Farzana Read online

  Only in the north-east quadrant of the walled city was this pattern of magnificence interspersed with squalor broken. Here, detached and slightly elevated above the worlds of labour and commerce, Shah Jahan had built his two pieces de resistance. The Jami Masjid, the largest mosque in India, enclosed a prayer ground of 100 metres square and could accommodate 5,000 prostrating worshippers. Lofty minarets of red sandstone, striated with white marble to accentuate their 40-metre height, flanked its great white onion domes and commanded the entire city – quite literally so when, five times a day, the call to prayer went forth from their topmost pavilions.

  To the west and south this muezzin’s call travelled along the rooftops lining Chauri Bazaar, in whose maze of side streets Latafat Khan had first lit upon his Zeldah. But east and north, across a part of the city later cleared by the British, the muezzin’s call met the high curtain walls of Shah Jahan’s other great creation, the Lal Qila or Red Fort. ‘Red’ by virtue of its salmon sandstone construction and so handsomely provided with bastions, buttresses and towering gateways as to be virtually impregnable, the fort was a city within the city. It had its own market, mosque, barracks, gardens and stables and, backing onto its eastern wall where the bed of the Jumna river provided a natural glacis as well as a sunken arena for elephant fights, it shielded the concourse of exquisitely fretted white marble pavilions studded with precious stones that constituted the Imperial Palace.

  Sadly though, history had already taken its toll of the city. By the time Farzana and her mother reached Delhi/Shahjahanabad in the late 1750s, a century of imperial neglect followed by half a century of strife had left their mark. Ever since the death in 1707 of Aurangzeb, the last of the six ‘Great Mughal’ emperors, it had suffered repeatedly at the hands of invaders – Afghan, Persian, Maratha – all intent on commandeering whichever of Aurangzeb’s ineffectual successors was currently on the throne and taking possession of his coveted capital. The walls still stood and the great studded gates were still closed at night, but the fabric of the city within had been devastated.

  Yet worse now followed. Within months of Zeldah and Farzana’s arrival, Delhi suffered its most destructive invasion of all. For in 1761 the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Abdali followed up his crushing defeat of the emperor’s Maratha guardians at the battle of Panipat by falling upon the city. It was Abdali’s fourth visitation and this time he was in no mood to negotiate a ransom. In a fit of rage he authorized his troops to reward themselves by sacking and ransacking whatever took their fancy. ‘They stole and plundered, and obscenely enriched themselves,’ wrote the chronicler Mir Taqi Mir. ‘They laid hands upon women. In every lane there was a reign of terror, and every marketplace was a field of combat … The poor were drained bloodless, while tyrants wallowed in their blood.’3

  How can I describe the desolation of Delhi [wrote another contemporary observer, Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda]? There was not a house in the city from where the jackals’ cries could not be heard…. The lovely buildings and…gardens…lay in ruins. In the villages surrounding Delhi, young women were no longer seen drawing water from the wells. They were full of corpses.4

  Battered and looted, its monuments crumbling, its houses, mosques and palaces in varying stages of dilapidation, its water supply suspect, its streets littered with the detritus of war and its population traumatized, the city was scarcely a safe haven for a penniless refugee and her slip of a daughter. ‘In the then anarchic and degraded state of Indian society,’ reflects Cecil Burns, ‘the needy widow and her orphaned child must have been esteemed of less value than the dogs which picked up a living in the Delhi streets.’ Burns paints a painful picture of the forsaken pair struggling to survive amidst ‘the corrupt and lawless population’. As their condition worsened the desperate Zeldah had little choice but to realize her only asset. She must sell the young Farzana into a form of slavery.

  For Muslim girls the short years immediately prior to puberty were the most emancipated of their lives. As yet free of the restrictions of ‘chador aur char darri’, ‘the veil and the four walls [of domestic confinement]’, they could seek out society of their own age and roam the city unnoticed. They made friends, ran errands, turned the streets into a playground and learnt fast. But whatever dusty delights a ransacked city might afford, for Farzana they soon faded. Zeldah’s needs were pressing. At the time – as still in parts of the world – a girl child was deemed dispensable. More than that, the not-too-dusky daughter of a destitute parent was a sought-after commodity.

