Farzana Read online

  Generally they were welcomed by the contending nawabs and rajahs. During the so-called ‘war of the Carnatic’, local Indian rulers and their military commanders had been dismayed to find that their sometimes vast armies were repeatedly defeated, even trounced, by much smaller European-led forces. The difference lay not in the accuracy of their cannon or the design of their flintlocks (they were similarly armed) nor in the fighting qualities of their troops (the ‘other ranks’ of both sides consisted overwhelmingly of Indian sepoys). Nor, as Indian historians have rightly pointed out, had it anything to do with the calibre of European officers ‘whose private characters were stained by unscrupulous selfishness, greed of gold and lack of fidelity to any master or any noble deed’.5 It lay, the nawabs quickly realized, in the superiority of European tactics and discipline, especially in respect of firing drill.

  Indian armies expected to overawe their enemies with cannon bombardments and then finish them off with mounted charges. Camels and elephants might sometimes be ridden into battle, but the horse was king. The Mughal hierarchy had been based on the number of mounted cavalry each rank holder maintained for imperial service, and this practice continued to the extent that nawabs and rajahs expected their officers and allies to bring with them a pre-agreed number of armed horsemen. Yet experience in the south had now shown that the humble infantryman, far from being mere cannon and sword fodder, could be a match for either. The crucial factor was the number of rounds per minute that could be fired, and this depended on the precise positioning and rotation of the massed flintlock men, their steadiness under fire, and the synchronized loading, aiming and discharging of their weapons. Drill, discipline and regimentation were the key, all of which were neglected aspects of an Indian soldier’s training.

  The Comte de Modave, an expert on military matters as well as child virgins, wrote of native-led forces suffering from a ‘lack of uniformity in recruitment, uniform and arms; lack of discipline; ignorance of basic elements of tactics; [and] lack of coordination between different corps’. They were ‘slow to obey orders’, and in the absence of a commissariat, required ‘the presence of a veritable walking city of merchants with each army, vastly increasing the number of people on the move’.

  These weaknesses, and the disparity that resulted, had been observed not just in the Carnatic and the neighbouring Deccan but wherever the British and French companies maintained a presence. Indian rulers and would-be rulers the length and breadth of the country took note and duly became receptive to offers of having their own troops trained in the new skills, so stealing a march on their rivals. The footloose freelances from the Carnatic would find themselves in demand as drill sergeants, tacticians and mercenary commanders.

  Walter Reinhardt, a native of Alsace and so as much a German as a Frenchman, had chosen to go north to the British in Bengal. Service with the English Company offered greater security and more realistic prospects of prize money than pandering to the fantasies of a nawab. Moreover, somewhere along the way – or perhaps from among those ‘native women of beauty and amiable disposition’ in Bengal itself – he had acquired a companion. Though Farzana would know this lady only as ‘Bara Bibi’ (a job description more than a name, it translates as ‘senior wife’), Reinhardt had a son by her in early 1756. The son did have a name, Louis Balthazar. Farzana would have to come to terms with a patron who already had both family and heir.

  With a wife and child to provide for, Reinhardt’s need of employment became acute and in the summer of 1756, perhaps drawn to the idea of serving alongside other German speakers, he enlisted as a private soldier in a Swiss battalion being recruited by the English Company in Calcutta. At this time he also changed his name to ‘Somers’, possibly to cover his tracks as a former French serviceman, perhaps just to make himself more acceptable to the English. In the event it was not his identity that threatened his plans but his timing. In the year 1756 Latafat Khan died, leaving the little Farzana and her mother to fend for themselves. But for India as a whole, for Bengal, and for Calcutta in particular, 1756 was a date that went straight into the history books, one that signalled the emergence of the British as serious contenders for the mantle of Mughal rule.

  AN UNCANNY EYE FOR A LOSER

  The site of Calcutta on the east bank of the Hooghly river had been selected seventy years earlier by Company factor Job Charnock. Intended for the establishment of a ‘factory’, it had since developed into a thriving port. Porticoed bungalows, whitewashed churches, a courthouse, a jail, a theatre and other facilities had been built for the merchants and their families along the river and upstream of its waterside warehouses; nearby a sprawling ‘black town’ accommodated the Company’s several thousand local employees; and the whole was protected by a picturesque but less-than-impregnable citadel, completed in 1706 and named ‘Fort William’.

