Calcutta Page 6
Calcutta, when it had a mind to, could mount an exquisite ball. It could revolve for a night round the delightful Miss Sanderson, who so captivated young men that sixteen once turned up simultaneously wearing a livery modelled on her pea-green French frock with pink silk trimmings. At some cost in that dreadful climate, no doubt, as a reporter of the period tries to convey. ‘Imagine to yourself the lovely object of your affections ready to expire with heat, every limb trembling and every feature distorted with fatigue, with a muslin handkerchief in each hand, employed in the delightful office of wiping down her face while the big drops stand impearled upon her forehead.’ In the end, Miss Sanderson married Richard Barwell.
This does not sound like life in a straggling village of mud-houses and it was that no longer, for Calcutta was expanding again. In place of the old Fort William, Clive’s new one was finished; and, bearing in mind the old garrison’s handicap with almost no field of fire, a vast area alongside had been ordered empty of everything but trees and a parade ground, or maidan. Business in real estate and mortgages was brisk and mansions were going up. Hastings built one himself in the rising suburb of Alipore, obtaining tons of marble from Benares for the staircase. He began to see Calcutta as the first city of Asia and not merely in size or wealth. He was more ambitious than that.
Unlike many of the British settlers in Bengal, he had on his first visit struggled with the language. By now he could speak Bengali and Urdu well and he had a grasp of Persian, which was the tongue of the Muslim court. He decided to create an élite of British officials, speaking the local languages and mindful of the local traditions, who would work more effectively within a hierarchy that was still curiously balanced between the Emperor’s court in Delhi and the Company’s offices in London. The object for Hastings, was not British Empire but a pervading British influence in India, and it was not to be a mindless one. So he drafted the plan to establish a Persian chair at Oxford and he drew up a scale of financial inducements to the study of Bengali in Calcutta. Under his influence a new manner of men began to appear.
One of them was Charles Wilkins, who within a year or two had completed a set of Bengali type-faces and started the first vernacular printing press in India. Another was Nathaniel Halhed, who composed a Bengali grammar. Jonathan Duncan became a Persian scholar and Henry Colebrooke became an expert in Sanskrit. William Jones, presiding over the Asiatic Society which Hastings founded in 1784, was to leave the most startling mark of all by arguing a common source for Indo-European languages. These men were the Orientalists, the first serious British students of Indian culture, whose conclusions were to be most strenuously disputed half a century later by Lord Macaulay. They evoked a golden age in India’s cultural past and they shared their discoveries with the native intelligentsia of Bengal. Racial privilege was anathema to them. They were rationalists, classicists and cosmopolitans for the most part and, put simply, they believed that both races in India had much to give to each other. They were, patently, an élite and in the Calcutta society of their day they must have seemed a very rarified group indeed.
Parliament, meanwhile, had stepped into the East India Company’s affairs. The 1770 famine had not only killed off people; it had demolished much of the revenue, which was how they tended to see Indian famines in Leadenhall Street. By 1772 the Company was in such straits that it went to the Bank of England for a loan, which was turned down. So it asked the Government for £1 million, and the money was advanced at the cost of a Regulating Act the following year. From now on, the Company’s dividend was limited to six per cent until the loan was repaid, and surplus receipts went to the Exchequer, with all accounts and correspondence submitted to Parliament. A Supreme Court was created for Bengal. Above all, a royal Governor-General was to sit in Calcutta from now on, with obscure but tacit authority over Madras and Bombay, and the first one was to be Warren Hastings at a salary of £25,000 a year. If Robert Clive had indeed laid the foundation stone of British India at Plassey, Lord North had just raised the scaffolding in London.
