White Mughals (63 page)

Nor was it just the British who did well and lived extravagantly: Bengali merchant dynasties also flourished. The Mullick family, for example, had rambling baroque palaces strewn around the city, and used to travel around Calcutta in an ornate carriage drawn by two zebras.

If Calcutta impressed and surprised the British who sailed out from Georgian London, it amazed Mughal and Persian travellers, for whom it combined the splendour of scale with the novelty of imported notions of European urban management and Palladian architecture.
^hj
Khair un-Nissa’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari, first saw Calcutta in 1789 and could not believe his eyes: ‘The city now contains around five thousand imposing two or three storey houses of stone or brick and stucco,’ he wrote.

If Calcutta was a city of trade and business, it was also a place of swaggering excess, famous for being as debauched and dissolute as any port in the world. Forty years earlier, Robert Clive had written that ‘corruption, licentiousness and want of principle seem to have possessed the minds of all the Civil Servants’; and he spoke from experience. British Calcutta was a uniquely introverted, self-obsessed and self-regarding society, a little island of Britishness with remarkably few links to the real Indian India beyond. In his decade in the subcontinent, Philip Francis, for example, never ventured more than a mile or two outside Calcutta, and as late as 1793 the artist William Hodges, travelling up the Ganges and Jumna, could express it ‘a matter of surprise that a country so closely allied to us should be so little known. Of the face of the country, of its arts and crafts little has yet been said.’
⁴

The hundreds of Company servants and soldiers who arrived annually in Calcutta—typically, penniless younger sons of provincial landed families, Scots who had lost their estates or their fortunes (or both) in one of the Jacobite uprisings, squaddies recruited from the streets of the East End, down-at-heel Anglo-Irish landowners and clergymen’s sons—were all prepared to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles to the impossible climate of Bengal’s undrained marsh and steaming jungle, hazarding what would very probably be an early death, for one reason: if you survived there was no better place in the world to make your fortune.

More clearly and unequivocally than those elsewhere in India, the British inhabitants of Calcutta had come east to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time. For the politically ambitious in the East India Company too, this was the place to be: here, by the side of the Governor General, was somewhere you could make your name, find yourself quickly promoted up the ranks, and, all being well, return home with a Governor’s cocked hat and an honour which would allow you to match your elder brother’s inherited title. Few in Calcutta seem to have had much interest in either the mores of the country they were engaged in plundering, or in the social niceties of that which they had left behind.

By 1806 William Hickey was an attorney working for Henry Russell’s father, the Chief Justice of Bengal. He had been in Calcutta for thirty years now, but was still appalled by the excesses he saw around him every day in the taverns and dining rooms of the city. In his celebrated diaries he depicts a grasping, jaded, philistine world where bored, moneyed Writers (as the Company called its clerks) would amuse themselves in Calcutta’s punch houses
^hk
by throwing half-eaten chickens across the tables. Their womenfolk tended to throw only bread and pastry (and then only after a little cherry brandy), which restraint they regarded as the highest ‘refinement of wit and breeding’. Worse still was

With only 250 European women to four thousand men, and with little else to spend their money on, the young Writers tended to wander the streets of Calcutta, whoring in the city’s famous brothels and debauching in its taverns. Even the otherwise admiring Shushtari was horrified by the number of bordellos lining the Calcutta backstreets, and the health problems this caused:

Even his own cousin, he admits elsewhere, caught something of the sort in Calcutta, ‘an itching skin disease called
hakka o jarb
common in Bengal … It spread to cover his whole body and the itching allowed him no rest, so that he had to employ four servants to scratch and scrub him continually; this they did so vigorously that he often fainted; and he was no longer able to eat or sleep.’
⁷
That such social diseases were rampant was due at least partly to the fact that the manners and morals of Calcutta’s European élite left much to be desired, at least to Shushtari’s Persian eyes. It wasn’t just the phenomenal consumption of alcohol that worried him: ‘No-one eats on his own at home whether by night or by day, and people who know each other go to each others’ houses and debauch together … No man can prevent his wife from mixing with strange men, and by reason of women going unveiled, it is quite the thing to fall in love...’
⁸

All this was, in a way, hardly surprising. The Writers who made up most of the Company’s Calcutta employees were little more than school-boys, sent out from England as young as fifteen. After a dull and uncomfortable six-month voyage they were let loose from the holds and found themselves free from supervision for the first time. One traveller commented how ‘the keeping of race horses, the extravagant parties and entertainments generally involve the young Writers in difficulties and embarrassments at an early period of their lives’, while according to another observer, ‘the costly champagne suppers of the Writers Building were famous, and long did the old walls echo to the joyous songs and loud rehearsing tally-hoes’.

