7
“A TIGER DID THAT?”
Nigel stared at the enormous scar on the arm of a dockhand shouldering mailbags on a ramshackle wharf on a tidal waterway just west of the main outflow of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. The dockhand repeated himself:
“Shere, sahib.”
He had been in a boat with his cousin on one of the narrow streams that threaded through the mangrove thickets of the river deltas. The tiger sprang from the densely packed trees along the bank, knocking his cousin into the water. To save his cousin, he jumped onto the tiger, pushing its head underwater. In the struggle, its claws raked his arm. But then it started to swim away, and they clambered back into their boat.
The dockhand smiled. His teeth were stained a delicate pink from chewing betel leaf. Nigel had heard that there were Indian river dolphins of a similar color. He longed to see them.
It was February 1843. After fourteen months in India, Nigel was on his first foray outside Calcutta, en route to a temporary posting in the revenue office at Dacca, the great metropolis of Bengal before the British seized control from the Mughal nawab and shifted the capital to Calcutta. He had passed his language examination barely a year after his arrival, twelve weeks ahead of schedule. Though he came up short in his effort to obtain a degree of honor in Persian, with its handsome prize of £160, he managed one in Urdu and received £80 instead.
No one would call his future in Dacca an exciting one. Filling in for an assistant to the collector whose home leave had been extended, he would spend his days recalculating land tax rates based on reports from field inspectors. His impulse in volunteering to serve in Dacca was purely romantic. He had heard it described as the Venice of the East, and he wanted to see it for himself.
As the vessel bobbed alongside the wharf, he was eager to get under way. Apart from two officers in the Native Infantry of the Company army and a clergyman affiliated with the London Missionary Society, his fellow passengers on the four-hundred-mile voyage via paddle steamer were Bengalis. For months he had chafed at his cloistered life in Calcutta. Now he was out at last in Asiatic society, a companion of crocodiles, a confidant of men who brawled with tigers. The dockhand had casually conferred on him the connection that he craved.
Everything about the journey was intense. It was only February, but the air temperature reached ninety degrees by midmorning. They all stewed ceaselessly in a cauldron of heat, sweating by day beneath canvas awnings rigged on deck and tossing and turning in stifling cabins at night. The water itself was so hot that he marveled at the schools of slender, silver hilsa that shimmered in the steamer’s wake: “I should think they would be cooked alive.”
The meals matched the climate: fiery curries of mutton and fish that left him gasping for water after every mouthful. At sunset, the nightly bombardment of insects began—thousands of moths, beetles, and dragonflies, attracted by the vessel’s lights. They flew unerringly into open mouths, making conversation impossible. It was no wonder, joked Nigel, that the voluble French had given up on colonizing India.
The route to Dacca followed the fringes of a vast virgin littoral mangrove forest, where the muddy Himalayan runoff from the north met the tidal waters of the Bay of Bengal to the south. For five thousand years this tangled floodplain, the Sundarbans, had resisted the civilizing impulses of the Indians themselves, never mind their would-be conquerors. No one lived there. But the Sundarbans teemed with life. Its inhabitants included spotted deer, crocodiles, wild boar, snakes, clawless otters, dolphins, some 315 species of waterfowl, raptors and forest birds, and a population of Bengal tigers that would continue to number in the several hundreds even as the species neared extinction in the twenty-first century. With shooting glasses borrowed from the Portuguese first mate, Nigel peered into the jungle, catching glimpses of deer, a rhinoceros, and a magnificent nesting sea eagle.
“Our noisy passage leaves them undisturbed, for these creatures have no fear of man,” he wrote afterwards. “It is man who fears them, or rather the primeval state of their surroundings. They live in a vanished world whose dangers we have happily escaped, but which fascinates from a safe and prudent distance.”
Talking with “J—— ,” the missionary who shared his cabin, Nigel ventured a religious parallel. No Christian could contemplate the gaudy pantheon of the Hindus without revulsion for the “pagan rituals” that lowered their faith to the level of black magic. But leaving aside the error of their ways, there was “much to ponder in the infinite variety of their sacred practices.”
J—— , who had earlier regaled Nigel with his scheme to further Christianize the Roman Catholic converts of Goa, would have none of it. He replied sarcastically that few things seemed to serve the Company’s men better in advancing their careers than a well-developed capacity for setting aside the error of native ways.
Had not Lord Ellenborough himself lately pledged to rebuild a heathen temple?
Were not objects of idolatry on parade in some remote province at that very moment, offered for public adoration on the governor’s command and accompanied by a guard of honor selected from his personal bodyguard?
The objects in question were the Gates of Somnath, spoils of war plundered from the Afghan city of Ghazni by the army Ellenborough had dispatched the previous summer to free British prisoners in Kabul. Though its troops were instructed to refrain from “vindictive” punishment of the recalcitrant Afghans, any pretense of taking those orders at face value disappeared after British troops reached Jagdalak, site of the desperate last stand by the Army of the Indus. The hills there, wrote one officer, were “literally covered with skeletons, most of them blanched by exposure to the rain and the sun, but many of them having hair of a color which enabled us to recognise the remains of our own countrymen.” Forced to trample the bones of the fallen for much of the difficult route, the men took revenge for the massacre on every Afghan they found.
