The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  The process was a fascinating one, despite its unequal politics. From the very start, the queen had shown interest in matters Indian, often revealing a broadness of mind that horrified the men who sternly operated her government. As Miles Taylor argues in The English Maharani , if the queen was magnanimous, it ‘always came from belonging to the winning side’. But even as she collected baubles and gems from the subcontinent, there was an awkward sincerity to her politics. The proclamation itself was a document with which she was not satisfied: she wanted a firm statement that Indians would be ‘placed on an equality with [all other] subjects of the British Crown’, a proposal parliament watered down to a vague line on her ‘obligations of Duty’ towards India. Elsewhere, she won—while an earlier draft loosely committed to the ‘relief of poverty’, Victoria revised this to promise Indians ‘peaceful Industry’, ‘Works of Public Utility’, and a government ‘for the benefit of all Our Subjects’ whose prosperity, contentment and gratitude would be the tests of its success.

  Of course, what followed was revealing. To successive viceroys appointed in India at the head of an extractive state, the queen’s proclamation of 1858 was held up as a mirror of shame. As late as the 1890s, Dadabhai Naoroji’s campaigns in Britain cited the promise of 1858, while in 1908 Mahatma Gandhi referred to the proclamation to demand rights in South Africa. The proclamation became the standard against which the Raj could be judged, and everyone, from dethroned princelings to ordinary souls fighting property disputes, appealed to Victoria’s words—and often directly to her—asking the British to live up to its meaning. Indeed, even the introduction of income tax was lambasted as flouting guarantees in the proclamation. So the men in charge found a typically British solution to play things down: a protocol was evolved to determine which petitions actually reached Victoria’s desk and, to quote Taylor again, soon ‘the Government of India [was] transformed from postman to the sovereign to censor of the royal mail’.

  Interestingly, for Victoria, India opened up something new on a deeply personal level: renewed relevance. ‘Denied a political role at home’ by constitutional convention, Taylor argues, ‘she found it instead in her Indian dominion’. From the 1840s, for instance, she corresponded privately with viceroys, and although this still offered a lopsided picture, it eliminated some filters installed by officialdom in London. While reports of atrocities against British women during the 1857 rebellion appalled her, she soon suspected sensationalism in the press, and asked for evidence. And she revelled in the adulation that came from India’s elites—whose nationalism at this stage did not sit in opposition to loyalty to the queen—as they composed poems comparing her to Hindu goddesses. Her affection for her Hindi munshi is, of course, well known (the letters they exchanged were destroyed after her death), and even from afar India came to mean something special for her in a way it did not for others in her establishment.

  Naturally, Victoria also grew jealous of her position. During the celebrated 1875–76 tour of the country by her son and heir, Edward VII, she was determined to ensure that the masses did not mistake him for their sovereign. Much to his irritation, she made it clear that he was the viceroy’s guest and not her representative. She would not even permit the prince to read out a message on her behalf to her Indian people. In fact, when the tour became a massive success, the queen chose to orchestrate a sensational event of her own to surpass it: the assumption of the title ‘Empress of India’. It was another matter that the innovation was received with borderline hostility in Britain itself, for powerful sections in the House of Commons were appalled by this gaudy claim of imperial status. The queen was furious, but the episode also highlighted the utility India held personally for her—her daughter, married to the German crown prince, was set to one day become an empress, and Victoria could not imagine being outranked by her offspring. Her son, meanwhile, used the occasion to pay his mother back in her own coin: he wrote to the prime minister that he had no desire to be styled His Imperial Highness, and was quite content as a Royal Highness.

  In the end, Victoria represented something for everybody in connection with India, becoming a bridge between competing ideologies and identities. The British deployed her to contain the earliest stirrings of Indian nationalism; to Indian nationalists, her proclamation allowed for calls for reform to be issued, couched in a language of loyalism. For Victoria herself, India offered both an empire and queenly purpose, carving out for her an unparalleled position that no British monarch after her was quite able to emulate—or imitate.

