Farzana Read online

  In a similar vein the French historian Maurice Besson, while conceding that Reinhardt had a reputation for being quarrelsome and hot-headed, supposed the same could probably be said of every European military adventurer who sought his fortune in the free-for-all that was eighteenth-century India. Like Modave, Besson stresses Reinhardt’s obscure parentage. He may in fact have been of Roma descent, so justifying his later reputation as ‘a famous gipsy’. His father is described either as a stonemason, a carpenter or ‘an honest peasant’ (although the British, for reasons of their own, decided that Reinhardt père must have been a butcher).4 Condemned to a life of military drudgery by his humble birth and lack of education, the son, aged thirty, had sold his watch and bought a ticket on a barge down the Rhine to Amsterdam, from where he had eventually enlisted with the French for service in India. Just like Farzana, he had embraced the freelance’s life by way of an escape from the slurs and reverses of an ignominious upbringing. The two had much in common, and the fifteen-year-old Farzana could have done worse than catch the fancy of the forty-five-year-old Walter Balthazar Reinhardt ‘Sombre’.

  Farzana’s abiding loyalty to Reinhardt, and later to his memory, is a sufficiently touching testimonial to the warmth of their relationship. It deserved, at the very least, to have been rewarded with children. In his flowery Zeb-un-Tavarikh, Lala Gokul Chand states that ‘Sombre was the father of one living child [Louis Balthazar], and three other offspring, who all sadly died.’5 Unfortunately, he does not say whether these dead children had been born to Bara Bibi or Farzana or someone else; and there are no other references to them. The fact that years later Farzana would agonize over an heir and eventually adopt a son to whom she became devoted suggests two possibilities. During their years with the Jats, either she and Reinhardt did have children but they all died in infancy, or they would have had children but she failed to conceive. Whichever was the case, it was surely a matter of regret to both, and it helps to explain her attachment to Reinhardt’s wild and wayward troops. The brigade became her surrogate family.

  Despite their childlessness, Farzana and Reinhardt stayed together, and despite the failure of Jawahar Singh’s attack on Delhi, they stayed with the Jats. For Farzana, the contrast between the war-torn Mughal capital and the rustic charms of Bharatpur could hardly have been greater. Delhi, her home for nearly a decade, had been in an almost permanent state of siege, every day being a struggle for survival. But in Bharatpur, and in Dig in particular, the Jats had created oases of elegance and security. Protected by lofty double walls with brimming moats in between, their palaces and parterres seemed immune to war.

  The ornate gardens were laid out with shady walkways; ornamental ponds fed avenues of fountains that played among the peepal trees, and cascades of water flowed between the flower beds, creating an illusion of cool even in the heat of summer. Beyond the walls, dyked reservoirs constructed by Suraj Mal flooded a vast area of stunted forest and farmland. These were the famous wetlands of Bharatpur, once renowned among sportsmen and ornithologists throughout Asia as a breeding ground for vast numbers of waterfowl. The leafless trees at the water’s edge bent under the weight of nesting herons, egrets, ibises and spoonbills; pelicans and swans sailed across the open water in dense flotillas; and the number and variety of ducks and geese was prodigious. A single day’s shooting at Bharatpur would reward a later British viceroy with a bag of 4,273 feathered corpses. Storks and cranes flapped over the trees into the palace gardens, there to pose on the terraces and pick their way among the roses. To a child from Chauri Bazaar, Bharatpur must have seemed like paradise.

  Reinhardt too was content. For the first time since Patna he was safely out of reach of the British; he had a powerful position as the general in charge of developing the Jat infantry (and, increasingly, their artillery), and Jawahar Singh was a generous employer. ‘Sombre was a man after Jawahar’s heart,’ writes the historian Qanungo, ‘a capable soldier without a conscience, who would unhesitatingly carry out with skill and thoroughness any dark design of a good paymaster.’6The nine years he served with the Jats was by far his longest and most profitable spell with any employer during his entire sojourn in India. Thanks to Farzana’s rapport with the troops, her interventions on their behalf and her fearless example, he retained their respect and overcame his own restlessness. ‘Her talents and sound judgement became so valuable to [Reinhardt] as to gain a great ascendancy over him,’ reports James Skinner, a British freelancer and later a comrade-in-arms of Farzana.7 She was becoming indispensable.

