White Mughals (99 page)

What seems to have most impressed the young traveller was the way Sayyid Ali combined in one man the callings of poet and astronomer, spending nights gazing at the stars while ‘every afternoon he held at home a
majlis
[gathering] of poets where they would present their new work. The author [Abdul Lateef] studied astronomy with him until his death.’ Over the years Shushtari grew increasingly interested in astronomy. At the same time, partly under the influence of the British during his time in India, he seems to have become increasingly sceptical of the traditional idea of using the stars as a means of predicting the future: as he wrote in the
Tuhfat
, he later came to regard as wasted the years he spent in the Middle East studying astral influences, because after a while ‘I had no belief in the influence of the stars and the predictions of astrology, yet in those days, I spent much of my time calculating and casting horoscopes.’ See
Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam
, p.145.

Maskelyne (1732-1811) will be familiar to anyone who has read Dava Sobel’s
Longitude
, where he is the villain of the piece—something Pearse would have sympathised with, as he later ceased to send his observations to Greenwich, believing that ‘Maskelyne has suppressed all my astronomical observations, and has not had the civility even to answer my letters to him.’

Thomas Deane Pearse (1738-89) not only shared the same astronomical interests as James, he seems to have lived a similar lifestyle. According to his will, Pearse had long been secretly married to ‘Punna Purree a native of Hindostan who since the said marriage is become Punna Purree Pearse and I do firmly believe that our marriage, tho’ for many years kept secret was in every respect Lawfull, and if it were not so I most assuredly would have gone through every possible form to have made it so. By my wife Punna Purree Pearse I have only one son Thomas Deane Mahomet Pearse’—who, it turns out, they somewhat surprisingly sent to Harrow. Whether Tommy Mahomet Pearse told his English public-school chums about his Indian mother is unknown; or indeed for that matter whether he told them that also living in the house and helping to bring him up was his father’s Hindu mistress, Murtee. Both, incidentally, seem to have been women of means—and thus presumably from an élite background—since in Pearse’s will he repays large sums of money to each which, so he writes, he borrowed from them to buy land in Chowringhee. It is also clear from the will that his wife, Punna Purree, seems to have brought to the marriage her own Mughal garden, Purree Bagh. Pearse’s will, written in Purree Bagh, is an extraordinary document in which he divides his property between his Harrovian son, his Muslim Bengali wife and his Hindu concubine—except for his chemical and astronomical instruments, which he leaves to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. There also survive amid Warren Hastings’ papers two of Punna Pearse’s own letters to Hastings, in which she talks of her difficulties since her husband’s death, and asks him to use his influence to help her get her full allowance, which the executors appear to have cut down: all Pearse’s estates are now ‘in the hands of Captain Grace’, she writes, ‘but he won’t do according to the Colonel’s Will—and he lessen’d my allowance so that I cannot be maintain’d by it. As you are like my protector—therefore I informs of it to you.’ Finally she asks Hastings to favour her son, now in England: ‘I beg you will be pleased to favor Mr. Tommy.’ There is no record of Hastings’ reply, or of the result of Punna’s pleading, and at this point the historical record goes silent. For Thomas Deane Pearse’s will see Bengal Wills for 1787-1790, 1789, OIOC, L/AG/34/29/6, No. 26, The Will of Col. Thomas Deane Pearse. For Punna Pearse’s letters to Warren Hastings, see Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,172, Vol. XLI, 1790, pp.317, 410.

Though George was James’s full brother and was also based in India, the two were never close and kept in only intermittent contact. William Kirkpatrick had even less contact with his other half-brother. George sounds a slightly hopeless figure—stiff, pious, unimaginative and somewhat lacking in charm—whose career in India never took off, despite the best efforts of James and William to use their influence on his behalf. When he finally returned home in 1803 he was unable to afford even to pay his passage, as James described to William in a letter of June of that year: ‘I must not omit noticing the lamentable case of poor George, who is gone home in the
Travers
so miserably poor after twenty years service in the Civil Line that his agents have applied to me for reimbursement of a balance due on account of his passage money. I enclose you his letter to me from Calicut, which will enable you to form some idea of the wretch’d forlorn situation of this excellent worthy fellow, who shall not however want either the comforts or conveniences of life, as long as it may please God to continue to me the means of enabling him to command them.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/59, 11 June 1803, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.