  THE ABSENT QUEEN OF LAKSHADWEEP

  In 1781, finding herself in a tricky spot with the English East India Company, an Indian woman sent a courier to the Ottoman sultan bearing a plea for assistance. Abdul Hamid I was inclined to help and, summoning the English ambassador in Istanbul, expressed hope that ‘the Beebi Sultan, the Queen of Malabar’ would be treated sympathetically by his countrymen. It was a generous gesture, certainly, but like most gestures did not translate into any tangible advantage for his supplicant. In 1783, on the contrary, since she had allied with the wrong side during the Company’s war against Tipu Sultan, her fort in Cannanore in Kerala was invaded, and her palace plundered. Plunder, that is, in addition to the 2.6 lakh she was compelled to pay as indemnity, of which a lakh, she discovered, was off the books to satisfy the personal (and secret) avarice of certain officers. A treaty was signed with both sides promising, somewhat ambitiously, to uphold it ‘as long as the sun and moon shall last’. Six years later, these exalted celestial bodies were brushed aside abruptly as the two parties went to war once again; and this time, the lady lost her fort forever.

  The woman in question, Junumabe II, belonged to the Arakkal family of Cannanore that had controlled the Lakshadweep islands from at least the sixteenth century, though of course no ruler ever actually condescended to visit their little kingdom, parked as they were across the water on the Indian coast. The origins of the house are obscure. One tale connects them with a legendary Malayali monarch who converted to Islam and sailed for Mecca—an eternal flame was maintained in the Arakkal Palace in memory of this ‘uncle’. Another story features a Hindu princess who, the Dutch said, ‘was made pregnant by a prominent Moor or Arab’, spawning a Muslim royal line that followed Hindu matrilineal succession. The firstborn ruled regardless of sex as the Ali Raja; if it was a girl, she had the additional honorific of ‘Bibi’. Yet another origin myth shows their ancestress in chaster light—she was drowning when a Muslim youth dived in to her rescue, but having been touched by a stranger in a compromising, watery situation, she took him and his faith as her own. A final story erases all royal links and simply points to a noble family that transferred its allegiance to Islam many centuries ago, and over time rose to princely status.

  Either way, a local rajah from the mainland called the Kolathiri granted this Muslim line the sovereignty of Lakshadweep in return for adequate tribute. ‘In its palmy days,’ one scholar notes, ‘the House administered its own laws, maintained its own currency and exercised powers of inflicting capital punishment over its subjects.’ These subjects are believed to have gone in boats from Kerala to populate the islands a long time ago, some claiming descent from high- caste Hindu clans. At a certain point, a saint revered locally as Munbe Muliyaka sailed in and persuaded them to embrace Islam, though the religion actually practised was a blend of Quranic principle and Hindu custom. It was the Portuguese who first disturbed the independence of the islands, and in the resultant bloodshed, the islanders sought the protection of the Kolathiri—the very Hindu ruler who would transfer the suzerainty he thus gained to the progeny of the drowning woman. This new royal family grew wealthy by cultivating commercial networks as far away as Arabia and Persia, and their approach to the islands now in their possession was also driven by calculations of profit and loss—a policy that led to great discontent in Lakshadweep.

  It appears that the islands were viewed, from the comforts of the palace in Kerala, more as a cash cow than as a community
to which its rulers also had certain obligations. In the 1760s, for instance, the Ali Raja introduced a coir monopoly under which islanders were prohibited from selling their goods to outsiders. The prices approved by the Arakkal treasury for coir were, however, vastly lower than the market rates. There were other rules too, some of them ridiculous enough to infect the air with a mood of rebellion. ‘Except jaggery’, we are told, ‘all the minor products of the islands’ (including tortoise shells) were monopolised. Cowries, for instance, were purchased dirt cheap from Lakshadweep and sold at a 400 per cent profit by its absentee princes in markets elsewhere. With tobacco, the arrangement was ‘particularly scandalous’, the Bibi reaping profits of up to 1,000 per cent. Agents of her government who were stationed on the island made things worse—their measly annual salaries meant they too were anxious for cuts. If a bovine were killed, the agent was entitled to a quarter of its meat. If a new boat was to be launched, the Bibi’s men could seize it if they were denied their illicit fee.

