White Mughals (13 page)

Even passing travellers began to take potshots at the increasingly isolated Stuart: ‘There was one circumstance which staggered my incredulity, ’ wrote Elizabeth Fenton in her journal. ‘There was here an Englishman, born and educated in a Christian land, who has become the wretched and degraded partaker of this heathen worship, a General S—who has for some years adopted the habits and religion, if religion it be named, of these people; and he is generally believed to be in a sane mind, rather a man of ability.’ Pausing in her horror only to add a second semi-colon to her breathless rant, she continued; ‘it makes you pause and in vain attempt to account for such delusion. Those whom it is the will of God to be born in Darkness are not accountable, but that any who ever lived in the light of Christianity should voluntarily renounce its hopes is truly awful.’
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Hindoo Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.

David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker who founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, was actually denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian.
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Many others found their Indianised ways led to a block on their promotion. When Francis Gillanders, a British tax-collector stationed in Bihar, was found to be involving himself too closely in the temple at Bodh Gaya, to which he donated a bell in 1798, the Directors of the Company back in London wrote to the Governor General expressing their horror that Christians should be, as they put it, administering ‘heathen’ rites.
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A little later Frederick Shore found that his adoption of native dress so enraged the increasingly self-righteous officials of Calcutta that a government order was issued explicitly forbidding Company servants from wearing anything except European dress. The following year the army issued similar orders forbidding European officers from taking part in the festival of Holi. ‘Pagan festivals’, along with gambling, concubinage, peculation and drunkenness, were all things to be firmly discouraged in this new climate. The shutters were beginning to come down.

Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were also beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1780s, and it was the burgeoning mixed-blood Anglo-Indian community which felt the brunt of the new intolerance. From 1786, under the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, a whole raft of legislation was brought in excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives from employment by the Company. Cornwallis arrived in India fresh from his defeat by George Washington at York-town. He was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America.

With this in mind, in 1786 an order was passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from travelling to England to be educated, so qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the civil, military or marine branches of the Company. In 1795, further legislation was issued, explicitly disqualifying anyone not descended from European parents on both sides from serving in the Company’s armies except as ‘pipers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’. Yet, like their British fathers, the Anglo-Indians were also banned from owning land. Thus excluded from all the most obvious sources of lucrative employment, the Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale. This would continue until, a century later, they had been reduced to a community of minor clerks and train drivers.
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Faced with limited prospects in India, those Company servants rich enough to send their Anglo-Indian children home tended to do so, and many mixed-blood children were successfully absorbed into the British upper classes, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-nineteenth-century Prime Minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.
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Much, however, depended on skin colour. As the Calcutta agent John Palmer wrote to Warren Hastings, when discussing what to do with his three orphaned Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: ‘the two eldest [who] are almost as fair as European children … should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at Home, it is become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child’ to proceed to England. It was decided in the end that the ‘dark’ child should stay in India and try to make his way as a clerk, while the others were shipped to Britain to try their luck there.
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It was not just Anglo-Indians who suffered from the new and quickly-growing prejudices in Calcutta. Under Cornwallis, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the increasingly arrogant officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William. In 1786, John Palmer’s father, General William Palmer,
^ac
who later became one of Kirkpatrick’s closest friends and allies, wrote to his friend David Anderson expressing his dismay at the new etiquette regarding Indian dignitaries introduced to Calcutta by the recently-arrived Cornwallis. They were received, he wrote, ‘in the most cold and disgusting stile, and I can assure you that they observe and feel it, and no doubt they will resent it whenever they can’.
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These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The Bengal Wills show that it was at this time that the number of Indian
bibis
being mentioned in wills and inventories began to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in 1780 and 1785, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805 and 1810,
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. The second edition of Thomas Williamson’s
East India Vade Mecum,
published in 1825, had all references to
bibis
completely removed from it,
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while biographies and memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the early nineteenth century so that the consorts were removed from later editions: for example John Collins, known as ‘King Collins’, who was the Resident at the court of the Marathas’ leader Scindia, was deprived of the harem mentioned in the first edition of Major Blackiston’s
Twelve Years Military Adventures in Hindustan.
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Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs likewise 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 Mussulmans’.
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Curries were no longer acceptable dishes at parties: ‘the delicacies of an entertainment consist of hermetically sealed salmon, red-herrings, cheese, smoked sprats, raspberry jam, and dried fruits; these articles coming from Europe, and being sometimes very difficult to procure, are prized accordingly’.
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Pyjamas, 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.’
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Soon the European use of the hookah was to go the way of the
bibi:
into extinction.

Yet what was true of Calcutta was not necessarily true of Company servants who lived outside the walls of the three Presidency towns. If a young Writer was bright, learned the languages and did well in his exams, he might still be posted to one of the Residencies attached to the various independent Indian courts. There he could find himself the only educated European for several hundred miles. In that case—and especially if he found himself in a centre of hybrid Indo-Islamic culture such as Hyderabad or Lucknow, or one of the more lively Rajput courts like Udaipur—he would by necessity be forced to draw his closest friends, his ways of speaking and thinking, and his sexual partners, from his Indian surroundings.
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Wearing Indian costume, marrying Indian wives and living a hybrid Anglo-Mughal lifestyle had always been more popular, and the transformations more dramatic, in these great centres of Mughal culture than they were in the insular world of the Presidency towns. From the 1790s until the 1830s, however, a division grew up between what was considered acceptable and proper in Calcutta, and the ways of behaviour that were still thought perfectly appropriate in the Residencies attached to the different Indian courts: for example, when the formidable Lady Maria Nugent, wife of the British Commander-in-Chief in India, visited Delhi she was horrified by what she saw there. It was not just the Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, who had ‘gone native’, she reported, his Assistants William Fraser and Edward Gardner were even worse. ‘I shall now say a few words of Messrs. Gardner and Fraser who are still of our party,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘They both wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians, if not more; they are both of them clever and intelligent, but eccentric; and, having come to this country early, they have formed opinions and prejudices, that make them almost natives. In our conversations together, I endeavour to insinuate every thing that I think will have any weight with them. I talk of the religion they were brought up in, and of their friends, who would be astonished and shocked at their whiskers, beards, &c. &c. All this we generally debated between us,’ concluded Lady Nugent, ‘and I still hope they will think of it.’
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Two worlds were growing apart—and it was into that growing chasm of cultural misunderstanding that James Achilles Kirkpatrick fell. If that gap widened into an abyss during the first years of the nineteenth century, it was largely due to the influence of one man.

On 8 November 1797, Lord Wellesley, a minor Irish aristocrat, set out from England to take up his appointment as Governor General of Bengal and head of the Supreme Government of India. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. That process was now drawing to a close. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. It was a place to be changed and conquered, not a place to be changed or conquered by.

This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.

 

 

 

When he stepped ashore at the Cape of Good Hope on a January day in 1798, Richard Wellesley was a short, self-possessed and ambitious young man of thirty-seven with a high forehead, thick, dark eyebrows and a straight Roman nose. He had compelling blue eyes and a firm chin, the prominence of which was emphasised by his three-quarter-length side-burns. There was a purposeful set to his small mouth and an owlish gleam in his expression that hinted at brilliance, and perhaps also at ruthlessness. But there was also a vulnerability and even a paranoia there too, apparent in all his portraits. It was a weakness that he increasingly came to disguise with a mask of arrogance.