11
PERHAPS IT WAS Barrackpore that changed Nigel’s mind about casting his lot with the colonial elite in Calcutta. Perhaps the craving for adventure of the young officers he befriended there proved contagious. Like their counterparts in the U.S. Cavalry during the same era, they were called to the taming of a Wild West. Once they brought Sindh to heel, they were sure to march on to the princely state of Gwalior, where a mutinous army, an eight-year-old maharaja, and factions in the Council of Ministers combined to make the country ripe for British intervention. Perhaps he could not resist the temptation to be three hundred miles closer to the action.
Or perhaps he simply remained a creature of romantic impulse, beguiled by the charm of points unknown—the oasis of Siwa, the Venice of the East, the oldest inhabited city in the world. Perhaps the Nigel who set out by barge up the Ganges for Patna in April 1844 was consciously turning his back on the Nigel who was wont to satisfy his appetite for the “diversions of life” by rising at dawn for horse races on the Maidan and running down jackals with pedigreed hounds. Patna, he wrote in one of his last letters from Calcutta, was a rare and special place.
Its history was glorious—Gautama Buddha himself had prophesied the city’s great future, even as he predicted its eventual ruin. When the Greek ambassador to the court of the emperor Chandragupta Maurya arrived there in the fourth century B.C., he was amazed. Even the splendor of the Persian capital at Susa, wrote Megasthenes, did not compare with Patna. The city stretched nine or ten miles along the banks of the Ganges. Palaces and pleasure gardens lined the river frontage. Under Maurya’s command were more than four hundred thousand men, with three thousand war elephants, and His Imperial Majesty traveled in state with a bodyguard of female warriors, Indian Amazons loyal only to him.
If Megasthenes is to be trusted, Patna—then called Pataliputra—was the greatest city in the world, capital of an empire stretching from the Bay of Bengal to Afghanistan. For a millennium it held sway over South Asia. After the Maurya kings came the Shungas, after the Shungas the Guptas, after the Guptas the Palas. And then came the ruin foreseen by the Buddha, again and again and again.
Ruin by flood. Ruin by fire. Ruin by feud. Ruin so complete, Nigel discovered to his dismay after he arrived, that it left no ruins. All that survived of imperial Patna, he learned, was “a pillar somewhere.”
There were no temples or mosques of any importance.
No splendid Mughal monuments.
He was told that the want of stone in the vicinity prevented their construction. He was told that the only building material thereabouts was earth, so impregnated with saltpeter that bricks began to crumble as soon as they were formed. And he was told that Patna proper was so unsuited for habitation—so filthy and disorderly—that no Europeans had lived there for at least a generation.
They lived, exclusively, in the outlying civil station, with its oval parade ground and leafy, reverential hush. In leaving Calcutta, Nigel discovered, he had traded the insular for the hermetic.
“The new arrival in the capital is pressed for a personal accounting of the various affairs of the day, and must respond as best he can to feminine curiosity about the latest in fashionable attire,” he wrote in what was probably his first letter from Patna. “The new man here is subject to no such interrogation. The world outside the Station seems so distant as to be unworthy of sustained attention, or at any rate the appearance of energetic interest.”
Any undue expenditure of energy amounted to a local taboo. Card parties—nightly amusements for his set in Calcutta—were maligned for running too long and too late to be countenanced by the man who valued his health. Upon dining at the home of the collector, he found that even after-dinner conversation was judged too taxing for prolonged indulgence. The company rose as one as the table was cleared, repaired to the cool air of a terrace to smoke in silence, and departed for their bungalows soon afterwards, with perfunctory expressions of gratitude. Host and guests were home in bed before eleven o’clock, he marveled, and that on a Saturday!
For several weeks after his arrival, he tried to enlist one of his colleagues in the audit division of the revenue office to join him in ascending the beehive-shaped structure that loomed above the treetops on the edge of the station. It was only a short walk, and the view from the top was said to be the best in the district. On the clearest days could be seen the icy heights of the Himalayas, two hundred miles distant. But nobody wanted to go. Finally, on a sultry Sunday morning in May, he set out by himself, shielded from the sun by a sola topee, the cloth-covered helmet that was destined to be immortalized by Hollywood heroes from Errol Flynn to Harrison Ford.
For ten or fifteen minutes he strolled past whitewashed bungalows housing civil servants like himself, shaded by toddy palms and neem trees. Each had its lush back garden and its broad veranda, furnished with reclining chairs whose arms extended to provide a footrest. Bent over one of these “planter’s long-sleevers” stood a turbaned manservant, shaving a sleepy Englishman. Even enlisted men in the Company army employed Indians to shave them in their barracks bunks. Nigel, however, preferred solitude during his morning toilet, and shaved himself.
The Golghar was four hundred feet around and a hundred feet high. Its design was patterned after the mound-like structures raised by Buddhists to house relics of the Enlightened One. Four portals at the base of the dome marked the cardinal directions. Passageways tunneled from each, through walls twelve feet thick, to massive doors that opened on the granary chamber. Affixed to the doors were commemorative plaques that recounted the story of the granary’s construction.
The unlikely architect was Captain John Garstin, an engineer with the East India Company. He was sent to Patna in the aftermath of a famine that lasted from 1769 to 1773 and killed nearly ten million people in the lower Gangetic Plain. He conceived and built the Golghar to store 140,000 tons of grain—not for the local populace, but for the Company army. For efficiency in filling it, he designed two spiral staircases that climbed opposite sides of the dome and converged at the opening on top. Porters would carry grain bags up the shallow steps of one flight, empty them, then descend the steeper steps of the other to collect their next load.
