Farzana Read online

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  IN BETWEEN EMPIRES

  Arguably India has never known a darker age than that into which Farzana had been born. The half-century between the demise of the Mughal Empire and the foundation of the British Raj was a period of such agonizing transition and upheaval that even nationalist historians have been driven to despair. ‘Hindustan [i.e., northern India] during the second half of the eighteenth century presents a sad spectacle to the patriot,’ writes Jadunath Sarkar,1 adding with scholarly understatement, ‘and a perplexing problem to the historian.’

  Government collapsed over much of the country; authority amounted to little more than the right, enforced at sword point, to extract revenue; war was the only constant. Cool heads and consistent policies were barely discernible. It was as if, in the interval between one effective empire and the next, the restraints of justice and social order had been suspended. The resultant free-for-all saw every conceivable power group sally forth to settle old scores and stake a claim to supremacy. Contemporaries were just as confounded as would be the historian.

  Though the fragmentation of the Mughal Empire had been under way since the early eighteenth century, it was not until towards the end of that century that the empire’s piteous condition was exposed. Decline became fall, in fact, just as in Europe another illustrious dynasty was succumbing to the French Revolution. Had India’s emperor also been sent to the guillotine, his Red Fort stormed and his authority overthrown by the flag-waving citizenry of Chauri Bazaar, matters would have been simpler. But an office as exalted as that of the emperor was too inviting to be simply abolished. Instead, the emperor, however powerless or incompetent, became the main bone of contention. As a host of contenders, both Indian and foreign, took the field, all pinned their hopes on commandeering his imperial person, controlling his capital and its treasury, and then rewarding themselves with the privileges and perquisites that were in his gift and with the exercise of that unfettered authority to bleed the people that was technically his alone. The competition would be cut-throat, the conflict unremitting and the outcome far from certain. In 1750 few would have bet on a rank outsider, then confined to a handful of peripheral ports and busy with bills of lading rather than battle orders, sweeping the board by 1802.

  Observing the Indian scene, foreigners naturally supposed strife to be the Indian norm, or at least a reversion to the norm. This suited their plans for gainful involvement and also provided a pretext for it: only foreign intervention could bring order. Looking around, they found no such country as ‘India’ and no such nation as ‘Indian’. They therefore presumed there never had been. How could a sense of common purpose and brotherhood exist among peoples of different ethnic origin who spoke dozens of mutually incomprehensible languages, subscribed to several hostile religions and classified themselves in terms of their specific caste or community rather than as members of any supposed nation? ‘India’, or ‘Hindustan’, was merely a geographical term of convenience for what was, in practice, an arena of warring peoples.

  And in a political sense these foreign observers were right. With a land mass the size of western Europe and an even bigger population, the subcontinent had seldom been centrally administered by a single power. Typically, as in Europe, India’s component regions – Bengal, Punjab, the Deccan, etc., most of them as large and populous as any European country – had boasted their own rulers. Each claimed absolute sovereignty over his region and jealously defended it against the others. A state of low-level war had indeed been endemic. In the coinage of one scholar,2 ancient South Asia comprised not a single empire or kingdom, but ‘a society of kings’.

  The Mughals had broken this mould. Muslims from central Asia of Mongol descent (hence ‘Moghul’ or ‘Mughal’), they had entered India from the north-west like other invaders. But they then stayed on and, by conquest and judicious accommodation, steadily extinguished or marginalized all rivals. A single empire embracing most of the subcontinent had been established by 1560 and held firm despite endless wars of succession for a century and a half. The subcontinent’s former regions and kingdoms became provinces of the empire, each administered by rotating governors appointed by the emperor. Revenue systems were standardized; so were rankings within the administrative and military hierarchy.

  It was more like the Roman Empire than the British. Emperors enjoyed absolute power, sometimes toyed with semi-divine status and ruled by force of arms. The opulence of their court beggared belief. Agra and then Shah Jahan’s Delhi, each larger than London, were so awash with precious metals as to lead one visitor to declare India3 ‘an abyss for gold and silver’. The silver glinted even from saddlery, crockery, carriage-work and guns; gold was so abundant it was spun into thread for fabrics and beaten into leaf for architectural cladding. The imperial jewels were the envy of the world. They attracted gem merchants from as far away as Paris. Shah Jahan boasted emeralds the size of eggs, while the pearls that covered his upper body were so closely hanked as to appear like armour. His courtiers avoided such ostentation only because any gems that caught the emperor’s eye would have to be gifted to him. But the man who was Aurangzeb’s governor in Bengal is known to have counted his store of diamonds by the sackful. Their weight was estimated as the equivalent of a third of a tonne.

