Farzana Page 7

  Suraj Mal’s palace at Dig rather disproves the assertion that the Jats lacked imagination. ‘I have seen nothing in India of architectural beauty to be compared with the buildings in this garden,’ eulogized William Sleeman in 1835. Only Agra, with its marble Taj billowing above a canopy of foliage, could compare. ‘The useful and the elegant are here everywhere happily blended; nothing seems disproportionate, or unsuitable to the purpose for which it was designed.’15 So meticulous were Suraj Mal’s plans, and so exacting his standards, that it took him over ten years to complete the construction of the palace and to lay out its sunken parterres and grassy terraces. Meanwhile, as Afghans and Marathas vied with each other for the control of Delhi and its emperor, Suraj Mal had concentrated on expanding his army, filling his treasury and making local conquests of his own. By 1761 the Jats controlled a strategically important area of some 27,000 square miles between Agra and Delhi, with Suraj Mal being hailed as ‘by far the most powerful prince in India, with absolutely unimpaired forces and an overflowing treasury’.16 In that same year, as Afghans and Marathas were cutting each other to pieces in the great battle of Panipat, Suraj Mal had crowned his achievements by snatching control of Agra itself.

  The Jats’ joy at capturing what had once been the Mughal capital was savage. ‘Reminded of the humiliation the Muslims had heaped on their own [Hindu] religion, they took their revenge in every way they could,’ reports the Comte de Modave. ‘Agra’s mosque’ was turned into a marketplace and any sign of Islamic worship, including the call to prayer, was forbidden; ‘one muezzin who defied this ban had his tongue cut out.’17 They ‘shot away the tops of the minarets at the entrance to Sikandra park, took the armour and books of Akbar from his tomb and sent them to Bharatpur, and melted down two silver doors at the Taj which had cost Shah Jahan more than 125,000 rupees’.18 On Suraj Mal’s orders, they even dismantled an entire building in the Agra fort and transported it back to Dig. Re-erected, inlaid marble block by inlaid marble block, it was renamed ‘Suraj Bhawan’ (‘Sun Palace’) and served as accommodation for the rajah’s female guests, then as a schoolhouse for his children. It now stands empty, an exquisite pietra dura souvenir at odds with the violent and rapacious age that esteemed it.

  Intoxicated by his success at Agra, two years later Suraj Mal had attempted a similar attack on Delhi. This time he overreached himself. His army was repulsed and Suraj Mal killed, his severed head being flourished triumphantly on the point of a lance by the city’s defenders. A year later, when Reinhardt presented himself at Agra in December 1764, Suraj Mal’s son Jawahar Singh was ensconced on the throne of Bharatpur, having seen off the claims of his four brothers. His position, though, was far from secure. ‘Nothing but a military success, grand enough to capture the imagination of the people, was likely to check the disruptive forces in the State,’ says Qanungo, ‘and consolidate the rule of Rajah Jawahar Singh.’19 Rotund and extravagantly moustachioed like his father, with a reputation for great daring prejudiced only by impetuosity and a complete lack of forethought, Jawahar Singh had decided there could be no grander gesture than to avenge the death of his father by realizing his father’s unfulfilled ambition. In other words, he would mount another assault on the Mughal capital. He had already hired a contingent of Maratha cavalry and a band of Sikh mercenaries to supplement his own considerable army. The addition of Reinhardt’s brigade brought his total complement to an impressive 45,000.

  Thus it was that when Rajah Jawahar Singh marched on Delhi in January 1765, Walter Reinhardt ‘Sombre’ went with him. Ominously, the first European at the head of his own troops to lay siege to the Mughal capital was none other than the serial loser of the French Company’s aborted ambitions in the Carnatic and Bengal, of the English Company’s pathetic defence of Calcutta, of Siraj-ud-Daula’s flawed defiance at Plassey, of Mir Qassim’s brutal campaign in Bihar and of Awadh’s grand alliance at Buxar. With such a catalogue of failures to his name, Jawahar Singh might have done better to leave Reinhardt behind. But to Reinhardt, Delhi represented the dawn of a bright new career. His British persecutors were nowhere to be seen, and the peace overtures coming from the governor of what was still one of the world’s greatest cities seemed to vindicate all his travails. A handsome share of the expected ransom and a permanent position at the Jat court were the least he could expect.

