Calcutta (10 page)

It was a society which thrived on scandals and gossip of
scandals
. Much of the gossip was circulated, for the two indiscreet years of its life, in the
Bengal
Gazette.
Everyone knew that the latest fragment purveyed about Marian Alipore referred to the Governor-General’s lady, and that greedy old Poolbundy was none other than the Chief Justice, so-called because Sir Elijah had helped his cousin to a contract (or pulbundi) for the
upkeep
of bridges and embankments at Burdwan. Eventually the
Gazette’s
freebooting proprietor, Augustus Hicky, went too far and Hastings had him up for libel. There had been plenty of scandals for Hicky to choose from. Hastings and Mrs Imhoff was juicy enough, but nothing was better than Philip Francis and Madame Grand.

She was Mile Catherine Verlée, to start with, daughter of a French official at Chandernagore. When she was not yet fifteen she married George Grand, a member of the Company’s civil service who had sailed to India in the same ship as William Makepeace Thackeray’s grandfather. Twelve months later, Grand being out at dinner with Richard Barwell, (‘the happiest, as I thought myself, of men’) Philip Francis scaled the walls and took himself to the young Madame behind a locked bedroom door. A dutiful ayah raised the household. By the time Grand got home Francis had disappeared, but a jemadar was holding Mr Shee (he was later knighted) flat on the floor; Mr Shee had merely rushed in to help after hearing an alarmed whistle from Francis. There were recriminations, there were tears, and Madame Grand was parcelled off to her parents at
Chandernagore
, till Francis pursued her and installed her in his house at Hooghly. There was talk of a duel, with Francis being
supported
by his redoubtable cousin Major Phil (Fighting) Baggs, but it evaporated into a Supreme Court action in which Grand sought
£
160,000 damages. He received
£
5,000 and soon after
left Calcutta for some other station. Only months later, Madame Grand herself sailed for Europe alone. There she eventually became the Princess Talleyrand, hostess to statesmen at the Congress of Vienna, wryly remembered by Napoleon on St Helena, last heard of in extreme old age surrounded by parrots and snuff in a house on the Rue de Lille in Paris. And when she died, randy old Talleyrand merely said that her death simplified his position.

It was, above many things, a heavily introverted society. It could hardly be otherwise, given the difficulties of travel
outside
Calcutta. You could go by boat up the Ganga to Benares, but that took 75
days. Dacca was 37½ days away and it took the best part of a month to be transported as far as Murshidabad. Apart from the boat, the palanquin was the only method of travel abroad. The passenger reclined on cushions in this
glorified
sedan chair, sipping loll shrub or some other refreshment, while four bearers staggered and stumbled along the jungle trails; and, weeks later, he would reach Benares for Rs 500 or Patna for Rs 400. Much better stay at home, even though the streets were so dimly lit that William Hickey once scraped his face rather badly on a wall
en
route
to a party, even though there were certain conveniences like window glass absent from practically every house but the Governor-General’s, even though there were plenty of local hazards like tigers stalking any kind of meat just behind Chowringhee and footpads of both races who made the Maidan a deadly place at night; and there was that awful spot in Bowbazar which was becoming known as
Gulla-kutta
Gully, or throat-cutters’ lane.

But at least, you could comfort yourself, villains were properly dealt with if caught. Thieves were generally branded on the hand and pilloried for hours, though Ram joy Ghosh in 1795 stole tenpence and was first gaoled for a few days before being carried to Burrabazar and whipped for four hours up and down the street until he was discharged half dead at Chitpore Bridge; he might, alternatively, have been flogged all the way from Loll Diggy, the great tank of water where old Fort William was, along Lalbazar as far as the house of Mr Willoughby Leigh in Bowbazar. Dacoits, who killed as well as robbed, were savaged
to death; fourteen caught in 1789 were pinioned to the ground, one by one in sight of the others, where their right hands and left feet were hacked off at the joints; the stumps were then dipped in hot ghee and the mutilated bodies were left to perish slowly in the sun. Only Mogul jurisdiction contrived more hideous executions than that.