  The British did not though have a monopoly of Bengal’s fabulous produce, nor even of the Hooghly’s. The French Compagnie des Indes, the Dutch company and a smaller Danish company had their own settlements at Chandernagore, Chinsura and Serampore respectively, all within a few miles of the British in Calcutta.

  During the lifetime of Alivardi Khan, nawab of the erstwhile Mughal province of Bengal and in effect its independent ruler, relations between the European traders and the court in Dacca had been wary but mutually advantageous, the Company being licensed to trade in return for paying substantial taxes into the nawab’s treasury. But in early 1756, just before Reinhardt’s appearance in Bengal, Alivardi Khan had died. His grandson, Siraj-ud-Daula, succeeded and at about the same time, in Europe, Anglo-French hostilities broke out again; it was the start of what would turn into the Seven Years War. The directors of the English Company accordingly ordered the reinforcement and extension of Calcutta’s Fort William, while the French followed suit at Chandernagore.

  All this military construction seems to have unnerved the new nawab, who is described as ‘a handsome, but weak, ill-tempered and profligate young man of whom little good can be said’.6 He took the new fortifications and the new wave of recruitment as a challenge to his authority and ordered them stopped. The French complied; the British did not; and so it was that Bengal’s Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula assembled a large army at his new capital of Murshidabad and set off on the 120-mile march south to Calcutta.

  The Dutch in Chinsura and then the French in Chandernagore watched anxiously as the seemingly endless column of cavalry, infantry, elephants, artillery, ox carts and that ‘veritable city’ of tradesmen and camp followers tramped past. Though word reached Calcutta well in advance of the expedition’s arrival, so confident had the British factors become in their ability to repulse any ‘native’ army, and so intent were they on bickering among themselves, that they signally failed to prepare either for the defence of the town or the provisioning of the fort.

  Exactly where Walter Reinhardt aka Somers was at the time of Siraj-ud-Daula’s famous assault on Calcutta is unrecorded. He was not listed among the European survivors of the onslaught against the town, nor of the capture of the fort, nor of the notorious ‘Black Hole’, the airless cell into which the nawab’s prisoners were herded overnight. In the panic of the siege anyone could have made their escape by forcing their way onto a boat in the river. Several senior Company officials and army officers did just that, regardless of the women and children they elbowed aside and left to their fate.

  Reinhardt was innocent of this stampede, and with considerable experience of fighting both with and against native forces, he was innocent of that scorn for their abilities shown by the British. But he had developed a genius for self-preservation. Most likely he took to his heels as soon as he saw Siraj-ud-Daula’s army coming. He had been in the employ of the British for less than three weeks; and within days of the debacle at Calcutta he had repaired to Chandernagore to re-enlist with the French.

  Whatever Reinhardt’s other talents, they did not as yet include good political judgement; carefully though he calculated the odds, he unfailingly ba
cked the wrong horse. For in January 1757 the British returned to Bengal with a vengeance. Gathering up the survivors of the fall of Calcutta, they scattered the nawab’s defenders and quickly recaptured the city. The relieving force, commanded by the now Colonel Robert Clive for the Company and Admiral Charles Watson for the Royal Navy, had been sent by sea from Madras. With Calcutta secured, the fleet sailed on up the Hooghly to attack the French at Chandernagore. This action had the sanction of the war in Europe and was thought essential to pre-empt a supposed anti-British alliance between the French and the nawab. Chandernagore was duly pounded into capitulation by Watson’s warships. Clive then marched in pursuit of the nawab.

  Meanwhile Reinhardt, with his uncanny eye for a loser, had deserted the French to sign on with the nawab. He had fled Chandernagore disguised in Indian clothes to avoid arrest, though whether as a Company turncoat or a Compagnie deserter is debateable. It was also irrelevant, for by offering his services to the nawab he effectively made himself persona non grata with either company. It was now March 1757. Farzana and her abandoned mother were trailing into Delhi to face an uncertain future in Chauri Bazaar. Reinhardt, having now burnt his boats with the European trading companies, faced an equally uncertain future in the maelstrom of Indian politics.

