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n the 15th of April 1649 Francis Breton, the East India
Company's most senior official in Asia, took up his quill and began
to write a letter to the Directors back home. He had some bad news
to break:
"And here we wish to our penn might bee sylent, but to
our griefe it must imparte unto you a sad
story, |
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itt tending not only to the losse of a man, but the dishonour
of our nation, and (which is incomparably worse) of our Christian
profession; occasioned in Agra by ye damned apostacy of one of your
servants, |
Josua Blackwelle." Breton went onto describe how after
prayers one Sunday, Blackwell had "privately conveighed himseife to
the Governor of ye citty, who, being prepaired, with the Qazi and
others attended his comeing; before whome hee most wickedly and
desperately renounced his Christian ffaith and professed himself a
Moore, was imediately circumcised, and is irrecoverably
lost."
Blackwell was only twenty-three, the son of the King's
Grocer at the Court of St. James. He had left home at the age of
seventeen and early on had been sent to oversee the East India
Company's trading post at the Mughul court of Agra. It was an
important appointment, for this was the apex of the Mughal Golden
Age, and from Agra the Emperor Shah Jehan ruled an Empire that
covered most of India, all of what is today Pakistan and great
chunks of Afghanistan; across the river from the small English
community, the great white dome of the Taj Mahal was already rising
from its plinth above the Jamuna. Blackwell was ambitious and he
knew that the wealth of the Mughul Emperor surpassed that of any
prince in Europe. The pain of circumcision, he must have reckoned,
was a small price to pay for gaining access to such a bountiful
fount of patronage.
 Moreover, he had before him
the example of several other Englishmen who had already converted
and prospered in Mughal service. A trumpeter and a virginal-player
brought out from England to entertain the Emperor in one of the very
first diplomatic missions to the Mughul Court both converted and
were made Mughal nobleman, as also-very probably-did one of the very
first English envoys, Williams Hawkins; certainly, according to one
shocked traveller, Hawkins had accepted a wife offered to him by the
Emperor and "used altogether the customes of the Moores or
Mahometans, both in his meate and drinke and other customes, and
would seeme to bee discontente if all men did not the like...he was
very fickle in his resolution, as alsoe of his religion." There was,
moreover, an entire suburb of Delhi-Firingi Pura, The Town of the
Foreigners, set aside for the battalion of renegade European
mercenaries in Mughul service commanded by a French convert,
Farrashish Khan.
Although this tendency to 'go native' in India
has by and large been either ignored or suppressed by historians of
the Raj, there was in fact nothing very new in all this. English
merchants trading to the Middle East had been converting to Islam
for centuries. Already, during the reign of Elizabeth there were
considerably more Englishmen living in North Africa than in all the
nascent North American colonies: five thousand English converts were
resident in Algiers alone. When Charles II sent one Captain Hamilton
to ransom a group who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, his
mission was unsuccessful as they all refused to return: the men had
all converted to Islam, risen in the ranks, and were now "partaking
of the prosperous Successe of the Turks", living in a style to which
they could not possibly have aspired back home. The frustrated
Captain Hamilton was forced to return empty-handed: "They are
tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," he
wrote in his official report. "Such ladies are," he added,
"generally very beautiful."
In such circumstances, British
travellers of the period regularly brought back tales of their
compatriots who had "donned the turban", and were now prospering in
the Islamic world: one of the most powerful Ottoman eunuchs during
the late sixteenth century, Hasan Aga, was the former Samson Rowlie
from Great Yarmouth, while in Algeria the "Moorish Kings
Executioner" turned out to be a former butcher from Exeter called
'Absalom' (Abd-es-Salaam). There was also the Ottoman general known
as 'Ingliz Mustapha': in fact a Scottish Campbell who had embraced
Islam and joined the Janissaries. As the ambassador Sir Thomas
Shirely pointed out, the more time Englishmen spent in the East, the
closer they moved to adopting the manners of the Muslims, "in everye
3 yeere that they staye in the East, they loose one article of
theyre faythe."
During the eighteenth century, as the British
power increased in India, and that of the Mughals declined, open
conversions to Islam became less common, but the habit of 'going
native' remained constant: in 1711 when Charles Lockyer visited
Madras he was surprised to see that the governor behaved like one of
the local princes: "He seldom goes abroad with less than fourscore
persons arm'd, besides his English guards to attend him and
Country Mustek [ie Indian music] enough to frighten a Stranger into
Belief that the Men were mad; two Dubashes attend to cool him
with Fans, and drive away the Flies, that otherwise would molest
him; he is respected as a Prince by the Rajas of the country,
and is in every respect as great."
 Further inland, and further
away from other Europeans, stranger transformations could take
place. George Thomas was an Irish mercenary who carved out his own
state in Haryana at the end of the eighteenth century, and was a
possible model for Peachey in Kipling's Man Who Would be
King. 'The Rajah from Tipperary' built himself a palace, minted
his own coins and collected about him a very considerable harem, but
in the process totally forgot how to speak English; when asked at
the end of his career to dictate his autobiography, he said he would
be happy to do so as long as he could speak in Persian or Hindustani
"as from frequent use they had become more familiar than his native
tongue".
