Begums, Thugs and White Mughals Read online

  Fanny stood in the middle of this process of change – this slow alienation of the British from the India they ruled – and was one of the last of the generation who was able to express unequivocal admiration for India. Even so her attitudes were subject to criticism from her peers. On her travels, she found that extreme Victorian religiosity was already beginning to make itself felt, and that attitudes were changing: ‘Methodism is gaining ground very fast in Cawnpore,’ she records. ‘Young ladies sometimes profess to believe it is highly incorrect to go to balls, plays, races, or to any party where it is possible there may be a quadrille. A number of the officers also profess these opinions, and set themselves up as new lights.’ In Calcutta she finds many of her contemporaries were ‘determined to be critical’ of anything Indian. When she visits an old Princess who was a cousin of the Gardners in the zenāna of the Red Fort in Delhi, British opposition to Fanny’s sympathies comes out into the open. She lets slip that she is clearly regarded as suspect by the British in Delhi for mixing with (or even taking an interest in) the sad, impoverished descendants of the Great Mughals, and fires back at the criticism, both of her and her Mughal hosts:

  ‘I heard that I was much blamed for visiting the princess … Look at the poverty, the wretched poverty of these descendants of the emperors! In former times strings of pearls and valuable jewels were placed on the necks of departing visitors. When the Princess Hyāt-ool-Nissa Begum in her fallen fortunes put the necklace of freshly-gathered white jasmine flowers over my head, I bowed with as much respect as if she had been the queen of the universe. Others may look upon these people with contempt, I cannot; look at what they are, what they have been!

  ‘One day a gentleman, speaking to me of the extravagance of one of the young princes, mentioned that he was always in debt, he could never live upon his allowance. The allowance of the prince was Rs 12 a month! – not more than the wages of a head servant.

  ‘With respect to my visit, I felt it hard to be judged by people who were ignorant of my being the friend of the relatives of those whom I visited in the zenāna. People who themselves had, perhaps, no curiosity respecting native life and manners, and who, even if they had the curiosity, might have been utterly unable to gratify it unless by an introduction which they were probably unable to obtain.’

  With such criticism buzzing around her, it is hardly surprising that Fanny took refuge and found friendship among an older generation of Indianised Europeans, men who had to some extent crossed cultures in exactly the way that she was now beginning to do.

  In Calcutta, she immediately fell for the dashing French General Allard, a Sergeant Major of Joseph Bonaparte’s bodyguard, who left St Tropez and ended up commanding two Regiments of dragoons and lancers for the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, marrying a beautiful Kashmiri girl and more or less becoming a Sikh himself. ‘He is the most picturesque person imaginable,’ wrote Fanny after meeting him. ‘His long forked beard, divided in the centre, hangs down on either side his face; at dinner time he passes one end of his beard over one ear, and the other end over the other ear. I was much delighted with the General: he asked me to visit him in Lahore, an invitation I told him I would accept with great pleasure, should I ever visit the hills, and he told me he would send an escort for me.’

  Fanny forged a deeper relationship still with William Linnaeus Gardner, perhaps the single most intriguing character in Fanny’s entire book. Gardner was born into a prominent American loyalist family on the banks of the Hudson. He had fled America after the Patriot victory in the War of Independence, and finished his education in France and Holland, before sailing to India to make his fortune. There he inherited his father’s peerage, married a beautiful Mughal Princess of Cambay and, having fought for many years as a mercenary under a variety of Indian rulers, he eventually resumed his allegiance to the British Crown and formed his own irregular regiment, Gardner’s Horse.

  Gardner was very much a family man, and in his private correspondence, now in the India Office Library, he talks proudly of his multi-racial family: ‘Man must have a companion,’ he wrote to his cousin, ‘and the older I get the more I am confirmed in this. An old age without something to love, and nourish and nurse you, must be cold and uncomfortable. The Begum and I, from twenty-two years constant contact, have smoothed off each other’s asperities and roll on peaceably and contentedly. Now I hope both my boys will get me lots of grandchildren, for I find the grandpapa is the greatest favourite they have. The shouts of joy when I return after an absence of any time can be heard for a mile. My house is filled with Brats, and the very thinking of them, from blue eyes and fair hair to ebony and wool makes me quite anxious to get back again … There’s no accounting for taste but I have more relish in playing with the little brats than for the First Society in the World … New books, a garden, a spade, nobody to obey, pyjamas, grandchildren, tranquillity: this is the summit of happiness, not only in the East but the West too.’

  Gardner’s son James continued the family tradition by marrying Mulka Begum, who was the niece of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shāh as well as being the sister-in-law of the Nawāb of Avadh, and together they fathered an Anglo-Mughal dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed some of them, such as James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time. Even those Gardners who were straightforwardly Christian had alternative Muslim names: thus the Revd Bartholomew Gardner could also be addressed as Sabr, under which name he was a notable Urdu and Persian poet, shedding his clerical dress in favour of Avadhi pyjamas to declaim his achingly beautiful love poems at Lucknavi mushairas.