  Some have claimed that Farzana herself comprised Reinhardt’s share of the spoils. Wishfully portraying her as a court beauty, even a Mughal princess, they suggest that she was given to Jawahar Singh to cement the terms of his withdrawal from Delhi and that he in turn conferred her on Reinhardt. How else, they ask, could a ravishing fifteen-year-old have ended up in the embrace of a ‘gloomy’ boorish European, thirty years her senior and notable only for a string of desertions and atrocities? The answer of course is that though she was certainly traded, it was not as a prize; it was more as a commodity, and in all probability, not unwillingly.

  Like the rest of Delhi, Farzana would have been well aware that among the besiegers outside the city’s gates was a brigade of those fearsome foreigners whose exploits in the Deccan and Bengal were now common knowledge. Christians were nothing new; and their often mixed blood, plus all-weather exposure, meant that most of the foreigners were no more ‘pearly’-faced than, say, a Kashmiri. But they were different, more direct, exotic even, as well as boorish; and when one or more of these strange creatures, in the course of negotiations between the city’s governor and the Jat leaders, passed down Chauri Bazaar and dismounted to inspect its facilities, they were assured of attention.

  According to the ever-confident John Lall, it was Reinhardt who was besotted at first sight. The ‘general’ supposedly cast his lascivious eye on Farzana’s blooming beauty and promptly purchased her from the kotha for a handful of gold mohurs; ‘wife, concubine or Lolita, she became the companion of an ill-favoured, saturnine Austrian from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg,’ says Lall. Quite apart from whether someone born either in Trier or Strasbourg qualified as ‘Austrian’ – or whether indeed he was ‘saturnine’ – this assumes that Farzana played no part in the transaction. But nautch girls performed to attract patrons, just as mercenaries drilled to attract patrons. It is inconceivable that she offered him no encouragement. He was her passport out of the kotha, her entrée to a life more adventurous. If not as romantic as Sultana Raziya’s Abyssinian lover, he would serve a similar purpose. Everything about Farzana and Reinhardt’s subsequent relationship, not to mention her own remarkable career, argues strongly for a mutual interest in their union, if not a reciprocal attraction.

  The deal was done, and out through the city’s elephant-high gates Farzana followed her purchaser. Delhi had been her playground and prison for nine years; not for another nine years would she see it again and then from a curtained cortege as an acknowledged ‘begum’ of beauty and consequence. Fairy tales come no better.

  By late January 1765 Jawahar Singh’s assault on Delhi, like his father’s before him, had run into trouble. His Maratha allies turned out to have been in secret correspondence with the governor of Delhi and almost immediately switched sides. Rumours that a large Afghan army was moving into the city from the north to support the governor then dispersed his Sikh mercenaries. Despite grumblings among his own commanders, Jawahar Singh had little choice but to settle for a modest indemnity and withdraw his depleted forces. This he did, and the middle of February thus saw Reinhardt, his brigade and his new concubine adjusting to a new life back in Jat-occupied Agra.

  ____________________________

  * A title rather than a name, ‘ud-Daula’ means ‘of the state’. ‘Shuja-ud-Daula’ = ‘Hero of the State’. No relation to Siraj-ud-Daula of Bengal.

  * According to Moon, ‘this form of execution had been employed by the Moghuls and was borrowed by both the French and the English. Death was instantaneous, though frightful to the beholders.’

  4

  ENCHANTED BY HER HEROISM

  Though currently held by the
Jats of Bharatpur, Agra remained an essentially Mughal city. Its own Red Fort had provided the inspiration for Shah Jahan’s Red Fort in Delhi, and within the fort’s irregular walls, the same array of airy pavilions and audience halls, mostly of a creamy white marble, looked onto the same Jumna river as in Delhi. Akbar, the third and greatest of the ‘Great Mughals’ and an almost exact contemporary of Elizabeth I of England, had made the city his capital and now lay buried nearby beneath the many-tiered monument lately desecrated by the Jats. The city’s other great tomb was the Taj Mahal, or what Kipling called ‘the gate through which all dreams pass’. Not even the Muslim-hating Jats had dared desecrate so sublime a creation; in 1788 the artists Thomas and William Daniell would camp within the gardens and find both the Taj itself and its flanking buildings ‘in very good repair’.