  In June 1757 Clive and the nawab duly met at Plassey in a battle that, like several others in India, was won without actually being fought. As pre-arranged, Mir Jafar, the nawab’s military commander and kinsman, plus other conspirators, swapped sides after the first exchange of fire. Their troops followed them, obliging the nawab to flee and leaving Mir Jafar to be handed the throne by Clive as a valued accomplice – and then mercilessly milked by Clive as ‘a weak, indolent, drug-sodden British puppet’. Reinhardt, though absent from this transaction, was out of a job again. Siraj-ud-Daula was soon murdered, and his successor, with the British breathing down his neck, had no use for a multiple renegade.

  In the course of their ‘famous hundred days’ (since Clive and Watson’s fleet reached Bengal, that is) the British had reclaimed Calcutta, vanquished the French, overthrown the nawab, acquired control of the most lucrative province in the Mughal Empire and enriched themselves personally to the tune of £1.25 million (very approximately £12.5 billion in today’s terms). Despite his own portion amounting to £400,000 (say £4 billion in today’s terms), Clive would famously declare himself ‘astounded by my own moderation’. This was not how his contemporaries saw it, most of whom were appalled by his rapacity. Reinhardt might have been one of the few who sympathized, had not the greatest opportunity of his career just passed him by. Initially he had backed the right horse but he had then switched bets twice and was now sent flying as the British colours romped home.

  Courtesy of his recent comrades-in-arms at Chandernagore, he had just changed his name again, this time to ‘Sombre’. French writers suppose it a sobriquet meaning ‘the gloomy one’ and credit him with un aspect sévere, which British writers translate as a look of scowling ill-temper. Writers in both countries have also suggested that sombre must imply a dark complexion. But of the two known (if not exactly lifelike) paintings of Reinhardt, neither supports either the deep tan or the black look. More plausibly, ‘Sombre’ was just a Gallicization of ‘Somers’. Both names would soon make way for ‘Sumru’, a rendering of the same syllables that was more congenial to Indian pronunciation.

  Clearly Reinhardt liked to blend into his surroundings. ‘Somers’ to the English, ‘Sombre’ to the French and ‘Sumru’ to the Indians, he was scarcely covering his tracks with a trail of impenetrable aliases as some have suggested. Rather was he adjusting his identity to match the many personae required of a mercenary in the treacherous terrain of northern India. Farzana would do the same, marking her progress with whatever tags, titles and honorifics her fluctuating station in life afforded.

  3

  THE BUTCHER OF PATNA

  The often uncomfortable story of how the British acquired their Indian empire has been largely constructed by the British themselves. Though appalled by the skulduggery of Clive and his cronies, scholars have shown little appetite for the plight of the Bengal nawabs or the death throes of the Mughal Empire. To explain the chaos from which the Raj emerged they prefer to pin the blame on blackguardly scapegoats from outside India, and none so readily fits the bill as a scruple-free, former French interloper like Walter Reinhardt.

  By the time he met Farzana in Delhi, Reinhardt’s unsavoury reputation was common knowledge; it would dictate their life together and hang heavy over Farzana’s subsequent reputation. But to a well-versed nautch girl in Chauri Bazaar it may not have seemed quite as unsavoury as both British and Indian chroniclers have made out. As Farzana herself realized, everything depended on how Reinhardt’s exploits as he now travelled west from Bengal to Delhi were interpreted.

  Redundant again after the death of the wretched ex-nawab Sirajud-Daula, in 1760 Reinhardt had surfaced in Purnea, a town in northern Bihar on the edge of the erstwhile province of Bengal and within easy bolting distance of neighbouring Awadh. Purnea’s faujdar, or local military commandant, was raising a force on behalf of the latest successor to the Mughal throne and had retained Reinhardt to recruit and train an auxiliary unit. Never having achieved a rank higher than sergeant, Reinhardt all of a sudden found himself commanding a battalion with instructions to drill it on the European model and recruit other Europeans to join him.