  In fact, India’s affluence was as much a cliché in the eighteenth century as its poverty would be in the twentieth century. In both cases the state of the countryside was supposedly responsible. Asked what he thought of Bengal, Francois Bernier, a French doctor who spent the years 1658–67 in India, had no hesitation in declaring its ‘fertility, wealth and beauty’ greater than that of Egypt, then universally reckoned ‘the finest and most fruitful country in the world’. Thanks to the climate, the soil and the ingenuity of its people, Bengal yielded a larger surplus of foodstuffs and a wider variety of export produce than any other known market. A proverb, popular among Europeans in India at the time, said it all: ‘A hundred gates of entry hath Bengal, yet of exit none.’ This was not because of the high mortality rate among foreigners but because of ‘the rich exuberance of the country together with the beauty and amiable disposition of the native women’. Once established there, no European cared to leave.

  The most easterly of the empire’s provinces, Bengal comprised what is today Bangladesh plus the states of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar in the Republic of India. It was larger than France or England as well as infinitely richer than either. Further inland, the great province of Awadh (or Oudh) stretched almost up to Delhi. Corresponding roughly to Uttar Pradesh, the most populous of modern India’s states, Awadh too was renowned for its wealth and especially its textiles. West and north of Delhi a third great province, that of the Punjab, was reckoned a veritable garden of abundance and now, half in India and half in Pakistan, is still the most productive region of either country. It was from the Punjab that the disinherited Zeldah and her little Farzana made their way to Delhi’s Chauri Bazaar; and it was from the same province that the erstwhile nautch girl Farzana and her ‘sombre’ patron, Walter Balthazar Reinhardt, would launch their joint career.

  Strung across the breadth of northern India, these three provinces – Bengal, Awadh and the Punjab – had been the breadbasket of the empire. The main source of its prosperity, they were also its principal reservoir of military recruitment. But by 1750 all three, though still pretending allegiance to the emperor, had already cast aside imperial control. The territory under Delhi’s direct administration had shrunk to little more than what now lies between the Red Fort and the city’s newest airport. Desperate for support in their interminable squabbles over succession, emperors had been obliged to cave in to their own administration. Governors had been allowed to stay put in their provinces in return for rendering token allegiance or a few troops. They had then diverted the revenues on which the imperial treasury depended to build up their own power bases. Resisting all attempts to unseat them, they named their own successors and were effectively sovereign powers. Once again India
seemed to be reverting to ‘a society of kings’.

  In former provinces like Bengal and Awadh, the descendants of these governors were now styled ‘nawabs’. Their courts had come to outshine that of the emperor. So had their patronage of the arts, their appetite for fanciful architecture and their interest in ballistics and gunnery. To their much embellished capitals of Dacca (for Bengal) and Lucknow (for Awadh) a host of fortune-seeking Europeans would soon be drawn, among them the ‘sombre’ Reinhardt aka ‘General Sumru’.

  A similar disintegration of the empire was evident in the third of the northern provinces, the Punjab. But there the picture was greatly complicated by the frequent passage of armies through what was effectively India’s only landward invasion route. Like the rampaging Afghan, Ahmed Shah Abdali, the invaders usually withdrew, though not without installing their own candidates in the provincial capital of Lahore and settling their own followers in the rich countryside. Turks, Persians, and Afghans (Pathans and Rohillas) were as likely to be met with in the bazaars of the Punjab as Punjabis.

  The result was a state of anarchy in which the native inhabitants banded together for defence and took up arms to further their interests. Two of these local groups would menace Delhi almost as often as Abdali. Much persecuted by the Mughals, one, the religious brotherhood of the Sikhs in the north of the province, had old scores to settle with the empire. The other, the dominant farming caste known as Jats in the south of the Punjab, simply saw a chance of rich pickings and qualified independence.

  Like the nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, and like the Mughals themselves, the outsiders – the Afghans, Persians, etc., – were all Muslims. Northern India had been under Muslim rule since the time of the Delhi sultans, and thanks to both settlement and conversion, a sizeable part of the population in the three northern provinces now acknowledged the Prophet. This was not true of India as a whole. Even in the Punjab, the Sikhs had their own faith and the Jats were predominantly Hindus. Their Rajput neighbours in the desert cities of what is now Rajasthan were all Hindus. So too were the powerful Maratha families who controlled most of central India and the Deccan (literally ‘the south’ but more commonly the upland core of peninsular India). Like the Muslim nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, these Hindu rajahs and maharajahs of the countless states in peninsular India had thrown off the Mughal yoke in the early eighteenth century. But in their case, in doing so they had also rejected rule by Muslims. The Marathas in particular proclaimed a resurgent Hinduism and rode under the saffron banner of the great Lord Shiva.

  In the struggle for control of the empire, religious antagonism certainly played a part. But it did not dictate allegiances. The emperor had perforce to accept any help that was going, regardless of the beliefs of those who proffered it; meanwhile all the other contenders indiscriminately engaged in whatever alliance promised the best chance of success. Wily tacticians were preferred to ranting fakirs. Fire power and cavalry numbers counted for more than religious solidarity. And regular troops under professional officers trumped them all.