  Fanny’s description of her visit to Gardner’s jagir, his estate, at Khāsganj, her detailed exposition of how an English nobleman lived in a culturally hybrid house with a Mughal zenāna, Mughal customs and mixed European and Mughal cuisine, and her account of Gardner’s strange Anglo-Mughal wedding celebrations, is the most fascinating section of her travel book, a unique record of an attractively multicultural world that was soon to vanish. Indeed Fanny was clearly a little in love with the dashing Colonel: ‘He must have been, and is, very handsome; such a high caste man! How he came to marry his Begum I know not. What a romance his love must have been! I wish I had his portrait, just as he now appears, so dignified and interesting. His partiality flatters me greatly!’

  Even at this stage Gardner, though clearly a survivor – even a museum piece from a previous age – was nevertheless not alone in his tastes and sympathies. At the wedding of the Colonel’s granddaughter, Fanny describes how the European guests, like their host, were all in Mughal dress. Later, ‘two English gentlemen, who were fond of native life, and fascinated with Khāsganj, requested me to mention to Colonel Gardner their wish to become of his family; I did so.’ It was the last gasp maybe, but the old inter-cultural hybridity was not yet completely finished.

  William Gardner died on his Khāsganj estate on the 29th July 1835, at the age of sixty-five. His Begum, whose dark eyes he had first glimpsed through the chinks of a curtain in Surat thirty-eight years earlier, could not live without him. According to Fanny’s account:

  ‘My beloved friend Colonel Gardner … was buried, according to his desire, near the [domed Mughal] tomb of his son Allan. From the time of his death the poor Begum pined and sank daily; just as he said she complained not, but she took his death to heart; she died one month and two days after his decease. Native ladies have a number of titles; her death, names and titles were thus announced in the papers: “On the 31st August, at her Residence at Khāsganj. Her Highness Furzund Azeza Azubdeh-tool Arrakeen Umdehtool Assateen Nawāb Mah Munzil ool Nissa Begum Dehlmi, relict of the late Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner. The sound of Nakaras and Dumanas [kettle drums and trumpets] have ceased.”’

  The following year Fanny returned, broken-hearted, and paid her respects at the grave of her beloved friend: ‘I knelt at the grave of my kind, kind friend and wept and prayed in deep affliction.’

  The family never rec
overed the position they held under William. Despite possessing a pukka peerage, the Barony of Uttoxeter, over time they squandered their wealth, became poorer and poorer and more and more provincial Indian, gradually losing touch with their aristocratic English relations. The penultimate Vicereine, Lady Halifax, had Gardner blood and records in her memoirs that she was a little surprised when alighting from the Viceregal train on her way up to Simla, to see the station master of Kalka break through the ceremonial guard and fight his way up to the red carpet. Shouldering his way through the ranks of aides and the viceregal retinue, he addressed Her Excellency the Vicereine:

  ‘Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘my name is Gardner.’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Lady Halifax, somewhat to the astonishment of the viceregal entourage. ‘We are therefore cousins.’

  The Gardner dynasty, incidentally, still survives near Lucknow, today one of the most violent and backward parts of India. The present Lord Gardner, who has never been to England and speaks only faltering English, contents himself with farming his Indian acres and enjoying the prestige of being the village wrestling champion. Until he recently missed his chance, he threatened every so often to return ‘home’ and take up his seat in the House of Lords.

  * * *

  Fanny enjoyed travel books, and mentions those of several of her male contemporaries in her text. She was well aware that her sex made her vulnerable and so deprived her of opportunities open to them; but she also knew that she had one distinct advantage where she could trump her male rivals: her access to Indian zenānas. No Englishman could go into the quarters of Indian women, and Fanny was determined to make the most of the opportunity and to report from beyond a frontier that her rivals could not cross.

  In Calcutta, in Lucknow, at Khāsganj and in Delhi, Fanny repeatedly visits the women of different harems and reports about the life, the pleasures and the sorrows of the women she encounters there. One women in particular she befriends, Bāiza Bāī, the dowager Maratha queen of Gwalior who had been deposed by her son and sent into exile at Fatehgar in British territory not far from Cawnpore.

  Fanny found a common love of riding with the Queen, and describes learning to ride Maratha style, while trying to teach Bāzai Bāī’s women how to ride side-saddle. Always impatient with Western notions of feminine decorum, Fanny records how ‘I thought of Queen Elizabeth, and her stupidity in changing the style of riding for women’.

  Far from fantasising the sensual pleasures to be had in the Eastern harem, as was the wont of many of the male painters and writers of her time, Fanny reports on her perceptions of the reality of the lives of Indian women, and especially the restrictions which she felt women in both East and West suffered in common: ‘We spoke of the severity of the laws of England with respect to married women, how completely by law they are the slaves of their husbands, and how little hope there is of redress.’ It is at such points that Fanny’s Wanderings becomes an explicitly feminist text. In fact it is one of the great pleasures of the book that the more Fanny wanders, free of her husband, the more outspoken, sympathetic and independent she becomes.