  In the 1780s, the cluster known as the Amindive islands revolted and pledged itself to Tipu Sultan. And when that ruler was defeated, control of these islands passed to the English as spoils of war. The Bibi, though, retained Minicoy and the Laccadive cluster, paying tribute to the Company now—during negotiations, she claimed her revenue from these was only 20,000, while a British investigation revealed that she drew nearly six times that figure in actual income. Her tribute was settled grudgingly at 15,000 a year. The islanders, however, continued to clash with their overseas royal government, and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, several years of tribute was in arrears—in 1869, it was discovered that Arakkal had, in fact, lost control over most of the islands and no longer had any revenue from them. A ‘phantom sovereignty’ remained in force, while the British took matters into their own hands. If Arakkal wanted the islands back, the Bibi was informed, she would have to improve her style of government—and, of course, settle the pending payments. Neither of these, everyone knew, was actually feasible.

  Decades passed in this fashion, till in 1908 the impasse was broken. Imbichi Ali Raja, the then Bibi, agreed to surrender sovereignty over Laccadive and Minicoy in return for an annual malikhana (pension) of 23,000—an amount that is still paid to the family. A seven-gun salute appears to have been granted, along with British recognition of the title ‘sultan’ for heads of the dynasty. As for the islanders, these events generated hope of a better, or at least fairer, regime. And to a certain extent, conditions were created, if not of prosperity, of fewer exactions. After all, in shaking off the autocracy of a princess in Kerala, the islands were only placing themselves under the very different variety of tyranny that came with becoming subjects of the British empire. And any real promise of progress would have to wait for some more decades till the colonial government withdrew, and a democratic state handed over the destinies of Lakshadweep, at last, to its own people.

  THE ENGINEER AND HIS RICE BOWL

  In 1877, at the height of the Great Famine that devastated the south, a distinguished Englishman, recently knighted for services rendered to the British empire, yet again took a vociferous stand against the policies of his queen’s government in India. For years he had railed against imperial overzeal for the railways—a sophisticated scam that funnelled out Indian resources while delivering unconscionable profits to faraway investors—and now he was vindicated. For ‘we have before our eyes’, he noted, ‘the sad and humiliating scene of magnificent [rail] Works that have cost poor India 160 millions, which are so utterly worthless in the respect of the first want of India, that millions are dying by the side of them.’ The railways certainly brought grain to starving masses, but the costs were so disproportionately high that nobody could afford to buy them—official profiteering perverted even the delivery of famine relief.

  Sir Arthur Cotton had made a career of crossing the line where India was concerned, taking stands that irritated his superiors even as they earned him much local admiration—two districts of Andhra Pradesh hold an estimated 3,000 statues of the man. He was, of course, as much an imperialist as his peers, but it was not a desire to bring glory to Great Britain that motivated him. Instead, this tenth son of the tenth son of a regrettably named Sir Lynch Cotton had experienced a religious awakening as a young man in 1826. Thereafter, he felt his mission was to work ‘for the glory of God … and the benefit of men’, and with familiar racial condescension, he decided that the men in question were poor brown Indians. His self-righteousness, however, was wedded to sincerity—having taken up the Indian cause, Sir Arthur never gave up, describing himself as ‘a man with one idea’ that could make a difference in India: irrigation.

  Sir Arthur was a military engineer who caused his colleagues great consternation by refusing to be awed by steel and steam. He had no dispute with the railways but it made no sense to him that extortionate technology should be imposed on a landscape where the basics had been entirely neglected. He was also somewhat naïve—he once argued against the term ‘collector’ since it suggested that the sole interest of revenue officials lay in extracting money, when surely they were also responsible for that other thing called development. The architects of the Raj, of course, were under no such delusions—the collector was there precisely to collect, and Sir Arthur’s lifelong mistake lay in hoping that India’s wants would also somehow feature in those essentially exploitative calculations masquerading as government policy. Naturally, he was thwarted by ‘administrative jealousy’, and many were the sneerers who called him a ‘wild enthusiast’ with ‘water in his head’.