  The assortment of ne’er-do-wells and cut-throats that he assembled in this remote corner of Bengal reported to him personally rather than to the faujdar; and Purnea being an important market for the hill peoples of nearby Nepal, his recruits likely included Gurkhas and other hardy hillsmen as well as Bihari sepoys and the numerous Indo-Europeans and Europeans, mostly of non-commissioned rank, who had been made redundant by the British triumph in Bengal. In effect they were better material for a band of irregulars than a regimented infantry. Thanks to Purnea’s flourishing trade in hill ponies, they were also highly mobile. Reinhardt had at last realized every freelance’s dream of assembling the nucleus of an independent brigade.

  Meanwhile, the English Company’s replacement as nawab of Bengal, the incompetent and ‘drug-sodden’ Mir Jafar, had been brought to his knees by three years of British bullying, manipulation and outright robbery. In 1760 another nawab, the third in three years, was installed in his place. This was his more resilient son-in-law, Mir Qassim, and for two years Mir Qassim strove hard to find an amicable way of working with the English East India Company. It was to no avail. Intoxicated by their ill-made fortunes, the Company men continued to badger and manipulate the new nawab as they had the old. Laws were changed to suit themselves, taxes increased, tax exemptions claimed for their own commodities, and sensational profits accumulated. In the face of this shameless behaviour Mir Qassim chose to abscond, moving his court two hundred miles up the Ganges to Monghyr in Bihar. There, beyond the easy reach of the Company’s forces and no great distance from Purnea, he set about raising a new army. The faujdar of Purnea would be hard-pressed to retain his new recruits; upstaged and outbid, he can hardly have been surprised when the resourceful Reinhardt led his men off to join Mir Qassim at Monghyr.

  As his commander-in-chief, Mir Qassim had already appointed a Christian, albeit an Armenian Christian. He was known to Europeans as ‘Gregory’ and to Indians as Gurghin Khan. Armenian merchants had been settled in India since as early as the twelfth century and were prominent in Chinsura, Chandernagore and Calcutta, mostly as dealers in precious stones and spices. An Armenian general was a novelty, but then, so too was a European of indeterminate nationality who headed his own mercenary brigade and haggled in fluent Urdu over the terms on which he would agree to put them at the nawab’s service. Impressed by Reinhardt’s self-confidence, Gregory accepted his terms and gave him command of two battalions. By early 1763 Nawab Mir Qassim was ready to take the field and challenge his British sponsors.

  If Reinhardt had any illusions about the perils of native serv
ice, these were quickly dispelled when General Gregory, having suffered four successive defeats in skirmishes with the British, was summarily beheaded on orders from Nawab Mir Qassim. It is fair to say therefore that, as Gregory’s protégé Reinhardt was under some pressure when a protracted tit-for-tat with the British landed him with the assignment that would blacken his name forever.

  Mir Qassim had intercepted a shipment of arms being transported to the East India Company’s premises in Patna. In retaliation, the English factor at Patna, William Ellis, had summoned all the troops at his disposal (about 200 European officers and some 1,500 sepoys) and seized control of Patna’s city and fort. Ellis, who had lost a leg in the recapture of Calcutta in 1757, has been described as ‘a bad-tempered overbearing man, the last person who should have been appointed to the post’.1 His precipitate and unauthorized action in occupying Patna extinguished any lingering hope of the Company and the nawab coming to terms and brought a prompt response from Monghyr. Moving the bulk of his army to Patna, Mir Qassim quickly retook both its fort and city, a task facilitated by the discovery that ‘no sooner had the British forces taken possession of the place than they dispersed through it in search of plunder and drink’.2 The sepoys in the Company’s service had fled the scene rather than face defeat (or, as Cecil Burns has it, ‘made more use of their legs than their arms’); several of the Company’s officers had been killed; and the remaining Europeans in the city – mostly English, and including several civilians – had been rounded up and placed under guard in the Company’s factory.

  Naturally, Calcutta took a dim view of all this. A Company army quickly marched to Monghyr, captured it, deposed Mir Qassim in his absence, and reinstated the previous nawab, the sozzled Mir Jafar. But Mir Qassim himself remained at large in Patna and still held its European complement under lock and key. His position, though hopeless, was not powerless. The Company’s heavy-handed actions cried out for a bloody revenge, and Mir Qassim, with little to lose, was not about to disappoint. Summoning Walter Reinhardt ‘Sombre’ as a suitably anti-British operative, he detailed him to eliminate all the Patna prisoners, Ellis included.