  That a teenage girl with no military experience might have influenced tactics on the battlefield seems doubtful, but her energy and her eagerness to learn acted as a tonic to the ageing mercenary and had a remarkable effect on the morale of his notoriously insubordinate troops. Even his most implacable critics would grudgingly concede that the reputations of both Reinhardt and the brigade were enhanced by their conduct during this period. They accompanied Jawahar Singh when he launched an attack on the Rajput city of Jaipur in 1766 and another on the city of Ajmer, also in Rajasthan but then in the hands of the Marathas, in 1767. Throughout, Reinhardt was acknowledged to have ‘acquitted himself well’, although both engagements ended in defeat for the Jat rajah. This left British commentators unable to resist some disparagement.

  ‘Sombre’s party were remarkable for their excellent retreats,’ wrote Lewis Ferdinand Smith dryly. ‘He made it a rule in every action to draw his men out in a line, fire a few shots, and then form square and retreat, by which singular mode of prudent warfare they have acquired no laurels, yet preserved their reputation.’8They also preserved their numbers, a paramount consideration for any mercenary leader. Reinhardt’s army was his only asset, its integrity his only guarantee of employment. It was wiser to withdraw without loss than to advance at heavy cost. Farzana took note.

  Even after the 1768 assassination of Jawahar Singh, Reinhardt remained loyal to the Jats. He answered to whichever contender for the Bharatpur throne looked likely to gain the upper hand, moving seamlessly on to the next when one was overthrown and somehow earning the regard of them all. Each of these rivals looked to Reinhardt’s brigade for protection. With Farzana a conspicuous presence, ‘Sumru’s army’ was deployed to strengthen the defences of Agra (which the Jats still held), to launch raids on neighbouring territories and to squeeze revenue out of their reluctant and near-destitute populations.

  Events though took an unexpected turn. In 1770 Najib-ud-Daula, the wily governor of Delhi installed by Ahmed Shah Abdali after his Afghans had sacked the city in 1761, suddenly died. A seismic shift in the balance of power in Hindustan then followed. After years in exile, Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor-in-waiting who had been a pensioner of the British in Allahabad ever since the battle of Buxar, was about to emerge from the wings. Given the support of new patrons, the way was at last clear for him to lay claim to his inheritance and regain his capital. Reinhardt’s fortunes would thereby be transformed; and Farzana, not unlike the emperor himself, would be swept centre stage by the swirl of history.

  THE EMPEROR RETURNS

  No longer an impish mascot dwarfed by a skittish pony and a floppy turban, by 1770 Farzana had grown into an assertive twenty-year-old, as secure in Reinhardt’s affections as in those of his men, party to all their decisions, and a respected member of the wider freelance fraternity. She rode with the best and jested with the least. While her ‘heroism’ provoked comment, it was no more ‘enchanting’ than the amiable disposition that had intrigued her clients in Chauri Bazaar or the perfect figure and peerless complexion that would captivate her later admirers. Well aware of these assets, she deployed them to effect. But if fortune was now smiling on her, it chose to do so in the impossibly devious, not to say confusing, fashion of the age. Personal qualities would play their part, but it was the unforeseeable events and freak encounters of a chaotic era that created openings.

  Since Buxar, Emperor Shah Alam II had been looking to the British in Bengal not only to def
ray the expenses of his court but to supply the military and diplomatic support that would enable him to regain Delhi. These last had not materialized. The English Company was still ambivalent about the exercise of power; its trade, after all, was trade, not territories and administration. The Company’s London directors and shareholders wanted profits; war was expensive and its spoils had a way of accruing to the victors on the spot, like Clive and other self-made ‘nabobs’, rather than to the Company’s accounts. Thus a sigh of relief had greeted Clive’s penitent reassurance that ‘never shall the going to Delhi be a plan adopted … by me’.9 The inexorable advance of the Company was to be stayed for a while. Shah Alam would have to look elsewhere.