  Still, Sir Arthur was tireless. In 1827, after inspecting the second-century Kallanai dam near Thanjavur, he regretted that ‘this work, which had a population of perhaps one hundred thousand and a revenue of £40,000 dependant upon it, had not been allowed £500 to keep it in repair.’ He personally rode out to persuade his superiors to correct this, only to be rebuffed. ‘Government,’ he was told, ‘could not squander such sums as this upon the wild demands of an Engineer.’ ‘Is it surprising,’ he asked in dismay, that ‘the natives thought us savages?’ Nevertheless, he kept up his interest in irrigation—learning from furloughs in Australia, as well as travels in lands as diverse as Egypt and Syria—till finally he was able to leave a real imprint along the eastern coast of India; something his daughter called ‘The Redemption of the Godavari District’ through, as his brother chuckled, ‘The Cheap School of Engineering’—also known today by that Hindi word jugaad .

  The British, Sir Arthur thought, brought ‘disgrace to [their own] civilised country’ by their ‘grievous neglect’ of India. He decided to make amends. When the Godavari project was sanctioned in 1847, he asked for six engineers, eight juniors and 2,000 masons. Instead, he was allotted one ‘young hand’, two surveyors, and a few odd men. Yet he persevered. ‘To save on masonry work’, Jon Wilson writes, ‘he copied the method of construction’ used by the Cholas. ‘Cotton created a loose pile of mud and stone on the riverbed, which he then covered in lime and plastered with concrete, instead of building up entirely with stone.’ The whole project was finished at a third of the cost initially estimated, till 370 miles of canals [339 of which were navigable] irrigated some 364,000 acres of land, transforming a dry expanse into the ‘rice bowl’ of Andhra Pradesh. And waterways, the Englishman demonstrated, were a doubly rewarding alternative to rail transport, simultaneously nourishing the farmlands of rural Indians.

  In the end, however, Sir Arthur couldn’t prevail over the railway lobby. Between 1885 and 1887, the railways cost £2.84 million while the irrigation budget stagnated at a measly £6,130. As late as 1898, the year before his death, it was stated that rail absorbed ‘so large a measure of Government attention, [that] irrigation canals, which are far more protective against famine … are allowed only one-thirteenth of the amount spent on railways each year’. It was easier, Sir Arthur sniffed, to propose a £4 million railway project over a £40,000 irrigation scheme. He had no dearth of ideas, however, offerin
g a pan-India river-linking project, and bombarding his bosses with notes and suggestions till they finally established, almost out of sheer exhaustion, a Public Works Department—the ubiquitous ‘PWD’ of today. And after collecting his shiny knighthood, he continued to cheerfully lambast the Raj for its neglect of India, receiving a more profound honour instead from ordinary peasants, who, to this day, remember Sir Arthur less as a representative of British dominion and more as a local saviour.

  THE MAN BEHIND MODERN HINDI

  In 1757, on the eve of the historic Battle of Plassey, a merchant called Amir Chand alarmed the notorious Robert Clive with a fresh demand. ‘Omichund’, as the English knew him, had served the East India Company, assisting in their shaky relationship with the Nawab of Bengal. Now, as war looked inevitable, he also made himself indispensable, helping hatch that infamous plot by which the nawab’s commander, Mir Jafar, was to betray his sovereign and join ranks with the Company. At the last minute, however, Omichund put forth an ominous clause—he wanted 30 lakh for his services, failing which he would (regretfully) divulge the scheme to the nawab himself. Clive was upset. But he was also shrewd: two copies of the pact with Mir Jafar were prepared. The counterfeit carried Omichund’s clause, while the actual agreement said nothing about his reward. And when everything was over and the English had prevailed, the old merchant was summoned and simply told: ‘Omichund, the red paper is a trick, you are to have nothing!’