Hinduism, and Hindu culture in general, proved less
accessible to the British than Islam, at least partly because many
Hindus regarded the British as untouchable, refusing to eat with
them, so restricting somewhat the possibilities for social
intercourse. Yet even this did not put off some of Hinduism's more
ardent admirers, such as the Bengal army general known to his
contemporaries as 'Hindoo Stuart'. Not much is known about this
strange Irishman who came out to India in his teens, but he seems to
have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism and within a year
of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice-which he
continued to his death-of walking every morning from his house to
bathe in and worship the Ganges according to Hindu custom. The
inventory of goods that Stuart left behind him when he died
indicates the degree to which he wore Indian clothes and had taken
on Indian customs such as chewing paan; it also details the
huge number of statues of Hindu deities which Stuart appears to have
worshiped. Certainly he built a Hindu temple at Saugor, and when he
visited Europe in 1804 he took a collection of his Hindu household
gods with him.
In 1808, he published a book called the
Vindications of the Hindoos in which he tried to discourage
any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing
that, as he put it, "on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning,
Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render
its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the
useful purposes of a civilized society." On the subject of Hindu
mythology which the missionaries ridiculed at every turn, Stuart
wrote "Whenever I look around me in the vast region of Hindoo
Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see
Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I
can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample
system of Moral allegory that the world has ever
produced."
Stuart was not just an admirer of the Indian
religions, he was also an enthusiastic devotee of Indian fashions,
and in the early years of the 19th century he wrote a series of
improbable articles in the Calcutta Telegraph in which he
tried to persuade the European women of Calcutta to adopt the sari
on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary
European fashions. Perhaps inevitably, the articles did not impress
the Calcutta memsahibs, who wrote a series of angry letters to the
editor denouncing Stuart as "an immoral libertine" with "enervated
Oriental ideas". Later Stuart got into more serious trouble when he
encouraged his seypoys to appear on parade with their
brightly painted caste marks and full moustaches. The issue was
taken up as high as the Commander in Chief who criticized Stuart for
allowing his men to effect a "preposterous overgrowth of facial hair
of Cheek Moustaches and immoderately large whiskers" which, he
maintained, undermined discipline and multiplied the religious
prejudices of the seypoys, "already numerous enough and
sufficiently embarrassing to the Publick service."
When he died,
Hindoo Stuart's collection of Hindu sculpture-the largest and most
important ever amassed by a European-ended up in the British Museum
where it still forms the core of the Oriental collection. Stuart
himself was buried in the Christian cemetery in South Park
Street-but with his idols in his coffin and under a tomb which takes
the form of a Hindu temple, with a carved stone gateway, the
recesses on each side of which were occupied by figures of the
Goddess Ganga, Prithvi Devi.
By the early 19th century, senior
British officials had to be more circumspect about their sympathies,
but the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident at
the court of Hyderabad shows what was possible if you were discrete.
While at Hyderabad Kirkpatrick fell in love with Khair-un-Nissa
('Excellent among Women'), the great niece of the Nizam's principal
general. They were married in 1800 according to Muslim law.
Apparently Khair-un- Nissa fell for Kirkpatrick when she saw him out
riding through the streets of Hyderabad. Kirkpatrick initially
turned away an old woman sent to press the girl's suit, after which
Khair- un-Nissa herself entered his zenana, along with her mother
and grandmother, ostensibly to visit Kirkpatrick's concubines. There
followed, so Kirkpatrick wrote to his brother, a "long nocturnal
interview", when he had "a full and close survey of her lovely
person" while being strong enough, as he put it, to "safely pass the
fiery ordeal…I, who was but ill qualified for the task, attempted to
argue the romantic young creature out of her passion which I could
not, I confess, help feeling something more than pity for. She
declared to me again and again that her affections had been
irrevocably fixed on me, and that her fate was linked to mine."
Shortly afterwards, he wrote to his brother, "the ultimate
connection took...I must have been something more or less than man
to have held out any longer."
 When word of Kirkpatrick's
marriage reached London it caused great alarm as it was assumed-
correctly-that Kirkpatrick had become a Muslim in order to marry
her. The Governor General ordered an inquiry, but the matter was
allowed to die down due to Kirkpatrick's exceptional success in
persuading the Nizam to expel the French from Hyderabad: in a
bloodless coup, 14,000 French trained seypoys surrendered to
Kirkpatrick's small bodyguard. What Calcutta never discovered is
that in order to gain permission to marry Khair-un-Nissa,
Kirkpatrick seems to have sworn to "give an unequivocal support to
his Highness's Government so long as he remained Resident, and also
to remain grateful for ever"-in other words, if the Indian
chronicles are to be believed, to have more or less become a double
agent.
Khair-un-Nissa's two children- who in Hyderabad had been
brought up as Muslims with the names Saheb Allum and Saheb
Begum-were sent to school in England and baptised at Dover; but long
after the deaths of both their parents, they continued to correspond
from Brighton with their Hyderabad grandmother, Sharif-un-Nissa
('Most Noble of Women'), who wrote in Persian on paper sprinkled
with gold dust and enclosed in. a Kharita, a sealed gold brocade
bag.
