9
NIGEL RETURNED TO Calcutta two months later, in September 1843. He expected to be posted shortly to a humbler locale. Nearly all fledgling civil servants received appointments to the hinterlands of British territory, where they served as underlings to collectors, judges, and magistrates. Settled at remote stations with only a handful of European colleagues, under skies too hot to be blue, they saw to the payments of taxes and land rents and administered justice, exercising authority over districts that in size and population dwarfed the largest English counties. For the most part, they followed an effortless path to promotion as their superiors retired. (Or succumbed—by the end of British rule, two million Europeans lay buried on the subcontinent, in more than thirteen hundred cemeteries.) The more they distinguished themselves—by resisting, principally, the temptation to ease their exile with drink and dissipation—the likelier the trajectory of their careers would one day return them to the concentrated wealth and power of the capital.
When he learned of his assignment instead to a plum job at Government House, in the Accountant General’s Office, he wrote to his parents that he could scarcely believe his good fortune. He assured them that “many” benefits would accrue to him by remaining in “the Asiatic Rome,” without elaborating on what they were. But one of his contemporaries, Fanny Parkes, the wife of a junior official in charge of ice making in Allahabad, would sum them up in her Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, published in 1850:
“The advantages of a residence in Calcutta are these: you are under the eye of the Government, not likely to be overlooked, and are ready for any appointment falling vacant; you get the latest news from England, and have the best medical attendance.”
In the stratified society of colonial India, the unlikelihood of being overlooked was a pearl without price. The European population was divided into three classes. The first, covenanted servants, comprised the civil and military officers, typically graduates of Haileybury or its sister college, Addiscombe Military Seminary, for candidates seeking commissions in the Company army. In the second, commonly called “commercial men,” were the managers of the large trading houses and financial agencies established by British merchants and banks in the aftermath of the Company’s withdrawal from trade. Members of the third (and, by 1840, the most numerous) class, the uncovenanted, included clerks in the private agency houses, assistants to the clerks in government offices, tradesmen, and various others, ranging from itinerant merchant seamen to missionaries.
With rare exceptions, uncovenanted Europeans were denied entrée to functions at Government House, which set the controlling precedent for all British India. This effectively placed them on the same social footing as natives. For the others, society revolved around activities and organizations that demarcated the ruling elite and fostered a sense of community within it. It was a closed society, in which everybody knew everybody else and all were conscious that making the right impression constituted an investment in one’s future prospects in India. And no stage on the subcontinent came close to Calcutta’s as a showcase for a turn in the spotlight.
As in England, blood sports were the first resort of young gentlemen with an eye on impressing their elders. Nigel found little to recommend in the popular pursuit of “pig sticking.” But he shot snipe in the bush across the Hooghly, and parrots in the jungle that crowded its waters farther upstream. Upon first payment of his salary, he subscribed to the Calcutta Hunt, founded in 1774, whose kennels were replenished annually with thirty pairs of hounds imported from England. Standing in for the English fox as the object of the chase was the native jackal, larger in size but equally speedy. And, despite initial doubts about his dexterity with a five-iron, Nigel began to patronize the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the world’s oldest outside Britain. Since its members were notorious for spending more time over drinks at the “19th hole” than on the links themselves, it was probably no exaggeration when he assured his parents that his outings there were “always jolly.”
About his attention to the non-sporting side of the colonial social calendar—the balls and fancy-dress parties of the Calcutta “season”—he had less to say. For many they were occasions to be endured, not enjoyed. These insular affairs were little more than ill-disguised auctions of what a subaltern in the Company army called the “marketable commodity” of matrimony, where a young officer might “pick up as partner some artless creature . . . who at the conclusion of the dance receive[d] from her haughty maternal” the stern admonition that the poor fellow was only an ensign, not yet even passed in the languages.
“The young man gets a withering scowl from a yellow-faced, over-dressed, spiteful, dowager,” reported the subaltern, “and, rushing out of the first door, registers a hasty vow never to enter into female society again—a vow too frequently kept.”