Hastings was to rule with a Council of four Members (at £10,000 apiece), each with a vote equal to his own, and this was to bedevil all he tried to do until a Member died and tipped the balance. One of the new Members was already in Calcutta, locally born and bred, and he was Richard Barwell. Two others, General Clavering and Colonel Monson, were powerfully connected at home; Clavering, indeed, was not only to be second to the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, but he was George III’s private choice to succeed Hastings as soon as possible; and Monson’s wife, the Lady Anne, was the great-granddaughter of Charles II. Then there was Philip Francis. He was the son of a chaplain to the Fox family and he had been a War Office clerk. He was also almost certainly (though it was never proved) the Junius whose scurrilous attacks on public figures made vivid reading in the Publick Advertiser at the time. He was engaging, he had soft hands, women liked him, and he was to leave his wife and children behind in England because he thought, among other things, that Betsy was not intellectually up to the company he was now about to keep. When the Indian appointment came up he had been unemployed for a year, some piece of patronage having broken down, so he set off for Shropshire and within a couple of months had the dive family utterly charmed. And his future was secured. Doubtless he had told them, as he was to tell others later, that he thought the Government of Bengal ‘the first situation in the world attainable by a subject’.
In April 1774 this bundle of rulers sailed in the East Indiaman Ashburnham, in consort with another vessel, the Anson. That contained the new judges, led by Chief Justice-elect Sir Elijah Impey. He had been at Westminster with Hastings, in company with William Cowper, Edward Gibbon and a brace of future Prime Ministers (Shelburne and Portland). He was to stay healthy in the taxing climate of Bengal by making sure that his court always rose for the day at one o’clock and by taking regular holidays by the sea, either at Chittagong or at nearby Beercool, where the beach was ‘totally free from sharks and other noxious animals except crabs’. He was also to complain bitterly before long that he had not been able to lay up more than £3,000 a year since coming to Calcutta.
On 19 October the new men disembarked at Chandpal Ghat at noon exactly, which Francis thought ‘a comfortable season for establishing the etiquette of precedency’. This was scarcely done to the satisfaction of General Clavering, for one. A royal salute of twenty-one guns from Fort William had confidently been expected but a mere seventeen salvoes were ordered instead. Worse, there were no guards, no person to receive the gentlemen or to show the way, no state. Just awful heat and confusion, not an attempt at regularity, and a Governor-General who only put down his work when his colleagues and judges were on the doorstep of his house. ‘But surely‚’ remarked a member of the entourage, ‘Mr Hastings might have put on a ruffled shirt.’ It was a bad start to a relationship already undermined by six months of plotting on the voyage from England. It was never to improve. Francis was soon to be dispatching his slanders to Lord North or Baron Clive in England. One letter concedes that Mr Hastings has some little talents of the third or fourth order, the next claims that Mr Hastings has wholly and solely sold and ruined Bengal. He kept this up right to the end, which was not until 1818 in England, where both Hastings and Francis died within a few weeks of each other. It was Francis who lobbied Burke for the impeachment at Westminster. It was now Francis who stimulated his colleagues in Calcutta to be rid of the Governor-General. They were willing accomplices, for the most part; Monson until he died within two years of arrival, Clavering until he followed soon after, having left strict instructions that Mr Hastings was not to be informed till he was buried. Only Barwell seems to have been rather more concerned with his pellet-flicking and his gambling; he had a duel with Clavering one day at Budge Budge, in which both missed with pistols and civilly apologized.
The Three, then, attacked Hastings over his organization of the revenue and they attacked him over his conduct of a war against the Rohillas beyond Oudh. They snubbed
him at his tenderest point, and she was Mrs Imhoff. The two had met on an East Indiaman bound for Madras, Hastings with his Member’s commission to Fort St George, Marian with her child and her husband the Baron, an impoverished miniaturist seeking a cadetship in the Madras army. Eventually the Baron returned to England, the child sometime after, and much later there was a divorce. The Reverend Tally-Ho Johnson then married Hastings and Marian in St John’s, Elijah Impey giving her away, and it was a love match that lasted deeply and passionately until Hastings died. But for the moment it was another small and mean weapon in the hands of Francis, Clavering and Monson. They finally nailed their quarry at his weakest point, though the wound did not bleed him till the impeachment at Westminster. This was the trial and execution of Nuncomar.
