Farzana Read online

  For Reinhardt – as for the young Farzana who must now have been undergoing her induction in Chauri Bazaar – there was no way out. Mindful of the punishment meted out to Gregory, he dare not spare the prisoners. It was his life or theirs. He may have prevaricated, even pleaded, but it made no difference. The order stood.

  As a way of detaching the mainly British officers and factors from their men, on the day fixed for the task Reinhardt invited forty of the senior prisoners to dine with him. The details of what followed are from a contemporary source, albeit a British one.

  When his guests were in full security, protected as they imagined by the laws of hospitality, [Reinhardt] ordered the Indians under his command to fall upon them and cut their throats.… The unfortunate victims, though wholly unarmed, made a long and brave defence, and with their plates and bottles and knives even killed some of their assailants, but in the end they were all slaughtered.3

  Having dealt with the principals, Reinhardt led his fellow butchers to the compound where the other prisoners were awaiting the return of their officers. Here ‘he directed the massacre, and with his own hands assisted in the inhuman slaughter of one hundred and forty-eight defenceless Europeans confined within its walls.’ Some were cut to pieces with sabres, others shot, and when the killing was over, the bodies were flung into two wells which were then filled with stones. The only prisoner spared was the Company’s surgeon, whose medical skills Mir Qassim was known to covet. Though a column of Company troops rode post-haste to the rescue, by the time they reached Patna both Mir Qassim and Reinhardt had fled the scene and crossed the border into neighbouring Awadh.

  As with the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, there has always been some doubt about how many victims there really were in the infamous Patna massacre. When Thomas Twining, a young East India Company employee, visited the city some thirty years later he heard many accounts of the incident, ‘one differing from another, and all probably from the truth, so difficult it is to obtain accurate information upon events, even of recent occurrence’. He had no doubt that a massacre had taken place, but he castigated his countrymen for concentrating exclusively on the English casualties when their ‘native adherents’ must have suffered far greater loss; and he suspected them of having exaggerated the scale since ‘it seems scarcely probable that at the period in question the number of English at Patna could have amounted to 200’.4 Writing in the 1980s, historian Penderel Moon judged it ‘an atrocity less well-known than the Black Hole, but more deliberate and more costly in human lives’;5 yet he too forbore to hazard a guess at the death toll. Whether few died or many, Captain Lewis Ferdinand Smith, one of the more respectable military adventurers and an eloquent chronicler of the deeds of his fellows, was ‘credibly informed that this nefarious act haunted [Reinhardt’s] mind to the last hour of his existence’.6

  Ten years later the Comte de Modave would hear Reinhardt’s version of the story from the man himself. In his memoirs Modave emphasized how Reinhardt had little option in the matter.

  Sombre [i.e., Reinhardt] told me himself that he did everything he could to make Mir Qassim change his mind about killing the hostages, and that he implored him to give the task to someone else, but Mir Qassim would not listen and threatened to cut off his head if he did not obey immediately. So he took a corps of sepoys and went to the house where the English were held and had it surrounded. The unhappy prisoners had no idea what was going to happen. With the idea of saving as many as he could, Sombre shouted out to them several times that if there were any French, Italian, German or Portuguese among them they could leave. But the prisoners, who didn’t realize the significance of his question and who were eating their meal, shouted back that they were all English. In the end Sombre started to fire on them.7

  Modave agreed with both Lewis Ferdinand Smith and Antoine Polier, a former East India Company officer turned freelance, that Reinhardt was indeed haunted by the affair for the rest of his days – haunted ‘by the fear of being delivered up to the English’ no less than by his responsibility for the massacre. For the haunting was mutual. The British would never forget ‘the butcher of Patna’, and the price on his head would remain there for the rest of his days. As the Company’s troops edged from Bengal into the heart of Hindustan, it would be this fear of rough justice at British hands that drove Reinhardt ever further west and ever closer to the fleshpots of Chauri Bazaar and the encounter with the Farzana.

  IN THE SERVICE OF AWADH

  Once across the border and beyond the reach of the British in Bengal, ex-nawab Mir Qassim and the bloodstained Reinhardt found themselves in safe hands with the nawab of Awadh. ‘A true warrior king, the grandson of a noble Persian soldier who had worked his way up the Mughal ranks to claim control of the province’,8 Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh had watched how the British had treated the nawabs of Bengal and was determined not to become their next victim. To this end he had already decided on a pre-emptive strike. Far from handing over Mir Qassim and Reinhardt therefore, he enlisted them and their forces in his self-ordained task of rolling back the British advance and reclaiming Bengal.

  Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh* already had a sizeable army of his own. His great province had been the main recruiting ground of the Mughals and would become the source of most of the Company’s sepoys. He could also, at this moment, call upon the support of the current Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, along with such forces as were still loyal to him. For, in a twist of fate typical of the topsyturvy times, the Mughal emperor, everyone’s supposed overlord, was currently a pensioner under the protection of Awadh’s nawab, his supposed ‘deputy’ (the literal meaning of ‘nawab’). The addition of Mir Qassim’s surviving troops plus Reinhardt’s (said to have been four battalions of infantry, one of cavalry and a strong complement of artillery) completed this grand alliance. It was not exactly a pan-Indian army of resistance but it was as near to it as the British had yet encountered. One authority calls it ‘the only effort made by the decaying Mughal Empire to halt the English advance in India’.9 The ensuing trial of strength, though far from pre-emptive, would certainly be momentous; the future of half Hindustan was about to be decided.

  Led by the three topmost representatives of Mughal power in northern India – the nawab of Awadh (Shuja-ud-Daula), the deposed nawab of Bengal (Mir Qassim) and their nominal overlord the emperor (Shah Alam) – in October 1764 these combined forces of more than 30,000 crossed the border into that part of British-held Bengal that was Bihar. They made for Patna, the scene of Reinhardt’s massacre, and on 23 October camped near the small town of Buxar on the banks of the Ganges. Here they were engaged by a British force of some 1,000 Europeans, 5,300 sepoys and 900 irregular cavalry, all under the command of Major (later Sir) Hector Munro.

  For once it was not just the superiority of European tactics and discipline that proved decisive. The Mughal alliance had already started to unravel. The nawab of Awadh, a man of such mighty physical strength that he could cut off the head of a buffalo with a single stroke of his sword, was now scheming to decapitate Bengal by taking Bihar for himself. Mir Qassim suspected as much but, currently deprived of the revenues of Bengal, was unable to pay his troops, who were therefore refusing to fight. Meanwhile, Emperor Shah Alam, never quite knowing whom to trust, watched his unsteady allies and wondered whether this was not the moment to renew earlier overtures to the British about their supporting his return to Delhi in return for his imperial recognition of their rule in Bengal. Finally, Reinhardt, though as a fugitive from British justice he was unlikely to swap sides, could for the same reason be expected to bolt rather than face capture and a certain death sentence.

  The battle lasted all day amid fighting that was unusually ferocious with appalling casualties on both sides. Even the Company’s losses were put at nearly 2,000, or one in four. Reinhardt, for once, was in the thick of the action. But with long experience of backing losers, he was also the first to scent defeat and withdraw his brigade. The nawab of Awadh followed hard on his heels, le
aving more than 2,000 of his own sepoys dead on the battlefield. The British then gave pursuit up to the Awadh border where, too exhausted to go any further, they contented themselves with rounding up over 100 abandoned guns and plundering the wreckage of the Mughal camp. They then pulled back to Patna.

  Buxar was the most hotly contested battle the English East India Company had yet fought in India and by far the most decisive – much more so than had been the celebrated encounter at Plassey eight years earlier. From now on there could be no question that the British were major contenders for power rather than just for trading concessions. The emperor drew his own conclusions. Immediately realigning himself with the British, Shah Alam officially conferred the diwani, or revenue-raising concession, for Bengal on the English Company. This implied reciprocal recognition by the Company of the emperor’s paramount sovereignty and brought him a handsome allowance plus interim permission to settle his court-in-exile at Allahabad, a city at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna.

  The main loser was the nawab of Awadh. A chastened Shuja-ud-Daula quickly sent his begums, their progeny and all their worldly possessions to a safe refuge in Rohilkhand in the far north-west of Awadh. Then he opened peace negotiations with the British. Allahabad was surrendered to be a haven for the emperor, and a large indemnity was offered as compensation for the expense of the war. But Hector Munro wanted more than money. He wanted the men responsible for the massacre at Patna, Mir Qassim and the unspeakable ‘butcher’ Walter Reinhardt ‘Sombre’.