  If Fanny was able to break some contemporary stereotypes about the life led by the inhabitants of Indian zenānas, she was less perceptive with her passages on Thuggee: the strangling and robbery of travellers by what the British came to believe was an Indian-wide brotherhood of Kali worshippers. Fanny devotes a great deal of space to the sensational reports then being circulated in the British press about the prevalence of thugs who were said to take the lives of literally tens of thousands of travellers every year. Today few would dispute that merchants and pilgrim bands were indeed very vulnerable to attack and robbery during this period; but most modern historians now believe that the British officials put in charge of the ‘Suppression of Thuggee’ hugely exaggerated the scale of the problem and created a mythical All-India Thug Conspiracy where in reality there were only scattered groups of robbers and impoverished highwaymen. Some historians also allege that the British used the suppression of Thuggee as an excuse and a justification for widening their area of rule: it was no coincidence that James Sleeman, the man who led the British campaign against the Thugs, was also the man who wrote most insistently for the annexation of the Kingdom of Avadh.

  Yet even here, while clearly fascinated by the threat and spectacle of thuggee, and excited by the idea of a conspiracy of sacred stranglers, Fanny sounds a note of caution, remarking on hearing about the mass execution of a group of twenty-five thugs that, ‘it cannot but be lamented that the course of justice is so slow; as these men, who were this day executed, have been in prison more than eight years for want of sufficient evidence’. So saying, she leaves a question hanging in the air. If the thugs were so guilty, how come there was so little evidence? It was certainly an apposite query. In normal circumstances, courts in India did not accept the statements of informers who turned ‘King’s Evidence’ on their fellow captives; but in the case of thugs, the colonial laws were altered to allow the conviction of thugs on evidence which would in other circumstances be regarded as wholly suspect and inadequate. The result was that accused thugs hoping for a pardon would produce lengthy and dramatic testimonials, giving evidence against scores of men they alleged to be former colleagues. The parallels with the Salem witch trial are obvious – and alarming.

  The same Evangelical Victorian colonial attitudes that wished to sell the Tāj Mahal for marble, and demolish the monuments of Agra, was also the world that dreamed up India-wide conspiracies involving vicious blood-thirsty thugs. It was not a world where Indian and English could cohabit on any terms of equality, and Fanny Parkes was one of the last English writers to believe – or even to want to believe – that mutually respectful relationships were possible and even desirable. The inevitable clash came in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the East India Company’s own troops finally rose in rebellion, joined in much of North India by great swathes of the civilian population. Nowhere was this more the case than in the supposedly ‘degenerate’ and ‘effeminate’ towns of Mughal Delhi and Lucknow, where the British only defeated the rebels with the very greatest difficulty and with unimaginable casualties on both sides.

  The world beloved of William Gardner and General Allard, and indeed of Fanny herself, was swept away by the Mutiny. During the fighting, Gardner’s Anglo-Indian descendants, like those of all the other White Mughals, were forced to make a final choice between one or other of the two sides – though for many the choice was made for them. After an attack on their property, the Gardners were forced to take refuge first in Aligarh then in the Fort of Agra, and so also ended up on the side of the British – though given a free hand they might just as easily have lined up behind their Mughal cousins in Delhi and Lucknow.

  Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed, the entire top rank of the Mughal aristocracy was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India; at the same time the wholesale arrival of the memsāhibs ended all open sexual contact between the two nations. White Mughals like Ochterlony and Gardner died out, and their very existence was later delicately erased from embarrassed Victorian history books. Only now is their existence beginning to be unearthed. Moreover, at a time when respectable journalists and academics are again talking of the Clash of Civilisations, and when East and West, Islam and Christianity are again engaged in a major confrontation, Fanny’s record of this fragile hybrid world has never been more important.

  * * *

  At the time of her travels, Fanny Parkes was criticised by her contemporaries for ‘going native’, for her over-developed sympathies for the cultures, religions and peoples of North India. Today she is under assault from the opposite direction.

  Following the success of Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism, a school of criticism has attempted to apply Said’s ideas to the whole range of colonial writings and art. Some of these applications have proved more
suitable than others, and there sometimes seems to be an assumption at work in academia – especially in the US – that all writings of the colonial period exhibit the same sets of prejudices: a monolithic, modern, academic Occidentalism which seems to match uncannily the monolithic stereotypes perceived in the original Orientalism.

  Fanny has not escaped this academic pigeon-holing, and has recently been the subject of two academic articles which would have her implicated in the project of gathering ‘Colonial knowledge’ and ‘imbricated with the project of Orientalism’ – in other words an unwitting outrider of colonialism, attempting to ‘appropriate’ Indian learning and demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ India as decayed and degenerate, fit only to be colonised and ‘civilised’. Anyone who reads Fanny’s writing with an open mind cannot but see this as a wilful misreading of the whole thrust of her text, an attempt to fit her book into a mould which it simply does not fit. There are many writers of the period to which such strictures could be applied, but it seems misguided in the extreme to see Parkes as any sort of gung-ho colonialist. Fanny was a passionate lover of India and, though a woman of her time, in her writing and her travels did her best to understand and build bridges across the colonial divide.