  To Colonel Louis Laurent de Fèderbe, otherwise the Comte de Modave and a crucial witness to the turbulent times in which Farzana lived, the only thing more shocking than the lack of discipline in India’s native armies was the discovery that India’s cities harboured a thriving trade in child-virgins. Compounding the crime, the vendor was not infrequently the child’s own mother. ‘Mothers do deals in the virginity of their daughters, sometimes three or four years before they reach puberty. When the time comes they deliver them to fulfil the terms of the deal and leave them to their fate.’

  Used, abused and finally discarded, the girls might then be picked up for a few rupees by a broker who would either sell them on or hire them out by the month. ‘In Delhi and several other cities there are shops or depots where the sad victims of this detestable commerce are kept,’ writes Modave. Most of the girls were billed as Kashmiris or Punjabis, both of whom were favoured for their fair complexions; ‘and you can choose the one that you want to buy as you would choose a horse.’5

  Of those trafficked children not claimed by an individual buyer like a horse, most would be consigned to a life of more organized prostitution. This might not be as dire as it sounds. The fairer of form and more obliging of disposition might even be rewarded with some training in the art of nautch. That the little Farzana was already turning heads can be implied from her induction into this marginally more select profession. For minus Zeldah, who here fades back into obscurity and never again features in her story, and minus her virginity as a result of ‘this detestable commerce’, the first thing that is known for certain about Farzana is that at the age of fourteen she was performing as a nautch girl in the same ‘district of lust and debauchery’ from which her mother had once been plucked by Latafat Khan.

  Here, surmises John Lall, a distinguished Indian Civil Service officer and would-be-racy raconteur, ‘Farzana grew into a young beauty, with flashing eyes, a pearly complexion and lively wit. She became one of the most sought-after girls of the kotha in Chauri Bazaar, the street of pleasure in the shadow of the Jami Masjid.’6 No doubt her physical charms more than lived up to this wishful billing, but it was through the nautch that she exerted her new-found appeal and it was thanks to the nautch that she acquired her first taste of status and influence.

  Common to several Indian languages and derived from the Sanskrit, nautch means simply ‘dance’; and just as a twenty-first-century ‘dancer’ can be anything from a prima ballerina to a lap dancer, so an eighteenth-century Indian ‘nautch girl’ could be anything from a virtuoso artiste to a clumsy coquette. Yet at every level nautch girls were more than just dancers. Those at the top of their profession excelled, like the Japanese geisha, in such accomplishments as would appeal to the social and intellectual interests of a wealthy patron as well as those that would gratify his physical tastes. Although the daughters of noble families did not become nautch girls, there was no stigma attached to girls whose talents or looks lent themselves to the profession. As devadasis, literally ‘slaves of gods’, some were actually attached to Hindu temples and their services advertised in the sensuously explicit statuary on the temples’ walls. Though officially performing for the resident deity, they too were expected to reserve a mascaraed twinkle for any male worshipper likely to reward their favours with a donation to the temple’s Brahmin priesthood.

  Europeans, and especially European missionaries, were horrified. But all these girls were accepted members of society. Their training from early childhoo
d as performers and companions was acknowledged as an education of sorts and was often envied by their closely purdah-ed sisters. Many learnt to read and write and to memorize and recite verses suitable to their profession. Some cultivated a singing voice while others became adept at strumming an instrument. Privy to all manner of gossip and intelligence, they might become fluent in more than one language, skilled in the arts of flattery and physical relaxation, and generally capable of elevating the business of love-making into an ethereal experience. What man would not admire such a delectable array of charms? Even the Christian missionaries were reported to have grudgingly ‘regarded nautch girls as the only intelligent and cultivated class of Indian women, although they did not approve of their public performances’.7 Nor, presumably, of their private ones.

  Success for a nautch girl at this level might come in the shape of an invitation to join the private troupe of a nawab or rajah and thereafter live in his palace, entertain his guests and, for the lucky few, win a permanent place in his harem. At the other end of the scale, by practising a few enticing moves and donning their most seductive apparel, common prostitutes might also call themselves nautch girls; and if their skills were less apparent than those of their more sophisticated sisters, their ambition was the same – to attract patrons who would pay for their company.