At the beginning of the 19th Century, with the increase of
intermarriage and concubinage across racial and religious
boundaries, the question of what to do with such children of mixed
marriages reached a peak. The Bengal Wills in the India Office
Library show that well over a third of Englishmen in India at this
period were leaving their goods to one or more Indian
companions.
Perhaps the most unabashedly enthusiastic keeper of
harems at this period was Sir David Ochterlony. Although the people
of Delhi knew Ochterlony as 'Loony Akhtar' (or Crazy Star),
when in the Indian capital he liked to be addressed by his full
Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (the Defender of the State) and to live
the life of a Mughal gentleman. Every evening all thirteen of his
Indian wives used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each
on the back of her own elephant. A miniature survives depicting an
evening's entertainment at the Delhi Residency. Ochterlony is
dressed in Mughal Jama, reclined against a spread of pillows and
bolsters. To one side stands a servant with a flywhisk; on the other
stands Ochterlony's elaborate glass hookah. Above, from the
picture rail, portraits of the resident's Scottish ancestors- kilted
and plumed colonels from Highland Regiments, grimacing ladies in
white taffeta dresses-peer down disapprovingly over the group of
dancing ladies below them. Ochterlony, however, looks
delighted.
Beneath this very jolly exterior seems to have lain
the sort of tensions that affect anyone who straddles two very
different and diverging worlds. One of the most moving of
Ochterlony's letters concerns his two daughters, and the question of
whether he should bring them up Muslim or Christian. If Christian,
he worries that they would be constantly derided for their 'dark
blood', but Ochterlony hesitates to bring them up as Muslim, with a
view to marrying them into the Mughal aristocracy as "I own I could
not bear that my child should be one of a numerous haram even were I
certain that other Disadvantages attended this mode of disposal
& were I proof against the observations of the World who tho'
unjust to the children, would not fail to comment on the Conduct of
a father who educated his offspring in Tenets of the Prophet." This
letter, which was written to another Scot in a similar position who
had opted to bring up his children as Muslims, ends rather movingly
"In short my dear Major I spent all the time since we were parted in
revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to
come to a positive Decision."
Such letters reveal an
extraordinary split between the public and the private face that you
find so often in the Raj. Just as a million diverse Indians working
for the British had to somehow split their official loyalty to their
employers with their private fears and hopes for their own culture
and religion, so we have in Ochterlony, the most successful British
soldier of his day, a similar division of loyalties: by day he is a
General working to expand the dominions of the East India Company,
by night, at home amongst his family, he worries whether to bring up
his children Muslims or Christians, laments the racism of his
colleagues and sits awake wondering whether his beloved daughter
would be better off in the harem of a Mughal prince or married to
some British subaltern.
Towards the end of his life Ochterlony
began to construct Mubarak Bagh, an extraordinary garden tomb in the
Mughal garden he had built for his senior most wife, Mubarak Begum,
herself a convert to Islam from Hinduism (she was born a Brahmin in
Pune). Although the tomb has now disappeared, pictures of it show
that the building in some ways represents a sort of resolution of
Ochterlony's worries. The central dome was clearly modelled on that
of James Skinner's Delhi church, St. James, and was surmounted by a
cross; but the sidewings were enclosed in a forest of small late
Mughal minarets: the perfect architectural expression of the
religious fusion which Ochterlony seems to have achieved in his
marriage. In the event, Ochterlony died away from Delhi and was
buried in Meerut, while the empty tomb appears to have been
destroyed during the upheavals of 1857. But it is an extraordinary
and completely forgotten moment in architectural history: the last
of the great Mughal garden tombs-a tradition that reached its finest
moments in Humayan's Tomb and the Taj-being built not by the last
Mughal but by a Brit.
The passing of Ochterlony marked the end of
an era. The rise of the Victorian Evangelicals and the coming of the
Memsahibs between them killed off the intermingling of Indian and
British ideas, religion and way of life but led to the surprisingly
vibrant-if now utterly forgotten-multi-culturalism of the East India
Company.
What happened to Ochterlony's Begum after his death
shows how quickly the world of the White Mughals disappeared.
Rejected by the Brits, she married a Mughal officer named Vilayat
Ali Khan and fought on the Indian side during the Uprising of 1857.
Afterwards, her estates-and even the garden named after her-were
confiscated by the British and she died in poverty.
The Uprising
led to massive bloodshed, with great numbers of lives lost on either
side. Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was. With the British
victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that
followed, the entire top rank of the Mughal aristocracy was swept
away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India; at
the same time the wholesale arrival of the Memsahibs ended all open
sexual contact between the nations. The White Mughals died out and
their very existence was later delicately erased from embarrassed
Victorian history books; they have since been studiously ignored by
postcolonial historians.
By the end of the 19th century it was
possible for Kipling to write that "East is East and West is West
and never the twain shall meet." It is fashionable to laugh at
Kipling today; but at a time when respectable academics talk of a
Clash of Civilisations, and East and West, Islam and Christianity
appear to be heading for another major confrontation, the
resuscitation of this fascinating and unlikely group who
successfully reconciled both worlds is now more timely than
ever. |
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