Nuncomar, seventy years old at his trial, had held many posts under a succession of native governments in Bengal; when Siraj-ud-Daula was Nawab he was Governor of Hooghly. He had become a wealthy Rajah and he was an unprincipled old rogue whose path had crossed that of Hastings during the latter’s first period in Bengal. Hastings disliked him intensely with that coldest arrogance which he seemed to reserve for Indians he judged shifty and underhand, though no Englishman had yet shown greater warmth to Indians in general or to individuals who passed muster with him. The dislike was mutual. No sooner had Nuncomar scented where the wind lay with the new Council of Bengal than he was cultivating its acquaintance in the most pointed fashion. Finally, he gave Francis a document purporting to prove that Hastings had been taking bribes and worse. It was like manna from above to the Three and they canvassed their new ally in return, attending his levees, receiving hospitality at his house. Only the door of the Hastings residence remained firmly shut on all these comers. And then, quite suddenly, the city was agape with the drama of events. The news spread that Nuncomar had been thrown into gaol, charged with forging a bond six years before. And forgery, as the British of Calcutta patronizingly knew, could be regarded as little more than a peccadillo among Indians.
The trial was conducted with speed, in eight days flat, and in spite of Sir Elijah’s preference for short sittings the judges heard argument from eight in the morning till late each night, retiring twice a day to change their linen. Nuncomar fared well in his prison, eating sweetmeats for the most part, and receiving messages of condolence from Lady Anne Monson and from the gentlewomen of General Clavering’s house; Clavering’s aide-de-camp also paid him a call. In court the sittings were not only extended beyond the norm, but ran through a Sunday as well and at the end Sir Elijah made a summing up that was to cost him impeachment, too, thirteen years later. The entirely European jury found Nuncomar guilty, he was refused leave to appeal, and he was sentenced to death as a felon. A number of petitions on his behalf were either ignored or were stillborn, including one that Francis proposed from the Three but which Clavering and Monson declined to sign. Nuncomar hanged within seven weeks and he died with much dignity. And for every man in Calcutta who thought that he had got what he deserved, there were two convinced that he was the victim of judicial murder. After the two impeachments, posterity became as much inclined to take the first view as the second. At this distance the biggest pity of it seems to be that Hastings, of all people, should be tainted by it.
But tainted he was, and goaded he still was, and he was to remain so long after he and Francis had fought their duel. By the time enmity had reached that stage both Monson and Clavering were in their graves but Francis was still single-minded in his pursuit of prey and prize. The calumnies continued on their way to London; the Governor-General was now glorying in General Burgoyne’s surrender in America, he was preparing a retreat in Switzerland, he was totally incompetent in directing a war against the Mahrattas near the Malabar coast. In the end Hastings turned on his tormentor, determined to destroy him morally by exposing his dishonour if possible, willing to obliterate him physically if that failed. Characteristically, he laid his plans with care. He sat down and wrote a minute he proposed to put before a Council which was now less weighted against him, though with Barwell soon to leave India anything might shortly happen; indeed, at any time a ship might sail in from London bearing both the warrant that was to depose him and the new favourite who was to succeed. It was a long and provocative document but the essence of it went as follows: ‘My authority for the opinions I have declared concerning Mr Francis depends on facts which have passed within my own knowledge. I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found to be void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made, from the firm persuasion that I owe this justice to the public and myself as the only redress to both, for artifices of which I have been a victim, and which threaten to involve their interests with disgrace and ruin. The only redress for a fraud for which the law has made no provision is the exposure of it.’ Then he packed Marian Hastings out of town, to stay with the Dutch Governor at Chinsurah. And he waited six weeks until Philip Francis had got over a bad bout of fever. On 14 August 1780, he had a copy of the minute sent round to Francis’s house, with a note to say that the original would be on the Council’s table the next day.
