pleasures of his life in Sardhana.
Already a heavy drinker and compulsive gambler (he lost immense sums at cards, often to Antonio Reghelini), David Ochterlony Dyce became sadly obese (‘got weighed, 19 stone 9 lbs!!! Surely I do not look so much!’) and suffered frequent doses of ‘clap’. References in his diary chart a rake’s progress – getting ‘infernally tipsy on bad champagne’ with Hercules Skinner (son of James), ‘going whoring’ with the Thomas brothers, and ‘doing it several times a night’ with the maidens Farzana had selected as his concubines. He also took full advantage of the ‘opportunities for indulgence’ offered by the nautch dancers who were regularly invited to Sardhana to entertain Farzana’s guests.
When Lord Combermere visited Sardhana in 1828 the news that his party was to be treated to a nautch performance brought his young ADC Godfrey Mundy out in a sweat of anxiety. Although Lady Combermere was currently in England, several members of the commander-in-chief’s staff had brought their wives with them to Sardhana. Mundy knew all about nautch dancers and their ‘sidling, bridling and, I may add, ogling’ ways. Unless the girls were warned in advance that there would be European ladies present, and adapted their performance accordingly, ‘there is some danger of their carrying the suppleness of their body and limbs quite beyond the disgraceful and even bordering on the disgusting’.23
Mundy need not have worried. If anyone knew exactly how to pitch a nautch performance to
suit its audience, it was the former nautch girl Farzana. No ‘solecisms against decency’ would be allowed to embarrass her distinguished lady visitors. But that did not mean that ‘opportunities for indulgence’ would be denied any of her male guests who were tempted to indulge, nor that the nautch girls would be denied the opportunity that had brought her such rich rewards, of captivating their own Walter Reinhardt. As for her heir David, she could deny him nothing.
For all his flaws, David had several redeeming qualities. He lent money to anyone who approached him with a hard-luck story, including the Shahzada, the eldest son of Emperor Akbar Shah, who ‘came on a begging expedition’. Like most of his loans, the money he lent to the Crown prince was never repaid. He was also diligent in visiting ‘the old lady’, his great-grandmother Bara Bibi, who was dozing her way into her nineties and had recognized no one for nearly fifty years. And he was devoted to Farzana (or ‘HH’ as he called her).
‘Really HH has been very kind to me’, he wrote, ‘and I am sure I am grateful for the same.’24 He accompanied her to church whenever hangovers permitted and he did his best to help her with administrative chores. He supervised the building of her new palace, Antonio Reghelini’s second commission which he started as soon as he had finished the church; and he took over her correspondence with the British authorities (who were far less genial with him than they had been with her) and with the Pope, now Gregory XVI.