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JANG BAHADUR’S VOYAGE by paddle sloop to England seems to have been uneventful. (Unlike that of two British officers who departed Calcutta on the long journey at about the same time, entrusted with conveying the Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria; after cholera broke out on board, the ship received a hostile welcome in Mauritius and was nearly sunk, then narrowly averted the same fate afterwards in a monumental gale as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope.) But the maharaja’s arrival was front-page news. As the first prince of the East to visit Britain, he created a sensation.
One newspaper account described him as athletic, dark, and handsome, dressed in splendor, “like most Oriental despots,” with special reference to his sarpech headpiece adorned with rubies, pearls, and diamonds. Waltz king Johann Strauss II composed “The Nepaulese Polka,” with sheet music featuring a half-page lithograph portrait of “General Jang Bahadur Koomwur Ranajee.” On an evening out at Covent Garden with Queen Victoria, Jang Bahadur tossed gold coins onstage at the conclusion of an aria, calling out “Pick up!” in Nepali, and his countrymen believe to this day that this is how the word “tip” entered the English language.
Jang Bahadur failed, however, in his mission to obtain a pledge that Britain would respect Nepalese sovereignty. At the insistence of the East India Company, he was refused direct negotiations. Despite increasing dissatisfaction in Parliament with the Company’s management of India, the sovereign powers granted by its charter remained in force. If Jang Bahadur was to treat with anyone, maintained the Court of Directors, it must be the governor general in Calcutta.
Though the maharaja was left to wonder why, then, he was encouraged to set out for England in the first place, the rebuff was precisely what Government House had counted upon in granting his wish to travel. No one in Calcutta expected him to make diplomatic headway on British soil. They endorsed his sojourn there in the belief that it would shatter any illusions he might cherish about opposing British ambitions, including the annexation of his country if it ever came to that. Once Jang Bahadur saw for himself the full extent of British wealth and power, went the thinking, he would realize the futility of resistance.
Of wealth and power he duly received an eyeful. He spent his days reviewing troops, inspecting armories, and touring factories. Accompanied by Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, he visited the gargantuan framework of iron rising in Hyde Park, 1,851 feet long and sheathed with a million square feet of glass—a “Great Shalimar” to some, and to others a “Crystal Palace.” Upon completion, it would enclose full-grown trees and thirteen thousand exhibits devoted to modern technology and design: steam engines and carriages, surgical instruments and “philosophical instruments,” the electric telegraph and the illuminated microscope. Organized by Albert himself, the upcoming Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations made much of its attention to the achievements of countries around the world, and would serve as the prototype for a succession of world’s fairs that continues to the present day. But it was conceived above all as a showcase for the supremacy and superiority of the people who were just then beginning to know themselves as Victorians.
Over there: cotton cloth made by the slaves of the king of Dahomey.
Over here: the first working version of a fax machine, made by a physicist in Hampstead.
England had the world at her feet. It was impossible for Jang Bahadur to come away with a contrary impression. But what Henry Lawrence and James Login had wanted him to see for himself about the British was not their material preeminence but, as Lady Login put it, “what sort of people they were.”
They wanted to expose him to the masters of India’s masters. And these, by and large, did not share the bloody-mindedness of those who ruled on their behalf in India. Staunch opponents of conquest for its own sake, the governing classes supported not the subjugation of native peoples but rather their elevation. Their lofty conception of empire was rooted in the conviction, as Jan Morris put it, that “British skill and science was ready to usher mankind into a golden age.” And, thanks to science itself, it was a mind-set that could now be imposed from afar. The telegraph wires first raised in Britain in 1846 already extended to Egypt and the Levant. Calcutta still clung to its remoteness from oversight, but its grip would not last long. Unauthorized wars and injudicious proclamations would soon go the way of suttee and Thuggee and the sacrifice of infants on the shore of Sagar Island.
It was up to Jang Bahadur to make of these English what he would. Events proved his judgment astute, for his dynasty’s rule of Nepal outlasted the British Raj in India. In the meantime, he succeeded at ingratiating himself with all the right people, just as Henry Lawrence imagined he would after experiencing firsthand the queen’s keen interest in the East and its natives during his stay at Windsor Castle two years before. All society took its cues from the royal couple, and their attentiveness to Jang Bahadur opened every splendid door in London at the maharaja’s convenience. He was feted so tirelessly that during his three-month stay he graced only one other English city with his presence: Nigel’s hometown of Coventry, in the West Midlands.
What Nigel’s family thought of Jang Bahadur was lost in the German raid that destroyed more than four thousand homes and made its own contribution to the English lexicon: “coventrate.” Nor do firsthand accounts survive of their reaction to Nigel himself. Judging from the stories told and retold for decades afterwards, he was anything but reticent about his life of luxury in Kathmandu, which he seems to have hinted was somehow connected with the conveyance of precious gems. Another story out of India that vied with the visit of Jang Bahadur for prominence in the news during Nigel’s leave was the arrival of the Koh-i-noor diamond, which reached London on July 2. That he returned East just as doubts about the diamond’s provenance surfaced publicly evidently gave rise to the legend that Nigel “owed everything” to that gemstone in particular.
What clinched it for his family was that he stayed there. He stayed there and maintained sporadic contact for a few years, and then there was none. They could only conceive of a nefarious explanation.
Whether it could stand up to scrutiny probably seemed less consequential to the Hallecks of the mid-nineteenth century than it would to a distant relative in the latter part of the twentieth. He was concerned with the vagaries of history. What mattered to Nigel’s immediate family in Coventry was incontrovertible contemporary fact.
He was gone. They said their goodbyes and wished him bon voyage in April 1851. They never saw him again.