Nigel—passed in the languages and appointed to Government House—was a better catch. He dutifully presented himself that fall at the round of balls that commenced with the arrival of the “Fishing Fleet,” the influx of unmarried daughters who joined their families in India for the Calcutta “season” in hopes of finding a husband. (At season’s end, those who met with disappointment went back to England, where they were unkindly known as the “Returned Empties.”) But his letters hinted that he was simply putting in appearances. His tenancy at the Writers Building was coming to an end, and he seemed to be too worried about the cost of setting up a household to even contemplate marriage. Rents in Calcutta compared unfavorably with those in most parts of England, and the likely annual outlay for something suitable to his position, without a stick of furniture, was considerable.
Then there were the premiums to be paid for such necessities as glassware, imported from England at a markup of two or three hundred percent, and candles. The price of beeswax—scarce because Indians harbored ethical scruples about ending so many lives for the purpose of robbing honeycombs—was the despair of even the wealthiest households, but cheaper tallow tapers were too odoriferous for all but the poorest Europeans to abide.
Even if Nigel could afford to take a wife, he was unimpressed by the spectacle of institutionalized spouse hunting. At best, it struck him as rather comical. In November, after accepting an invitation to the station ball at Dum Dum, a cantonment for the artillery corps eight miles outside Calcutta, he fled the ballroom for the adjacent library within minutes. The proceedings, which he later recalled as “frantic,” were worthy of a Restoration playwright. For all that, though, it was too “close and hot” to properly enjoy the show. His description jibed with Miss Emma Roberts’ account of a ball there that fall—possibly the same one. Thirty or forty young ladies, thronged by “all the beaux who have any hope of being noticed by them,” were obliged by custom to dance with each and every one of them.
Nigel discovered that he was not the first wallflower to desert the ballroom for the reading room that evening. Lieutenant M—— and Captain Lieutenant C—— were both stationed at Barrackpore, another eight miles upriver, awaiting staff appointments after completing two years of service with their regiments of the Bengal Native Infantry. In the meantime, they were “chumming it,” sharing a bungalow and household expenses. When C—— rose from his armchair to shake Nigel’s hand, he laid aside a volume of Persian poetry. M—— , it turned out, was keen on Mughal architecture. Their shared interests overwhelmed their habitual English reserve, and the three men chatted like old friends for hours. When they parted, Nigel promised to call on the officers at Barrackpore, where the governor general kept a country residence with a fine park and a famous menagerie, noted for its tigers and cheetahs.
Though no record survives of that visit, it must have gone well. Nigel returned to Barrackpore several times afterwards, riding with M—— and C—— in the broken wooded country beyond the cantonment boundaries and joining them for meals at their bungalow or the officers’ mess. Their friendship cut across the prevailing Company grain, which separated British civilians from British troops as a matter of policy. Fort William, in Calcutta proper, was garrisoned by a single regiment, with the forces actually considered necessary for the city’s defense stationed well outside its boundaries.
It wasn’t long, however, before Nigel found himself wishing M—— and C—— Godspeed on their posting to Ferozepore, a thousand miles distant on the far western frontier of British India. Ferozepore, where Lord Ellenborough had personally greeted the returning “Army of Retribution” after its rampage through Afghanistan with an honor guard of 250 decorated elephants, was everything Calcutta was not. Rustic, tribal, and practically lawless, it was situated, as the young John Nicholson wrote home upon his posting there in 1840, in “a perfect wilderness: there is not a tree or a blade of grass within miles of us; and as to the tigers, there are two or three killed in the neighbouring jungle every day.”
M—— and C—— were thrilled. Action in the field was the surest means of advancement in their military careers, and they had yet to see any. The previous fall, Ellenborough had promised that henceforth the government of India would devote all its efforts to “the establishment and maintenance of general peace.” In a magniloquent proclamation, he ordered a commemorative medal struck with the legend PAX ASIAE RESTITUTA (“Peace Restored to Asia”), and ambitious officers like M—— and C—— had to wonder if commands under fire might ever come their way.