The chronicles of these times do not mention Bengalis much, except in subservient capacities. There was, in fact, by now a rising mercantile class among them, distantly accepted by the British, having its share in the plunder of Bengal, soon to
become
much closer to the new masters of the country. The way was almost open for a bright young lad of the district to
become
as rich on his wits as any red-faced sprig from
Kensington
. Russomar Dutt worked as a clerk for Hawke Davis and Co. at the turn of the century for Rs 16 a month until the accounts got inextricably confused; the firm offered Dutt Rs 10,000 to straighten out the mess, which he did, and was rich thereafter. There were natives making plenty of money before that. A
member
of the Tagore family was letting his house on the Esplanade to Company servants for Rs 800 a month, and if an Indian had property he invariably rented it to an Englishman at a very high price. It had long been commonplace for a man to take a local mistress on arrival in Calcutta, as William Hickey took his lovely Jemdanee; and sometimes these liaisons became so deeply
affectionate
that the
Calcutta
Gazette
in 1809 could advertise for sale ‘a garden house and grounds situated at Toltalah Bazar, which to any gentleman about to leave India, who may be solicitous to provide for an Hindostanee Female Friend, will be found a most desirable purchase’.

But mostly the British regarded the natives as servants of one kind or another. They were part of that mob of bheesties who crowded all day round Loll Diggy to fill skin bags with water, eight gallons at a time, for their masters. They were dur wans (doorkeepers), peons (footmen), hurcarrahs (messengers),
houcca-burdars
(stewards), mussalchees (dishwashers), dhobies (
laundrymen
), or sirdars (chief bearers). They were that army of menials attached to your household; one family of four had 110 servants, the bachelor William Hickey had sixty-three, and thirty or forty
was common. They were the sharks who extracted extravagant wages from you (head cook Rs 15–30 a month, bearer Rs 4, syce Rs 6–8, wet nurse Rs 12–16) and so in 1785 you and the other Company employees asked the Directors in London to do something about it, perhaps by fixing a pay scale; then you drifted along to the London Tavern or the Harmonic House in Lalbazar, to sup a dish of coffee and to riffle through the
newspapers
for R 1 inclusive. And eventually you sailed for home, taking your fortune with you. Samuel Tolfrey, under-sheriff,
returned
with Rs 600,000, which is six lakhs, which was then
£
30,000. Thomas Farrer, who defended Nuncomar, walked off with
£
60,000 and became Member of Parliament for Wareham. And the tales these people told when they reached home were so enticing that, within a few years, the Prince Regent himself was lobbying the Governor-General for a post in this fabulous land. He was turned down.

*

This was the society Warren Hastings bestrode like a colossus for thirteen years. The clearest symptom of his management was Pitt’s India Act in the last year of his power, which subordinated the Company even more to the authority of Parliament. The best of his achievement was a shift in the governing cast of mind, though this did not show itself at once. Immediately after
Hastings
there was Sir John Macpherson, a Skyeman best
remembered
for singing ballads with equal verve in Gaelic, Spanish and Hindustani and for helping himself on his way to the top by interesting the Nawab of the Carnatic in electricity and the magic lantern. His successor Cornwallis, lately surrendered at Yorktown, thought that Sir John’s twenty months in office had bequeathed him a ‘system of the dirtiest jobbery’ and proceeded to clean it up. He called the Calcutta warehouses ‘a sink of
corruption
and iniquity’ and did what he could there, too. And then he went on to make the Permanent Settlement. Only a few years before, Frenchmen had been storming the Bastille and what Cornwallis now did was almost as revolutionary in the context of Bengal.