An interesting and typically non-sectarian Deist usage of James’s, and one that would work equally well in a Christian and a Muslim context. For similar reasons many Muslims living in the West today sometimes choose to use terms such as ‘the Almighty’ rather than the more specifically Islamic ‘Allah’ (though ‘Allah’ is also used by Arab Christians as their word for God).

Nur kept careful accounts, which typically read as follows: 18 requests for pocket money . . . . . . 3.0 [?shillings] a pair of gloves . . . . . . 3.0 a pen knife . . . . . . 1.0 a great coat for Geo Polier: 1.1 a silver spoon for Miss AB: 14.6 25 × coach to take Miss AB to school: 10.613 × bisquits from Miss AB: 1.0 25 Oranges for GP: 1.0, Prayer books and Christian doctrine for Miss AB: 1.6
Blossoms of Morality,
slate and Spelling book . . . . . . 8.3.

At the same time de Boigne is spending a king’s ransom doing up his lodgings at 47 Portland Place: £73 for the carpenters’ work in the house, £39 for the painters, £32 for the plasterers, and £28 for the bricklayers’ work on the chimney in the stables—a total of £254-with £42.19s. for the removal bill alone. In September 1799 de Boigne paid £169 for a travelling chaise, and in February 1799 he paid J. Hatchett and Co., His Majesty’s Coachmaker, £82.5s. for painting his chariot. He also spent a fortune on his new Countess: £20.13s on a trip to an Edinburgh jeweller, John White of South Bridge, on 14 July 1801 to buy Madam earrings, necklaces and a gold brooch. This clearly wasn’t enough: the following day he was back in the same shop buying more necklaces, clasps, bracelets and earrings for a further £58. After de Boigne asked for his children to be sent to him in France a decade later, Nur Begum lived the rest of her life on her own in Horsham in Sussex, where she converted to Christianity, took the name Helena Bennet (an improvement on ‘Mrs Begum’) and inspired Shelley, who saw the woman known locally as ‘The Black Princess’ wandering lonely and forlorn around St Leonard’s Forest. She died on 27 December 1853, aged eighty-one. Her former housekeeper, Mrs Budgen, remembered her as ‘sallow in complexion with strange dark eyes. She would sometimes stay in bed until noon and often kept her nightcap on when at last she got up. She took no trouble at all about her dress but wore magnificent rings. She smoked long pipes [presumably a hookah], lost her temper very easily and could not be bothered with anything.’ She attended mass at the local Catholic church in Horsham, but her grave is aligned quite differently from the others in the cemetery, possibly indicating that at her death she had hedged her bets and tried to have it aligned in the Muslim fashion. See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s sad and fascinating piece on Nur/Helena in her book
Engaging Scoundrels: True Tales of Old Lucknow
(New Delhi, 2000), pp.88-93.

An Indian expression for the sea. According to tradition, Hindus lost caste if they ‘crossed the Black Water’.

This was rather rich coming from Ochterlony, who, it should be remembered, was reputed to have thirteen wives, all of whom took the evening Delhi air with the Resident, each on the back of her own elephant.

Sutherland (1766-1835), from Tain in Invernesshire, was the Maratha
qiladar
or fort-keeper at Agra (and as such would shortly face Ochterlony in battle). In old age both he and his Begum returned to Britain, where they settled on Stockwell Green. Sutherland died in 1835, but his Begum, who eventually converted to Christianity (in contrast to her daughters, who remained Muslims) lived on until the age of eighty, finally passing away in 1853. Two cousins of Sutherland’s also married Indians or Anglo-Indians: Lieutenant Colonel John Sutherland (1793-1838), who briefly commanded the Nizam’s irregular horse, married Usrat Hussaini, ‘a Persian Princess, in the principal mosque at Bhurtpore’, while another ne’er-do-well member of the clan was Robert Sutherland (c.1768-1804), who had been cashiered from the Company’s forces and joined the mercenary army of Scindia under Benoît de Boigne. There he was known as ‘Sutlej Sahib’, married the Anglo-Indian daughter of George Hessing, another Maratha freelance, and had a whole tribe of Anglo-Indian mercenary children. He and many of his brood (and those of his Hessing in-laws) are buried in domed Mughal tombs in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Agra.

