Farzana Read online

  Sumru was presented on 21 May 1774 and was received very graciously by His Majesty. A salute was fired on the occasion and every mark of attention shown to him.

  After presenting nazar [a formal gift] to the king, Sumru said that the enmity between him and the English was such as precluded every reconciliation. Therefore if the English…made any overtures to His Majesty, no notice need be taken.

  The king then asked him to be easy on that account.1

  In effect, Reinhardt had secured an imperial assurance of sanctuary. British demands for his surrender to stand trial for the Patna massacre would be as stoutly resisted in Delhi as they had been in Bharatpur.

  By virtue of his being one of the emperor’s senior military commanders, Reinhardt and his household were given accommodation within the Red Fort. Naturally the presence there of the twenty-four-year-old Farzana did not go unnoticed by the palace spies and informants, nor by an emperor ‘obsessed by women’. Just to leave the fort by one of its three gateways Farzana had to cross several open courtyards and thread her way round the cloistered colonnades abutting the imperial apartments. No doubt she donned purdah within the fort and seldom walked; but her reputation had preceded her. Her movements were observed and her conduct scrutinized. Through intermediaries at first, a close relationship between the former child prostitute and the melancholic ‘king of the world’ would result.

  There has never been any suggestion that this relationship was other than that between sovereign and subject, yet neither can it be doubted that sovereign and subject were drawn together at a more personal level. Farzana’s respect for the emperor would be tinged with a lively curiosity, and the emperor’s curiosity about Farzana would be tinged with an improbable respect. Each saw in the other something they coveted. Of Shah Alam’s many wives and concubines not one appears in history as an effective consort or even as the assertive mother of a potential heir; most never appear in history at all. They were what they were expected to be – submissive, unambitious and invisible.

  Farzana was none of these things. Rather was she confident, wilful, intelligent and eye-catching, a combination of qualities that the faint-hearted emperor might never have encountered in a woman. She treated him with flattering deference, yet was not afraid to speak her mind; and he, like Reinhardt, came to value her judgement, rely on her advice and delight in her company. Farzana also knew the value of patronage. Whatever her personal opinion of Shah Alam, and regardless of who wielded real power at the imperial court, the Mughal emperor was the Mughal emperor; in his veins ran the blood of conquerors; his favour and esteem could only be to her honour and the brigade’s advantage.

  Cecil Burns, her Bombay biographer, insists that Shah Alam was so enamoured of the young Begum’s ‘genius and vigour’ that, reluctant to part with her, he appointed Reinhardt’s force to guard the Imperial Palace. If so, the appointment was promptly countermanded by Mirza Najaf Khan. The emperor’s commander-in-chief had sterner duties in mind for ‘Sumru’ and his brigade. He was to march north at the head of an expedition to reclaim territories usurped by the Sikhs. More specifically, he was to ‘possess himself of whatever places he could wrest from the Sikh faujdar of Karnal’.

  Much like the Jats to the south, the Sikhs to the north had successfully exploited the weakness of the empire and the recent confusion in Delhi. Preaching a comparatively new faith (Guru Nanak, the Sikh founder, had lived in the sixteenth century), they had been penned back in the Himalayan foothills during the heyday of the Mughal Empire and had acquired a strong martial ethos as a result of persecution. But as the empire crumbled, bands of Sikh warriors had pushed south, accruing territories in northern Punjab, imposing their own brand of religious rule and terrorizing neighbours with a fanaticism made all the more alarming by their black robes, uncut hair and beards, and flashing sabres.

  Karnal, 70 miles north of Delhi, had been snatched during a Sikh raid in 1763. The town, which would later bestride what the British called the Grand Trunk Road running from Calcutta to the Khyber Pass, is today on National Highway 1, an accident-prone artery whose signposts hereabouts still read like an index of Indian battlefields. Twenty miles to the north of Karnal, Kurukshetra was the site of the legendary encounter related at enormous length in the Mahabharata, greatest of the ancient India’s epics. At Karnal itself Nadir Shah, the Persian invader of 1739, had routed a Mughal force prior to descending on Delhi, sacking the city and making off with the Mughals’ Peacock Throne plus the famous Koh-i-Nur diamond. And 20 miles to the south, Panipat, besides witnessing the titanic engagement between Abdali and the Marathas in 1761, had been where both Babur and Akbar, the first and the third of the six ‘Great Mughals’, had won the wars that had been decisive in establishing Mughal rule in the first place. With more battlefields than Flanders, this ‘neck’ of northern Punjab was every invader’s high road to Delhi. Holding it, let alone reclaiming any of it, promised just the sort of carnage that a mercenary commander dreaded. In effect, Sumru’s brigade was being posted to the Mughal equivalent of the Maginot Line.