Less than six months later, the governor lifted their spirits with another proclamation, annexing the province of Sindh. A prosperous country south of Ferozepore, Sindh was ruled by independent emirs who cherished their control of the Indus River, the main artery to the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab. Ellenborough’s proclamation meant war, and M—— and C—— were off to fight it.
Nigel, for his part, was right where he needed to be to make his own career: ensconced in the Asiatic Rome. At the beginning of 1844, about the same time he said his goodbyes in Barrackpore, he received the surest confirmation possible that his star was on the rise. Bastions of the colonial elite though they were, Calcutta’s Hunt Club, Golf Club, and Jockey Club lacked the cachet of the gentlemen’s social clubs that were emerging as the pinnacle of refinement in the empire’s first cities. Patterned after the venerable upper-class institutions of White’s and Boodle’s, in the City of London, they aimed to reproduce the comfort and ambience of “home” in an alien land. Preeminent in Calcutta was the Bengal Club, founded in 1827 and well on its way to securing the reputation it would enjoy until the end of British rule as the premier haunt of the most pukka of India’s sahibs.
Exclusivity, needless to say, was the watchword. When one of Nigel’s superiors offered to sponsor his candidacy for election, he rushed to put pen to paper, detailing for his parents the charms of the Hepplewhite, Chippendale, and Louis Quinze that graced the handsome rooms on Chowringhee Road. There was no finer setting in Calcutta, he wrote, for taking meals, reading newspapers, and playing cards or billiards. What appealed to him most about the Bengal Club, though, was the serviced apartments made available to members. Nearly as worrisome to him as the expense of renting and furnishing a house of his own, he confided, was the prospect of hiring and managing the necessary retinue of servants:
I shall have to have a khansama, or butler, who does the marketing and supervises the kitchen, holding first precedence above the others, whose company is astonishingly numerous. To begin with there is the cook. Secondly, the khidmutgar, the boy who lays the table and waits upon it during meals. Thirdly, the musalchee, corresponding to the scullion of an English pantry. Having seen to the culinary necessaries, I must then employ a principal house servant or bearer, the sirdar, who acts as valet and prepares the evening lights, among other household duties. Since there cannot be a principal in this country without a subordinate, the sirdar naturally requires a bearer’s mate to assist him. Next must be engaged the essential trio of bheesty, or water bearer, mihtur, or sweeper, and dhobee, or washerman. Owing to the strenuous exertions of the latter, and the damages occasioned by his zeal, it is necessary to maintain a durzee or tailor on the premises as well, although I am assured that a half-time appointment should suffice in service to a bachelor. In this census I omit the outdoor servants . . . Does it surprise that one of my age and inexperience in all things domestic should be daunted by the prospect of administering such a surfeit of Native labour, cheap though it may be?
In the long term, he calculated, he would save on living expenses by residing at the Bengal Club, where all customary services were included in the rent. The short term was complicated by the club’s requirement that its annual subscription fee be paid in one lump sum. Fortunately, he had saved enough during his sojourn in Dacca that he could just scrape by.
“I am inclined to suffer the leanness of two or three months as the price of resolving my future in a manner that frees me from further anxiety about the arrangements of everyday life—anxiety which I fear would only assume another form upon establishment of an independent household.”
His relief was palpable, and so, unusually for Nigel, was a note of self-satisfaction. “My thoughts, when I am sitting alone here in the evening,” he concluded, “now turn to the diversions of life, a pleasing realm to contemplate.”
The message to Coventry was clear: The uncertainties and awkwardness of griffinhood were behind him. Now in the full tide of his life in India, he was swimming well.
Three months later, however, seemingly out of the blue and much to the bemusement of his parents, he requested and received a transfer to Patna. Three hundred miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, it offered none of the capital’s advantages. But it was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.