  Most of the kothas in Chauri Bazaar were straightforward brothels. Girls, often barely into their teens, touted for business from balconies overlooking the narrow noisy streets, their diaphanous clothes and painted faces illuminated by strategically sited oil lamps. More stylish establishments with pretensions to refinement offered music and floor shows. Presided over by professional madames who were more often than not former nautch girls themselves and who combined the roles of instructor, protector and cashier, these classier kothas acted as agents for troupes of dancers who, as well as performing on the premises, might be hired out to enliven private parties elsewhere in the city.

  To visiting Europeans – merchants, fortune hunters, East India Company officials, and military men – the nautch was irresistible. In 1780 Captain Innes Munro of the 71st Highlanders attended one such private performance at the home of a fellow officer in Lucknow:

  [The dancers] accompany the music with amorous songs and a palpitation or heaving of the bosom calculated to excite in the spectators corresponding desires. In this they are generally very successful, continuing their lascivious gestures till by the force of imagination and the heat of exercise they become almost frantic with ecstasy and sink down in the most inviting attitudes, motionless with fatigue. The conclusion of the scene it is unnecessary to describe. Where the passions rage in their utmost violence, such opportunities for indulgence are not to be lost.8

  ‘Opportunities for indulgence’ constituted the standard finale, with the host inviting his guests to choose their partners for the night from among the dancers. And it was the same in Chauri Bazaar. There patrons, Indian or European, who could not afford to hire a troupe or had no friends with whom to share the cost, were welcome to attend the public performances in the kotha and then avail themselves of whatever sexual companionship they were prepared to pay for.

  At the time few Europeans had any understanding of the role of either dance or sex in Indian tradition. Where they came from, sirens did not cavort in temples let alone churches, and sex was certainly not considered an art form, let alone a spiritual experience. The notion that physical passion was intrinsically divine was incomprehensible to aspiring empire builders reared on cold showers and the conviction that copulation was just a basic and slightly grubby animal instinct. It was this ignorance that led Europeans to label all nautch girls as prostitutes. They danced for you, had sex with you, and you paid them – what else could they possibly be? That servicing the most demanding of instincts was a worthy calling, capable of great refinement, blessed with the promise of deep satisfaction, and well worth subsidizing hardly deserved comment. Nor had such dealings anything to do with love. It was permissible to feel for a prostitute something of the casual affection one lavished on a labrador, but of those sublime sentiments that distinguished a Christian marriage, or the still loftier ones that linked sinner and Saviour, bazaar liaisons seemed the absolute negation.

  Farzana was destined to carry the disparaging label of prostitute beyond the grave simply because, on entering European society, she would come to be judged by European standards. She was also unlucky in her timing. In the mid-eighteenth century the chances of a foreigner marooned in India securing a partner of his own race were negligible. Recognizing the problem, the East India Company in London thoughtfully despatched an annual draft of marriageable British womanhood. The ships entrusted with this precious cargo were popularly known as ‘the fishing fleet’, and their putting into port did provoke a flurry of balls and some hasty engagements. The ladies though were often a disappointment, being mostly rejects from the marriage market at home, often sickly after the long voyage and highly susceptible to India’s cocktail of fatal diseases. Instead it was generally accepted that Company men might take as resident bedfellows one or more native ‘bibis’, some of whom were former nautch girls. Such arrangements often worked well, resulting in mutual devotion and many children. Eighteenth-century Calcutta or Bombay, though rife with the prejudices of class and caste, was blissfully ignorant of the colour bar.

  But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, when an ageing Farzana was holding court in her Delhi and Sardhana palaces, the social climate had changed. Smoother and faster sailings (journey times were halved by travelling via Egypt rather than round the stormy tip of Africa), better domestic sanitation, the strictures of evangelizing missionaries and a heightened sense of both moral purpose and racial superiority led a new generation of expatriate Englishmen to bring their brides with them or return home to find them. The arrival en masse in the 1820s of house-proud memsahibs not only banished the bibis of the previous era but effectively rendered places like Chauri Bazaar out of bounds to any respectable husband. Nautch girls, however accomplished, were relegated to the rank of ‘comfort women’ for corporals and sex slaves for the natives. Farzana’s past association with the profession became a black mark against her.