They met at six in the morning on the road to Alipore, by a double row of trees that had once been a walk of Belvedere Garden. Colonel Watson, the Chief Engineer at Fort William, was already there with Francis when Hastings arrived with Colonel Pearse, the Commandant of Artillery (the one with a Begum wife and a half-caste son at Harrow). Colonel Pearse thought the place very improper for the business, so near to the road and the hour close to riding time when horsemen and women might soon be passing by. So they walked some distance towards Mr Barwell’s house, and found a retired and dry spot. Colonel Pearse discovered that both gentlemen seemed unacquainted with the procedure on these occasions (as they were; Francis had never fired a pistol in his life and Hastings only once or twice) and took the liberty to tell them that if they would decide on their distance, he and Colonel Watson would measure it out. Watson suggested fourteen paces, which Hastings thought rather a lot, but didn’t object, so it was done. The gentlemen next had to be told where to stand and when to fire. Then Francis had some trouble with his priming, coming thrice to the present and down again, until it was discovered that his powder was damp. Neither he nor Hastings had brought enough for more than one shot, but provident Colonel Pearse had a spare cartridge and supplied his man’s adversary with dry powder from that. And at last they were, after a fashion, ready to kill each other.
They presented together and Francis fired first but missed. Colonel Pearse said afterwards that it would have been possible to count three before Hastings pulled his trigger. He fired, Francis sat down with a bump and a cry that he was a dead man. Hastings shouted ‘Good God, I hope not’ and ran up to him. Francis, in fact, had the ball in his side and was bleeding heavily. Pearse and Hastings wrapped a sheet round the wound while Watson dashed for a palanquin from Belvedere, to carry him into town. That evening Hastings sent a message to Francis, asking him if he might call on the convalescent. Two days later, Francis declined ‘as civilly as possible’ through Colonel Watson, while Hastings was writing to a friend that he hoped ‘Mr Francis does not think of assuming any merit from this silly affair’. Both had behaved like English gentlemen of the period for half an hour or so, while conducting a deadly business which deceptively reads like a piece of comic opera. But within a month Francis was back in Council and the deep hostility between the two continued.
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Even if Job Charnock had duelled with Captain Hamilton, it is doubtful whether we should have known so completely what went on. But from the time of Warren Hastings onwards we begin to form detailed pictures of Calcutta. The age of Charnock and his immediate successors is a period of small and indistinct cameos because men were then too busy hacking at the jungle for existence and profit to sit down and describe for posterity the minutiae of their lives, which in any case were probably emptier than we care to think. So we get the bare bones of hi
story and little else. Even at the time of the Black Hole there is not much reporting of social trivia from Bengal; the chronicles, such as they are, are all of trade and campaigns and crucial events. But from the last quarter of the eighteenth century we find ourselves deeper and deeper in a mass of social literature which becomes more and more comprehensive as the eighteenth century slides into the nineteenth.
It is partly because newspapers begin to appear with the first number of the Bengal Gazette in 1780. It is partly because ladies have started to arrive with much time on their hands and large diaries to fill; parting gifts from England, no doubt. First it is Mrs Kindersley, then it is Mrs Fay, later it will be Emma Roberts and later still the Hon. Emily Eden. But it is also because there are now men in Calcutta who can apply a pen to words as well as to columns of figures, who can absorb what is happening around them while waiting for the fortune to grow; who can occasionally perform both feats as well as some professional task and remain remarkably indifferent to the possibility of a fortune. It is the age of, among others less vivid, William Hickey – attorney, dapper man about town, occasional painter and diarist extraordinary – who can both introduce the New Cutch Club to a new drink (burnt champagne) and maliciously but indelibly say all that needs to be said about an Army chaplain, Mr Blunt, in one sentence. This incomprehensible young man got abominably drunk, and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, running out stark naked into the midst of them, 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.’ Perhaps poor incomprehensible Mr Blunt had just been celebrating the recent rise in the salary of Bengal clergy, from Rs 800 to Rs 1200 (when 10 rupees were worth one sovereign). Or maybe he had landed some other windfall, for parsons dabbled in trade like everyone else. Officially they had leave to send up to £1,000 a year to England through the Company’s bills, but some did very much better than that. Mr Parry had a two thirds share in a salt, betel and tobacco cartel which yielded him a profit of £2,800 in the first year of trading and over £2,200 in the next.