  By way of a sweetener Reinhardt was given proof of imperial favour in the form of two courtesy titles – ‘Zafaryab Khan’ (‘victorious commander’) and ‘Muzzafar-ud-Daula’ (‘triumphant of the state’); victorious or not, at court he would henceforth be known by the former. To defray the costs of the expedition and ensure adequate remuneration he was also offered the jagir, or revenue rights, to the twin districts of Panipat (scene of all the battles) and Sonepat. Neither place was famously remunerative and both lay to the west of the Jumna river, so in the path of the advancing Sikhs. Farzana and Reinhardt therefore protested, complaining to the emperor’s vazir, Abdul Ahad Khan, that the income generated by these districts was insufficient. According to the official records, ‘Sombre wrote from 10 to 15 letters requesting the allotment of more places for the support of the troops, but no heed was paid to them. After waiting for a considerable length of time in expectation of receiving assistance, he determined to look out for a subsistence elsewhere.’2

  Happily Mirza Najaf, the Mughal commander-in-chief and Abdul Ahad’s bitter rival, now intervened. Enraged by the vazir’s intransigence and determined not to lose the services of a general whose intimate knowledge of the Jats could be vital in any campaign to the south, Mirza Najaf quickly persuaded – or perhaps instructed – Shah Alam to make a better offer. This the emperor did, though not without vigorous prompting from Farzana. ‘The Begum was central in the behind-the-scenes negotiations that ensued,’ confirms a recent authority.3 The imperial weakness for spirited young women was put to good account and the deal was quickly done. She had only to ask. Instead of Panipat and Sonepat, Reinhardt was offered the jagir of Sardhana. East of the Jumna, Sardhana was much safer from the Sikhs and other Delhi-bound raiders. It was also too distant from Karnal to serve as an operational base, much closer to the capital and the intrigues of court, and potentially far more remunerative than the killing fields of Panipat and Sonepat. Reinhardt accepted, and Farzana ensured their benefactor was aware of her gratitude.

  The Sumru brigade now had a base of its own and Farzana a home. Yet a more oppressive system of land management than the jagir would be hard to imagine. In the words of Comte de Modave, ‘If the prince who employs mercenaries is either unwilling or unable to pay them he just says “here is such and such a province which belongs to me, establish yourself there, collect the revenues and pay yourself whatever I owe you”. Pity the poor district that is abandoned to such tyranny and humiliation.’

  Much of India was parcelled out in this way, usually among rapacious feudatories who had no interest in agriculture and whose only concern was to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the local peasant farmers. The jagirdar (the holder of a jagir) was expected to defend the district and collect the taxes, out of which he paid and maintained his troops and passed a percentage to the imperial treasury. The rest, usually as much as 50 per cent of the total, he could keep for himself. The position was not
hereditary and reverted to the crown on the demise or disgrace of the holder. Holders could also find themselves removed without warning if suspected of harbouring dangerous ambitions or being too complacent. There was thus no security of tenure and no incentive for the jagirdar to invest in his holding or provide any basic services for its population. Clive, whose personal jagir in Bengal was worth £30,000 a year (say £3 million today), may never even have visited it.

  The jagir of Sardhana covered a county-size area of about 800 square miles in the heart of the Doab, that featureless but sensationally fertile region between the rivers Jumna and Ganges. Its main town was less than 30 miles from Farzana’s birthplace of Kutana, which was possibly an added incentive to acquire it. Like most of rural Hindustan, the estate had long suffered from desperate neglect, and because of the constant passage of armies was ‘but imperfectly cultivated’. Roads scarcely existed, the markets were pitiful and many fields lay fallow. Herds of elephants occasionally trampled the wheat crop while tigers and, in those days, even lions infested the region’s still extensive tracts of woodland and bush.

  Yet, however run-down, at the time Sardhana was granted to Reinhardt it was estimated to yield an annual gross revenue of six lakh rupees (the equivalent of £60,000 then or £6 million today). Assuming half was remitted to the emperor, this would have provided Reinhardt and his begum with a personal income of £30,000 a year, which was the same as Clive’s and ‘more than enough’, mused an envious East India Company officer, ‘to allow the adventurer to live in much state and amass a large fortune’.4

  With Reinhardt’s blessing, and probably rather to his relief, it was Farzana who supervised the building of an appropriately stylish residence for the new jagirdar of Sardhana and then obligingly took over the day-to-day administration of the estate. The first Sardhana ‘palace’, now a Catholic seminary within easy summons of Farzana’s later basilica and her much grander palladian palace, remains intact, a long whitewashed building, single-storey, with a deep central verandah and flanking wings. Mango and lychee trees shade an exuberant front garden in which seminarians now take the air.

  In the 1770s the brigade must have paraded on the open ground beyond, whose ranks of sugar cane now stand at breathless ease beneath a blazing sun. A mud fort, no longer extant but perhaps sited where the church would be built, is said to have served as the brigade’s arsenal and to have incorporated underground vaults for storing the coin and treasure accumulated during service with Awadh and the Jats. Cattle grazed in shady paddocks, horses peered from timber stabling. Rows of artillery, some of it wheeled, the rest mounted on bullock carts, glinted from beneath camouflaged netting.

  Reinhardt could relax. Honoured by the emperor, wealthy beyond the dreams of any ‘butcher’ and with his affairs in the hands of a capable and enchanting ‘wife’, he had fulfilled the fantasies of every European mercenary in India. He was not at ease though. Remorse for the massacre of Patna and an abiding terror of being betrayed to the English dogged his days. Lest he be hunted down, a vial of poison is said to have accompanied his every march; suicide would be preferable to facing British vengeance. When the Comte de Modave at last came face-to-face with him, probably in Delhi in the spring of 1775, his first impression of the ‘unspeakable villain’ of English legend was far from unfavourable. ‘He is a good looking man of 62,* sensible and rational,’ he wrote, ‘… much respected, and his wise and measured behaviour makes him secure in his role of chef de parti (mercenary commander). They say his wealth is incredible, but despite my prompting he refused to talk about it.’

  Later that year Modave was invited to Sardhana and so became the first of many to cast an envious eye over the Sumru jagir. But on this occasion he found the chef de parti a bit more complicated. Evidently a Catholic, Reinhardt was anything but ‘without conscience’ and seemed obsessed with making his peace with his Creator.

  He is devout, superstitious and credulous. He fasts on all the set days. He gives alms and orders masses. He fears the devil as much as the English.

  I found his camp better laid out than most but unconventional. It forms a triangle. His artillery is distributed on all three fronts and he showed me how this meant that whichever side he was attacked from, he was protected. His artillery was in very good condition and he had about 1,200 Gujerati bulls in his park [to pull the gun carriages]. Of all the chefs de parti in Hindustan he was without doubt the best equipped with the munitions of war.5

  Modave’s Indian memoirs would lie unread for 200 years. Not published in French until 1971, their 600 pages never mention a woman by name and reveal nothing of Farzana’s role. Yet that casual reference to 1,200 gun-hauling Gujerati bulls, presumably acquired while serving the Jats, reveals more about the rewards and responsibilities of military adventuring than any number of flowery imperial titles. Managing a jagir, while marshalling a brigade, meant combining in a modest way the duties of government and military service, indeed the arts of peace and war. Farzana’s collaboration was more vital than ever, and nowhere more so than in organizing and securing what was in effect a mini-state.

  Modave holds forth at great length on a wide range of other topics – politics, personalities, religion, agriculture, wildlife, food, climate, scenery and (interminably) military strategy – but the near-incredible size and potential of the Sardhana establishment left a deep impression. In a land of wonders, it was one of the most enviable, if demanding.

  I believe [he continued] that Sombre is master of 3 or 4 million of our money [French livres] not counting his arms, his artillery, his ammunition, his baggage and all the equipment of his army. But it does not seem to make him happy. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was disgusted by the life he leads and I believe that if he could find a French or Dutch establishment where he would be safe, he would retire there to live in peace.

  But peace was at a premium in the still hotly contested hinterland of Delhi. Reinhardt’s retirement would have to wait. To the south, in Bharatpur, the succession of rajahs that had followed the assassination of Jawahar Singh had felt obliged to resume the Jat tradition of harassing Mughal communication between Delhi and Agra. The latest rajah was a minor, and while the boy’s uncles were fighting over who should rule as his regent, Mirza Najaf, the Mughal commander-in-chief, saw a chance to eliminate the Jat threat for good. Reinhardt’s uneasy repose in Sardhana was thus interrupted when towards the end of 1775 Mirza Najaf countermanded the Sikh campaign and ordered him south. He was to join the Mughal forces for an assault on the Jat fortress of Dig, an action in which his personal acquaintance with the place would be as invaluable as his professional expertise.

  Farzana stayed behind. There is nothing to suggest she had tired of her lover, nor he of her. But with the brigade operating as Mughal auxiliaries under the Muslim command of Mirza Najaf, Farzana’s brand of ‘enchanting heroism’ was thought inappropriate, perhaps embarrassing. It was barely a year since the jagir had been conferred. Her energies were needed at Sardhana. The expenses of the brigade had to be met from taxes levied on the estate’s produce, and the only way to increase this revenue was by extending and intensifying cultivation. By now Farzana had learned enough about rural India to realize that its cultivable potential greatly exceeded its actual yield. Extortion and insecurity were discouraging endeavour. The farmers needed the reassurance of her presence and the protection of the brigade’s pensioners and resident staff. They also needed motivation.

  Farzana duly assumed the role of one of those known as ‘improvers’ in contemporary England. More land must be cleared, more settlement encouraged, new crops tried, wells, ponds and channels dug for irrigation, roads repaired and livestock improved. Fruit trees and vegetables were planted, grain was stored against famine, and markets began to prosper. The social welfare of the cultivators was the best guarantee not only of their loyalty but of the estate’s prosperity. When visitors marvelled at Sardhana’s productivity, they invariably ascribed it not to Reinhardt’s ill-gotten gains being invested in
the estate but to ‘the singular prudence of her [Farzana’s] administration’. It was as if she had determined to create, in the midst of chaos, another lush oasis of peace and elegance, just like Bharatpur or Dig.

  Meanwhile, Reinhardt, in what would be his last campaign, was busy reducing Bharatpur and Dig to rubble. The Mughal siege of Dig proved to be one of the great set pieces of the decade. It lasted six months (October 1775–April 1776); it had an unusually decisive outcome; and it witnessed the first appearance in Hindustan of a host of other European freelances encouraged by Reinhardt’s example. Among them was the memoir-writing Comte de Modave. He had found service in the brigade of one René Madec, a Breton seaman, whose career had followed Reinhardt’s to the letter. Redundant in Pondicherry, Madec too had drifted north, acquired a teenage bride (‘Begum Babette’), cobbled together his own parti, served the Jats in the 1760s, then defected to Delhi and been enrolled for Mirza Najaf’s punitive expedition against Dig. As a comte, Modave disdained Madec’s humble origins as much as he did Reinhardt’s. But while Reinhardt redeemed himself by ‘despising show and preferring a plain unostentatious way of life’, Madec was vulgarity incarnate, ‘a vile peasant and insolent scoundrel’ who fleeced the Indian people.

  Thanks to the inside knowledge provided by Reinhardt and Madec, Dig’s inky moat, its 80-foot walls, twelve bastions and extensive outer defences came as no surprise to Mirza Najaf. But he was less prepared for the Jats’ firepower – or at least for their historian’s account of it. ‘So numerous were the guns and the matchlockmen manning its walls that his heart misgave him. Dig appeared to him a living volcano, every inch of which seemed to emit fire and send forth an inexhaustible flood of molten lead.’6 Modave, as usual, was more dismissive. As a self-proclaimed expert in poliorcétique (siege craft), he poured scorn on Najaf’s tactics, excoriated Madec’s entrenchments, and thought none too highly of the Jat’s marksmanship. ‘If I was asked my opinion I would say that if apes were fighting each other they would do it like this.’7 While Modave scoffed from the sidelines, Reinhardt was actually earning his keep. He advised Najaf on the layout of the fort and compounded his betrayal of the Jats by providing their besiegers with gunpowder from a hidden supply he had accumulated whilst in Jat employ. At one point he led his sepoys in a last-gasp rescue of the Mughal commander-in-chief when the latter was taken unawares by a counter-attack. ‘Sumru loaded his guns with grape-shot which dealt out death to hundreds at a time,’ writes Qanungo, ‘the progress of the Jats was arrested and at last they were driven back into the fort.’8