  This last was the speciality of the Christian contingent in the end-of-empire free-for-all. Most Christians in India with any military credentials were of European descent, although not necessarily of European birth. By 1750 the Portuguese had been in India, principally Goa, for 250 years. At various other ports the employees of the English and Dutch East India Companies, each with a chartered monopoly of their nation’s trade with India, had been loading their ships and cohabiting with their Indian bibis for more than a century. Operating from shoreline ‘factories’ (a corruption of the Portuguese feitoria meaning a fortified trading post), their senior merchants were known as ‘factors’ and their juniors as ‘writers’; a governor or ‘president’ presided over the main establishments; and such troops as were needed for garrison duty were recruited locally either from native infantry (or sipahis, hence ‘sepoys’), or from any footloose Europeans or Indo-Europeans with pretensions to military experience. In addition, a limited supply of officers and men from the home country might augment these irregulars when circumstance required.

  Of the several European East India Companies, only the French Compagnie des Indes was a comparative newcomer in India. Based in the far south at Pondicherry, a day’s sailing down the coast from the English Company’s fort-cum-factory at Madras, the French quickly established a formidable presence. Intervening in the affairs of the Nizam (or Nawab) of Hyderabad, another former Mughal province, and freely deploying troops to further their interests, they soon posed more than just a commercial threat to the English Company.

  In Europe and then in the Americas, Britain and France were in a semi-permanent state of war throughout the eighteenth century. These hostilities readily carried over into Indian waters, and when the French and British fleets clashed in the Bay of Bengal in the early 1740s, the fighting spread from sea to land. Each side endeavoured to augment its forces by recruiting any available Europeans, whatever their nationality, and by enlisting more Indian sepoys. They also threw up additional fortifications and wooed the support of local rulers with promises of reciprocal assistance in their own interminable struggles for power.

  In 1746 the French, on the instructions of their Governor Joseph Dupleix, attacked and captured Madras. The English withdrew from Madras but in 1748 laid siege to French Pondicherry. Pondicherry’s garrison put up a stout defence behind makeshift fences of brush and driftwood, but just when Dupleix thought the tide was turning in his favour, the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, signed in October 1748, officially ended hostilities between the two nations. The terms of the treaty (which did not become known in India until 1749) included the lifting of the siege of Pondicherry and the return of Madras to the British.

  Governor Dupleix, however, had other ideas. When sometime in 1750 the unknown Walter Reinhardt, fresh from the battlefields of Europe, had disembarked from a French frigate at Pondicherry, he was immediately drafted into the force with which the fiery Dupleix had determined to continue his quest for French supremacy in peninsular India.

  None of these developments in the extreme south made much impression on the contenders for power in the faraway north of India. The squabbles of some bewigged shippers and purchasing agents along the remote Coromandel Coast counted for nothing in Delhi and not much in Bengal. Though in Bengal both companies were already represented by their respective establishments at Calcutta and Chandernagore, each deemed that province too enticing, and its trade too valuable, to be forfeited by the disruption that would result from warfare.

  As Dupleix upped the stakes in the south by backing one of the contenders for the vacant nawabship of the Carnatic (the ex-Mughal province surrounding Madras and Pondicherry), northern India remained indifferent. In Madras the British lent their support to another candidate for the Carnatic throne. Both companies then ‘continued their hostilities under the aegis of competing Indian princes’.4 Thanks in part to the energy and talents of Robert Clive, an English ‘writer’-turned-warrior, this particular contest ended with the installation of the English company’s candidate. But the French had already succeeded in installing their own candidate as Nizam of neighbouring Hyderabad. The new situation only made honours even. The struggle resumed, and by 1754 the French were very much in the ascendant. Forces under their command were penetrating deep into the peninsula and threatening the Marathas’ homeland south of Bombay. Even Delhi at last took notice. It was these French exploits in the Deccan that first alerted the gossips of Chauri Bazaar to the possibility of European intervention in the affairs of the ailing empire.

  But at this point Dupleix was recalled for overstepping his authority and embroiling Paris in conflicts it could ill afford. When his more conciliatory replacement negotiated a peace settlement with the British, the armies of both companies were returned to barracks and their hastily recruited auxiliaries disbanded. Thus a host of Europeans and Indo-Europeans, mostly junior and non-commissioned officers, suddenly found themselves surplus to requirements.

 
Reluctant to return home, or simply lacking the fare, many (including Walter Reinhardt) opted to remain in India and seek their fortunes elsewhere in the country. There was the possibility of service with the French or English garrisons in Bengal or the more exciting option of handsome remuneration from one of the many Indian contenders for power. Wealth and status beckoned, perhaps through an independent command followed by a few quick victories and the eventual award of a jagir, in effect a principality of one’s own. The military diaspora from the Carnatic, the first of several, thus saw hundreds of ex-servicemen and officers drifting northward in pursuit of their dreams. It would be no coincidence that the fortunes of Reinhardt, and then Farzana, would be repeatedly entangled with other footloose freelances and mercenaries. Mostly ex-recruits of the Compagnie des Indes, although by no means all French-born, they became a feature of the age and gave to the death throes of the Mughal Empire an unexpectedly cosmopolitan flavour.