  Unfortunately, neither was now in Awadh’s gift. Mir Qassim had fled to Delhi, where he would die in poverty in 1777 leaving insufficient funds even to pay for a burial sheet. Meanwhile, Reinhardt, whose personal following had almost doubled in size since being joined by the ‘debris’ of Mir Qassim’s army, was too wary and well guarded to be taken by force. Keeping one step ahead of the British, he was already out of easy reach, having been delegated to escort the Awadh begums and their possessions to Rohilkhand. Anxious not to appear uncooperative, Shuja-ud-Daula did offer to arrange for Reinhardt to be murdered ‘in the presence of any person whom the English General might send to witness the deed’. But this was not good enough for the British. They wanted Reinhardt alive.

  When word of these negotiations reached ‘the butcher’ himself, he drew the obvious conclusion: Awadh was no longer safe; it was time to move on again. But first there was a small matter of finance to be addressed. He had not as yet received his promised remuneration from the nawab of Awadh. His troops were therefore in arrears, as well as resentful over the plunder that had failed to materialize from the battle of Buxar. A solution, however, lay to hand. To someone who had lately murdered hundreds of unarmed prisoners in cold blood, a breach of trust seemed a minor transgression. He therefore had no hesitation in stripping the Awadh begums of their jewels, cash, ornaments and trinkets. These purloined treasures turned out to be worth a fortune – enough not just to pay his men and ensure their continued loyalty but to fill his own saddlebags and strongboxes to overflowing. With cannon and munitions loaded on bullock carts, Reinhardt mustered his brigade, turned his back on Awadh and, venturing still further west and north, advanced into the chaotic heartland of Hindustan.

  DELHI AT LAST

  The Comte de Modave observed:

  The constant effort of everyone against everyone else has turned Hindustan into an enormous battlefield. As soon as the season permits warfare, more than fifty armies launch campaigns to defend or attack, or sometimes just to pillage, friends and enemies alike. There is not a prince in India who is not seeking to enrich himself at the expense of his neighbours.10

  The campaigning season ran throughout the winter, from the end of the monsoon in September till the onset of the hot weather in April/May. Most rivers were dry or fordable at this time of year, while the lower humidity ensured that flintlocks fired and powder readily ignited. Buxar having been fought on 22 October 1764, it must have been early November by the time Reinhardt’s brigade hit the trail. The nights were still warm and the showers few. Wells and ‘tanks’ (the ponds attached to villages as much as the pools attached to temples) brimmed with water, while the fields were green with winter crops of wheat and chickpeas, tempting forth boar and deer to the delight of the military sharpshooters. In many ways the plains of northern India seemed positively intended for ‘an enormous battlefield’. With few physical obstacles to overcome and every chance of living off the countryside, a small army might move about indefinitely. Dust, often knee-deep in the rutted trails that passed for roads, was the greatest inconvenience. Soft as talcum powder, it turned man and beast into sweat-streaked statuary and insinuated itself into gunny sacks, trunks, firing mechanisms and even, it was said, casks of wine. An officer’s family, like Reinhardt’s Bara Bibi and the young Louis Balthazar, might be conveyed in a rough carriage or in palanquins, both tightly closed; more like coffins than sedans, the palanquins were shouldered by teams of bearers who alternated in shifts and kept up a grunting chant as they jogged along. Officers themselves of course rode, as did the cavalry. The rest marched, taking care to keep ahead of the artillery and the baggage train whose unsprung carts lumbered along in a dense brown cloud of talc dust that was often the farmer’s earliest indication of approaching trouble.

  Although all the fifty-odd warring factions mentioned by Modave fielded their own regular units and auxiliary levies, they – like the European companies – appreciated the professional dedication of mercenary units with a genuine, if pecuniary, incentive to fight. Reinhardt’s ‘party’ (as such brigades were called), although the first to be led by a European, was just one of dozens. They would fight for whoever would pay them and accepted that further recompense depended on victory. But they also displayed a disconcerting tendency to change sides in the thick of battle or simply retreat, like Reinhardt at Buxar, whenever their interests dictated. Military operations could be over before the first shot was fired if, as at Plassey, the commanders of one side succeeded in bribing the enemy into absconding or defecting. Alternatively, comrades-in-arms one day could be killing each other the next.