One afternoon, after random shots were fired on a British cavalry column from a fortified village near Ghazni, on the road to Kabul, a company of foot soldiers was sent to investigate; as a result, noted one of them in his diary, about a hundred of the village’s men were “butchered.” Only the evacuation of Ghazni—Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city—prevented the “Army of Retribution” from putting its population to the sword. Its commanding general, Brigadier William Nott, instead consulted his engineer officer and directed him to destroy “the city of Ghuznee with its citadel and the whole of its works.”
Spared from the flames was a famous piece of loot. Eight hundred years before, an Afghan force led by Mahmud of Ghazni had plundered and desecrated the Hindu temple of Somnath, on the southwest coast of India. Tradition held that the invaders had removed the ornate sandalwood gates of the shrine and carried them back to Ghazni, where they were hung on Mahmud’s tomb. Nott had recovered the gates, acting on orders from Ellenborough, who conceived of their triumphant return to India as a potent symbol for the Hindu majority of the defeat of the Afghan Muslims. When word reached the governor that they had been secured, he issued instructions that the gates be paraded through the cities of the Punjab in a special ceremonial car and brought by an honor guard to the old Mughal capital of Delhi. There, he announced in a proclamation to “all the Princes and Chiefs and the People of India,” he would personally restore them to the keeping of the Indians themselves:
“My brethren and friends, our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnath in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Mahmood looks on the ruins of Guzni. The insult of eight hundred years is avenged. To you . . . I shall commit this glorious trophy of successful warfare. You will yourselves, with all honour, transmit these gates of sandal wood to the restored temple of Somnath.”
J—— could scarcely contain his fury. What was one to make of such a proclamation? Did it not elevate “Brahminical superstition” to a status denied time and again by the East India Company to the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Nigel knew that it was no use defending the Company’s record in religious matters to someone like J—— . Though the law forbidding missionary work had changed, the Court of Directors still believed that preaching to poor Indians that the meek should inherit the earth was tantamount to sedition. Missionaries were subject to onerous limits on the scope of their activities—religious discussions with native women, for example, were forbidden—and their freedom to travel was severely restricted. J—— had waited eighteen months for permission to visit Dacca, even though he had no plans to proselytize there.
“I could only convey to him that criticism of the Governor’s regard for the relics retrieved from Afghanistan was general in Calcutta, where I heard it expressed in the strongest terms and lately with increasing frequency,” Nigel wrote. “Residing in Benares himself, he was naturally ill-acquainted with the sentiments of the capital, and glad to know that they accorded with his own.”
Half the truth, Nigel seems to have decided, was better than none. The East India Company’s rank and file had indeed questioned the wisdom of Ellenborough’s proclamation. What concerned them, though, was not his insult to Christianity but his disregard for the feelings of Muslims. Everyone knew that British control of the subcontinent depended on alliances with the Muslim princely states, whose rulers revered Mahmud of Ghazni as the founder of their power in India. They were bound to take offense at the affront to his memory. Among the Hindu princes, who were minor figures by comparison, there was general bewilderment. Almost to a man, they first learned of the “insult of eight hundred years” when the governor general proclaimed it avenged.
(The whole affair turned farcical when Hindu scholars called in to examine the gates rejected the idea that they were the originals taken from Somnath. As it turned out, they were not even made of sandalwood. It subsequently emerged that the mullahs of Ghazni had clung to the fiction as a means of extracting offerings from the faithful who visited the old conqueror’s tomb. “The guardians of the tomb wept bitterly,” wrote Major Henry Rawlinson, an Orientalist who had supervised the gates’ removal in Afghanistan even as he concluded from their inscriptions that they were modern forgeries. “But the sensation was less than what might have been expected.”)
Nigel, for his part, was less interested in the controversy than in the relics themselves, which he hoped to one day see for himself. He had never paid much attention to news of military adventure. But the uproar over the Gates of Somnath had drawn him into the reports filed by correspondents who met the avenging army on its triumphant return.
One was the saga of two hundred Europeans taken hostage at the outset of the fateful retreat from Kabul, who overthrew their captors in short order and turned their prison fortress in the mountain wilderness of the Hindu Kush into a defensive position. Within days the former prisoners had recruited an armed group of Afghans, run up a Union flag, and imposed a system of taxation on the local community. When they received word that a detachment of British troops had reached the vicinity, they marched out smartly to meet their would-be rescuers. All Calcutta delighted in the tale of their pluck, but what fascinated Nigel was passing mention of the backdrop to their valor: colossal stone Buddhas carved into alcoves in the mountainside.
Another was a darker story out of Kohistan, a district northwest of Kabul whose inhabitants were thought to have played a part in fomenting the uprising that forced the British to abandon the Afghan capital. Buried in the account of its righteous pillage was an aside about a scouting party who found themselves in a forested enclave of the Kafir, pagan tribesmen with European features. It seemed probable that their ancestors were deserters from another army that had once passed through those parts, led by Alexander.