Joyous songs was clearly about as sophisticated as British Calcutta’s musical scene got. In 1784 a Danish player of the newly invented clarinet turned up in the city, seeking employment. Joseph Fowke, regarded as one of the more cultured citizens, was appalled: ‘This Clarinet D’Amor [is] a coarse instrument,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘worse to my ears than the grunting of Hogs.’ As for the new music of Haydn that the clarinet player had brought with him from Europe, Fowke was quite clear that it was not fit for public performance: ‘[This] Noisy modern music … ’ he wrote. ‘[Haydn is] the Prince of Coxcombs.’ A John Bull conservative down to his square-toed shoes, Fowke continued, ‘Fashion governs the world of Music as it does in dress—Few regulate their taste on the unerring principles of Truth and good Sense.’
⁹

Certainly not, so it would seem, the Calcutta clergy. According to Hickey, the army chaplain Mr Blunt, ‘[an] incomprehensible young man, got abominably drunk and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs, so as to render himself a common laughing stock’.
^hl
Even the Calcutta Constabulary were far from paragons of virtue: W.C. Blaquière, the startlingly effeminate police magistrate throughout the 1780s, being a noted cross-dresser who used to leap at any opportunity to adopt female disguises.
^hm

Wellesley had made some efforts to reform this dissolution, and in one of his more far-sighted moves had set up Fort William College in an attempt to educate the cleverer of the Writers in the Indian languages that they would need to administer the subcontinent. But the social reforms and stricter Victorian morality that began to establish themselves from the 1830s onwards were still far away, and in 1806, when Khair un-Nissa first arrived in Calcutta, this was still a city of Hogarthian dissipation.

Sometime at the beginning of May 1806, a small boatload of Shi’a Muslims from Hyderabad docked at the Port of Calcutta. Two veiled Begums were accompanied by their ladies-in-waiting and the shrouded ladies of another family, headed by a pair of suave and highly educated brothers, originally from Delhi.
^hn
Munshi Aziz Ullah and his younger brother Aman Ullah, and their families, had all made the journey to Calcutta before and knew what to expect. But to Khair un-Nissa and her mother this was all new, foreign territory, to be wondered at with the widest of eyes.

It was not the sailing season: the winds and unpredictable coastal tides of April and May made it too unsafe. So from Masulipatam, the party had skirted the foothills of the Eastern Ghats on elephant-back, then headed on up the east coast as far as the Orissan river port of Cuttack. There they had sent their elephants and the
mahouts
back to Hyderabad, and caught a skiff down to the coast and thence across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta.

After the relatively dry, equable climate of Hyderabad, the weather in a Bengali May—the hottest and most humid time of the year—would have been something quite new to the two Begums. Certainly, their cousin Abdul Lateef had been amazed by the humid fertility of the Calcutta hinterland—so different from the dusty scrub of Persia or the Deccan plateau: ‘The rainy season lasts for up to four months,’ he wrote,

The Hyderabadi party eventually landed at Beebee Johnson’s Ghat, beside the old Customs House, and set off—perhaps carried in closed purdah carriages or covered palanquins—to a rented house in the fashionable district of Chowringhee.
¹¹

To the two Begums, this city, so different from their own, and indeed from anything they had ever seen, must have been a breathtaking sight. Like their cousin Abdul Lateef Shushtari twenty years earlier, they would have been amazed at their first glimpse of a European town: by the succession of tall, white-porticoed palaces that lined the banks of the Hooghly long before they arrived at the city itself; by the mansions of Garden Reach with their soft lawns and fertile, landscaped grounds leading down to the muddy brown monsoon waters of the river; by the flowerbeds of the riverside gardens full of unfamiliar, imported English blooms; by the star-shaped ramparts of Fort William, then the port with its hundred Indiamen bobbing at anchor; the wide, clean streets leading into the heart of the town, and the buggies and carriages bumping in and out of the potholes on the Esplanade; the top hats and tailcoats of the men about town; the busks, parasols and (inexplicably to Muslim eyes) lapdogs of their ladies; the Governor General’s bodyguards in their plumed busbees and ‘blazing uniforms’; the ubiquitous storks perched atop Wellesley’s new Government House; the gleaming stucco.