  Perhaps too there was just cause for the contempt felt by the sahibs and memsahibs for the supposed ‘artistry’ of her calling. It is not certain whether Farzana ever acquired more than basic literacy; nor would she be given to reciting poetry, singing or performing extempore dances. They were not skills her lifestyle would require; horsemanship would serve her better than the nautch; so would marksmanship. In the booths and backstreets of Chauri Bazaar she did though improve her chances of escape by gaining a reputation for conviviality. Her wit and easy companionship were universally acknowledged as part of her charm, and they seem to have been informed by an unusually wide range of interests. As an eyewitness to Abdali’s sack of Delhi, to the comings and goings of armies and the high politics of the age, she was naturally drawn to the ways of the world. And if this interest in power generated a taste for adventure, it probably owed much to a neighbour, in fact Chauri Bazaar’s most distinguished resident, albeit a dead one.

  Chauri Bazaar is now a station on the Delhi metro. Midway between Chandni Chowk (for the Red Fort and Jami Masjid) and New Delhi Railway station, you surface here not only for the busy artery that is Chauri Bazaar itself but for the entire area at the heart of the old city that was, and still is, named after it. ‘A kotha in Chauri Bazaar’ could therefore be anywhere. Without knowing the precise location of Farzana’s establishment it would be presumptuous to track her movements. But in this same warren of streets and alleys, and certainly within the parameters of a young girl’s daily wanderings, there lay, and still lies, a walled courtyard that would have made an excellent play area, and within it an unremarkable tomb whose appeal to the young Farzana was surely as more than a climbing frame.

  A grave rather than a tomb and ‘completely devoid of interest’ according to a modern guidebook,
it dates from AD 1240, so four hundred years before Shah Jahan built his city around it. In that distant age Delhi was ruled by a succession of Muslim sultans, but in the grave lie the remains not of one of these bloodthirsty Delhi sultans but of a sultana, Begum Raziya, the only woman ruler (if one may exclude Indira Gandhi) to have reigned from the Indian capital. At the very least, Farzana must often have heard Raziya’s story – of how Sultan Iltutmish had chosen her as the ablest of his offspring to succeed him; of how she became a devotee of Shah Turkman, the Sufi saint whose nearby shrine and burial place would dictate that of her own; and of how, partly due to the machinations of gender-jealous rivals, partly to her own headstrong passion for a black Abyssinian slave, after three years of exemplary rule she was forced to flee her capital. The African was killed, but to regain the throne Raziya went on to wage a running war with outstanding dash and courage. ‘She was endowed with all the qualities befitting a king,’ wrote a chronicler of the times,9 ‘but she was not born of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men all these virtues were useless.’ She lost the struggle, was taken prisoner, then tried again and lost again. Yet her loss was a gain for romance, and her fame a tonic for tender minds. It can be no coincidence that Raziya’s story would be echoed, sometimes quite uncannily, in that of Farzana herself.

  Of all the girls who lived and worked in the kotha in Chauri Bazaar, there was unquestionably much about Farzana that commanded attention – her extreme youth, her diminutive size (she never grew to more than 4'8'' tall), her undoubted attractions (what Lall calls her ‘flashing eyes, pearly complexion and lively wit’) and just as plausibly, her interest in matters masculine and military. In particular, these traits were about to captivate a man who has confidently been described as ‘one of the most unmitigated scoundrels who ever disgraced the name of Europeans in India’. A ‘morose and ill-conditioned ruffian’, apparently without scruple or conscience, Walter Balthazar Reinhardt, otherwise known as ‘General Sombre’ or ‘Sumru’, was just the sort of monster to thrive in the free-for-all that was northern India in the late eighteenth century. Either that or he was the natural product of this chronically unstable environment. For more than character or ambition, it was the turbulence of the times that dictated careers – Farzana’s as much as that of her ‘sombre’ future patron.