  He had then toyed with the Afghans and their Delhi governor, Najib-ud-Daula. Each had much to gain. The emperor would at last reclaim his capital while Governor Najib and his Afghan supporters would be accorded imperial recognition by virtue of their having sponsored his return. But this assumed the arrangement went unopposed. In reality, neither Jats, nor Rajputs, Sikhs or Marathas were likely to acquiesce. Native non-Muslims, they all opposed the Afghans as both alien and Islamic. In fact, Najib’s grasp of the city was ‘no more than a brilliant feat of poise and balance between [these] contending forces’.10 Delhi remained far from secure, and without substantial troop numbers to protect him, the emperor was reluctant to return. Then Governor Najib-ud-Daula died. This aborted the scheme and threw the Afghans into confusion. It also emboldened their rivals. The Marathas re-entered the fray. Described as ‘a confederation’, although often acting as independent warlords, the Maratha rajahs of central India and the Deccan had been a thorn in the side of the Mughal Empire for over a century. Seeing themselves as its natural successor, they had also long prized Delhi, for as the historian Percival Spear has put it: ‘The master of Delhi was the master of Hindustan, and since the wealth of India was to be found in Hindustan, its master was the potential master of the whole subcontinent.’

  To this end they were even prepared to tolerate an enfeebled emperor so long as it was they who exercised control of his person and his capital. Hence it had been the Marathas who, on behalf of the ailing empire, had opposed the invasion of Ahmed Shah Abdali and his Afghans at the great battle of Panipat. They had lost catastrophically and left an estimated 35,000 dead on the field. But after ten years of recouping their losses – financially as well as militarily – in the Deccan, by 1771 they were again ready to strike north and relieve the Afghans of Delhi. Governor Najib’s death played neatly into their hands; and Shah Alam II spied new sponsors.

  As soon as he heard news of the Maratha mobilization, the emperor sent an envoy to negotiate an alliance. A treaty pledging Maratha military and financial support in exchange for imperial endorsement of their right to govern Delhi was signed at the end of 1770; and in April 1771 Shah Alam left Allahabad heading for Delhi accompanied by a small force of his own and a contingent of troops supplied by his old Buxar ally, the Nawab of Awadh. It was a bad time of year to be travelling. The imperial cavalcade was delayed by the excessive heat and then the onset of the rains, which left the rivers impassable. Meanwhile the Marathas made good their capture of Delhi. But on 6 January 1772, after twelve years in exile, Shah Alam II finally entered the gates of his capital to claim his birthright.

  It was a sober homecoming. The city was more derelict than when Farzana and her mother had first sought refuge there. According to the Comte de Modave, an imminent visitor, more than a quarter of the buildings had been destroyed, ‘the palaces of the nobles were all in ruins, the only houses in good repair were those belonging to merchants and bankers, and whichever way you looked you could only see piles of desolation’.11 The exterior of the Red Fort was almost intact, with its parapets commanding the river and its curtain walls overawing the city, but Shah Jahan’s white marble palaces, the pearls within the ruddy oyster, lay blackened by smoke and begrimed by the city’s pigeons; the courtyards were strewn with rubble, trees squirmed through cracks in the walls and pathways, the fountains were smashed, the water courses blocked with leaves and debris, and the great storerooms lay bare. The emperor was welcomed by his family – his mother, numerous wives and, according to Modave, ‘at least twenty-seven children’* – plus other members of the imperial household. They had been eking out a meagre existence in a remote corner of the palace as hostages of the Afghans. But if they now raised a cheer, it was more from expectation than relief.

  For this could have been the start of a very different story. The death of Najib-ud-Daula had cleared the way for Shah Alam’s return; now another death spared the emperor the humiliation of exchanging the Company’s long-range protection for close subjection to the Marathas. The new death was that of the paramount chief of the Marathas, the Peshwa of Poona (or Pune, inland from Bombay), who had been murdered in his capital at the instigation of his uncle. The ensuing succession crisis cast many of the Maratha leaders as contenders and necessitated their return. Warning that they would be back, the Maratha warlords wheeled about and hurried home to the Deccan, there to become embroiled in dynastic squabbles that would keep them busy for years.