In his early letters James himself was not above making disparaging comments about Anglo-Indians. His attitudes to mixed-race children—as to so many other aspects of Indo-British relations—seem to have been radically changed by his falling in love with and marrying Khair un-Nissa, and he writes of his two children by her in an utterly different and infinitely more compassionate way than that in which he once wrote about his first ‘Hindustani’ boy. This could, however, have had as much to do with class as race: in India, as in Britain, illegitimate children born to lower-class mistresses were treated in a very different way to children of aristocratic women, whether born in or out of wedlock.

Isabella was the most beautiful of William Kirkpatrick’s daughters, and quickly became famous in Calcutta for her startling blue eyes and her grace of movement. According to the
Calcutta Review
of April 1899, ‘even so critical a genius as John Leyden made her the theme of his verse, as befitted one who was known on the banks of the Hooghly as ‘’Titania” and who had been compared for her stately beauty to Madame Récamier’.

This is the first and only explicit reference in James’s letters to Lieutenant Samuel Russell, to whom the Residency is usually attributed—I think wrongly. On the evidence of James’s letters his contribution seems to be limited to finishing the building off—and even that possibly only after James’s death.

This square, still known as the Mir Alam Mandi, survives in the old city of Hyderabad, albeit in a pretty ruinous and derelict state.

A mourning ritual in Mughal society, and the most extreme expression of grief Khair un-Nissa could have made.

The surgeon in charge of the Madras Lunatic Hospital certified that John Chinnery ‘has entirely lost … his judgement and [his] memory is so impaired that he cannot recognise his nearest relatives—he is in fact in the most lamentable state of mental fatuity’. See Patrick Conner,
George Chinnery 1774-1852: Artist of India and the China Coast
(London, 1993), p.87.

Further personal, political and economic disappointments awaited Lord Wellesley in England, and though he rose to become Foreign Secretary (1809-12) and later Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1821-28 and again 1833-34), he never fulfilled his remarkable early promise. His marriage broke up almost immediately on his return to Britain, and in later years he suffered the additional humiliation of watching his younger brother Arthur eclipse him both as a politician and a national hero. He died disappointed and embittered (though still remarkably self-regarding) on 26 September 1842. See Iris Butler,
The Eldest Brother: The Marquess Wellesley 1760-1842
(London, 1973), passim.

Holkar eventually made peace with the British, only to lapse into insanity shortly afterwards. According to one authority, ‘out of remorse he took to drink, consuming vast quantities of cherry and raspberry brandy, and in 1808 went mad. From then on until his death in 1811 he was kept tied up with ropes and fed on milk.’ See Sir Penderel Moon,
The British Conquest and Dominion of India
(London, 1989), p.347.

Dr Ure had accompanied his wife to Calcutta a fortnight earlier.

The inscription reads:

Though even at the best of times, town planning was never one of Calcutta’s more obvious virtues: as early as 1768, Mrs Jemima Kindersley thought it ‘as awkward a place as can be conceived, and so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand: people keep constantly building; and everyone who can procure a piece of ground to build a house upon consults his own taste and convenience, without any regard to the beauty or regularity of the town’. Mrs Jemima Kindersley,
Letters from the East Indies
(London, 1777), p.17.

‘Punch’ being of course an Indian word, arriving in the English language via the Hindustani
panch
(five), a reference to the number of ingredients for the drink, which traditionally were (according to
Hobson Jobson
) ‘arrack, sugar, lime-juice, spice and water’.

Blunt was part of a long tradition of dubious English clergymen exported to India after failing to find a living at home. The curate of Madras in 1666, for example, was described as ‘a drunken toss-pot’, while his counterpart in Calcutta twenty years later was ‘a very lewd, drunken swearing person, drenched in all manner of debaucheries, and a most bitter enemy of King William and the present Government’. Back in Madras, Francis Fordyce, padre to the Presidency throughout the 1740s, turned out to have fled his post as chaplain at St Helena after having debauched a planter’s daughter. In Madras he fared little better, quarrelling with Clive and being called before the Council to justify his conduct. He refused to attend, but it was declared in his absence that he vowed he would ‘pull off his canonicals at any time to do himself justice’. See Henry Dodwell,
The Nabobs of Madras
(London, 1926), pp.19-20.