  When the nineteenth-century historian Herbert Compton characterized Reinhardt’s army as being ‘in a state of pronounced mutiny and insubordination’11 he could have been describing any mercenary force in Hindustan. Sepoys in the employ of native rulers, even if they were European-led, frequently resorted to mutiny as the only way of extracting their wages. The Company’s sepoys were more fortunate. They were paid regularly, better trained and usually better treated. But mutiny was therefore even less forgivable. When Hector Munro had faced a rebellion on the eve of Buxar, he had ordered twenty-four sepoys to be tied to the mouths of cannon. The cannon were then loaded with grapeshot and fired, blowing the would-be rebels to shreds in front of their fellows. Though undoubtedly effective, such extreme measures make British outrage over the Patna massacre ring a little hollow.* In their eyes, Reinhardt stood condemned less for all the lives he had taken than for all the British lives he had taken.

  Even when qualified by the term ‘mercenary’, an ‘army’ implies a more orderly and cohesive force than the sizeable ‘party’ Reinhardt had by now assembled. Although military historians have calculated its strength as equivalent to five battalions, in reality it consisted of some three thousand self-serving individuals, all as unscrupulous and single-minded as their leader. Of these, perhaps 200 were Europeans of various nationalities. Most of them, like Reinhardt himself, were barely literate troopers of obscure or mixed parentage who had escaped from the brutal drudgery of regular military service to pursue an equally brutal but potentially much more lucrative career as ‘adventurers’. Like the sepoys, they would stay with Reinhardt while he paid them, while his star was rising, and on the understanding that they could supplement their income by plundering every district through which they passed, even when not engaged on a campaign.

  But, as soon appeared, the lawless lands between Awadh and Agra had been plundered before �
� by robber tribes (Pindaris, Mewatis, etc.,) as well as by marauding armies like Reinhardt’s. Usually the mere threat of another round of pillage and rape sufficed to extract protection money and supplies. But south of the Ganges it was a different story. Here, in the still notorious Chambal ravines, the countryside is as desolate as any in India and cut into scrub-covered sandhills by a maze of steep-sided gullies. In 1764 the scattered villages showed little sign of life, and their few fields lay barren and neglected. Any dwellings not already flattened were hidden behind brushwood barricades and ‘so reduced was the actual number of human beings, and so utterly cowed their spirit, that the few that did remain had scarcely any communication with each other’.12

  A 3,000-strong army would have been safe enough from the armed bandits who lurked here and little troubled by the tigers that roamed the badlands in such prodigious numbers that ‘it is rare to venture into the countryside without seeing some’.13 Yet the pickings were few and the hardships many as the carts and palanquins struggled through the ravines. Discipline, ever under strain in Reinhardt’s brigade, was almost impossible to maintain. And only its commander knew where the 300-mile march would end. The destination was in fact the great metropolis of Agra, the ex-Mughal capital, home of the Taj Mahal and still Hindustan’s second city. It had lately fallen to the immensely rich Jat ruler of Bharatpur; and as Reinhardt had learned, this Jat rajah had barely heard of the British and was on the lookout for professional military assistance.

  K.R. Qanungo, the historian of the Jats, describes his people as ‘a tribe so widespread and numerous as to be almost a nation by themselves’. Being mostly Hindu agriculturists, others would call the Jats a caste, except that there are also Muslim Jats and Sikh Jats. Characterized by Qanungo as ‘tough, slow, unimaginative and unemotional, lacking brilliance but possessed of great solidity, dogged perseverance and an eminently practical turn of mind’,14 they had been rated ‘an undemonstrative race of farmers’ until Mughal depredations persuaded them to take up arms in defence of their land and livelihood. Newcomers to the art of war, they showed an unexpected aptitude for it and had harried and harassed their hated Muslim overlords so mercilessly that in 1724 the then emperor had recognized their leader as ‘Rajah of Bharatpur’. Far from mollifying the Jats, this merely encouraged them to declare Bharatpur an independent kingdom. The third and greatest Jat rajah, Suraj Mal, strengthened the fortifications round his capital and built himself a spectacular summer palace protected by another nigh-impregnable fortress at nearby Dig (pronounced ‘Deeg’).