  A cloud-like presence, the Taj challenged the sternly battlemented fort from whose topmost pavilions Shah Jahan is supposed to have looked on this last resting place of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal and wept. The building exuded womanly grace, and it still exercises a peculiarly feminine appeal. Like Sultana Raziya’s unremarkable grave in the depths of Old Delhi, it surely spoke to Farzana. Its message though was different. Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s life had been neither tragic nor especially adventurous; in fact it was one of unflinching loyalty and devotion to the emperor who doted on her.

  Farzana, while quite at home in another Mughal city, found much else in her new situation that was not familiar. Fidelity, for a start, must have been a novelty. It was not something one learned as a nautch girl. Then there was Reinhardt himself. Was he really a monster? And what kind of relationship was she embarking on? Where would she stand in respect of his Bara Bibi and their now ten-year-old Louis Balthazar? And how would she fare in the aggressively masculine company of a brigade of swaggering mercenaries?

  It is notable that, for as long as Reinhardt lived, no accusations of infidelity would be levelled at Farzana. This is surprising given both her previous history and her later entanglements, and all the more so given the freedom she suddenly enjoyed. As the apple of Reinhardt’s infatuated eyes, she could have expected to be confined to the tight seclusion of the all-female quarters of his zenana. Glimpses of a heavily veiled and closely chaperoned little bundle being ushered from a locked boudoir to a guarded palanquin would have discouraged interest even in those who knew of her life in Chauri Bazaar. But in fact she was subject to no such restrictions. Possibly because Reinhardt, as a Christian, disapproved of purdah, possibly because he could refuse his delightful companion nothing, from the moment of her arrival in Agra she enjoyed a uniquely liberated status.

  If Reinhardt reasoned that no member of his brigade would dare take liberties with their commander’s closest companion, his confidence was repaid – both by the men and Farzana. No amount of drunkenness and debauchery was going to alarm a fifteen-year-old girl who had grown up among the very dregs and dross of society in a devastated Delhi, and she was soon on familiar terms with both Europeans and sepoys. There were certainly other women attached to the brigade – wives, servants and camp followers of various kinds – but they remain anonymous. Farzana on the other hand became the company’s mascot, riding out with the troops on every sortie, getting as close to the action as Reinhardt would allow and learning useful lessons on how and how not to conduct a military campaign.

  During the campaigning winter months the outdoor life became second nature to her. Rural India was now as much her home as Agra or Bharatpur. Like the rest of the brigade, she slept beneath the stars, rising to the slap of dough being clapped into breakfast chapatis and then climbing into a palanquin or saddle while it was still dark. They marched through the dawn and the cool of the mornings and made camp in the heat of the day. Farzana then busied herself about what was as much a farmyard as a military encampment with its dogs, horses, oxen, buffalo and now camels (they being common beasts of burden in the vicinity of the western desert). Greasing the guns, grazing the livestock and foraging – for fuel, provisions, protection money and intelligence – took up what remained of the daylight hours. When the short dusk brought the emerald parakeets screaming home to roost, they cooked and dined at campfires, drank and gambled, smoked and joked, and after checking the watch and testing the tethers, dossed down amid saddlebags and blankets.

  Tents were few, if any. Shade being a higher priority than shelter, they rigged up awnings using the shafts of ox carts as ridge poles, or better still the much longer shafts of the camel carts. And the men, unless expecting ceremony or action, rarely wore uniforms. White, or once-white, cotton pantaloons and voluminous shirts were more practical in the heat. Flintlocks were slung across shoulders and bayonets thrust in cummerbunds. As headgear, all favoured a loosely tied turban whose extremities could be used as a mask against the dust and as a cloth to catch the sweat. Alternatively, forage caps, like those later worn by Dr Livingstone and later still by Mao Zedong, were becoming popular among Europeans. Farzana would have looked fetching in either headgear. In later life she still wore a turban. It was not a fashionable affectation but an emphatic statement of her martial past, just like the hookah by her side. Neither turbans nor hookahs were normally favoured by Indian women. They advertised her unique status as one who had transcended her gender to shine in a masculine firmament.