  This, then, should have been Shah Alam’s moment. ‘An active and resolute emperor could have quickly established his authority and reclaimed the rights that had been lost by the weakness and cowardice of his predecessors,’ opined Modave. But Shah Alam was neither active nor resolute. Modave thought him well intentioned, gentle, courteous, and lacking in neither wit nor wisdom. Antoine Polier, an East India Company officer who would soon take up service with Shah Alam, agreed, adding that the emperor was ‘indulgent to his servants, a doting father and very devout’.12 But he was also indolent, indecisive, avaricious, suspicious and ‘obsessed with women’, the last of which, added Modave, seems to have been ‘a hereditary failing in his family’. In short, he was utterly devoid of those ‘military qualities’ so esteemed by the French colonel.

  The emperor’s commander-in-chief on the other hand possessed military qualities in abundance. Mirza Najaf Khan, a cultured Persian soldier and diplomat, had joined Shah Alam in Allahabad and had since been biding his time for just the opportunity that now presented itself. While the emperor dedicated himself to rediscovering the pleasures of his harem, Mirza Najaf moved quickly to reinforce his own position, diverting the revenue from several districts around Delhi that had been intended for the imperial household and using it to boost the strength of the imperial forces. Any prospect of employment, however uncertainly paid, brought veterans and novices alike flocking to Delhi. Adding this new intake of 7,000 to his existing force of some 12,000, Mirza Najaf and his army marched out through the gates of Delhi at the end of the rainy season in 1773. Bent on a reassertion of imperial authority, they would invade the territory of the Jats and reclaim the former Mughal capital of Agra. The nine-year lull in the peregrinations of the Reinhardt ménage was about to be terminated.

  The Jats, still embroiled in their own dynastic squabbles, were unprepared for this assault. Mirza Najaf defeated them in battle at Barsana, just north of Dig, in October 1773. He then went on to recover the city of Agra without a fight, although the garrison in Agra’s fort still held out. Reports of Reinhardt’s contribution to the battle of Barsana run true to form. Michael Edwardes, in the best traditions of British demonization, has it that ‘Walter Reinhardt and his men, always averse to the reality of fighting but happy to collect the loot, arrived and ostentatiously set up their guns’. Indian historian Jadunath Sarkar on the other hand insists that the ‘Sumru’ brigade fought well, maintaining its position despite being ‘severely cut up’, and withdrawing ‘with the utmost steadiness and order’ only when defeat was inevitable. More certainly, as soon as Reinhardt saw the battle slipping away, in the time-honoured fashion of the consummate freelancer he swapped sides and offered his battalions to Mirza Najaf and his Mughal superior.

  Thus by 1774, in which year Agra Fort was finally restored to the Mughals, ‘Sumru’s brigade’ was in the employ of the
Mughal emperor, and Farzana and Reinhardt had removed to Delhi. Returning to the capital at the head of their own troops was a remarkable turnaround for both. Reinhardt, a reject from the battlefields of Europe and the butt of the conflict in Bengal, suddenly stood high in the esteem of ‘the king of the world’ (the literal meaning of ‘Shah Alam’). Likewise, Farzana, a product of the city’s low life, now swept down Chauri Bazaar from the city’s Ajmeri Gate to the emperor’s Red Fort in a carriage-and-pair drawn by matching mares flanked by trotting retainers. Sadly, there is no record of her stopping along the way to pay her respects at the little walled courtyard in which Sultana Raziya lies buried. But Raziya would have been impressed, and a far from stoney-hearted Farzana surely made a mental salaam as she passed.

  ____________________________

  * Polier calculated that the emperor had as many as seventy children.

  5

  A HOME OF THEIR OWN

  Shah Alam seemed content with his role as a figurehead, secluded in the Red Fort and ruthlessly sidelined by his commander-in-chief Mirza Najaf Khan. The Comte de Modave, himself just arrived in Delhi in search of employment appropriate to his rank, noted that Mirza Najaf ‘seldom went near the emperor, gave him a minimal allowance to live on and rarely consulted him on affairs of state’. As a result the emperor ‘was living a pathetic, spineless life surrounded by his women and worrying only about how to get his hands on more money’. Yet the arrival of a foreign mercenary at the head of a sizeable brigade was worthy of notice. Protocol demanded that the emperor acknowledge this newcomer to his service by organizing a formal audience. Accordingly, noted the court diarist: