Begums, Thugs and White Mughals Read online

  BEGUMS,

  THUGS AND

  WHITE

  MUGHALS

  FANNY PARKES

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘WE ARE RATHER OPPRESSED just now by a lady, Mrs Parkes, who insists on belonging to our camp,’ wrote Fanny Eden in January 1838. ‘She has a husband who always goes mad in the cold season, so she says it is her duty to herself to leave him and travel about. She has been a beauty and has remains of it, and is abundantly fat and lively. At Benares, where we fell in with her she informed us she was an Independent Woman.’

  Fanny Eden was the sister of the Governor General, Lord Auckland, and the First Lady of British India. Fanny Parkes was the wife of a mentally unstable junior official in charge of ice making in Allahabad. The different status of the two women made friendship between them impossible, and posterity has been far kinder to the Eden sisters than to Fanny: Emily Eden’s Up the Country has long been regarded as one of the great classics of British Imperial literature and has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1866; the critic Lord David Cecil went as far as placing the author ‘in the first flight of English women letter writers’. Fanny Eden’s Journals (recently republished as Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals, 1837–1838) are also much read and much reprinted, though they have never had the celebrity of her sister’s work. In comparison Fanny Parkes’ Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque had no second edition, and has only recently re-emerged into print. In contrast to the fame of Emily and Fanny Eden, few have ever heard of Fanny Parkes. Fewer still have read her.

  Yet anyone who today reads the work of these three women together can hardly fail but to prefer Parkes’ writing to that of her two more famous contemporaries and rivals. While the Edens are witty and intelligent but waspish, haughty and conceited, Parkes is an enthusiast and an eccentric with a burning love of India that imprints itself on almost every page of her book. From her first arrival in Calcutta, she writes how ‘I was charmed with the climate; the weather was delicious; and … I thought India a most delightful country, and could I have gathered around me the dear ones I had left in England, my happiness would have been complete.’ The initial intuition was only reinforced the longer she stayed in South Asia. In the twenty four years she lived in India, the country never ceased to surprise, intrigue and delight her, and she was never happier than when off on another journey under canvas exploring new parts of the country: ‘Oh! the pleasure,’ she writes, ‘of vagabondizing over India!’

  Partly it was the sheer beauty of the country that hypnotised her. Indian men she found ‘remarkably handsome’, while her response to Indian nature was no less admiring: ‘The evenings are cool and refreshing … the foliage of the trees, so luxuriously beautiful and so novel, is to me a source of constant admiration.’ But it was not just the way the place looked. The longer she stayed in India, the more Fanny grew to be fascinated by the culture, history, flowers, trees, religions, languages and peoples of the country, the more she felt possessed by an overpowering urge just to pack her bags and set off and explore: ‘With the Neapolitan saying, “Vedi Napoli, e poi mori,” I beg to differ entirely,’ she wrote, ‘and would rather offer this advice – “See the Taj Mahal, and then – see the Ruins of Delhi.” How much there is to delight the eye in this bright, this beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab [horse], one might be happy for ever in India.’

  It is this sheer joy, excitement and even liberation in travel that Fanny Parkes manages so well to communicate. In the same way, it is her wild, devil-may-care enthusiasm, insatiable curiosity and love of the country that immediately engages the reader and carries him or her with Fanny as she bumbles her way across India on her own, wilfully dismissive of the dangers of dacoits or thugs or tigers, learning the sitar, enquiring about the intricacies of Hindu mythology, trying opium, taking down recipes for scented tobacco, talking her way into harems, befriending Maratha princesses and collecting Hindu statuary, fossils, butterflies, zoological specimens preserved in spirits, Indian aphorisms and Persian proverbs – all with an unstoppable, gleeful excitement. Even when she dislikes a particular Indian custom, she often finds herself engaged intellectually. Watching the Churuk Puja, or ‘hook swinging’, when pious Hindus attached hooks into the flesh of their backs and were swung about on ropes hanging from great cranes for the amusement of the crowds below, ‘some in penance for their own sins, some for those of others, richer men, who reward their deputies and thus do penance by proxy’, Fanny wrote that: ‘I was much disgusted, but greatly interested.’

  No wonder the Eden sisters turned their noses up at Fanny Parkes, complaining that she clung onto their party, taking advantage of their protection while touring the lawless roads of Northern India and taking the liberty of pitching her tent next to theirs: she was a free spirit and an independent mind in an age of imperial conformity. Behind the jibes of the Eden sisters (‘There is something very horrid and unearthly in all this,’ wrote Fanny Eden on March 17th, ‘nobody ever had a fat attendant spirit before …’) lies a clear uneasiness that ‘Bibi Parkes’ (as they call her) is a woman whom they would like instinctively to look down upon, but who is clearly having more fun – and getting to know India much better – than they are.

  The mental gap between the world of the Eden sisters and that of Fanny Parkes widened as time went on. The longer she stayed in India, the more Fanny Parkes became slowly Indianised. At one point in December 1837, after visiting an Indian Rani where Parkes acts as interpreter for the Eden sisters, Parkes urges ‘with considerable vehemence’ that the Eden sisters should conform to Indian custom and accept the symbolic gifts offered to them as they leave, thus pleasing the Rani and avoiding giving offence. The Eden sisters worry that this might be seen as corruption and want to follow Company regulations and refuse the presents. There is a standoff, and eventually the Edens do turn down the gifts so giving huge offence to their host. Already Fanny Parkes is instinctively embracing Indian custom and trying to adapt herself to the Indian scene, trying to avoid rudeness and unpleasantness. The Eden sisters are more worried about what others will think: instinctively they want to play by the imperial rules, to keep within the accepted boundaries.

  Parkes’ slow ‘chutnification’ (to use Salman Rushdie’s excellent term) continued long after Parkes left the Eden’s camp. Over the following years, Parkes – the professional memsāhib, herself the daughter of a colonial official (Captain William Archer), who came to India to watch over her colonial administrator husband – was gradually transformed into a fluent Urdu speaker, and spent less and less of her time at her husband’s mofussil posting, and more and more of her time travelling around to visit her Indian friends and assimilating herself to the world she discovered. Aesthetically, for example, she grew slowly to prefer Indian dress to that of the English. At one point watching Id celebrations at the Tāj she notes how ‘crowds of gaily-dressed and most picturesque natives were seen in all directions passing through the avenue of fine trees and by the side of the fountains to the tomb: they added great beauty to the scene, whilst the eye of taste turned away pained and annoyed by the vile round hats and stiff attire of the European gentlemen, and the equally ugly bonnets and stiff and graceless dresses of the English ladies’.

  Later, visiting the women in Colonel Gardner’s Khasgunge zenāna, she again raises Indian ways over those of Europe:

  [Mulka Begum] walks very gracefully and is as straight as an arrow. In Europe how rarely – how very rarely does a woman walk gracefully! Bound up in stays, the body is as stiff as a lobster in its shell; that snake-like undulating movement – the poetry of motion – is lost, destroyed by the stiffness of the wais
t and hip, which impedes the free movement of the limbs. A lady in European attire gives me the idea of a German manikin; an Asiatic, in her flowing drapery, recalls the statues of antiquity.

  She becomes increasingly unorthodox in her views and can barely believe the philistinism of the Government in Calcutta and recoils in horror when she sees what the English have done to the beautifully inlaid Mughal zenāna apartments in the Agra Fort: ‘Some wretches of European officers – to their disgrace be it said – made this beautiful room a cook-room! and the ceiling, the fine marbles and the inlaid work, are all one mass of blackness and defilement! Perhaps they cooked the sū’ar, the hog, the unclean beast, within the sleeping apartments of Noorahān – the proud, the beautiful Sultana!’

  She is even more angry when she hears that the Turkish ‘baths in the apartments below the palace, which most probably belonged to the zenāna, were broken up by the Marquis of Hastings: he committed this sacrilege of the past … [Then] having destroyed the beauty of the baths of the palace, the remaining marble was afterwards sold on account of the Government; most happily the auction brought so small a sum, it put a stop to further depredations’.

  Gradually, over the twenty-four years she lived in India, and as her Wanderings took shape, Fanny’s view begin to change. Having assumed at first that good taste was the defining characteristic of European civilisation and especially that of her own people, she finds her assumptions being challenged by what she comes to regard as the rampant philistinism of the English in India, and by the beauty of so much of Indian life, not least its architecture. (In this, incidentally, she would have agreed with Robert Byron who was equally horrified by what the English had done to India a hundred years later: ‘In a country full of good example,’ he wrote, ‘the English have left the mark of the beast.’ He also wrote with horror about ‘how the whole of [British] India is a gigantic conspiracy to make one imagine one is in Balham or Eastbourne … [as for Darjeeling] imagine Bognor or Southend roofed in corrugated iron and reassembled in the form of an Italian hill town …’)

  Every bit as bad, in Fanny’s eyes, was the attitude of the British who employed a band at the Tāj so that visiting Company officials could have the opportunity to dance a jig in the marble platform in front of the tomb: ‘Can you imagine anything so detestable?’ she wrote. ‘European ladies and gentlemen dance quadrilles in front of the tomb! I cannot enter the Tāj without feelings of deep devotion: the sacredness of the place, the remembrance of the fallen grandeur of the family of the Emperor, the solemn echoes, the dim light, the beautiful architecture, the exquisite finish and delicacy of the whole… all produce deep and sacred feelings; and I could no more jest or indulge in levity beneath the dome of the Tāj, than I could in my prayers.’ On leaving the enclosure, she writes, movingly: ‘And now adieu! Beautiful Tāj – adieu! In the far, far West I shall rejoice that I have gazed upon your beauty; nor will the memory depart until the lowly tomb of an English gentlewoman closes on my remains.’

  Over time, these emotional and aesthetic responses to India slowly consolidated themselves into something more structured, and in due course they profoundly altered Fanny’s political outlook. By the late 1830s she came to be increasingly critical of the East India Company her husband served. In her published work that criticism was by necessity muted, but her allegiances are clear. At a time when many of her contemporaries were calling for the British to annex the ‘degenerate’ Kingdom of Oude (or Avadh as it is more usually spelled today) Fanny was quite clear that, ‘the subjects of his Majesty of Oude are by no means desirous of participating in the blessings of British rule. They are a richer, sleeker, and merrier race than the natives in the territories of the Company.’ She rails against the authorities for failing to reward her friend William Gardner for his gallantry (largely, though she does not say this, because of the degree to which Gardner was believed to have ‘gone native’.) She points out how many have died painful, unnecessary deaths from smallpox as ‘Lord William Bentinck did away with the vaccine department, to save a few rupees; from which economy many have lost their lives.’

  At the end of her travels, when Fanny finally looks forward to seeing her family in England again, she turns to a Persian aphorism to express the intensity her feelings: ‘The desire of the garden never leaves the heart of the nightingale.’ Yet when she finally sets foot on English soil again, her return is not a moment for rejoicing but for depression and disappointment: ‘We arrived at six o’clock. May-flowers and sunshine were in my thoughts. [But instead … ] it was bitterly cold walking up from the boat – rain, wind and sleet, mingled together, beat on my face. Everything on landing looked so wretchedly mean, especially the houses, which are built of slate stone, and also slated down the side; it was cold and gloomy … I felt a little disgusted.’

  When she arrived home, her mother barely recognised her. It was as if the current of colonisation had somehow been reversed: the coloniser had been colonised. India had changed and transformed Fanny Parkes. She could never be the same again.

  * * *

  In 1822 when Fanny Parkes arrived in India, British attitudes to the country were undergoing a major transformation.

  In the late eighteenth century, the more intelligent of the British in India tended to respond to their adopted country with amazement and fascination. Under the influence of Sir William Jones, the Chief Justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta, there was a sudden explosion of interest of what Jones called ‘this wonderful country’. In 1784, Jones had founded an Asiatick Society ‘for inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. Its patron was the most enlightened of all the British Governor Generals, Warren Hastings, who shared the new enthusiasm for Hinduism and who declared ‘in truth I love India a little more than my own country’. Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatick Society became the catalyst for a sudden explosion of interest in Hinduism, as it formed enduring relations with the local Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In India, Jones wrote that he had discovered Arcadia. Valmiki was the new Homer, the Ramayana the new Odyssey. The possibilities seemed endless.

  Yet in the early years of the nineteenth century, this optimism and excitement began to wane, and senior figures in the Company became openly disdainful of all things Indian. Partly the reasons for this were political. In the eighteenth century the Company was a small, vulnerable coastal power that depended on the goodwill of Indian rulers. Many Indian armies were better equipped and better trained than those of the Company: the armies of Tipu Sultan for example had rifles and canon which were based on the latest French designs, and their artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies. But by the 1830s the British had become the paramount power in India. For the first time there was a feeling that technologically, economically and politically, the British had nothing to learn from India and much to teach. As with the contemporary US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it did not take long for imperial arrogance to set in.

  Religion played a major role too. Perhaps the most powerful of the new breed of hard-line critics of Indian culture was one the Company’s directors, Charles Grant. Grant was among the first of the new Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company Boardroom. Writing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions,’ he proposed to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved.’ Within a few years, the missionaries – initially based at the Dutch settlement of Serampore – were beginning to fundamentally change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom as Jones and Hastings believed, but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some
of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

  It was at this period too that the first development of ideas of racial purity, of colour and ethnic hierarchy, and the beginnings of straightforward racialism emerged: ideas which would of course reach there most horrifying denouement in the middle years of the twentieth century, but whose roots can be traced to developments in European thought a century earlier, and at least partly to developments in British India.

  These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century had produced many ‘White Mughals’ – characters like the British Resident at the Mughal court, Sir David Ochterlony. When in the Indian capital, Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State) and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman: every evening all thirteen of Ochterlony’s consorts used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a ‘choga and pagri’ while being fanned by servants holding peacock-feather punkhas.

  Such people were few and far between by the 1830s, and their way of life was beginning to die out. The Bengal Wills show that it was at this time that the number of Indian wives or bibis being mentioned in wills and inventories begins to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in the 1780–85, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805–10, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared.

  Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs began to be objects of surprise even, on occasions, of derision in Calcutta. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of men ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Musulmans’. Curries were no longer acceptable dishes for parties, and pyjamas – common dress in eighteenth-century Calcutta and Madras – for the first time became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. By 1813, Thomas Williamson was writing in The European in India how ‘The hookah, or pipe … was very nearly universally retained among Europeans. Time, however, has retrenched this luxury so much, that not one in three now smokes.’ Soon the hookah was to go the way of the bibi: into extinction.