Traditionally, the revenue had been collected by the hereditary zamindar, a word which literally means landholder, but which
covered anyone from an owner to a tax-collector. The
zamindars
paid dues to the Mogul’s government, later to the
Company’s
government under the revenue licence that Clive had secured in 1765. In turn they collected what they could extort from the peasantry in their areas; and the difference between the two sums, a jealously-held secret, represented their income. It was a system complicated, as far as the British were concerned, by the vagueness of Hindu and Muslim land-law which
recognized
force as the only title to land possession. This was
anathema
to the rising rulers of India, who were Whigs with a belief in justice founded on private property and commercial transaction. It was substantially this philosophy that they now imposed in Bengal; the peasant was to be secure as long as he paid fixed dues to the zamindar, who was to hold his position while he could produce a fixed revenue to the government. It was well-intentioned, it was civilized, it was very English. It meant that the zamindar was a recognizable proprietor who could be sold up like any other squire who failed. What it did in the end was to break up a potentially brutal but always close relationship between peasant and zamindar and lay Bengal wide open to a new breed of speculators from Calcutta and even farther afield; it made the peasant even more uncertain of his future than before. And it was the beginning of the end of Muslim supremacy in India.

It was part of Cornwallis’s permanent aversion to corruption and in this it was enormously misplaced. He had little time for most of the British he found in Calcutta but his distaste for the Indians was even greater. He verily believed that every native of the country was corrupt, and said so; just as the Marquis of Hastings (who gave us the word Eurasian) was to say within a generation that ‘The Hindu appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions and even in them indifferent’. The same language was to be repeated until the British left Calcutta, but from now on new voices could be heard from time to time and the first of them was Sir John Shore’s, who governed near the turn of the century. ‘When I consider myself the Ruler of twenty-five millions of people,’ he declared, ‘I tremble at the greatness of the charge … I consider every native of India,
whatever his situation may be, as having a claim upon me; and that I have not a right to dedicate an hour to amusement further than as it is conducive to health and so far to the despatch of business.’ That was the genuine tone of the Raj as the Raj was to imagine it for a century and more to come. It was the voice of the Clapham Sect, for Sir John, like a good many of his
successors
and their administrators, believed in a profound alliance with the Testaments – with, if anything, a slight preference for the Old over the New. It was also an echo of Warren Hastings.

Lord Wellesley arrived. Where Cornwallis had been
preoccupied
with corruption and Shore had been preoccupied with making land reforms work under the Ten Commandments,
Wellesley
was preoccupied with living like a prince and with
dislodging
the French once and for all from India, together with any damn-fool revolutionary notions that might now be
infiltrating
with them. His younger brother Arthur came, too, and promptly marched on the Mahrattas in the West; he was soon to win more applause with battles at Talavera, Salamanca,
Vittoria
and Waterloo. Yet nothing that either Wellesley did in India was to have greater effect than Lord Richard’s idea of a college at Fort William. It sprang, indeed, from that anxiety of his about revolutionary influences. He wished to transform the young men of the Company, prone to instability under the social pressures of Calcutta and a prey to the money-lenders now thriving in the city, into reliable functionaries of government. ‘To fix and establish sound and correct principles of religion and government in their minds at an early period of life‚’ he was to write later, ‘was the best security which could be provided for the stability of the British power in India.’ To this end he would create something comparable to the institutions of Oxford and Cambridge in Calcutta. Knowing well enough that the
Company
Directors would not tolerate anything that cut into their profits, he financed it from a levy he imposed on all civil
servants
in India. And he found an unlikely ally in the person of William Carey.

Carey was a farm labourer’s son with a remarkable talent for languages; he is said to have been proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Dutch before he was fifteen. He had renounced the
Church of England and become a Baptist minister and he had arrived at the Danish missionary settlement of Serampore in 1800 with four sons and a psychotic wife. Two of the six
missionaries
there, Fountain and Ward, had police records in
England
for openly supporting the French Revolution. In 1799 Wellesley had tried to seize a clutch of Baptists on suspicion of spying, being prevented only by the refusal of an American ship’s captain to hand them over and by the asylum offered at Danish Serampore. The talents of this community were such that by 1805 the Mission Press – run for a start by the printer Ward on a contraption Carey bought in Calcutta for
£
40 – could print any work in Bengali, Urdu, Orya, Tamil, Telegu, Kanarese or Marathi.