The news did more than pique Nigel’s curiosity about what lay beyond the boundaries of British jurisdiction: It also changed his thinking about the Company’s army. To his surprise, there were learned men among the rough and ready soldiery. One was a player in the saga of the spurious gates, Henry Rawlinson. While helping reorganize the Persian army in the 1830s, he had located in the mountains between Hamadan and Baghdad ancient cuneiform inscriptions, which he went on to decipher after copying them at great risk to his life. It was a breakthrough that led to important insights into Babylonian and Assyrian languages and culture. Another officer, Lieutenant Robert Carey, was a botanist. Still another, Major Warwick Ball, was trained in archaeology.
It impressed Nigel that even as such men went about their military duties, they took scholarly stock of their exotic surroundings. War was destructive, he wrote. Yet warriors could also be agents for the advancement of knowledge: “Without war we should know almost nothing of Afghanistan, or suspect the existence there of that worth knowing.”
The two army officers on board the mail boat were cut from different cloth than the likes of Henry Rawlinson. Though their regiment had seen action in Afghanistan, they had little to say about the country or its customs. They were en route to the princely state of Cooch Behar, an enclave south of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. There they hoped to bag their share of big game while stepping up the pace of native recruitment.
Their principal contribution to Nigel’s personal store of knowledge was the revelation that a group of tigers was called an “ambush.” But he enjoyed their company, and relished the novelty of talking “mostly of India and Indians” with other Englishmen. It was a welcome change from Calcutta, where conversation revolved around England and the race meetings of the local Jockey Club, held at dawn to avoid the heat. Even the lectures and debates that Nigel attended were confined to such Occidental topics as iron suspension bridges, antique musketry, and the merits of meteorology—the last a protracted affair at Metcalfe Hall that left him wondering whether the venue had been selected on account of its architecture, borrowed from the Athenian Tower of the Winds.
On their third day out of Calcutta, they left the dark, primeval world of the Sundarbans behind. The jungle thinned into isolated stands of mangrove on sandbars surrounded by mud flats, and the first mate pointed out a species of smooth-coated otter domesticated by fishermen and used to drive fish into their nets.
Fishermen themselves were nowhere to be seen, even as signs of habitation appeared on lush Bhola Island, where the route veered northward up the Buriganga River. Dacca was just a hundred miles away. But crocodiles seemingly outnumbered people, and the island’s paddy fields turned out to be abandoned.
Nigel remembered Sagar Island, at the mouth of the Hooghly, and asked if the islanders had been flooded out.
No, said the first mate.
They went away.
Went where? Nigel wondered. Most Indians lived out their lives within a few miles of their birthplace. The rigid social structure discouraged mobility of any sort.
To other lands, said the boatman.
All those lands were the zamindar’s.
The zamindar decided.
The mail boat turned up the Buriganga. Dolphins leaped from the mottled brown water. They were not the storied pink variety of the Indus and the upper Ganges. But they were nacreous and lovely in the low-angle light of late afternoon.
In Nigel’s letter home about hiring a munshi, he had explained to his parents that zamindars were the hereditary tax collectors of the Mughal Empire, “who have always held rank in society but have only come to prosper through acting in concert with our larger interests.” But he failed to elaborate on how that prosperity had come about. Under the Permanent Settlement of 1793, promulgated by Charles Cornwallis, zamindars were transformed into British-style landlords, and the vast territories from which they collected revenue became their private estates. With a stroke of his pen, Cornwallis reduced the entire peasantry of Bengal to tenants with no enumerated rights, not even of occupancy to the land they cultivated.
Nor did Nigel specify just what those larger interests might be. The avowed purpose of the settlement was to fix land tax revenues in perpetuity. But its unspoken strategic object was the creation of a new propertied class that would be both loyal to and dependent on British rule.
The effect, for the dispossessed, was something close to slavery. Crop failures forced cultivators to borrow at usurious rates from moneylenders, often the zamindars themselves. When they failed to meet the terms of repayment, they became bonded laborers for the zamindars. Many proved unable to work off the compounding interest of their debt, let alone the principal, a circumstance that justified the servitude of their children to the zamindar after the death of the initial borrower.
It is unclear how much Nigel then understood about the effects of the Permanent Settlement. But a year had passed since he hired the munshi, and he would have known at least a little more about the zamindars. They were objects of ridicule in Calcutta society, which reserved its most withering scorn for the pretensions of the native parvenus. In the munshi himself he would have recognized another stereotype: the Bengali babu. The more powerful the British became, the more they relied upon the urbane, educated Indians of the emerging babu class. But the more the British relied upon the babu, the more they pretended that the babu was not to be relied upon at all.
All his knowledge of India was filtered through the conventional wisdom of Calcutta. It was a self-absorbed teenager of a city, obsessed with the dazzle of its own reflection in the gleaming windows of Chowringhee mansions. The zamindars were next to invisible; only their vulgar display was likely to intrude upon the field of view. Babus were seen for the most part as figures of fun. Even of the natives with the closest ties to the British, he knew almost nothing.
But that was about to change. Every churn of the paddle wheel closed the distance to a pair of Indias. One was the “real India” that Nigel longed to see. The other was the British India that he was forced to see, by the ghost city of Dacca.