  Though wary of her sharp tongue, the men grew to relish her spirited company, admire her quick intelligence and feel challenged by her fearlessness. Since no professional mercenary could allow himself to be outshone in feats of daring or endurance by a girl, let alone one half his age and barely half his size, the effect was salutary. In the words of Warren Hastings, soon to be the English East India Company’s first and most revered Governor General, ‘they were enchanted by her heroism’.1 They called her ‘Sumru ki Begum’, ‘wife of Sombre’, a name that pleased her so much that, although she never formally married her lugubrious lover, she would use for the rest of her life.

  All this was in marked contrast to the shadowy role assigned to Bara Bibi and young Louis Balthazar. Cecil Burns, the Bombay antiquarian who was so reticent about his sources, describes their situation as one of ‘discreet retirement’. The boy was thought to be retarded and his mother to have become deranged. ‘Her nerves not being of the tough fibre of [Farzana]’s, she had been driven into a state of insanity following the birth of her feeble-minded son,’ asserts Burns. Sequestered in Agra, or in one of the houses Reinhardt had taken in both Bharatpur and Dig to be near Rajah Jawahar Singh, mother and son rarely accompanied the brigade on the warpath and so posed no threat to Farzana.

  All Reinhardt’s properties were said to have been heavily fortified so that ‘they became like strongholds’.2 Of the three, only the house in Bharatpur has been tentatively identified. A substantial stone haveli, it stands in a commanding situation outside the palace compound and within the walls of the fort. But it must have been rebuilt, for there is now no trace of even a garden wall.

  Self-defence was important because by the time Reinhardt and Farzana took up residence with the Jats the secret of his past was known. The British had not forgotten ‘the butcher of Patna’. The very mention of his name was enough to make every Englishman in India spit venom. ‘An unspeakable villain’, they called him, ‘mercilessly cruel and bloodthirsty’, ‘utterly devoid of military skill, martial spirit or personal courage’ and ‘the perpetrator of one of the most atrocious smaller massacres of defenceless people ever recorded in history’. When his presence with the Jats was reported to Robert (now Lord) Clive, currently the governor of Bengal, the latter wrote immediately to Rajah Jawahar Singh requesting him ‘to dismiss the notorious Sumru’ and offering the prospect of a defensive alliance with the British if he was handed over. Jawahar Singh had no quarrel with the British, but neither at that moment did he need a defensive alliance with them. He also disliked the peremptory tone of Clive’s letter. Expecting Reinhardt to organize an infantry division for him, he therefore ignored the request. Instead of dismissing hi
s European ‘General’, he gave him the house near Agra in recognition of his loyalty during the Delhi siege. That too had to be fortified. Reinhardt trusted Jawahar Singh; but he was dispensable to any would-be usurper with an eye to British support.

  For if Reinhardt was Farzana’s passport to status, even power, he remained just a ticket to infamy in British eyes. Butchering 200 unarmed Englishmen in cold blood was an atrocity that no extenuating circumstances could possibly mitigate. As Sumru ki begum, Farzana would have to live with the stigma as much as Sumru himself. Both had contentious pasts to live down; fear of betrayal bound them together.

  Convinced that Reinhardt was an utter blackguard, the British construed his entire career as one of inexcusable treachery. They made no allowance for the fact that his lesser crimes, like repeatedly swapping sides or relieving the Awadh begums of their jewellery, were standard stratagems of self-preservation among mercenary ‘parties’. He was a butcher and a coward; therefore his every move was reprehensible. But the French saw him quite differently. The Comte de Modave, a philosopher and economist as well as a one-time colonel, spent three years in India and would soon reach Delhi, where he met Reinhardt at the imperial court. He found him sensible and rational. ‘His conversation is simple and instructive and full of a certain soldierly honesty, which adds to his dignity,’ recalled Modave. ‘He has adopted the customs and habits of the country so thoroughly that even the Mughals believe he was born in Hindustan. He speaks all the languages of the country and even though he can neither read nor write he is much respected.’3