Nigel started up. Adjoining the ascending stairs at regular intervals were broad resting platforms. He ignored the first, stopped briefly at the second, and lingered at the third, panting in the oven-like heat reflected off the stucco and brick. A hundred yards away churned the Ganges. He wondered if there might be a breeze off the water when he reached the top.
No such luck. Nor were the mountains visible in the haze. Thirsty and a little dizzy, hand cupped over the brim of his headwear to cut the glare, he searched out the local landmarks—such as they were, for the only imposing structure anywhere near Patna was the Golghar itself. Close by to the west, the square house built by Captain Garstin turned its back to the river. To the north there was nothing but the water’s muddy margin, which lacked even bathing steps; certain stretches of the Ganges, he was given to understand, were less copiously endowed with sanctity than others. Eastward, tangential to the parade ground, ranged the neat grid of bungalows, overlooked from a slight, almost imperceptible rise by the collectorate and the two- and three-story houses of government officials—the commercial resident, the district judge, the various revenue officers, the civil surgeon.
None qualified as mansions. Only the surgeon’s, with its pocket portico and tall arched windows, pretended to grandness. But its distinction had nothing to do with the status of the medical profession. Divided into apartments, it had formerly housed the agents who carried on the largest part of the Company’s trade in India. That business, as at Ghazipur, was opium.
Production of the narcotic had begun under the Mughals, who were fond of it themselves. Unlike alcohol, opium was not proscribed by Islam, and its production and sale became a state monopoly. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, control of the trade passed first to the merchants of Patna and then to the British. By the end of the eighteenth century, after the Company turned to opium to erase its trade deficit with China, East Indiamen laden with half a million pounds of opium each departed almost daily for Canton, returning months later with cargoes of tea.
Few Indians used the drug themselves. Warren Hastings, the first de facto governor general, had decided shortly after his appointment in 1773 to spare natives its temptation:
“Opium is not a necessity of life, but a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted but for the purpose of foreign commerce only, and which the wisdom of the Government should carefully restrain from internal consumption.”
The welfare of the Chinese, in other words, was someone else’s problem. (Which it rapidly became: the tenfold increase in the amount of opium exported to China by the Company between 1790 and 1836 resulted, by one estimate, in a fiftyfold increase in the number of addicts there.)
Despite the Company’s withdrawal from trade, it retained a monopoly on granting licenses for opium production and sale. Revenue from such licenses, which totaled £729,000 in 1834–35, would reach £3.3 million in 1849–50. The drug still accounted for a fifth of its revenues in India, with the percentage in Bihar as high as four-fifths. The opium agents stricken from the Company’s payroll in Patna a few years before Nigel arrived were busier than ever. Some had gone into business for themselves. Others worked for private firms. They resided now in the Company Bagh, the Eurasian neighborhood sandwiched between Patna and the low rise at the edge of the civil station.
Even at that distance from the Golghar, a half mile or so, the Company Bagh could be recognized for what it was: a bastard child of East and West, unplanned and unloved. Mean, meandering streets, flat-roofed tenements, a colorless bazaar. Here and there, fine houses of a certain age, oddly placed and haphazardly maintained. Most belonged to the class of “commercial men.” A few housed well-to-do natives of the zamindar class. There were two or three churches, and the District Court House. Overhanging all was a sallow pall of dust that merged in the distance with the undulating smudge of the old city wall. Beyond, through its western gate, lay what the British called the Black Town.
One of its last European residents was Francis Buchanan, a surveyor whose journal of life there in 1811–12 reads like an indictment. To his mystification, natives often spoke of their fondness for Patna. As far as he was concerned, “it would be difficult to imagine a more disgusting place.” Amenities such as paving, cleaning, and lighting, considered essential in any European town of similar size and prominence, were “totally out of the question.” The principal street, though “tolerably wide,” was “by no means straight or regularly built.”
The only thing Buchanan found to praise about the city was the “great number of fine-formed women” who frequented the riverbank, fetching water. But their burdens roused him to further indignation. Unlike most of the larger Indian cities, Patna lacked any waterworks. Thus, he wrote, “the capital of Behar continues to stand parched and dusty by the river’s brink. The Ganges is at her feet and offers her its treasures, but her arm seems palsied, for she does not stretch it down to receive them.”
Even wells were poorly utilized. Those near the river were inconveniently deep, and liable to contain water too saline for drinking. Better wells could be found farther inland, but no one had ever attempted to distribute their supply to the city.
About the Golghar, Buchanan struggled to contain his exasperation. He noted that the structure was “intended” as a granary. But it had never been filled. Captain Garstin, so diligent in perfecting arrangements for depositing the grain, neglected to provide for dispensing it: the four sets of doors opened inward. Even a small amount of grain inside would prevent them from opening at all.
There was no reversing the doors on their hinges without enlarging the access tunnels, no enlarging the tunnels without running the risk of bringing down the dome.
It was irremediable.
There stood the handiwork of the engineer John Garstin, by profession an apostle of the “regularly built.” How then had it risen so hugely and absurdly on that graceless shore of ocher clay, as illogical and irregular as anything conceived or concocted by the wild, unknown men in the Black Town, that warren of chaos beyond the Company Bagh?
If only it was made by the natives, then that would explain it.
But it was not.